The Playmaker (35 page)

Ralph laughed at her irony. This family history she had embarked on was, he was ecstatic to notice, proving her elegant, intelligent, a dazzling companion.

“When my father married my mother,” she continued, “they set up a small academy of their own in Feltham, for the sons of small traders and farmers. It was awesomely hard though to get people to pay for the education of their sons, especially when those same people were often the butchers and grocers to whom my mother and father owed money. My father was already suffering from consumption. It killed him before he was twenty-nine years old. After we had settled all our debts in Feltham, my mother and I moved up to London. I was ten years old. I think my mother came to London not because of any dream she might have of that great city, but because she could see no future ahead of us in Feltham other than charity. Sir Desmond was dead, and his son mainly in London, and so there was no one to protect us from being labelled on parish books with that terrible name. The Poor.”

Mary Brenham's mother began to attend Quaker meetings in Stepney, perhaps because the Quakers were well known for their charity. And so she found work on the fringes of benevolence, as a cook and housekeeper for the Society for the Ruptured Poor, a Quaker house of charity which took in and nursed those whose frames had been broken in mills and factories and who could therefore no longer work.

“She found me my position at the Kennedys' and I repaid her miserably,” said Mary Brenham flatly, glancing at her child. “The consequence of my early years is that I do not fit the same tongue or have the same mind as those who have been felons from babyhood. I am not better than them, I am probably worse for having known better and still become a thief.”

“No,” Ralph hurried to say. “You mustn't flay yourself. Society does not demand that. It has taken your time and put you in a distant place. That is the extent of what you have to give.”

“In any case, better or worse, the ones like Nancy Turner and Duckling I do not understand and therefore cannot—since they choose it so—be their friends.”

The mention of Duckling again reminded Ralph that he was exploiting poor mute Harry as a species of table, a useful item of furniture, over which he received Mary Brenham's sweet confessions.

His sudden discomfort must have shown in his face, since she shook herself. “I have spoken at a terrible length, Mr. Clark.”

“No, no,” said Ralph. Her short history seemed almost infinite to him, full of questions, more ramified than that of the Roman Empire. “And does your mother still work in that Quaker house?” he asked.

“At the time my ship left the Thames, yes. My trial confirmed her position there, making her doubly unfortunate and so doubly worthy with the Brethren. I could say my crime confirmed her imprisonment with the Quakers, just as it assured my transportation.”

Ralph laughed. “You do not like the Quakers?”

“Away from them, my mother might have found a new husband.”

“And might have starved on the other hand,” said Ralph.

“I do not think I could be a Quaker,” said Mary. “It seemed to me they were very severe on ordinary joy.”

Ralph wondered whether her concept of ordinary joy included John Wisehammer. He spent so long trying to imagine the framing of this question in a way which would not give himself away to her that he must have seemed to have become distracted. She employed this apparent drifting mental state of his as a signal that he certainly had heard enough of her life history, for now she changed direction and took exactly the course he wanted her to.

“Sir,” she said, “there is John Wisehammer's epilogue, which I have helped him to write.”

She had his attention instantly. “Yes?” he asked.

“May I say, Lieutenant Clark, that you have never wanted to see it, and therefore he thinks he is under a shadow with you.”

“So much nonsense,” said Ralph, knowing that a more competent lover, a Captain Plume, would have said, “He
is
under a shadow. He has taken a claim to a woman I desire.”

“I had forgotten the epilogue,” lied Ralph.

“If you could ask to see it, sir,” said Mary Brenham, “it would—if I can speak freely—be the end of a terrible tyranny for me. For he writes it and writes it again, he edits out lines, he alters meters and rhymes, and he asks me continuously if I think it is ready for you to lay your eyes on.”

“He is concerned to such a degree?” asked Ralph.

“All the players are becoming sick of urging him forward, telling him to show it. And I above all, since the main burden lies on me as John Wisehammer's friend and helper.” She sighed and it was no false sigh. “If he gained your approval, then you would become an object of friendly devotion, and the weight would be lifted from me.”

In the seconds after she had said this, it was apparent she was about to ask his pardon for being so frank. But Ralph had enough trouble suppressing his joy. Wisehammer was something of a nuisance to her! It took some seconds for him to understand that though he knew she was now free of claim, lag or otherwise, he lacked the stomach, what he would have called the ordinary gall, to recruit her as his lover. Perhaps he feared the world would be unbalanced, and Betsey Alicia sent into even more prodigious gales of extravagance. It was above all that he—who had once kept a journal—lacked the tongue for the task.

And it was while Ralph was suffering in that acrid way from his inability to speak to Mary Brenham, it was while he was cursing the Destinies which permitted Davy to speak to Ann Yates, George Johnston to speak to Esther Abrahams, but put a stone on Ralph Clark's tongue, that Johnny White appeared in that room at the hospital and stood in the door shaking his head.

His air of philosophic disapproval, however, had nothing to do with the sight of Ralph and Mary Brenham. He asked if he could see Ralph. Ralph joined him and stood in the main ward, where some of the sorrier cases of scurvy, flux, and starvation lay, for the most part older lags or those who had been cheated out of their rations through dice and card games and the superior cunning of their fellows.

“Without a word to me,” said Johnny White, “H.E. showed the pouch to the native. The sight of the thing caused a violent fit in Arabanoo and the fever asserted itself yet again. The native is dead, Ralph. Now all that lies ahead are the excessive funerary rights. H.E. is determined to bury him in the grounds of the viceregal house. He is concerned at his lack of knowledge of the native burial ritual, and I would not be surprised if he sent out another armed party to gather information on this point.”

“I do hope not,” said Ralph. “The last expedition returned unharmed only through Davy's good sense—I must say that, despite any differences we might have had.”

Johnny White drew his hand over his forehead and looked forlornly at his wardful of sad cases. “Damn me, I do not resent H.E., his interest in these unfallen and natural creatures. I have something of the same myself. But to bury one in viceregal ground, with Robbie Ross and Jemmy Campbell, those vile letter writers, looking on … It makes one see that H.E. is capable of grand folly. I do hope he is never captivated by one of the she-lags. For she will end as queen; she will sit at the head of table. Although again, if rumour is true … but we won't speak of that.”

For the rumours were back, that H.E. was a sodomite—his passion for Arabanoo was seen by the more base-minded as mere pederasty, the assault of a high culture on a low.

“There is no change in Harry?” asked the surgeon.

“I have brought in a convict to watch him,” said Ralph, attempting to control through his will the surges of blood inside his head.

“When Harry goes,” asked Johnny White, “do you think he will merit burial in H.E.'s garden?”

On the day before Arabanoo's funeral, Harry awoke. The left half of his face would not move, but he was able to speak. And he woke speaking, consumed with the same concerns he had had before his stroke. “Where is she?” he asked.

Only Mary Brenham was with him when he stirred. She sent a convict orderly at once to find Ralph.

Ralph had just heard he had been nominated as officer of the honour guard for the burial of the native. Since no Indian or
ab origine
performer of rites could be found without a major military expedition, H.E. had decided to fall back on the more accustomed resources of the British armed forces and the Established Church.

The funeral would further interrupt Ralph's preparation of the play. The space in his military career which the playmaking had nonetheless created enabled him to rush to the hospital immediately to visit the resurgent Harry. What he saw was a man who could speak only with one half of his face.

“Where is the Duckling?” asked the new Harry.

“She is staying with friends.”

“On the east or west side of the stream?” Harry had never been sharper, despite the distortion of his face.

“We will send for her,” promised Ralph. By motions of the head he signalled that Mary Brenham should see to this—the fetching of Duckling from whatever ancient tie now detained her.

Mary understood exactly and gathered up her small son, who made a minor protest at being separated from his jigsaw, and set off to summon Duckling. Tears brimmed out of both Harry's eyes. The stroke had not frozen them in their well behind the gnarled face. “They claim her back with such ease,” Harry murmured. One side of this mouth exactly articulated; the other was a mere slit. Yet he forced both into service to speak of Duckling, that unprofitably loved lag. Ralph had hoped that if Harry did return to a conscious state, he might emerge without the memory of Duckling, having lost her somewhere in the swamps of his coma. For it occurred to Ralph and to most people that there was not a great deal in the girl for besieged memory to cling to.

Next Harry said, “Is the Captain still alive?” He retained that memory too, of shipping with H.E. before H.E. was a viceroy. But Ralph told him the Captain was in excellent health and had been to see him, that news of Harry's awakening would be a cause of great joy to the viceroy. “Christ,” said Harry, suddenly, licking his palsied lips, “I am hungry.” But as Ralph got up to go to the cook orderly at the far end of the hospital and commandeer a bowl of floury stew, Harry began to weep again.

“He will always be there, just out of sight,” he told Ralph. Ralph knew he meant Private Baker, that leering phantom. “And they will always fetch Duckling right easy.”

Almost at once he fell asleep again, as if exhausted. Surgeon Considen came in and said, “We will first feed him and then see how well he walks.” Duckling arrived with Brenham and the child. Duckling did not show any interest in inspecting the sleeping features of her master and sometime lover but sat silently on a bench by the wall. Ralph approached her.

“Will you be kind to him?” he asked.

She looked up at the rafters. “Yes, Mr. Clark,” she said.

“If you were not determined to be kind to him, it would be better if you were sent to Norfolk Island, where you would have greater liberty to choose your friends.”

Now she lowered her gaze and engaged his eye. “I like the friends I got here, Mr. Clark. I like you. I like them players. I like that Brenham best of them.”

He wondered if she was mocking him by naming Brenham like that. Irony and warmth both seemed alien to her, and it was hard to find out which one this was. He told her she was to sit with Harry throughout the afternoon, that she was not to attend the rehearsals of the play, but that when Harry spoke she was to reassure him and try dissuading him of the existence of Private Baker's ghost.

In the midst of funeral preparations for Arabanoo the following day, news of Harry's revival had reached H.E. He came over to the hospital for a short visit, during most of which Harry was tongue-tied or given to tears. It happened, too, that during the afternoon's playmaking, Surgeon Considen helped him trundle around the room and concluded that in a little time he might be able to take up again the duties of Provost Marshal. One thing, however, Considen told Ralph when Ralph reached the hospital that evening, Harry must be moderate answering the calls of Venus and must drink no more than a cup of brandy a day. “His history as a good bottleman,” said Considen cheerily, “is at an end.”

It was agreed too among Considen, Johnny White, and Ralph that Duckling should be permitted to sleep on a pallet on the floor of the same room Harry occupied. And indeed Duckling was there in the early evening when Ralph arrived and found a Harry still tremulous and tearful. It was Ralph's impression again that Duckling, by the questions her presence aroused, was poor company for the sick man. Yet Harry could not have been content with her absent from the room, because then he would have been plagued by questions of where she was.

Harry did ask Duckling to leave for a small time—he wanted to speak privately to Lieutenant Clark. She rose up obediently, almost gratefully. She could join the convicts in front of the fire in the main ward.

When she was gone, Harry began to tell the story once again of the night Goose had simply sent for the girl because Private Handy Baker had wanted her and had made an arrangement with Goose. And because too, since babyhood, since Soho and the parish of St. Giles, since the days when Goose ran an apothecary in Greek Street, in the shadow of the great Rookery of St. Giles—that island of criminal tenements looming near the Tottenham Court Road—since those days, Duckling had always obeyed Goose.

Ralph settled in to hear the great and engrossing history from Harry yet again. He believed he could half listen, for all he expected to hear rehearsed again was the mystery of Duckling's daughterliness to Goose.

First Ralph heard again how Harry had—one evening in the settlement's first days—discovered Duckling's absence from her tent across the stream. In those days, soon after the women were landed, Duckling occupied her own little bell of canvas close to Captain Jemmy Campbell's marquee, for whom she worked for a time as a servant. Harry had set the patrols of the convict night watch and then gone to Duckling's tent to see sitting in front of it Dot Handilands, the most ancient of the she-lags, rumoured to be eighty years of age. For then, before huts and locks, felons with little else to do were often employed for a small portion of food or liquor to keep watch over people's possessions.