The Playmaker (36 page)

She admitted, only after threats, that Duckling had gone to see Goose.

Harry crossed the stream in the last blue of the evening and walked up through the women's camp, which was then all tents or insubstantial tumuli of boughs, looking for an innocent glimpse of Duckling among the cooking fires.

Even in those days the apothecary she-lag, Goose, had achieved a superior dwelling. Her mere tent had been extended with a length of canvas to become a spacious marquee. It had therefore both an anteroom and a sanctum.

Calling Duckling's name, he went inside this elegant tent. There, on a pallet, the big Marine, Private Handy Baker, dressed only in a shirt, was plunging and rearing between Duckling's knees.

Harry launched himself, strangling away, onto Baker's shoulders, but was soon thrown, with all the diverted violence of Private Baker's desire, onto the clay floor. Baker landed on top of him now and, with hands which held the odour of Duckling, began strangling
him
. A shadow passed over Harry's mind. For the first of the two times he would manage it, Baker took Harry's senses away.

Waking later, Harry found himself seated on a square of canvas, a tumbler of spirits in front of him. As his brain reached painfully for the memory of the latitude and the year—the common bread of time and place without which Harry was not Harry—the knowledge returned to him and he hurried to the corner of Goose's tent to be sick.

Looking up he recognised Goose standing calmly by the flap, some firelight from outside richly burnishing her red hair. He knew now that he was still inside her tent. It was a further segment of it than the one in which he had observed Baker and Duckling. Perhaps there was no end to the canvas Goose had already acquired.

She was the same ample, red-haired woman he had seen in Newgate on the occasion he visited Duckling there. He had rarely bothered to face her since the night of Duckling's commutation of sentence. When he discovered that Duckling and Goose were both in the same detachment of Newgate prisoners marched down to Portsmouth and placed with over a hundred other female convicts aboard the
Lady Penrhyn
, he had devoted himself to having Duckling transferred to the smaller female convict hold of
Charlotte
. This expedient, he now bitterly understood, had been quite fruitless.

Goose sat on a folding camp stool and grinned at him. She had mad, nut brown eyes. “You should never set yourself to stop Handy Baker once he's in his stride. Handy Baker is a runaway coach and four. Handy can take on three coolers a day.”

Cooler
was flash talk for
girl
.

She surmised aloud that Harry, in spite of the bruising he'd had, wasn't planning any vengeance based on the letter of the law. “All the camps might laugh at you then, Mr. Brewer,” she told him. Besides, everyone came over here to the women's camp to see Mother Goose, she said, slapping her stomach. To ask Goose for favours.

She had even told Harry—and Harry always told Ralph in retelling the tale—that Ralph had once been there. But Ralph was strangely unabashed, since Harry had confessed so much greater follies of his own. Goose said that the girl had been amused when tipsy Ralph had tried to show them all his little picture of his wife. But, Goose told Harry (and Harry passed on to Ralph), that when it came to the assizes of the flesh, Lieutenant Clark went at it as strong as anyone.

This Handy Baker, Goose had informed Harry as he sipped his brandy, was a good cove and had a position of favour with some of the officers. Harry, argued Goose now, had seen Baker flogged on the back and arse in Rio for trading in Tom Barrett's counterfeit Portuguese quarters. He would see Baker suffer again if he just waited for it. For Handy Baker had always gone to the trouble of arranging punishment for himself.

The longer Harry sat before her, trying to piece his head together, the greater and more terrible was the sense she made. Harry was not to think that Handy Baker and Duckling were somehow set, said Goose. Handy was settled in with the Huffnell woman. But he'd asked for Duckling to be sent over in return for some favour he'd done Goose. Baker knew Duckling was clean and in good health, said Goose, as if that explained entirely Baker's preference for her.

Harry's head had still been tolling from the blows and strangling Baker had given it, but he was capable of a slow, balanced, waiting fury. For one thing he picked up the brandy she had poured him and emptied it onto the clay floor. Then he had warned her not to send for Duckling again. To which Goose replied that Duckling had to come if her old mother and abbess sent for her—Harry knew that. These young things always answered the calls of their madame.

She was closer to Duckling, she argued, than mother, than law, than any favours Harry might give the girl. “I am the Flash Queen, Harry. He who tries to put the wind up my skirts finds vipers beneath. You give her little gifts of mugfuls of flour, and sips of rum. Good for you, Harry. It might keep a wife in a cottage. It won't keep the Duckling over there when her Queen calls.”

Goose further elaborated the state of her nation to him. She would let him buy Duckling, but he did not have the wealth. And though he was Provost Marshal, he would find it hard to have her, Goose, sent before “the Beak,” Davy Collins, and sentenced in any way. If she were put on a list for Norfolk Island, someone else would take her off it. “Because everyone talks to me, Harry.”

Then she produced her brandy bottle again, refilled his glass, and advised him not to waste it this time.

Though he needed it to ice his brain a little, he struggled upright and walked away into the corner. He could not remember later what threats he uttered then—not only the noose but an array of inconceivable punishments. Yet as he left she clapped him on the shoulder. A maternal indulgence from a woman two dozen years younger than him.

When Harry got to the stream (as Ralph heard in all these retellings), Duckling was waiting for him, sitting propped on the handrail. Once she saw him she did not maintain this posture. She came upright and said nothing. There was such an expectation of blows in her manner that Harry could not remember how it was he'd ever wanted to punish her.

“A strong bastard, that Baker,” he said to her then, to let her know she was safe. He hoped she showed to Baker the same whorish competence and coolness she showed him, the writhings which had no juice in them and were intended merely to move the customer along.

She assured Harry that he was her regular swell. She went so far as to touch his face. She murmured that no one could afford making enemies of the Marines.

There was one he intended to make an absolute enemy of.

Soon afterwards (again as Harry told it to Ralph), Harry and H.E. had one of their awkward conversations. It was over a glass of port on the Good Friday before that first Easter.

“This woman you know,” H.E. had said quietly. “Do you think you would ever marry her? Or is she in the nature of a temporary solace?”

The question had struck Harry oddly, so that he wondered was it a test. Since H.E. saw the convicts as future yeomanry or, in Duckling's case, future yeo-womanry, was he suggesting that gentlemen should be happy to marry them? Or was he doing what friends do everywhere, taking a hand in the grotesque passion of an elderly comrade for an unlikely young girl.

“If she were pardoned, I would marry her,” Harry had said to his surprise. It was a thought he had never consciously held before. And H. E. remarked—as if he thought a girl ought to have a dowry—that when she had served her time, she would be given a land grant. That was to be the standard arrangement.

It was at this point that Harry chose to damn Goose with H.E. “There is a procurer working in the women's camp,” Harry suddenly confessed. “A woman called Goose. A woman of many false names. She procures girls, even from this side of the stream, for Marines and for convicts with a bung, as they say, a purse. In terms of the women's camp she lives in grand style. She calls herself a queen.”

H.E. closed his eyes for a time. “I shall have my adjutant look into it,” he said.

H.E.'s adjutant was George Johnston, the affable young officer and paramour of Esther Abrahams.

About the time Harry mentioned the name of Goose, H.E. went off on an excursion across the harbour, traversing for the first time the country where Ralph and Davy would later meet Ca-bahn. In the meantime a lag named Joseph Levy died, a genial young cockney Jew. Harry and Lieutenant Johnston attended that funeral, and Dick Johnson was accommodating enough to allow the Jewish convicts, Esther Abrahams shawled among them, to sing Kaddish over Joseph Levy's grave. The seven-shilling kettle Joseph Levy had once lifted had brought him to the earth's further burial.

Dick Johnson supervised the ceremony, as if he suspected something infamous would take place, but at the end he remarked to Harry that it was a remarkable thing that Jews sang Kaddish in Aramaic and not in Hebrew, and he began to speculate on the historic reasons for that.

It was after this funeral that Lieutenant George Johnston took Harry aside. “Harry, His Excellency told me to look into this matter of Goose. What would you like to see done? A prosecution, is it? Because there is nothing to prosecute her with!”

It struck Harry that George was a little overheated on the matter, as if a friend of his had been attacked. At last though, he grew more jovial and put a hand on Harry's shoulder. “Harry, that woman keeps order for us in the women's camp. If not for her, it would be all Stygian chaos, believe me.”

“She keeps order?” asked Harry, unbelieving.

Lieutenant Johnston had licked his lips and begun to tick off the fingers of his left hand. “In the first and best place of all, she keeps all those girls in the camp. Do you think you do it, with your night patrols? Do you think great space does not call to them? Remember that they are beings used from childhood to impulsive action. They have seen alleys and escaped up them without thinking of the wisdom of it. They have stolen whatever presents itself in the same spirit. Here we have an immense space, but most of the women choose not to flee into it. That, in the first place, is one of the services she does for us. In the second place, she works some order upon the disorderly desires of Marines and convicts alike.”

“You mean,” said Harry, “she manages the women's camp like a pushing shop.”

“It
is
a pushing shop in any case, Harry,” George Johnston said, and groaned. “It would be a bloody slaughterhouse without her.”

“And it is not bloody now?” Harry pursued, remembering the damage Baker had done to his head and throat.

“Harry, old fellow,” said George, “you must consider that girl might love one of those scoundrels perhaps better than she loves you.”

“She doesn't love any of them,” said Harry, deciding not to be angry. “She doesn't love me. It is too much to ask of someone who has been a whore from babyhood.”

This disarmed George. He shook his head. “Anyway, Harry,” he said, “there are always people like Goose. I think I find them more essential to society than parsons, probably more important to the tone of things than the military and officers of the law. And believe me on one point, Harry. They can't be expunged.”

Harry had felt shamed. He had risked greatly in raising Goose's name with H.E., risked that friendship which went back to the
Europe
and the
Ariadne
, to the time of the war with the Americans. But all that had come of it was this picture of lag society as sketched by George Johnston.

When Johnston withdrew, he was muttering still about the lack of matter for prosecution.

CHAPTER 25

Withholding Prussian Blue

As the resurgent Harry Brewer now continued to tell Ralph, it was on the day after the six Marines were detained for trial that the young son of one of the Marine sergeants had come jogging over the stream with a summons from the woman Goose herself. After some delay, meant to signify his independence of her, Harry obeyed.

Crossing to the women's camp, he found Goose sitting in a straight-backed chair in front of her tent; her camp stool had been placed beside her and was waiting for Harry. She told him to sit on it but he refused, leaning instead against the tent pole and looking down over the disorder of the women's camp, which the day before George Johnston had chosen to call order.

“You didn't have to do me the honour, Harry, of dropping my name in your His Excellency's ear.”

“Given a chance,” said Harry, “I'll drop more than a name.”

Goose clapped her dimpled hands. “Spirit, Harry! Love is very good for a man's spirit!”

She had then come out and asked him about His Excellency, what His Excellency's fancy was. If it was boys, she could find him boys. If he was a plug-tail … she said with half a smile, using the contemptuous cant word for sodomite.

“He's nobody's lover,” said Harry. “It would be more merciful for him if he were. He is a true solitary, and so you can never rule him.”

“But he never has a woman?” said Goose. She spoke speculatively, as if there were a gap she might one day fill. Harry began to laugh at the idea.

Suddenly, “You can keep Duckling,” Goose told him.

Harry could not speak for a time. Then he ranted at Goose. “I can keep her, can I? I can
keep
her? I have Your Grace's
approval?”

“I'll say to Handy Baker, ask for someone else, Jim.”

“Thank you, my sweet abbess,” Harry continued satirically, calling on his knowledge of Soho for invective. “May you piss pure cream.” He was answering her in kind—with the cant alternative for catching the gonorrhoea. “What do I need to do to repay such generosity?”

“You could speak well of me to this His Excellency,” said Goose without any smile.

Harry could see she was not joking.

“Speak well of me, I say. No words like abbess or bawd or Madam Ran or such.”