The Playmaker (44 page)

An ecstatic Harry Brewer clapped Ralph on the shoulder. “This is your invention, Ralph, and I will not take the praise that belongs to you. I would, however, desire the honour of presenting Caesar to the Captain.”

Ralph could hear Captain Plume's raised voice exhorting Pearmain and Appletree to sing the refrain with him, and singing it they marched off stage to volleys of applause. All that would have to be moved on stage for the beginning of Act Three was a little wooden sundial, and the capture of the Madagascan would so delay the play there was ample time for that.

Harry now limped forward to lead the night watch in, their mouths agape with the celebration of their capture, and Caesar seemingly as joyous as any of them. Ralph followed behind. Art had been supplanted by a criminal sensation, or at least Art was about to be. As Caesar and his captors entered the barracks, Ralph, following on, noticed that Harry had put the twenty-eight-pound ankle irons on the prisoner, who nonetheless moved more or less like a dancer.

When the crowd saw him they gusted him forward with applause. The captors were sportingly applauded too. It was all a game, a hazard, a contract which had been skillfully concluded by both parties to it, by the Madagascan and the night watch. Harry led Black Caesar on a roundabout route, not up the centre by the braziers and past Goose, but around the outer aisles of the barracks, past the young wives of the private Marines and their sleepy children lying on blankets on the floorboards. Everyone had risen, except these children drugged by noise and the redolence of gin and brandy and tobacco which hung around the walls. Everyone rose as if the monarch they were celebrating were not George but Caesar. As Caesar and the night watch made the front row and the Madagascan was presented to a mildly smiling H.E., willing to tolerate such sportiveness because of the day, Ralph dodged onto the stage and through the flats to see his actors. He thought they all looked wan—it was not simply the powder of their faces. They knew Caesar had out-theatred them.

“Act Three will be a little delayed,” he told them.

He saw Mary Brenham, now wearing her white suit of men's clothes and her wig, turn and flee down the steps and out the back door.

“Have courage,” he said to the others. “It is all progressing beautifully. Everyone is dazed with happiness and admiration. Otherwise they could not so applaud this villain from Africa.”

He knew it was a brave battlefield speech, delivered quickly, with half an eye to the back door Mary Brenham had left ajar. But it seemed to revive them. They turned to each other. There were modest caresses of congratulation—not the grand gothic ones they had expected an hour ago to be able to extend, but worthy of people ruggedly and competently taking on themselves the burden of three more acts.

Ralph took one more look at the front of the stage. There Black Caesar was doing a little kick-up with his fourteen pounds of iron on either ankle. Davy, who would bring down death or some other heavy sentence on the Madagascan, applauded and laughed as hard as anyone. Ralph felt for a moment bereft of bearings. When is roguery laughable, and when is it hangable? Davy Collins seemed to know all the answers to those questions which left Ralph baffled still.

Ralph said a brief goodbye to his actors and went to find Mary Brenham. For the second time in his life he pursued a girl dressed in a white calico suit of men's clothes across the night.

He found her among the trees of the marquee. She had her back to him, one arm raised to the trunk of the thing, the other bent across her face.

“Come back,” said Ralph. “He is wearing the twenty-eight-pound chains and is as good as sentenced.”

“I cannot say my lines with him sitting in front of me there,” she told Ralph. She covered one side of her face with her hand. The side he could see looked suddenly like that of an unwise thirteen-year-old, the one who had erred for Andrew Hilton. “Knowing, too, that I'll need to go to court and show my arse.”

“If you say rape, he will hang, my dear. And if you say merely bruises, he will still be put on a rock in the harbour, or sent to an outstation.”

“But you will want me to say rape. They will try to get me to say rape, so that they can have him, so that Ketch Freeman can twist him. And if I say rape, I will be forced to show myself. And you know by now, Mr. Clark, that I cannot bear it.”

She turned to him, and he could see her shuddering distress. He put his arms around her. “I have not a line of Silvia left in me,” she said.

He knew she was beyond reason—that he could not fruitfully explain to her that so long after the assault she would not need to show any limb or organ. Her face alone could hang Black Caesar.

“You do not have to say rape, and I will protect you from saying it. But please find Silvia's lines again, my love. Please, since the play still has half its way to run and yours is the foremost part.”

He had to go on repeating his assurances about the trial of Caesar, and he did it energetically and without faltering.

“I fear for my son,” she confessed.

“Remember,” said Ralph, “the Madagascan stole food and weapons. He made incessant raids. His attack on you was simply one element in the whole cloth of his crimes. If I told Davy there is no reason for you to show yourself, Davy will believe me.”

And so, with some halts, he coaxed her back across the clearing and to the barracks again. As she neared the door, Silvia revived in her. She asked Ralph if he could send the perfumier Nicholls out to her to restore the whiteness of her face, which had been somewhat furrowed by tears.

“Remember,” said Ralph, about to re-enter the barracks, “that if he is permitted to sit down in his chains and watch the play, he will not know you in your suit of white clothes.”

“He did not know me when he savaged me in my hut,” she said. “Just that I had a body to be bruised, and a son to protect.”

“So hide behind your Silvia mask and mock him,” said Ralph, kissing her cheek and feeling her breast behind the harshness of the cloth.

“Lieutenant Clark,” she told him, “you are such an honest poor fellow.”

“I shall send Dabby Bryant to fetch you when the play is to go ahead,” murmured Ralph, weak with her praise.

Back inside, Ketch Freeman the hangman, dressed in a scarecrow suit and heavily lined to pass as Justice Balance, was waiting at the head of the stairs like a child waiting for a parent. Ralph decided to be jovial.

“So it seems you will have the turning off of Black Caesar, Ketch.”

“I never done anyone so heavy nor so big,” said Ketch.

“You still have your lines as Balance?” Ralph asked, passing him.

“Balance is easy,” said Ketch Freeman. “Freeman is hard.”

“Wait and see, Ketch. He may not be given death. In the meantime, you are a fine Balance.”

Ketch Freeman laughed as if Ralph had made a play on words. Mary Brenham's praise, thought Ralph, had transformed him into a sage and a wit.

Ralph eased along behind the backdrop to look out the window of Justice Balance's country house. The scene was like a multitudinous wedding feast. Caesar was making his way down the aisle, past the braziers. The constables and the Marine guard still flanked him. By the middle of the three braziers, Mother Goose, pontiff of the Tawny Prince in this penal reach, rose and clapped her hands. Her cup-bearer came to her side, uncorked the new bottle of fresh brandy he had been carrying all night and poured it into the goblet. When he handed it to Goose, Goose raised it high, to the level of Black Caesar's face. She took a great draught—three mouthfuls. A little of the third mouthful bled down either side of her mouth. The lags were cheering, had never seen such public honour done. With a gesture of beneficence from her left hand, Goose passed the goblet to Caesar with her right. Caesar smiled massively and turned on his heels to show the entire crowd the half-drunk goblet. By the time he had completed the circuit, had toasted Goose and had raised it to his own lips, Goose's mouth had opened wide and she had taken a throttling hand to her throat. Caesar took the cup from his lips without having drunk even a sip. He stared. The crowd began to moderate, except at its edges, in the noise it had been making. Ralph saw Goose emit three grunts—three clouds of blue mist—before she crashed to the boards.

Surgeon Johnny White rushed down the centre aisle as if he had seen the first signs of collapse in Goose and was out to combat them. Dennis Considen ran behind him. Johnny knelt by Goose's substantial fallen bulk and raised her eyelids and lowered his ear to detect breath. Ralph saw Black Caesar raise the goblet and start another circuit, crying, “Oh look, my brothers! The Fragrant One has delivered Caesar one more time!”

But Johnny White rose and grabbed the glass and emptied its contents onto the floorboards. After a conversation with Considen, he reached out and closed Goose's startled eyes. At that point an enquiring roar rose from the audience. Johnny found four young lags to carry Goose out of the hall, and it seemed to Ralph from his point of observation that there was a sort of inadvertence in the way the crowd took note of this bearing forth of the centre of felonry. The barracks were still loud with question and surmise. But of all those who could have followed Goose weeping, only Dot Handilands, the she-lag of more than eighty, staggered behind, cursing God.

Any tolerance the front row theatregoers—H.E., Johnny Hunter, Davy—had extended to Black Caesar was now cancelled. Davy instructed Harry Brewer, and Harry Brewer instructed Bill Parr and the Marine guard to remove the prisoner. There was no applause for him as he left in the wake of Goose's corpse.

“It is apoplexy,” Ralph heard Davy report to H.E. “The play should now go on without any more of this.”

Goose—as Ralph would later discover—was laid down just beyond the barracks doorway and covered with a blanket. There were no sentimental visits from her cup-boy or anyone else. It showed you that in the lag commonwealth, fealty was exactly cut off at the instant of the sovereign's fall. There were no ceremonious or heartfelt obsequies. Everyone but old Dot stayed indoors to see the balance of the play.

Even without knowing these details at the time, Ralph—behind the backdrop—understood at once that her ungrieved death and the expulsion of Black Caesar had created a space in which his play could flourish. He hurried toward the wings of the stage where his cast was still waiting.

“It will be time in perhaps two minutes,” he told them. He was distracted by the strange hobbling noise of Harry's approach and his appearance among the actors. Harry grasped Duckling by the arm and bore her down the back steps and out the door. Ralph followed, precisely because he did not wish to lose any further players. Emerging into the night, he saw Nichols applying a final coat of powder to Mary Brenham's face, a face restored and eager and as grandly familiar to Ralph as if he had known it all his life. “Perhaps only two minutes,” he shouted to Nichols and Silvia.

Over by the marquee Harry raged at Duckling, “Do you have the phial? Do you still have it?”

Ralph, only a few steps away, saw Duckling reach into the bodice of her dress and drag forth a small tube of glass.

“Give it me!” Harry demanded. He saw Ralph there and glowered at him crookedly from a palsied face. “Oh Jesus,” he said. “Thank God it's friend Ralph!”

He threw the phial to the ground and tried, in his uneven and crippled way, to crush it. Ralph held a hand out, conveying that Harry shouldn't strain himself, and raised his own boot and brought it down many times on the glass tube until nothing was left but silvery powder.

“Ralph,” said Harry, “we are dependent on you.”

“Dependent?” asked Ralph, for he had not yet pieced it all together.

“You understand, Ralph,” Harry barked, more vulpine for having only half a mouth. “You understand, goddamn you!”

“But I thought she was indifferent,” he said, pointing to Duckling. “I always thought she was indifferent.”

“That's how much you and I know of loyalty and of whatever in the Christ this is. Or of poison and murder, whatever they are! You understand, this is a wedding present to you. And some sort of present to me.”

She had said once she liked Brenham. When caught in carnal enthusiasm with Curtis Brand she had made some slack-mouthed speech about the play. And had there been something about gratitude to him as playmaker? Had Farquhar's play really conquered the Tawny Prince?

“Jesus!” said Ralph. “She has killed her own Dimber Damber.” It was like water running uphill. It was science disproved.

Duckling stared at him in her frank, slightly sullen way.

“She grew up among those substances,” said Harry. “Sitting there, watching Goose make up potions in Greek Street.” He was trying to explain why Duckling looked no different from her daily self. Half-dead Harry said, “If you mention it to anyone, I will deny it on oath and to the death.”

“You underestimate my love for you,” said Ralph. But he was not really offended.

He turned to Duckling the poisoner. There was no sign of her motives, which lay in another universe than his.

“I hope,” he said, dizzy and exultant, “that you still remember your lines.”

EPILOGUE

What is to be said of Ralph's play that night? Its local success in the city of lags was never in question. Both Davy and Watkin wrote of it in their journals. “In the evening,” wrote Davy, “some of the convicts were permitted to perform Farquhar's comedy of
The Recruiting Officer
in a hut fitted up for the occasion. They professed no higher aim than ‘humbly to excite a smile,' and their efforts to please were not unattended with applause.”

Watkin wrote that the play was honoured by the presence of H.E. and the garrison officers. “Some of the actors acquitted themselves with great spirit and received the praises of the audience: a prologue and an epilogue, written by one of the performers, were also spoken on the occasion.” Thus Watkin credited Wisehammer not only with having composed his own epilogue but also with the introductory verses written by George Farquhar himself eighty years earlier.