The Playmaker (6 page)

As well as that, he and his young and inquisitive friend, Captain Watkin Tench, were the leaders of a party among the officers who saw this particular new world as picturesque and curious and worthy of future study. Their military pride was not offended, as was Major Robbie Ross's or Captain Jemmy Campbell's, to find itself engaged with convicts in such an odd back-pocket of a barely known world.

“At least in other nations,” Robbie Ross had fulminated, “Adam and Eve arrived innocent. Here they arrived with their crimes already written all over their faces.” But reasonable Davy had accepted the lags as they came. He, like George Johnston with Esther Abrahams, had made a careful friendship with a convict called Ann Yates, seamstress. Ralph, still determined to be true to his wife, Betsey Alicia, nonetheless saw Davy's association with a lag not as a lapse of morals but as a willingness to take the new felon society on its own terms.

Ralph approached the door of Davy Collins's old shack through the brick steppings of the new one Bloodsworth was building for him. The site was yet another proof that in its little more than a year the town had had three incarnations—one canvas, one bark and wattle, and a third slow transformation to stone and brick, based to an extent on H.E.'s powerful sense that a brick was a statement of civilisation and social order, an appropriate declaration to make to the convict population.

Davy welcomed Ralph and told his Marine servant to make them some tea. Ralph asked for the sake of form after the state of Davy's journal. Davy picked up a page as if to refresh his memory and looked at it through his overhanging silvery curls, which, it was rumoured, had changed colour from gold under the deadly fire of the American colonists—or, more exactly,
rebels
—at Bunker Hill some nine years ago. “At the moment I am writing about the hangings,” Davy said. “I state the opinion that the worst of the women are to blame.”

“Do you think that could be classified as fresh news, Davy?” said Ralph despite himself, slapping his knee.

The flippant answer annoyed Davy and he shook his head. “Remember what Robbie Ross said once. The breast of every whore will become a food market.”

“He said the
quim
of every whore,” Ralph amended.

Davy nodded. “The reader will understand what I mean,” said Davy. “In a country without, as Robbie is also always saying, top-soil and a mint, food and wine are currency, and flesh is the chief industry.” Davy smiled then. “This is pretty serious talk for a Sunday.”

A soldier brought in the tea and Davy poured some sugar into it from a small sack he kept in a Delft canister for protection from the ants.

“You remember Nancy Turner, who perjured herself to protect Private Dukes?” asked Ralph then. “She has some ability as an actress.”

“She came along to your tent to read for a part?”

“These she-lags,” said Ralph, “they keep a fairly short period of mourning.”

“Yes. About half an hour, I'd say. Well, Mister Covent Garden, do you want to make use of her?”

“I don't want to seem to approve of her perjury on the one hand. And on the other, I do not want to begin her in the role and then find in two weeks' time that she is arrested and on trial for her perjury. I wouldn't be speaking of the matter with you if there was another woman of equal talent. But I have had the dross of all dross pouring through my tent—Meg Long, Liz Barber, Mrs. Dudgeon. I don't know … they see pardons in it, and the love and respect of their fellows. If Garrick and Palmer are able to dine free at Chuddock's Chop House in the Strand just because they've done well in Drury Lane as Captain Plume, then some of the sorriest convicts imaginable believe they too will have fame and a free table. That's the way it goes.”

They drank their tea for a while, Davy frowning. At last he said, “It would be improper for me to say Nancy Turner couldn't be used. She will not be arrested, as much as people would like to see it. There is no women's prison here, other than the open-air one in which we all subsist. No men's prison either to speak of, not as prisons are built at home. And, although we all knew she was lying, that is not enough to convict her. By the time your play is performed, also, most of the present argument about Nancy Turner will have been forgotten. What you should remember is that Captain Jemmy Campbell might froth a little if he sees her on the stage. But who can live their lives according to the ebb and flow of Jemmy's ardours? Robbie Ross, however, has immediate say in the matter of your promotion and mine, and you might want to take better care of
his
sensibilities.”

Ralph could sense that Robbie would never make his colonelcy and that therefore a man's military career could perhaps survive his disapproval. Above all, though a careful officer, eager to please, Ralph felt in his blood the maddest, purest, and most fragrant triumph. He knew at once that this was why people were theatrical managers, so that they could have this god-like excitement frequently—the excitement of bringing together on the one stage the dark volatility of Nancy Turner and the coy strength of Mary Brenham.

“This play will amaze everyone,” he told Davy, who had the grace to laugh in celebration with him.

“Your whole damn cast has definite and unarguable crimes written against their names,” said Davy. “It would seem a little crack-brained to cut an actress off the list for something that can't be proven. Is it a large part you intend for her?”

“One of the two larger of the women's roles. But not the better of the two women. Melinda has a spite and wilfulness which prevents the audience from loving her completely as Act Five ends.”

“Nancy Turner should not be loved completely,” murmured Davy. “I have seen at least three performances of this play and remember Mrs. Jordan acting the role of the other girl, the one who disarms and enchants the entire theatre …”

“The role of Silvia,” Ralph supplied.

“And who will be Mrs. Jordan in this world, and disarm and enchant all of us, eh, Ralph?”

“The clothes thief Mary Brenham,” Ralph told him, wondering himself for an instant why it was necessary to specify Brenham's modest crimes. Yet again he savoured the correctness of that balance between Nancy Turner and Mary Brenham. It was the correctness of all art, of all balances; when the elements demanded each other's existence, the way a recidivist criminal like Turner seemed to demand the existence of a one-time offender and accidental mother like Brenham.

CHAPTER 5

Dreams

For the part of Rose, a lively country girl with a number of pointed lines to speak, Ralph wished to have Will Bryant's wife, Dabby. He knew from his brief time in her arms a year before that she had a capacity to utter pointed lines. Added to this, she was able to mimic the thickest Cornish accents. Since the days of the Elizabethan dramatists, theatre managers had been gouging laughs from audiences by exploiting such West Country tones. Yet most of the time she herself spoke more or less exact English, for she had been educated at a point of her girlhood when her father's fortunes were higher than usual. Her father had been what they called in the West Country a “Mariner,” a smuggler, and possessed for a time the money needed to live in town, in this case the town of Fowey.

Later, when peace and excise officers had been searching for him, the Broad family (that was Dabby's maiden name) had lived in a shack of wattle and osier in the forest, amid a wild community of forest dwellers, part Gypsy and all devotees of the lord of all thieves, the Tawny Prince. She was therefore a strange balance of town girl and forest savage, of the polite and the unspeakable. She had been given seven years for holding up an unmarried woman on a country road, stripping her of her hat, her clothes, and her jewellery, and leaving her defenceless and naked in a hedge under an early moon. Such were the extremities you went to when your father was no longer a “Mariner.”

Ralph had first heard of Dabby Broad-Bryant in terms of certain acts of mercy. When Duckling had been sick in the Atlantic, aboard the
Charlotte
, Harry had crossed from the flagship to offer money to Broad so that she would keep on forcing water between Duckling's lips. For Duckling had the flux, and was also losing her hair in lumps the size of coins. Dabby Broad was to be Duckling's irrigator. When Duckling got better, Harry had praised Dabby Broad to Ralph during a dinner on the
Sirius
one evening in Capetown.

And very early after the women convicts had been landed Ralph himself had an experience of what he thought of as Dabby Bryant's compassion.

This had been in the first weeks. Ralph had been doing duty in charge of the guard at Government House. The Captain, or H.E., was at that time still living, a little comically, in a large gubernatorial canvas and wood structure not far from the place where Harry Brewer and the convict bricklayer Bloodsworth would later build him a more orthodox two-storey residence.

Beyond H.E.'s place a fishing camp had been set up on the shore. There were three huts, a long boat, and nets. The nets attracted Ralph. The crusty, twiny, salt, and fish-gut smell possessed a beguiling familiarity. A different star pattern hung above his head at night and he was still learning to read it. But though the heavens had altered, fishing nets maintained their universal reek.

Whenever Ralph wandered past the fishing camp in the settlement's first high summer, which in that country was February, he would usually see Dabby Bryant sitting in front of her hut jiggling her baby daughter, the one she had called Charlotte after the transport which had brought her so far. She would be chatting either with Susannah, the wife of the convict overseer Kable, or with Duckling, or with some other woman from that select side of the stream. Bryant would call greetings to Ralph as he went past. He would look back surreptitiously to see if she were making the inevitable convict jokes the women made in the wake of any officer's passage. But in Dabby Bryant that sort of frantic malice seemed to be lacking.

Once, when he went by the fishing camp, the child was sitting waist deep in the water, and Mrs. Bryant had her skirts belted up around thighs olive as sin.

The West Country convict Will Bryant, who had married Broad the Sunday after the women came ashore, had mentioned to Surgeon Johnny White and Davy Collins as well that he did not believe he was married in the Cornish sense of the word, that if ever he were to return to Cornwall—in spite of the hope of the Home Secretary to the contrary—his marriage to Dabby Broad would be annulled by that very passage. So that Will Bryant clearly harboured the same suspicion as Ralph himself did—that here you were a different sort of being from the one you had been in that world of rational starlight from which you had now been exiled. But in spite of Will's doubts about the universal value of his marriage, Dabby seemed very much the chatelaine, the confident possessor of the fishing camp.

Because so many of the lags were London criminals, more used to lifting watches than casting nets, Will Bryant was the only fisher of any experience in all that felon civilisation. He had been sentenced for what might be seen as a characteristic vice—bringing Norman brandy, collected from French vessels standing offshore, into the complicated Cornish and Devon coast. In a fight on some isolated beach he had wounded an excise officer. Indeed he had all the dark intentness of a wounder. But he was also muscular, quickwitted, and energetic.

The affair between Dabby and himself had begun aboard the prison hulk
Dunkirk
in Plymouth Harbour. The
Dunkirk
was an old naval vessel moored in place a short row from shore and peopled by the overflow from the city and county gaols. The overflow included Dabby and Will. Prison reformers like the Reverend Dick Johnson denounced the hulks as sinks of lechery, but here was a remarkable marriage which had come out of such a hulk!

Because of the stature of Will, the Bryants were the only convicts with a servant—a servant, that is, offficially permitted by H.E.—a slack-mouthed boy called Joe Paget. They had a gardener too, an older prisoner named Nat Mitchell. So that in this way, in those first days of the new society, Bryant and Broad reminded Ralph a little of Harry Brewer—this version of a new world had given them a standing they could never have enjoyed in the old.

The time her child Charlotte was in the water and her own skirts belted up and her husband out in the harbour in the fishing boat, Ralph had found himself talking to her about lightning. At that stage he was much concerned with lightning. Every afternoon and evening that first February there seemed to be a thunderstorm with the most remarkable and vengeful lightning of its species. Recently he had been dining in Major Robbie Ross's marquee when a thunderbolt had struck a tree fewer than ten paces from the door, bowling the Marine sentry over and frying three Cape sheep and a pig. Ralph hated the lightning, especially when he was alone in his tent and all the canvas turned a violent blue, and one lay naked under a drench of unearthly light. Even in Ralph's frequent dreams there was no lightning so thorough in intent as the lightning of this new penal universe, as it flashed down out of the west, out of an unseen and unguessable hinterland.

Ralph had asked Dabby Bryant about the influence the lightning had on the baby girl.

Dabby Bryant laughed robustly, the olive flesh above her knees jiggling. “She isn't so afraid as I am,” said Dabby.

Encouraged by this frank confession, Ralph suddenly said more than he had intended, uttering a sentence from the journal he was writing for Betsey Alicia: “It is the most terrible country for lightning that I have ever seen.” It was a small part of the substance of his marriage that he'd let slip away into the hands of this Cornish looter of spinsters. Ralph had an absolute temperament and believed that if you betrayed a little you would ultimately betray everything. The concept of betraying everything excited him more than he dared utter.