The Playmaker

by Thomas Keneally

  “Refresh my memory as to why you are here?” Ralph asked. For there were some crimes which would disqualify you from belonging to Lieutenant Clark’s Theatrical Company, even though he doubted Mary Brenham had committed any of them.

  “I stole clothing from my employer, sir,” she told him. There was no shamed hanging of the head. Convicts were used to answering such questions.

  “Who is the child’s father?” Ralph had asked her.

  “A sailor,” she said, looking away now yet still with the accustomed convict frankness. “I was on the Lady Penrhyn. The child’s father is Bill Crudis, a sailor a long time gone away from here. But a decent fellow.”

  Ralph wondered for an unfaithful second if his Betsey Alicia could have lived through the eight-month journey on the Lady Penrhyn without taking on a protector, someone who would be a source of oranges and chickens in such places as Rio and Capetown.

  “You say you stole clothes?” Ralph asked, filled with a genuine curiosity. She was one of those instances where the stated purpose of this penal enterprise had surely not applied. What had brought such a young woman—an unhabitual felon who carried, artificially or naturally, a lack of taint in her face and bearing—to the limit of things, the place meant for ultimate punishment?

  She told him she had been sent at the age of thirteen years and eleven months to act as a maid in a house belonging to a Mr. Kennedy in Little Queen’s Street. She had put Mrs. Kennedy’s baby to bed and had then wandered into the parents’ bedroom and discovered there clothes of a richness she had never seen so close before. She took two petticoats, a pair of stays, and four and a half yards of fine cloth from Mrs. Kennedy’s wardrobe, and various items of male clothing from Mr. John Kennedy’s. She had never stolen—or so she said—anything before or since. She had been sentenced to seven years at the Old Bailey. The length of the sentence meant nothing now, however. She inhabited a shore which was a fair model for eternity. Lord Sydney had chosen it for that quality: the unlikelihood of her or any of the others ever making a return.

  Ralph sat her at the desk in the marquee and asked her to copy out and read Act One, Scene Two, the meeting between Silvia and her cousin Melinda. Outside, in the town, the work detachments straggled off to the sawpits and to H.E.’s farm, the fishing boat put off into the great harbour, the she-lags and the Marine wives fed wood into the fires beneath the great boiling coppers down by the shore and threw in their soiled clothing. Behind the hospital Reverend Dick Johnson was burying a forty-year-old she-lag from Manchester who had been destroyed by flux. It seemed that all the cove was engaged in tedium and the remembrance of mortality, except Mary Brenham, who gave herself to the copying of the living words of George Farquhar. It took her most of the morning to complete the task—she was occasionally distracted by her little son. Then Ralph read it with her, himself taking the lines of Melinda and pronouncing them in a monotone, since a few of them embarrassed him by their raciness.

  Silvia asserts, for example, that she doesn’t care that Captain Plume is not constant in his affections.

  “I should not like a man with confined thoughts. It shows a narrowness of soul. Constancy is but a dull sleepy quality at best, they will hardly admit it among the manly virtues; nor do I think it deserves a place with bravery, knowledge, policy, justice, and some other qualities that are proper to that noble sex. In short, Melinda, I think a petticoat is a mighty simple thing, and I am heartily tired of my own sex.”

  To which Melinda—in this case Ralph—has to reply without blushes, “That is, you are tired of an appendix to our sex, that you can’t so handsomely get rid of in petticoats as if you were in breeches. On my conscience, Silvia, hadst thou been a man, thou hadst been the greatest rake in Christendom.”

  Ralph liked the way Mary Brenham, ravager of the Kennedys’ wardrobe, read. She was very careful not to commit herself to too much ardour, but there was a promise of great liveliness at some future date when she and Silvia would be one creature. She listened to the earthier lines of Melinda as if they were readings from Isaiah. There was no arch smile or lifting of eyebrows. This demonstrated to Ralph not that she was somehow unworldly—no one had ever been in the Lady Penrhyn’s convict hold and emerged unworldly, except maybe Dick Johnson—but that she was weighing the part, circling its edges, her eye fixed on its centre.

  He commented that she read well, and she told him that in the convict hold of the Lady Penrhyn she had read to the she-lags on the bed platforms around her stories from The Gentleman’s Magazine, bound copies of which had been loaned to her by Lieutenant Johnston, a young officer with a like-sounding name to Reverend Dick’s but of very different disposition.

  “You used to read to Esther Abrahams?” Ralph found himself asking. He was delighted and disarmed by the image of Mary Brenham, leaning forward over a bound copy of The Gentleman’s Magazine to catch the light from the charcoal brazier in the aisle between the two convict platforms, and all the other women hushed; Esther Abrahams, the Jewish convict, hushed, her baby daughter, conceived in Newgate gaol, swaddled in a blanket beside her. Lieutenant Johnston, who travelled on the Lady Penrhyn, had admitted and celebrated his love for Abrahams early on in the voyage, and one token of it had been this gift of bound magazines to the women’s hold.

  Ralph was so seduced by this image of Brenham, perhaps already plump with Small Willy, reading aloud deep among the thwarts of the Lady Penrhyn, that afterwards he would hardly remember having uttered the words “Do your duties, Brenham, permit you to take the part of Silvia?”

  CHAPTER 4

  Recruiting the Perjurer

  Ralph wrote for his own instruction:

  For the role of Mr. Balance, Ketch Freeman the public hangman, who has H.E.’s approval and is overjoyed, since he believes that as an actor he might not be disdained by the young she-lags, as he is in his role of executioner.

  For the role of Captain Plume, the recruiting officer, Henry Kable, the convict overseer.

  For the role of Silvia, daughter to Balance, in love with Plume, Mary Brenham, who is as well as a competent player a good copyist.

  For the role of Lucy, Melinda’s maid … the girl Duckling.

  For the role of Melinda, a Lady of Fortune … Nancy Turner, if we can do so without seeming to condone perjury and bringing down Major Ross and Captain Campbell on our heads.

  Davy Collins, Captain of Marines and Judge Advocate, spent Sundays writing his journal. It was a journal intended for publication, since fantastical voyages such as Davy, Ralph, and all the convicts had undertaken would be considered remarkable in England and even in Europe at large. Ralph had no literary ambitions of his own and was unrancourously certain that Davy’s book would be a journal of great quality and popular appeal, since Davy was a natural scholar. That did not mean he had ever been to Oxford or Cambridge; he had entered the Marines at the age of fourteen. But he had a scholar’s nose—he was interested in everything to do with this strange reach of the universe. In the wild sweet tea with which Johnny White treated scurvy, in the more extraordinary species of fish Will Bryant found in the harbour, and in the language H. E.’s savage, Arabanoo, spoke: its terms for uncle, turtle, death, and God. Many of the gentlemen had been taken in by the repute the very first visitors, James Cook, his artists, and his scientists, had—some eighteen years before—given the place. Through them it had acquired a name for being a miraculous reach of earth. So that ordinary commissioned oafs like Lieutenant Faddy and Captain Meredith had expected it would pamper and entertain them all the time. But it did not do that. It was not concerned with entertaining people. Its dun forests affronted them, its vivid birds shrieked and were inedible, its beasts mocked the Ark. Its Indians lived by rules further removed than the stars from the normal rules of humankind. Cook had named the country New South Wales, as if it were an echo of a British corner. But it was no echo. It was a denial of all that. It was the anti-Europe. You needed a subtle mind if you were to find wonders here once a month let alone daily. Davy Co
llins had such a mind. Where others were bored or appalled, he was diverted frequently and grew excited. His journal therefore multiplied and was now the size of a three-volume life.

  As well as working on his history of the new planet and its novel society, for the past thirteen months Davy had administered and been the embodiment of the law in a latitude which had not previously been acquainted with statutes. To help him in this exercise he employed a few inviolable texts: the Letters Patent, Clode’s Armed Forces of the Crown, and Hayward’s Principles of Civil and Criminal Law. Davy was no fierce judge but extended to the criminal something more terrible than ferocity—a calm and generous curiosity.

  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 devote
es 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.