The Playmaker

by Thomas Keneally

  The Alexander, itself defeated by current and wind, had then made slow way back to Batavia, and when it arrived there hardly a man was left fit enough to work above deck.

  “Without H.E. to direct them all,” Ralph found himself saying with passion, “the proper procedures don’t get themselves followed out on board. Damn that Duncan Sinclair and damn old Frank. They are both indolent buggers at the heart of it and drunk for most of their working day. If we’re ever to go back from here to where we came from—and it’s something I often wonder about—we need men of some moral bowels to take us.”

  Yet he knew that when his three years were finished, he might be put on any ship that arrived, without regard to the fibre of its captain.

  “I am not surprised, Ralph,” said Southwell. “The crews were utterly slackened by too much nubbing with the convict women. But listen, we are carrying mail for you—it was waiting at the Cape.”

  Ralph had become so accustomed to the conditions of this new existence that when he had seen the Sirius he had not even thought of mail. Now the chance of a letter from Betsey Alicia nearly swept his legs from under him. He excused himself from Southwell and went aft to find the Sirius surgeon, who had charge of the mails. As he came to the aft companionway he saw Arabanoo stagger along the half deck and lean swaying out over the harbour. H.E. and Johnny Hunter, Captain of Sirius, retrieved him and sat him down against the gunn’ls. It looked to Ralph as if Arabanoo had had too much of “the King.”

  Ralph found the surgeon at last, a musical young man who had brought a piano with him with the convict fleet and had often accompanied that honeyed Irish tenor and tooth-puller Dennis Considen on it. Ralph made a little polite talk with him. The surgeon too had been shaken, as had the structure of the ship, by the recent storm. “It was as absolute, Ralph,” he said, “as anything in the Bible or Shakespeare. It was bloody awesome. I have two letters for you, in fact.”

  Ralph suppressed an impulse to embrace him. If there were only one letter, it could as well be from his business agent in Plymouth, Broderick Hartwell, as from Betsey Alicia. But if there were two, one had to be from his wife, as difficult as she found it to place words down on paper, a single letter being the work of a week.

  The surgeon fetched the letters, both wrapped in sealskin to protect them from the many onboard seas they had encountered on their long transit. The tenderness and care of those sealskin wrappings prickled Ralph’s eyes.

  He unwrapped the larger of the two sealskin parcels—he was sure it would be the one from his agent. Inside, the paper was bearded with a blue green mould. The humid seas off West Africa had caused it to grow there, and all the turbulence and freezing of the Southern Ocean had not killed it.

  The letter, however, was not from his agent Hartwell but from his best friend, George Kempster, a Marine officer of genuine and independent fortune. He was touched that Kempster should write, but he wondered could it mean that the other, smaller letter was from Broderick Hartwell, and that Betsey Alicia had not yet been able to summon up her chancy literacy. So he opened the second sealskin envelope and found on it her childish handwriting, obscured only in part by the same blue-green mould which had attacked the correspondence from Kempster.

  The reality of his wife’s existence, which he had come increasingly to doubt since he received the mercies of Mrs. Bryant, fell on him now with such stunning force that he wondered whether he would have to be aligned against the gunn’ls with Arabanoo. “Are you well, Ralph?” he heard Southwell call.

  “Yes,” called Ralph, from what seemed to him a distance. But he did not hold up by way of explanation his wife’s childish calligraphy. He saw that H.E. was helping Arabanoo across the gundeck toward the longboat which would take them ashore. There was something shamefully servile about H.E., as if he were a civil official overlooking the drunkenness of a mayor. Ralph hurried to join them. He wanted to take his letters ashore. It seemed indecent to open them on this crowded deck. He could read them, he thought, on the long walk back from the government pier to his own hut on the west side of the bay.

  A coxswain helped drape Arabanoo in the bows. H.E. sat beside the prone native and leaned over the body so closely to inspect Arabanoo’s glistening face. His posture was for a second so like that of a lover leaning over a lover that Ralph, settling himself more or less amidships, saw the oarsmen smirk.

  “He had only a little brandy,” H.E. said to Ralph, as if to excuse the Indian. “I hope it is nothing else.”

  On the excursions Ralph had shared with H.E. into the wilderness, the pain in H.E.’s side had always flared, impinging on his sleep and appetite. Ralph now saw H.E. favour his right side as once again he leaned over to inspect the native. Arabanoo’s eyes opened. There was a snorting noise from him and a spurt of bile and other rank liquid from his mouth. The oarsmen crinkled their noses.

  “Something is wrong with the boy,” said H.E. to Ralph.

  With the sort of awesome humility which had once permitted him to make Harry Brewer his familiar, he began to dab at the puke with a handkerchief. It reminded Ralph of an archbishop washing the feet of poor men on Maundy Thursday, except H.E.’s was not a mere ritual kindness. When he had finished, H.E. held the stained handkerchief still, balled in his right hand. There was no archdeacon he could hand it to.

  Arabanoo spoke a plaintive sentence in the native tongue and went to sleep again. H.E. picked up Arabanoo’s petty officer’s hat from the bottom of the boat and held it a little above the native’s face, to protect the wide open features from the sun and the mockery of the sailors. Again there was that strange foreign delicacy of movement and gesture.

  “Letters from home, Ralph?” he asked, still keeping Arabanoo’s hat suspended in mid-breeze.

  Ralph explained—one from his wife and another from his friend Kempster. He was expecting one from his agent as well, but oh the long sea mileages and chancy connections by which correspondence found its way!

  H.E. agreed. He said that at Capetown news had been waiting for Johnny Hunter that the Admiralty had put out tenders for a second convict and supply fleet, but that they had been waiting for the latest dispatches from H.E. before sending them off. “Wagering men could run a sweep on the month and day relief will pitch up here.” Next H.E. honoured him with numbers. “From the Sirius in any case we have 127,000 pounds weight of flour, Ralph. Dependent on the rate of deaths, it is adequate for four or five months of full rationing. And the ship itself has supplies for twelve months, so they are off the stores.”

  He gestured stiffly with the wadded handkerchief in the direction of the receding Sirius.

  It was one of the things Robbie Ross found offensive about H.E.—that he gave equal rations to all, to Robbie as to the she-lags, to the shifty St. Giles boys as to the few competent farmers who worked at H.E.’s wheat planting.

  Certain luxuries Ralph had placed an order for with Lieutenant Southwell to bring from Capetown would be landed in the next day or so—tea and sugar, smoked ham and preserves. But even with the prospect of restored plenty, Ralph could think only of the letters in their sealskin and tropic mould.

  H.E. had sailors carry Arabanoo up to the house in a chair. Ralph congratulated the distracted viceroy over the return of the ship and the rumor of King George’s illness and recovery, and went walking past poor Harry Brewer’s place and Dick Johnson’s toward the stream.

  He sat on a ledge of sandstone still on H.E.’s side of town and opened Kempster’s letter. He knew now what he expected from it—news of Caroline Kempster’s death. For before Bryant had delivered him of his well-built dreams, he had enountered in one of them Mrs. Kempster, a dark-haired girl of about twenty-four years, a woman who resembled Nancy Turner the Perjurer but with a more banked and orderly spirit in her eyes. She and Kempster’s mother appeared frequently in the dreams which had beset Ralph during the long passage to New South Wales. She was more pallid in the dreams, a more ceremonious Mrs. George Kempster than ever she had been in the Stonehouse b
arracks. Ralph had no doubt that as a symbol in his dreams she stood somehow for sickness and mourning, whereas in the real world she stood for laughter, a quick tongue, and great domestic competence. She could breeze through the married quarters, sustaining more tremulous wives, chattering away without malice while left-handedly she attended to this or that fragile wife. Stonehouse Caroline Kempster had good colour and ate well—Mrs. George Kempster Senior sent hams and apples and diced fruits in jars to her son and daughter-in-law. But dream Caroline Kempster was a pole away.

  It had been in the last days of the voyage, when the bilges had turned sour and the air in his cabin seemed yellow, that he had dreamed of young Mrs. George Kempster’s death. It had been like this. He had fetched her from the door of Mrs. Kempster Senior’s house at Yelverton—there had been no quick laughter, no half-comic offer to wipe the snot from Ralph Junior’s face. He knew how he had been elected to hand Mrs. Kempster Junior down these graceful stairs, for at the start of the dream he had been engaged in a horse race between himself on a chestnut and Betsey Alicia’s brother Matthew on a white horse. It was because he had outridden Matthew that he now had the stature to be here and to have the sombre, dream Mrs. Kempster on his elbow.

  When he got to the base of the stairs, a coach drawn by six black horses was waiting. Ralph was aware that when most people dreamed of coaches, they did not take account of whether they were manned or unmanned, whether there were other passengers or not, unless there were faces they recognised which presented themselves. Ralph was so stricken with dreams, however, that he did take account of such things. The driver’s seat, as precisely tooled as a driver’s seat on the Plymouth Mail, was empty.

  He handed Mrs. Kempster into the interior of the coach, very perturbed for her but knowing he could not travel at her side.

  That dream of the riderless carriage and six black horses was now some sixteen months past, but he feared the letter he held in his hands would confirm its potency.

  After a time devoted to doubt and trembling, he unsealed the message. Part of its bulk was accounted for by an enclosure, which fell to the ground and which Ralph now picked up. It was headed:

  Pay Office, Plymouth, December 1st, 1788

  It continued:

  Sir,

  It is with very great concern I acquaint you of the death of our late valuable friend Mr. Broderick Hartwell on the 18th of last month. His Executors feel very much for the distress Mrs. Clark might experience from this unhappy event if they called in the moneys advanced to said Mrs. Clark by Broderick Hartwell against the guarantees you signed for him before your departure from this country. I fully understand that this is a normal arrangement for officers who are to serve in remote places, than which there is no more remoter than the land in which you presently find yourself. Mr. Hartwell’s Executors are therefore willing to continue to furnish Mrs. Clark with money, waiting for their reimbursement till the return of the Letter of Attorney enclosed herein, a letter which we conclude you will readily execute and send by the first conveyance either to Mr. George Hartwell, your late agent’s brother, care of the Navy Office, or to myself, we being joint Executors to the deceased.

  You are debtor to the late Mr. Hartwell for seventy-six pounds, eleven and sixpence, and as we continue to supply Mrs. Clark, we take it for granted no further Bank Drafts of yours will appear.

  I am Sir, your most obedient servant,

  Thomas Wolridge

  Ralph felt a wave of that strange sickening impotence which comes from being not only in debt, but moons removed from the site where something could be done about it. There was also that itch of the blood when someone you had cherished and held intimately, Mrs. Betsey Alicia Clark, had to the date of Hartwell’s death somehow exceeded reasonable spending of forty pounds over two years by some thirty-six pounds eleven and sixpence.

  Broderick had been a man about fifty, a reasonable, plump man who would tend to indulge Betsey Alicia if she made special appeals. He had had a younger and leaner brother whom Ralph had sometimes spotted moving with a frown through the offices the Hartwell brothers shared in Gibbonfields. Ralph knew he should have taken better notice of this younger brother, since Broderick Hartwell’s death had put the Clarks under his management.

  Ralph had to bite the webbing between thumb and forefinger to absorb the irony. At this penal reach of the universe there was no real entity called money. Money was Liz Barber’s thighs. Money was wine, money was spirits. Money was the flour Black Caesar had absconded with. Money was edible, potable, solid. Whereas a sum like seventy-six pounds, eleven shillings and sixpence, seemed a chimera.

  “… as we continue to supply Mrs. Clark we take it for granted no further Bank Drafts of yours will appear.”

  He had given Lieutenant Southwell of the Sirius a ten-pound bank draft to make purchases at the Cape. That would have to be added to his debt to the estate of Broderick Hartwell, and no doubt frowning George Hartwell, not understanding the disturbances and the lapses of time under which Ralph Clark laboured, would be aggrieved when this further claim turned up on his desk.

  The Power of Attorney allowing Wolridge and Hartwell to collect his pay against the debts had to be signed by two witnesses as well as by himself. He regretted poor Harry’s stroke, for Harry would sign it without making judgments about the size of the debt. Knowing of Ralph’s modest income, his brother officers could not but raise an eyebrow when witnessing the document. Perhaps he could get Lieutenant Faddy or Captain Meredith to sign it when they were far into their night’s liquor. But even under liquor, Faddy had an eye for a figure like that, for a detail out of which jokes and mockeries could be constructed.

  (At last, one evening when he dined aboard, he would slip the document first in front of Lieutenant Poulsen and then in front of the surgeon from Sirius, and they would both—to his joy—sign it in a cavalier way, without bothering to read it. It seemed that many officers in the place had received legal documents of various kinds from home, and there was a brotherly tradition that you witnessed them without prying into their contents.)

  He opened Kempster’s letter. News of Hartwell’s death had dulled the expectation of Mrs. Kempster’s. And certainly Kempster gave in the letter no indication that he was widowed. His main news was also about Hartwell’s death.

  Stonehouse, December 1st, 1788

  Dear Clark,

  I hope you received my last letter which I sent to Portsmouth when your strange expedition was there on the eve of throwing itself into the void. I have undertaken to enclose letters for a Mr. Thomas Wolridge, and the purpose of those letters are clear.

  Your wife and boy are both well, but by your agent Hartwell’s death she is thrown on the mercy of his brother, who takes to Hartwell’s affairs and has reduced her allowance to twenty pounds per annum. Do not let that make you uneasy, as hitherto she has contrived to keep out of debt. But what money she will want I will be her banker for, and you must pay me when you come home—this you will keep to yourself as not any person here knows it. To be poor and to appear so is the worst of all evils and therefore I advised her to keep our arrangement to herself.

  The dear woman is well and your son, Ralph, recovered from a short but fierce fever. We are taking them with us to Yelverton to spend Christmas—please do not be concerned, they will travel in my mother’s covered carriage. All we would need for utter happiness, my dear Ralph, is your delightful company and your funny and serious whimsicality when you have brandy in you.

  Mrs. Kempster sends her warmest best wishes. No doubt the ship which bears this will bring fresher news than I can give you here.

  However, I should suppose Hartwell’s death will be one advantage to you—it will save the nine pounds a year which he paid for insuring your life and then charged to you.

  They are forming a second convict fleet and have recruited a new corps for the security of that distant New South Wales. Our old friend Nepean has decided to join it as the eldest captain. I am told you will all be offered Com
missions in it—you may all, including our friend Major Robbie, have changed your minds about New South Wales and be now declaring it a decent human habitation. I know not whether it will be advisable for any of you to go into this Corps—you will get an immediate step up in rank, of course, but the question is, will not that be the last promotion you are to look for, unless you can purchase one, which except in the event of Betsey Alicia inheriting her father’s estate would seem—forgive me for saying so, dear Ralph—not likely?

  Be assured I shall be always willing to serve you and am your sincere friend.

  Lieutenant Quartermaster Kempster,

  Marines, Stonehouse,

  Plymouth

  Ralph was not abashed to find his prophetic dreams of Mrs. Kempster portended nothing. It was not the first time he had dreamed things which should have spelt tragedy but which had not. A dream ran like a fuse toward the final deaths of the players of the dream, but the fuse in Mrs. Kempster’s case might run for forty or fifty years, since as everyone knew time was suspended in sleep.

  What Ralph took from the letter was therefore not a sense of thwarted vision but a rich sensation of gratitude to Kempster. He would manage Betsey Alicia’s business for her. In the most unintruding way, he would have Mrs. Kempster watch Betsey Alicia for extravagance. He wanted to write glowingly to Kempster, but that had to await a ship, and the frustration of not being able to state his thanks was nearly as great as his earlier sense of monetary powerlessness.