The Playmaker

by Thomas Keneally

Now he opened the letter from Betsey Alicia. As in the case of the Kempster letter, mould had tried but not succeeded in devouring the handwriting. This triumph of good will (together with certain legal documents) over equatorial forces of improbable heat and air moisture struck him again as a savoury and wonderful victory.

  Plymouth, December 3, 1788

  My dearest Ralph,

  How I miss you and what awful dreams I have!

  Ralph was pleased in a way that she had not delivered of them, as he had.

  I dreamed we were in Midlothian at your Aunt Hawkings and I saw you looking in at me through a Haberdasher’s window, but you did not know who I was. When I chased you to explain, you ran away through the streets.

  Betsey Alicia and Ralph always began their letters with dreams, and now it was a habit from which he had been broken, he looked forward to breaking her of it.

  As you know, Mr. Hartwell has died, but though those who manage his business have been very kind, I have been happy to institute certain economies. You will be proud of me, my Ralph. I go to the Union Road markets in the late afternoon when the price of things has fallen and the butchers and grocers are getting anxious. It is quite a game, and Ralphie and I both quite enjoy it so that I do not want you to feel your normal melancholy on the matter.

  The same week Mr. Hartwell died Ralphie had a flux, and I was for a few days tormented by the fear that it could not be reversed. Thank God it has been, and he is a boy of spirit again. The Mercers’ twelve-year-old boy Philip has gone as a midshipman aboard the ship Intrepid. Ralphie has been speaking of nothing else since, which as you know does not too much please me, since I would prefer a life for him other than at sea.

  Kempster and Captain Nepean have filled me with news that they are recruiting a new Corps specially for that far off place. Nepean says if you joined that Corps you would go straight to Captain, Ralph. But I must plead with you that I do not want to live among those awful felons. George Kempster says you would get to Captain but not beyond, and I hope you will take his advice, my love.

  We are off to Mrs. Kempster’s place at Yelverton for Christmas, and shall have a happy, warm time around that great fireplace Mrs. Kempster keeps in the main hall. Indeed it is as big as our two little rooms here in married quarters. We will all much toast you, and I shall shed my tears.

  Missing you, I have been driven to make a verse. I have folded it and put it in this letter.

  Believe me your most loving wife,

  Betsey Alicia

  Ralph found the little wedge of poetry, folded four ways. Unwrapping it, he read:

  Written by Mrs. Clark on her husband’s birthday.

  May each Returning Year in Pleasure bring

  The glory of his Country and his King.

  May Angels guard his peaceful home with Care,

  Conjugal happiness be always there.

  Forgive oh God the follies of his youth,

  Mould his heart in piety and truth,

  And when Thou callest him to the Realms of Bliss,

  Oh take me too, I am but Thine and his.

  Signed Alicia

  Ralph was disarmed and unstrung by the sweetness of the verse, though his joy was diminished by two aspects of both verse and letter. One was the blanket refusal to join him at this limit of space, this geographic test of devotion. He could imagine perhaps Mrs. Kempster writing to George in the same situation and saying that although she would not like to spend all her life in a distant penal nation, she would follow him if that was his choice.

  Ralph did not in any case want to remain here, even with a captaincy ensured. But he wished Betsey Alicia had had the wit to make the offer while at the same time conveying she would prefer it was not taken up.

  Then, in the verse, the reference to the “follies of his youth.” He had at the beginning of their engagement confessed to her a few modest whorings. Yet she liked to cast him sometimes as if he were a rescued hellrake, and so she did even in this verse.

  So, in half an hour, reading letters by the stream which divided the convict city in two, Ralph experienced a fast rate of disillusionment with his divine spouse. Mr. Hartwell’s executors had begun it by pointing to her mild extravagance. These signs of fallibility in Betsey Alicia surprisingly did not disappoint him. But she had, through her letters and her spending, suddenly lifted from him the burden of frantic adoration. “They change while you’re at sea,” his friend Oldfield told him once, and it was exactly so. With all that time on their own, said Oldfield, they become more careful of their comforts than most wives have time to be.

  He folded the letters and crossed the stream. In his clearing Ketch Freeman the hangman paced alone, reciting lines. “Was ever man so imposed upon! I had a promise, indeed, that she would never dispose of herself without my consent. I have consented with a witness, given her away as my act and deed. No, I shall never parden Plume the villainy, first of robbing me of my daughter, and then the mean opinion he must have of me, to think that I could be so wretchedly imposed upon …”

  It was wonderful for Ralph to encounter now, in a world diminished by his wife’s small frailties, the private and—until he came along—unobserved devotion of Ketch to the play.

  He walked towards his hut, wanting to get down on paper his thoughts to Kempster while they were still fresh. Ketch Freeman saw him and came loping in his tracks. Ralph turned to see his comic Adam’s apple and bony features drawing close. As Justice Balance his long bones were worth a laugh, though they did not seem quite so amusing when he functioned as an executioner.

  “Sir,” he said, bowing. It showed Ralph what an excellent means of reform a play is. From a play—and he promised himself to tell Dick Johnson this—a convict learns how politer people carry themselves, which is something he would never learn in church. “Sir, Mr. Clark, I would like to convey to you my thanks for giving me room in your play. The minds of my fellow criminals are now distracted from my normal exercises, and laugh with me about my gestures as an actor.”

  “You talk like an actor,” said Ralph, with a smile.

  “If I had known it was possible to be one,” said Freeman with grand fervour, “I would never have taken to the highway.”

  Ralph thanked him. He must have found an uncritical girl to spend time with, someone who did not unman him at the height of yearning by making some joke about his trade.

  Where can I find such a woman? Ralph asked himself, going indoors.

  CHAPTER 20

  Bruises

  Johnny White’s hospital was laid out thus: a ward for male convicts, a ward for females, a military ward, and a small civil ward in which Harry Brewer lay. His bulldoggish features which had always looked ruddy were, in the lee of the stroke and after three days of unchosen sleep, a waxy blue. He smelt of urine and excrement. “What can you do to keep them clean?” asked Johnny White. In that stench the vengeance of Private Baker was clearly conveyed.

  Often when Ralph visited, Dick Johnson would be in place by Harry’s cot. Dick saw Harry’s state as a merciful obliteration. Dick’s idea was that while Harry slept, God contended with the Tawny Prince for Harry’s spirit. “He will not get out of this without some paralysis,” Dick murmured to Ralph. It was what Johnny White had said, too. But Johnny saw whatever wastage Harry would suffer as arising from some cerebral damage, whereas Dick read it as the harm done because of Harry’s body being a cockpit for a contest between the Deity and satanic troops.

  The day after Ralph read the letters, a chest of tea was landed from the Sirius with his name on it, and he took a small caddy of stuff up to the hospital to place beside Harry’s cot. It was one of those offerings you make when you are close to a life under threat—you do not know if the gift is given simply in case the sufferer wakes, or whether it is a sort of magical oblation to those forces engaged in the fight for the sufferer’s breath and soul. Ralph knew at least that on awakening Harry would welcome tea, and after that would call for brandy and be denied it.

  Ralph had
placed the small tin of tea on the ground beside Harry’s bed and was now checking his friend’s features, in which there were certain flutterings of eyelids and tremblings of the cheeks, as if the man himself were trying to wake. His features though, always puggish, seemed now to be tending in one direction, into the lower left corner of his face. It reminded Ralph of the way water seeks the lowest point. This vortex of the flesh, this drag of gravity in one corner of Harry’s face, fascinated Ralph, and he stared at the features in a frank way he would not be able to repeat once Harry Brewer awoke.

  The room where Johnny White, Dennis Considen, and the others did their occasional surgery, the room which Ralph associated with Dennis’s tooth-pulling and the Bullmore autopsy, stood beyond the one where Harry lay. Johnny White kept most of the specifics in there—both the native herbal ones and those he had brought from Europe. He was in fact expecting a further shipment to come ashore from the Sirius—diarrhoetics, astringents, digitalis, laudanum, ointments, medicinal wines.

  Johnny White one morning hurried through the civil ward, peopled only by undemanding if redolent Harry, on his way to this surgical room. “The native is ill with a fever,” said Johnny. “H.E. sent me a note. It says, ‘Bring much laudanum.’ Can you imagine? These are people, Ralph, who have lived from before the Flood without laudanum, and suddenly they need it in quantity. Or is it really H.E. who needs it for his own sedation?”

  When Ralph returned at the end of the afternoon’s playmaking, the tea was still in its place, and Harry’s uneven features still tended downward in his blue-white mask. As Ralph waited beside Harry, Surgeon White got back from H.E.’s with the story of Arabanoo’s fever. Johnny had arrived at H.E.’s new house (the stairwell designed by Harry) to find Arabanoo indeed strongly affected by fever and lying on a sofa in H. E.’s front parlour. And what an Arabanoo Johnny White saw! He had painted himself with orange and white ochres; his limbs were banded with paint. H. E. had admitted him to the parlour fully painted and had let him carry in the weapons he had recently made in idle hours—a flat-faced war club banded in the same colours as the native himself wore, and spears tipped variously with bone and stone. H.E. had permitted the construction of such arms, and Bill Bradbury had not much feared them and had often slept with the native and the weapons at night.

  Johnny White found Arabanoo very agitated. H.E. called in Davy Collins to explain all his distress. According to Davy, Arabanoo was aware that his kinsmen, at least those on the south side of the harbour, had been consumed by the smallpox—gal-gal-la. Now, stricken with it himself, he had been moved by some sort of guilt for all his fellows who had the same. Davy said, on his basis of some sixteen or seventeen months’ knowledge of the native peoples of the place, that there had been some outstanding obligation on Arabanoo to paint himself and take up arms and find the perpetrator of gal-gal-la. The native had had no doubt that it was someone among his own people, rather than the European intruders, who had provoked the outrage on the persons of his cousins the Cadigal people and on his own group the Gayimai.

  That was why, when returning ill with H.E. from aboard the Sirius, he had painted himself in preparation to go in search of the enemy who had laid such a curse. Setting off, he had collapsed among the corn in H.E.’s government garden. Though so ill, he was still trying to rise when Johnny got to H.E.’s house, and any attempt to wipe from his body the paint which signified his purpose, the bands of ochre and white, caused him grief and anxiety. Hence the laudanum, to still Arabanoo, to put a halt to his obligation, to permit a hiatus during which the paint could be washed away.

  The fever of Arabanoo, according to what Johnny White told Ralph, resembled that of smallpox, and it seemed likely he might have caught it during the time he attended the two children Booron and Nanbaree when they lay in hospital with the disease. Yet strangely Arabanoo showed no pox at all. There were no sores upon his face or body.

  Soon Davy was able to swab the ochre off the Indian’s body, for the native’s mania had now been dulled with laudanum. Without which, of course, as Johnny said, his race had done from beyond the Fall and the Flood.

  Duckling too would come to Harry’s bedside and make lazy motions with her hand across his body, keeping the flies away on the last hot days of autumn. At the playmaking she performed the maid Lucy with the same gusto she had shown in Brand’s arms, and it was hard to tell if she feared Harry Brewer’s death as an end to her privileges on H.E.’s side of the stream or welcomed it as liberation from Harry’s fatherly besottedness with her.

  Harry had more than once described how equably she had faced the eve of her own hanging, not even teased by the chance of reprieve, letting herself be rented out from the condemned hold by Goose and the warders for three shillings a toss. And telling Harry when he visited her that she wouldn’t cry peccavi on the gallows. If she were not too troubled three years past by the question of which side of the lime pit she stood on, it was likely that, despite all Harry’s benign care, she did not spend too much time concerned with which side of this penal world she would inhabit.

  There was a sort of dull affection, however, in the way she waved her hand above Harry, watching the roof and perhaps remembering her Lucy lines.

  Ralph learned of the attack on Mary Brenham, his Silvia, only when his actors met at the three-o’clock claxon in the clearing by his marquee. He saw John Wisehammer and Dabby Bryant sitting in the coarse grass with a third convict he did not recognise, a woman of ill-assorted features. Nancy Turner the Perjurer, skeletal Ketch Freeman, and Sideway, the histrionic mutineer, stood above the three. The hangman stood back somewhat from the rest of the group, but Sideway crowded in with a pose of stageworthy concern, and Turner—with her usual dark composure—inspected the woman Ralph could not recognise. As Ralph got closer though, he saw with some alarm that the woman was a mute and badly beaten Mary Brenham. The way her bruising and swellings brutally overlay her normally fine-lined face appalled him. An urge to protect her sent him jogging, not like an officer but like a manager, a friend, across the clearing.

  “It’s that satanic bastard, Black Caesar,” Sideway rushed across to tell him.

  “Caesar has been retaken?”

  “Retaken,” Dabby Bryant murmured, commenting indulgently on Ralph’s innocence.

  Mary Brenham raised her contused lips toward Ralph, explaining by this mute evidence why she did not wish to undertake her own explanations.

  “Black Caesar did this to you?” asked Ralph.

  “All the days he was sitting there,” said Mrs. Dabby Bryant, “and we think he likes the play, he’d had the eye for this poor gal, this little duck.”

  “So he ravished her?” asked Ralph, hollow, looking suddenly at skinny Freeman for some reassurance the Madagascan would be punished but getting none from the boy, who stared away into the woods, like Justice Balance keeping counsel.

  Mary Brenham denied rape, shaking her head fiercely once before the pain of the gesture overcame her.

  “It’d be her shame,” said Mrs. Bryant, to explain the gesture. “It’d be her natural mercy, poor chuck. Any great black cull bruised me that way, I’d call ravishing whether he done it or whether he kept his engine in the mill! I would swear to ravishing to Captain Collins.”

  “And he,” said Wisehammer, his hand hovering in Mary Brenham’s direction, “would in his turn appoint a jury of old she-lags to look at you and see if it was true. And I ask you, what if they said it wasn’t.”

  “There wouldn’t be any jury of she-lags who’d deny a woman justice for such bruises as poor Mary’s!”

  “He took flour and beef,” John Wisehammer told Ralph, “and beat her while the little boy looked on, screaming. And did anyone come to help, I ask you? No, since they thought it was just a rare fit of the weeps the boy had.”

  “The things children behold in this place!” said Sideway, already in the role of a horrified Mr. Worthy, a gentle Bristolian squire.

  “And escaped again?” said Ralph. He wanted to see
Caesar punished for this.

  “And escaped again,” said Wisehammer. “How would he say it? I’ll tell you. That the Fragrant One was on his side.”

  “What were the Quarter Guard doing?” Ralph asked, his face bristling with scarcely concealed anxiety. “Where was the night watch? Where’s Henry Kable to answer me that?”

  Wisehammer said reasonably, “How could you stop a man black and strong as Caesar is? Can you spread a net from the brick kilns to the bay on the west side? It can’t be done.”

  “And he carries that private’s musket with him,” said Dabby Bryant, “and that would make him taller still. There isn’t no arguing with a man as big and hungry as that and carrying arms.”

  “You have been to the surgeon?” Ralph whispered to the girl.

  “Time is her only surgeon,” said Sideway grandly. “And she has nearly a month to heal before the play is performed.”

  Ralph saw Wisehammer’s hand move discreetly on Mary Brenham’s wrist. There was a bruise even there, the size of a large man’s thumbprint. There was no question that a woman in her state needed such tender movement of the hand, but Ralph would have liked to have found the authority to order Wisehammer to stop it.

  He asked where the child was. Mrs. Dick Johnson was minding it, he was told.

  Then he asked her could she walk.

  He ordered a rehearsal of Act Four, in which Silvia speaks only in Scene One, though she is much spoken of in the other scenes. This is the act where Sergeant Kite, the carpenter Arscott, who was just now appearing on the slope below the marquee, delayed a little as always by the demands of his trade, dressed as a fortune-teller to deceive country boys into joining the Marines. Plume—the overseer Kable, similarly delayed by work and now rushing toward the clearing in Arscott’s wake—hides beneath the fortune-teller’s table through all this and impersonates a communicating spirit. He continues to do so as Lucy and Melinda visit Kite, not knowing who he is, and beg to be enlightened on their futures. The players had these scenes paced well by now, and sometimes Ralph would be so beguiled by what they did with them that he would whimper with enjoyment as he circled the actors, sometimes giving this or that eucalypt a little nudge, imparting to the mute wood the secret of his pride as playmaker. Black Caesar, however, had ensured that this afternoon would not be one spent genially nudging gum trees.