The Playmaker

by Thomas Keneally

  So, after the day’s reading, Ralph took Wisehammer aside and enquired pleasantly if his epilogue was finished.

  “You ask me is it finished, Mr. Clark?” asked Wisehammer, blinking with delight.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “The epilogue is finished, sir, and I believe it is suitable for our little play.”

  “For our large play,” Ralph insisted.

  “Indeed, Mr. Clark, for our large play. But I must tell you, Mr. Clark, that if in any particular it offends you, sir, I can mend it, I can make it to fit. For I am but a tailor of words.”

  Ralph could see, from Wisehammer’s slightly overblown speech, that Captain Brazen had returned.

  Ralph explained that he was going out to his turnip island, which he had greatly neglected since the work of the play had begun. Wisehammer could meet him at the dock about dusk and hand the document to him. “You must be aware I can give no promise, Wisehammer, that it can be used, since there are so many sensitivities abroad in this city.”

  Wisehammer nodded assent again and again. He was willing to have his work rejected. It was clearly having it ignored which had sapped his acting.

  As Private Ellis rowed Ralph out to his island, the sun of early winter shone as sweetly as that of a Devon summer above the dun cliffs where the late Arabanoo had captured his shrewish tribal wife. Ralph felt himself ready, too, for a new world spouse. His mind idled over the prospect not only of accustoming Mary Brenham to the idea, but of so accustoming H.E. and all other British inhabitants, bond or free, that he and Mary Brenham could, without attracting any malice, float out here at will to the garden isle, Small Willy lolling amidships. By the mouth of the cave on the blind side of the island, they could sit before a fire and grill bream from the harbour. As pregnant as the harbour seemed this evening with such fish, so did the coming months seem pregnant with such opportunities.

  Ralph found the old convict gardener Amstead undisturbed by the long lack of a visit from his master. Ralph felt, in fact, that had the strange lag enterprise been totally given up, had H.E. decided to cram all the people aboard the Sirius and abandon the city, the gardener would have continued on the island, wondering perhaps a little at the non-appearance of his rations of flour and beef, but making very good meals of mixed pots of vegetables. He had baskets of turnips, potatoes, and one of carrots for Ralph to take back to the town. “There be some grub got at them potatoes,” he told Ralph. “It weren’t here when first I come, when first I take up the task of gardener. So damn grub must be able to swim, the ruffian!”

  In a boat full of the island’s plenty and rowed inexpertly by Private Ellis, Ralph returned to the settlement.

  It was dusk. From half a mile out, Ralph could see Wisehammer pacing the dock, glancing out across the harbour and then back inshore as if there were a whole crowd to whom Ralph’s arrival needed to be announced. As Ralph’s boat drew in, Wisehammer was waiting, avid as a hunting dog, on the bottom step of the quay. It was apparent now why Mary Brenham might find him wearing.

  He thrust some papers into Ralph’s hand even though it was now too dark for Ralph to be able to read them. “I shall look at these with great interest,” he promised the Jew.

  Later, by his fire, Ralph took out the pages and inspected the poesy of Wisehammer.

  To make this play we travelled by the mile,

  More distance than those gentlemen of Style

  You find around the Royal in the Lane.

  We beg you to ignore the felon’s stain,

  And look upon our art without disdain.

  As we with humour bold before you file,

  We humbly hope we may excite a smile.

  Ralph remembered how Mary Brenham had ranged around the tent, ticking off the rhymes on the fingers of her left hand. Mile, style, file, smile. A lesser Sappho making line endings for a clever poetaster.

  Upon the one hand we commend the Navy.

  Phillip and Hunter—may this be their gravy!

  Upon the second, we applaud Marines

  And hope their brave and robust spirit means

  They will enjoy the tenor of this play,

  This sunshine of our brief theatric day.

  May these our antics represent in sum

  The first time you went marching to the drum

  Inveigled by some handsome, martial Plume,

  To give to King and country all your bloom.

  And on the third hand, since we have three here,

  We hope our play the felons will endear.

  The lags of Dyot’s Isle and Cornwall both

  Will with our Silvia reclaim their troth,

  And see in arch Melinda and in Worthy

  Exemplars at the same time wise and earthy.

  May each lag now his cull-ess quick bespeak

  Avoiding all attentions of the Beak,

  And Thus the holy state of marriage blazon,

  As do our Silvia and Plume, Lucy and Brazen.

  May every lag-ess now have wit to force

  Upon her lag the matrimonial course,

  And blessed will this felon shore then be

  If your lag-ess says yes, as mine to me.

  And so we hope our play begins with wit,

  But ends with happiness derived from it.

  And may our King be happy to display

  This joyous penal place so far away,

  And boast of happy culls and blooming molls,

  Beyond the stars where great Orion lolls.

  We hope the action has been fast and clear

  And so invite your universal cheer.

  It was as clever as any officer could have done, but Ralph calculated whether outright applause for Wisehammer’s epilogue would excite the man so much he would now turn again to courting Mary Brenham. Then there might be congratulatory fondlings and so on, which Ralph found very painful to envisage.

  An hour before curfew, still tormented by this mean question, he was pacing back and forth from the fireplace to the bed, sitting briefly sometimes either on the cot or at the chair by his writing desk and repeating in a distracted way snatches of the play which he had now learned by heart, muttering them to himself as if they had a magical or a religious importance, when someone knocked jauntily on his door. At first he presumed it was Harry with a bottle of brandy, but then remembered all jauntiness had been struck out of Harry. The shrunken Provost Marshal had earlier in the day been carried in a chair by four convicts back to his home across the stream. Duckling had been there, dutifully at the door, but with a nomadic look in her eyes. She did not give any clue as to whether she would have preferred Harry to die and so release her to a sort of freedom over in the women’s camp, or was happy that he had lived to ensure her a certain status on this side of the stream.

  Ralph, on first hearing the knock and thinking it Harry Brewer, had felt guilty. He had cherished Harry as a friend, as a teller of whimsical and grotesque stories of criminal London, and above all as a confessor of such crimes—lechery, embezzlement—that one felt able to confess anything in his company. Yet Ralph understood now that when Harry Brewer had been struck down and rendered mute, he, Harry’s friend, had without knowing it taken his death as read.

  And so Lieutenant Ralph Clark, playmaker, manager of convict players, had broken an undertaking he had made earlier to the vertical, perambulating, joking Provost Marshal—that Duckling would be given no lines that were too gamy.

  In Scene 5 of Act 5 a need had emerged for someone to say the lines of two common women who appear, one after another, in front of Justice Balance. These lines reek of carnal jokes. Rather than search for another player among the women who could be tutored in these lines, Ralph had—during the first days of Harry’s stupor—had Duckling read them. The comedic wariness with which Duckling performed this section of the play newly opened to her convinced Ralph she was precisely the right choice. So that—in a sense—he had had a minor and underhand interest in Harry’s never reawakening.

  The first woman
Duckling played in Scene 5, Act 5, was the wife of a young man Sergeant Kite had impressed into the Grenadiers—or as it would be in this city of convicts—Marines. Balance asks her is she married, to which she replies, “We agreed that I should call him husband to avoid passing for a whore, and that he should call me wife, to shun going for a soldier.”

  That “to avoid passing for a whore” worried Ralph guiltily. He feared Harry might come for an explanation, introducing another argument on top of the Wisehammer-Brenham dilemma he himself was already occupied with.

  He opened the door and it was Dabby Bryant, looking witchy under a shawl, her sleeping girl child in her arms. She seemed a little blank-faced, as if she were still absorbing the mystery by which one who could travel among the stars and converse with the Emu-Mother and Daramalung her Son could also be quenched by something as average as smallpox.

  Ralph told her to come in from the cold. He had never before had a she-lag inside his hut after sunset, but even if he were not contemplating having one there after each future sunset, Dabby Bryant, with her higher powers and mercies, would have been exempt from such narrow rules. Ralph gave up his own chair to her and sat her by the fire. If she had not delivered him of his relentless nightmares, he would never have been able to negotiate the distance between the dream Betsey Alicia and the one who had built up a debt with Broderick Hartwell’s estate: the gulf between the two would have consumed him whole. The beneficent and dazed Cornish Gypsy who now sat at his hearth had saved him from that and so deserved the best chair.

  He asked her would she like some tea, but she said no. The child called Charlotte slept as tranquilly as Mary Brenham’s child. What mysteries of contentment you might take in with your mother’s milk if you were Dabby Bryant’s infant!

  Ralph made some remark about the tragedy of Arabanoo. Dabby blinked at the fire. “Did you know,” she asked, as if it referred to the native, as if it was a talent she and the native had shared, “that a person ought to be able to tell the time from the Southern Cross?”

  “I don’t have the skill myself,” said Ralph.

  “My father taught me,” she said. “To some souls, the sky takes exactly after the high street of a village. You can look and see where the crossroads fall.”

  Her star talk, he was sure, referred to the trance she had suffered in the native’s arms. She sat for half a minute—Ralph thought she had gone to sleep. He wanted to ask her was she plagued by Arabanoo still—did he come and take her on exhausting expeditions in her sleep.

  “I don’t rest well now,” she said suddenly, her eyes still closed.

  “I’m sorry to hear it. Is it the native? Or the play …?”

  She waved her hand dismissively at the idea of the play. “It’s Mary Brenham,” she said. She opened her eyes. “And it’s you too, Lieutenant Clark, boy.”

  That “boy” struck Ralph strangely, but he had no doubt she was entitled to such a familiar appellation.

  “I disturb your sleep?” he wonderingly asked. Yet he knew himself how it was possible to have the unhappiness of other people, as well as your own terrors, infest your peace.

  “You and that Mary Brenham should settle to each other. But you don’t, darling, because such is your nature. And she don’t because of the tattoo on her arse.”

  “Tattoo?” That pagan novelty which adorned the bodies of sailors. The idea that Mary Brenham carried one was not only beyond belief but also extended and challenged his image of her. “She carries a tattoo on her body?”

  “She carries on her arse a tattoo which says Andrew Hilton I love thee to the grave. She dreads you’ll see it. It is the shame of her life. On account of it she tells the surgeons after the big black man bruised her that he did not try ravishing, even though he did. She feared Surgeon Considen seeing her arse and that Andrew Hilton.”

  “And who is Andrew Hilton?” asked Ralph, trembling, he was sure, visibly.

  “Why, her fence, wasn’t he? She comes to London, a green girl of thirteen years. She’s working as a maid, but running an errand she meets this lovely boy, who is foul, mind you, as an adder behind the sparkle of his face. He gives her gin and shows her his love, and when they are in one of those bad max fevers he puts it to her that she have that message carved in her sweet little flank. Andrew Hilton I love thee to the grave. And so she does love him to the grave, very near. For his sake she fumbles through all the wardrobes of her master and her mistress, handing him through the window all that good linen Mrs. Kennedy, that gentlewoman, wore on her untattooed arse, all those good tablecloths. So much good linen it came near to earning a wryneck day for our girl, if the Middlesex jury hadn’t discounted the value of all that truck and lumber, because of her sweet face and her thirteen years. And because they knew there must be someone like Andrew Hilton behind it, some fly boy with dark eyes and a treacle tongue and a prick like a dagger! That poor Brenham kept herself buttoned up in Newgate and on the ship for fear people would see that tattoo. But her sailor boy saw it, of course. And the she-lags on the Lady Penrhyn see it when she gives birth to that little boy of his, AndrewHiltonIlovetheetothegrave heaves about then as the poor thing drops her kid. She would like to scar or burn it off, but how can she do it herself? And she can’t trust them that offer to do it. She knows they would be likely to poison her blood, and then her small boy would be orphaned. And what a place for an orphan this is, darling.”

  The baby called Charlotte suddenly woke, struggled in its mother’s arms, clawed itself higher, its feet finding purchase against Dabby Bryant’s stomach, and stared at Ralph with an enormous infant limpidity.

  Having inspected him for a time, the baby settled again and slept.

  “So this awful thing, this tattooed arse of hers, you know it now, boy. You should do something with it. Unless you are the sort of mean mind who finds a tattoo too low for his touch, you ought to take her for your lag wife so I can have some peace from her.”

  “It means that Caesar ravished her?” he asked.

  “So that’s what it is, darling? In such a place as this you want a girl who’s suffered no mishandling? A black man, bodied like a brick stack, comes into your house and says he might kill your child. Do you do battle with him, chuck? Not if you had your training on the Lady Penrhyn or the Charlotte. She is a good little duck. What else do you need to be told?”

  “But the black man forced himself on her?” Ralph persisted.

  “If that sours the girl for you,” sniffed Bryant, “more than tattoos on her haunch, you should tell her, boy, so she can go and live with John Wisehammer.”

  “It isn’t any such thing,” Ralph said, getting heated over Dabby Bryant’s constant suspicion that he might be a narrow and unmerciful lover. “It means nothing. The tattoo and Black Caesar. I would like to see her safe from attack and from shame as well.”

  Both the women I best know, or hope to best know, he realised, are in debt and subject to hard dealings. Betsey Alicia had never experienced the hard erotic business of transport or penal city, but in a way the closely managed estate of Broderick Hartwell would be a similarly merciless regime. And only Mary Brenham was available to receive the kindnesses he now felt himself brimful of. Betsey Alicia had to depend on the generous friendship of his friend Kempster. And Kempster was a man of such honour he would seek nothing from her, not even a kiss or a fondle.

  “Ah,” he said aloud, despite himself, “my two tormented girls!”

  This scarcely conscious cry of his satisfied Dabby Bryant and she stopped harrying and accusing him of being affronted by tattoos.

  “Will you speak to her?” Dabby asked all at once.

  “I don’t know that I can,” Ralph confessed.

  He sweated with his incapacity to approach Mary Brenham. To know that she was subject to similar torment did not help him at all. And so, almost coolly, almost with deliberation, he set aside this obvious new world duty of speaking to Mary in favour of fury against the Madagascan Black Caesar. The Fragrant One would not save h
im.

  “We must catch that fellow!” Ralph said, on an impulse. “You could tell her that tattoos mean nothing to me. The idea of a convict misusing her means much, at least in the sense that I want the bastard found.”

  “Would Captain Plume call on a Cornish witch to take a message for him? To a poor she-lag with a tattoo on her arse?”

  “I am not Captain Plume,” said Ralph, understanding himself all at once. “I am Mr. Worthy. A frightened lover, who takes all signs in the worst way.”

  “You might do what other gentlemen do, and use your power, darling!”

  “That is not my nature. It would be better if it were.”

  “You might give me rest, God damn you!” said Dabby Bryant, rising.

  “Lifetimes aren’t long enough, Dabby,” he pleaded, “for me to make my tortured approaches.”

  “I seem to remember a time your approach was quick enough,” Dabby cried. She had stood suddenly, heedless of the sleeping child in her arms, and shouting in the same reckless spirit. “Don’t think I cannot curse you as easy as I cured you that time, boy. Others of my stripe have surely put a curse on me, don’t you worry!”

  “Don’t you curse me, Dabby. Give me a little time.”

  “Holy Jesus!” said Dabby and, crossing the dirt floor, disappeared from the house. Ralph wondered desperately where he should go now—Mary Brenham was still at Reverend Dick Johnson’s. Could he propose an arrangement to her under that roof? He decided instead to hold fast to his rage against Black Caesar. He searched for his greatcoat, found it, pulled it around his shoulders, and went out to see Provost Marshal Brewer, however marred by paralysis that official might be.