The Playmaker

by Thomas Keneally

  On the edge of the brick kilns, a similar hut to the one Arscott was building as matrimonial cover for Ralph was being constructed so that a small but tempting quantity of stores could be stacked there. On Ralph’s one visit, he saw Harry Brewer limping about with crooked vigour. The calmer Ralph at the core understood that this access of vehemence and punch he saw in the world may have been an illusion. Harry, indeed, on a closer look, seemed not to be consumed by the sort of congratulatory sweetness Ralph was seeing in most people now, in his lag players, in George Johnston, in Nicholls and Arscott. Harry was plagued—as always—by questions to do with Duckling.

  “My toxin is gone,” Harry confided to Ralph. “The Prussian Blue I used to toy with. Duckling didn’t give it to you or the Reverend Dick?”

  On the morning of Harry’s fit and collapse, Ralph and Dick had forgotten the little phial. They should have taken it and emptied it, but it seemed a small matter beside Baker’s ravening ghost and Harry’s stroke. Now Ralph suggested that Duckling, in her concern for him, might have poured the stuff in the roots of a tree.

  “She denies it,” murmured Harry. “If she returns it to Goose, that Pope of the Whores will know I failed to honour my contract with her!”

  Ralph assured him Duckling would not do that. She was negligent perhaps but not treacherous. In his roseate state, he believed in the comfort he was offering Harry. Lucy/Duckling in the play could deceive Brazen by taking on the identity of her mistress, Melinda. But Duckling/Lucy of the penal city would not so abruptly betray Harry Brewer.

  “You see,” said Harry, “she may have thought—after I suffered that apoplexy—that I was good as dead, and so returned it to Goose. You can’t tell with those people! You can’t tell!”

  The term those people, especially as it came from Harry, shocked Ralph for a moment. He had grown accustomed in the last days to seeing this earth and this population as one thing.

  “I am not built any more,” said Harry, “for a battle with Mother Goose. That big slattern is a galleon of Dimber Dambers, and I don’t have the weight for it any more.”

  Returning to the clearing, the marquee, the new housekeeping residence, and, a little beyond it, the new barracks where the play would be performed, Ralph saw—waiting by the door of his own hut—the Reverend Dick Johnson and his wife, Mary. He considered hiding in a clump of cabbage-tree palms—indeed he took temporary refuge there and observed the Johnsons taking sightings up and down the length of the cove, on the lookout for him.

  They must be faced, Ralph knew, and it might as well be sooner than otherwise. So he emerged from the cabbage trees and walked with what he thought of as an absorbed nonchalance towards his home, his canvas marquee, and his legal fiction of a housekeeper’s hut. He was—he realised—more afraid of Mary than of Dick. The tightly built, bustling little olive-skinned woman believed in the Johnson dogma, which was that everyone misused her husband. She was prepared to say so militantly, without any of the pallid wistfulness which characterised Dick himself. She did not bruise as easily as Dick. Ralph decided to act at least as angry as she would, knowing that if he showed any penitence or doubt Mrs. Mary Johnson would flay him with it.

  He was not prepared for the Johnsons’ sage regret.

  “Oh, Ralph,” said Dick, staring at him with wounded eyes. “How you took advantage of me!”

  “It seems to us,” said Mary Johnson, “that you used our household to provide a refuge for your concubine until you had prepared your own household for her. We had a right to expect something less arch, Lieutenant Clark!”

  “We spoke to the adjutant to dissuade him from assigning Mary Brenham to you,” Dick told Ralph. “But we all know where he stands. He is delighted to compound his own guilt.”

  “So we intend to appeal to His Excellency,” said Mary Johnson.

  Ralph flushed despite himself at the idea of H.E., whom he thought of as a grey and preternatural presence, receiving frontally from Mary Johnson the news that Lieutenant Clark intended to cohabit with Brenham.

  “That won’t do any good either, my dear,” said Dick Johnson, almost tranquil in his despair. “He is a viceroy who would rather build a theatre than a church.” He turned his eyes to Ralph. “We are absolutely alone now,” he remarked almost amiably. “Mary and I alone are united in something like righteousness and in regard for Christian doctrine. We cannot point to you any further as a paragon.”

  “I was always only a poor paragon, Dick,” said Ralph.

  “When the play takes place,” said Dick in that same strange companionable tone, “Mary and I will be the only ones at home, a loaded pistol on the table between us in the event Black Caesar raids us.” He put his hand across his eyes.

  “Come, Dick,” said Mary. “Fortitude, my love!”

  Ralph had been prepared not to yield to clerical fury and denunciation. But Dick’s wistfulness routed him. He found himself putting up a moral defence.

  “It is better that she live with me than with a convict. Even the married convicts prostitute their wives.”

  He had no evidence that Henry Kable, who played Plume, prostituted his—Henry was a jealous spouse. Yet he argued on, hoping the example of Kable would not come to Dick’s mind. “On the first Sunday after the women were landed,” he said, “you married many lags of whom it could not be said with any certainty whether they had previously been single or married to persons left behind in that other country, the one they will never see again. You did so on the instructions of H.E., who believed that it was better for them to marry here for the sake of this society than to maintain the mere letter of ruined marriages in another place—marriages which could never be resumed. The Dutch geographers, Dick, used to say that there had to be a great southern continent to act as a balance to the land masses of Europe and Asia. Likewise it has always been H. E.’s suspicion—and I must say it is my suspicion as well now—that people here have needed southern marriages, new world associations, to balance the marriages and associations they might have had in the old. We have travelled too far in space—perhaps we have come further than human creatures should—and the influence and the glow of English marriages and loyalties cannot reach us here. I wish it were not so, but too much space lies between. I shall honour my English marriage, Dick, and I shall not call upon you to sanctify this loosely termed marriage I undertake here. Yet it is a marriage, and it will have honour, even if you denounce it. My punishment will come when I must leave Mary Brenham.

  “I ask you,” Ralph continued, “why does H.E. not object to these arrangements? It is not, as you must realise, because he wishes to attack the morals of Christians. It is rather because he knows that these ‘marriages,’ these arrangements, are a leavening in this society. It is because he has an active understanding of the way whoring begets felonies. He is not satanic, nor is he bent absolutely on disappointing you, Dick. It is that he understands what is possible with human flesh, and what is not.”

  Dick had been becoming increasingly enraged throughout this speech. “Get thee behind me!” he now screamed. “There are always high-sounding arguments for sin, and Satan is a lawyer. But the Decalogue does not cease or become transmuted at the Equator. It is because such people as His Excellency and you believe the Commandments are altered here that this slub, this scrag end of civilisation stinks so high in the nostrils of Creation! Sin heartily if you must, but make no apologias, Ralph! There is no defence to save you from the lick of hell!”

  “And remember,” said Mary Johnson, “we who have been your friends are witnesses to you and your illicit association with Mary Brenham.”

  This idea frightened him. Did Mary Johnson feel bound to write to Betsey Alicia when the relief ships came?

  “You would not tell my wife?” he begged. “You would not for the sake of the Decalogue ruin my English marriage and torment poor Betsey? I ask you to have ordinary human sense and compassion!”

  “When I say witness,” said Mary gently, “I mean that we will observe your sin, and
the knowledge that you are observed will bring you shame and a final repentance. I am not a writer of poisonous missives, Lieutenant Clark. You must depend on someone else to write such a letter.”

  “Depend? Do you think I wish Betsey Alicia to be tormented? But no one will write it, since this sort of arrangement—a convict marriage let us say—is taken as normal here and below remarking.”

  “Oh, the truth, the truth!” Dick groaned. “Now that you have made such an arrangement, this city is entirely devoted to concubinage. This is the way the world goes, Ralph. First I come to you and counsel you against a play. The play finds fornication funny, fidelity a joke, and a woman a fickle organ of pleasure. But it is merely an entertainment, you say. Yet now I approach you under circumstances which have made the conditions of that play incarnate in this cove, on this shore, in your very household, Ralph. Adultery is a laughing matter for you now, fidelity is a joke, and woman is an organ of pleasure! The play—as I warned—has become your very life.”

  If Dick had not been himself an almost theatrical parson in his horror for the play, Ralph would not have been so pleased to feel anger coming to him like a friend. He embraced it gratefully. “Blame the Admiralty perhaps! They let you bring your wife, but refused me permission for mine. I have the letter from H.E. which says that for me to bring Betsey Alicia was contrary to Admiralty rules.” He grabbed at the sentence which was forming, as it were, behind his back, a sentence to bludgeon the Johnsons with and brutally end the conversation. “Can you be sure, Mrs. Johnson, that if the Admiralty had not provided you with this long passage, after two years of fidelity Dick himself might not have been ready to find an honest companion?”

  Dick covered his face from the possibility and Mary Johnson became brick-red with rage. Yet her answer was unexpected. “Do not use,” she said, “the possible crimes of one man to pay for the certain ones which you are about to commit!”

  Ralph would have hoped for something a little less coherent from her. Nonetheless, thankfully, she took Dick’s elbow and suggested they should leave. Ralph, she said, could not be diverted, and the struggle would be a long one. As he watched them go, two loyal friends supporting each other in what they considered a grief peculiar to themselves, Ralph began to feel a blinding shame, a grief at his betrayal of Betsey Alicia. Her mishandling of money and of debts suddenly seemed an enormous claim on him. It was one thing to imagine a spouse bravely managing while an officer was away and living with a lagwife. The idea of her bravely mismanaging was somehow more pitiable and more of a reproach.

  He went to his hut and covered the butterfly collection he had made for Betsey with a cloth. Then he staggered off to the barracks, where the players were at work. Their lines, he was sure, would restore him. Perhaps the play was—as the Johnsons argued—his life incarnate.

  That same shame recurred at dusk when old Dot Handilands came trotting up to the clearing, the marquee, the now extensive Clark household, looking for Ralph. She had in her hand a bottle which she presented to Ralph. “Good max, the best gin,” she kept saying, assuring him of its high quality. She said it was from Goose, who had heard of his good fortune and wished him well.

  The old she-lag staggered away, the ancient perjurer, at eighty years of age an errand woman.

  “Dot!” Ralph called on impulse.

  Dot Handilands stopped and turned, fixing a strange stooped gaze on him. Ralph uncorked the bottle and let the gin flow out on the ground. “Tell Goose I do not look for her presents.” For the first time since Dick Johnson had confronted him, he felt justified and restored.

  CHAPTER 29

  San Augustin

  JUNE 1789

  By the time the chief dish was served at H.E.’s great noonday dinner for the birthday of the distant King, Ralph was glimmering away at table with a wonderful tipsiness. He had had a celebratory brandy with his breakfast, which had been served for the first time in his history by Mary Brenham. She worked with the same mean rations as Ellis, but there is a difference between food that is willingly instead of sullenly handled. Mary had suggested the brandy to mark the day. She left it unclear whether she found her new world marriage, the play, or the monarch’s birthday the cause for serving spirits. Breakfast brandy had put Ralph in a state where he could consider the night’s performance of The Recruiting Officer with composure. For the sake of composure he had drunk well before H.E.’s dinner and was now drinking well at table, becoming more convinced with every mouthful of what a consummate group of men these officers were, glowing with affection for Watkin and Davy, and even finding the sullenness of Robbie Ross and Jemmy Campbell engaging in its consistency.

  “Is the play up to viewing, Mr. Garrick?” one or other of the gentlemen would periodically ask Ralph, and he was ecstatic for this merely whimsical comparison of himself to the great actor-manager. “Mr. Garrick, the port if you please!” and “Mr. Garrick, will you pass along the salt?” became staples of the humor of H.E.’s table and filled everyone with increasing hilarity. The talk turned also, in such a military gathering, to old battles. There were four or five there at table who had seen Bunker Hill and could trade impressions. “If it were not for Bunker Hill,” said Jemmy Campbell, morosely, though he had survived the musketry of the Minutemen, “we would not be in this ghastly place. Our lags would still go where they were intended by nature and geography—the Americas.”

  From his place at table, Harry Brewer began to rumble. “Warriors, are they? Those who faced the Americans. I was one such warrior. But do they deserve the name? We are not warriors. The Captain, when he served with the Portuguese, was a warrior!”

  Enough of the younger, less embittered officers at the table heard Harry. They were not yet of an age or a narrowness where the mention of another man’s glory was an affront to them. Davy and Johnny White the surgeon began to press H.E.—the Captain, as Harry still cherished calling him—to recount his adventures on the Brazil station.

  And H.E. himself was in one of his rare companionable moods, less aloof than usual, capable of memorialising and storytelling. Sometimes he made a poor president of a dinner table, but today he was an excellent one. There was some slamming of plates and the bases of glasses against the table, a tattoo of sound created by the younger members of the company to encourage him to speak. And so, his dish of pork half-eaten, H.E. began. “You have to understand that I was Captain of a mere frigate for the Portuguese. Its title—oh, you have no idea how grandly the Portuguese entitle their ships—Nossa Senhora do Pilar e Sao Joao Baptista!”

  Everyone laughed, this day of Hanoverian kings, at the Papist excess of the name of H.E.’s Portuguese frigate.

  “There were a number of English and Irish naval officers scattered throughout the fleet, of whom this humble narrator was but one. Oh, and it had been a dismal year! The Pope had long ago divided the New World between the Portuguese and the Spanish at the fifty-first meridian west. The Portuguese had—for what you could call reasons of geographic convenience—created a city far beyond that meridian, on the Plate River opposite Buenos Aires. They called that city Colonia del Sacramento and they peopled it with—well, I will leave it to you to guess who they peopled it with, but they call them degradados.”

  “Lags!” called a number of those at the table.

  Rations were so short, said H.E., that the Portuguese monks at the Benedictine monastery ate meat only on the highest feast days, and then it was pickled dog! “We have not got so far yet in our Colonia here, gentlemen,” said H.E. “Now the governor of the place I felt great compassion for—he was a soldier, a man of perhaps the age I am now—his name was da Rocha and he understood, all through the blockade, that he would be blamed for the loss of the place. And so he was blamed and even sentenced to death, though they commuted that and sent him to—”

  “New South Wales,” yelled one of the young officers and Ralph doubled up with the humour of it.

  “To Africa,” said H.E., “where he was to perish of blackwater fever. You see in all t
his, gentlemen, the object lesson for the colonial viceroy. You are forgotten until you are remembered. You are remembered when the day of blame comes.”

  “Oh, do not move us to tears!” Robbie Ross murmured snidely to the wall behind his chair.

  H.E. now stood with abnormal suddenness and vigour and raised his glass of port wine. “Gentlemen,” he said, “may we all in the service of His Majesty be delivered from the spirit of fear, delay, and inertness. Let us have no doubt that for damage it is matched only by the spirit of rancour.”

  There was a cry from Jemmy Campbell. He rose. Suddenly he was trembling and he asked in a thin childlike voice. “But, Your Excellency, how can we know whether the King is alive or not? And isn’t it dangerous to drink to a dead king?”

  There was such alarm in Jemmy’s question that no one laughed. H.E. said gently, “I am sure the day finds him well, Captain Campbell. All the reports are of his recovery.”

  Tears appeared on Jemmy’s face. “Reports? The reports are years old? How can we know anything here, Captain? How?”

  He half turned as if to leave the table and then fell against the wall and subsided. Some of the younger officers laughed now, at the idea of Jemmy drinking too much and getting soulful. He was carried to a bedroom and soon forgotten, though he left a certain wistfulness behind him at the table.

  Maybe to dispel it, Harry Brewer—farther down the table—had taken off his shoe and was beating the heel of it against the wood. “Tell them about the Augustin, Captain!” he was roaring from his crippled mouth. Meanwhile a fine pudding had been served. It was full of dried Brazilian fruits and had plums from H.E.’s garden in it.

  As Ralph listened in an ecstasy, his mind half fixed on Mary Brenham’s delicious tattoo, H.E. launched into a comic account of an engagement off the Brazilian port of Destêrro. One of H.E.’s colleagues blocked the path of a great seventy-gun Spanish warship called the San Augustin, but H.E. himself, in his little converted merchantman, drew near from astern, calling to the captain of the San Augustin consolingly in Spanish. The poor fellow thought that H.E. was in the service of the Spaniards and was disabused only when H.E. drew abeam and unleashed a full broadside volley at him. H.E. described this comic approach, this matter of confused identities, Ralph thought, as sweetly as Farquhar could have. When he announced that the San Augustin was repaired and commissioned in the Portuguese navy and renamed the Santo Agostinho, and that he himself was placed in its command, and that then—further—when the Spaniards and the Portuguese came to terms the ship was handed back to the Spaniards and renamed the San Augustin, the table seemed to be consumed with hilarity.