The Playmaker

by Thomas Keneally

  “Lovell? Or Freeman?” asked Harry, unbelieving.

  There was no hope either of them would ever resemble an august instrument of the law. Duckling told a story of Freeman—it was hearsay—that he and a pal had held up a gentleman in the streets of Hereford and taken away his wallet, but when the victim saw Freeman and the other boy part, he followed the thin boy, caught him, beat him up, and delivered him to the peace officers of the city. How could the condemned be awed by a boy who’d been served up by his own victim?

  As the procession neared the tree, the dozen or so Jamaicans and Africans among the crowd of lags maintained a strange chant, singing almost under their breaths but in sublime harmony. Oh that black antiphon cramped Ralph’s stomach cruelly! He noticed the way the condemned boys began to gaze about, taking in the ranks of witnesses. The event all at once took on the stench of long habit, as if the ceremony of hanging had already become ancient and fixed here.

  Freeman and Lovell, looking very young and pardonable in the thunderous light, now stood on their ladders. Their halters had already been tied to the branch by the constables, when Davy walked to the tree, the folded document still in his hand. Opening it, he began to read aloud from it. Lovell was to be reprieved and sent into exile on the exposed rock out in the harbour. He was to dwell there in caves and his supplies would be thrown to him weekly from a longboat. The next time the Supply, the little storeship which shuttled eight hundred miles between this harbour and the outstation on Norfolk Island, set out, the ivory turner would be on it. The document declared that he was never to return from there.

  He would not be alone, however, on that small lump of sandstone in the harbour. The Jamaican Jack Williams, who had recently gone hunting with Harry and Ralph, had just in the past few days been sent out to the same place for a lesser disciplinary matter. Black Jack was a man of ferocious hungers and would devour a week’s rations at one meal. What a life it would be for young Lovell out there on the rock when Black Jack grew frantic with hunger or passion.

  When Davy Collins read that Freeman was also pardoned but on condition he consented to be the common executioner, there was some laughter among the convicts. His Excellency, Davy read on, had been sensitive to sundry petitions he’d received on behalf of the condemned from groups of convicts. But these, said Davy, were the last he would receive.

  Collins stepped to the bottom of Freeman’s ladder and looked up at the angular boy with the noose around his neck. He asked would he consent to the work he had been offered? When Freeman did not hear there was more laughter. A stammer of indecipherable words came at last from his lips, and Dick Johnson murmured, “The gift of tongues!” but not with considerable certainty. Then the boy’s head began to loll. Collins told Bill Parr to help him down the ladder.

  Major Robbie Ross intercepted Davy straightaway. “What does that soft-hearted and -headed womanly man mean by all this?” he thundered. He meant H.E.

  Davy Collins’s defence of H.E. was as brisk as his dislike of the Major. “Why, encouragement of virtue, Major,” he answered softly.

  “I will nae have my officers wasting hours passing sentences of death which are then transmuted into comedy. Executionists! We are to have executionists! I tell you I could appoint one from among my sergeants!”

  “There are clear philosophic advantages,” said Davy, “in a place where three out of four people are sentenced criminals, to involving the criminals themselves in the mechanics of justice.”

  “So this earth is not foul enough!” roared Robbie, kicking dust. He hated the soil of this place. He felt it was an insult to reasonable agricultural intent. “But you have to further cover it with a light coat of pretty-boy philosophy!”

  The amused convicts were being marched away. New South Wales’s executioner, soon to be named Ketch after the famous English hangman Jack Ketch, stood bereft by the fig tree under which the two empty ladders remained. A partly restored Harry Brewer limped up to him and—in Ralph’s hearing—gave him instructions. “You’re not to mess things, Freeman, and you’re not to waver. You are to study the principal parts of the neck—speak to Surgeon White without delay. And you are to learn your knots from Sergeant Scott!”

  Harry had got back the voice of command, or at least thought he had. In the attenuated features of Freeman, in which the witnessing felons had seen little but comedy, Harry saw the visible mercy of H.E.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 11

  Perjury and the Play

  1789

  In Act Two of George Farquhar’s The Recuriting Officer the Sydney Cove executionist, Ketch Freeman, found speeches to his taste. Here, for example, Justice Balance discovers that his son Owen is dying in London.

  “But the decree is just,” Ketch Freeman intoned, “I was pleased for the death of my father, because he left me an estate, and now I’m punished with the loss of an heir to inherit mine.”

  Freeman—perhaps, Ralph thought, trained in matters of balance and gravity through his public post—had a surprisingly refined sense of the equilibrium of Justice Balance’s sentences.

  He had by now been hangman for more than one lonely year. On the rainy eve of his first task—the hanging of a young man named John Bennett, a food thief like Barrett condemned in the first May, Ketch had tried to escape the town and had fallen into a flooded sawpit in the dark. Ralph had been at Harry’s recently constructed hut when the night patrol brought Ketch in. Harry had harangued the wet boy desperately, grabbing him by the sodden front of his jacket. Ralph remembered how Ketch, like a crane flown in from a storm, had raised his face to Harry, the long line of his nose glistening with water. He had pleaded that the women would have nothing to do with him.

  “We’re stuck in this, Ketch, you and I,” Harry had screamed, “and you won’t go to China on me, you meat-mongering bastard!” (Indeed, some of the convicts believed China lay behind the mountains forty miles out.) “You’ll stay with me, you little prigger. I’ll have you scragged and gutted otherwise, by H.E. himself, and you can look for sweet sockets in Hades, you great streak of oyster. Listen to me! You’ll not move from your purpose, you little squeaker. You’ll show me some spunk, you sodomite!”

  On the strength of Harry’s desperate threats, Ketch Freeman hanged Bennett the next day, and all officials were satisfied with the executionist’s deftness. Nor had there been since, on the dozen times he had performed his public function, any inhuman horrors. Unless you counted the day two men, hanging together, had while strangling embraced each other in mid-air, causing Dabby Bryant to scream “Oh, pity!” and the Africans and Irish to keen.

  It was because Ketch remained so lonely that he could now bring to his reading of Justice Balance the tenor and wistfulness of a much older man.

  Ralph nonetheless found some aspects of Balance’s character and emotions, as portrayed by Farquhar, distressing. In Act Two, Scene Two, he discovers that his son has in fact died. He finds it out from Mr. Worthy (the theatrical Robert Sideway), who has just received a letter from London. To Ralph—to the private Ralph behind the cut-down scarlet military coat, to the Ralph who stood privately behind the all-knowing master of the play—Balance’s reaction to his son’s death was such as to trouble any man’s sleep. “My advices says he’s dead, sir,” says Worthy. To which Balance replies, “He’s happy, and I am satisfied. The strokes of heaven I can bear, but injuries from men, Mr. Worthy, are not so easily supported.” And later he declines an invitation to drink at Horton’s hotel with Worthy. “I must allow a day or two to the death of my son; the decorum of mourning is what we owe the world, because they pay it to us. Afterwards, I’m yours over a bottle, or how you will.”

  It was the strokes of Heaven which Ralph could least bear. He knew he could never accept the death of his son, Ralphie, with the philosophic levity of a Justice Balance. Yet he listened to Ketch Freeman declaim the words and talked to him about the speed at which they should be said, the energy, the attack.

  Mary Brenham, clothes thief
and now Silvia, moved around the executionist Freeman with an instinctive spirit. She needed no prompting. She strode across the stage like the masculine girl she was supposed to be. To Ralph it was already believable that Kable/Captain Plume should desire Brenham/Silvia.

  In Act Two, besides losing a son, Justice Balance receives a poison pen letter from Melinda which says that Captain Plume has dishonourable designs upon Silvia. These designs, Justice Balance concludes, must have been compounded by the fact that Silvia is now his heiress. Despite Worthy’s assurances that Plume is an honourable fellow, Balance sends his daughter into the countryside to hide her from Captain Plume. “Twelve hundred pounds a year would ruin him—quite turn his brain! A captain of foot worth twelve hundred pounds a year! ’Tis a prodigy in nature.”

  Just as the Established Church in the form of Dick Johnson had interrupted the readings of Act One, the Scotsman Captain Jemmy Campbell turned up in the midst of Act Two. He didn’t arrive a step at a time like Dick Johnson or wait for a suitable moment to interrupt. He stormed in between Ketch Freeman and Sideway. Neither did he wait for the end of a speech. “Where is that perjuring woman?” he demanded.

  Ralph asked him did he mean Nancy Turner.

  “During the trial of Marines,” Jemmy contended, “she perjured herself to save her lover, Private Dukes. So at the close of trial she was bound over in custody for her patent violation of the oath. I now find that on the limping pretext that we have no women’s cells she has been permitted to wander free and become a darling in a play.”

  Ralph was pleased to say, “We are at the present reading Act Two. Melinda does not appear in Act Two.”

  “Melinda?”

  “Nancy Turner,” said Ralph. “She is not here, Captain Campbell.”

  Jemmy’s complexion was speckled with grievance. In earlier times he had been a more genial man. He would make set speeches in the mess and they were so eloquent people would ask him to repeat them. Like his speech on the reasons one could not find a mistress among the native women. “But yon black lassies,” he would thunder, “are a pure antidote to all desire. It’s the snot, lads, and the ancient fish oil they put on ten years back. The flies themselves are overwhelmed with distaste. And what a fly won’t lay lips to, neither will Jemmy Campbell.”

  Jemmy was Robbie Ross’s main partisan, and the aloes in Robbie had now soured Jemmy, too.

  “It’s yon wee judge in a red coat,” he raged at Ralph. He meant Davy Collins. “And here he is letting the Perjurer wander free and be a damned Mrs. Jordan. I have just discovered this, Ralph, and my breath is taken away. And when I ask why she is not in a prison, that yon aged Midshipman Brewer says, ‘She is, she is here!’ The casuistry, Ralph, will not be forgiven!”

  He glowered at Ralph’s actors for a few seconds. Ketch Freeman coughed. Robert Sideway took up a theatrical stance, one ankle hooked behind the other. Perhaps he thought Captain Campbell was there purely to look the actors over and judge their competence. With his right hand he made curlicues as if signing his name on an invisible page.

  In younger days Jemmy had stood firm in a lane by the Charles River in Massachusetts while the Yankee general Prescott and his marksmen felled more than half the Marine detachment. But it turned out that Jemmy had been spared for worse things—low rank (though not as low as Harry Brewer’s), and this convict kingdom which had the feeling of an invention of the mad Dean Swift of Dublin.

  “And now, laddie, I discover you yourself have enlisted the Perjurer for your damned masque.”

  “But I have the approval of H.E. and of Davy Collins,” said Ralph. “And of Harry Brewer of course.” It was not that Ralph was afraid of Jemmy’s power, which was small even by the standards of a penal star. It was that he did not want to waste an afternoon arguing with the Scot.

  “Do you think they give a tin cuss about the proprieties, Ralph?” Jemmy raged. “They are employing that wee perjuring slut to defeat me in the argument about the officers and the Court of Criminal Jurisdiction. I’ve now refused to serve on that court any further, since my fellow officers and myself voted for the Perjurer to be gaoled and tried, and our vote was ignored. You see, any tool yon H.E. and the Judge Advocate and that dog-faced Provost Marshal can lay their hands on, they pick up with hoots of exaltation and belabour Robbie and me!”

  Ralph remarked he did not think there was any grand design to make Jemmy look foolish.

  “It is time there was solidity of purpose in our mess,” remarked Jemmy. “Some loyalty to Robbie Ross. Who after all holds the key to all our promotions. He would want to see you at his quarters this afternoon, when the evening bell rings. If you have the time, Ralph, to tutor perjurers in their lines, I believe you might have time also to speak with your commander.”

  “You want to see her hanged?” Ralph challenged him.

  “There are other actresses, aren’t there, Ralph?”

  Jemmy Campbell considered the actors for a second. “Yon scrawny hangman,” he asked like his old self, his eyes having receded a little back into a normal position under his brow. “Is he here to stretch the lines?” He laughed, prodding Ralph fraternally in the kidneys. Then he strode away like a man who believes he has made an ally. That is my future, Ralph told himself. If I don’t make major’s rank before I am fifty I’ll be as cracked as that.

  “Let us start again please, players,” called Ralph, swallowing down his dread of the afternoon’s meeting. “As Justice Balance reads the malicious letter from Melinda.”

  As the reading went on, he noticed Mary Brenham, who was not for the moment engaged in the scene, sitting in a square of autumn light. Her small docile son had his hand inside her convict jacket, on her left breast. She looked confused for some reason. Perhaps it was the mysterious increase in homilies she was hearing as she did the ironing in the Johnson household. Ralph was tempted to offer her employment at his own place. But he could not have a she-lag at his hearth. He did not know where that edict came from, from within his conforming self or from without. He knew, however, that for the time being it was inviolable.

  Freeman as Balance now read the letter from Melinda in the most orotund manner, sure to amuse the Marines and the lags, if seeming to the more cultivated taste—Watkin or Davy perhaps—a little overdone. And Worthy/Sideway entered with an effete grandeur which, taken together with the sight of Mary, restored Ralph’s soul a little.

  What a wonder he would be on the night! With a profound bow, his head very nearly as low as the hangman’s knees, he uttered his entry line. “I’m sorry, sir, to be the messenger of ill news.”

  When Ralph got to Major Ross’s residence that afternoon he found the meeting of officers had been ordered not by Robbie Ross but by H.E. John Ross, Robbie’s young son, who when Captain Shea died had been promoted—at Robbie’s own command—to the temporary rank of a second lieutenant, was not invited, being only nine. He sat in a tree behind the house. He was an officer for the sake of the records and for pay purposes. But in questions of the relationship between the soldiery and the Court of Criminal Jurisdiction, he was what he certainly appeared to Ralph to be. A child.

  Robbie Ross sat at the table inside, in the usual attar reek. His face, like his friend Jemmy’s, had that mottling which derives from profoundly sustained grievances.

  Ralph remembered a conflict which had begun in the penal town’s early days, when a court martial made up of five young officers—Ralph was not one of them—had offered a private accused of brawling the option of being flogged or asking in front of the garrison on parade the pardon of the Marine he had assaulted. Robbie had told the court—it was headed by Watkin—that they had to impose one sentence, not a choice. When the court martial convened again and decided its original sentence had to stand, Robbie placed them under arrest. This meant they could perform no duties and must remain in their tents.

  Both sides appealed to H.E., who made the reasonable point that he could not spare the suspended officers, nor could he give Robbie his wish of trying
them before a General Court Martial, which would require thirteen officers. Davy Collins, said H.E., could keep the records of the dispute and if ever numbers of officers increased, the General Court Martial could be held. In the meantime, though, guards should be taken from in front of the tents of the court martial officers.

  For the sake of conciliation, H.E. invited Robbie to tea. The viceregal residence was still at that stage the canvas affair designed by Smiths of St. George’s Field. H.E. also invited Robbie’s son. Harry Brewer was there when Robbie turned up alone and bristling. “It is a deliberately devised division at the heart of our society,” said Robbie. “To which a bairn should not be required to give witness.”

  Harry saw in H.E. then the signs he had learned to read as profound anger—a repeated swallowing, a whiteness on either side of H.E.’s Semitic nose, and a pinkness on the neck. He had been accused of trying to use a child as a lever, and any chance he could ever choke down his reserve, take Robbie by the elbow, call him Robert, and tempt him to reason had vanished for good. The tinned biscuits H.E. had brought with him from Piccadilly and had ordered opened by servant Dodds so that young Johnny Ross could choose among them sat untouched. They were the bread which the two of them refused to break.

  H.E. had pressed on Robbie, but in the coolest, most distant way, the idea of submitting the entire matter to swift arbitration of the body of officers. Robbie replied that he would not stand for arbitration by the young cronies of those five miscreants, those students of the bottle and close enquirers into the private parts of she-lags!

  “I take this,” he roared, “as another large instance, among so many, of your intent to geld me of my authority with my own battalion.”

  That, in the lag city’s first March, marked the end of all human conversation between H.E. and Robbie, though an oblique one proceeded, and was proceeding still, a year or more later in Robbie’s new-built residence of brick and shingles, when the question was Turner the Perjurer. And whether Ralph should lose his Melinda.