The Playmaker

by Thomas Keneally

  Finally Black Caesar was led in, wearing those terrible twenty-eight-pound anklets and holding the connecting chain against his stomach. Turner swiveled once in her seat to consider Black Caesar calmly. From the bench you would have thought it was Harry Brewer who had been listed for trial.

  Davy Collins declared the court open, read the charge of perjury against Nancy Turner, and called on Captain Jemmy Campbell to step forward and make his case against her.

  “I am not the maker of cases, sir,” said Jemmy with a groan. “I am a witness. Will you kindly swear me in?”

  He took the oath thunderously and so began.

  “I must say first, Mr. Judge Advocate,” Jemmy observed, “that it seems a contradiction of interest to have sitting on the bench an officer who has spent the past four weeks teaching the accused how to act certain lines in a poor farce and who must therefore—a reasonable man would say—hope the accusations against her will not be proven.”

  Davy considered this with his enormous calm. Ralph had no doubt the bullets of the Yankees had been deflected by it on the banks of the Charles River, just as Jemmy had survived that same battle by melting down the flying American lead with his white-hot ecstasy of resentment.

  “I am very happy to say,” Davy murmured, “that conflicts of interest do not disqualify an officer from sitting on this court. In such a small and fabulously distant jurisdiction, it would be impossible to find officers who did not—in a great variety of the cases we try—have some conflict of interest. All we can do is depend on Mr. Clark’s probity as an officer, and since none of my fellow judges has cast any doubt on that, it is hardly a matter for a witness to decide.”

  Oh how that cool answer roiled in the bowels of Jemmy Campbell! You could hear it being gratefully absorbed with little groans.

  Even so, Ralph heard with alarm the size of Jemmy’s accusation against Nancy Turner. By the evidence of a number of the Marines who had recently plundered the stores, Nancy had knowingly received from Private Richard Dukes, one of those accused of the theft, a large quantity of provisions being property of this government. These included more than twenty pounds of pork, thirty pints of wine reserved for hospital use, and twelve pounds of flour.

  Among those who claimed to have seen Turner receive goods from Private Dukes, said Jemmy, were Privates Luke Haines, Handy Baker, Jones, Brown, and Askey, all of whom were later hanged for their offences.

  Dukes had sworn, said Jemmy Campbell, that he had neither been in any large way involved in the plot to steal government supplies, nor had he passed any to Nancy Turner. Turner, under oath, had made the same claim on behalf of her imperilled lover and herself. And it was the opinion of most members of the court that she was perjuring herself, largely for Dukes’s sake. The court, of which he—Captain Campbell—had been a member, had very properly demanded that Turner be separated from the other witnesses so as not to vitiate them, and kept in custody while the question of her perjury was further looked into. Days after this decision, he had been shocked to discover that the convict Nancy Turner had not only not been detained, but was acting in a play!

  Jemmy then read, with a poisonous lack of emphasis, his letters to Davy, Davy’s to him, his to H.E., H.E.’s to him. Had oaths undergone a sea change? he asked. Did they have a discounted value in this barbarous place—was that the court’s view? Was it the duty of a single officer to prosecute the Perjurer? Or would the court assume its true duty and prosecute the matter itself?

  Jemmy then claimed he had, through his own questioning, discovered a witness to Nancy Turner’s having with full knowledge received stolen goods, and he hoped the court would now swear in and adequately question this witness. He suggested this should be done before any oath were administered to Turner, since there was a presumptive certainty she would not speak the truth under oath and therefore the oath would once more be violated.

  John Caesar was brought forward and took his oath. “By the Fragrant One, the Fragrant One,” he kept on repeating at the end of the standard oath.

  “So that we know the value of your oath,” said Davy, “could you tell me who is the Fragrant One.”

  “The Ruler of the Dead, sir. The son of Zanahary. Jesus Christ, sir.”

  “I suppose that will have to satisfy us,” murmured Davy Collins to the other members of the bench. They nodded and looked at their hands. They did not want to lose themselves, this morning, in Caesar’s cosmogony.

  “Now, John,” said Davy. “You say you saw Private Dukes pass goods, knowingly stolen, to Turner.”

  “That Dicky Dukes, he love Nancy Turner,” said Caesar.

  She was indeed someone’s credible love, thought Ralph, and he felt a gust of dead Dukes’s passion sweep across the courthouse, stirring Jemmy Campbell’s angry letters.

  “So he gave these goods to Turner for her favours?”

  “He give more than you need give any mollisher. He love Nancy more ’an breath.”

  “And where did you see Private Dukes pass all these goods to Nancy Turner?”

  “I see him bring this stuff to her at her house in the camp of the femmes.”

  Jemmy asked when this was.

  “It was the evening of the spears. You remember. Les Indiennes. When them malheureuses go off to Botany and come hoyin’ back studded with the spears.”

  There was some discussion on the bench about the date of the spearing. Early March, said Ralph. In the end, Davy sent Bill Parr over to his residence to fetch his journal. Throughout the delay, Jemmy Campbell sat sideways in his chair, looking at the floor and shaking his head. This finickiness over dates, his manner said, was characteristic of the Judge Advocate and his dangerous attitudes.

  The fetched journal showed that the date was March 6. Caesar said that that day love-struck Private Dukes had carried a poke, a canvas bag, which had contained bottles of hospital wine and enough pork to feed two men for a week. He had passed them to Nancy Turner, who put them in a sea chest Dukes had bought her from a sailor on the Prince of Wales before it sailed away. Caesar said the chest was in the same hut as Amelia Levy, a girl who practised whoredom among the Marines and lags, and Caesar had himself been there with Amelia Levy when Nancy brought the stuff in. Dukes had built Nancy a large hut, which allowed her to rent out space, as she had done this time with Levy.

  Davy asked John Caesar if he wasn’t under a charge himself of having stolen food from the huts of the men who worked at the brick kilns.

  John Caesar said it was so, except that every time Les Indiennes, the People of the Forest, crept into the encampment and stole things, the lags thought it was him, since he had dark skin too. “They see jest the Negro skin, sir, and what do they say? They say it must be that hungry cull, that Monsieur John Caesar.”

  Davy remarked that it was not necessary for him to defend himself yet. But had anyone said to him that there could be an advantage to him if he gave evidence against Nancy Turner?

  “That Captain Campbell,” said John Caesar, “he tell me it will help me if I say the truth about Dukes and Turner.”

  Jemmy Campbell was on his feet now. He had asked, he said, a number of Nancy Turner’s associates if they had witnessed any exchange between her thieving lover and herself. Was this somehow improper? If John Caesar was himself ravenous as a locust, did this somehow cast doubt on what he had seen between Dukes and Turner? Was the Judge Advocate, and those who were still willing to sit on his court, so determined to dismiss evidences which he had through an energy—which should properly have been theirs—uncovered?

  A number of the young officers on the bench—Lt. Davey and Faddy, the navigator Ball as well—began to mutter, “Oh God!” and “Christ, what pillocks!” Davy beat the table so everyone would remember his dignity. Ralph did not exclaim at all. He knew that if Nancy Turner were acquitted as a result of a loud and enthusiastic revelation by him he would begin to feature in the correspondence of Robbie Ross and Jemmy Campbell not merely as a fatuous playmaker but as an underminer of the holine
ss of oaths. So he reached for the pen which lay before him, dipped it in ink, and wrote on the court papers, “The 55th Company, Dukes among them, was at Rosehill on the day of the spearings.” He passed his paper to Davy Collins, and after reading it, Davy sent for the orderly book, to find out whether Dukes had been sent down to Sydney by boat that day.

  He had not been. He could not have been with Turner. Whatever Turner’s part as a fence for stolen goods may have been, it was not the part which Jemmy Campbell’s only witness, the Madagascan, said it was. By the noon claxon Turner was dismissed by the court.

  As she was uncuffed and released to resume the part poor George Farquhar had so long ago prepared for her, Jemmy stood up at his table, made a baton of his correspondence, and brought it down on the wood with a thunderous whack. “This is a fatuous court. It is not worth pissing away one’s evidence in front of it. I shall prepare a report for all the British newspapers. I shall make you all famed wee derelictors and traducers. If Jemmy Campbell can do anything to mar your careers, you can consider it from this day hence absolutely done. You have my richest contempt. And I welcome you to charge me with it. I will proclaim in any forum other than this that I spit you out of my mouth and piss on your pitiable procedures. Good day!”

  Davy began to call him to order and to remind him of the laws of contempt, but Jemmy ignored him and stumped out to make his apoplectic report to Major Ross.

  As it happened, there was nothing inexact about the evidence against John Caesar, who stood trial immediately after Nancy. So many of the brick kilns crew had seen him take their food; so many had seen him work it up into a dumpling and eat it at a sitting. He was sentenced to be sent to the outpost at Norfolk Island for the rest of his life.

  The following night he stole the rifle of a Marine and vanished into the wilderness. Perhaps he hoped those he called the People of the Forest would honour the cast of his skin and feed him sumptuously and in perpetuity on kangaroo and iguana.

  CHAPTER 18

  Exorcising Handy Baker

  His Melinda now safe from gallows or disabling punishments, Ralph crossed the stream to visit the Reverend Dick Johnson. He found him in his garden, hoeing placidly. His wife, wearing a large straw hat and looking tanned by the sun to an extent not common among the wives of ministers of the Established Church, worked with a pair of shears at a little peach tree. The Johnsons had brought it all the way with them in a tub from Rio and planted out in the small margin of less clayey soil on their side of the settlement. Mrs. Johnson waved the shears at Ralph—perhaps she was not associated with her husband in condemning the play. Perhaps the Reverend Dick—for fear of confessing to his own spouse his lack of power in this remote penal arrangement—had not shared his disquiet over Farquhar’s earthiness with her.

  The native child Booron, wearing a canvas dress, her features cruelly cavitied by healed smallpox, slept in the shade of an acacia bush.

  Ralph had decided his appeals to Dick should be on the basis of friendship rather than official standing. “Dick, I must talk to you,” he said. “It is a matter of horrific moment in which you must give me help.”

  Dick Johnson blinked. He was not used to being summoned in such terms. There were desperate souls in the new earth, but they did not know it, nor cry out in anguish for him. He stuck the blade of his hoe into a lump of clay and walked slowly to the sapling fence where Ralph stood.

  “Harry Brewer is beset by a spirit,” Ralph confided in him. “His convict girl tells me he has poison and may take it to be delivered of the ghost.”

  “Is it surprising, Ralph?” Dick Johnson asked. “Has there been since the cities of the plain a place like this?”

  “Probably not,” Ralph conceded, to get that debate out of the way. “You and I must go and see him this evening, when he is drinking and considering the poison. There is a rite for the expulsion of spirits.”

  “Do you think I am up to the weight of driving out a spirit?” asked Dick with a surprising grin.

  “If you are proof against the seductions of plays, then perhaps you are equally proof against phantoms,” said Ralph. “We may have to sit with him through the night. According to his girl, the spirit presents itself at dawn.”

  “Am I to sit in the house of concubinage?” asked Dick, but with strange resignation.

  “It seems you already do,” said Ralph. “That we all do. If I come here after supper, we can go to Harry’s place together.”

  Dick didn’t seem yet to be sure.

  “Harry is not fornicating with her,” said Ralph. It was merely a guess. “He has her there only for fear of being alone. Come on, Dick, be an honest friend!”

  So after dinner Ralph fetched the Reverend Dick and they walked the few yards to the Provost Marshal’s house. It was not yet winter in that country, and Ralph could see faces around a bonfire at the fishing camp and heard one robust laugh from Dabby Bryant. There was a light too inside Arabanoo’s shack, which Bill Bradbury still shared. The Quarter Guard crunched past on their way to the convict camps on the other side of the stream. The air of early evening seemed, as always to Ralph, as full of energetic plans, of conspiracies and propositions, of half-stifled cries of hate, surmise, and expectation, as the air of any city. Yet this was only a city in the whimsical sense of the word, and it was no place. It was—as Harry had once said—the unexpected face of the other side of the moon. It was a demonstration of what Ralph believed—that the human spirit, which some thought of as angelic but which in fact might well be a dark and toadish thing, bloated itself to take advantage of available spaces. In Plymouth, Ralph thought, you often had the sense that people were breathing their souls in, tightening the belts of their spirits. Here they breathed out and out. They grabbed the square yardage of the night sky; they expanded beyond reason.

  He was shocked at the Harry who answered their knock. In the cooling season, he smelt outrageously of sweat. There was a reek of barely digested brandy too, but that was to be expected. For Harry was a good bottleman. Duckling was indoors by the fire. As Dick and Ralph came in, she nodded for Ralph’s benefit to Harry’s uneaten dinner of beef dumpling and rice. Harry hooked her around the neck with his arm as she tried to vanish behind a canvas curtain to her bed. “Are you here on behalf of that Deity,” Harry asked, “who damns the oldest midshipman in the fucking Royal Navy for lying joylessly beside a ruined child?”

  Ralph suspected Dick might be about to say, “Yes.”

  “Your convict girl told me that Baker’s ghost presents itself to you,” said Ralph quickly.

  “Oh Jesus,” said Harry. “I have always seen the bastard. It doesn’t matter.”

  “She says you have poison in mind,” Ralph pursued. “Harry, we do not want you to drink poison. We all regard you with too much affection to take your notion calmly.”

  “Oh, I see,” yelled Harry. He called to Duckling. “Do you tell all the players how the old man wants to drink poison?”

  “She is frightened for you,” said Ralph. “Even your gardener is concerned for you. I am frightened for you, and so is Dick.”

  It was probably a lie, since Dick was interested in people only in the context of immortal souls vulnerable to heresy. It was only a narrow span in which lovers and believers could breathe as far as Dick was concerned. But he was an ordained priest and could adjure spirits.

  Harry turned to Duckling. “Go to your bed, my baby,” he said.

  This is his pet lamb, Ralph acknowledged, whom he first met on a street in Soho and saw reprieved in Newgate. In his capacity as master of the lists for this convict fleet, he included her name. With the result that Curtis Brand could have her in my marquee.

  “Then you must both drink with me,” said Harry Brewer, getting a bottle and a few cracked cups out of his sea chest. “Oh God, it is good to have friends in the house.”

  He poured both Dick and Ralph his idea of a modest sup. He poured himself the idea of an immodest one, and then he sat to consider it.

  “Where�
��s the poison, Harry?” Ralph asked.

  “Oh,” said Harry. “It’s nearby.”

  “And when can we expect to see Baker?”

  “Oh Jesus! He’ll be along. He’ll be along.”

  “While we sit here,” said Ralph, “why, Harry, can’t you get our your poison so we can see it in the open?”

  “Don’t talk to me in that wheedling way, Ralph, not if you want to claim friendship.”

  Duckling’s face appeared briefly at the green curtain separating the kitchen section of the house from the bed she shared with Harry Brewer.

  “You aren’t my favourite girl,” Harry snarled at her. Ralph thought that if she had been close enough, Harry might have struck her. “Don’t you go telling my thoughts to people, you little moll! Now should I drop dead of stroke, Dick will think it’s poison and not bury me in church ground!”

  “There is no church ground here,” murmured Dick wearily.

  Harry refilled his cracked cup from the bottle. “This is poison enough, this Dutch max they unloaded on us in Capetown. Drink it up, Father Dick. It will help your marriage!”

  “I’ll take it a little slowly, if you don’t mind,” said Dick Johnson tightly. “And if my unviolated and temperate marriage is to be mocked, Mr. Brewer, I wonder need I stay? After all, I do not mock your connection with that girl.”

  “You call it bloody concubinage, you turnip. You mock it! You damn it to God!”

  “I did not impose the Commandments on humankind, Harry,” said Dick.

  “No, but you would have enjoyed it, and you would have bred Commandments out of your arse so that there be two hundred fifty of the bastards!”

  “Harry!” called Ralph. “We can’t have Dick insulted like this. He is here at my invitation. We can go, if you choose, and leave you to those ghosts of yours.”