The Playmaker

by Thomas Keneally

  It was agreed they would all leave H.E. asleep, but Davy wrote a quick note and left it under the pouch.

  May 16th, 1789

  Your Excellency,

  We have returned this evening from the country north of the harbour, having had communication with the car-rah-dy named Ca-bahn. We encountered among the lagoons a fine figure of a native who called himself Bennilung and who seemed unmarked by the smallpox. He conducted us to a small grove of palms some twelve miles north of our landing place where we encountered a substantial body of warriors, all armed and bent on intimating by unearthly sounds and by militant gestures that they did not wish their priest to return with us. Other than by opening fire on their ranks, an expedient which would have left many dead on both sides, we could not have borne Ca-bahn away. On learning that Arabanoo was ill, however, Ca-bahn delivered to us a pouch, which I hereby present to you. Surgeon White indicates that the dark substance is human waste and has recognised the button as belonging to Sir Joseph Banks, Bart.

  We are pleased to hear from Surgeon White that the Indian has recovered from the fever associated with the disease, and we therefore leave to Your Excellency himself to decide whether the native should be shown the pouch.

  Your obedient servant,

  David Collins,

  Captain, Marines

  Post Script: I shall present a more detailed report, as will Lieutenant Clark, who has some forceful views on the manner in which the capture of Arabanoo has diminished the trust the Indians once showed us.

  Signed D.C.

  They crept out through the hallway and then through the front door. When they were past the sentry, Ralph asked the surgeon how poor Harry Brewer was now.

  “Kind of you to enquire, Ralphy,” said Johnny White. “Everyone’s forgotten poor damn Harry. His old friend H.E. had visited him only once before the Indian’s fever arose to claim all his attention. Harry’s lungs are growing congestive with lack of proper motion. I have him turned over three times by day, and twice by night, but it is not enough. He is wasting too. We can pour only a little broth down his throat a few times a day, and though his power to swallow is there, he gags after a few mouthfuls. In short, Ralph, it is my view we shall lose our friend.”

  Ralph found that hard to believe. It seemed to him the convict society of New South Wales would grow quite unbalanced if Harry Brewer were lost. He feared he would grow unbalanced himself. “Until the play is presented, I am free in the mornings and evenings. You must call on me, John, to sit by Harry.”

  Johnny accepted the offer with a solemn nod. “It’s a long way from the Strand for a flash boy like Harry. And his tart has backslid and gone over the stream for company.”

  “The company of men?” asked Ralph, suddenly enraged at Duckling.

  “The company of her Dimber Damber, her abbess, Goose.” Johnny himself had a good command of cant talk. It came from treating convicts, Ralph surmised.

  They passed Dick Johnson’s place, where Mary Brenham and her child lay asleep—cunning arrangement of which the surgeon and Davy were unaware. But Ralph’s own solitary understanding of Brenham’s location filled him all at once with a ridiculous joy.

  CHAPTER 24

  The Watching of the Ill

  He wrote a letter to Dick Johnson.

  My dear Dick,

  John White tells me that our friend Harry Brewer is in great danger and needs a constant watch. A number of occasions throughout a given day, his body has to be turned to prevent the blood from pooling and the lungs from congesting. I would like to make use of the services of convict Mary Brenham in watching and helping to turn poor Harry—at least in those periods when she is not required for domestic service in your household. I would be grateful if you could send her to the hospital at nine o’clock, where I shall give her her instructions.

  He had not left his hut for the hospital when a servant of Dick Johnson’s came panting up the hillside to his hut with a reply.

  My dear Lieutenant Clark,

  Of course I am happy to provide Brenham for such a merciful service. As your spiritual counsel, however, I must advise you that you are concerning yourself overly much in the movements and affairs of this woman, since this is the second time in three days that you have taken a direct interest in her. I urge you to beware of low motives hidden behind high ones. In Jesus Christ I remain

  Your obedient servant,

  Richard Johnson,

  Pastor.

  Dick’s clumsy spiritual advice made Ralph kick the leg of his small camp table and then cross the room and pound the corner upright of the hut. That mean Eclectic talking to him as if he were a boy of twelve. It was a prime instance of the way Dick worked to put a distance between himself and those who were willing to be his clients.

  But the anger gave way to an awkward shame. Dick had so precisely read his motives. Ralph considered for a time whether he ought to arrive late at the hospital, let Mary Brenham sit there waiting with her baby son for an hour or so. But that would mislead only Mary herself. She would have sixty minutes to sit and perhaps occupy her mind with the Jewish epiloguist Wisehammer. Whereas Surgeons Considen and White would understand his game exactly, since they both seemed so competent in dealing with women.

  Harry Brewer used to mutter a great deal to himself, rehearsing arguments, some of which he had had years before and which were beyond repair, or chastising himself for historic or present follies. Ralph found himself so discomforted by Dick Johnson’s letter he now took up this habit without thinking; halfway to the hospital he stopped and patted his hand emphatically against a tall eucalyptus tree. “I will be very curt with Dick Johnson in the future!” he announced aloud.

  He surprised himself by being at the hospital before she got there. He was disgruntled, too, to find on duty not Johnny White and Dennis Considen, for whom he had prepared himself, but the rakish young Scot Balmain, who had come in from Rosehill for a few days and who proceeded around the hospital with stiff limbs, as if a more fluent style would hurt his head too much. He barely listened when Ralph told him a convict woman was being brought in to keep watch over Harry.

  Mary Brenham and her child, both pleasantly breathless as if Mary had made a game of the short journey, got to the hospital a little later. The Reverend Johnson had detained her, she pleaded, fanning her face with her hand. The hurry she had been in had brought out a few childlike freckles under the fine skin of her broad forehead, and Ralph was reminded, despite her rich, full-lipped features, of how young she was. He led her into the room occupied by Harry. Harry’s rankness did not seem to appall her. She had probably encountered worse on the convict decks of the Lady Penrhyn. She settled the child in a corner with a wooden jigsaw puzzle which Ralph recognised as belonging to the Johnsons. Then she crossed the room to Ralph for her instructions. He led her to Harry’s pitiable cotside.

  Harry lay under three blankets and on a sheet of sealskin. His breathing was very noisy. He was a man drowning terribly in his own flesh.

  “Mr. Brewer must be turned twice every morning while you are here,” said Ralph. He did not know where he got the number from, he knew simply that it was more than the surgeons and the orderlies would do.

  He took back the blankets and there was Harry in nothing but a stained shirt. His legs were thin and blue, and his stubby little prick hung loose. For its sake Harry had embezzled and joined a criminal mob, a canting crew. Now it looked so negligible and, worse, as if the stroke had sundered him from it.

  Mary Brenham began to behave with great capability and briskness. She suggested they lift Harry to another cot while she scrubbed down the sealskin. Shifting Harry was a task Ralph and Mary managed more easily than Ralph would have believed. She bundled Harry’s small, failing body in the three blankets, so that only his head appeared, and Ralph carried him by the shoulders as she took the legs. Looking at Harry from behind, Ralph would have thought him a child.

  Then Mary took the fouled sealskin outside to wash. Ralph was left alone wit
h her son and with mute Harry. “Come there, Harry,” said Ralph forlornly. “Time to stir. Your girl is living with Goose.”

  Ralph saw the child looking at him and smiled. “I am just talking with Mr. Brewer,” he told the child, who returned to his game.

  Mary came back with a bowl of water and a cloth. She raised the cloth to Harry’s mouth. Harry’s cracked lips worked at the cloth. “See,” said Brenham. “He has the same thirst as a man in a good state of health.”

  She had laid the sealskin in the sun, and when it was dry she brought it in again and spread it briskly on Harry’s empty cot. She and Ralph then moved the child body of Harry back across the room to where it belonged, and Ralph fetched a stool and a chair so that they could sit beside Harry. He insisted Mary take the chair, since she would be there longer. Before sitting she gave her child a scrag of dried beef to chew on.

  “I am perhaps Harry’s truest friend,” said Ralph to his own surprise as he settled himself on the stool. “He is well liked. I think …”

  “There is no need for you to sit, sir,” said Mary Brenham. “I am here.”

  “I will stay for a while,” Ralph insisted.

  Within seconds they were talking of the play and then of the players.

  “I heard that Turner the Perjurer,” Ralph ventured, “is spending time with Private Hunt.”

  “Private Hunt?”

  Private Joseph Hunt, he explained. The man whose evidence had hanged Nancy Turner’s lover.

  In the corner Small Willy Brenham was talking to a piece of jigsaw, an amenable child who was disappointed with the lump of wood he held rather than determined to cause it harm. His mother blinked. “I have seen them together once,” she admitted.

  “I think it is curious, that is all,” said Ralph.

  Mary Brenham rose and put the wet cloth again against Harry’s lips. The lips worked away. They were what was most live of Harry now—Harry that man of complicated ambition and mysterious desire. Only the lips spoke for him in sucking against the rag.

  “What if the poor man gets thirsty in the night?” asked Mary.

  “There is a night orderly who gives him broth. And his hut mate Duckling should be here to ply the rag.”

  Mary Brenham blinked again.

  “Do you know Goose?” he asked.

  “She and Duckling are mother and daughter,” said Mary Brenham. “Well, not mother and daughter in the ordinary way. But mother and daughter just the same. I can’t answer for Nancy Turner or Duckling, Lieutenant Clark. They are dear friends in the play, but a puzzle to me in the flesh.”

  He saw his mistake. She thought he was plumbing her for intelligence on the two women. He changed the subject and began to talk to her about reading, since the source of her obvious writing and speaking capacities now interested him. He told her that from the start he had noticed how well she had taken to the reading of Silvia and how competent her transcriptions of the play had been. He asked her about her education, the years before she was convicted at Justice Hall in the Old Bailey … how long ago?

  “It will be five years this eighth of December, Mr. Clark,” she told him, staring at him directly. He had noticed this in the lags—they stated the dates of their convictions with great candour, for fear that to state them either shyly or sullenly would bring them undone with something like bitterness, would force them to a railing against destinies and governments.

  Soon she was talking freely of her infancy.

  Her grandfather had been a groom in the house of Sir Desmond White at Feltham in Middlesex. Her father had been the groom’s clever son, a companion therefore to Sir Desmond’s small son, the Honourable Horatio White who became in the end, so Mary Brenham told Ralph, a justice of the King’s Bench. Grandfather Brenham—as his lag granddaughter called him in speaking to Ralph—was much trusted by the household. That enlightened Whig Sir Desmond had no doubts about asking the chief groom’s son into the household for lessons in the classics and geometry. The tuition was provided by a former scholar of Peterhouse, Cambridge, a man who was also an ordained minister of the Established Church. “My father,” Mary told Ralph, “was said to be the equal of the Honourable Horatio in Greek and Latin, and better than him in mathematics and geometry. But when the boys were nine, the Honourable Horatio White was sent to Harrow and there were no further lessons for my father. There he was, you see, Mr. Clark, high and dry with some education—portable wares, you might say. But he couldn’t take them anywhere. So at last Sir Desmond was aware of the cruelty of teaching the boy only so much, and arranged for him to go to one of the Dissenting academies—Sir Desmond did not believe in God. So the fact that my father would get a different doctrine at Sunbury Academy than the Honourable Horatio was receiving at Harrow made no difference in Desmond’s mind. It made a difference in my father’s—he used to like to talk of divine matters. When I was small, he taught me such words as Socinianism. I’ve remembered the name, though I cannot quite remember what its point is now.”

  Ralph laughed at her irony. This family history she had embarked on was, he was ecstatic to notice, proving her elegant, intelligent, a dazzling companion.

  “When my father married my mother,” she continued, “they set up a small academy of their own in Feltham, for the sons of small traders and farmers. It was awesomely hard though to get people to pay for the education of their sons, especially when those same people were often the butchers and grocers to whom my mother and father owed money. My father was already suffering from consumption. It killed him before he was twenty-nine years old. After we had settled all our debts in Feltham, my mother and I moved up to London. I was ten years old. I think my mother came to London not because of any dream she might have of that great city, but because she could see no future ahead of us in Feltham other than charity. Sir Desmond was dead, and his son mainly in London, and so there was no one to protect us from being labelled on parish books with that terrible name. The Poor.”

  Mary Brenham’s mother began to attend Quaker meetings in Stepney, perhaps because the Quakers were well known for their charity. And so she found work on the fringes of benevolence, as a cook and housekeeper for the Society for the Ruptured Poor, a Quaker house of charity which took in and nursed those whose frames had been broken in mills and factories and who could therefore no longer work.

  “She found me my position at the Kennedys’ and I repaid her miserably,” said Mary Brenham flatly, glancing at her child. “The consequence of my early years is that I do not fit the same tongue or have the same mind as those who have been felons from babyhood. I am not better than them, I am probably worse for having known better and still become a thief.”

  “No,” Ralph hurried to say. “You mustn’t flay yourself. Society does not demand that. It has taken your time and put you in a distant place. That is the extent of what you have to give.”

  “In any case, better or worse, the ones like Nancy Turner and Duckling I do not understand and therefore cannot—since they choose it so—be their friends.”

  The mention of Duckling again reminded Ralph that he was exploiting poor mute Harry as a species of table, a useful item of furniture, over which he received Mary Brenham’s sweet confessions.

  His sudden discomfort must have shown in his face, since she shook herself. “I have spoken at a terrible length, Mr. Clark.”

  “No, no,” said Ralph. Her short history seemed almost infinite to him, full of questions, more ramified than that of the Roman Empire. “And does your mother still work in that Quaker house?” he asked.

  “At the time my ship left the Thames, yes. My trial confirmed her position there, making her doubly unfortunate and so doubly worthy with the Brethren. I could say my crime confirmed her imprisonment with the Quakers, just as it assured my transportation.”

  Ralph laughed. “You do not like the Quakers?”

  “Away from them, my mother might have found a new husband.”

  “And might have starved on the other hand,” said Ralph.
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br />   “I do not think I could be a Quaker,” said Mary. “It seemed to me they were very severe on ordinary joy.”

  Ralph wondered whether her concept of ordinary joy included John Wisehammer. He spent so long trying to imagine the framing of this question in a way which would not give himself away to her that he must have seemed to have become distracted. She employed this apparent drifting mental state of his as a signal that he certainly had heard enough of her life history, for now she changed direction and took exactly the course he wanted her to.

  “Sir,” she said, “there is John Wisehammer’s epilogue, which I have helped him to write.”

  She had his attention instantly. “Yes?” he asked.

  “May I say, Lieutenant Clark, that you have never wanted to see it, and therefore he thinks he is under a shadow with you.”

  “So much nonsense,” said Ralph, knowing that a more competent lover, a Captain Plume, would have said, “He is under a shadow. He has taken a claim to a woman I desire.”

  “I had forgotten the epilogue,” lied Ralph.

  “If you could ask to see it, sir,” said Mary Brenham, “it would—if I can speak freely—be the end of a terrible tyranny for me. For he writes it and writes it again, he edits out lines, he alters meters and rhymes, and he asks me continuously if I think it is ready for you to lay your eyes on.”

  “He is concerned to such a degree?” asked Ralph.

  “All the players are becoming sick of urging him forward, telling him to show it. And I above all, since the main burden lies on me as John Wisehammer’s friend and helper.” She sighed and it was no false sigh. “If he gained your approval, then you would become an object of friendly devotion, and the weight would be lifted from me.”

  In the seconds after she had said this, it was apparent she was about to ask his pardon for being so frank. But Ralph had enough trouble suppressing his joy. Wisehammer was something of a nuisance to her! It took some seconds for him to understand that though he knew she was now free of claim, lag or otherwise, he lacked the stomach, what he would have called the ordinary gall, to recruit her as his lover. Perhaps he feared the world would be unbalanced, and Betsey Alicia sent into even more prodigious gales of extravagance. It was above all that he—who had once kept a journal—lacked the tongue for the task.