And it was while Ralph was suffering in that acrid way from his inability to speak to Mary Brenham, it was while he was cursing the Destinies which permitted Davy to speak to Ann Yates, George Johnston to speak to Esther Abrahams, but put a stone on Ralph Clark’s tongue, that Johnny White appeared in that room at the hospital and stood in the door shaking his head.
His air of philosophic disapproval, however, had nothing to do with the sight of Ralph and Mary Brenham. He asked if he could see Ralph. Ralph joined him and stood in the main ward, where some of the sorrier cases of scurvy, flux, and starvation lay, for the most part older lags or those who had been cheated out of their rations through dice and card games and the superior cunning of their fellows.
“Without a word to me,” said Johnny White, “H.E. showed the pouch to the native. The sight of the thing caused a violent fit in Arabanoo and the fever asserted itself yet again. The native is dead, Ralph. Now all that lies ahead are the excessive funerary rights. H.E. is determined to bury him in the grounds of the viceregal house. He is concerned at his lack of knowledge of the native burial ritual, and I would not be surprised if he sent out another armed party to gather information on this point.”
“I do hope not,” said Ralph. “The last expedition returned unharmed only through Davy’s good sense—I must say that, despite any differences we might have had.”
Johnny White drew his hand over his forehead and looked forlornly at his wardful of sad cases. “Damn me, I do not resent H.E., his interest in these unfallen and natural creatures. I have something of the same myself. But to bury one in viceregal ground, with Robbie Ross and Jemmy Campbell, those vile letter writers, looking on … It makes one see that H.E. is capable of grand folly. I do hope he is never captivated by one of the she-lags. For she will end as queen; she will sit at the head of table. Although again, if rumour is true … but we won’t speak of that.”
For the rumours were back, that H.E. was a sodomite—his passion for Arabanoo was seen by the more base-minded as mere pederasty, the assault of a high culture on a low.
“There is no change in Harry?” asked the surgeon.
“I have brought in a convict to watch him,” said Ralph, attempting to control through his will the surges of blood inside his head.
“When Harry goes,” asked Johnny White, “do you think he will merit burial in H.E.’s garden?”
On the day before Arabanoo’s funeral, Harry awoke. The left half of his face would not move, but he was able to speak. And he woke speaking, consumed with the same concerns he had had before his stroke. “Where is she?” he asked.
Only Mary Brenham was with him when he stirred. She sent a convict orderly at once to find Ralph.
Ralph had just heard he had been nominated as officer of the honour guard for the burial of the native. Since no Indian or ab origine performer of rites could be found without a major military expedition, H.E. had decided to fall back on the more accustomed resources of the British armed forces and the Established Church.
The funeral would further interrupt Ralph’s preparation of the play. The space in his military career which the playmaking had nonetheless created enabled him to rush to the hospital immediately to visit the resurgent Harry. What he saw was a man who could speak only with one half of his face.
“Where is the Duckling?” asked the new Harry.
“She is staying with friends.”
“On the east or west side of the stream?” Harry had never been sharper, despite the distortion of his face.
“We will send for her,” promised Ralph. By motions of the head he signalled that Mary Brenham should see to this—the fetching of Duckling from whatever ancient tie now detained her.
Mary understood exactly and gathered up her small son, who made a minor protest at being separated from his jigsaw, and set off to summon Duckling. Tears brimmed out of both Harry’s eyes. The stroke had not frozen them in their well behind the gnarled face. “They claim her back with such ease,” Harry murmured. One side of this mouth exactly articulated; the other was a mere slit. Yet he forced both into service to speak of Duckling, that unprofitably loved lag. Ralph had hoped that if Harry did return to a conscious state, he might emerge without the memory of Duckling, having lost her somewhere in the swamps of his coma. For it occurred to Ralph and to most people that there was not a great deal in the girl for besieged memory to cling to.
Next Harry said, “Is the Captain still alive?” He retained that memory too, of shipping with H.E. before H.E. was a viceroy. But Ralph told him the Captain was in excellent health and had been to see him, that news of Harry’s awakening would be a cause of great joy to the viceroy. “Christ,” said Harry, suddenly, licking his palsied lips, “I am hungry.” But as Ralph got up to go to the cook orderly at the far end of the hospital and commandeer a bowl of floury stew, Harry began to weep again.
“He will always be there, just out of sight,” he told Ralph. Ralph knew he meant Private Baker, that leering phantom. “And they will always fetch Duckling right easy.”
Almost at once he fell asleep again, as if exhausted. Surgeon Considen came in and said, “We will first feed him and then see how well he walks.” Duckling arrived with Brenham and the child. Duckling did not show any interest in inspecting the sleeping features of her master and sometime lover but sat silently on a bench by the wall. Ralph approached her.
“Will you be kind to him?” he asked.
She looked up at the rafters. “Yes, Mr. Clark,” she said.
“If you were not determined to be kind to him, it would be better if you were sent to Norfolk Island, where you would have greater liberty to choose your friends.”
Now she lowered her gaze and engaged his eye. “I like the friends I got here, Mr. Clark. I like you. I like them players. I like that Brenham best of them.”
He wondered if she was mocking him by naming Brenham like that. Irony and warmth both seemed alien to her, and it was hard to find out which one this was. He told her she was to sit with Harry throughout the afternoon, that she was not to attend the rehearsals of the play, but that when Harry spoke she was to reassure him and try dissuading him of the existence of Private Baker’s ghost.
In the midst of funeral preparations for Arabanoo the following day, news of Harry’s revival had reached H.E. He came over to the hospital for a short visit, during most of which Harry was tongue-tied or given to tears. It happened, too, that during the afternoon’s playmaking, Surgeon Considen helped him trundle around the room and concluded that in a little time he might be able to take up again the duties of Provost Marshal. One thing, however, Considen told Ralph when Ralph reached the hospital that evening, Harry must be moderate answering the calls of Venus and must drink no more than a cup of brandy a day. “His history as a good bottleman,” said Considen cheerily, “is at an end.”
It was agreed too among Considen, Johnny White, and Ralph that Duckling should be permitted to sleep on a pallet on the floor of the same room Harry occupied. And indeed Duckling was there in the early evening when Ralph arrived and found a Harry still tremulous and tearful. It was Ralph’s impression again that Duckling, by the questions her presence aroused, was poor company for the sick man. Yet Harry could not have been content with her absent from the room, because then he would have been plagued by questions of where she was.
Harry did ask Duckling to leave for a small time—he wanted to speak privately to Lieutenant Clark. She rose up obediently, almost gratefully. She could join the convicts in front of the fire in the main ward.
When she was gone, Harry began to tell the story once again of the night Goose had simply sent for the girl because Private Handy Baker had wanted her and had made an arrangement with Goose. And because too, since babyhood, since Soho and the parish of St. Giles, since the days when Goose ran an apothecary in Greek Street, in the shadow of the great Rookery of St. Giles—that island of criminal tenements looming near the Tottenham Court Road—since those days, Duckling had always obeyed Goose.<
br />
Ralph settled in to hear the great and engrossing history from Harry yet again. He believed he could half listen, for all he expected to hear rehearsed again was the mystery of Duckling’s daughterliness to Goose.
First Ralph heard again how Harry had—one evening in the settlement’s first days—discovered Duckling’s absence from her tent across the stream. In those days, soon after the women were landed, Duckling occupied her own little bell of canvas close to Captain Jemmy Campbell’s marquee, for whom she worked for a time as a servant. Harry had set the patrols of the convict night watch and then gone to Duckling’s tent to see sitting in front of it Dot Handilands, the most ancient of the she-lags, rumoured to be eighty years of age. For then, before huts and locks, felons with little else to do were often employed for a small portion of food or liquor to keep watch over people’s possessions.
She admitted, only after threats, that Duckling had gone to see Goose.
Harry crossed the stream in the last blue of the evening and walked up through the women’s camp, which was then all tents or insubstantial tumuli of boughs, looking for an innocent glimpse of Duckling among the cooking fires.
Even in those days the apothecary she-lag, Goose, had achieved a superior dwelling. Her mere tent had been extended with a length of canvas to become a spacious marquee. It had therefore both an anteroom and a sanctum.
Calling Duckling’s name, he went inside this elegant tent. There, on a pallet, the big Marine, Private Handy Baker, dressed only in a shirt, was plunging and rearing between Duckling’s knees.
Harry launched himself, strangling away, onto Baker’s shoulders, but was soon thrown, with all the diverted violence of Private Baker’s desire, onto the clay floor. Baker landed on top of him now and, with hands which held the odour of Duckling, began strangling him. A shadow passed over Harry’s mind. For the first of the two times he would manage it, Baker took Harry’s senses away.
Waking later, Harry found himself seated on a square of canvas, a tumbler of spirits in front of him. As his brain reached painfully for the memory of the latitude and the year—the common bread of time and place without which Harry was not Harry—the knowledge returned to him and he hurried to the corner of Goose’s tent to be sick.
Looking up he recognised Goose standing calmly by the flap, some firelight from outside richly burnishing her red hair. He knew now that he was still inside her tent. It was a further segment of it than the one in which he had observed Baker and Duckling. Perhaps there was no end to the canvas Goose had already acquired.
She was the same ample, red-haired woman he had seen in Newgate on the occasion he visited Duckling there. He had rarely bothered to face her since the night of Duckling’s commutation of sentence. When he discovered that Duckling and Goose were both in the same detachment of Newgate prisoners marched down to Portsmouth and placed with over a hundred other female convicts aboard the Lady Penrhyn, he had devoted himself to having Duckling transferred to the smaller female convict hold of Charlotte. This expedient, he now bitterly understood, had been quite fruitless.
Goose sat on a folding camp stool and grinned at him. She had mad, nut brown eyes. “You should never set yourself to stop Handy Baker once he’s in his stride. Handy Baker is a runaway coach and four. Handy can take on three coolers a day.”
Cooler was flash talk for girl.
She surmised aloud that Harry, in spite of the bruising he’d had, wasn’t planning any vengeance based on the letter of the law. “All the camps might laugh at you then, Mr. Brewer,” she told him. Besides, everyone came over here to the women’s camp to see Mother Goose, she said, slapping her stomach. To ask Goose for favours.
She had even told Harry—and Harry always told Ralph in retelling the tale—that Ralph had once been there. But Ralph was strangely unabashed, since Harry had confessed so much greater follies of his own. Goose said that the girl had been amused when tipsy Ralph had tried to show them all his little picture of his wife. But, Goose told Harry (and Harry passed on to Ralph), that when it came to the assizes of the flesh, Lieutenant Clark went at it as strong as anyone.
This Handy Baker, Goose had informed Harry as he sipped his brandy, was a good cove and had a position of favour with some of the officers. Harry, argued Goose now, had seen Baker flogged on the back and arse in Rio for trading in Tom Barrett’s counterfeit Portuguese quarters. He would see Baker suffer again if he just waited for it. For Handy Baker had always gone to the trouble of arranging punishment for himself.
The longer Harry sat before her, trying to piece his head together, the greater and more terrible was the sense she made. Harry was not to think that Handy Baker and Duckling were somehow set, said Goose. Handy was settled in with the Huffnell woman. But he’d asked for Duckling to be sent over in return for some favour he’d done Goose. Baker knew Duckling was clean and in good health, said Goose, as if that explained entirely Baker’s preference for her.
Harry’s head had still been tolling from the blows and strangling Baker had given it, but he was capable of a slow, balanced, waiting fury. For one thing he picked up the brandy she had poured him and emptied it onto the clay floor. Then he had warned her not to send for Duckling again. To which Goose replied that Duckling had to come if her old mother and abbess sent for her—Harry knew that. These young things always answered the calls of their madame.
She was closer to Duckling, she argued, than mother, than law, than any favours Harry might give the girl. “I am the Flash Queen, Harry. He who tries to put the wind up my skirts finds vipers beneath. You give her little gifts of mugfuls of flour, and sips of rum. Good for you, Harry. It might keep a wife in a cottage. It won’t keep the Duckling over there when her Queen calls.”
Goose further elaborated the state of her nation to him. She would let him buy Duckling, but he did not have the wealth. And though he was Provost Marshal, he would find it hard to have her, Goose, sent before “the Beak,” Davy Collins, and sentenced in any way. If she were put on a list for Norfolk Island, someone else would take her off it. “Because everyone talks to me, Harry.”
Then she produced her brandy bottle again, refilled his glass, and advised him not to waste it this time.
Though he needed it to ice his brain a little, he struggled upright and walked away into the corner. He could not remember later what threats he uttered then—not only the noose but an array of inconceivable punishments. Yet as he left she clapped him on the shoulder. A maternal indulgence from a woman two dozen years younger than him.
When Harry got to the stream (as Ralph heard in all these retellings), Duckling was waiting for him, sitting propped on the handrail. Once she saw him she did not maintain this posture. She came upright and said nothing. There was such an expectation of blows in her manner that Harry could not remember how it was he’d ever wanted to punish her.
“A strong bastard, that Baker,” he said to her then, to let her know she was safe. He hoped she showed to Baker the same whorish competence and coolness she showed him, the writhings which had no juice in them and were intended merely to move the customer along.
She assured Harry that he was her regular swell. She went so far as to touch his face. She murmured that no one could afford making enemies of the Marines.
There was one he intended to make an absolute enemy of.
Soon afterwards (again as Harry told it to Ralph), Harry and H.E. had one of their awkward conversations. It was over a glass of port on the Good Friday before that first Easter.
“This woman you know,” H.E. had said quietly. “Do you think you would ever marry her? Or is she in the nature of a temporary solace?”
The question had struck Harry oddly, so that he wondered was it a test. Since H.E. saw the convicts as future yeomanry or, in Duckling’s case, future yeo-womanry, was he suggesting that gentlemen should be happy to marry them? Or was he doing what friends do everywhere, taking a hand in the grotesque passion of an elderly comrade for an unlikely young girl.
“If she w
ere pardoned, I would marry her,” Harry had said to his surprise. It was a thought he had never consciously held before. And H. E. remarked—as if he thought a girl ought to have a dowry—that when she had served her time, she would be given a land grant. That was to be the standard arrangement.
It was at this point that Harry chose to damn Goose with H.E. “There is a procurer working in the women’s camp,” Harry suddenly confessed. “A woman called Goose. A woman of many false names. She procures girls, even from this side of the stream, for Marines and for convicts with a bung, as they say, a purse. In terms of the women’s camp she lives in grand style. She calls herself a queen.”
H.E. closed his eyes for a time. “I shall have my adjutant look into it,” he said.
H.E.’s adjutant was George Johnston, the affable young officer and paramour of Esther Abrahams.
About the time Harry mentioned the name of Goose, H.E. went off on an excursion across the harbour, traversing for the first time the country where Ralph and Davy would later meet Ca-bahn. In the meantime a lag named Joseph Levy died, a genial young cockney Jew. Harry and Lieutenant Johnston attended that funeral, and Dick Johnson was accommodating enough to allow the Jewish convicts, Esther Abrahams shawled among them, to sing Kaddish over Joseph Levy’s grave. The seven-shilling kettle Joseph Levy had once lifted had brought him to the earth’s further burial.
Dick Johnson supervised the ceremony, as if he suspected something infamous would take place, but at the end he remarked to Harry that it was a remarkable thing that Jews sang Kaddish in Aramaic and not in Hebrew, and he began to speculate on the historic reasons for that.
The Playmaker Page 27
