The Playmaker

by Thomas Keneally

  Duckling answered the door, opening it only wide enough to admit him if he inhaled. Harry, his stockinged feet sitting on one of the hot stones of the hearth, his upper body wrapped in a naval cape, looked expectant and amused at his arrival. He told Duckling to fetch Ralph some port. Surgeon Johnny White, he said, had cut him down to a tumbler of port and half a measure of brandy a day. “Just enough to get some warmth to the ancient extremities,” said Harry, “but not enough to explode what’s left of the brain.”

  He had already had his daily quantity, so Ralph would have to forgive him if he did not join in with the taking of refreshment.

  When Duckling had brought the liquor in a cup, she fetched her clay pipe again and sat on a stool. Her air was that of a child waiting to be let from school. Again Ralph found himself speculating that if she could be sent to Norfolk and replaced in Harry’s house by one of the more reliable she-lags, Harry could begin a better ordered life. He had got rid of the ghost beyond his door, and now all he needed for perfect balance of his mind was to be rid of the ghost on his hearth. But any list she was placed on, Harry had the influence to alter; as once, working in a broom cupboard at the Admiralty. Those were the days when he had hoped that by dropping the raw earth of her criminality through such an enormous sieve of latitudes and longitudes, her soul would be cleansed.

  “Have you heard from H.E.?” Ralph asked Harry, not wanting to introduce his own exciting proposal at the very start of the conversation.

  “I was visited. He is not well, the Captain. It is the death of this savage. On one side I could say to him, why grieve so long for the boy? He had an innocence, a frankness, indeed. But there are boys in England I could find who have an innocence and a frankness worthy of the affection of an older man. And don’t misunderstand what I say, Ralph, as the rest of the officers’ mess does. Sometimes I wish for his own sake he was that thing, or that he showed a preference among the convict women. There is something inhuman in the poor Captain.”

  It appeared to Ralph that Harry might no longer consider himself H.E.’s intimate, might have heard in fact that H.E. had spent more time at Arabanoo’s bedside than at Harry’s. In any case, Harry now smiled at Duckling, who puffed equably on her pipe.

  “It was the first time I’ve seen the Captain and thought, Poor old boy! Another man might look at me and say that I was a poor source of law with half a working face and a hobble of one leg. But he told me he hoped I could continue in my duty, and since it is the only duty I could exercise here or anywhere else in the universe, I looked him in his eye and told him I was fit for it.”

  Ralph was pleased the talk had come round neatly to the point at which he wanted it. Did Harry know that Black Caesar the Madagascan was still at large? “He lives in the fringes of the forests,” said Ralph, “and raids the town at night. He stole firearms from Private Meadows, he bruised and misused the convict Mary Brenham, and he stole flour from the brick kilns party. I know how he can be caught, at least I would hope so.”

  Harry blew air through his stricken lips and sat forward. “I would love to find that great bastard!”

  “Never will conditions be better for that, Harry, than on Thursday when my play unwinds itself. Everyone will have his eyes fixed on it—I can’t tell you how amusing the women will be—Dabby Bryant and Mary Brenham and Nancy Turner the Perjurer. And Kable and Arscott. Even Sideway and Wisehammer. They’ve transformed the normal arts of criminal dissembling into the better dissembling of the actor on stage.”

  Harry Brewer slapped his own knee—a sudden, youthful, unstricken movement.

  “The Madagascan,” Ralph continued, “is cunning in ways in which we are simple-minded, but simple-minded in ways in which we are cunning. If you were to create an improperly guarded store of food on the edge of the settlement, say at the brick kilns, if you would talk the Commissary into letting you have some beef and flour on a trust basis, then the black man would come into town to steal it. For everyone remarks he has no rationality in the matter of food. We think of the Madagascan as somehow having the same dimensions as the forest which hides him—as being as difficult to gauge and capture as that. But his appetites reduce the extent of the space he can occupy. That is, he is bound always to be close to the town.”

  “But now he has a gun,” Harry said. “He can wander wherever he likes, living off kangaroo and iguana. There is no reason either why the savages wouldn’t take him in as a brother.”

  Ralph shook his head. Even this degree of argument seemed to him mysteriously to advance his surreptitious approaches to Mary Brenham. Caesar first, then Brenham to follow! “If he were living well from kangaroo and iguana, and if the savages took him as a brother, he would not have needed to raid the convict woman.”

  “Are you suggesting that not only did he break into her house, but that he also raped her?”

  Ralph, for no good reason, burned with shame. “The convict woman is very reticent on that matter,” he said. He was very reticent himself.

  Harry struck the ham of his leg again, with a force which took Ralph by surprise. The young rake who had embezzled Cuxbridge and Breton’s accounts could not have slapped flesh with more impact. Duckling stared at him sharply but—Ralph thought—without understanding.

  “This,” said Harry, “is how I re-enter the live business of being a Provost Marshal. By capturing the Fragrant One.”

  Ralph again felt a sudden envy for Harry, who had rediscovered his profession, rid himself of phantoms and possessed—more or less—his love. “Black Caesar isn’t the Fragrant One,” Ralph corrected. “He calls his god the Fragrant One.”

  “Capture a man,” shouted Harry, under the brunt of an excitement which might well be bad for his health but was certainly good for his spirit, “and you capture his gods.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Celebrating the Part

  But even the planning of the capture of Black Caesar had failed to ease Ralph’s bewilderment over Mary Brenham. In the cold night air he felt warm with apprehension as he made his way toward the bridge of barrels over the stream. An inexactly played fiddle and the high laughter of two or three women sounded across the cove, yet you still had the feeling any noise made was barely resounding in an enormous silence. Over on that more populated and less sober side the nights of liquor, whoring, and thievery ended earlier than in the sweet humid nights of summer.

  Nearing the Reverend Dick Johnson’s place, he saw a man in a white suit pacing among the widely spaced trees which skirted Dick’s garden. It was, Ralph felt sure, the little Irish dentist and surgeon, Dennis Considen, though why he should be wandering like this—like a man rehearsing an argument with himself—Ralph could not guess. The likelihood was that he had had dinner with Robbie Ross or Jemmy Campbell and that the experience had left him half drunk and angry, and that he was saying in the privacy of the native cedars what he believed a man of courage would have said at the table of whichever turbulent officer had had him to dine.

  “Dennis,” called Ralph. Considen paused in his exaggerated pacing and stared at Ralph. Then, as if Ralph’s being there added further to his shame, he began to flee along the picketed edge of the Reverend Johnson’s garden. Ralph was non-plussed but also alarmed for the little dentist. Considen’s strange jerky running reminded Ralph of an earlier tragedy, of the exaggerated gait of Lieutenant Maxwell, who had gone mad in the Indian Ocean. In the settlement’s first days he would run, bare-arsed and with that same broken lope, toward glittering stretches of harbour, intent on ecstatically drowning himself. Ralph did not want to see the little Irishman drown himself, so he began to pursue Considen, sure he was the only one in all the night who could save the Irishman from some Maxwell-like excess.

  It was when one began to run that it became clear how the poor quality of the naval and penal diet throughout the lag city’s existence—a diet only sometimes spiked with the liveliness and fibre of turnips or cabbages or kangaroo or fish—had sapped one’s strength. Considen ran bent now, and not quite
like a terrier, but one could not doubt he took energy from his frenzy, whatever it was.

  He broke away now from the corner of Reverend Johnson’s garden, making for the confused ground of boulders and sinewy acacias in the direction of the fishing camp. He fell once, over a ledge of sandstone, and Ralph heard him give a strange and pitiable bleat. He got up swiftly, but the fall seemed to have destroyed his certainty of direction. At last he knelt at the base of a boulder, as if now that speed could not be invoked he intended to call on powers and principalities.

  Ralph reached him, but for some time had too little breath left to circle him, consider his face by starlight, and quiz him about his desperation. At last he staggered in a half circle to Considen’s front and looked down at him. The surgeon was still kneeling.

  It was not Considen in his white suit. It was Mary Brenham in her white suit, the one run up by the convict seamstress Hart out of calico, yet as perfectly cut as any suit anyone in the place owned. Mary began to weep. But Ralph, in his breathlessness, was exalted. All those movements and gestures which had seemed madness when he had associated them with Considen now had a sweet reason to them once you attributed them to her. To a Mary Brenham so consumed by the play that she asks Frances Hart if she might take her costume home with her, and then, after the Johnsons and their native child and Small Willy are soundly asleep, dresses in her calico coat, vest, and breeches and, defying the convict curfew, goes out to recite her lines among the trees and to take on the theatrical postures suitable to a Silvia in men’s clothing.

  Now arose what he knew to be the supreme moment of temptation in his life. He could take an air of authority with her, and this would defeat her yet still give him at least her body and her willing performance. With authority and the harsh question, he could take from her without turning over any mysterious gifts of his own, without becoming a fool as she had become a fool in her white calico suit in the night. This first possible procedure appealed indecently to him. His blood itched. He suffered a sharp and panic-stricken awareness that this was the way damnation was decided and Heaven and Hell apportioned. Yet he was still beset with the question of whether to tyrannise her when he heard his voice asking with humanity or even tenderness, “So you were rehearsing your part?”

  “I know my part,” said the girl.

  “You were celebrating your part, perhaps? You were celebrating Silvia.”

  “I am always caught out,” she said. “It seems to be a condition of my life that I cannot do anything secret without being found out.”

  Ralph reached out and touched the line of her jaw. The sweat dampened his hand. “Andrew Hilton I love thee to the grave,” he said.

  As he raised her she was looking away, as if the night itself were not adequate cover for her. He kissed her through the medium of those tears. They had their source, he fancied, in the night she had ransacked the Kennedys’ wardrobes, passing the clothes of better people down to Andrew Hilton in the street. One crime, one capture, one sailor, one child, one Silvia. There was in her eighteen-year-old face and gestures the certainty that her vanity in Silvia too would turn to tears. He felt desperate to correct this assumption of hers. He kissed her throat. He encountered beneath the calico suit of white clothes the remarkable firmness and design of a young woman’s body. Climate was canceled. He tore at the fabric so painstakingly sewn together by Frances Hart. Vest sundered, coat dropped, breeches tore apart at the buttons. And Mary Brenham tore similarly at his vest and breeches, which though adequately tailored by Lambton Brothers of Plymouth fell apart with the same ease as the works of the lag costumier. All at once Clark and Brenham were joined, blue as ice beneath that moon merely rumoured to be the same as the one which gave its light to Britain. His blue hand found the holy delta as she cried, “Oh soft, soft!” So the wonderful hard and liquid entering of his Silvia/Brenham commenced. How she appreciated his shoulders, how she tore him to her! What exquisite gasps compounded of Farquhar and unhappy criminality, of what Ralph thought of as lost years and unchosen motherhood, went into her cry as he entered. When he turned her over it was because he wished to demonstrate to her, at the peak of his joy, that her tattooed arse meant nothing. Raging as he gave himself, he saw the calligraphy of her thirteen-year-old folly shining like some runic inscription.

  “Silvia,” he screamed, delighted under that penal moon. “Oh, now.” He laughed, recovering his breath. “Oh, now can our friend Rose forget us.” He had used Dabby Bryant’s play name, he would later suppose, since the mistaking of Mary Brenham for Considen, his pursuit of Brenham under the supposition that she was a young and dapper surgeon gone lunatic, and his astonished coupling with incarnate Silvia seemed to him as neat as anything Farquhar could devise, seemed to be a gift and a contrivance from poor Farquhar’s comic genius.

  What was most gracious about this gift was that Mary understood it too—the play and Ralph and Mary were of one mind.

  “I altered my outside,” said Silvia/Brenham, quoting Farquhar with a directness and a humour Ralph had before merely suspected she possessed, “because I was the same within, and only laid by the woman to make sure of my man. That’s my history!”

  Then, with the tears of the chase and the shame still in her eyes, she began to laugh as—aware of the necessities of time—she began to button herself back into her white calico suit for a return to Dick Johnson’s house.

  “I will have you built a hut in my garden,” Ralph promised her. “You shall be by name my housekeeper and by night my beloved.”

  She nodded. She knew that was the way love was managed on that particular penal moon.

  CHAPTER 28

  Lag Matrimony

  Lag matrimony was accomplished thus: between the scenes in which John Arscott played scandalous Sergeant Kite, he was detailed to the work of building a small wattle and daub hut close to Ralph’s. Curtis Brand, who had fewer lines to speak, cut the lathes and wattles for the wall panels and dug holes in which to sink the corner posts. Ralph had not denounced him to Harry Brewer for taking joy in Duckling, and in Curtis’s code of action this entitled Ralph to a certain quantity of grateful labour.

  The roof was of that shaggy bark which could be cut in whole pieces from certain species of trees and which had, ab origine, kept the rain off the heads of the Indians.

  Ralph did not explain the purpose of the hut to either Arscott or Brand beyond saying that it was for a servant. During the reading of those scenes in which Arscott and Curtis did not appear, sounds of adze or axe or hammer could be heard from the direction of Ralph’s place, and a knowing flicker would, however, enter Mary Brenham’s eyes. She and Small Willy, she understood, would be domiciled more in Ralph’s house than in that outbuilding the two handy players were erecting. The hut would have its uses as a storeroom, an alternative kitchen, and a concession to the fiction that Mary was a mere servant.

  In his nuptial frame of mind, he looked kindly at Nancy Turner the Perjurer, who by now knew her lines intimately enough to let her true spirit and sharpness emerge as she strode, queenly and dismissive as Melinda. She had loved Private Dukes and spawned a false oath to save him—affronting solider deities for the sake of honeyed, treacherous Eros. In one sense, good for her!

  Towards dusk Ralph went down over the stream to speak with Lieutenant Johnston, who possessed the power to direct convicts here and there, to this side of the stream and to that. George could well have been amused—he had been the first to declare a love for a she-lag. He had been mocked behind his back, though he was built so huskily and came of such obdurate Scottish farming lineage that very few made jokes to his face. He did not smile when Ralph told him that he required the convict Mary Brenham as his housekeeper, and Ralph was grateful. He at whom everyone had grinned had not descended to grinning now. In that there was something to admire.

  George looked through his registers in the small office at the front of H.E.’s place. “This is Mary Brenham, who is presently with the Reverend Johnson?”

  “That�
�s the one,” said Ralph. He thought it would be to betray her if he said that because she had worked in Dick’s house she was known to be trustworthy. George Johnston knew, as did Ralph, that that was a narrow recommendation.

  “Can it be done?” Ralph pleaded.

  “Yes, Ralph, it can be done,” said George. How sweet was the compassion of a fallible man like George. Their mutual weakness made them brothers.

  “George, I am a bad cook, but if ever I should shoot anything worthwhile, then I hope you and your Esther will join me at my table.”

  It was only now that George showed some marginal amusement. “Ralph,” he said, “I would be honoured.”

  I have joined a club, Ralph concluded.

  In those last days before the play and the accomplishment of the marriage, the carpenter Arscott seemed to be driven to a fury of energy by the force of the mutual expectations of Mary Brenham and Lieutenant Clark. He rushed from the quickly done hut in Ralph’s garden to the wildly accented scenes in which he represented Sergeant Kite, and then on to the work party which under his direction was making a rude stage in the new barracks building on which the play would be enacted. Here the thief of powder and perfumes John Nicholls painted flats and a backcloth on which you saw great oaks and parklands and country houses sublimer than H.E.’s place, and prepared himself for confecting and decorating the faces of the players on the night of the performance. One of the convict women made artificial flowers of coloured canvas to deck the stage, and both she and the powder thief too seemed to work with what Ralph thought of as a celebratory enthusiasm.