The Playmaker

  Trials took place in those days, the settlement’s first February, in the drooping trial marquee of the Court of Criminal Jurisdiction. For the trial of Barrett and his three accomplices, Ralph and six other officers sat on the bench under the presidency of Judge Advocate Davy Collins. The defendants—apart from the renowned Tom Barrett himself—were a young London ivory carver called Lovell; John Ryan, a silk weaver of Irish origins, displaced by the new mills and machines and reduced to criminality and now—unless he was lucky—to a capital punishment; and a cadaverous Cockney named James Freeman.

  Murphy’s King’s Evidence this flood-ridden afternoon was that he and Tom Barrett, with Lovell and Freeman and Ryan, had made a number of raids on the supply tent. They had taken what presented from flour casks and pork barrels and the stacked supplies of hospital wine and brandy. They had used this plenty for their own consumption and to buy the favours of women. At this point in the trial, Ralph heard Robbie Ross’s Scottish friend Captain Jemmy Campbell groan in the manner of a man whose pet thesis about the society in which he lives has now been proven.

  Arrangements in the trial tent were like those in the distant courts which had, in the first instance, exiled these people. Murphy stood behind the accused and could see only the backs of their heads. But these must have seemed to him as eloquent as any frontal features. For at one stage he screamed, “Forgive me, boys! You know the way these here assizes hound a man!”

  “I imagined how the gallows would bloom,” Harry Brewer told Ralph later. “Four men. Such an exercise would not in London attract a journalist from The Evening Post. Here, it’s such a terrible proportion of the human population to hang in one afternoon. More than one half of one per centum of the lags of New South Wales.”

  A little before one o’clock the court brought sentence of death on three of the men before them. There was no choice, Davy Collins instructed them, in the matter of the stealing of such large measures of food—that was a capital offence by H.E.’s executive edict. Ryan the silk weaver, who was shown only to have thieved wine, was condemned merely to a flogging. The sentences were, said Davy Collins, to be administered that very afternoon. Thereby the law’s dispatch was to be signified. Harry would confess later to Ralph that he believed it seemed heinous of Davy Collins to demand a hanging in such heavy rain.

  Ralph, though a little awed by the processes of the court he was part of, was not distressed. He knew the face of justice, military and civil. He had seen, through nearly averted eyes, both the Dutch and the Marines hang deserters, rapists, and thieves.

  Harry was by contrast overwhelmed by the sentence. Later he would detail to Ralph all his movements and conversations of that afternoon.

  For example, crossing the spring by the bridge of planks and barrels, Harry met the Reverend Dick Johnson, transmuted by the severe, thunderous light to a blackbird figure, a gallows phantom. And in a hurry, rushing across to the detention tent to bring redemption to the three. Harry’s bowels leapt at the sight of him. Could it be as late as this already?

  “There are hours to go yet, Dick,” called Harry Brewer hopefully. But Dick answered with mad fervour. “It is not much time when you consider the history of these men. Tom Barrett might be less than twenty years, but Satan has worked in him epochs of malevolence.”

  Harry would describe how in that second he yearned for one of those agnostic gentlemen of the cloth, who wouldn’t take on Satan brow to brow in this way, who would consider it bad manners and a vulgar excess to seem to do so.

  H.E. had spoken briefly and reassuringly to Harry. He went so far as to say no one could be sure of the extent to which that afternoon’s event would prevent future criminality. But it would demonstrate that society had arrived here and was asserting its order. Harry argued that—in number terms—to hang three in a swipe was equivalent to hanging two thousand Londoners. H.E. waved his hand, saying the court had not taken the trouble to consider percentiles and that therefore neither could he.

  So the conference ended with a solemn shaking of hands and the idea lying between them that when Lovell and Freeman and mad Tom Barrett were hanged and, like potsherds or statues, were socketed away in the earth with the marks of civilised execution around their necks, the place would be confirmed as a European town, the bread of the British law having been so conspicuously broken there. The concept did not seem, however, to comfort feverish H.E. to any great extent. In genial Harry Brewer, it increased a barely concealed agitation.

  Ralph had command of the Quarter Guard section at the prison tent when one of Harry’s convict constables turned up with a jug of rum, drawn by the storekeeper, for the three condemned men. Harry Brewer trundled behind him in a sodden cloak, carrying three pewter pannikins. The rum was poured into these, and Harry instructed the constable to take them in to the condemned men, who sat on the bare ground, shackled at the wrists and ankles.

  The constable seemed as squeamish as Harry. He was a convicted swindler called Bill Parr, and some nicety of feeling prevented him from entering the tent. He confessed it was some quarrel he and young Barrett had had over a woman.

  “And so?”

  “He’ll look at me now, and he’ll say, I reckon the argument’s settled, Bill Parr.”

  “And that would be too painful, would it, Bill?” Harry asked desperately. “Too bloody painful?”

  The rain was watering the jug of liquor as they stood there. Harry grabbed the pitcher, stood, and entered the tent. Ralph went with him. Lovell the ivory turner took with a sort of fraternal gratitude the measure of spirits Harry poured for him. So also, with a little speech, the skeletal young Freeman. But as Harry poured the rest into Barrett’s pannikin, the boy raised his chin and began to laugh. He could see right into the frantic charity behind this issue of rum from Harry’s hands, and he despised it. He said nothing, but the laughter got so loud and niggling Harry ended by tipping the pannikin of spirits over the boy’s head.

  “Drink that in, Barrett, and go to hell,” he roared, stamping out of the tent. The boy called after him through the canvas. “Kiss my arse, Mr. Brewer! Into the bargain, kiss your whore’s grimy arse for me.”

  Ralph followed Harry from the tent. They got in under one of the great native fig trees for protection from the rain. The Provost Marshal turned to him with tears in his eyes. Whether they derived from provocation or grief or doubt, Ralph couldn’t have said. “It shows you, Ralph,” said Harry, “that though they can speak in riddles, they speak clear enough English when it suits them.”

  Some time during that afternoon, Harry consulted Duckling, for she was his encyclopaedia on the felon mind. Although he had committed frauds in his youth, unlike most London criminals he did not have that sense of being born and consecrated to crime. At a reach as distant as this place, the image of the Dimber Damber, the claims of the canting crew, and all other forms of criminal allegiance were meant to loosen and shrivel in the sun. Harry knew to his grief that this had not happened. And so he went to Duckling for a clarifying word, one which could carry him through the day. His bemusement lay in this. Though he didn’t want Tom whimpering—would be absolutely unmanned by it—the idea of Tom taking it with that unspeakable London calm scared him more.

  Duckling, thinking she was giving him comfort, fed his worst fear. She thought he wanted to be informed that Barrett and the other two were ready for the drop, schooled to it from childhood. She said she wouldn’t have squawked if she’d been turned off that time at Newgate. She wouldn’t have cried peccavi at any stage.

  And—as Harry understood what she was saying—in London’s criminal code you got points for that. A show of repentance, even an acknowledgement of Christ, was forgivable either as a piece of last-moment irony, a theatrical trick, or even as a reasonable caution in view of the strongly touted idea of a life after death. But the heroes who spat in the priest’s eye were the most remembered. And those who pleaded for mercy disgraced the brotherhood and the great Tawny Prince, that ancient Gypsy god who was honoured
at the heart of the act of crime.

  “If I’d been twisted there, I’d have kept that oath,” Duckling assured him.

  There was a particular native fig tree between the men’s and women’s camp which Robbie Ross had chosen for the event. As if he suspected Harry Brewer’s primitive horror of capital punishment, he himself arranged for the placing of three ladders under the most obvious and strongest bow, as into the dripping glade came that part of the garrison which was on duty and most of the convict population. Will Bryant and his fishing crew, far out in the harbour behind a veil of rain squall, were excused. Pardoned from attending too were the eight men working today, waist deep in water, in a clay pit recently found on a hill to the south whose contents were thought to be potentially suitable for brickmaking. In a city of canvas, the very possibility of bricks carried with it privileges and exemptions.

  When the three walked down from the guard tent, wrists shackled behind them, their column fringed by Harry Brewer’s convict constables armed with lengths of wood and by the Quarter Guard bearing firearms, Ralph noticed that Dick Johnson walked beside Freeman, the solemn young thief, and that on both their faces was an expression of ineffability. It could only mean that Dick believed he had saved the snake-thin boy in the last hour of life; Freeman, who since babyhood had worked with burglars, slitherring into households through broken panes and fanlights not large enough to admit heftier thieves.

  Ralph remembered from the Friendship how Freeman liked to get pious now and then, and found it exciting, a kind of performance. There was a day off Capetown, in a storm when he had said the prayers over a dead baby, the child of one of the women prisoners. He had been as orotund as any Anglican canon. Therefore, it appealed to his sense of occasion to show a little solemn penitence this afternoon.

  The procession arrived at the tree and each of the condemned was pushed to the bottom of a ladder. Harry read the sentence of the court aloud. Ralph could sense—knowing so much about him—that Harry felt intimidated by the ranks of men and women in front of him. As if they were one spiritual mass, as if each of these three villains did not have mute enemies among the convict lines, whose hearts would be chirruping with pleasure to see their enemies from gaol or hulk or convict transport about to be obliterated.

  As Harry read on in unexceptional tones, treading the thin margin between his own criminal youth and his present civic eminence, a soldier from the canvas Government House guard came sloshing and puffing along the shallow valley by the stream. Rain continued to fall on the court’s sentence which lay in Harry’s hands, blurring syllables and bearing vowels away. It seemed Harry might get to the end of the judgement only seconds before the paper in his hands turned to pulp.

  The soldier handed a paper to Major Ross. It was from H.E. Robbie read it aloud. It said that Harry Lovell and James Freeman were to have a respite of twenty-four hours. Freeman sat on the wet ground when he heard. Such was the effort of keeping the code of the Tawny Prince! And then finding you would need to do it again in a day’s time.

  Harry approached Ralph, incredulous anger in his face. “Twenty-four hours? Twenty-four hours.” But Ralph, who was calmer about these things, guessed that the Captain, H.E., intended to give Freeman and Lovell their lives, not simply twenty-four hours but the whole complicated future. Except that he did not want to say so straight out.

  The event was rendered more solemn rather than less by the fact that Tom Barrett was now on his own, standing at the base of his ladder. The ivory turner and Freeman, blinking, confused, panting, no exceptional champions of the Tawny Prince, had been marched back at once to the prison tent.

  As Ralph witnessed it, Tom Barrett asked Harry if before being turned off he could speak to Robert Sideway, for they had been on the Mercury together, had been at large together in the West Country. The idea of Tom’s speaking to Sideway was, remarkably, considered by Robbie Ross to be a fair request.

  Then Barrett asked to speak to the she-lag and infamous madame known throughout the penal planet as Goose. “And to Goose,” he said, “who’s my lifelight.”

  Robbie considered Goose the most abandoned woman in the place. As if she might contaminate Tom at this late stage, he refused to let her near Tom’s scaffold. When Tom heard the refusal, he closed his eyes a second and took on a pallor which raised Dick Johnson’s hopes for his repentance. But as he opened them, he laughed and shook his head, then raised his chin and thrust it forward.

  No one had to tell him to hurry his messages with Sideway, who began to weep, saying nothing, but now and then nodded. Sideway—you could guess—absorbed messages to women Barrett had known, messages also perhaps to Barrett’s parents, messages to Goose, messages to the criminal community at large.

  A number of journals, including the one Ralph then kept, recounted that the convict constable Parr refused to set the rope around the boy’s neck. In the end Harry was forced to mount the ladder and adjust the rope himself, doing it deftly for fear the boy would say something to him, plead, or—worst of the lot—grant forgiveness.

  Luckily forgiveness wasn’t the style of the Tawny Prince. In the smallest way, but so that it could be seen from the lines of convicts, Barrett rolled his eyes and, as Harry finished adjusting the rope and pulling on the noose, winked. This is all a show, said the wink, and I mean to give all parties what they severally expect.

  Harry climbed down and nodded to the Major. Poor Harry looked diminished and humiliated by the boy’s complicated courage.

  Asked by the Major for last words, Tom said the sentence was just and he had earned it by his wicked life. He called on the crowd to learn something from his unhappy fate. He was ready now to face a just God.

  Most of the gentlemen of the cove concluded from this little speech that the feel of the noose around his neck had brought him to real sense for the first time in his cunning life. Only Harry fully understood—and would later convey his certainty to Ralph—that it was the prescribed lag performance Tom was fulfilling.

  As the city of convicts waited for the drop, there were tears in the Reverend Richard Johnson’s honest eyes. By all the rules of Dick’s evangelism, Barrett was already with God. So Dick was certain his Deity was established in this convict city for good. All local gods who might have been watching from the dun forests were now vanquished.

  But he was unaware of that other divinity who had traveled with the convict fleet. In making Dick Johnson ridiculously gratified, Tom Barrett was paying vivid honour to the Tawny Prince, here at a native fig tree in a new world, by means of his own whimsical blood sacrifice. You had to be an initiate to understand what Tom Barrett’s act meant, and Harry was an initiate. To understand that tonight in the convict camps those with liquor would drink to Tom’s consummate hanging.

  The convict constable Bill Parr’s reluctance extended also to pulling the ladder out from under the boy. Harry Brewer grew desperate now and began to yell at him, and Major Ross told Parr in his compelling Scots that his earlier reluctance had been noted, and that if he persisted in further reluctance the Marines would be ordered to shoot him dead. So Bill Parr, averting his eyes, kicked the ladder sideways. There was an instant silence in which the tautness of the rope could be heard even in the rain. Then all the prisoners began to yell, to cheer either in irony or in concern, advising Tom on weathering the next minute. The rain increased as Barrett swung, and the thin and piteous stench of his death came wetly to Ralph.

  The next afternoon, when the twenty-four-hour respite of execution was over, the rain still fell, and Harry, flushed with brandy and mad-eyed, followed Lovell and Freeman back to the tree.

  Such had been Harry’s ravings during the evening before, so unhinged had he been by the ceremonial hanging, that Ralph had considered writing to H.E. about it, but forebore for fear of the results such a letter might bring for Harry’s barely begun career.

  Davy Collins himself turned up in the clearing this humid afternoon, attended by a convict woman carrying a tray of lime juice and tumble
rs to take the edge off the officials’ thirst. He carried in his hand a document which he kept folded and approached Harry, who stood in the clearing by the execution tree in the company of Ralph and Captain Meredith, Ralph’s genial but inebriate company commander. Together they watched Lovell and Freeman proceeding down the hill with their retinue.

  All the officials in the execution parade seemed to have a fever—Ralph, suffering diarrhoea and terrified it was the flux; Dick Johnson stooped with stomach cramps; and Harry close to madness and looking for Barrett’s apparition everywhere.

  Poor damn Bill Parr, swindler, specialist in selling nonexistent shipments to shopkeepers, and now the kicker out of ladders, had, Ralph saw, placed the halters round the necks of Lovell and Freeman while the condemned were still in the prison tent, so they already wore them as they entered the clearing.

  “Look at that,” said Davy. “An understandable sensitivity on Parr’s part, but for Christ’s sake we have to get beyond these queasy little stratagems.”

  He turned to Harry. “We have to get you an executioner, Mr. Brewer,” said Davy. “It is improper for you to have to quarrel about these things with your convict constables. But whomsoever we choose, it can’t be one of the black men. The other prisoners would not tolerate it.”

  Just the same, the Jamaican lags—or even the Madagascan Caesar—seemed suited to the work by their air of calmness and their bulk.

  Having for the past two days drunk too much and rested too little, Harry got petulent. “You intend I should take my hangman from among those condemned by the court?”

  Davy Collins lowered his voice, “In view of the code operating among the criminals, this was the only lever which could be used to enlist an executionist. This is not like an open society, Harry, where a hangman can be recruited or advertised for.”