The Playmaker

  “No doubt you would run to H.E. and tell him I see spirits.” Harry touched his cup. “And drink them too. I suppose you would tell H.E. his Provost Marshal is cracked as Black Caesar. I have no income other than from this post, and you two—with your terrible kindness—would do me out of it! That’s the sort of friendship Harry Brewer doesn’t require. Harry Brewer would rather be tarred and buggered than enjoy that sort of friendship. So go, go through the officer’s mess telling how poor Harry talks to the shades, get Jemmy Campbell to write a letter to H.E. How Jemmy and Robbie would love to see me discharged from my post! I tell you, if I have to meet a parliament of ghosts every dawn, I still choose to be Provost Marshal, and only my kind friends can deprive me of it!”

  Ralph had to pat Dick’s arm and pacify him. Although he was used to being angry with the High Church and the Papists, his anger could also run fairly freely against ordinary people of no apparently heterodox view as well. At the same time, with gestures of the other hand, Ralph began to reassure Harry. The girl Duckling, he said, had spoken of the toxin because of her regard for Harry. He did not mention, of course, that it had dropped from her, like a handkerchief, as she shook off an extreme ardour produced in her by the gardener Curtis Brand. They, Ralph and Dick, would be repeating the news to no one. The Reverend Johnson had come here because the traditional power of a minister of the Established Church included the capacity to command spirits.

  “But if you two go talking to other friends in confidence,” Harry insisted, “Davy Collins will fall off the bench laughing at me. You must swear, the two of you.”

  “I do not take oaths lightly,” said Dick. “You have my promise, however.”

  “And mine,” said Ralph.

  Harry considered them with his tormented eyes and drained his cup. “Well, Dick, have you ever driven out spirits before?”

  “It is not a normal exercise for a man of religion,” said Dick, half-appeased now.

  “Don’t you fear to do it?” asked Harry with a spirituous shudder.

  “To fear it would be to doubt the power of my Saviour.”

  Harry began nodding as furiously as a child. “You’re probably the right sort of priest to do it,” he said, as if to himself.

  “Why is that?” asked Dick, suspicious of this declaration of faith.

  Harry imitated a West Country drawl. “Ah, thou haz a more certain faith than most fingerposts I’ve knowed.”

  “I will not take offence at such an observation,” said Dick. “I pray it will always be so. We should prepare ourselves, however, with prayer and not with drinking.”

  “You deliver me,” said Harry, “and I won’t have reason to drink. Not in such volume anyhow.”

  Preparing himself now, Dick called on God to help this our troubled brother and to protect him from the intrusions of the Devil. Ralph was very pleased he did not find it necessary to make an issue about the brandy—he even drank a further cup and a half himself. Within his limits Johnson wasn’t a bad fellow, and he would certainly be hell on a ghost.

  “I am not a godless person, by the way,” Harry then found it necessary to say in a lull in Dick’s prayers. “I know you cannot countenance my attachment to the child there.” He signalled with his thumb over his shoulder towards the curtain. “But even in my disordered youth, when courting her in Newgate prison, I was not blind, Dick, to the graciousness and the hope which religion lent to our culpable lives. No, I am not joking, Ralph; no smile there please. You have both been generous and friendly to me, and I shall be generous and friendly back. Do you know the chapel inside the gatehouse at Newgate? Oh, I used to go there all the time. I went there after Duckling was condemned too. You climb to the gallery, and you sit looking down on the pews full of warders and leg-ironed lags. It’s the sort of place which attracts a particular kind of young man, and I was once that sort of young man, Dick, as I confess freely to you. In the middle of the chancel at the chapel of Newgate is a shoulder-high pen where those under sentence of death sit—the child sat there once, it was awesome to behold her there. For they sit round a table so weighed with chain they are exempt from the normal movements of worship. And in case their condition is not obvious to them a cheap coffin stands, with its lid a little way ajar—it always looked to me as if someone had just escaped from it—right in the middle of their table. It promised certain death, Dick, but also the chance of resurrection. I used to look down on the mob caps of the condemned women when I was young, all of them spaced around that coffin. I wanted to see inside their heads and their apprehensions, but I never did. But how august was divine service in their presence! So I hung over the balustrade with spotty young surgeons from St. Bartholomew’s, who were as besotted with criminality as I was and as intrigued by the awful death which hung over all those mob caps. Have you ever taken the last services at Newgate, Dick?”

  Dick said he had taken them once when he went there in the company of a certain renowned Mr. Wilberforce.

  “Oh, the improver of prisons,” murmured Harry dismissively. “Well, you no doubt found it edifying. I can see from your point of view I should have left it at looking down on Duckling from the gallery. But when she was reprieved, it was on condition of transportation to Africa for life—they were thinking of Africa then, you see. Thank sweet Christ they never put that to law. Then when George Rose—that’s the Captain’s neighbour in Lyndhurst—got the Captain appointed to control of this circus, I was in our little space at the Admiralty, which H.E. and I shared, when the lists of prisoners for the fleet began to pile up. A list arrived from the Surrey County gaol in Horsemonger Lane, from Marshalsea, a long one from Newgate. Another from Hereford, and even the gaol governors of the city of Oxford hopefully sent in some names. Duckling wasn’t on the Newgate list; shitty Meg Long was there, as you’d expect. But Duckling, the redeemable Duckling, did not appear under her most common alias on the list from Newgate. I thought of speaking to the Captain about this, but did not know how to frame it—H.E. is so austere when it comes to women. So in the end, damning the risk, as if I were still a boy stealing petty cash from the merchant I worked for, I crossed out a woman called Dyer and wrote in Duckling’s name. Then I went out into the corridor, called a messenger, and ordered him to take the list to the Home Secretary to be signed for approval.”

  Harry drank lingeringly, his eyes moist with the memory of that exercise of power. Clearly, he considered that that was what had broken the banked-up waters of his stale career and that the tide of modest power had then turned and flowed into his hands.

  “You think I am guilty of concubinage,” he accused Dick. “I ask you what manner of life she’d be leading now, over in the women’s camp, if it were not for me?”

  Dick moved in his chair. “Harry, I would be pleased to tell you otherwise. But it does not do to argue according to the good effect of an act which is, by its nature, vitiated.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Harry. “A philosopher.”

  “I would be more comfortable,” said Dick, suddenly shivering, “driving spirits from a house that was properly established.”

  “Jesus, little friend,” said Harry, after taking thought. “Put up with me and deliver me as I am.”

  Harry grew sleepy in the end. He spread two cloaks by the fire for them, and a third for himself. “You will not see Baker before first light,” he said, lying down on the cloak closest to Duckling’s bed and going wheezily into an untidy slumber. Ralph and Dick found it harder to sleep. Dick lay on his back, Ralph noticed, his arms crossed over his chest, proof against the early arrival of phantoms. It was cold on the floor, on the clay under which Ralph could, with a little recklessness of thought, feel the spirits moving.

  He tried to picture Betsey Alicia, but could barely remember her face. He had a guilty sense that she was becoming one woman with Mary Brenham the clothes thief.

  As he waited for sleep, Ralph felt his mind shrink to the size of a coal. But the more it diminished, the more the vigour dropped out of his thoughts
, the more that central coal glared and rankled. He could hear Dick Johnson snuffling beside Harry—the just and the unjust united in the same rasping and slovenly breath. He was entertained for a little time by wondering if Duckling would sneak to the gardener’s hut, but was distracted from that speculation by waking and wide-eyed terrors for his son, Ralphie. It took so little for children to vanish in married quarters—an afternoon fever could grow and consume them overnight. That was a known, from which no Cornish witch could deliver you. Beside it, he felt little terror at the idea of facing Private Baker.

  At last he fell into an unhappy sleep.

  When he woke, everyone was on his feet—Harry, Dick, Duckling in her nightdress. Ralph had a clear vision of Private Handy Baker with his reckless blue eyes and olive poacher’s complexion, standing by the door. In that clarity of first awakening Ralph heard the words spoken, “Not the right key, Harry Brewer.”

  “Damn you!” Harry was yelling to no one. “Damn you! Damn you!”

  The apparition was gone, and Dick seemed not to have seen it anyhow, for he was calling, “Where is the thing, Harry? Where?”

  Harry ran to the door and threw it open. “You see him,” called Harry pitiably, pointing to a shadow among the eucalypts, which were an impalpable blue in the first light.

  Dick tore the Book of Common Prayer out of his pocket and found the place. “I adjure you, spirit of Satan, in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord to return to the pit whence you came …”

  Harry grabbed his own throat and, over a protruding tongue, began to froth. He struggled with his neck to such an extent that Ralph saw a bruise appear there. All the energy was Harry’s—there was nothing in the dawn now, Ralph could see that. Then Harry collided with the wall and was pinned there, contending still with himself. Ralph reached for him, but his hand was struck away. With a short but galvanising scream Harry fell to the ground, his legs drew up and back two or three times, and then he lay still with his tongue emerging from his lips like a tranquil serpent from its hole.

  “Oh, God!” said Dick. “He has suffered a seizure!”

  Ralph called one of the guards from Government House and they went haring off to get Johnny White, the only surgeon who on this bibulous star could be trusted to look upon apoplexy at dawn.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER 19

  Letters

  In the days Harry lay unconscious, Ralph had time to reflect on how potent Handy Baker had been, taking Duckling away in the first place, and then somehow continuing that tyranny over Harry’s spirit. Harry had lived through a career as a thieving clerk, through the demi-profession of an existence as the world’s oldest midshipman. It could not be predicted whether he would live on in this more exalted stature of Provost Marshal of a space vaster than all the Russias. Surgeon Johnny White could not predict when or whether he would wake; and if he did, then certain sections of his face and his body would surely be paralysed.

  At the playmaking in the clearing, Nancy Turner, delivered from the threat of death or flogging, was no more or less composed than ever she had been in the part of Melinda. Brenham and Wisehammer, bound together by the conspiracy of their epilogue, continued excellent.

  From the clearing one afternoon, during a lapse in the reading, Ralph saw the dreamlike progress of a ship through the heads of the harbour—three masts and sails set for mild south-easter.

  “Oh,” he said to his players, “look. Quickly!” Children were already beginning to spill from the Marine and the convict camps. Until that second Ralph had without knowing it resigned himself to being the inhabitant of an enormous harbour into which no ships came—to the staleness of that. So, he was sure, had everyone else—locked in time and, as the lags said, doing it.

  As the ship drew closer you could tell she was stricken, digging her nose into the sea and tossing it back like a terrier tossing gravel. Her figurehead of the Duke of Berwick was much disfigured but identifiable. It was the Sirius.

  Last October H.E. had sent her off to Capetown to get flour and medicine. Now she was back, holding what delicacies no one knew. And by her presence in this unknown world, she proved the existence of the known one.

  From all points of the convict city boats put out to the Sirius. Ralph saw a boat start out from H.E.’s place across the stream. Arabanoo in his tricorn and white breeches could be seen in its bows—H.E.’s standing favourite, as Ralph thought of him.

  Ralph instantly suspended the play readings. Large Captain Plume/Henry Kable was anxious to go and celebrate the apparition of the Sirius with his wife, Susannah. Ralph went down to the landing to try to find a place in one of the cutters travelling out to the ship. Succeeding, he was on board within a few minutes.

  The deck of the Sirius had been divided up into cattle and sheep pens, leaving only enough room for the sailors to find their way around the deck to the shrouds. The ship was a floating cattle market in which the stock were disturbed by the jubilance of the crew and the visitors piling aboard. Arabanoo now stood by the base of the main mast, absolutely stunned at the sight of the pens full of restless Cape sheep with the smell of land in their nostrils—the false expectation of sweet grass.

  Ralph called to an officer he knew. “How is the Cape?” He was too ashamed to ask, “Is it still there?” But that was the burden of the question.

  “They are still breaking people on the wheel there,” the officer told him, referring to the punishments the Dutch imposed on their criminals. Ralph felt a tremor pass through him when he heard H.E. murmuring to Johnny Hunter, his old friend and Scots captain of the Sirius, “Harry Brewer has suffered a stroke. Johnny White doesn’t expect him to live.”

  The officer Ralph was speaking to showed merely an appropriate but perfunctory grief for Harry. He was a boy of about twenty-four. His name was Daniel Southwell, and under the exigencies of all this distant travel he had already leapt from the rank of midshipman to that of mate. He was the sort of man Watkin and Davy Collins were—a keeper of journals—and in that spirit had plenty of news for Ralph. First, the Sirius had gone round the globe—from Capetown, it had returned to New South Wales by the Horn and the Pacific. And it was remarkable, Southwell thought, that it was only on nearing the shores of this last place in the universe that the figurehead had been torn from the cutwater in an almighty gale of wind, and the seas had shocked the timbers.

  “And what it shows,” said Southwell, “is that this place is surrounded by such turbulence that there is a good argument it was never meant to be approached by the civilised.”

  In Capetown, Southwell had picked up the political news from newspapers left behind by a whaler. “Your old place of service, Ralph,” he said, “the Netherlands. The mob tried to get rid of the King, or as they call him, the Stadtholder, William the Fifth. And the King of Prussia wouldn’t stand for having his sister—who as you know is the rather unequally potent spouse of the Dutch king—put to any such threat. So he marched in, and we sent a regiment or two. The French wanted to resist us for interfering, but they spent so much on thwarting us with those damned Americans they can’t afford it anymore. It is said that France is full of starving mobs. Perhaps we are fortunate to be here with a mob of the Home Secretary’s devising.”

  Ralph remembered the time in The Hague when the horse-faced young queen, Wilhelmina of Prussia, had reviewed his guard of Dutch peasants. A rigorous visage atop a strong little body, itself infused with a most bellicose soul. If her brother the King of Prussia had any such stuff in him, it was no wonder he sent the Prussian army into the Low Countries to acquit the insult she had suffered.

  “There’s talk that our King went mad, too, at last,” confided Southwell, “and not without being provoked by his children, let me say. He thought he was a tree … Yes, it’s the truth. Yet when people were despairing and bishops were praying for him and all the rest, he got better. In a day, it’s said. Robust and capable just one day after his mind was all in a crazy sprawl!”

  This, Ralph reminded himself, w
as the monarch for whose birthday celebrations he and his players were working. It was, Ralph thought in a remote and detached way, better to labour for a sane king than mad Lear.

  The next item of news struck Ralph more intimately. The Dutch in the East Indies post of Batavia had told Southwell that the Friendship, the ship in which Ralph had lived aft of the slatterns in the forrard hold, above the male lags—the ship which had been his town and his farm and his parish, in which he had swung dreaming his perfect and horrifying dreams of Alicia; whose bilges had grown so sour towards the end of the journey that he had not dared open her cameo for fear it would immediately grow a beard of mould; in which he had a fight with Lieutenant Faddy and argued with drunken Captain Meredith and toasted Alicia’s birthday and wept as he read The Tragedy of Lady Jane Grey; at the bottom of whose after-companionway the orange trees bought in Rio had withered; on whose penned decks the Cape sheep had died of cold on the long and hectic race through the Southern Ocean; which had carried, jostling in the hold, the separate criminalities of Liz Barber and Liz Dudgeon, which had carried Kable’s wife, Susannah, and Kable too, deep into the time of their sentences, time marked and appeased as they fumbled for each other through the bulkhead—that ship, the Friendship, cancelled of all its reckless human meaning, lay on a bath-warm seabed. Sharks nuzzled the cot where visions of Alicia had held Ralph in tyranny. It was as incredible as knowing that Plymouth or a whole country had fallen into the sea.

  Southwell gave the details. The emptied convict transports, the Friendship, the Prince of Wales, the Alexander, had taken five months to reach Batavia in Java. Among all the love-sick sailors, and from Captains Sinclair and Frank Walton, there must have been much carelessness in diet. Because after the Friendship and the Alexander sailed from Batavia to head north, leaving seventeen of their seamen in graves in that Dutch port, scurvy had become so notable among the crews it was impossible to navigate both vessels against the strong contrary currents and the western monsoon. Off the coast of Borneo, Frank Walton of the Friendship had shifted all his men and stores aboard the Alexander—there were not enough healthy people to work both ships—and his own ship had been scuttled. Ralph had an image of the froth and rind of his dreams rising from the wreck and floating neglected in that equatorial sea.