“You must come with me if you can walk,” he told the girl. “We must see Surgeon White or Considen.”
The girl moved her hand stiffly back and forth before her swollen face.
“That’s what she fears,” explained Dabby Bryant. “That the surgeon will look into her body for signs of the black man.”
“No,” Ralph said to the girl. “I swear the surgeons will not roughly inspect your body. But your swellings and bruises are too terrible for your small son to see.” It was an argument Sideway had given him through the remark about what children witnessed. Sideway, Ralph had decided, was not such a bad fellow. “I swear. If you say the Madagascan did not force himself on you in that manner, then neither will the surgeons force themselves on you. For you are the only witness to the wrong. Apart of course from your son.”
She gave in at last, and stood up quaking, helped by Wisehammer and Bryant on either side. Freeman watched his stage daughter rise without extending a hand. Ralph told the players to approach Act Four with good attack. They should not dawdle through it or make their own jokes. Let Farquhar’s jokes suffice, he told them. They were to think of how bond and free would both be enchanted and agape with laughter at this scene—for it was the one, which properly acted, would raise all those who saw it to a new level of laughter and wonderment and ensure delighted applause and ample congratulations at the close of the comedy. Henry Kable was to move along any lags who came round to the clearing gaping and making loud comment.
One of the smart lags had said that time was her surgeon, and now Ralph wondered if perhaps they could see that he was forcing her across to the hospital partly out of concern for her violated features, yes, but also to remove her from Wisehammer’s touch. In case they had any doubt that he was taking an officerly course in leading her to Johnny White’s hospital, he called the buffoon Private Ellis and told him to bring his musket with him. Hence they would look like a small military column as they walked the four hundred paces along the slope to the hospital.
Mary Brenham’s pace was a little slow and Private Ellis and Ralph had constantly to stop and wait for her. Ralph considered offering her his arm, but with his fear of mockery thought that would raise certain suppositions in onlookers. Private Ellis at last drifted off ahead, his musket cradled in his arms. He had probably forgotten what he was doing here: he could keep hold of an idea only for limited periods, and though this so often enraged Ralph when it came to matters of cooking or carrying messages, it suited him now. Ralph walked crab-wise, keeping pace with Brenham. He found himself making a speech to her, which, though it might seem to an outsider to be normal and merely friendly, pulsed in his throat like a live animal.
“You have been awfully treated, Mary. I would be pleased to have at my mercy the one who harmed you like this. And I ask you to keep in mind the play, to cling to the play as the thing which will give you your spirit back. I would ask you to do this for me and for your fellow players.”
“I shall try it, Mr. Clark,” she murmured through stiff lips.
He wanted to embrace her then, in the wake of Private Ellis, but managed to prevent himself.
He was aware of the folly of further admonitions surging up his throat. “Captain Collins’s edition of the plays of George Farquhar, the creator of the play we are performing here, Mary, carries a short life of the playwright. He was, as you might have guessed, an officer himself, and like Captain Plume went to Shrewsbury to raise recruits. He would be a man of less than thirty when he died, and that fact can stand as a sign of his rich talent. He wrote The Recruiting Officer in great hardship—he never had much income apart from army pay and what he took from performances of his plays. Even so, this was no great amount; no one knew when the play was first performed at Drury Lane more than eighty years past that it would hold its place in the theatre of England over any other play of that year. Within a short time of its first performance, poor Farquhar had to sell his commission in the Grenadiers just to get money to live. He wrote his last play with a loan of twenty pounds from an actor friend, an Irishman. Farquhar was Irish, you know, and seemed to have all the eloquence that went with that nationality. The name of the last play was The Beaux’ Stratagem—you would have heard of it and possibly seen it before you came to prison.” Though he remembered she was less than fourteen years when sentenced! “And so he died on the third night of the performance of The Beaux’ Stratagem.”
She was listening to him earnestly; her bruises made a sweet amalgam with the tragedy of comedic Farquhar, and Ralph’s eyelids itched with tears.
“What I wish to tell you, Miss Brenham, is that of all the roles this great young man wrote, the one to which he was most attached was that of Silvia. He put in his plays a number of characters, brave girls who dressed in men’s clothing to achieve their brave ends. But none matched Silvia.”
He felt his voice thrumming crazily as he reached the burden of his speech.
“When George Farquhar was a young man first in London, he visited the Mitre Tavern in St. James’s Market and heard the owner’s niece reading some passages from a play by Beaumont and Fletcher. The girl’s name was Anne Oldfield, and Farquhar recommended her energetically to the manager of Drury Lane. Anne Oldfield was the woman he had before his mind when he wrote Silvia, and no one else would do to act that part but her. She was the first Silvia—you can see her name in the list of players at the front of Captain Collins’s edition. And as Anne Oldfield was Farquhar’s essential Silvia, you are mine, Miss Brenham. No other woman among the female convicts could ever be an adequate Silvia, for it needs a certain quietness of character combined with a strange unboastful liveliness. It needs courage, forthrightness, and a good head. And as I so badly need and admire your acting, so do the other players. We will do anything to restore your soul after this sad bruising. Please, no, you must not weep.”
For she had begun to cry, and because of the bruising, she could touch her face only tentatively to absorb the slick of tears. With the force of her grief the wound on her lower lip reopened and its blood spilled down her chin. It was clear now that she would not be able to talk until one of the surgeons had staunched the flow with styptic or some other painful astringent. This gushing of her wound prevented him now from going on to offer her protection within the shadow of his own household—to provide her with a hut, perhaps, and a guard from his own company. The very success with which he had declared her his Silvia in the play had now left unachieved his plan to call her his Silvia more intimately.
Dennis Considen, who considered himself a good repairer of mouths—it was his own term—thought for a time that Mary Brenham’s gushing lip would have to be cruelly sewn up. But at last he staunched it with a blood-sodden cloth and let her lie on a cot and begin healing.
“The nose is broken but will mend itself,” Considen told Ralph. “I am pleased I did not have to stitch her. As to whether Caesar performed a rape, it’s too late even for me to enquire. I could investigate her parts, but it is too late to discover much, and in any case she may have been comforted by a lover since the time of Caesar’s attack.”
“Not Mary Brenham,” said Ralph, his face burning again. “She has a sober reputation and works for the Reverend Dick Johnson.”
The Irish surgeon looked at Ralph keenly and then mercifully repressed a smile. “She is seen often with that Jew Wisehammer, isn’t it so? And in any case it’s wise to presume the convict women are very busy in the commerce of the flesh.”
“I don’t think Mary Brenham is of the general class of felon,” insisted Ralph.
“Perhaps not,” said Dennis, now not entirely hiding his smile. “You will be surprised how quickly a young woman mends from injuries such as these. Within three days her face will have returned to normal and she will be able to say her lines.”
He placed his hand confidingly on Ralph’s wrist. “She is a pretty woman indeed, and I do admit she doesn’t have the whorish demeanour of some of them. But she is very taken with the Jew. I would a
ct quickly, Ralph, lest this be his pretext to move her in with him and offer her marriage.”
In those seconds of frank and exact appraisal of his fears and desires concerning Mary Brenham, Ralph hated himself for his foolishness, and that little dandy Irish tenor and tooth-puller for his percipience. But he could say nothing, while the Irishman chattered on.
“We all know you are uncommonly fastidious. But it is not yet proven that the Ten Commandments even run here. At this distance the morality of small villages or townships has no meaning. Adultery, that is, is a grievous business if it is done in the street next to the one where you live, with women whose faces your wife knows. But my God, Ralph, there is no chance that anyone’s wife will become aware of or appalled by the face of any of these women, who have been removed from the world more firmly than Spanish nuns.”
Ralph thought this raciness of attitude was characteristic of the English-Irish, to whom religion was merely a sort of guarantee of their wide property rights in their unhappy nation. He felt impulses both to punch Considen for his presumption and to run from him. In the end he muttered something about how a man must be left alone, without hectoring, to make his own choices. Considen shrugged.
“She should stay at the hospital tonight and tomorrow. Her son can be brought to her if it distresses him to be separated from his mother.” Considen smiled very broadly now, this little mocking jockey. “So there is nothing to detain you from your play, Ralph.”
Leaving the hospital Ralph swore he would be chaste if it choked him, just to show Surgeon Considen he was not all-knowing. But the memory of Betsey Alicia’s extravagance in drawing bills on Broderick Hartwell and her flat refusal to contemplate existence in this new world rose sourly, though not without encouragement from him, in his memory. Since she had in his eyes become something less than the absolute, the essential spouse, perhaps there was room for a lack of absoluteness in him, too.
He would send John Wisehammer to Norfolk or Rosehill, the outer stations of the convict universe, if only he did not do Captain Brazen so well, or have a gift for writing epilogues!
CHAPTER 21
The Redeemed Forest
It had got cold now. Ralph lay with two blankets, thinking of a third, but knowing his coldness was one which went to the core and could not be offset by an extra layer of naval-weight wool.
On a morning when he felt time could least be spared from the rehearsals he received a note from H.E., asking him to present himself at the viceregal residence at the noon claxon, the hour at which the playmaking was to begin that day.
He sent a message to Henry Kable, asking the convict overseer to supervise the other players in the reading of Act Five. Sideway may perhaps have made a better manager, except that he—as ever—annoyed the other players with his histrionics. And Wisehammer might indeed be the perfect manager, but was disqualified because the stature of temporary playmaster might encourage him in the direction of Mary Brenham.
Having made these arrangements, Ralph put on his heavier jacket and set off for H.E.’s place. As he crossed the bridge of barrels over the stream, he met Dabby Bryant coming in the opposite direction. Her face was set in a spasm which Ralph at first took for laughter but could then see was grief.
“No lines in me today, Lieutenant Clark, boy,” she told him. It was obvious she had crossed the stream precisely to seek him out and tell him. “I beg you to let me off that. For the sake of what we know.”
By that she clearly meant all the forced mirth of being Rose.
Ralph touched her wrist. “Is your child ill?”
“Sir,” she told him, “the savage is dying. I have it from Harry Dodd.”
Harry Dodd was a servant in H.E.’s house.
“Then you know him well?” Ralph could not prevent himself asking. “The savage?”
She had no trouble confessing it. In fact she did so at once. She had heard him crying at night. She had gone to the hut Bradbury shared with him and had tried to soothe the poor thing—he was tethered to the corner post inside by the chain attached to his wrist. At last Bradbury fell asleep on his mattress, and then so did the native. Her arms, it seemed, were around Arabanoo, and together they slept like two children in a fable.
“When I woke,” she told Ralph, “I discovered the native sitting up. He was there, cutting shallow little wounds in his chest with an oyster shell, and he told me by signs to be quiet. He sang one of those plainsongs he favours, but it kept Bradbury asleep.”
It was to this point a normal story which dealt with Dabby Bryant’s usual ministrations. Now, though, it was to become fabulous, a matter of astounding magic which Dabby Bryant relayed in the same tone she used when arguing ordinary matters—such as whether or not she should be a player, whether or not Will Bryant should be boatmaster. Later Ralph would remember with surprise that he listened in the same manner, as if she were telling him about a fever or a recipe.
She said that while she watched the native she noticed he chewed on a tuber, the end of it sticking out of the corner of his mouth. She did not wake Bradbury—there was no doubt the native’s song was deepening his curator’s sleep. Arabanoo took the tuber from his mouth and forced it into hers. She chewed on it. “My head grew,” she told Ralph. “It hung over the place. But it was there too, small as a beetle, right by him. I saw him fold his big hand thinly on itself and slide the iron cuff off his wrist. Then he put down that bloody oyster shell and walked out of the hut.”
In the first of the light he led her past the fishing camp, where of course her husband, restored not only to the decent side of the stream but to the mastery of the fishing boat again, slept at their daughter’s side.
This dream journey she recounted to Ralph seemed very geographic. She said the native had led her eastwards, over a hill covered in native cedars, to certain sharp rock ledges. And so to a crevice where lumps of quartz lay about. Smiling, he had picked up a triangle of quartz, and to her surprise—though not, it seemed, her alarm—cut into his abdomen with it.
This had been a serious opening of the body, unlike the decorative business he’d been engaged with when she first awoke. “He gouged away so hard that all in a hurry I could see his shining guts,” she told Ralph, and Ralph nodded, ordinarily astounded. “I’d go yelping at him, telling him not to do that. Yet I know it wasn’t a grave wound for him, Lieutenant. For me or Will or Bradbury or any other Babylonian slave it could be a grave wound, and at another time of day or under a different sort of business, it might be a grave wound even for the Indian himself. But I knew that this cutting of his—it was no more to him than peeling off dead skin.”
Ralph felt a flush of concern that under certain influences his Dabby Bryant, his Rose, might believe it possible to inflict deep yet—to her confused mind—harmless wounds on her body.
“It was a poison he gave you,” Ralph explained, “and it made you see things.”
“I understand that, chuck,” she told him, piqued. “It was a dream, but—I tell you—a waking and walking one.”
So she had, in the manner of dreams, not felt too great an alarm when the savage uncoiled from his intestines a long rope of vine or gut. It ran forth slackly at first, but within a few moments was rising infinitely into the sky, toward the last of the stars. He took her by the waist, she said, and, climbing with her held by the ribs and dangling from him, drew her up that filament—that great green sinew—into a crowded wood. It was like the woods of her childhood, according to her description, the woods occupied outside Fowey by Gypsies and the families of failed mariners.
Yet this was—the way she relayed it—a redeemed forest and an Eden.
“Then we met the Mother and the Son,” said Dabby Bryant.
“The Mother and the Son?” Ralph asked her.
“The same ones,” she said. “The same ones you meet outside Fowey.”
Without being abashed at all, she was telling Ralph the gods of her childhood were Arabanoo’s gods. Ralph felt an urge to ask, Who is the Son? Is it th
is Tawny Prince? But he did not ask it because Dabby Bryant went on about the encounter.
This Son, she said, had drenched the earth with the blood from his tooth, from which everything came, harbour and sea, mullet and oysters, cray and whiting. The clever ropes inside Arabanoo’s belly connected him to this wonderful Son.
So Bryant understood—as she told it—that the savage was not a prisoner. “He was able to get out when he chose.”
But that Mother, she said, wasn’t kind to Arabanoo. She warned him he’d been too easily charmed by H.E. Arabanoo’s wife had arranged for him to be cursed because he had looked into the eyes of a pink-faced spirit. “Yet there was a clever man who could take the curse off the savage. She said the man’s name was Ca-bahn.”
Hearing the wizard’s name, and never having heard it before, Ralph had no doubt he would hear it again. Why, he could not say. It was a reason of the gut. He was connected to that name by a green sinew of thought.
Bryant recounted then how, by means she seemed to take as given, she and Arabanoo had returned from the sky to earth, to the hut and to sleeping Bradbury; and that, folding his hand like a flower once more, the Indian had enslaved himself inside the iron wristlet, while she had gone back to the fishing camp.
“How cruel it now is,” said Dabby Bryant, the tears beginning easily again. “the poor black man will perish of smallpox and think it is a curse.”
Ralph sat her down, soothed her, and pleaded to the player in her. The player, he hoped, would win over the generous witch. And indeed, perhaps because she knew there was no recourse she could take to help the savage further, she did revive at last. He could see in her face a desire to take on the shrewish country cunning of Rose again. It was as if she had passed on the burden of the savage to Ralph.