“So it seems you will have the turning off of Black Caesar, Ketch.”
“I never done anyone so heavy nor so big,” said Ketch.
“You still have your lines as Balance?” Ralph asked, passing him.
“Balance is easy,” said Ketch Freeman. “Freeman is hard.”
“Wait and see, Ketch. He may not be given death. In the meantime, you are a fine Balance.”
Ketch Freeman laughed as if Ralph had made a play on words. Mary Brenham’s praise, thought Ralph, had transformed him into a sage and a wit.
Ralph eased along behind the backdrop to look out the window of Justice Balance’s country house. The scene was like a multitudinous wedding feast. Caesar was making his way down the aisle, past the braziers. The constables and the Marine guard still flanked him. By the middle of the three braziers, Mother Goose, pontiff of the Tawny Prince in this penal reach, rose and clapped her hands. Her cup-bearer came to her side, uncorked the new bottle of fresh brandy he had been carrying all night and poured it into the goblet. When he handed it to Goose, Goose raised it high, to the level of Black Caesar’s face. She took a great draught—three mouthfuls. A little of the third mouthful bled down either side of her mouth. The lags were cheering, had never seen such public honour done. With a gesture of beneficence from her left hand, Goose passed the goblet to Caesar with her right. Caesar smiled massively and turned on his heels to show the entire crowd the half-drunk goblet. By the time he had completed the circuit, had toasted Goose and had raised it to his own lips, Goose’s mouth had opened wide and she had taken a throttling hand to her throat. Caesar took the cup from his lips without having drunk even a sip. He stared. The crowd began to moderate, except at its edges, in the noise it had been making. Ralph saw Goose emit three grunts—three clouds of blue mist—before she crashed to the boards.
Surgeon Johnny White rushed down the centre aisle as if he had seen the first signs of collapse in Goose and was out to combat them. Dennis Considen ran behind him. Johnny knelt by Goose’s substantial fallen bulk and raised her eyelids and lowered his ear to detect breath. Ralph saw Black Caesar raise the goblet and start another circuit, crying, “Oh look, my brothers! The Fragrant One has delivered Caesar one more time!”
But Johnny White rose and grabbed the glass and emptied its contents onto the floorboards. After a conversation with Considen, he reached out and closed Goose’s startled eyes. At that point an enquiring roar rose from the audience. Johnny found four young lags to carry Goose out of the hall, and it seemed to Ralph from his point of observation that there was a sort of inadvertence in the way the crowd took note of this bearing forth of the centre of felonry. The barracks were still loud with question and surmise. But of all those who could have followed Goose weeping, only Dot Handilands, the she-lag of more than eighty, staggered behind, cursing God.
Any tolerance the front row theatregoers—H.E., Johnny Hunter, Davy—had extended to Black Caesar was now cancelled. Davy instructed Harry Brewer, and Harry Brewer instructed Bill Parr and the Marine guard to remove the prisoner. There was no applause for him as he left in the wake of Goose’s corpse.
“It is apoplexy,” Ralph heard Davy report to H.E. “The play should now go on without any more of this.”
Goose—as Ralph would later discover—was laid down just beyond the barracks doorway and covered with a blanket. There were no sentimental visits from her cup-boy or anyone else. It showed you that in the lag commonwealth, fealty was exactly cut off at the instant of the sovereign’s fall. There were no ceremonious or heartfelt obsequies. Everyone but old Dot stayed indoors to see the balance of the play.
Even without knowing these details at the time, Ralph—behind the backdrop—understood at once that her ungrieved death and the expulsion of Black Caesar had created a space in which his play could flourish. He hurried toward the wings of the stage where his cast was still waiting.
“It will be time in perhaps two minutes,” he told them. He was distracted by the strange hobbling noise of Harry’s approach and his appearance among the actors. Harry grasped Duckling by the arm and bore her down the back steps and out the door. Ralph followed, precisely because he did not wish to lose any further players. Emerging into the night, he saw Nichols applying a final coat of powder to Mary Brenham’s face, a face restored and eager and as grandly familiar to Ralph as if he had known it all his life. “Perhaps only two minutes,” he shouted to Nichols and Silvia.
Over by the marquee Harry raged at Duckling, “Do you have the phial? Do you still have it?”
Ralph, only a few steps away, saw Duckling reach into the bodice of her dress and drag forth a small tube of glass.
“Give it me!” Harry demanded. He saw Ralph there and glowered at him crookedly from a palsied face. “Oh Jesus,” he said. “Thank God it’s friend Ralph!”
He threw the phial to the ground and tried, in his uneven and crippled way, to crush it. Ralph held a hand out, conveying that Harry shouldn’t strain himself, and raised his own boot and brought it down many times on the glass tube until nothing was left but silvery powder.
“Ralph,” said Harry, “we are dependent on you.”
“Dependent?” asked Ralph, for he had not yet pieced it all together.
“You understand, Ralph,” Harry barked, more vulpine for having only half a mouth. “You understand, goddamn you!”
“But I thought she was indifferent,” he said, pointing to Duckling. “I always thought she was indifferent.”
“That’s how much you and I know of loyalty and of whatever in the Christ this is. Or of poison and murder, whatever they are! You understand, this is a wedding present to you. And some sort of present to me.”
She had said once she liked Brenham. When caught in carnal enthusiasm with Curtis Brand she had made some slack-mouthed speech about the play. And had there been something about gratitude to him as playmaker? Had Farquhar’s play really conquered the Tawny Prince?
“Jesus!” said Ralph. “She has killed her own Dimber Damber.” It was like water running uphill. It was science disproved.
Duckling stared at him in her frank, slightly sullen way.
“She grew up among those substances,” said Harry. “Sitting there, watching Goose make up potions in Greek Street.” He was trying to explain why Duckling looked no different from her daily self. Half-dead Harry said, “If you mention it to anyone, I will deny it on oath and to the death.”
“You underestimate my love for you,” said Ralph. But he was not really offended.
He turned to Duckling the poisoner. There was no sign of her motives, which lay in another universe than his.
“I hope,” he said, dizzy and exultant, “that you still remember your lines.”
EPILOGUE
What is to be said of Ralph’s play that night? Its local success in the city of lags was never in question. Both Davy and Watkin wrote of it in their journals. “In the evening,” wrote Davy, “some of the convicts were permitted to perform Farquhar’s comedy of The Recruiting Officer in a hut fitted up for the occasion. They professed no higher aim than ‘humbly to excite a smile,’ and their efforts to please were not unattended with applause.”
Watkin wrote that the play was honoured by the presence of H.E. and the garrison officers. “Some of the actors acquitted themselves with great spirit and received the praises of the audience: a prologue and an epilogue, written by one of the performers, were also spoken on the occasion.” Thus Watkin credited Wisehammer not only with having composed his own epilogue but also with the introductory verses written by George Farquhar himself eighty years earlier.
Seen from the immensity of time, Ralph’s play might appear a mere sputter of the European humour on the edge of a continent which, then, still did not have a name. This flicker of a theatrical intent would consume in the end the different and serious theatre of the tribes of the hinterland. In the applause at the end of the evening, in the applause whether from H.E. or from Will Bryant, Arabanoo—had he still li
ved—might have heard the threat.
In recounting the further destinies of our playmaker and our players in that third world of the past, one is aware of the dangers posed by melodrama. Antibiotics and plumbing have made melodrama laughable to the modern reader. It is only in our own third world, where in the one phase of time lovers are sundered, clans consumed, and infants perish without once saying “Mother,” that melodrama causes tears still to flow. The Sichuanese, the Eritreans, or the Masai would understand better than us the destinies which befell some of our players and in particular our playmaker, Lieutenant Ralph Clark.
For yes, though they are fantastical creatures, they all lived.
Even in the records of those players who had a happier existence than Ralph’s there is a flavour of dramatic excess. Henry Kable would serve his time, become a constable, begin farming, go partners with another former lag in a sealing enterprise, rear ten children by his wife, Susannah, found a brewery (like Ralph’s play, the first of its species in the penal world), run a public house, and live to be eighty-four years of age.
Robert Sideway, seven years after Ralph’s version of The Recruiting Officer, opened his own playhouse. The authorities twice closed it down for the reasons authorities generally do such things—a suspicion that the theatre has too much influence. He would farm on the river between Sydney and Rosehill, marry a convict woman sentenced at the same Old Bailey sessions which had sentenced him, and—twenty years after The Recruiting Officer confirmed him in his theatrical ambitions—die of natural causes.
If the later histories of some of the players seem tame, it is mainly for want of information on them. We know that Nancy Turner lived to be pardoned and to beget a numerous family from a watch thief called Stokes. Duckling was shipped to Norfolk Island in the year following the play. It was no punishment, but the result of H.E.’s decision to shift a number of lags there as famine bit harder in Sydney. Harry Brewer, who stayed on in Sydney as Provost Marshal and who would live to a good age there, did not resist her transfer. The events of the night of the play had (so Ralph supposed) shown Duckling to be an affectionate daughter of Harry’s rather than a lover, and in letting her go Harry absolved her from the burden of being filial to him. She would disappear from the records then—Harry had no hand in that, though clerical ineptitude might have—and whether she married and begot, and where she is buried, are not known.
Curtis Brand served his time, began to farm—quite close to Sideway’s farm—and married and died before the age of forty. We are given the intriguing detail that he left his farm to a blind boy.
John Hudson, the youngest of Ralph’s actors, would go to Norfolk Island on the same ship as Duckling and disappear for the same sorts of causes. Ketch Freeman would at last be exempted from any further hangings, find a convict wife, have seven children by her, and live into his sixties. John Wisehammer, thwarted in his love of Mary Brenham, began farming and trading at the end of his sentence, married a Cockney she-lag, and grew to be a respected merchant in a Sydney whose population had been augmented by further shipments of lags.
It is with John Arscott’s records that melodrama bites deep. He was sent to Norfolk Island with Ralph Clark, behaved bravely when the Sirius ran up on rocks there, and helped extinguish the fires which started in her galley. At last pardoned, he had married a friend of Dabby Bryant’s and accumulated wealth through his carpentry skills. He was one of the minority of lags who were able to afford to return to Britain. On the way home, in Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea, a party from the ship, including Arscott, landed on an island to look for water. They were beset by natives, who killed six of them. Not able to find their ship again because of a cyclone which overtook them, they were forced to sail by open boat all the way to Batavia, now known as Djakarta. When their ship did find them there, Arscott was told that his wife, Elizabeth, who had once helped Dabby Bryant attack a spinster in a Cornish laneway, had died aboard of what the surgeon on the ship described as “a spotted fever” induced by drinking and grief.
Dabby Bryant herself would have made wry mouths at the idea that she would generate monographs in future times and be a historical curiosity. Instructed in astral navigation by Arabanoo, she escaped from Sydney Harbour in H.E.’s government fishing boat on a March night in 1791, taking with her Will, her two children, and seven male lags. They sailed all the way to Kupang in the Dutch East Indies, were eventually gaoled in Batavia, where her younger child, Emanuel, died of fever, as did Will. Dabby, Charlotte, her daughter of five years of age, and four convicts were shipped to the Cape, then to a British vessel, the Gorgon, which was bringing the Marines, including Ralph Clark, home from Sydney. So Ralph laid eyes on his physician of dreams one more time. He and Watkin showed many kindnesses to Dabby and the child, but the small girl was exhausted from her adventures and died at sea off the African coast.
Dabby herself was returned to Newgate to await trial for attempted escape from transportation. Her story was read by the passionate and generous Scot, James Boswell, familiar of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and he began a drive to get her a pardon. Cynics said he and Dabby became lovers—and why not, since like the more obscure Ralph Clark he was a man burdened by terrible marital dreams. There is a good poem by one of Dr. Johnson’s literary circle on the subject of the supposed affair between Dabby and that warm and fallible Scot. In fact, Boswell settled ten pounds a year on her, even though he was always plagued by financial problems himself.
Then one night he said an affecting farewell to her aboard a ship in the Thames and sent her back to her family in Fowey. A letter from her in Fowey, thanking him for receipt of a bank draft, is the last we hear of her. At Yale University, in the Boswell archives, is a small package of wild tea leaves which Dabby brought with her from Sydney on her escape and gave to her benefactor.
It cannot be doubted that she carried her peculiar mercies and enthusiasms on to other associations. Imagination could create a plausible later career for her, but it could not say that she was ever convicted of further crime.
To Mary Brenham and Ralph, however, attaches the full brunt of melodrama—except that we know Ralph by now, and so the news of his last years, no matter how excessively tragic, will not be considered grotesque or laughable. When H.E. decided to send the annoying Robbie Ross to Norfolk Island, Ralph being also posted there as part of the garrison, Ralph ensured that Mary was among the convicts transferred to that outstation. Brenham bore him a girl child in July 1791, and five months later, after Mary and the child returned to Sydney with Ralph, she was christened Alicia. He sailed from Sydney with most of the other Marines late in the year. He leaves no record of his feelings at saying goodbye to Mary Brenham.
Mary was moved to Rosehill convict station, up the river from Sydney, towards Christmas that year. There placid Small Willy died of a sudden childhood fever, but the girl child Alicia flourished. Brenham and Alicia then disappear from the public record.
Returned to England, Ralph was stationed at Chatham on the Medway, and sailed aboard the Tartar for the West Indies in 1793. At some stage he was with the Marines aboard a ship called the Sceptre, and his young son, Ralphie, who could not have been much more than eleven years of age, was with him as a midshipman. In June 1794, the Sceptre was part of the squadron which trapped the French revolutionary Admiral Besseton in Port-au-Prince and engaged him when he tried to break out. Young Ralphie witnessed the fight from the gun deck of the Sceptre and was very elated by it.
Ralph himself suffered dysentery caught during a military excursion ashore to St. Nicole Mole, a location which would appear in most of Ralph’s letters of the time. The position was for a time under great threat from the French. “All the Marines of the ships,” he writes to Betsey Alicia in a letter dated May 8th, 1794, “and half of the seamen have been landed here since we expected to be attacked every moment, but thank God we are relieved from our fears in that head. For three days ago, the Irresistible of seventy-four guns with one regiment and the Bellequieux wi
th two transports containing two regiments from Ireland arrived here, and in the room of their (the French) attacking us, we are making preparations to attack them.”
Though it was through this campaigning ashore that he suffered dysentery, thoughts of the bonus or bounty money he would receive when the French surrendered their ships enlivened him during his recovery aboard the Sceptre. He wrote to Betsey Alicia that even young Ralphie was likely to receive over forty pounds as his share of the captured French ships and cargoes. But he complained of the price of everything. “I have received my board and forage money, but my dearest love, my illness has prevented me sending you part of it as I promised—for the first fortnight after I was taken ill it cost me from two shillings to half a crown a day for washing, I dirtied so many shirts and sheets a day. What do you think I paid for a pair of shoes for our dear sweet boy a few days since? No less than seven shillings and ninepence.” Perhaps the finances of the Clark family had not yet recovered from the death of Broderick Hartwell, Ralph’s old agent.
Sometime in June, sent with his friend, a Captain Oldfield, along the coast north of Port-au-Prince to accept the surrender of a French outpost, Ralph was fatally wounded by a random shot from within the fortifications. His body, dead or dying, was carried back to St. Nicole Mole and taken aboard the Sceptre, where Ralphie was suffering the ravages and sharp muscular pains of yellow fever.
In the catalogue produced by Sotheby’s in another age to advertise the sale of Ralph’s erratic journal, it is stated that father and son died on the one day. Neither of them knew that Betsey Alicia herself had suffered a stillbirth and died in the Marine hospital at Chatham. So in a pulse of time the blood and all the complex of dreams and very ordinary fervours of the Playmaker were extinguished, except for his lagwife Brenham and the new world child Alicia. Of them fiction could make much, though history says nothing.