The Playmaker (13 page)

“Prince?” asked Harry. Perhaps he was still thinking of the Tawny one.

“It was a giant of a kangaroo,” lied Ralph. He stalked off south into the woods, waving at the others to follow him. He came close to swallowing his tongue when he saw, in an open area at the top of the ridge ahead of him, exactly the giant beast he had predicted, taller than a man. It surveyed him. Behind him, he heard Harry mutter a prayer and stop, panting, transfixed by the kangaroo's placid gaze.

Anyone who brought back game earned a temporary renown in Sydney. Ralph took his gun from Private Ellis's hands and aimed. He could hear Harry going through the same motions, disconsolately, discomposed by the animal's serene eye. As Ralph aimed, Ellis reached over the weapon, striking the flints together to light the fuse. The hunting gun exploded with an awesome concussion, worse than Ralph had expected. He noticed Ellis sitting on the ground, nursing smashed fingers and cursing. Ellis, by pouring too big a powder charge around the pan, had caused a flash and blown away a part of the breech of the gun. Wrapping up Ellis's hand in a handkerchief, Ralph was aware that his own face had been lightly burned and his brows perhaps comically singed. The kangaroo had of course vanished. Ellis cursed as if the gods and not his own inexpert hand were to blame.

The accident had absolutely restored Harry. He fed brandy to Ellis, helped him upright, and told the Jamaican to carry both guns. Ralph, wanting to keep Harry in a good frame of mind, chatted away about the animal they had just encountered. “Davy Collins tells me,” said Ralph, “that they carry their young in a pouch, and give them the tit there. And the penis of the male lies between its buttocks and its balls.”

Harry clapped Ellis's shoulder. “Do you think our earthly lot, Ralph, would be easier or harder if we enjoyed a similar arrangement?”

Ralph laughed along with the joke. His mind toyed a second, and no more than a second, with Harry's surmise. For as if to replace the gigantic kangaroo in this garden of wonders, four natives appeared among the cabbage trees ahead. They did not seem to block the path even though each of the two men carried a number of spears between them, as well as the dish-like implements which they used to launch their spears, and hardwood clubs. This was the closest both Ralph and Harry had been to any of the inhabitants, and Ralph watched them with more curiosity than fear. He wanted to be able to report every detail of the meeting to Davy Collins, for Davy at that stage wrote up reports of such encounters in his journal.

The party consisted of an older man, a younger man, a woman, and a boy of perhaps fifteen. The hair of the two grown men was divided into matted strands and the teeth of animals were stuck onto the strands with a mustard coloured resin. The older man had a white bone through the cartilage of the nose. Both the male adults carried ornamental scars across their chests and their upper arms, and so did the woman—the upper line of her breasts, which Ralph thought were good breasts, were delineated with a raised scar. She would look beautiful if she were not coated in the soot and fish oil they rubbed into themselves to keep the mosquitoes off.

“You've been watching the camp,” Harry suggested to them. “And no doubt your brothers and sisters are watching the French down there behind us. And the difference is, my friends, that the French are visitors and will shuffle off to the cannibal isles. Whereas Mr. Harry Brewer will cling to this shore for good. What's that you have in your hand, my honey?”

Ralph himself noticed for the first time that the woman held in her left hand a shovel. It was held lightly. Four fingers. As in the case of all the native women, the first two joints of the small finger had been removed—Davy Collins had already noticed this custom, but could not suggest why it was practised. It seemed to Ralph there was a dangerous innocence in the way the woman kept the shovel in her maimed hand. He remembered there was only one intact hunting gun left to them now.

But the natives did not seem to have any guilt about the shovel. The woman did not try to hide her plunder. She had picked up a tool some lazy felon had thrown away. That was all.

Ralph felt a duty to deal with the whole business in pantomime. “Shovel—it's ours,” Ralph said. Harry laughed and Ralph could not blame him. The older man and the woman replied at once, and there was no knowing if their reply was germane to the shovel. By an instinct Ralph reached forward and took the thing out of the girl's slack hand. She had been distracted by the sight of Jack Williams, who through stealing some gin in Deptford at the age of fifteen had four years later merited this encounter.

“Jack,” Harry announced pedagogically, comic himself now he was attempting to make sense to the natives. He pointed to the young lag. “Jack.”

The four natives glowed and began to laugh and talk at once, to circle the party and point at aspects of their dress and demeanour, and then to inspect the wound in Private Ellis's hand. “Get to buggery,” Ellis invited them, fearing their exhalations might infect the wound.

But their main interest was in the Jamaican. Harry turned to the boy and relieved him of the two guns he was carrying.

“Go on, Jack,” said Harry. “Go up and talk to the lady and the gentlemen.”

“Jack,” Ralph kept saying, as the West Indian stepped closer to the natives.

Private Ellis stood by with the forlorn patience of the soldier, holding his hand upwards in its sopping bandage to relieve the pain.

“Jack,” the natives began dutifully to yell. They were engrossed in the young gin thief. They inspected his mouth, and Jack obliged them by smiling. The older of the two men reached out and pulled open the front of Jack's canvas shirt. Seeing the flesh and nipples of Jack's chest he bleated with delight. The other man moved forward and together with his elder felt Jack's chest all over and gently tested the nipples, as if to see whether they gave milk. When they did not, the men turned and spoke to the woman and she came and joined them in front of the convict. Everyone laughed, even Jack himself, his eyes glittering as she explored his chest and pushed his shirt up at the back and felt the satiny flesh. Then the elder of the men, finished with Jack's upper body, began to feel the crotch of his canvas trousers. Ralph had an impulse to come to the young West Indian's rescue. But Harry cried, “They wish to know if you're a man, Jack. Drop those trousers and inform them.”

The boy undid the navy belt from around his waist and let his trousers drop. He held his scrotum from beneath for better display. He was excellently endowed. Harry yelled—Ralph thought it was risky of him, both in terms of dignity and because it might give Jack ideas—“Oh Aunt Martha! Don't go near my sweetheart with that thing, Jack.”

The sight of Jack's manhood brought some yelps of praise from the two older natives and from the young woman. The elder of the men turned his rump briefly toward Jack and danced it about in a way which would lead Ralph to report to Davy Collins that sodomy must be known among the natives.

Harry and Ralph began to fear that Jack and the woman would want to copulate now and alter the balance of what had been till then an educative encounter. Harry averted this outcome by telling Jack to give the older man his shirt—it would be replaced out of stores. He himself gave a spare brass button to the younger man, and Ralph felt bound to give the woman a handkerchief. She placed it on her head and set her face at an angle, so much like a European woman trying on a hat that even Private Ellis laughed painfully.

As the natives went off, conversing together in their bird-like language and looking back all the time at Jack and laughing, Ralph's toothache revived. The surgeon's wad of narcotic had fallen out.

“Perhaps we should have showed more anger over the shovel,” said Ralph, biting the air off to stop it penetrating the hole in his mouth.

But the meeting with the savages had been only a momentary amusement to Harry. He had returned now to his own consistent pain, just as Ralph's tooth had.

Harry said, “You will stand by me, friend?”

“When, Harry?”

“On gallows day,” said Harry. “Or as they call it, wryneck.”

“Wait till it happens,” said Ralph, laughing. But they both knew Harry had so compelled Ralph with his frank confessions that he would have to provide intimate rather than mere friendly succor.

“I will support you, Harry,” Ralph promised.

CHAPTER 10

Wryneck Day

As Harry had feared, the new penal society in the South Seas worked its way toward its first hanging through a number of petty meannesses, lesser tragedies, and hapless tries at escape.

In that first February, for example, the convict transports still sat in the deep anchorages of Sydney Cove. One day the black cook of the
Prince of Wales
, pulling himself ashore by means of the ship's hawser rope, which was fastened to nearby rocks, was—for a joke—shaken off it by two of the boys aboard the ship and he drowned in the deep opaquely blue anchorage perhaps twenty paces from the beach.

While those who could swim splashed about looking for his body, two of the she-lags were ordered—for some minor thieving—to twenty-five lashes at the tail of the cart, a punishment supervised by a reluctant Mr. Provost Marshal Brewer and enacted by his convict constables. It was not that Harry questioned that such sentences were statements of public order. He was no radical. It was because he did believe in retribution that his dreams
were
so coloured with punishment.

Because of his gentle spirit, he had ordered the lighter flay for the women. The rumour went around this town at the world's end that he'd instructed the constables to give a high proportion of “sweetheart blows”—blows, that is, which Harry's convict constables deliberately delivered with less than full force. Seven sweethearts out of each ten, it was rumoured Harry had ordered. People thought this quaint, and the women themselves, two of the worst London criminals from the
Friendship
, would later, healing around their campfires, mock him for it.

In those days, too, some were fleeing H.E.'s rational kingdom. A general muster of all the convicts on a Saturday in late February showed that nine men and one woman had gone beyond the boundaries of the camp and were missing.

The French were still down in Botany, refitting their two ships and waiting for their naturalist, the Abbé le Receveur, to die of the terrible wound in his side a Samoan native had given him two months before. You could be sure that every one of the ten escapees had been down to Botany to beg the Compte de La Pérouse and his officers, in the name of French mercy, to take them aboard.

In fact, the Frenchman had recently sent two officers north to Sydney Cove, a seven-mile walk overland through the unearthly forests, still—in those days before the smallpox plague—full of playful and flitting Indians, to assure H.E. that he had dismissed all convicts who came out of the woods pleading with his men. He had, said the Compte, no desire to intrude in the internal justice of Britain. Ralph thought the phrase in one sense funny. The convicts were as
external
to the kingdom of the Georges as you could get!

Omens continued to multiply. In Sydney, it was considered a cautionary sight when on a thunderous afternoon a white arm floated by the women's camp on the tide. Better, the arm signified to the women, to wait around the new township for the familiar rites of the Church of England and of the criminal law than to run away into the forest or expect the aid of Indians or of French scientists.

The rite of punishment, then, towards which the settlement was collecting itself, and the forces of both order and darkness so clearly tending, began with the night arrest of William Murphy, a Yorkshire Irishman and highway robber found singing an indistinct Gaelic song while flat-out drunk outside his tent. Murphy's condition was the first evidence to arise from a crime which had been reported that afternoon by the commissary. Eighteen bottles of wine, part of the hospital stores, had been stolen.

Robbie Ross, who took a particular interest in the stores, undertook the questioning of Murphy. Ralph had been at that time the officer of the day. He had been sleeping in his uniform every night, and very poorly, since Dabby Bryant had not yet delivered him from his terrible dreams. So a number of times a night he still might encounter Betsey Alicia in her coffin, or bearing a louse on her forehead, or a cockroach on the hem of her dress. Thus sapped by his dreams, he went to Robbie's tent for Murphy's questioning.

Major Robbie had his quirks. The interrogation went ahead in the redolence of attar of roses which Robbie scattered around his bed and clothing, and that of his nine-year-old son, John, to ward off fevers. Harry Brewer, as Provost Marshal, was there too in Robbie's oversweet ambience. Harry got no pleasure from the fragrance of Robbie's tent. You could tell from his face that he knew he now stood in the presence of the first capital crime of the new world.

Murphy seemed parched and remorseful, but kept on denying any wrongdoing. He claimed he had traded a shirt for the wine—he couldn't remember who had made the trade. Major Ross circled him with a savage intent worse than blows. In Robbie's apparent hatred of this Irishman, this idiot thief, you could see all his grievance against the country, against Cook and Banks for having recommended this place in the first instance, against Tommy Townshend the Home Secretary for taking them seriously. But all that ferocity was, for the moment, transferred to this young sallow Irishman.

“You will hang,” yelled Robbie, his voice somehow reverberating even in a canvas tent. There was an awful Caledonian length to Robbie's vowels. “You will be the first Christian twisted in this awful place. And when it is given over, as it will be, and when we all leave, as we will, you will rot unknown in a grave visited—from now to the first fart of doom—by no one but savages! And you a Papist! A Papist! Aren't you, laddie? Answer me! Answer!”