The Playmaker (39 page)

“It means that Caesar ravished her?” he asked.

“So that's what it is, darling? In such a place as this you want a girl who's suffered no mishandling? A black man, bodied like a brick stack, comes into your house and says he might kill your child. Do you do battle with him, chuck? Not if you had your training on the
Lady Penrhyn
or the
Charlotte
. She is a good little duck. What else do you need to be told?”

“But the black man forced himself on her?” Ralph persisted.

“If that sours the girl for you,” sniffed Bryant, “more than tattoos on her haunch, you should tell her, boy, so she can go and live with John Wisehammer.”

“It isn't any such thing,” Ralph said, getting heated over Dabby Bryant's constant suspicion that he might be a narrow and unmerciful lover. “It means nothing. The tattoo and Black Caesar. I would like to see her safe from attack and from shame as well.”

Both the women I best know, or hope to best know, he realised, are in debt and subject to hard dealings. Betsey Alicia had never experienced the hard erotic business of transport or penal city, but in a way the closely managed estate of Broderick Hartwell would be a similarly merciless regime. And only Mary Brenham was available to receive the kindnesses he now felt himself brimful of. Betsey Alicia had to depend on the generous friendship of his friend Kempster. And Kempster was a man of such honour he would seek nothing from her, not even a kiss or a fondle.

“Ah,” he said aloud, despite himself, “my two tormented girls!”

This scarcely conscious cry of his satisfied Dabby Bryant and she stopped harrying and accusing him of being affronted by tattoos.

“Will you speak to her?” Dabby asked all at once.

“I don't know that I can,” Ralph confessed.

He sweated with his incapacity to approach Mary Brenham. To know that she was subject to similar torment did not help him at all. And so, almost coolly, almost with deliberation, he set aside this obvious new world duty of speaking to Mary in favour of fury against the Madagascan Black Caesar. The Fragrant One would not save him.

“We must catch that fellow!” Ralph said, on an impulse. “You could tell her that tattoos mean nothing to me. The idea of a convict misusing her means much, at least in the sense that I want the bastard found.”

“Would Captain Plume call on a Cornish witch to take a message for him? To a poor she-lag with a tattoo on her arse?”

“I am not Captain Plume,” said Ralph, understanding himself all at once. “I am Mr. Worthy. A frightened lover, who takes all signs in the worst way.”

“You might do what other gentlemen do, and use your power, darling!”

“That is not my nature. It would be better if it were.”

“You might give me rest, God damn you!” said Dabby Bryant, rising.

“Lifetimes aren't long enough, Dabby,” he pleaded, “for me to make my tortured approaches.”

“I seem to remember a time your approach was quick enough,” Dabby cried. She had stood suddenly, heedless of the sleeping child in her arms, and shouting in the same reckless spirit. “Don't think I cannot curse you as easy as I cured you that time, boy. Others of my stripe have surely put a curse on me, don't you worry!”

“Don't you curse me, Dabby. Give me a little time.”

“Holy Jesus!” said Dabby and, crossing the dirt floor, disappeared from the house. Ralph wondered desperately where he should go now—Mary Brenham was still at Reverend Dick Johnson's. Could he propose an arrangement to her under that roof? He decided instead to hold fast to his rage against Black Caesar. He searched for his greatcoat, found it, pulled it around his shoulders, and went out to see Provost Marshal Brewer, however marred by paralysis that official might be.

Duckling answered the door, opening it only wide enough to admit him if he inhaled. Harry, his stockinged feet sitting on one of the hot stones of the hearth, his upper body wrapped in a naval cape, looked expectant and amused at his arrival. He told Duckling to fetch Ralph some port. Surgeon Johnny White, he said, had cut him down to a tumbler of port and half a measure of brandy a day. “Just enough to get some warmth to the ancient extremities,” said Harry, “but not enough to explode what's left of the brain.”

He had already had his daily quantity, so Ralph would have to forgive him if he did not join in with the taking of refreshment.

When Duckling had brought the liquor in a cup, she fetched her clay pipe again and sat on a stool. Her air was that of a child waiting to be let from school. Again Ralph found himself speculating that if she could be sent to Norfolk and replaced in Harry's house by one of the more reliable she-lags, Harry could begin a better ordered life. He had got rid of the ghost beyond his door, and now all he needed for perfect balance of his mind was to be rid of the ghost on his hearth. But any list she was placed on, Harry had the influence to alter; as once, working in a broom cupboard at the Admiralty. Those were the days when he had hoped that by dropping the raw earth of her criminality through such an enormous sieve of latitudes and longitudes, her soul would be cleansed.

“Have you heard from H.E.?” Ralph asked Harry, not wanting to introduce his own exciting proposal at the very start of the conversation.

“I was visited. He is not well, the Captain. It is the death of this savage. On one side I could say to him, why grieve so long for the boy? He had an innocence, a frankness, indeed. But there are boys in England I could find who have an innocence and a frankness worthy of the affection of an older man. And don't misunderstand what I say, Ralph, as the rest of the officers' mess does. Sometimes I wish for his own sake he was
that
thing, or that he showed a preference among the convict women. There is something inhuman in the poor Captain.”

It appeared to Ralph that Harry might no longer consider himself H.E.'s intimate, might have heard in fact that H.E. had spent more time at Arabanoo's bedside than at Harry's. In any case, Harry now smiled at Duckling, who puffed equably on her pipe.

“It was the first time I've seen the Captain and thought, Poor old boy! Another man might look at me and say that I was a poor source of law with half a working face and a hobble of one leg. But he told me he hoped I could continue in my duty, and since it is the only duty I could exercise here or anywhere else in the universe, I looked him in his eye and told him I was fit for it.”

Ralph was pleased the talk had come round neatly to the point at which he wanted it. Did Harry know that Black Caesar the Madagascan was still at large? “He lives in the fringes of the forests,” said Ralph, “and raids the town at night. He stole firearms from Private Meadows, he bruised and misused the convict Mary Brenham, and he stole flour from the brick kilns party. I know how he can be caught, at least I would hope so.”

Harry blew air through his stricken lips and sat forward. “I would love to find that great bastard!”

“Never will conditions be better for that, Harry, than on Thursday when my play unwinds itself. Everyone will have his eyes fixed on it—I can't tell you how amusing the women will be—Dabby Bryant and Mary Brenham and Nancy Turner the Perjurer. And Kable and Arscott. Even Sideway and Wisehammer. They've transformed the normal arts of criminal dissembling into the better dissembling of the actor on stage.”

Harry Brewer slapped his own knee—a sudden, youthful, unstricken movement.

“The Madagascan,” Ralph continued, “is cunning in ways in which we are simple-minded, but simple-minded in ways in which we are cunning. If you were to create an improperly guarded store of food on the edge of the settlement, say at the brick kilns, if you would talk the Commissary into letting you have some beef and flour on a trust basis, then the black man would come into town to steal it. For everyone remarks he has no rationality in the matter of food. We think of the Madagascan as somehow having the same dimensions as the forest which hides him—as being as difficult to gauge and capture as that. But his appetites reduce the extent of the space he can occupy. That is, he is bound always to be close to the town.”

“But now he has a gun,” Harry said. “He can wander wherever he likes, living off kangaroo and iguana. There is no reason either why the savages wouldn't take him in as a brother.”

Ralph shook his head. Even this degree of argument seemed to him mysteriously to advance his surreptitious approaches to Mary Brenham. Caesar first, then Brenham to follow! “If he were living well from kangaroo and iguana, and if the savages took him as a brother, he would not have needed to raid the convict woman.”

“Are you suggesting that not only did he break into her house, but that he also raped her?”

Ralph, for no good reason, burned with shame. “The convict woman is very reticent on that matter,” he said. He was very reticent himself.

Harry struck the ham of his leg again, with a force which took Ralph by surprise. The young rake who had embezzled Cuxbridge and Breton's accounts could not have slapped flesh with more impact. Duckling stared at him sharply but—Ralph thought—without understanding.

“This,” said Harry, “is how I re-enter the live business of being a Provost Marshal. By capturing the Fragrant One.”

Ralph again felt a sudden envy for Harry, who had rediscovered his profession, rid himself of phantoms and possessed—more or less—his love. “Black Caesar isn't the Fragrant One,” Ralph corrected. “He calls his god the Fragrant One.”

“Capture a man,” shouted Harry, under the brunt of an excitement which might well be bad for his health but was certainly good for his spirit, “and you capture his gods.”

CHAPTER 27

Celebrating the Part

But even the planning of the capture of Black Caesar had failed to ease Ralph's bewilderment over Mary Brenham. In the cold night air he felt warm with apprehension as he made his way toward the bridge of barrels over the stream. An inexactly played fiddle and the high laughter of two or three women sounded across the cove, yet you still had the feeling any noise made was barely resounding in an enormous silence. Over on that more populated and less sober side the nights of liquor, whoring, and thievery ended earlier than in the sweet humid nights of summer.

Nearing the Reverend Dick Johnson's place, he saw a man in a white suit pacing among the widely spaced trees which skirted Dick's garden. It was, Ralph felt sure, the little Irish dentist and surgeon, Dennis Considen, though why he should be wandering like this—like a man rehearsing an argument with himself—Ralph could not guess. The likelihood was that he had had dinner with Robbie Ross or Jemmy Campbell and that the experience had left him half drunk and angry, and that he was saying in the privacy of the native cedars what he believed a man of courage would have said at the table of whichever turbulent officer had had him to dine.

“Dennis,” called Ralph. Considen paused in his exaggerated pacing and stared at Ralph. Then, as if Ralph's being there added further to his shame, he began to flee along the picketed edge of the Reverend Johnson's garden. Ralph was non-plussed but also alarmed for the little dentist. Considen's strange jerky running reminded Ralph of an earlier tragedy, of the exaggerated gait of Lieutenant Maxwell, who had gone mad in the Indian Ocean. In the settlement's first days he would run, bare-arsed and with that same broken lope, toward glittering stretches of harbour, intent on ecstatically drowning himself. Ralph did not want to see the little Irishman drown himself, so he began to pursue Considen, sure he was the only one in all the night who could save the Irishman from some Maxwell-like excess.

It was when one began to run that it became clear how the poor quality of the naval and penal diet throughout the lag city's existence—a diet only sometimes spiked with the liveliness and fibre of turnips or cabbages or kangaroo or fish—had sapped one's strength. Considen ran bent now, and not quite like a terrier, but one could not doubt he took energy from his frenzy, whatever it was.

He broke away now from the corner of Reverend Johnson's garden, making for the confused ground of boulders and sinewy acacias in the direction of the fishing camp. He fell once, over a ledge of sandstone, and Ralph heard him give a strange and pitiable bleat. He got up swiftly, but the fall seemed to have destroyed his certainty of direction. At last he knelt at the base of a boulder, as if now that speed could not be invoked he intended to call on powers and principalities.

Ralph reached him, but for some time had too little breath left to circle him, consider his face by starlight, and quiz him about his desperation. At last he staggered in a half circle to Considen's front and looked down at him. The surgeon was still kneeling.

It was not Considen in his white suit. It was Mary Brenham in her white suit, the one run up by the convict seamstress Hart out of calico, yet as perfectly cut as any suit anyone in the place owned. Mary began to weep. But Ralph, in his breathlessness, was exalted. All those movements and gestures which had seemed madness when he had associated them with Considen now had a sweet reason to them once you attributed them to her. To a Mary Brenham so consumed by the play that she asks Frances Hart if she might take her costume home with her, and then, after the Johnsons and their native child and Small Willy are soundly asleep, dresses in her calico coat, vest, and breeches and, defying the convict curfew, goes out to recite her lines among the trees and to take on the theatrical postures suitable to a Silvia in men's clothing.

Now arose what he knew to be the supreme moment of temptation in his life. He could take an air of authority with her, and this would defeat her yet still give him at least her body and her willing performance. With authority and the harsh question, he could take from her without turning over any mysterious gifts of his own, without becoming a fool as she had become a fool in her white calico suit in the night. This first possible procedure appealed indecently to him. His blood itched. He suffered a sharp and panic-stricken awareness that this was the way damnation was decided and Heaven and Hell apportioned. Yet he was still beset with the question of whether to tyrannise her when he heard his voice asking with humanity or even tenderness, “So you were rehearsing your part?”