The Playmaker (45 page)

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 lived—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
with 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.

Author's Note

The author would like to acknowledge that in making this fiction he found rich material in such works as
The Journal and Letters of Lieutenant Ralph Clark
, edited by Paul G. Fidlon and R. J. Ryan; David Collins's
An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales
, edited by Brian H. Fletcher; and Dr. John Cobley's compilation
The Crimes of the First Fleet
Convicts and the same author's
Sydney Cove
, 1788–1792. Information on H.E.'s Brazilian experiences was found in
The Rebello Transcripts
, by Kenneth Gordon McIntyre.

About the Author

Thomas Keneally (b. 1935) is an Australian author of fiction, nonfiction, and plays, best known for his novel
Schindler's List
. Inspired by the true story of Oskar Schindler's courageous rescue of more than one thousand Jews during the Holocaust, the book was adapted into a film directed by Steven Spielberg, which won the 1993 Academy Award for Best Picture. Keneally was included on the Man Booker Prize shortlist three times—for his novels
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest
, and
Confederates
—before winning the award for
Schindler's List
in 1982. Keneally is active in Australian politics and is a founding member of the Australian Republican Movement, a group advocating for the nation to change its governance from a constitutional monarchy to a republic. In 1983 he was named an Officer of the Order of Australia for his achievements.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1987 by Serpentine Publishing Company Proprietary, Ltd.

Cover design by Drew Padrutt

ISBN: 978-1-5040-2677-2

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