The Playmaker (18 page)

At last Baker had come out fully dressed to fight him.

There were other Marines in the women's camp that night, some sitting on doorsteps. They agreed formally to second the two fighters. In this first fight, early in the evening, some damage had been done to Bullmore's face, especially when he fell and knocked his jaw against the lintel of Mary Phillips's next-door neighbour's house.

Bullmore had nonetheless come back sometime between four and five o'clock in the morning to disturb Baker and Phillips. This time Baker had apparently waged the fight unmercifully, and other young Marines—Nancy Turner's lover Private Dukes and two of Baker's standard followers, Privates Askey and Haines—had appeared. Seeing Bullmore's blood they turned on the stunned and stumbling young Marine as on a pariah. After that, Bullmore had staggered up the hill, presented himself to Dennis Considen, and after much frenetic anxiety characteristic of a victim of concussion, fallen into a faint and died.

It was believed, said Johnny, that at the height of the savagery Baker had tried to restrain Askey and Haines from crushing in Bullmore's rib cage with their boots.

“His arguments for peace might well help him in court,” murmured Johnny White, laying the saw aside. Having cut a clean inverted dish of bone off the top of Bullmore's cranium, he removed that shield to expose what he called the
dura mater
, which he now began to probe with scissors. Harry and Ralph moved their eyes to Bullmore's head, which assistant surgeon Considen, having put his arms under poor Bullmore's shoulders, had lifted toward the light. A glimpse was enough for them to fulfil their duty.

Johnny began devising a report to Harry, in the hope that he himself would not be asked to waste his time in court. “You can say, Harry, that there is a quantity of extravasated blood under the skull and between the
dura
and
pia mater
on the occiput or hinder part of the head. This was caused by blows or a heavy fall and was on its own enough to kill the boy.” He shrugged. “So my friend the Irish tooth-puller here was right.”

While Johnny White and Considen went on to examine Bullmore's viscera, Harry and Ralph, their duty dispatched, went outside. Harry lit a yellowed clay pipe and sucked on it with a pained expression. Down the hill, in the civil prison, Baker, Haines, Dukes, and Askey slept in twenty-eight-pound ankle chains and under a gallows shadow. The idea, of course, gave Harry no joy.

Again what took his attention was the great puzzle of criminal fearlessness. “When I go down to the lock-up,” said Harry, “Baker wants to speak to me. He complains that Haines has shat himself in the corner. Maybe you should choose friends with better habits, I reply. And then he says, You tell Ketch Freeman to leave the knot loose so I'll dance plenty. You'd do that for me, wouldn't you, you old scandal? The bastard asked me if I thought there wasn't a Marine or a convict who would give up the chance of a turn in love lane with Duckling? He asked me, in front of his friends, did I think I was the only general of her lowlands?”

Ralph wondered yet again at the completeness of Harry Brewer's confessions. There was no vanity at all, no hedging of cruel fact. There could not be a doubt that this derived precisely from his having been for ten years the oldest midshipman in the Royal Navy, sharing the rank with sweet-faced twelve-year-olds, and saved only from the indignity of the midshipmen's mess by his friendship and collaboration with the Captain. So that there was no humiliation inherent in the penal city which Harry could not countenance and report to a true friend.

“See, Ralph, he—like all the other bastards—has this indecent lack of fear, which I cannot understand. If the wrongdoer does not fear the punishment, where's the sense of any of it?”

Harry did not want his troubles with Baker settled by the Court of Criminal Jurisdiction. They were not. Six days later Davy's court found the Marines guilty not of murder but of manslaughter. Davy Collins and the others could not be sure it was Baker, or any other specific soldier, who inflicted on Bullmore that one fatal wound to the brain. Each of the participants in Bullmore's destruction was sentenced to two hundred lashes. Though this was a moderate-to-severe penalty, it would not in any large way impede Private Baker as a lover or a bruiser. Yet the survival of his tormentor seemed to fill Harry with elation.

CHAPTER 13

Hanging the Marines

MARCH AND APRIL 1789

“I think a comedy,” H.E. had said, appointing Ralph manager and playmaster and leaning forward on his bandy legs, which the lags found comedic indeed. “But I do not want jokes about Jews, Mr. Clark.” H.E. then continued in that manner both penetrating and abstract, his eyes at once piercing and myopic. “They are the chosen race, and jokes at their expense come too cheaply to be of value.”

H.E., said Harry Brewer, had a German Jewish father from Frankfurt, a Bread Street language teacher and dance instructor. The man had been H.E.'s mother's second husband, but she had taught her son to pretend to be the offspring of her first, who was an officer in the Royal Navy, so that the boy could get into the Greenwich Naval School. Ralph could not tell whether H.E., in raising that proviso about Jews, was acknowledging his own Semitic connections or taking a rational British posture.

The question of Nancy Turner and her notorious perjury arose from criminal events, which occurred at the same time H.E. first approached Ralph with the idea of a play. Early on a morning in the last week of March, the two commissaries came to open the storehouse at dawn and found the shaft of a key stuck in the padlock. They gouged this section of key out of the lock and put it in the hands of Harry Brewer. He fancied he could feel the heat of perfidy in it. It was clear to Harry at once, as it had been to the commissaries, that a consortium of thieves had forged a key, the shaft of which now lay in Harry's hand, and with it were raiding the storehouse in a far more adroit way than that characterised by the thefts of Tom Barrett and his supporters a year past. It was likely, too, that this new crew of thieves were Marines, since even if you had a key you could still not enter the store without being seen by the sentry.

There was one convict locksmith in the settlement. He was a man called Frazer, a greater favourite of H.E.'s and Watkin Tench's. They would recount at the dinner table how Frazer once had made a set of delicate tools for a crew of counterfeiters every one of whom had been hanged. Watkin once described him as a thief in fifty different shapes—a trickster, a forger, a pickpocket, a tumbler and magician at country fairs, taking in the rustics. Frazer released in people that love of the amiable rogue which is common to all men.

He identified the key at once. He had altered it for Joseph Hunt the Marine, who had borrowed it from the widow of a Marine who had recently died of a fast, unnameable fever. Private Hunt told Frazer he had lost the key to his own chest, and he needed Frazer to do a little work on the widow's key to adjust it for his needs.

The commissaries were, by the time half a key was found in the storehouse lock, nearly bereft of pork, and butter would last, they said, only another two months. On top of that the beef was of a very poor and sinewy quality. It was apparent to everyone that victuallers and chandlers of the Thames, Portsmouth, and Plymouth, now sitting in the known world in front of their fires with brandy and nuts, had unloaded all their worst merchandise on H.E.'s grotesque circus, certain no complaints would get back to them from such a deep reach of space. But whatever its quality, the beef, too, was essential as air to the continued life of the convict dominion, and no one could predict when or if new stores, aged a further year by shipment from the known world, would ever supplement it.

The chance of famine was therefore a common subject among Marines and lags both, though it was not often raised among those engrossed in the making of the play. There were known to be two degrees of hunger in Sydney Cove. The more extreme degree was starvation, generally found among the old and defenceless felons or those who had gambled food away. It brought in the end its own heinous tranquillity. The second and more common variety was an absence of quality and novelty in what one ate, and this was very dangerous to the balance of the mind.

In the convict city, this latter degree of hunger was growing universal—the officers themselves were beginning to run dry of any delicacies they had brought with them. Convicts had swum out even as far as Ralph's little turnip garden in the harbour to steal a handful of vegetables. People had that irritability about food, about the punctilio of sharing, which Ralph had seen before, but only in hard times aboard ship and on garrison duty in Holland. The longer it continues, this species of hunger, the more flighty do people become.

So when Private Joseph Hunt faced his interrogators, who included Robbie and three short-tempered sergeants, it did not take long for him to confess everything—his accomplices, his methods, the quantities they had raided.

Hunt named first Luke Haines and Richard Askey, two soldiers who had helped beat Bullmore to death. Robbie suspected that Hunt was naming first the two he liked least, in the hope that would satisfy.

He locked him up without an evening meal and took him out next morning. Now Hunt confessed there were seven in the group. They had sworn each other in, a blood oath, and borrowed three keys from people, having them altered to fit the locks on the three doors of the storehouse. Members of the group came from all five Marine companies, so that at least one would be on duty at regular times. And when he was, the others could arrive, let themselves in, relock the door from the inside, fill burlap bags with supplies of flour and pork, and steal brandy and wine, while outside the Quarter Guard marched past and the sentry told them all was secure.

The key had broken because Hunt himself had decided to do a little plundering without any of his associates; he had put the key in the door and was about to turn it when he heard the Quarter Guard patrol coming up the road. In his panic he found he could manage to lock the thing but that the key would not come out. He worked at it frantically and then broke it off at the shaft. At least the sergeant of the Quarter Guard had discovered the door locked and all well, and in the dark would not have seen the shaft caught in the mechanism.

Among the others Hunt now named was Handy Baker, the same soldier who had taken part in Private Bullmore's slaughter and who had once taken Duckling away from Harry Brewer.

The Marines Harry Brewer took under arrest also included the soldier generally considered to have been Nancy Turner's lover, Richard Dukes, who was then serving at the Rosehill outstation and had to be brought down harbour by boat to face trial.

As Harry later told Ralph Clark, the six prisoners talked together in a comradely way in the civilian gaol, now an adequate structure of slab timber. Dukes claimed innocence but was overcome with hilarity when the others told him not to bother with it. He behaved, said Harry, like a man on whom a joke had been played. Generally you could say of all six that there was a terrible equanimity about them—that calm in the face of sentence. They all said Hunt had been the prime mover, but were more amused than aggrieved that he had informed on them. Luke Haines had the idea of escaping execution by handing in a string of names of those who had received the stolen goods—Nancy Turner was of course on that list, as was Private Baker's convict wife, Liz Huffnell. But Robbie promised him nothing for the information and when Luke Haines was put in the cell with his friends again, they teased him about his stratagem. “It's a trick that can be played only the onst, Luke,” called Private Baker.

At the trial Private Dukes, patently lying, said he had taken nothing from the stores, that he had sometimes turned his gaze away when on sentry duty, but that was understandable in view of what Haines and Baker and Askey had done to Private Bullmore. Besides, it was only in the past three weeks, he said, that he had known of the business the others were in and done this occasional turning away. He named people who, he said, were part of the thieving partnership at Rosehill—two privates and a young convict named Smith.

Dukes's expedient also seemed to fill his fellow prisoners with amusement. By Luke Haines's testimony, Dukes had paid his girl, Nancy Turner, in goods. “Winnings for her weppings,” as the lags and many of the private Marines said.

Davy Collins nonetheless brought the two privates and the convict named by Dukes down the river, and Robbie treated them to an intense questioning, offering first one of the privates a complete pardon if he would confess, and then the other. They all, however, stood up to their interrogation with apparent innocence. At last Davy Collins dismissed them and sent them back upriver.

It was Nancy Turner's appearance before the court which would remind Ralph, a few weeks later, of her suitability as Melinda. She was twenty years old, had a kind of fatal darkness to her, a luscious girl with the sort of mannered reserve servants sometimes pick up from their masters. She denied under oath that she had ever received any goods from Private Dukes. She was reminded of the solemnity of her oath, asked the question again, and again denied it. Dukes called to her at once, an indistinct cry which everyone took to be helpless gratitude. She could not be shaken. Davy told Harry Brewer the Provost Marshal to keep her separate from other witnesses so they would not be infected by her perjury.

John Arscott, the carpenter who would soon be playing Sergeant Kite, was instructed to erect a scaffold between the two storehouses. When the six condemned mounted this new structure and met the nascent Justice Balance, Ketch Freeman, a number of Marines were seen to be weeping and hiding their faces in their hands. Ralph and other officers, themselves overcome, permitted this display of grief. Harry stood through it but later said to Ralph, “This is a most accursed business, and I cannot attend to it any further.”