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 instruc
ted 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.”
Some of the wives and lovers of the condemned called advice and endearments before and after the drop, and wept. Nancy Turner, still held separately from the others and standing by Harry Brewer—a circumstance which might have led Jemmy Campbell to believe she was under permanent arrest—kept her reserve and closed her eyes as her lover was thrown off the platform. Perhaps she would later be comforted by the observations of others that, whereas his condemned comrades had brief though terrible struggles, and Handy Baker bit through his own tongue, Private Dukes seemed to lose his senses at the very instant of the drop.
CHAPTER 14
Playing to the Indian
The play, Ralph concluded after a few weeks of readings, though crowded with characters, was in fact a simple matter at heart:
• Two gentlemen, friends, desire two country cousins—fortunately each a different cousin, so that their friendship is enlarged by their longing.
• Both girls, Melinda and Silvia, inherit a terrible degree of wealth which puts them beyond the two friends.
• Through the loud stubbornness of one lover, Captain Plume, and the painful melancholy of the other, Mr. Worthy, the women are won over. But this doesn’t happen until Melinda has persecuted poor Worthy by pretending to prefer the ridiculous Captain Brazen, or until Silvia has disguised herself as a young man and enlisted herself in Plume’s regiment.
All the other characters, Ralph saw as he considered the play, were for high colour.
It was, he concluded, at the beginning of Act Three that the chances for love seemed leanest. Mr. Worthy, expressing the bitter equation which has overtaken his own life and that of his friend Plume, brought to Ralph a painful but languorous sense of his own hollow desire, which was part for the impossibly distant Betsey Alicia and part nameless, even though the name Mary Brenham did present itself in one corner of that yearning.
“I cannot forbear,” says Worthy at the start of the act, “admiring the equality of our two fortunes. We loved two ladies, they met us halfway, and just as we were upon the point of leaping into their arms, fortune drops into their laps, pride possesses their hearts, a maggot fills their heads, madness takes ’em by the tails. They snort, kick up their heels, and away they run.”
And of Silvia, who has vanished from town, Plume says in Kable’s Norfolk accent, “The generous good-natured Silvia in her smock I admire, but the haughty, scornful Silvia with her fortune I despise.”
Ralph had been waiting for this act to see how Dabby Bryant would play the country girl, Rose, described by the playwright as possessing particular beauty. When she first enters she is accompanied by a large oaf of a brother—his name Bullock. Ralph had made his Bullock Harry Brewer’s gardener, Curtis Brand, who did double duty as Costar Pearmain, a bumpkin recruit. Brand was a convicted poacher who knew the rustic manner well and, not being quite a bumpkin himself, could convey it.
Rose enters selling imaginary chickens. Soon Dabby and Curtis and Kable as earthy Captain Plume were well advanced into Farquhar’s double-meaning jokes, which Dabby delivered with a succulently slack mouth and a slight breathiness. Most of this passage of the play, Ralph reflected, the Reverend Johnson would no doubt indict.
Plume (feeling Rose’s chickens): Let me see. Young and tender, you say?
Rose: As ever you tasted in your life, sir.
Plume: Come, I must examine your basket to the bottom, my dear.
Rose: Nay, for that matter, put in your hand. Feel, sir! I warrant my ware as good as any in the market.
Through all this, Melinda/Turner the Perjurer, the threats of Jemmy Campbell and Robbie Ross building behind her like an unregarded cloud, sat in the shade of a native fig, waiting for her first appearance since Act One. She paid attention as the bizarre Captain Brazen, acted by the Jew Wisehammer, arrived on stage with Ketch Freeman as Justice Balance. Mary Brenham had already mentioned to Ralph that John Wisehammer was in his English past a theatregoer like Sideway. But unlike the excessive Sideway, Wisehammer knew exactly how to handle a grotesque line with the proper pitch and emphasis, and so Nancy Turner studied him with calm intent as he spoke.
Brazen (to Justice Balance): My dear, I’m your servant, and so forth. Your name, my dear?
Balance: Very laconic, sir!
Brazen: Laconic! A very good name, truly. I have known several of the Laconics abroad. Poor Jack Laconic! He was killed at the Battle of Yorktown. I remember he had a blue ribband in his hat that very day, and after he fell we found a piece of neat’s tongue in his pocket.
Balance: Pray, sir, did the Americans attack us, or we them at Yorktown?
Brazen: The Americans attack us! Oons, sir, are you a rebel?
Balance: Why that question?
Brazen: Because none but a rebel could think that the Americans durst attack us! No, sir, we attacked them on the Charles. I have reason to remember the time, for I had two and twenty horses killed under me that day.
It was remarkable to Ralph that Wisehammer, like Dabby, somehow had a gift for the exact theatrical emphasis to place on a line. He believed that if he had had to find his players from among the officers and the better wives of the Marines they would have brought to Farquhar none of the instinctive touch which seemed to be there in Arscott and Wisehammer and merciful Dabby Bryant.
In the midst of that scene of farce and complication, Harry Brewer turned up with Bill Parr his constable on the edge of the glade. That he had Parr with him was a sign he was not there as a private man, and a number of the players grew nervous and forgot their lines. Ralph held up his hand and went and spoke with Harry.
“How is my girl, Ralph?” Harry murmured.
“She has the manner, Harry. And no risqué lines.”
“There is the line about Flanders lace, Ralph, how soldiers bring it back as presents for women.”
“You’ve read the play, Harry. But that is mainly Melinda’s line. ‘Flanders lace is as constant a present from officers to their women as something else is from their women to them.’ That is Melinda’s whimsy.”
“Fair enough. I cannot lock the girl away from all earthy meanings, not when she was a whore at nine years. But tell me the truth. She’s good?”
“She is excellent,” said Ralph, overstating it a little and understanding all at once that he was bargaining for Nancy Turner and wanted his Melinda safe from arrest.
And certain now that the preamble was over, Harry called Turner out of the press of players.
“The order is that you consider yourself under arrest,” said Harry. “You should not take to the wilderness. Stay here with Lieutenant Clark and learn your lines. For the case against you can’t be proven, Turner. A better thing to stay here and learn Melinda than go out there and become a shadow for nothing. So should I chain you up, Nancy? Or will you stick with the playmaker here?”
“I will stay, Mr. Brewer,” said Nancy Turner.
“For God’s sake, Nancy, don’t be found outside your hut after curfew. At least not at ground level. If as some say you are a witch and a necromancer, by all means avail yourself of the upper air.”
As Harry laughed and nudged her upper arm, she smiled and looked away.
Harry sent her back to the rest of the company. “Jemmy Campbell says he has a witness,” Harry murmured to Ralph. “It’s a worse business than I told her.”
“Witness?”
“Someone who saw her take the goods from Private Dukes.”
“If it’s the truth, I won’t have a Melinda.”
“The court has not hanged a woman yet.”
“But even if she is commuted to life imprisonmen
t,” said Ralph, “they will not let her act.”
“You must be philosophic, Ralph,” said Harry, patting his arm as he had earlier patted Turner’s. Ralph wanted to say, You should be philosophic when you see the ghosts of the hanged!
“Isn’t there another Melinda somewhere here?” asked Harry.
But Ralph knew now, from his new avocation as a play manager, that artistic necessities operated in the theatre—that was the charm of the thing. All art proceeded by reducing contingencies and accidents to the essential, and to the part of Melinda, Turner the Perjurer was essential beyond all question and quibble of the law.
“I must hope she is not hanged then,” Ralph whispered. And he felt oddly, in keeping secrets from Turner, that he was betraying the theatrical and artistic necessity he felt in his blood: by not permitting her to choose whether she would flee into the forest and die quietly there, or await her accuser in the settlement.
That same afternoon of Nancy Turner’s arrest, H.E. himself appeared on the edge of the clearing. Ralph was by now used to the continual appearance of officials. H.E. had with him the native hostage, Arabanoo, who wore the uniform of a petty officer in the Royal Navy. Ralph wondered did the native remember Ralph’s part as a Marine officer in the painful capture—but Arabanoo never gave any sign of memory or resentment.
Everyone said the native was captivated by H.E.—some said unkinder things still. Arabanoo looked from the players to H.E. and back again, as if to verify that their excessive theatrical emotions were approved of by the man he called father—Be-an-na. (Davy Collins had made the point to Ralph once that the nouns of the natives had an emotional conjugation. For when in pain, Arabanoo would call on H.E. by the variation Be-a-ri!) And “Be-an-na?” he called, faced with Ralph’s players.
Ralph had always found Arabanoo an affecting figure. He was a man of perhaps twenty-two or -three years, lean, with a beautiful anthracitic blue to his native blackness. His eyes were a different and penetrating blue and seemed to Ralph to convey polite bafflement. Somewhere in the forests were his relatives, who, as Ralph had once remarked to H.E., might well be dependent on him for their provender. But H.E. had claimed to need the native more, so that he could be cultivated and then sent back to his people as an ambassador. Not that H.E. had yet dispatched him to talk to the natives either on this side of the harbour or on the other, the side from which he had been captured.