The Playmaker Read Free Page A

much desperation as Miss Long had earlier shown, as if they sensed like her that their best chance out of hunger and lovelessness and a bad name was to capture the first primitive stage of this new earth.

CHAPTER 2
    Isle of Turnips
    April 2nd 1789
    Concerning the play The Recruiting Officer:
    For the Information of His Excellency.
    General Principles of Procedure—
    For the chief male parts, those with less outlandish British accents. West Country people—whom the convicts call Zedlanders, I notice, because of their well-known inability to pronounce S—will serve pretty well for the lower and more comic parts. The play is set in Shrewsbury, but there are not many Salopians among the prisoners, and certainly none with any Thespian ability. For the women, Melinda and Silvia should be capable of polite London accents, but Rose and Lucy can be wilder. Nancy Turner, the Perjurer, would be a perfect Melinda—she is handsome and dark. But perjurers should not be honoured, particularly in parts which have been graced by a line of great actresses, beginning with Mrs. Rogers. I might say it is surprising to find her reading for a play the day after her lover Dukes was hanged, reading without apparent grief. There’s a steeliness to the woman, however, which might be the mask of grief.
    So far I have settled upon only one actor—Henry Kable has the right levity and intelligence to play Captain Plume. His East Anglian voice is very pleasant, and given that he is a convict overseer he will be able to keep order among the others. Your Excellency might remember too he is a characteristic East Anglian Dane, very fair-haired, but his complexion a quite handsome leathery brown. Your Excellency might also remember that he is married to the convict Holmes and that his history is somewhat more interesting than that of the run of felons. He is still a thief—I remember from the Friendship how when he was working the pumps with another lag he managed to cut a way into the forrard stowage and take a quantity of flour. But his present behaviour is such, and his engaging character so marked, that we are not likely to find another quite like him. I shall keep Your Excellency informed concerning the preparations for our play.
    Your obedient servant,
    Ralph Clark,
    Lieutenant, Marines.
    At the noon bell he cleared the auditioning convicts from his tent and Private Ellis brought him his plain lunch of rice pudding and bread. He ate the food without joy, and it sat like a cramp on his belly. The sun appeared, and suddenly the tent was full of those great black flies which infested this littoral. He would have liked to sleep, but he had a duty to his turnips.
    A pug-faced man of about fifty years, wearing a crooked three-cornered hat, stuck his head in at the tent flap. “Holy Christ, Ralph,” he said. “I swear I saw Baker watching me this morning, when I rose at first light to take a piss.”
    Private Baker had been hanged with the other Marines just yesterday, and it was normal for Harry Brewer, the Provost Marshal and owner of the rumpled face, to see the phantoms of the hanged.
    â€œDid he speak?” asked Ralph, feeling again the oppressiveness both of yesterday’s extreme punishment and of the sickly liquor in his blood.
    â€œNothing. I spoke, Ralph, though I am not sure he stayed to hear. I told him I was the one in possession of the earth, I was the only one with an active manhood left to ply. He was not the sharpest man of intelligence and it will take some days for it to come to his attention that his cock has fought its last fight.”
    Ralph wondered how Harry Brewer’s image of the dead’s behaviour fitted with the Christian doctrine of Heaven and Hell, of deliverance or damnation at the second of death. There was something heathen, Portuguese, or even Chinese about Harry’s belief that spirits delayed and lingered and had to be spoken to harshly to make them move on.
    Harry