The Playmaker Read Online Free PDF

She wears a mask at one stage and pretends to be her mistress. But all the risqué lines belong to the part of Rose, who is a girl from the countryside. A Salopian shrew.”
    â€œI would not like it to go to her head,” said Harry again.
    â€œAt the end of the play she will hardly be remembered by the audience,” said Ralph, arguing—to his own amazement and delight—like a theatrical manager. “Yet she will have a justifiable sense of personal success nonetheless.”
    Ralph watched Harry weighing the matter, pressing first one eyebrow, then the other, blowing speculative air first into his left cheek, then into his right.
    Ralph knew it was fashionable for gentlemen to take an interest in girl whores they had known who might suddenly be on trial for theft. It was counted elegance for a man to go over to Newgate prison to help out some young tart, whether she sat in the remand section waiting to appear before the Middlesex jury, or in the condemned hold waiting to be hanged or reprieved. But there had been none of that mere modishness in Harry’s attendance on Duckling which had begun at the Old Bailey one dim autumn afternoon nearly three years ago, and had even earlier causes. Harry had had no choice. He had therefore gone to see Duckling’s trial not out of idle kindness but out of a compulsion he could not control.
    Duckling’s crime had had no distinction. She had stolen some silverware from a client, a young jeweller’s clerk who had been to a sale, got drunk, and employed her for an hour’s joy. She had, a little later, been making off down Dean Street with the sack of candlesticks and salvers when her client, awakened from his brief post-coital stupor, dressed, descended the stairs of the tenement to which Duckling had taken him, and came running after her.
    Harry Brewer was in Dean Street that evening, his last visit to the streets where he had paid out his youth. It was an evening when England seemed to lie under a fug, a cloud of felonies great and minor. A young curate had just confessed that he had married the Prince of Wales secretly and illegally to the Catholic widow Mrs. Fitzherbert for a bribe of five hundred pounds. The Whigs in the House of Commons were claiming that the aging governor general of India, Warren Hastings, had bullied the Nawab of Oudh into handing him jewellery worth a million pounds. The Whigs wanted Hastings impeached, but there would never be an execution for His Excellency Hastings.
    Humbler servitors of crime than Hastings sat hip to hip in London’s dozen prisons and in many county gaols, all of them much condemned by reformers, by Messrs. Wilberforce and Howard and members of the Eclectic Society. An over-spillage of prisoners was chained up in aged warships whose hulks rode at moorage in every harbour. Once a portion of all these felons would have been shipped off as farm labourers to Virginia and Georgia and the Carolinas. But now Virginia, Georgia, the Carolinas, and nine other unfilial American colonies had violently ended that penal connection.
    As the children of that criminal deity, the Tawny Prince, accumulated in the streets and prisons, H.E., who had been farming in Hampshire since the war with the Americans came to an end, was commissioned to bear some of England’s lags away to the limits of space and time. Harry had been his secretary at sea, and remained so on land. H.E., that is, was the only officer on the Navy lists in whose company Harry had a standing and something like a rank. So there was no question that Harry would go with H.E., who provided him with the only breathable air in the universe.
    First H.E. moved into an office at the Admiralty to plan the enterprise. Harry was placed in a small closet next door, where he kept accounts, wrote letters, and contemplated the gulf before which he and his Captain stood. H.E. himself did not understand quite why he had been selected. He was one of a number of