The Playmaker Read Online Free PDF Page B

competent officers. He had, before his appointment, shown no particular fervour on the question of prisons and prisoners. But he was captivated by the idea now. Could a new Virginia made of utterly sullied beings be perfected by distance? It was clear to Harry the Captain would spend some years testing that question.
    In Dean Street for a farewell, therefore, Harry had seen two young culls, as the felonry of Britain liked to call themselves—both of them members of the same criminal mob as Duckling—emerge from a public house in answer to Duckling’s cries, jump on the jeweller’s clerk, and rake him with punches. Both of them vanished, however, when two constables appeared. The jeweller’s clerk now grabbed Duckling, who had waited too long in the hope of seeing him brained, and pushed her into the arms of the constables.
    Not wanting his employer to know he had been foolish enough to bring items of jewellery up into the Parish of St. Giles, the young man—Harry watching—swore to the constables that she and the two culls had held him up with threats right in the road, that he had never seen any of them before. Harry intruded—his profligate youth had given him a sympathy for whores. He reminded the young jeweller that he should swallow his embarrassment and avoid both perjury on his own part and a death sentence for the girl.
    The legal point was, as Harry would often in later days explain to Ralph, that if she stole the silverware from the boy while he was still sleeping in the room they had rented, she would be condemned to death only if the goods were valued by the jury at more than forty shillings. And even then she might have a good chance of a reprieve. But if she had attacked him in the open road, with her two companions, then she was technically a highway robber and was all the more likely, by statute, to take the jump.
    Harry, with his terror of hanging and his plague of dreams and ghosts, argued with the boy and the constables while Duckling struggled in their arms. But the jeweller’s assistant kept stubbornly to his story and at last the constables ordered Harry away.
    Harry had attended her trial before the second Middlesex jury, who doubted the jeweller’s clerk but still placed the value of the stolen goods at a hanging level. Harry had seen her accept the fatal sentence with a nightmarish composure. It was that—her terrible equability at the prospect of noose and lime pit—which had drawn him in.
    He had told Ralph the story of her reprieve every time they had drunk together, whether in Rio, the Atlantic, Capetown, the Indian Ocean, or here in Sydney, this new extreme of space. He was fatally drawn by her strangeness, her incapacity to utter a tender word. He bore, by his own confession, the fear that she might one day say aloud that she might as well have been hanged in front of Newgate Arch—that a mouthful of lime meant about as much to her as a mouthful of air.
    He was equally terrified that she might find a younger man. He did not want her to do it by Thespian success in the role of Lucy the servant.
    â€œI have had great problems finding convicts who can act,” Ralph pleaded. “Mainly the mad and the stupid and the relentless villains have presented themselves, sniffing an advantage.”
    Harry reached out his knotty hand and slung it around Ralph’s shoulder, hugging him. The Provost Marshal gave off a not unpleasant musk, sweat, an excess of the bottle, a strain of brotherly bemusement.
    â€œI have no rank, and to some I am laughable. Many of your brother officers are very careful not to be too genial to me when they are being watched. You are genial at all times. You are welcome to her, my friend.”
    Ralph felt a flush of shame. He was himself sometimes careful not to be overwarm with Harry when too many of his brother Marine officers were near. For Harry had been, until an accident had made him Provost Marshal on this distant