Free The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally Page B

new they called it by such a name—New South Wales.
    Brand and Arscott were aware now, from Meg’s snorting, that even this tentative performance could delight. There seemed to be an expansion of their presences before Ralph’s eyes—they leaned into their parts.
    â€œLook’ee, Sergeant,” groaned Brand, “no coaxing, no wheedling, d’ye see. If I have a mind to enlist, why so. If not, why ’tis not so. Therefore take your cap and your brothership back again.”
    Kable and Sideway, watching, were both engrossed, with smiles on their faces, and as the noon bell rang Mary Brenham emerged from the marquee, holding her son. From the direction of the dividing stream appeared the other women of the play—Nancy Turner the Perjurer, Duckling, who must not have risqué lines, and Dabby Bryant, the benign witch of dreams. They sought shade apart from Meg Long and sat and watched the men. For Arscott was shouting compellingly.
    â€œI must say that never in my life have I seen a man better built. How firm and strong he treads! He steps like a castle! But I scorn to wheedle any man. Come, honest lad, will you take share of a pot!”
    Curtis, fearing now perhaps that the newly arrived women would mock him for his halting reading, began to mumble.
    â€œLouder, if you please, Curtis Brand,” called Ralph, like an authority. He went over then and spoke privately to Curtis. “It is early days, and we must all make fools of ourselves many times over if we are to cause the crowd to laugh when the time comes.”
    He nodded to Arscott to carry on.
    â€œGive me your hand then,” boomed clever Arscott. “And now, gentlemen, I have no more to say but this—here’s a purse of gold, and there is a tub of humming ale at my quarters! It’s the King’s money and the King’s dish.”
    â€œNow, John Hudson,” said Ralph, “you have to call, ‘No, no, no!’”
    â€œNo,” said John Hudson obediently but dully. “No, no, no!”
    â€œYou must do better with your ‘no’s,’ Johnny,” Ralph observed.
    But Arscott took up the slack.
    â€œHuzza! Huzza to the Queen, and the honour of Shropshire!”
    â€œâ€˜ King ,’ John Arscott,” said Ralph. “‘ King ’! Now you, Curtis, and you, John Hudson, you yell, ‘Huzza!’”
    â€œHuzza!” yelled the two lags, so wanly it made the women laugh for the wrong reason.
    â€œAnd now you enter please, Mr. Kable, from the right of the stage.”
    Henry Kable entered trembling. Once in Norwich Castle, when a housebreaker of seventeen, he had been reprieved at the base of the gallows and then—within a minute or so—witnessed the hanging of his own father and his father’s accomplice. It struck Ralph for the first day that some of the terror of that public performance had now transferred itself to this one. In Kable’s mouth Plume’s gallantry withered. He muttered that he, Plume, had left London at ten yesterday morning and ridden a hundred twenty miles in thirty hours. “Pretty smart riding, but nothing to the fatigue of recruiting.”
    Kite, according to the play, implies that Plume has begotten a child on an old friend of his, Molly, at the Castle Inn and tells Plume she has just been brought to bed. “Kite, you must father the child,” muttered Plume with an uncertainty of delivery which made the women hoot. Kable looked up, glowering. “Take no notice, Henry,” advised Ralph.
    Arscott, who was now the darling of the women in the shade, took the attention away from Plume by reciting the women he was already married to—an Irish potato saleswoman, a Whitehall brandy seller, a carrier’s daughter at Hull, “Mademoiselle Van Bottom-flat at the Buss, then Jenny Oakum, the ship’s carpenter’s widow at Portsmouth. But I don’t reckon upon her, for she was married at the