The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally

as Ralph himself did—that here you were a different sort of being from the one you had been in that world of rational starlight from which you had now been exiled. But in spite of Will’s doubts about the universal value of his marriage, Dabby seemed very much the chatelaine, the confident possessor of the fishing camp.
    Because so many of the lags were London criminals, more used to lifting watches than casting nets, Will Bryant was the only fisher of any experience in all that felon civilisation. He had been sentenced for what might be seen as a characteristic vice—bringing Norman brandy, collected from French vessels standing offshore, into the complicated Cornish and Devon coast. In a fight on some isolated beach he had wounded an excise officer. Indeed he had all the dark intentness of a wounder. But he was also muscular, quickwitted, and energetic.
    The affair between Dabby and himself had begun aboard the prison hulk Dunkirk in Plymouth Harbour. The Dunkirk was an old naval vessel moored in place a short row from shore and peopled by the overflow from the city and county gaols. The overflow included Dabby and Will. Prison reformers like the Reverend Dick Johnson denounced the hulks as sinks of lechery, but here was a remarkable marriage which had come out of such a hulk!
    Because of the stature of Will, the Bryants were the only convicts with a servant—a servant, that is, offficially permitted by H.E.—a slack-mouthed boy called Joe Paget. They had a gardener too, an older prisoner named Nat Mitchell. So that in this way, in those first days of the new society, Bryant and Broad reminded Ralph a little of Harry Brewer—this version of a new world had given them a standing they could never have enjoyed in the old.
    The time her child Charlotte was in the water and her own skirts belted up and her husband out in the harbour in the fishing boat, Ralph had found himself talking to her about lightning. At that stage he was much concerned with lightning. Every afternoon and evening that first February there seemed to be a thunderstorm with the most remarkable and vengeful lightning of its species. Recently he had been dining in Major Robbie Ross’s marquee when a thunderbolt had struck a tree fewer than ten paces from the door, bowling the Marine sentry over and frying three Cape sheep and a pig. Ralph hated the lightning, especially when he was alone in his tent and all the canvas turned a violent blue, and one lay naked under a drench of unearthly light. Even in Ralph’s frequent dreams there was no lightning so thorough in intent as the lightning of this new penal universe, as it flashed down out of the west, out of an unseen and unguessable hinterland.
    Ralph had asked Dabby Bryant about the influence the lightning had on the baby girl.
    Dabby Bryant laughed robustly, the olive flesh above her knees jiggling. “She isn’t so afraid as I am,” said Dabby.
    Encouraged by this frank confession, Ralph suddenly said more than he had intended, uttering a sentence from the journal he was writing for Betsey Alicia: “It is the most terrible country for lightning that I have ever seen.” It was a small part of the substance of his marriage that he’d let slip away into the hands of this Cornish looter of spinsters. Ralph had an absolute temperament and believed that if you betrayed a little you would ultimately betray everything. The concept of betraying everything excited him more than he dared utter.
    Though that fishing camp redolence nagged at his brain, he did not go back there to smell the nets for some days. When he did return, on a Saturday, he was delighted to see the shore deserted. The convict gardener Mitchell worked in the Bryants’ garden, planting turnips, as Ralph himself would soon start doing on his island out in the harbour. Gulls argued about the place where Will Bryant usually gutted the fish before taking them to Surgeon Johnny White at the