The Ballad of Desmond Kale (17 page)

AS A SPANIARD I FEEL much more able to supply the wants of my Nation, and as an individual the loss of my property by Tiranny is no less painful; but if there is no remedy I should nevertheless find alleviation of my troubles if thou, Capitan Rankine, should permit me to buy of ye a certain quantity of Fire Arms at thy disposition (the Magazine under your guards) in consideration of my kings merinos which I have ready for ye Keeping in a certain playce, eating of freshly herbs. Goodsir, since I cannot insure my Flocks here in Spain I shall have at least the pleasure of being useful to the Cause, altho I have not been so to the Commerce National — (signed) Yncan, Manuel
.

 

Why Rankine had been chosen, in that time and country, to receive this curious letter he certainly knew: it was musketry in a stone coop desired by two rival bands.

Every night brigands had crept around trying to get past the sentries and by day employed all manner of dissimulation and eager friendship to get their hands on powder, shot, and bayonetry. Don Manuel Yncan then was the broker between these guerillas, a
landholder with his castles in ruin and doubtful politics his only bargain. For his purposes Yncan had obtained, and held in a safe place, one thousand of his Spaniard king's best sheep.

The brigands were a swarm of flies getting stickier by the day. As Rankine hotly wanted this king's sheep, whichever of the two bands was most favoured by Yncan was a matter of no great opinion to him. The arms were needed to strengthen competing positions over fellow Spaniards and to use against the retreating French (they were captured French arms) now that winter was coming on, and the French were shrinking, like a blue stain bleeding red at the edges, towards the Pyrenees.

‘If Yncan sells those arms on to the highest bidder then the very best of good fortune to him' — was Rankine's not very deeply thought-out but deeply self-serving opinion. The arms were feasibly Rankine's own to sell, not registered yet to the quartermaster as spoils. Only let it be done soon, as the people were hungrier than ever, in a land where dry crust was a banquet. British troops and their camp followers were hungry, birds were falling from the sky, the mice, the rats, except those on the battlefield, where they fattened on corpses, were all scant ribcages on four spindly legs — every living thing was skeletonised bar lice and bedbugs plump as blisters.

There was already the debacle, fresh in Rankine's mind, of a sheep-chasing murderous roasting of finest-woolled flocks, when companies of the 95th regiment took up position in a wood of oak and cork. As soon as their arms had been piled, a ferocious attack was made on two hundred of the best breed of sheep. Fires were lit and livers and kidneys grilled while slippery warm and the hearts still pulsing. It was seen some parts were even savaged raw. Private Leonard Knags was selected out by their colonel to be representa
tively punished, and although Rankine had seen many men flogged and ordered punishments himself it was hurtful to see Knags, an obliging, tireless, cheerful, and lumpy young soul, so roughly handled by the drummers who both administered floggings and beat time to the lash. He was stripped and tied to a gun carriage in the middle of a hollow square formed by Rankine's unit of men. Knags suffered like a piece of raw meat thrown on the rack, there softened near to death while Rankine stood by sick and silent, obedient to orders. Such looting of livestock, he agreed, caused hostility among the Spaniards whose cause they were fighting for; and to some it seemed that with the common enemy, the French, in retreat, the British would be next foe in line.

As soon as he could Rankine went on with his men, Leonard Knags foremost among the best of them.

A rocky canyon stood between Rankine and the mountain pastures where the thousand sheep were held by a doughty shepherd, Moreno, nephew of the black priest Moreno — he who was forced into hiding and emerged transformed with a troop of three hundred horsemen, and a great deal of terrible fame after shooting four French prisoners to every Spaniard executed. Any male of Moreno surname then, female of the same name, or child caught by French regulars was tortured and put to death. Fear was in the dry cold air of the sierras. Rankine had given his word he would take young Moreno with him and carry him safe to England, as part of his contract for sheep, but first had to reach him. Sides changed slippery as cloud shadows ascending the bare rocky upland. The friend of yesterday became the enemy of today, and so in a stone quarry came a volley of shots, distantly drawing them on, and then at close range men stood up from behind rocks showing their intentions as plain as their dirty faces.

Horses were cut down, men fell, a rabble descended yodelling hatred of betrayers — for Yncan had done the dirty and traded the arms to their dearest rivals and they would therefore kill the source of them, Capitan Rankine.

But Rankine and his company adopted defensive positions back to back inflicting more damage than they took — but oh, the damage that they did take!

Honest stone-cutters from the quarry watched the transaction from vantage points and afterwards helped bury five young men in hard ground. They chiselled their names into a square boulder under Rankine's tearful direction — to give them such honour as their service demanded, which hardly acknowledged what Rankine owed. Their names were Henry Gale, Richard Haywood, Timothy Wolfe, Leonard Knags, and Robson Crosby. In his worst times to come, Rankine would bring those names to his lips, and recite them, a litany of sentries blocking him from heaven's gates, holders of life's best hopes and bravery fallen victim to cupidity over sheep.

At the last, when it seemed all heads were counted and his remaining men were safe, a groaning was heard and they found Clumpsy M'Carty lying with his legs writhing and his breach bloody. Two stones had been used to crush his stones between them.

‘We dance according to our own legs' — an old Estremaduran proverb. ‘Our hearts are our secret wonders' — that was another saying of shepherds wandering lonely in the high sierras. It applied to Moreno's love of Rankine. Snows turned into torrential streams and wildflowers came out from crevices in stone as Moreno chained them and wore them in a garland on his head.
Dios todo poderoso
. Rankine said he looked like a young bull and he would
fight him. Bogs sank their sheep to the bellies, crevasses threatened, dark nights without end and lightning storms bewildered the brain. Bargains were made with sheep gods. Their hearts were their secret wonders in the revelation of deeds of which they were capable: theft, escape, loss. It was all prefigured there in Spain.

 

‘Within a month of reaching England, my hair turned grey,' said Rankine, ‘as it used to be quite dark.'

‘I am sorry to hear it,' said Meg, ‘although I have to say, it agrees with you.'

Rankine walked Meg back to his cottage that first day of their closeness. They did not touch as they walked, but could not stop turning to look at each other with shy eagerness. There was nothing more to be kept from each other, Rankine believed. She told him how the father of Warren was George Marsh, dead in London, but that if she'd had officer lovers — as Kale fumed — they were not worthy to stand beside Rankine, even the highest of them, because of what he had done. (‘Does that get me into your bed?' thought Rankine. ‘No.')

The eyes of Parramatta were upon them — a gentleman captain of rangers and an available washerwoman. They were a delight to the respectable. It was barely ten days since the rattle of bed boards was heard with Biddy Magee squealing for all her worth about fifty yards in both directions.

Meg said:

‘If you love me, Tom, I will send Mother Hauser across in the morning to clean your house and wash your bed linen. Look where the swallows are nesting, making a mess. You have spiderwebs in the corners. Leaves blown in. So much neglect …'

‘If I love you?' Rankine echoed.

She turned and touched a finger to his throat.

‘If you love me.'

A rush of heat blew clean through the house with doors open at either end of a passage. Meg's capacity for springing surprises was infinite, Rankine's hunger for giving what she asked was absolute. It was the strangest thing, and remembered to his dying day — how deeply bone-satisfied he was with Meg from that moment. They were not yet lovers. She strongly resisted his intentions, in that regard, not by any word or gesture but by principle of the very power in their love itself. The fever of wanting her that previously sprang on him as a four-footed beast came as a deeper desire run into the peacefulness of the settled herd. They touched fingers. They looked and they sighed. Any fiercer lovemaking could wait … and so Rankine went on with his account of himself:

‘Starting in the high country of Almaden, coming down from the snows, crossing the bare plains pursued by banditos and wolves, I had myself a bunch of the very most extremely well-bred animals in the history of the world, a royal flock, and a shepherd and sheep shearer named Moreno, descended from the Moors who shipped their north African doers into Spain in the year one thousand.

‘For they go back that far, and they were mine, understand, no longer the King of Spain's, they were paid for in blood of brave soldiers of my own fierce company, of which only a few were left, and Clumpsy M'Carty was one.

‘Then I had my Spanish one thousand in England for a while, but ask them to thrive there and all they did was cough their lungs into the grass and mince around on pustulated feet, while extruding a wool the weakness of worms. As my Frenchified stepbrother said, when he still liked me, and thought as highly as I did of those
sheep, “
Il devient citoyen du lieu qu'il habite
” — they become natives of the place they inhabit. I gave him seven hundred to make the peace between us. A reckless gesture: it was the wrong country for them. They are made for growing their legs long, browsing on rough herbs, going for miles and getting into all sorts of byways where they find they will do, and the harder they go the better they shall do in a hot country, like the ox whose number of teeth they share, and their secret is the glorious beauty on their backs.'

‘And that is your “why”?' said Meg.

Rankine nodded the truth of it. ‘As much as I know.'

RANKINE, HEEDING THE GOVERNOR'S LETTER requesting his company at table, put on his red mess jacket, white trousers, campaign medals, and high black boots, conscious of dressing for some last high battle to be fought with overtopping nonchalance.

As he left the house he filled a small sack with candies in the shape of piglets and starfish, treasure chests and kneeling bulls. They were the best of caramelos saved to soothe a sweet tooth, a biting tooth. He thrust the sack in a side pocket.

Rankine reported to Sir Colin Wilkie's house at his officers' dinner that started at four in the afternoon and went on until four in the morning.

A cheer went up when Rankine walked in. Tin cups were banged on the bench and his name loudly chanted.

‘Ugly Tom! Ugly Tom!'

Various other opinions were essayed.

‘When the Irishman hears an officer's got his daughter pinned, hoots he'll roar!'

‘Like a maddened dog in a bear pit, he shall!'

‘Rankine shall smoke Kale out, carry him over, bring him in, and then he'll be sorely beaten!'

‘With a ten-shilling rake in his hand for Rankine's raking, no less!'

As the governor made the sign of the promiscuous finger Rankine looked blankly secretive, which was to say suitably stupefied by contentment. He grasped the sack of treats in his pocket to hand to the governor but swore when the sack broke open and half filled his pocket with sugar. Left whole was a pig that the governor crunched between his teeth in a moment, making pink spittle at the side of his mouth as he chewed.

They sat down a dozen men each side of the long bench and ate rock oysters, snapper fish, roast goose, turkey, wild duck with pellets of lead shot still in them, boiled pork, fowls, a round of beef, mutton, pork chops and all washed down by buckets of Cape wine. Most of the company drank Cape wine, that is to say, but Rankine as best and loyalest prodigal son was offered Sir Colin Wilkie's good Madeira from the governor's own jug.

A great deal of wildness prevailed after toasts were raised to various eminences starting high as the king — as the governor began to see, after dusk, lurching majors and flushed lieutenants disappearing into the bushes and most of them returning, only some few lying sick asleep until they awoke hours later, staggering up with dew upon them, and coming into the house hardly missed at all. When Rankine disappeared Wilkie smiled craftily. He'd be having wild Meg in the laundry sheds between courses, nae doot, as the governor (without fanfare) had tried to enjoy her a couple of times himself, in earlier days — Mistress Inchcape's skirts hiked up and her head turned aside resisting his hoarse breath and rapid attentions, asking him to please behave and be quick about it. Cold,
he called her. He seemed to remember resentfully mumbling something about risking his skin and fortune for the sake of her touch but as she never showed she knew what he meant, by any gesture of good, he decided against her improvement, and left her alone.

Wilkie was known as ‘auld scratch', a man of sixty keeping on the button. Having fathered two children with convict domestics he liked the in-and-out game too much. Born on the island of Harris and Lewis he'd never seen a coach nor heard much English spoken until the age of fourteen when a kindly dominie took him away to improve him. He was classically educated in Edinburgh but remained a son of the peat bogs and herring baskets who broke bread with dirty fingernails among the diplomats of Europe, and at Botany Bay urged table companions do likewise. Hunger unchecked in the slabbed halls of despotism fitted him best. Who was to tell a governor he was wrong? Who dared? Only the king, but the king was a long way off.

Except one man dared: Parson Magistrate Stanton slandering him to the point of saying he allowed black masses to be sung by atheist Gaelic priests, had congress with goats, drank the blood of slippery eels, and would rather have convicts at table than anyone higher.

In the wee small hours now, look how well it went! Rankine came back in, groaning and holding his head but charging his beaker with wine. Here was Tom Rankine up with the best, playing horsey to the governor's rider around the table legs, while fellow officers wagered the race and hardly bothered asking where Ugly Tom was gone these many hours past — ‘Asleep under a tree, with a fuzzy head,' said the governor, rousing a chortle. ‘But who with?' he baited. ‘Hee haw.'

Rankine's authentic horse might have given him away if it could only complain of being ridden so hard. It was in a terrible foam of
sweat, salt greasy and damp and badly used, standing out in the yard after a wild gallop of many miles, to Laban Vale and back. For a sheep was taken from the Stanton flocks that night. A sheep and a ram.

 

At dawn, the alarm was raised by hutkeepers along a line of woods, east of the biggest river, to tell Parson Stanton quick fast and get him down there to look at the blood and entrails on the ground before the ants and flies ate them. It was the worst place troubled by warregal dogs. Only the feed was good at that time of year, which was why sheep were shepherded there.

Stanton came riding up with Warren behind him, on his busy important pony, and Titus on foot. Titus was followed by the old man, Mr Moon. Titus and Mr Moon walked along, the rest of them following, the old black man scanning the tracks of the marauding invaders of sheep and sometimes laughing with a bare parting of his gums, as if it was all too easy for him — making Stanton grumble — while pulling his opossum-fur cloak tighter around his shoulders, sometimes frowning and making a sucking whoosh out of his mouth. There were scattered guts and blood to be seen, a gullet was looped on a branch, kidneys were under a bush like a pair of blue jewels, but whether it was the ram that was missing or just a poor sacrificial ewe destroyed for deception was beyond telling, unless somebody found a torn handful of wool to examine, and then Stanton's eyes would light up at the find. Then he would know if it was Young Matchless's torn fleece scattered on the ground or strung on a bush, revealed by its fine, dense staples welded on a supple hide from where any wild dog might have taken it, like a ripped piece of upholstery from a sag-bellied chair. But there was no wool anywhere of the
sort. No wool meant no dogs. No dogs meant the ram alive somewhere in the hands of his enemies.

The words the old man spoke ran evenly coming from nowhere and going nowhere except into Titus's ear and out the other side.

‘What is he saying? Confound him,' said Stanton. ‘Speak up, Titus, like a good Christian boy and tell me straight — what is the old debbil saying about my ram last night, murder and mayhem, or as I verily believe, a piece of plotting that I shall flog to discover.'

Stanton swung accusingly round on his shepherd and raised an arm like the judgement unanswerable of Yahweh. Clumpsy M'Carty lowered his head contritely, and said, ‘It was the warregals what done it, coming in awful quiet on their padded feet' — which Titus underlined by speaking for the old man:

‘Mr Moon sees one big doggy come down, he stands about there and looks around, big red tongue licking his chops for a decent supper, warregal goes round teasing quiet as he can. He flies in and takes one by the froat. Wait a minute now. He says two of them now, they carry the sheepy between them.'

‘Dogs could not do that, for it would take men to carry that wonderful sheep, he weighs a hundred pounds bare shorn. You are all a bunch of liars.'

They stared at him expressionless.

‘Liars from birth.'

Towards dark Titus led Warren back to the place where the ram disappeared.

‘Clumpsy was here,' said Titus.

‘Clumpsy was here when it happened?' said Warren, talking in a low whisper, feeling his legs shake, beginning to understand that the convict stockmen of Stanton's were not just former thieves all sitting around smoking their pipes in rum-drinking befuddlement,
cured of bad deeds done before they were lagged, but were Stanton's present thieves messing his paddocks between them, nothing in their bent natures cured. Was there never to be any peace in the world?

‘Lookit, pop your eyes out,' said Titus. ‘See where our Clumpsy come round this way, a long way, from way over in the trees with a warregal dog.'

‘So there really was a dog who made the attack, like Mr Moon says?'

Warren was pleased to think so, anyway.

‘No, like I says,' corrected Titus, giving Warren a cuff on the ear, ‘Clumpsy brung one to make it look good. Keeps it on a rope with a broken leg at his hutkeeper's hut. That bad man puts the sheep on his back, pluddy heavy, here's where he hoists it up off the ground, here's where somebody gib him a push.'

‘Two of them now? Who is the other one?' said Warren, the drama of the night pictured in a few worn scratches in the ground, a scuffle of twigs, the imprint of what it took to lift Stanton's good ram, the dust a little more weighted and unweighted in places.

Titus roved his head from side to side and looked over the ground, not directly under his feet but always a perch or a pole ahead, where the light glinted more on irregular bumps and stirrings of dry sticks. He was just as good as Mr Moon at this.

‘That is where that first sheep come in,' he pointed, ‘the dead one, they want to make it look good, so the parson don't flog, and don't they want to have good fun! They tie a sheepy's front legs together and then his back legs, and they stretch him on his back, and they rip up his belly. They scoop up the guts and they tear them guts from the carcase, and with the other hand they stir the blood that comes from the belly. So they makes a good story to gammon the parson, and a big ram for breedin and nothin is wasted. Didden
I tell you, that breedin is the best sport, Warrie inch-long boy. They want him for his quick jump.'

Warren squatted on the ground, his stomach hurting from the bad excitement of the day, and asked Titus what he didn't want to know:

‘Titus, who is the other one, that gives the sheep a lift onto Clumpsy's back?'

‘That is the pox face,' said Titus, scratching the dust with his bare toe, and glancing curiously at Warren, who turned quite pale at the information. ‘I asked that old fella, Mr Moon — he's my uncle — why he wrinkles his nose too much. He's smellim sweet-meats when we come down inter the hollow.'

‘What are you talking about?' said Warren, afraid.

‘The pink sugar, the white sugar, that was all mixed up in the sheep shit for him. You seen that old man wrinkle his nostrils and smile? You seen him! You seen him bendin over double and lookin down? Talkin about bush honey? But he never meant bush honey, Warrie, he meant them sugar treats, it was the smell of them sugar treats hangin about in the air or in someone's pocket tuck. They ain't faint smells to old Mr Moon who can stink a little lizard pissin no bigger than your inch-long-nail prick while he's up on a gallopin horse.'

Warren went over to the least-disturbed piece of ground. He took a stick and with scratching fury drew a circle around a soft footprint, and called Titus over to look.

‘Is this his boot with his mark on him?'

Almost immediately as Titus looked, Warren started scuffing the bootmarks out.

And Titus nodded:

‘He's the one they's goin to hang, Warrie.'