The Ballad of Desmond Kale (21 page)

‘What is the word you are trying to say?' Stanton affectionately encouraged her.

‘
Horribilis
!' she cried.

‘WHERE DID YOU HEAR THAT word?' said Stanton, with sudden unnatural calm.

‘From our Titus, he is a great mimic, you know that. “Papa, you horribilis crumpet,” he heard people say, which probably is not very nice, but I told him, with butter and after being toasted on the end of a fork, you
are
very nice, Papa.'

Ivy jumped up and kissed her father on the top of the head, then ran from the room. Stanton resumed his correspondence with a cold trembling hand, pulling down a clean page of parchment. Refreshing his quill in a dish of purple ink he condensed his correspondence down to a ten of angry stabs:

 

1. It is hard grind funnelling the vastness of God down the necks of a convict plantation and converting the heathen.

2. The native race has no wants, lives free and independent, has little more thought of tomorrow than the fowls of the air or the beasts of the field, putting no value upon the comforts of civilised life. Yet I do try and am tried sorely. If they cannot be saved, what is to be done with them?

3. ‘Put everything in four feet,' I was advised on gaining the colony. I am vilified for it. But sheep are better than redcoats in taking a country over. Some of my money goes on printing up tracts and some is portioned to pay for a missionary sent to the Bay of Islands. Some goes to the native heathen. I have not gained one convert (only half a one, the boy Titus). The rest goes on sheep.

4. Nothing is put aside to pay for my family's passage on a voyage to England because I have the king's guaranty as a government chaplain to pay for it — when you as governor tell me that a vessel is found.

5. Find me a ship, sir, to take me and my family to England (in comfort)!

6. Remember the treasury is to pay for it (formerly agreed).

7. Remember the money I have spent. It will grow while I am gone, not all to my benefit.

8. Pray that their lordships in London remain aware that my sheep are thriving. The true Saxon breed of merino is in the hands of one who turns his mind to improvement. Let claims be made about wools on the other side of the law. Do not listen to any of them. Should their wools thrive in my absence, they are mine, by descent of my ram, Young Matchless.

9. My fine sheep are raised in country away from Parramatta towards the biggest river, hotter, drier, dustier, hillier, a combination of acreages that nobody wanted except a struggling chaplain of His Majesty's established Church, no object of envy to begin.

10. I want ten thousand acres more.

 

Stanton pulled on his hat and walked out into the paddocks away from the house until he found a wide-spreading pale-trunked berry
ergro box tree. The morning was bellows hot after the thundery shower. The leaves of the box tree stood hanging down like shavings of steaming tin. Stanton kicked hot stones at the base of the tree expecting, at the least, a message — a ball of paper to roll out. The eye of reason was a bookish complainer, but no writing was there.

Back at the house Dolly had his coffee ready. Stanton liked it from a tin pannikin hot enough to burn his tongue, three cups at a sitting. The only other drink he liked as well was wine, which he swilled when the mood was upon him with a darkening thirst and met the Devil in a quandary of mutual wrestling, remembered next day in prayers and a bad head.

The Stantons kept a good store of coffee beans after living through a shortage some years before, when they were forced to drink a concoction of roasted chaff and eat mouldy corn and womback hams accompanied by pot herbs of
Atriplex halimus
. Barrilla. Botany Bay greens.

The time husband and wife shared over the hot kettle was a good part of their friendship on busy days.

‘Warren was seen with an officer,' said Dolly, handing Stanton his cup, ‘talking under the tree at Parramatta they call the croppies' parliament, which gives the only shade for a long way around. Anyone coming up to it can be seen from the open ground, but by the time interested parties get close, their topics of conversation are always innocent, while their faces burst with holding it in. Only this time, Warren punched and pushed and didn't care. It was said he shouted the name of your ram, Young Matchless.'

‘Who was it he attacked?'

‘Captain Tom Rankine.'

‘That name again,' said Stanton complacently. ‘Warren does take on sides! It is a glory to him (seeing he takes mine). The craze
among officers is to breed wool. Our boy is known as good in wool, but he is sad, he misses our ram and blames himself — while officers — such as this Rankine — know less than nothing and half their flocks have tongue blain and thrush. Though I believe Rankine has no flocks, but lives day to day in the governor's pouch.'

‘The governor's pouch is not the only pouch where he lives,' said Dolly, restraining her triumph, but not very well, ‘because Captain Rankine is the one, or the main one, that is messing up your Mistress Inchcape's bedclothes lately. I believe they are gone on each other as far as that goes. Watch out he doesn't want the boy for his own, as some men do, to snare the woman in further.'

She had Stanton there in his jealousy of where he stood commanding the Inchcape dame, for he said nothing, only coloured spottedly and swelled a little before letting out his breath. He knew that Dolly could hardly even glance in Warren's direction any more, having developed a dislike towards the boy of the kind she often whimmed through her passionate logic against persons, dogs, or sheep. But then he was flattered by her jealousy when she said:

‘Matthew?'

‘What, darling pie?'

‘There is something I have never told you.'

‘It is our time for talk. Pray tell.'

‘I had a suitor before you. I left him passionate with hopeless longing, which I don't remember why — I never told you before.'

‘You were too ashamed?' he condescended. It was seventeen years gone, at least.

‘I was not ashamed. No doubt he always remembers me, while I hardly think of him at all. Anyway, his name was Blaise Cribb, of Thomas's Mill, in Rawden.'

‘I can't say I ever went to Rawden,' said Stanton, with a startled look, ‘though I remember an alnager and wool sorter of that name, Cribb, who came to Leeds.'

‘Blaise Cribb?'

‘Indeed, Blaise Cribb. He is the one who writes to me about my wool, each time I send consignments.'

‘You seem angry with him,' said Dolly, rather pleased if it was stirred-up jealousy.

‘I have a quarrel with him as he never praises my wool well enough. There is a feeling around of someone better in Botany Bay — I am mystified who.'

‘Then it is Kale,' said Dolly.

‘It cannot be Kale — you cannot breed sheep while wearing irons. That is fairly well established in the rule of law.'

‘Then it cannot be Kale. Obviously.'

There was a chewed, fraught silence before Stanton continued.

‘Cribb writes that to meet a standard, my wool — that could hardly be bettered in the whole world — needs to come “up”. Where is this “up” to be compared? Where is its nonpareil, “up”?'

‘
I
cannot tell you, Matthew,' said Dolly, drawing back.

‘Did Cribb get so far,' said Stanton, leaning forward, ‘as to make you a proposal, Dolly, did you say?'

‘Not as far as you.'

‘I am thankful for that.'

Stanton needed no reminder that his marriage invitation to Dolly all those years ago remained a thorn between them. His proposal had not been passionately expressed — that was the quarrel — rather put forward as an offer of convenience, based on the practical Christian principle that two might go out and missionise the world better than one, and would she come along and helpmeet
him, as the Good Book urged, until death did them part? With reasonable alacrity she accepted and donned the white kirtle. It was not without fiery love, either, that proposition when he made it and when she answered in the bridal bed. Just it had seemed more heavenly a statement, at the time, than falling to his knees, chewing her frugal lace petticoats and howling with want (which was how he'd inwardly churned at the sight of her). There was no guessing a woman's mind. Whichever way it went, he was the one left looking foolish most.

‘You rejected a saint,' said Stanton. ‘I remember there was a martyr, Blasius, or Blaise, a hermit of the old days living in a cave.'

‘What happened to him, your Blasius of old?'

‘St Blaise the patron saint of woolcombers he was made, by the early popes. He was put to death tormented by iron combs. He was scourged, and seven women anointed themselves with his blood; this sounds like your Blaise, don't you think?'

‘All the maids sighed over him,' she agreed.

‘Whereupon their flesh was raked and their wounds ran nothing but milk, their flesh was whiter than snow.'

‘But that is terrible.'

‘In any event, angels visibly came and healed the women's wounds as fast as they were made and when they were put into the fire, it would not consume them. Though after the miracle of milk and being burned they had their heads cut off.'

‘Clean cut off?'

‘Off.'

The finality of the statement, with its unanswerable judgement upon women, had the effect of numbing Dolly into silence and leaving Stanton complacently satisfied.

Except she looked out the window and said:

‘Who is that over there?'

Stanton went to the doorway. He shaded his eyes against the bleached outside light.

‘Where?'

‘In the woods across the way, on the far side of the track, where you sneak around, Matthew, when you think nobody is watching. There is a bullocky under the trees.'

‘A bullocky?' he peered.

‘A bullocky, a bullock, and a man waiting.'

Stanton lost no time in getting across there, rocking from side to side on his bandy legs and fanning his hot face with his floppy hat the whole three hundred yards. He expected Mick Tornley on the evidence of a brindle bullock with cocked horns, but had given up on Lehane and was surprised to find him too — and tied by leather thongs knotted at the wrists, lashed at the ankles and sunk at the foot of the message tree.

‘What have we here?'

‘The eye of bullshit dipped in malarkey,' said Mick Tornley, red-brown of face, coming forward holding his sweating coiled whip.

Lehane was not quite entirely melted in the shade.

‘I am a victim,' he struggled to his feet, ‘of Jews.'

‘What? More of that thundering?' said Tornley, pulling a dirty spotted cloth from his pocket. ‘Do you want your gag back on?' He turned to Stanton. ‘We are witnesses to a bail-up, one of us Christians, the other five being the Josephs, man, woman and children offended against by a streak of crawling maggot.'

‘Are they safe, those good people?'

‘Unhurt, but inflamed to the gizzards by having their goodness repulsed. Seeing as how they welcomed Lehane to their fire, gave
him baccy, and would have fed him, too, if he hadn't drawn a bead on them. They have a mind to seek justice. They know what justice is, or should know, anyhow, from their taste of irons. Joe speaks highly of you, he does, as his very particular friend. They shall lay it at your feet, anyway, and be coming through tomorrow. With your permission we shall camp on your flats till Lehane is tried and sentenced for his nuisance. He deserves a flogging, at least.'

‘That is for me to decide.'

‘With all the facts laid before you,' agreed Mick Tornley.

Lehane fixed his eyes doggily on Stanton, licked his grey lips, dropped his narrowly boned head to such an extent that Stanton was not surprised when he sidled against him, almost rubbing affectionately, like a kangaroo hound, and said, out of earshot of the bullocky:

‘The one you want is Tumbankin.'

Or so it sounded like.

‘Come along now,' said Stanton. ‘I am taking you in.'

‘I
sharn't
be flogged,' baulked Lehane, a boast more than a plea. If Tornley had one good reason for wanting to flay him, Stanton had a good few more. He disliked being put to a test. It enraged him being held to a promise. Lehane's duty of informing caught him in a tangle, replete with hooks. There would be thinking to do around it, a letter to the governor by express rider, may be, along the lines of: ‘The traitor in your midst is called … “
Tumbankin
”?'

‘Come along quietly,' he said. ‘We have a cell in our barracks' sheds, with a straw-filled mattress. No more nonsense for the moment.'

‘Are there biting fleas?' sneered Lehane.

‘Just a friendly one or two,' said Stanton, understanding what Lehane meant. More like cruising sharks with sharp-toothed grins,
his countrymen, he thought. He would keep Lehane under lock and key until the matter was sorted between them.