The Ballad of Desmond Kale (37 page)

INTERMINABLE COURSES MARKED CAPTAIN MAULE'S charts like a cat's claw raking the bottom of the world looking for where to pounce, until they rounded the Horn (in a lull of rare good weather) and were safer — released from fogs and gales and their worst dangers.

After a creeping progress up a low coast they reached Montevideo and were allowed to take water but passengers were forbidden ashore — it seemed for the reason of driving them mad except it was claimed to be political and there were reports of shootings! Two weeks more afloat, and they reached Rio on a port tack on a warmish tropical evening, but were denied a fair wind and stood off for two more days impatiently waiting and smelling the wood smoke of landsmen. If they thought this the end of their torments they were wrong.

They went over to the town in the jolly boat as soon as allowed and at the dockside felt their legs slumping under them after too many months at sea. Stanton fell down on all fours on the flagstones and kissed them in prayer. Titus, his humour bright as his bruises, and loose in the legs himself, mimed kneeing his master in
the rump, to the delight of bystanders. Stanton was warned by their commotion, chased Titus with his stick, couldn't run, fell, and cursed all slaves as much as pitied them. For they were slaves or freed slaves in their rags and tatters who watched and found him a joke. It was ever the minister's fate to be paraded, on an unwelcome stage, closer to the earth's misbegotten than where he wanted to be. Meantime Titus elected to take his freedom as he found it — on the shores of a foreign land.

Where Titus disappeared for three days roaming not even Warren knew. When he came back Titus knew every tavern or stew in which a mortal could get drunk for a song or a penny. When Stanton finished flogging him and next time reached for his cane Titus ran away again — one statement Warren heard him make was that if Stanton touched him ever again, he would kill him. Though upon return, to Stanton's face, he merely bowed his head and called him master.

‘I am not your master, Titus, I am your father.'

Stanton smiled saying this probably for the last time, putting some meaning behind the words, but not much, as if his love for Titus had life left in it, but not much, and Warren knew that the minister had forsaken Titus in his heart. Titus was no longer a representative of a native people worth saving. If there was a tribe on earth worth saving they were the Bay of Islands islanders: they seemed to like putting on snowy-white chemises and singing in choirs of salvation numbering as many as made a sweet sound.

‘The word “master” is a bad one,' said Stanton, souring his lips in a smile — sure sign of a crueller pleasure, when you knew him better. ‘Because in this country, Titus, a master has the authority to sell his servant in the slave market. Though I doubt you would fetch many dollars, and none at all if an honest man did the spruiking.
You are better off being disobedient within reach of my right arm, let me tell you.'

 

In that interlude of loitering on land there was never a day when Warren stopped off adventuring nor Titus running wild. Ivy bloomed into coppery beauty (white-shouldered, small-waisted, tiny-plum-breasted), was declared a fleet favourite and taken to receptions on board vessels and met ships' officers who were around her a few days and then gone on the next leg of their voyages as if they had never existed on the face of the earth, and the more offhand they were in losing her gaze, the better she liked them.

The best that Warren did was to become friends with a boatman, Peres, by name.

Peres was that poor commodity — a freed slave. Together the two of them rowed out to ships and carried captains and midshipmen all around the bay. Sometimes they took Stanton. It kept Warren interested in boating matters and gave Peres a spell. Warren took up the oars willingly. It was the same as when he became a shepherd and sheep herder. The sea and the means of crossing it filled his mind, because what call was there for knowing sheep, when there wasn't any land? So Warren answered to water, formerly to dust. As long as he was certain Titus wasn't getting murdered, he was pleased. Titus was safer among brigands and cutthroats in Rio than he was on the deck of a ship with his master.

One day Warren rowed Titus to Peres's camp on the beach, expecting he might get finished with sprees, but as soon as Titus woke under a palm tree and shook off his bad head by diving into the waves, he was looking out for grog and shortly found a few
companions of a like mind to indulge him with their sugar spirit distilled over fires.

The
Edinburgh Castle
was taken away to be beached and scraped of a crust of barnacles and if the Stantons thought they would find another vessel with berths for five (as they daily applied) they were marked for sure disappointment. The peevish bureaucracies of the Portuguese were as nothing compared with the tarrying of the British consul. The only one happy in it was Ivy, observed by Dolly (but not yet by her father) to have busy flirtation in mind, particularly where an older officer was concerned. She met him, Valentine Lloyd Thomas. He was made to match her need. Dolly, if she were not so ill every day with the heat and the belly gripes, might have seen where Ivy was taken during the time he gave her because she had been there herself, at the same age, and only luckily come through: although not steered by such a practised diplomat in getting agreement without much opposition. His blue eyes, black hair, and expression of need were the same strong forces effective on women that he applied in his work as a royal commissioner. In the evenings they walked in the gardens with Ivy's chaperone walking a few paces behind. Mrs Redway was a Portuguese woman married to an Englishman, and came with recommendations. When required to look the other way, she had her price.

Daily confronting the British consul Stanton made himself an enemy of the one person who might have helped shift them off before they grew mildew from the rains or had their brains fried by the sun. Of course, if he paid his own way instead of doing their journey on government warrant it would be quite easy to get a vessel. But he still had that stubborn idea of himself as a consequential chaplain of the Crown.

Appearing off shore in the glittering Rio roads were some
convict ships bound for Botany Bay. Their next port of call was Cape Town and then Sydney. As well as people, they carried livestock, cattle and sheep. Stanton, Dolly, Ivy, Titus and Warren — all five — elevated their noses when a pungency of sheep's dung wafted over the water and for a moment they forgot where they were, it was such a wavering banner of home.

From those convict ships Stanton was sought by officers and a party of free settlers with farming plans. They were ill equipped with rural handbooks telling them what to do about cows, horses, pigs, dogs, bees, and sheep when they got there. They asked which breeds were best for a colony where the seasons were reportedly turned upside down, and it was fairly well known that it did not rain as much as at home, except when it did bucket down and there were tremendous floods on the biggest river. As Stanton knew of no books being any use at all, unless it was a few chapters in Lord Jeremy Bramley's
The Shepherd's Sure Guide
, he told them that all breeds were pretty scarce and wanted in their own way, but they would have to wait and see. If they wanted his wisdom they might have to wait a bit longer. Why should he give out for nothing the wisdom gnarled into him by sweat?

‘All very good queries, ask me again tomorrow,' said Stanton, his head filled with visions of being beaten at his own game. He feared newcomers were set to inherit a man's advantages unless he closed on his security quick, reached London, found maps, recited his needs, and received his land grants from the king according to where the maps showed best land. The new men were a fairly serious sort of traveller and some were rich, going abroad with their wives and families, their overseers, their servants, their leading shepherds as well as their best bloodstock lines including bulls, rams and stallions.

From them (as they'd been briefed in London) Stanton learned that Sir Colin Wilkie was sacked as governor of New South Wales and since five months past a better man was on the water, wearing cocked hat and gold braid, to learn how much harder it was to rule prisoners from Botany Bay than from Britain.

Hiring Peres's light dory and Warren as boatman Stanton used his time going around preaching to ships' crews at Evensong and Sunday Eucharist, picking up what information he could, which was very little. His daughter was more up than he was on officers' knowledge but ask her what they talked about and she said they talked about her, and very nicely too. At night, tossing on his sweaty bed under a breathless muslin net, Stanton applied in his prayers for acknowledgement of all he had done and for strength for what he would do when released from confusion over his wife and child. His wife being ill, his daughter pining for a man who sailed off on the morning tide, and who Stanton learned — too late — had in his keeping the next New South Wales governor's secret despatches! Moaning with inward defeat, approaching Ivy with any sort of question regarding Lieutenant Commander Lloyd Thomas was to risk perdition of a poisonous rage casting him as whoremaster to his own daughter's usefulness. The Stantons made a dismal show of life ashore among bananas, goats and coffee beans, in a bungalow with one servant and a well of putrid water.

 

Fevers swept through the town and carts groaned out carrying bodies marked by smallpox.

Storms raised thunderheads and squalls whipped the water. Peres got up a small sail, with Warren at the steering oar and Titus in the bow to give their dory weight in a rough sea. They put around
a few miles to the slip of a bay with its sandy white beach and a clear stream running down. The motion of the dory was easy in a rough water, better in a beam sea when Peres balanced the centre of motion around which the boat pitched so they didn't get thrown about in a seaway. There was no fever in the boatmen's camp, it never reached them from the steep ridges of the town. Warren and Titus, little they knew, were getting ready for their life as independent providers of their own needs, which they barely fancied as a future, even yet.

Warren learned from an old carpenter how to steam boards in a curve and peg them tight ready for sealing with oakum and tar. Bearing beamwise to the shore in an offshore wind, using sails cut down from an old schooner, Warren learned his captaincy of a small boat. In a squall he was almost knocked down, but came up drenched holding the rudder angled hard and luffing up to the wind.

WHEN THEIR WORST RUPTURE CAME it was not the usual cause — the contrived, inflamed impression Stanton had, that it was the next high moment for a whipping — but a real commotion Titus produced coming out on deck dressed as their captain!

Only the day previous the
Edinburgh Castle
had returned from careening and there was a lot of excited work restoring items to the chests where they spilled when the ship was laid on her side.

There was even an impression of Titus being forgiven his worst roamings (after a light lashing only, though which he seemed to have mutely resented more than most): but oh then, how he eased on deck like a piece of silk being puffed in light airs, cuts and bruises covered, floating up the captain's companionway wearing a three-cornered hat with a seagull's feather in the top, a high-collared cutaway coat, grey in colour with blue piping and brass buttons. Braces made of plaited string ran up under the coat. The trousers were of white cotton with a blue silk stripe down the seams, and his long feet were bare. In the time since they left Sydney Titus had grown a wiry beard. He never trimmed it, it was
not enormous, but it grew quite dense and smart; it twirled to his upper lip like a pencil and pushed forward from under his lower lip like a small thick box. There he posed, a hand upon his hip, as he would always be remembered, while Warren, who was in on the game, asked him to turn one way and then another which Titus gladly did, as if posing for a sketch.

Accounts were to vary on what happened next, but there was never a court in judgement to establish any record for the keeping — as there was no crime as Stanton willed, in that instant when his fingers flexed and he reached for his hand whip and remembered it was down below in its sack, like the licking viper it was. There was only a crime in the insult so thunderously delivered as Stanton looked around for Captain Maule, to be certain the commander of their safety knew he was being ridiculed by his lowest rig scrambler. There was Maule, standing in the wheelhouse, only looking bemused. ‘By God, am I the only one? Always the only one?' Stanton bellowed, and looking down at his right hand, flexed his fingers that were used to turning pages of the Bible and thumping lectern wood, to see if they were really as strong as they needed to be. Which they were, and so like a bowler lurching to the crease Stanton went a full twenty-two yards down the deck and knocked Titus backwards with his balled fist. It was not a strong blow, but Titus's next action was to roll, hardly a fall, over the side: so to drop lightly into the ship's tender knocking against the stern, pause there a minute keeping his balance in a barefoot dance like any good sailor might. Then he peeled off his clothes and stuffed them into the capacious admiral's hat he wore, and slid into the water naked and began swimming ashore about one mile. Laughter was heard from every watcher leaning out of hatches, hanging from the main topgallant yards one hundred feet in the air. Even from the
captain, mildly, though he was out of good moods — for Maule's government passenger, the reverend, was worse than any limpet that could be scraped from the belly of his boat, and he was stuck with him. It was an exhibition, to be sure, of the power of a suit of clothes — now all that could be seen was the bundle of hat apparently bobbing across the water at a reasonable pace and growing smaller.

‘Oh you lump, you gob, you chunk, don't save him, will you!' screamed Dolly Stanton, throwing a piece of soapstone at Warren.

‘Hey, what?'

She took him around the neck and dragged him to the stern.

‘Go after him, or don't you love him like the rest of us? S-s-saaa-ve him!'

‘He's saved hisself,' said Warren, as the demand in all its importance came clearer; therefore follow him he would, despite Titus being a swift swimmer, and as he hit the water and went gurgling under remembered he was losing his inheritance by doing so. They were making ready to sail and if the captain didn't give the order any minute (in a stiffening gust that would push all swimmers to landward) he would find himself driven like them to a lee shore. With a spluttering gasp, Warren's head broke the surface and so many of the crew ran across to see the fun that the deck swung noticeably. As Warren pulled at his shirt and loosed his trousers for a swim, the longest of his life, he reasoned there were easier ways of getting back what was owed him, but none of those ways were honestly his any more to choose.

Turning around, treading water facing the ship, he filled his lungs with air and trumpeted:

‘Stanton, you're the next, you horribilis cunt, and bugger my eyes if I don't get hanged for it!'

This was when the captain asked Parson and Mrs Stanton if he should wait or go, and they both of them said set sail.

Dolly was handed the captain's telescope. The good man held it steady into her trembling arms. Last glimpse of Titus under the trees. Going and gone through her lashes blurred with tears. Then came the last glimpse of Warren turning, shaking his fist.

 

At evening they'd found themselves becalmed and the next evening, drifting close to shore, a tide carried them near what seemed like a ghost barge made up of hulls of old fishing schooners, ten or twenty of them roped together and their decks patrolled by yellow dogs. Families clustered around cooking pots of fish heads and meat bones. As the
Edinburgh Castle
made her way past this vision of dismal hell without much choice (her boats rowing her in the calm) Dolly stood in the stern and her husband stood in the bow as far as they could stretch from each other without stepping overboard. It had been such a day of awful, immutable silences.

Stanton was fairly sure he saw Titus, Dolly was fairly sure she saw Warren, their boys taking shelter with the misbegotten escaped slaves and wretched of the earth who found shelter neither on land nor upon the waters there. Husband and wife, each one of them saw, or decided they saw, the one person they did not want to see and good riddance to him too. They both said nothing. It seemed to bind them as there was a rivalry grown between them stronger than other disappointments that carried them on in a picture of agreement. Dolly always had it in mind, now, if she could not curb him, to harm her husband as carefully as she could having tested her means on Warren and found them effective enough. As for Ivy,
Titus's loving playmate, companion of touch and tingle of touch, she would miss him all her days — but was in another state of confusion altogether, now that fun was finished, from which if rescues were needed, could she please be found by the Lloyd Thomases of Caermarthenshire and London, and taken to safety, or she would ruin her parents' happiness even more than it already was.