The Ballad of Desmond Kale (38 page)

SOME OF IVY'S YORKSHIRE COUSINS came to see her in London and she was marvellously rude, saying she did not like them at all, they would not last two summers in New South Wales — declaring it was her sister Leah whom she loved most, missed most in this awful London, and thought of always as moving through the Botany Bay bush with rainbow parrots flying around her head.

‘Who is Leah?' the cousins said.

‘A young Jewess,' intruded Stanton, with a cautious controlling eye on his daughter, ‘who writes every day a journal of her experience, and already some packets of letters have come to Ivy. They leapfrogged our boat by faster ship and waited for us in London, although what is in them, and where Ivy keeps them, I might as well ask the sparrows.'

Ivy said nothing to this. Her silences were more aggravating than a torrent of accusations. The memory of Leah Josephs came to Stanton, those dark eyes, those high-thrown black eyebrows as he asked his wild questions of her — that she effectively be his next watcher in line — when he'd promised, after whipping Titus
through the creek and under the trees at Laban Vale, never to harm his own daughter.

Stanton recalled the way Leah pursed her lips when she made the request — an effect like a branding iron making the sign of zero scorching her agreement as they parted. And that was the quandary he was in. Whether to make it pay. Because to get what was wanted from Ivy meant smashing her hiding places in those very sorts of action he was pledged to avoid. To quiz her on Valentine Lloyd Thomas, RN, and impugn her virtue irrecoverably, probably as well. Yet he wanted to maintain in his daughter a few shreds of respect lost from his wife.

For the strangest result of their voyage was that since the loss of the boys Ivy gained the ascendancy. The eventuality of a highly placed lover, if only a Welshman, and the friendship of a lowly trader's daughter, if only a Jew, were connected elements in Stanton's need as he faced his losses. Ivy was in London and the other two in New South Wales. Say if they were all in the one place! — then if Lloyd Thomas were able to say where new country was being opened, Leah Josephs might already be indicating where the choicest particles of it were grazed, Ivy could draw out required knowledge with her affections, and Stanton would be happy as sin!

His longstanding application to the colonial office was for land a mere twenty or thirty miles beyond Laban Vale. Now he begged for a change of locale, country much farther out. ‘But where?' he was asked. It moved around in his mind like a cloud rippling shadow across rock ramparts, and he could not say. Yet he argued: what difference to the king if it was two hundred or ten hundred miles from Laban Vale, as long as it was deserved? It was just as far from London. What difference if the quantity was ten thousand
or ten hundred thousand acres, either? What was any wasteland to the king? He'd been New South Wales's ruler for five and twenty years and hadn't shown much interest in expanding past the biggest river. Stanton was told that a grant was pending, but the locality required a description good enough for a government surveyor to go out one day and make it legal.

Then Stanton's heart hammered with excitement of what was nearer to him in London than anywhere else. He excused himself from a day of appearances at Westminster to worry that a hint of Kale's location was under the roof of his London chapter house in letters, and exult how much was at an Inns of Court lawyer's office in maps, George Marsh's old maps — if only Stanton could claim them without Warren, which he believed he could fairly do, wearing his minister's cut of clothes and clutching a Bible.

Leah Josephs's mail packets were probably hidden somewhere quite obvious, for Ivy was too emotionally honest to be devious, but when Stanton pried under Ivy's bed when she was out with her cousins, into her sewing baskets, and jabbed between the pages of a book (though not into her Bible through superstition of its sanctity), there they were not. Stanton's hunger to know what progress Joe Josephs was making in discovering where the best wool was being grown and in tracing Desmond Kale was so very strong in him that as he set off almost running through the streets to find the lawyer, Ritchie, guardian of a cockatoo, he suffered heart palpitations.

It happened within sight of the Inns of Court: his chest buckling with a loud thump. He fell over onto his knees and jarred the bones of his hand on the stones.

‘Oh Lord, where is thy beam of light?' he found himself on his knees asking, quite unable to breathe.

He'd long expected, near death, revelation as a source of knowledge. Nothing came of it except a small voice enticing him that he was of the Devil's camp, if he wanted a way.

He remained down on his knees staring at the grey cobblestones, head spinning in a beatless, hapless moment when he heard himself addressed:

‘Mister?'

He looked up, rapturously drawing breath. Being alive was quite splendid after a reeling blow. Two ragged boys held their filthy hands out to him. ‘Are you all right, mister?'

Dirty smudged faces, ears pointed at the tips. ‘I am all right, thank you, boys.' The most remarkable haunting impression was of Leah Josephs and her brothers in the fathomless softness of the two undernourished boys' eyes.

‘Are you Jews?'

The boys grinned wanly. ‘
Marsel toff
,' and they touched their cap brims.

They guided him to a horse trough where he wetted the back of his neck.

Then the boys led him over to some grimy steps, and he sat down. Stanton was obliged to scrabble for a farthing, and told them of a paradise he knew, not like this foggy London, but where Jews lived in the wide open spaces, where boys giving good work could raise to be princes if they did not run away.

Truly, since arriving in London, Stanton could hardly open his mouth without making a boast of some sort about Botany Bay. Even his charity was a boast. For he was sick with remembering the deafening noise of cicadas, the scraping cry of cockatoos, the lumpy-backed, ever moving progress of a flock of sheep through the skinny trees. Happiness narrowed down to a stinking hoof and
a twisted horn. Impossible for anyone this side of the world to know the wrench of experience in a place of pitiless desolation. But the two boys listened.

‘Will you wait for me here?' Stanton said.

‘We shan't run away,' the boys answered, as the minister gave each another coin, and looked around to find he was already nearby where there was a name board, telling him it was the rooms of Alexander Ritchie, attorney at law, at the very top of the stairs where he sat.

As he slowly climbed those stairs he thought to himself:

‘Laban Vale — I do wish I was back there — where my sullen marvel, Paul Lorenze, is getting on with breeding plans; where my man, Galvin, sergeant of convicts, is keeping the bond men up to shepherding; where the dim Lehane circles the district with crazed sensitivity on my behalf; where all shall be restored to order when a boy appears, cap in hand, and waits for his day's commands.'

The name of that boy tormented him all the way up the stairs until he reached the top.

‘WARREN!' STANTON HEARD THE NAME squawked as a door swung open before him. He was met by a bald cockatoo sitting on the shoulder of an elderly man of old-fashioned military bearing. Erect, metallic-eyed, guarded — both of them.

Scotch, the man was revealed to be:

‘Weel, halloo!' or words of that dry sort. Though it may have been the bird that spoke.

Stanton made himself known, stated his business. Placed the Bible on the counter. Told the sad tale. Boy. Lost. Fled. Boy sad victim of attachment to native rascal and expected on ship any day, following to London, but not arrived. Tut tut, very well able to handle himself, but gone.

Ritchie said little causing Stanton to talk more.

‘That boy, Warren, effectively my ward, sad owner of maps, papers, and one cockatoo of venerable scalp. Hello cocky!'

The bird grumbled a grey tongue. Stanton pulled a downcast look, and said, ‘I knew Marsh as a young man. I had the privilege of tending Warren's mother's soul in her poor simple cottage.'

‘You are well briefed, sir.'

‘By Warren good soul himself. I wish to make myself more so, on his behalf,' said Stanton, stating his next desire, with some assertion: it was to satisfy himself, he said, that Alexander Ritchie was an honourable attorney, for such an honourable boy.

‘And how do you propose to examine my integrity, then?' said Ritchie, a little more tightly than Stanton hoped.

‘Oh, by seeing the maps left him,' said Stanton. ‘And whatever else there may be. To be sure he gets what's coming to him, when he appears.'

The bird waddled to a corner of Ritchie's rooms. It had a dish of corn to crack in its dismal blue beak. But instead of eating, it hauled itself up a shelf of tomes via beak and claw.

‘Wha'ever and wherever,' said Ritchie. ‘There's a great store of estates I have to govern, but ye shan't have your revelation, Reverend Stanton, ye shan't be shown any maps, sir.'

Stanton watched close as he could the direction Ritchie's hand wandered when indicating the bulging cabinets holding legal papers. Then he closed his eyes and prayed for calm. Enough for now.

‘Until tomorrow or the next day,' Stanton bowed out of the room. He grinned with laborious strain. ‘I am sure we shall be friends.'

‘Tuesdays and Wednesdays I'm in court,' said Ritchie.

At the bottom of the stairs the boys waited. Stanton led them around the corner and pledged to meet them there again. It was another five days until Tuesday, and if he wasn't warm glued to Ritchie by then, there was a door, and a window, he wanted them to watch.

Then it was off through the streets dodging carts and beggars, sheltering in doorways avoiding downpours, and generally despising himself for being unable to be in three or four places at once. He wished his mind would stop going over the same matters all the time, when there was so much to be fixed settled and done. A painted apparition grabbed his elbow. ‘I'm yours, master, for a gold coin,' she boasted, hardly fourteen years old, and he shook her off with an unkind word. When he looked back to correct his sharpness, she was gone on the arm of a soldier. Why, she reminded him of the most reluctant consideration he confronted! — the power of fornication. Ritchie in denying him had used the word ‘revelation'. Well, here was the connection — when he was a theological student he'd been set to write a sermon: ‘Revelation as a source of knowledge', and better if had been the coupling of animals, he might have won a higher mark. A young man newly wed had the world at his knees and he thought only that far: sweating over pages, scoring out words and fitting others in, never settling his mind to the question. Revelation he appreciated as the word of God. Knowledge he knew from his sensations. The word ‘source' — he did not notice as he wrote, but his examiners replied, ‘“Sauce”, as you have spelled it, is a warm, flavoursome substance, either savoury or sugar, that is used on meats or puddings.' And that was only a small part of revelation on a day of test. A devil splashed in the bathtub where he frolicked with his new wife and she glowingly splashed in his mind. It was a great tiled tub in the palace of the bishop where they found themselves taken as penniless students for their bridal holiday while sitting his viva voce and written tests. He'd had knowledge of his wife on the steaming tiles, once twice and more, till he was pleasantly squeezed of desire. On one of those nights of release Ivy was conceived. Knowledge of his
ineptitude as a scholar was delivered to him in the verdict of his advisors. A suggestion was made that God was calling him afar. Rather than go on with his degree mightn't he answer the call head up — be ordained and go to Botany Bay as a chaplain of convicts? Thanks to fornication he sailed.

Now, in the shortness of the same year in which the mere child Ivy Stanton became a woman, Titus and that bitter twist, Warren, newfound seafarer and moral judgement maker, had entered their manhood phase. It was there in them, the moment they came aboard that ship eyes flashing. Two juveniles of passable innocence overnight changed into braw jack tars with lust in their eyes and opposition in their heads. Their voices boomed, their chests broadened, their arms grew stronger. Their gloss of carnal excitement shone on their lips with unappeasable hunger and foul jokes. It had not been Stanton's imagination that on a ship of two hundred feet the distance Warren Inchcape went to avoid him was more like two hundred miles. They were seen going to the ship's doctor one day and Stanton wondered to the doctor if he was shown, by that pair of grubs, any blains of vice on the genitals, and was given an assenting answer.

They had all of their voyage a sailor's perplexing ways, and knew their halyards, sheets, and eight-hour watches very well — thanks, it should be remembered, to the employment Stanton settled on them with the captain of the
Edinburgh Castle
from their first day! Titus said he liked it better, as a job of work — scrambling up rigging and staying high as he could until dark — for which Stanton whipped him, naturally enough, as mostly it expressed rebellion for failing to serve his master at a given hour. Every day unlucky for Titus there was something the boy said, or did, for which it was justifiably needful to chase him with the whip
around the narrow decks, saving the good Captain Maule the exercise of a masthead flogging that might be harsher than the minister's by far, if any more justification was needed, which it wasn't. But now scanning faces in the street and hoping, wouldn't Stanton give a lot to be able to say: ‘Forgive me!' and get over this constant running of thoughts through his head and sudden stoppings of his heart to do battle. Especially if it got him those maps without the Devil's work.