The Ballad of Desmond Kale (42 page)

IT WAS ENOUGH TO KILL decent people stone dead, Ivy's news. But Stanton and Dolly would survive it, Ivy believed, because while holding themselves to be decent people all through, and going about accordingly among good Christians and bad, the two of them, her parents, were not at all so very decently inclined at all. Their daughter knew it about them better than anyone: unseemliness was their saving grace in regard to her predicament — impropriety the undercurrent of their virtue. She'd learned it from them only to improve on it over them, to make of it something more honest, because they did not know it very well of themselves, if at all. She hardly knew she pitied them this way more than fearing them. She would not go as far as what she'd heard them called. The father tyrannical fool, the mother foolish tyrant. Insupportable labels to bear. Horribilis crumpet was far enough.

Torment came out fairly naked and supported them better than prayer, when her father was without his whips, her mother without her servants, without her saddle horses prancing about like demons, and without their boy Titus to practise passions on. They
trod the London stage of their choosing, horribilously roused. While they raged, wept, and asked what was to become of them, they became what they always were, only more so.

 

At last Stanton got up from his knees and a pointlessness of prayer, wiped his mouth of spittle, and decided theologically speaking what experience showed: that God was not interested in New South Wales, the Devil was, and very much so and should have his own patch entirely. One day Stanton started to say such things as, ‘When I was a good Christian I did so and so, and so on.' When he heard himself he wept, and after weeping, smiled.

In preparation for the Devil knew what, only with his mind cleared of doubts, Stanton went to a gunsmith and purchased himself a pair of small, fine pistols. One, the larger, he kept in a walnut case under his bed. The other, the smaller more personal of the pair, he carried in his coat pocket where it made a bulge hardly more noticeable than a pottle of brandywine.

They moved from their church quarters into lodgings nearby. It was a small but quite clean house that was going for six weeks renewable, complete with a maid and a man, and was fairly affordable to a minister whose bank account made him a wealthier cleric than any he'd met in the county of his birth or those adjoining, before leaving to minister to convicts. It was all scrimp and save and put aside with country parsons and theirs, even among those who hunted to hounds in the week and had barely the time for their prayers on Sundays.

From a small window Stanton viewed up and down the busy street. Some days he stood there twitching the curtains for hours. He wondered, as he studied the lewd, deprived faces of passersby,
what he would do if any one of his principal enemies turned up. It was mostly a speculation but fed his anger pretty well. Would he ask them to turn their backs before firing, or would he shoot them honestly in the face? If they all came at once would it be too many for his pistols which were double-barrelled — he knew it was fancy matter, but flexed his fingers — seeing that the count of betrayers whose lives were forfeit to his brainstorm amounted to a good few more than he listed when he left Parramatta. There was Kale to the fore, there was Captain Rankine, Paolo Moreno alias Paul Lorenze, Clumpsy M'Carty, and Warren Inchcape, of sorry fame, together with Titus Stanton — fled — and Commander Valentine Lloyd Thomas and a few other hangers-on to a young woman's freshness of beauty who'd raked their eyes over Ivy quite blatantly lustful including the arrogant Blaise Henry Cribb.

There was a limit to alteration, however. Unseemly as Stanton and his wife were, unseemly as everything in their lives had become, they pretty soon decided they could not have a grandchild out of wedlock. That was understood between them. Dolly was never one to vent rage like her husband but in this they were welded back into their marriage vows as one.

‘Suffer, suffer, suffer,' she cried.

They decided the ragamuffin sinner their daughter whose defiance was quite heart-rending, was inventing her encounter with the lieutenant commander inspector advocate to give grandiloquence to her fall. From Stanton's description of when he found her under the jolly boat with Titus feeling up to her waistband there was little left to imagine. Ivy did not deny it, you see, neither did she confirm, but sat with her hands in her wilful green lap allowing the little bows in her hair to droop all awry, the slackened curl of an overlooked, abandoned temptress's sorry locks sticking to her
cheek with cold sweat. Altogether their Ivy matched a blowsy image of what she could very well become, in this life, having made a start early on a path of debauch. Unprotected experience had begun for her early — when never at all would have been early enough.

‘You must never go back to Botany Bay,' said her father — banging his hard stick on the floor and saying never, never to the ghost of a dear gone persuasive child, who'd played out her wiles in a game of consequences, and was now, for the first time! come under his fidgety consideration for a thrashing — from one end of their rented house to the other if he could be sure it wouldn't be heard by the servants.

‘Certainly we can't go back there. How could we?' said her mother. There was one consolation in it. Dolly was at least pleased that her argument to stay in England longer wouldn't have to be put. It was won by Ivy being enjoyed which she daren't picture, except with an arm over her eyes. Yet where might they go? It could not be to Yorkshire and several villages of righteous cousins on both sides. There the ancestors of this problem spark dusted their leather-bound Bibles thrice daily and read hard lessons. They had waited almost eighteen years to bless her, they could wait one more! Something would have to be said to explain that delay for eight months or seven until the infant was out, and then, after due search for a good family, taken away from them. It was an area of experience where Dolly shone, the gathering up and farming out of sucklings. And she was sure she meant it, too.

‘Mother?'

‘I have spoken.'

‘Father?'

‘It must be.'

London was a vast, anonymous place, her parents agreed, heads together plotting. Together in want they had always plotted best. When they found their agreement, their truest, strongest marriage was in the creaking bed of pleasure where much if not all was forgotten for minutes apace.

 

Ivy could hardly disagree that London was where to hide, having traipsed the streets bewildered until she was spurned as a liar by the Lloyd Thomases and saved by Rosalind Hardcastle instead. London was a maze and a thicket, that wondrous dirty town, and if a girl went through the streets with a shawl wrapped around her and a belly getting bigger, who was to care? Already a few old wives sensed it on her, not from her size, but from her desperate pride — it meant only one thing apart from her being a colonial, and so she had nosegays thrust into her hands, wishing her well. They were formed of the daffodils and snowdrops coming in as spring peeped out a warmer eye before shutting it away again. Who could ever be ashamed of due pride? It was something to take anywhere. And so she had returned it, day after day, knocking on the door of Lord Bramley's house in her mood of courageous abandon; there to be greeted by Rosalind, that energetic, pretty woman of thirty, with golden hair, red cheeks, blue eyes, and greatly mischievous smile. Of the friendship, her parents hoped for the best. Her virtue was no longer a question among Christians let alone freethinkers. After all Ivy could hardly be ruined twice.

Dolly's mind went racing ahead. ‘We can take rooms in Hampstead, say, and allow we are from the West Indies. I have heard of ladies from there, whose grandfathers were slave owners, and there is a taint they talk about, which is shameful, of course, but of such
high colour it's almost a distinction of shame to be born into it. Or to have a child coloured so. They are good church people, too. Necessity has made me used to hard work,' she added, ‘if need be.'

‘No need,' said Stanton sternly, as if it was her fault; he'd provided for her over the years, and still was able.

‘Remember I was born to something else, in a small cottage of weavers and ewe milkers,' said Dolly. ‘See what I made on the voyage, that turned our daughter so vain. My fingertips are callused with sewing it all. If it wasn't Titus she loved, green is the colour of a grown man's envious lust and he wanted what wore it, uncaring as a ram.'

She wept. Stanton comforted her with an arm around. It did little good. But he left it there, dangling.

Dolly thought: ‘This will ruin his respectability and his believability for the final time, they are already rough used, but when we get back to the colony — thank God — everything will be the same if there is no child to justify. I am respected enough. Matthew is often enough disliked, but he does get ahead. He is my strength and keeper. He must get a London parish for a year and bury himself in good works. We shall make forays to Yorkshire separately, satisfying our obligations there. We have the money to keep us while the other one of us keeps watch over Ivy.'

SIR COLIN WILKIE'S LONDON ROOMS were located in a meanly furnished house, close to the river, that Wilkie's aide-de-camp complained about as below his general's needs, but that the returning governor assured his visitor would do.

‘I am a great despiser of comforts,' said Wilkie, ‘having slept enough nights in heather, wrapped in plaid, with icicles formed on the tip of my speculative nose, having my preferences hardened into a vanity of roughness.'

Rotting stained walls, shaky stairs, flaking gilt cornices and a mouldy cellar were small inconveniences after a lifetime of living rough. And this was not even to begin listing his times of campaigning in the Peninsular War, where a staff officer's billets were as good as they were found, and mostly open to the weather. Wilkie, he told Bramley, had served in Spain with the 88th Foot, later 1st Battalion Connaught Rangers, dubbed by General Picton ‘the Devil's Own'.

‘Lord Bramley,' bowed Wilkie, accepting a pint bottle of the Athol brose Bramley handed him as a gift. He asked his servant to draw the cork and leave the room. Then he raised his glass to the
light. ‘It is a good drink for a Scot to taste in the morning.' The Athol brose was a mixture Bramley had his man prepare. It was made from old whisky, strained honey and sweet cream beaten together in a certain order and in the correct proportions. Men had been known to fight to keep drinking it after being offered their first glass.

After taking a lick, Wilkie continued his theme of tolerance. ‘I have in recent times taken a few damned roistering tours around the prison colony of New South Wales, seeing how it might improve, until the imperatives of my position and not so much the privations of living caught me out. Nobody was willing to live rougher, in that heel end o'the world, and I would not have slept under canvas, either, except a charming captain of rangers convinced me it was better for my aching bones. Later, when I thought about his extreme fastidiousness on my behalf — coming and going and proving he never went anywhere — why, and seducing my handsomest laundrymaid away from me — it came as a warning, and I began to have him watched. There was an outrage involving sheep, and the Irishman, Kale, offensive to every faction of opinion except the prison gangs'. Even after his being watched I trusted him like a son. Will ye take a wee dram of the Athol brose?'

It was ten in the morning as Bramley accepted a brimming glass, and said to the yellow-haired Scot:

‘Might that same captain have been —' but Wilkie cut him off with a raised hand. Bramley was about to ask, might that same captain have been the one arrested by the ministering magistrate, Stanton, and sent to perish in Van Diemen's Land? But he would come to it soon enough, as it preyed on his plans.

With a patient expression, like a grazing old horse, looking this way, and that, Wilkie said:

‘I would rather talk about principles than give out names, until I am sure of your protection, sir. Then I shall be glad to confide in you more about the venal factions eating away at my good name, hungrier than the white ants of Parramatta. There is to be a committee of enquiry over my administration, and I need a friend before the table, speaking on my behalf, as I have very few friends left to me any more. Major Agnew is here to do his damnedest. I don't trust many since the new governor was sent.'

Then Wilkie finally admitted, with a defeated air: ‘While I am happy with the roof over my head, whatever the condition, it tells you I am yesterday's man, and that is a humiliation.'

‘Where there is talk of livestock,' said Bramley, ‘I am often called down from Yorkshire, and believe it's my duty towards His Majesty to oblige. There is much to do over sheep at Botany Bay. I have reasons for asking. Are they the cause of the outrage you mention, committed by that officer you resent, against his own kind? I know the officers all have em, and aren't they all set against each other over sheep? Are you a herdsman yourself, Sir Colin?'

‘I am a soldier plain and true. The great set against me concerns men as cattle.' Wilkie narrowed his pale-lashed eyes, apparently willing to go further, now, in the direction Bramley led. ‘In a place of cruel punishments I was regarded as lenient, having invited improved convicts, emancipists, Irish balladeers and ticket o'leave birds to my dinner table as equals. This despite daily floggings and hangings proceeding around me apace. I have signed away hanged men, aye, and women too, and ordered them lashed for all manner of evils, for arson, rape, forgery, buggery, burglary or house breaking in the night-time, housebreaking in the daytime, shoplifting above five shillings, stealing linen from bleaching grounds, stealing sheep and killing sheep maliciously. Y'see, as a Scot, I am
a child of the enlightenment, which favours instruction, but as a loyal servant of the king, I am an agent of calibrated punishment. That is the reason I was recalled — as you see me before you, wiping my tears — each and every day a conflict of duty most intolerable to my masters, in their rule books, but to me in my heart. Then at the end I was enraged, and used all the authority I had to bring a man viciously to heel, although I am not sorry. I want you to know that I am not sorry.'

‘I understand. You are not sorry. That is clear but it is the only matter that is clear, Sir Colin.' Bramley frowned enquiringly and threw back his heady mixture. ‘Who was it you brought to heel, now, can we get to that man?'

Without yet answering Wilkie poured him another, and a larger one for himself, which brimmed over onto the table top, making a brown stain, causing Wilkie to lament under his breath: ‘Ochone.'

The two men did some staring into vacant space as a servant came into the room and cleaned up the sticky spilt drink, Wilkie tugging at his untidy hair to busy the silence, Bramley severely smoothing his stockings at the knee. Bramley was a man of compassion to the extent that he disliked having his conscience pricked. As a landlord of forty thousand acres, and sitting locally as a magistrate, he often had cause to be quite as severe as Wilkie lamented.

The servant backed out a pair of closing doors. Wilkie glared after him and raised his voice an octave:

‘He is no doubt listening, being in the pay of the colonial secretary, may he profit from the nonsense I am peddling you, Lord Bramley.'

‘I am interested to know your opinion of Parson Stanton,' said Bramley, as they took their glasses over to the window, and talked
more confidingly. ‘You see, I wonder whether to join Stanton as a partner, when applying for land in New South Wales.'

‘If he's not mad, you must be so for considering it.'

‘You think him a doubtful prospect, then?'

‘He is not certifiably insane,' said Wilkie, ‘I've had that looked into by a medical wise head; but he resists careful definition of soundness, by all standards except those of his livestock keeping.'

‘He seems near to weeping over the smallest matters,' said Bramley. ‘Then he peers out at you, red of eye, to check his advantage. Everything is needful to him in a particular light. I wish that understanding people wasn't required. He challenges understanding. There is a nakedness to his feelings under the skin, but what are those feelings worth?'

‘Like an owl without feathers,' said Wilkie, ‘who won't admit he's no longer covered, and hoots the day long.'

‘Were you ever so close to him?' said Bramley.

‘I was, at first, through his tremendous obsequiousness and his wife's species of charm, which I was rather more drawn to than to his, for it seemed more on fire in the seat of the passions than self-servingly righteous and interfering. We got along well enough until Stanton discovered I was a reformer, that I spoke the Irish tongue through command of Scots' Gaelic. He was very suspicious of my meaning when I played the pipes. He went around saying I played a little spring in a very ranting manner, as if the force of an opinion carried the logic of a dislike. Yet my first six months there he called me his friend. I could noo get through a day without he or his wife calling in, leaving a mutton ham for my table or requesting some concession or other, which I was glad to sign over. Importation of horses was always on her mind, as much as his was on rams. They had lockfast chests of trade goods, meant for cannibals, which
I believe they sold at a profit to smallholders who desperately wanted nutmeg graters and pretty paint boxes to brighten their huts. Conscience walks a wide path in that land, my lord. I'd barely completed my first six months' rounds of inspection and made out my reports — the tenor of reports that finally brought me down — when Stanton led a case before me, asking the limit of fifty lashes be lifted from a magistrate's orders. I certainly refused him and would have taken away his power of the lash altogether, had I the reach. While limited to fifty, he worked an art of renewing the lash for a separate offence the next day, or the day after it more, when the scabs were still fresh, and if the offender had information he wanted, it suited him to extract a confession by this means. Always at arm's length, mind — he's sworn never to attend a flogging for fear of letting emotion intrude, has my quondam friend.'

‘That is wise, his hide being thick with exposed feeling.'

‘At a quarterly church parade, that Stanton insisted was required to preach governors — under orders he brought with him to the colony many years past, that none of us wanted kept up but he saw no reason to stop — he exceeded good manners as a mark of righteousness, and made me out to be a devil through analogy. It was done with heavy humour. He winkled out that my two regiments were both called the Devil's Own, you see. As a young man, before I went to the 88th Foot, I was adjutant of a territorial unit called the Inns of Court Rifles. Because it consisted mainly of lawyers, and some good Scots lawyers, the king called us the Devil's Own as a piece of humour against clever attorneys. The strange effect was, that the wilder the parson raged in his pulpit the more his portrait of the Devil resembled himself. Holding a mirror to hatred he sees his own face. There he is, at the trick of exposing himself naked, that you observed so wisely, scouring me while he scourged
himself, and rousing as much pity as amazement. Something about him suggests, och, merit through a debasement of what he stands for. That is about all, and why that is almost worth something, is a mystery that annoys me at the same time as it very reluctantly prevents me from dismissing him utterly to hell. His destructiveness has one undeclared object — himself. And it sustains him. Carries him on. There have been times when I've wanted him hung. I think it shall happen, too, before he's much older. Then he will be complete.'

‘I can't have a partner on the gibbet,' said Bramley, closing his fingers over his glass while Wilkie gestured an offer of more, and then helped himself quite generously. ‘Thank you for this warning, anyway. He's become a regular caller at our house. We are all colonial sheep experience men, of a sudden, lapping up knowledge. We do pump him for facts.'

‘You'll find no better in flocks.'

Wilkie stared at his glass, asking the question a drinker will beg — a little mair? — and then to sip its peaty medicine, almost reluctantly, as a deserved treat. ‘Weel weel, as you are a livestock man, Bramley, you might do worse. He is conceded best sheep breeder in the colony with the exception of the man at large, Kale, who was his convict shepherd and his bosom friend, when they were all younger, starving for bread and grinding meal from wattle seeds, in the early years of famine.'

‘Kale, I remember being told,' said Bramley, ‘was the author of Cribb's most remarkable fleece.'

‘Stanton would rage to hear it,' said Wilkie. ‘Now did I tell ye: she, I declare — Dolly Stanton — tried to rid me of two little children I fathered by different mothers — all four of whom, mothers and bairns, are now in this house drinking chocolate in the
kitchen below stairs. I am proud to claim them as my own, by warrant of the love I bear them.'

The topic of children made Wilkie sentimental, as he wiped away a tear. He was drunk and they had still not arrived at where Bramley wanted to have him.