The Ballad of Desmond Kale (44 page)

Titus's song started Warren remembering Laban Vale. Tears. Men so crying everywhere. Amid talk of home and loved ones it wasn't so very noticed how Warren sobbed more than most. They passed around the fiery jug that drowned the souls of those who drank it, in the invitation of its fumes. Warren wasn't the least bit drunk, though, as he watched Harry Dugdale quaffing it back and trying to find out who his challenger was to be at the sound of the bell. It was to be Warren Inchcape but for the moment only Warren and his second knew. It was their names on a fold of paper passed to the captain.

Men were calling for shanties from every part of the ship and they asked Warren what he knew. He swore loudly as he splashed his lips and spat rum out, that he knew a ballad when he sang one! The rocking motion of the ship gave the rhythm, and the lofty masts indicated how far into heaven a feeling pierced. The attentive faces of the crew that could hear him, were the roads where the ballad dusted.

Warren was a tuneless singer, his bad notes could make you wince. Oh but the trembling heart of his manner, and the bellow of his heart in the bellow of his lungs! — sailors broke from their brawling and listened to his story:

DRUNK BY CLOSE OF DAY, each day of the week, Parson Matthew Stanton found this stool or that bench, this serving window or that low door reeking powerful drink, leading into a few London streets of haggard hope that he took to, now, in the time since Ivy dropped her confession and he arrived at his estimation of Botany Bay as the Devil's exclusive domain.

In slips of the tongue's reasoning, Stanton even called Botany Bay home, in drowsy moments when the soul slipped its ropes, when he thought he had dust in his nostrils and the riddly cry of rosehiller parrots in his ears. Dressed in flowing black robes, he found himself roaming there realer than anything — riding a snorty horse into abandoned sacristies and violating altars and gleaming crosses with spit and piss puddles and piles of steaming dung before cantering off in a sweat. One of the chapels he despoiled was his own, St Botolph's, left a smouldering ruin of wattle and daub, where the roof fell in.

In the weeks since meeting Cribb and Bramley at the wool committees, Stanton found himself doing his London rounds in
agitation and befuddlement as much as in purposeful achievement. His missionary duties he neglected. On his almost daily visits to Ritchie's chambers, the man showed contempt, mistrust and disbelief. Thrice weekly Stanton went to Bramley's house as boaster and supplicant, buying friendship of doorman and staff, and getting lordly good manners but little more than sheeply interest from Bramley. Stanton's brains were picked but his pocket was not flattered.

Indeed, Stanton daily felt that, of his family of three, he was the chief one being pushed aside while having most to offer any enterprise being planned. For in that tall, wide, deep and important house, Ivy and Dolly were busy on other floors where he was not taken at all. A pretence was kept up they were not even there at the same time he was. Another pretence was that Ivy wasn't in trouble, only her father was, just by being himself. The great peddlers of pretended ordinariness around a girl's foolish sin were the merry little Hardcastles, whose hair was golden as clouds, who moved past Stanton in the hallway nimbly begging their pardons, a pair whose way of dealing with disastrous experience was woefully positive! Stanton disliked them except for their three lively little girls and their boy, Barney, who asked keen questions about sea voyages and sea monsters while Stanton sat in the parlour and awaited his next interview. He very much liked this boy who was sharp, with a good turn of phrase, having the eyes of a dreamer and the hands of a blacksmith's apprentice, a stocky lad made for colonial experience once he got there, and grew into it.

‘I always have need for a boy, to benefit him,' said Stanton, with wistful awareness of the vacancy in his heart, and that strange homesickness for a country where he had not been born.

The routine with Bramley was the same, week by week, until the most recent call Stanton made at Bramley's house.

Stanton was shown in, as usual, by the footman, Wetherell, and waited for Bramley to come in. Stanton met him in the hall. Bramley, shaking his topcoat of a downpour, said he'd been at the Inns of Court — and why did Stanton suddenly think, of all the persons there, Bramley was closeted with a particular resistant Scotsman by the name of Sir Colin Wilkie? Well, it was that Bramley reeked of sweet whisky fumes; and his eyes were particularly veined in opposition.

Bramley called for black China tea, and said he had a headache. ‘What do you want, then, Stanton?' he said, quite rude as he was able.

Stanton, as usual when pleading, smiled in a stricken sort of way, and reminded Bramley for the hundredth time of his eminence in wools, as testified to by Cribb, however scurvily, in his classification of colonial fleeces. Of money, experience, and stock Stanton lacked nothing, and Bramley tiredly agreed — said he didn't question it, but opened his palms admitting that unless Stanton was personally in the colony when the proposed party of Cribbs and Hardcastles arrived there, he was of little practical use to him. They needed more than a partner — and less — they needed a reliable, loyal, experienced manservant and guide. Somebody lower down the social scale, perhaps.

‘A convict bond man, is what you want,' said Stanton. ‘If I knew the name of a good one, practised enough in sheep, I would tell you where to seek him. They are lazy rascals and rogues, one good man in a thousand. The only very good one I ever knew is gone to the bad.'

By degrees, however, Stanton tempted Bramley with larger ideas. His important station, Laban Vale, he suggested, could be
made available as a staging post in a process of setting up. If Cribb wished to assemble a flock he had Stanton's blessing to lead out from Laban Vale. Why, when their acres were totalled, Stanton and Bramley owned pretty roughly the same amount of land on opposite sites of the world! They could both afford largesse. Of course, on his forty thousand acres Bramley had a hundred farms and a thousand tenants, factories and towns, salmon runs and green hills, sheep tight-packed not scattered — while Stanton's station was one great dry bap baked miles wide and split with gullies and rocks, parched creekbeds, no habitation except the homestead, the barracks, and a few shepherds' huts made of stringybark. If there were three acres to the sheep he was lucky with feed.

‘I have a man there, on Laban Vale, of exceptional brilliance, steadiness, and sheepliness of eye,' said Stanton. ‘I do think you know of him. Paul Lorenze he calls himself today. A louring, pouty individual who persuades me by his sullen possessiveness that my best interests are safe.'

‘Obviously, Rankine is abandoned,' said Bramley.

‘From what I have heard,' agreed Stanton.

‘It does not sound good.'

‘No. We do not always get everything we deserve. But in his case, Rankine will be held as a gentleman convict, a particular beneficial class. They never fare badly as the rest, aren't as flogged, aren't as hung. Indeed, if they want to hang a man at Hell's Gates they bring him back to Hobart Town. Or so I have heard.'

‘That is a consolation,' said Bramley, taken aback by Stanton's blithe summary of a system. He wondered how fast his emigrants would get past the prison towns and into the interior, which he imagined so peaceful, so empty. ‘A bit like the moors, only hot,' he'd heard it described, ‘and with savages.'

‘As for Lorenze not being my man's real name,' said Stanton, ‘a false name in that country is a sure sign either of an outright rogue, or of a man intent on improving himself. My judgement on the fellow tells me the latter. I have a great trust. It is something that inspires me, trustingness. I have charged Galvin, my sergeant of convicts, with giving Lorenze what he wants. A word from you, Lord Bramley, and Galvin shall be at your service as well! I mean to have all of my lands and waterholes at your disposal!'

Bramley seemed not to be taking the bait. He motioned to the sick man upstairs.

‘I have not heard Cribb coughing, today,' he said. ‘On other days it is quite distinctly heard, all through the house.'

‘If he is better,' said Stanton impatiently, ‘shouldn't we ask him down?'

‘What if he's not better?' said Bramley, picturing the scene three floors above them: Dolly Stanton holding Cribb bare-chested upright in his bed and bathing his sweaty torso out of a basin with a white cloth. It seemed Dolly had the strength for nursing and making Cribb better with her sudden devotion. She was up there tending Cribb a good part of each day. She was up to something and she was most of the reason Cribb was improving, but Bramley was reluctant to admit Stanton into that knowledge. There was no benefit stirring a man already stirred.

 

Stanton walked home to his house in the rain. Most of what made Bramley uneasy around Stanton's wife did not make Stanton uneasy at all. They were in this together.

For Bramley, in allowing Dolly under his roof and up into the
gods of his house to nurse Cribb, gave Stanton the opportunity to hear from her what she had learned.

Today, the only morsel, and a nicely confusing one, told of superb wools from a location that sounded like ‘plotops'. The best wool Cribb had ever seen, he coughed it out to Dolly, into his basin, was a word sounding Greek.

‘Cribb knows less Greek than a Hottentot,' said Stanton, ‘but Bramley has a first in classics. He gives nothing away. When he admits me to his house I find, to my chagrin, that I'm no better than a peasant babbling out my service to his lordship and getting little mercy for my pains. Bramley would rather cultivate failed governors and peevish lawyers than successful graziers of sheep. I will get to the bottom of this.'

Confirmation that Bramley was seen with Sir Colin Wilkie at the Inns of Court was brought to Stanton by his beggar boys.

They lived in shadows, up stairways, below window panes. They ran at night through sewers and up the inside legs of painted ladies who shrieked with delight in gin shops. Stanton walked past, angling his head to beckon and learn how other lives were lived. Very soon, as instructed, they would bring him a key.

He next learned, from Church sources, that a whole week's missionary engagements were cancelled by the archdeacon in charge of arrangements, and he was surprised that his own reaction was a shrug. Without enquiring too close why, he was glad enough without his afternoons and nights of hectic storytelling. New importances were in the air. The only times he looked in his Bible now were to argue with the old sheep-herding prophets in mental debate between divided parts of his brain. Any thought of opening his New Testament and Gospels — which was to say, the Christian parts of the Book — left him cold in the nostrils. Hinted to him
was news that a Church committee was preparing a report to a committee higher up, on the question of whether Matthew Stanton (B.A. Cantab., failed) should be deprived of his Botany Bay chaplaincy. The only trouble with that suggestion, and why it would get nowhere, Stanton patted himself thinking, was it could scarcely be followed in a population of clergy where half of them were nice to the point of cruelty to others, and all over England without even setting sail to the Bay. England was a country where cuffings and canings of lessers was known to be beneficial even without consent of law, and Botany Bay was her child.