The Ballad of Desmond Kale (50 page)

IT HAPPENED ONE DAY THAT the two adventurers went up a river, and out of the bush stepped Patrick Lehane.

They watched as he unloaded his packhorse and placed a fowling piece and a horse pistol on a canvas groundsheet. They approached along the bank. All three called out greetings, so as not to alarm, and then stood eyeing each other in mistrustful knowledge of who each was. No surprise to be known in a country of very few souls.

‘You two is famous,' said Lehane, as he sat by their fire cadging tobacco and rum: they gave him tobacco, as their rum was gone. Lehane spoke his thanks in a rasping brogue, his hair tangled and lengthy, cursing he was placed in the wrong country for his improvement, but overjoyed to find friends, for his blacks had cast him aside, as he'd done with providing.

Titus that night put on his captain's jacket, quite stained from travel, smelling of stale fish blood. ‘Oh, my Lord,' Lehane smirked at the vision. He told of his livestock being speared — by his friends. ‘I was only doing my best to keep them intact, such is my thanks. Great beasts they were. There was a strawberry one with
snail horns and a bullfrog bell. He was skinny as an orphan calf without a poddy bucket. They was flung down from the high ranges along steep ridges and through rocky creeks hurting their hooves and blooding their hides with black fellows chasing them.'

‘Did you duff them, Lehane?'

‘You mustn't say duffed. No. They was strayed from Mick Tornley's team. It was my intention to lead them back, to the duck mole reach, and I meant to, too. The trouble is, that Noisy betrayed me. Them bullocks was galloped too far down the ridges to follow — them people who can run down a wren, they are just as able running down a beast of several hundredweights. One of them took hold of the bell and held it by the clapper as they ran. From a ridge I saw the bullocks lying on their backs being cut into pieces and taken away. The leader of the miscreants was Noisy, oh I hate him I do: no bigger than an ant, seen through the tops of peppermint gums, he wielded the tomahawk I gifted from my gear. There was my thanks. Blood so fresh it winked in the noon light way off.'

‘How come we're famous?' said Warren.

‘For being ditched by the parson and lost at sea.'

‘Does everyone know?'

‘Word come through the ballad of Desmond Kale, how his grandson was bothered with.'

He did go on. As a sailor of the reluctant rank, Lehane told them, he too found himself pressed into service some years ago, and after a wreck, was marooned on an island towards China. Through a practice of the place (that was on the equator) his ear lobe was stretched according to native ideas of beauty. He was made a convict upon his rescue, on grounds he was a mutineer, and lucky he wasn't hung, though he was here before them to swear, in this judging wilderness, that he was innocent of all charges.

Warren and Titus did not believe him, did not trust him, and did not like him at all. They observed he carried a pocket pistol secreted in his waistcoat. Titus went to relieve him of it while he slept. His muskets were safely out of reach. ‘There will be a price on his head,' decided Warren, lying on his blanket with his hands propped behind his head fighting sleep while the fire burned down, waves of injustice and everlasting resentment coming from their snoring companion. ‘The place he comes back to is the duck mole reach. Since we've been gone it's established.' Their boat was drawn up on dry land and covered with branches. It was time to leave it be, and strike out on land. Either Lehane took them or they took Lehane — to the duck mole reach, where the bullocks were raided, not strayed, from Tornley's team, and where his mother was, and the Josephs, please God all safe.

 

The dawn noise of birds woke them. A low, bright sun slashed through the trees. Lehane sat up, looked around at the camp, and then lowered himself back again. In a minute he'd feel for his pistol. Titus never liked getting up either, if he could help it. Now that he was a free man, he embellished his freedom with luxurious sleeps, at least until the chill came from the ground and he took the blanket from over his head. When he heard the crack of a few sticks, as Warren got the day started, he woke a bit more, but stayed snug as he could for as long as he might, the pistol primed and aimed ready for use.

Lehane stirred, slapped his sides, felt in his pockets and swore. Before he could think it through there was a sound behind him, and Warren stood over him with a foot on his chest. Lehane croaked with his ribs compressed:

‘Jeez,' he said. ‘There's no need of this. I am your friend.' His breath was like wet-packed hay, all broiled and steamy.

Warren agreed he must be their friend as they already had his pistol with inlaid pearl, that Warren knew was the same owned by Joe Josephs.

‘Jesus and Mary love yer, get your hoof off me, I'm yours,' he said. Titus collected his muskets.

Lehane warmed his hands to the fire:

‘It is purrfectly fitting you should take a bow, because you, Warren Inchcape, are the grandson of Desmond Kale,' and as he said so, he made a motion of tugging his forelock, which Warren did not enjoy.

‘You'll take us to the duck mole reach?' said Warren.

‘I might, but it won't be easy. Kale will thank me for guiding you. He's on a bit further, always out of reach. Up there, the world has changed. You'll excuse me if I don't go the whole distance. There's an inn, run by Tharpe, who never liked me. A man is trusted one day, spurned the next. A man don't always know his reception from old friends.'

‘I'd say there's a price on your head,' said Warren.

‘If there is, it's a good one,' snapped Lehane, ‘but from the wrong sort, which leaves me respected.'

‘All we've heard from you is blather,' said Warren.

‘Why don't you shut up, ole man?' said Titus.

‘Not till I've finished, boys. Think of the amazement we all felt — on learning, from a ship that arrived here fairly busting with news — that one of the Bay's most conspicuous men was tried for intentional murder after plugging a man in London, over wanting some maps, and was sentenced to death, placed in the bowels of Newgate Prison, and from there was hung.'

‘For wanting some maps?' gaped Warren.

‘It was the praist fellow, Stanton.'

‘My father!' said Titus.

‘Hung. Horribilis, I called him to his face, and spat in his eye when he rode past me, to my eternal merit.'

‘Hung? You are a liar.'

Titus raised his fist:

‘Dat's gammon, ole man.'

Two chilled, shaken hearts faced the teller of tales, who took a stick in his hands and scratched an illustration of a gallows in the dirt. Well enough to say Stanton was dead, but worse to say he was hung. It was delightful to Lehane to score the beams and the trapdoor, to make the sound with his stick of two heels being jounced over cobblestones and thrown into a pit.

‘The appeals went as high as the king's royal prerogative of mercy, but His Majesty takes one look at the haitch, an all thoughts of mercy fly out the door of his palace. He throws his petitions an sub-petitions all in the fire. No, bugger im, hang him, he says. Hang the horribilis cunt. All them poor sufferers in Botany Bay deserve a bit of polish in their lives. What is the matter with you two, ain't you happy?'

Their eyes were filled with tears, of a sudden. Their cheeks gleamed wet in the sunlight. They were angry with disbelief. No, not the parson. This was only a trick, to make them love him again. It was not believed by them — only, to be sure it sank in, Lehane elaborated the vision by taking it through until they felt the hairs of the rope that tightened under the reverend's bristly and never very carefully shaved pink chin, which they quite well remembered from the times he kissed them.

‘The London papers was full of it, and papers came here on the
first available boat, were printed up in the
Gazette
, and was rushed up country for all to see, by the convict commissioner, who's about making evildoers of the upper echelons feel sorry.'

‘You saw the papers, then?'

‘I admit, I was never that close to getting my eyes on print,' said Lehane. ‘I was too far out in the wild bush minding me own business, but you could hear the kookaburrows laughing as the word spread. They must a heard it first. Escaped men brought it through the trees. They was cheered. The only particular was, they never got his last words, a good solid speech of repentance. That would have been the greatest reward. I would have pardoned him, myself, for the benefit of a glorious statement. But too late. It is all well known in Parramatta by now, and has changed the world. No more flogging and preaching two sides of the same coin. Boys, don't look so gloomy, as every cloud has a silver lining.'

‘How so?'

‘It was reported in them same London papers, that Miss Ivy Stanton was expecting an infant after her marriage to a Lord Bramleys, who is aiming to settle the back country of New South Wales, and for all I know is landed ashore, as we speak, for the time it takes to get across the sea has already passed.' Lehane cocked an eyebrow. ‘She might be ruling from guvvermint house be now, the little strumpet.'

Without warning Lehane burst into tears.

‘Dear me, I am lonely for love.
Your
loved ones are as far up the arsehole of this country as a civilised party ever went. Excuse me language for once. Your dear mother was there, and I never harmed her, I promise, only she didn't like the way I went on, and said I was a shame to my principles.'

Lehane leaned sideways and exposed his neck, as if to ask for
absolution from these two salty strays, and please excuse the ingrained filth on his pale shoulders, where his shirt fell open, as he hated taking baths.

‘Now we're getting the truth,' said Warren.

‘I sent back a note, undertaking to return everything I stole, except one horse and a pair of boots. Your black fellows have made a liar of me over them bullocks. They've left nothing but bones to prove my honour. No firearms were discharged in any direction. The darlin, the sweet one, Leah — she got a bad fright. I did my best to soothe her.'

Warren's eyes went the colour of dry leaves, on the forest floor most flammable. ‘If you hurt one hair of her head I'll strip your guts for mainsheets.'

‘Ooh, the boy and his brother got the worst of it,' said Lehane, well away to the music of repentance, ‘by creeping up on me, like they do, till they saw which side their saviour was born on, with a pistol in their faces. Mick Tornley was the only one I manacled, and I made sure it was done good, for what he done to me before. He is a man who thinks to be Mick Tornley answers most needs. So I took his bullocks to show him.'

 

They set off the next day. The western hills rose like shoulders in the blue distance, the greatest hill peering above them like a woolly head. It was mist-crowned lolling in the sky. The duck mole reach was up there somewhere. They walked two days with Noisy's band skipping along beside them. They were strong from feasting on bullock meat. Titus parlayed with these camp followers as they turned their eyes to the hills — it wasn't their country after a certain definable point, they declared, and then it was time for them
to turn away. While Lehane was pleased to see the blacks break off, he was almost beside himself to be taken where he came from. He thought they'd be friendlier after he told them the truth, he whined and bickered — ‘Please, not this hell's own climb.' So to persuade him, they held him by rope tied to the pack-saddle of his stolen mare. Having no other choice he followed along, rubbing his wrists and complaining if only they would listen. They couldn't be serious. But they were. ‘There might be magistrates at platypus reach be now,' he said. ‘An troopers.' They followed up shallow rivers and creeks, over forested ridges, up deep valleys and along native pathways nobody knew about, shadowed into existence by bare feet, where the only white man who ever trod them was walking with them. Titus proved himself nimble finding a way in this country he didn't know.

As they walked, Lehane worked his knots loose. When Warren and Titus turned round, he was gone, leaving his horse. When they checked the bandolier of silver and gold, hidden in Titus's best clothes, every coin of it was accounted for. Then they set off after Lehane.

Titus had not gone very far down the ridge when he stopped, and sounded the call of the whistling kite. Warren clambered down to him — depending on which bird was whistled it was possible to tell what Titus found. The kite meant business.

She was a carrion eater and so Warren was not surprised to see a collapsed pile of clothes on the ground, and in amongst that pile the limbs of a man.

THE RUMOUR THAT LORD BRAMLEY was expected as a settler in New South Wales after a hasty marriage to Ivy Stanton proved false; he was already married to Hetty, the Lady Bramley; and he never, ever left England. So it wasn't Lord Bramley coming over the sea with Miss Stanton as his child bride and brought to term rather quickly at all. No such premature elevation of the prison colony's tone was to happen; there was to be no aristocracy of the place except Botany Bay aristocrats wearing chains.

The hanging of Parson Magistrate Stanton was as close to the greatest story ever told. It was to die a snickering death in Sydney or Parramatta, after raising some loud guffaws. He'd joined the throng of those once up, flung down, and never to be raised again! which was the neediest part of the population; he'd joined them most convincingly, next door to the worms. Most of this was guessed from the report in the
Sydney Gazette
, taken from London papers, where the court reporters tersely expressed it: ‘Guilty, death, aged 53'. Then the mail ship sailed.

It was pleasantest to know that the fellow he'd shot wasn't too badly hurt but Stanton still got the weight of the law on his voice box.
A good few hard men went to the gallows in Sydney, Parramatta and even as far away as Van Diemen's Land feeling better for the knowledge that Parson Stanton was black-capped by an English judge who thought he was worth the sentence. Those who'd been at Newgate and sentenced to death but were lucky enough to be reprieved to the hulks and sent to Botany Bay told how life was lived in the press yard. It was, they said, where Stanton would have been doomed to spend his last weeks while his family and whatever friends were left ran around raising petitions to save him. He was not a full murderer but a fully intentional murderer and so would have waited his turn at the gallows a lot longer than those who'd done the deed better, and were hung sooner. So the torment was sweeter? Oh yes. For companionship he would have no one better than other murderers, and so did his righteous bones crack in humiliation, or what? And here was the best part. When he went to the church services of a Sunday, which he would be required to do, at Newgate, there were pews set aside for the condemned near the altar. There in front of them was placed a black coffin upon a table. It was to remind them to make their peace with their creator in the face of approaching doom. Ah, then the parson would learn to speak humbly, at last. He would learn the patois where evil was called good. He would learn how a good man was called wicked, and a leader in vice virtuous. He would learn to invert the human heart and reverse the conscience. And learn to blaspheme and grovel to the yard captains. There was pride and much need in corruption of ordinary language amongst Newgate's human congestion. To this he'd been brought down.

 

The part of all that was true was this part the truest. For even before his sentence, it was learned by Stanton to put everything that
mattered the other way around, and shrug off his overstrained virtues, that had been expressed through whips. The gunshot he fired in the lawyer's rooms merely confirmed his direction! He'd already been well into the Devil's camp when the Bow Street runner of Robin Redbreast fame, so called, asked for his surrender; then came the trial; the death sentence; the horror of shame; the shame of horror; then he was in the Devil's camp even further, enjoying the conversation of whores and coiners; Bramley sent money for his gin supply; then the prospect of heaven or hell as the shadow of the noose swung across his imagination; on balance it was going to be hell, he would have to say, and bring it on; then the small black coffin in the Newgate chapel, a pair of greedy eyes shining from the slightly open lid, the eyes of a Thames rat. And then he knew there was an omen of life somewhere. In the coffin.

The evangelical ministers who pursued the condemned at Newgate had a need to make him one of their own all over again, and extract from him an execution-day statement to use in their cause. There they came in their drab jackets and buckled shoes. He refused to talk to them, or pray with them and sing to them their hymns. As for one or two old friends at Cambridge, what could they do for him? They could bring him, while their wives went to Dolly and were given a welcome, a basket holding a pork pie and a bottle of Bordeaux, a crusty loaf and a pat of sweaty butter. They could not eat with him, their stomachs were turned; while Stanton, unfussed, was hungry as a horse — and as heavy a beast as ever was, oblivious to the coming slaughter. Or as big-heartedly brave in seeming so.

But then (if you will believe it) came those visits made to the press yard by his recovered victim, Cribb, talking about sheep breeding when what Stanton wanted to hear was the hour of his
execution, so as to get on with it without more pain than Dolly and his dear fallen daughter needed to bear.

While Cribb talked about sheep Stanton felt his brain shrink back into the fumes and straw of a ram pen. The brown light between timber slabs. Swallows building mud nests in the low rafters.

‘Qualities too opposite never amalgamate, but only produce a worthless hybrid … The defects in breed can only be corrected gradually … violent extremes are unsafe.'

‘Violent extremes are unsafe,' said Stanton, using sarcasm as he liked to do with Cribb, only in this instance turning it on himself. Why should he cough from the lip of the lime pit such maggots of knowledge as would assist Cribb in his emigration? Who was making a voyage to the colony to breed sheep? It wasn't Stanton. What was Cribb tormenting him for, with visions of greasy perfection?

‘Hmm. But there
is
a royal road to perfection,' said Cribb, at which Stanton looked up, startled. Was Cribb trying to tell him something?

He was. For word had come from the king. He was reprieved.

 

At Sydney there was no ship for a while, so no latest news. Rumours and excitements burned off the colony's imagination like an early mist from the headlands of Port Jackson on a hot morning.

One day, with the sea deep blue and sparkling, the sandstone headlands glowing golden as honeycomb, and dolphins riding below the waves like silky banners, a ship sailed in.

She was the
Edinburgh Castle
under Captain Maule, remembered as the boat that had removed one of the colony's most bothersome characters from its stage, and if he wasn't missed, there was certainly
an emotional thrill experienced when the ship went about in a slam of noise with its booms and hinges, off the Middle Head, sounding like a trapdoor sprung under someone. After being rebuilt and given the improvements to her accommodation and her sailing efficiency suggested by Captain Maule, she'd made the voyage from England without too much battling in adverse blows, coming via the Cape and dipping south taking advantage of cold strong winds.

They took on their pilot. She passed up the harbour without much fanfare, carrying passengers of no great notice — except that free settlers were not all that common in those times, and so they were prospectively watched — a Mr and Mrs Blaise Henry Cribb; their baby daughter, Rose (a perfect little object as white as whipped cream and with mauve lips, veined eyelids, and a robust habit of punching wildly when she woke, until she was given all her mother's attention). There was also Cribb's son, Johnny, a gangly, intelligent lad from an earlier liaison; there was a Mr and Mrs Dudley Hardcastle, and their sturdy son, Barney, and daughters; and there was a ferrety-faced servant woman wearing a tight bonnet, by the name of Mrs Dolly; and with her, her husband, Convict Matt — an assigned convict servant to the Cribbs and Hardcastles, a man they had organised for themselves in London, by means of the exercise of privilege. It was said he'd been released from Newgate Prison directly into their care, after being reprieved, by the king's royal mercy, from hanging on a capital charge, just as the hangman came looking for him. Yes, reprieved, but he sent murderous looks if you tried getting close to him. Touchy? There was no doubting it. Undoubtedly proud. ‘Wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles be gathered together,' was written on his brow.

This servant, Convict Matt, was a Yorkshireman, a rubbery, tubby man in his fifties with a sharp eye, which he disliked flashing
(only sometimes couldn't help it), and preferred keeping his gaze averted or hooded shut. He kept a black-brimmed hat pulled low on his eyes — had a practised habit of grunting and turning aside when anyone pursued a question. When they persisted he gave them a push. The ship's nonconformist chaplain he particularly disliked, letting it out once, with a yelp during divine service on the afterdeck, that if he was in any sect's grip (when asked for confessions of Christ), it was for the Devil's party he groped. He couldn't help making a comment from the congregation, when the chaplain heard himself disputed on a text — correctly as he later found out, when he went to his Cruden's in a snit — how Abram and Lot came from Ur of the Chaldees, and Abram pitched his tent on a mountain on the east of Bethel, not on the west. When he resolved it, the dear chaplain was saddened to think old Matt had fallen so low, from a worthwhile Christian past, even one so scholarly spent in a sheepfold, as it seemed.

The ship carried sixty convict women to Captain Maule's profit, held in their convict quarters at the other end of the vessel (distant from where some rams and ewes were kept in stalls, but not far enough to blank their stink). Anne Kemp, the prettiest and most flirty of the women, was in business with men from the upper decks the whole voyage, and someone in the Devil's party was just her sort. She made a good try to crack Convict Matt's smile, but never reached him except she showed more intelligence than the paying passengers had between them to get to the bottom of his story. It happened that her wanton's compassion made her a thoroughly good nurse — knowledgeable, kind, willing, and sure of touch — and so she learned from Mrs Dolly and her daughter, Mrs Cribb, by helping them.

There was only one detail anyone needed to know of him, that he
wanted acknowledged, at least. He was a sheep man all through. His lack of curiosity about the colony surprised some. Throughout the whole voyage paying passengers, prospective settlers, took every opportunity to learn what they were in for, but not old Matt, he could not care less for the question. Only sometimes he let fly with an opinion on something he couldn't possibly know — the poison of snakes; the call of the kookaburra or laughing jackass or Hawkesbury alarm clock, so called; or that sheep there had better have long legs for walking ways to water. How did he know? Don't ask Convict Matt! His duties as a servant were not very onerous around his master and mistress; he was usually slumbering drunk in the afternoons. As for Mrs Dolly, she was the opposite, wide awake and dedicated the whole day to the young Mrs Cribb and her Rose. As for the young Mrs Cribb herself, Ivy, she had that beautiful, cold, silvery aloofness that redheads in the fullest arrogance of their glory must have by the age of eighteen, or die of neglect, when they sense the control they have over men's desires. Except with her it was remarkable how towards one man, her husband, how extremely cold and punishing she was — as if the ice of the southern oceans (that had formed in their rigging, on the way over) splintered down into her, accumulating and intensifying towards him the longer their voyage ran out. It was noted that Cribb, without too much ceremony, visited Anne Kemp in the curtained cubby she had for her business. As the frosty darling was not giving away any of it, a whore did a wife's duty, it was said. Except you would have to be an intimate to know. In that curtained cubby all they did was talk. Cribb was famished for heart warmth. What Anne Kemp learned among her cushions she kept to herself. It was her quietly spoken opinion, however, that Mr Cribb was in love with his wife.

It remained still quiet enough as the
Edinburgh Castle
, at around two in the afternoon, came to its mooring opposite the handsome town of Sydney. Soon, from below decks, in the part of the ship where the women were packed in, there was heard a symphony of shrieks. Many secreted phials of perfume were broken out, precious lumps of rouge applied, that had been kept ready for this hour the whole voyage. So many various coloured skirts and dresses appeared it was like a bazaar, and the dark-haired, white-skinned, slenderly hipped and voraciously red-lipped Anne Kemp, swirling like a dancer, was the one who would surely go for a price near the top.

It was a sparkling June day, the ninth of the month, the king's birthday, second anniversary of that serene day when Desmond Kale was flogged his last fifty.

Captain Maule congratulated himself on a voyage well run. A good return cargo and the ship's owner, Lord Bramley, might not be much richer, as he was already rich enough — but Maule was made richer by it. As well as a good few thousand, a gratuity of five hundred pounds was already in Maule's London account, having been passed to him by Bramley, on consideration of his keeping to himself, as strenuously as he was able, the intention of his party of settlers under the charge of Cribb.