The Ballad of Desmond Kale, page 21
Gaunt, ugly and exposed, a low shameless building with vent holes and narrow windows barred with iron, the barracks’ sheds positioning gave a clear line of sight from the homestead direction, if there was ever a revolt.
At the sound of a heavy key being turned and Lehane kicking the walls and swearing, Mick Tornley was satisfied justice was begun and climbed up on his bullock, riding him forward on the shoulders. Galvin returned to his office. Stanton peered in at Lehane through the bars.
‘Here we are, then,’ he said.
‘I WANT MY WRITTEN RELEASE,’ Lehane peered back at Stanton through the bars. ‘As promised.’
‘You have made it too difficult for me.’
‘I’ve given yer the name.’
‘Thank you for that, as now instead of having to satisfy you, in all your glory, I must satisfy those you’ve wronged. One cancels the other out.’
‘Well, I’ve given you the name,’ sulked Lehane.
‘Tumbankin. Sounds like a native,’ said Stanton.
‘Not when you say it slowly, it don’t. It puts on trousers and a lobster’s red coat, its face pockmarks all over in little pitted rings, it grows grizzly grey hair and looks out from sad eyes like burnt paper, it says, “I’m the governor’s friend. Tumbankin.”’
Lehane giggled tiredly.
Stanton said the name slowly, and laughed. Not possible. Tumbankin.
Then he thought it over, and his mood changed. That someone riding past in the night. That someone stooped half asleep in the saddle. That military campaigner crossing miles. That man who comes and goes, and each time is seen closer to the heart of a matter — that man getting his chest thumped by Warren Inchcape under the old gum tree while Young Matchless’s name is shouted, and then makes his way to Kale’s daughter’s bed. That man of subtle fame who Stanton had never so far met.
Stanton asked Lehane for as many precise details as he knew: ‘Dates said officer enters rampart of southern ranges, dates comes out. Times of travel, day and night. Names of native informants, your friends.’
‘Billy, Mary, Pegleg and Crouch. You won’t get them in court.’
‘It is all very strange.’
‘There’s more. I seen your ram being carried past.’
‘By the same Tumbankin?’
‘Only by a horse.’
‘A horse?’ said Stanton dryly.
‘Aye, he was tied to its back, and the horse bolting.’
‘Whose horse, then?’
‘It never stopped to say.’
Bidding farewell to Lehane with a warning he should be flogged to the gristle if he was lying — only possibly saved if not — Stanton stumbled through his garden scattering flower heads, scaring up birds, annoying his gardeners and, without a word to his wife, only a hiss commanding silence, hurried along the flagstoned verandah and entered his study and slammed the door. Dolly knew better than to insist with questions, while the house servants fell to their scrubbing and rubbing and their surreptitious sidelong winking: ‘The reverend’s a thrashin around again.’
Stanton addressed the governor in a hurried script:
All is revealed. The traitor in your midst is Captain Tom Rankine. My informant is held. There are natives keeping watch. The night of Thursday last, when my ram was took, where was he then? The day of the Mundowey ruse involving Kale, where was he, pray? — on duty, was he, then?
The more Stanton wrote in this captious vein the more certain he was of Rankine’s role at the centre of the plot. But the eye of reason was a blathering witness unproven at law. There were details lacking, sufficient to dissuade a partial governor from making a move against one of his own. To get this carried, hot-blooded conviction was needed from the minister himself, directed straight up — strong as when he preached — REVELATION his source of knowledge in the molten fountain of FAITH.
Stanton called for his horse and rode to Parramatta, and that same evening delivered his letters to the governor’s secretary and refused to leave government house until he gained an interview with Sir Colin Wilkie.
Stanton was kept waiting in an antechamber until after eight. But he was well acknowledged. Candles were lit. A servant brought a plate of bread and cheese, a bowl of mussel broth, a mug of Cape wine. Stanton leaped up when the governor entered from dining, still wearing a stained bib and holding a hammer from smashing crab shells, with Stanton’s letters stuffed in his breast pocket and all of them sprayed with oily sauce after being read.
Stanton made his accusations — he thought in reasonable tones — but was told to restrain himself, to sit down, to spell them out sensibly, to lower his voice and get himself composed. The governor called for brandy and ever so softly and superciliously said, while running his oiled fingers back through his thatch of knotty gold hair:
‘It is Tom Rankine, you say, who took your ram?’
‘You seem less than alarmed, and I wonder why,’ said Stanton, ‘as we are both equally endangered by disorder in this outpost of moral conquest.’
‘Then be assured in the matter, and feel safe from your best protectors, whom you seem intent on vilifying. I have been through my officers’ lists. On Thursday last, when your ram was took, Tom Rankine was with me the whole night.’
Stanton bowed his head, mortified. Yet clenched his teeth, and lifted his head in jerky movements until he met the governor’s eye once more.
‘Didn’t I tell you, sir, of my belief that an officer with sheep broke Kale of his irons, in the Mundowey forest, on the king’s birthday last ninth of June?’
‘You did propose it, Reverend Stanton, and I listened very closely indeed when you named the N.S. Wales rangers.’
‘Well?’
‘It seemed a grand idea to me then, as it does now — a loyal regiment in collusion against their king.’
‘One conjectured officer of that regiment might not be such a fancy, a man besotted with Irish politics holding views in private. I could not name the Mundowey one before, now I can.’
‘Your informant gave you it, as well?’
‘No,’ admitted Stanton with strangled reluctance. ‘It is more this time it came through sheep.’
‘Oh, it is sheep, then, above Pat Lehane?’
‘I make a deduction based on sheep — based on who travels the night country with treasonous purpose, wrapped in a military cloak. The mystery of Mundowey is sheep. Whoever aided Kale picked up sheep. That is known. Rankine is not known for sheep, but I believe he acquired a superior flock and fooled us with them.’
‘You are right in that, he acquired a flock.’
‘What?’ said Stanton, rather more than surprised. Thrilled, he would say rather.
‘Rankine arrived with sheep when he came to the colony. They were fat-tailed mutton breeders carried on the Melanthus under Captain Quayle.’
‘Nobody has fat-tails any more,’ said Stanton. ‘The breed is discounted. The only blood of the fats anyone needs is a tiny percentage, invisible except to the expert eye, as a builder of frame. As wool breeders, they grow something like nests of wire.’
‘Please be assured they were fully described in Rankine’s manifest of shipments via Calcutta.’
‘I heard of a flock in the wilds, that grew fine wool, better than any. Since Mundowey they disappeared from the face of the earth.’
‘They were his fat-tails, then?’
‘You must know your sheep, sir,’ said Stanton with caustic brevity.
‘Now you listen to me, reverend magistrate. I love this Ugly Tom, but I love my duty more. The things you say do worry me. You have your agents, I have mine.’
‘What have you learned?’
‘That the worst devil wears a twist of wool around his wrist.’
Stanton felt his heart lurch, his mouth go dry. He covered his left wrist with his right hand, tugged at his coatsleeves, and took another draught of wine.
‘It’s what my Gaelic tells me. That Kale is gone so far into the outlands he’s sure to perish before he can ever be found. The land itself is a punishment.’
‘It is why it was settled,’ said Stanton, who wanted more of it nevertheless. ‘The gahlic, as you enounce this word, gave you this?’
‘Aye,’ admitted Wilkie, ‘through a poem, a ballad.’
‘Oh, it is poetry, then, above intelligence?’
‘Look ye. Tom Rankine is no more political than a pinch of snuff. There’s nae politics between bedsheets, and very little morality asked of a woman’s consent.’
‘My sheepcraft apprentice’s mother …’ Stanton said, with a look of mottled contemplation coming over his face as he remembered a half dream of morning: she drew him to her with a tired consent, raised her hands like two deep bowls, and out from her shift shrugged her large bouncy breasts, peerless ivory, mulberry tipped, with goose-bumped buds. The stocky man Matthew Stanton ran forward with his tongue drizzling lick and bleated his want —
‘Her bedsheets, you say?’
‘She is our queen of laundry sheds and look no further, now, for it’s there she answers to Tom Rankine on every one of your suspicions. He’s made some sort of hedgerow form of marriage, my people tell me, to keep her tamed. I do not blame Rankine for making a fool of himself on Meg Inchcape’s account — she is a grand composition of parts — nor you on her account.’
‘Nor me?’ said Stanton.
‘Aye, for making a fool of yourself on her account also.’
‘How?’ said Stanton in a higher pitch, and reddening.
‘Her son, Warren Inchcape, is your sheepcraft apprentice. That’s cosy enough.’
‘Warren is Kale’s grandson, with all Kale’s genius but none of his trespass.’
‘Then aren’t you thicker with Kale than anyone, on this score, reverend? Doesn’t that boy put you closer to Kale than is Rankine?’
Wilkie held Stanton’s eye as he spoke, and Stanton looked back at him, caught. ‘I thank you for your time,’ he said. ‘You have been more than gracious.’
There was little left for them to say to each other then. Stanton had a better idea of their equality in controlling disorder. The man of impractical government and the practical man of God. See who won of the two of them, in the game of prominence.
‘We shall part our separate ways, and do our separate deeds,’ said Wilkie, ‘and if we cannae wake each other to our separate purposes we shall be like the rest of the world in feeling justified.’
‘To say the least,’ said Stanton. But he would be going to England, he wanted to crow to the governor, when a ship was found. And after his time in England he would return to the colony blessed by the king with more land to his name, more information to his call, more power to his wristband of wool than could be imagined. The governor, conversely, would complete his duties and never return to Botany Bay again. From the mutterings that were enlarging around him, as the convicts’ friend, he might even be recalled before his term was complete.
The governor took Stanton’s letters from his pocket and smoothed them on his knee.
‘Young Warren shall travel to England with you, I agree, when you have your ship.’
‘Oh,’ said Stanton, with querulous gratitude. ‘Our ship. And he’ll return to New South Wales improved, if the place ain’t always preferred for convicts and rogues.’
THERE WERE SIX OF THEM all told in their close crew when Warren met them for the first time — the father, the mother, the older son, the daughter, the younger son, their bullock driver, and spare horses hobbled with relief bullocks that numbered a round dozen. They were on their way out of civilisation’s reach but had not yet come very far, having only just reached the inside boundaries of Laban Vale. Stanton had sent him to welcome them with condolences for being bailed up. The boys, he would learn, were the horse tailers, and also the girl was handy on an old nag, wheeling around to bring back stragglers or chase a rogue bullock across a clay flat, as Warren would see her do one day, when he came to know her better, and got up on a horse to follow her as far as he could.
From closer in Warren shielded his eyes from firelight as he walked into their camp. It was bright, their blazing fire, until those around the flame dissolved from dazzle and took back their details of shirt and trouser button and shining eye. He stated his name and was made welcome when they saw it was just a stout boy striding into their camp with legs like sticks a-cracking. It was a matter of pride to them to welcome strangers even after their clash with Lehane. Their ire was roused but their charity remained undimmed.
Warren shook hands with each of them. Mick Tornley, the bullocky, he knew as the finest of that slouching breed of experts known. Joe Josephs, Warren saw, was not to be judged by the gold threads in his weskit as being too fine for everyday use, or by the vainly perky top hat he wore tipped back on his head, that would never stop any sun, and his gold teeth dangerously boasting the wealth he carried in his smile. He was a shadowed, thin, sharpish crook of a man, but a cheerful and apparently kindly fellow well met. Tornley, the man they paid in gold coin to guide them through the bush, sat on a stump drinking tea and telling their story of being bailed up by Lehane. When it was told, Warren said:
‘Before I left, I looked in and seen him. He’s a sorry sight.’
Warren looked around at the waggon standing stolid and still against the stars, the high load of store goods in the dark which represented, in his mind, uncountable riches and mysterious desirables. The wife and her younger children had a lantern and were settled under the high floor of the waggon playing knucklebones, with much argument, their legs crossed on a patterned rug unrolled on the ground.
‘Do you have any cuckoo clocks?’ Warren wanted to ask, but didn’t, from shyness of desire. Instead he said:
‘I have heard my master say, Mr Joe, that you always have what he wants, and he enjoys wrestling you down to his buying price to get it.’
‘If there is gain in it for both,’ agreed the trader, ‘I do bring a cove what he wants from wherever it comes — Birmingham, Egypt, China or America, I don’t hardly care — and meet him for what he gives in price with dungaree cotton, steel knifes, tobacco for chewing, black tea in a lump that would stop the toothache, it is so packed into itself, and porcylain so fine it floats on the breath of a baby.’
He turned to his son:
‘Arfur, our friend here don’t have no blanket, will you shake one out like a good boy and make a place for him nearby?’
‘This one is mighty clean,’ said Arthur, as he dusted a blanket of fleas. He was a handsome boy of about seventeen, with thick dark eyebrows, a considerable sidelong way of looking a person over, and a greatly hooked nose that got in the way of his prominent dark eyeballs. He had long fingers and knobbly wrists. There was a violin case on the ground and Warren imagined he’d heard tunes being played on a fiddle earlier, the sounds carrying on the breezes as he came down the last half hour of track through Mundowey forest, where owls hooted back and forth and there was the ghost of nefarious doings behind every tree.
From the corner of his eye as Arthur made ready the blanket, Warren saw Joe flick a canvas to the ground and cover what lay there. It was a quick action but not quick enough. There was not much time to look, and the ground was dim shadowed in the direction Warren had not looked before, but a branch flared and showed him. It seemed like an array of stoneworker’s or blacksmith’s tools lying ready that weren’t to be noticed by strangers — the knob of a driving hammer, a twisted pair of tongs, and a steel chisel-point. Then they were covered. If the hammer was incised with the government’s broad arrow you could be sure the rest were, too. And so they were dangerous goods, for a certainty.
Joe put his arm around Warren’s shoulders and walked him to the other side of the fire.
‘Does this little nest please you, here by our blaze?’ he said, wrinkling his eyes and puckering his mouth into a smile of concentrated pleasure that almost shrank into a dark tight sugarplum. It stayed there for a few seconds until he next spoke. ‘Arfur, get them quart pots bubbling and offer our friend a swallow of tea. Ask your mother and sister out to sit with the stranger till it’s time for bed.’
‘Thanks for your baccy, and your offer of tea,’ said Warren, ‘but I am asked to make you welcome to Laban Vale, then I am to keep on walking, otherwise I’ll be in the wrong place for tomorrow’s sheepwash, that starts before seven, not counting the time it takes to get them yarded, which might be a long time. It is a mucky job, sheepwashing, and we never have enough hands.’
Warren was given his mug of scalding tea anyway, as refusals weren’t counted by the Josephs, and passed a fistful of sweet bread, which was like damper bread being cooked in the ashes without leavening, only softer and deliciously made with sugar and eggs. Being delayed was all right with Warren then, and there were those others under the waggon he wanted to meet before he left.
‘Arfur will nip along with you and help with your sheepwash,’ said Joe. ‘Won’t you, boy?’
Before Arthur could answer, Warren said:
‘What, and stand up to his waist in mucky water and push an animal under till it wants to drown, an do it all day until when he gets out he’s wrinkled white as a peach, all for a shilling for a whole day, oh, and a tot of rum when he gets them rheumaticks from cold, even on a hot day too?’
‘Arfur needs a shilling, don’t you, lad? And if you force him to swallow it down, he’ll take rum for his rheumaticks. Our other boy, Solly, and my girl, Leah, will take over, and tail them horses on his behalf, and with a good will, and so he’s yours and the parson’s for the pleasure of your need till he’s all wrung out.’
