The Ballad of Desmond Kale, page 39
‘There is a new owner now,’ said Bramley, without giving away who it was — first ship of a Bramley line if it came home in profit.
‘I hear she reached your wharfings with my wools. Ten bundles of heavy weight apiece?’
‘She did too, and your wools,’ said Cribb, ‘if I remember aright, were a record weight. Fleeces averaged four pounds each, to the weight of between four and five thousand pounds total.’
‘You do remember aright. It had excellent fineness, then?’
‘It had only moderately excellent fineness, over all, yet made good price at auction.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘Density of staple was the lack. I am still saying a great deal.’
‘Is he always quite as offensive?’ Stanton asked Bramley, as rudely as he could manage without twitching for a strap.
‘Fairly often,’ said Bramley with the sort of smile that an aristocrat did get away with.
‘But you praised it to Lord Bramley here, as he testifies,’ said Stanton through his teeth. ‘Was that before you saw something else?’
‘Oh,’ said Cribb, discovering he was caught out on his main hidden subject.
‘What was it you saw after mine?’
‘Nothing much,’ said Cribb — and left the room.
As he passed through the half-opened doors into the anteroom Cribb saw the young woman again — the purest yearning, reddened golden doe that was ever startled out of a hide.
‘Is Lord Bramley going to be long?’ she said, jumping up and standing in Cribb’s way.
Cribb shook his head. ‘I think an age with that man.’ She ignored this slight on her father in favour of her only wish.
‘Do you know the Lloyd Thomases?’
‘Of Caermarthenshire?’
‘That’s them in Wales — but here in London, I asked the man with the buckle sash, and he knew them, but couldn’t remember their houses, or untruthfully said he couldn’t. They’re here aren’t they, tell me they are!’
This was consistent. Bramley’s greatest fame, apart from his ‘Shepherd’s Sure Guide’, his wealth and his wondrous wife, Hetty, who rode to hounds five days a week, was that he forgot nothing he learned in life that passed for a fact, including all numerals, whether alone or in long-division calculations which he computed without a pencil. He would certainly know Lloyd Thomas’s connections. Cribb guessed he took the young woman for a bother, and held back from telling her what she wished through fear of unwanted involvement. Bramley could be aloof in passion. His position gave him wealth, power, entree — the privilege of admission to any house in England — but very few adventures except in commerce. Whereas presumption in a young woman gave Cribb nothing but excitement burning north of his kneecaps.
They went to the bench. Cribb steadied himself, pulled out his purse and found the London addresses of the fairly well-known judge advocates and fading wool brokers. In the time it took for her to decipher details, Cribb’s intuition told him more than he wished to know about the young woman and her needs. She had been wronged. It would be by the younger brother who had gone into the navy: Valentine, the rake. The knowledge covered Cribb with sadness over a young beauty’s needs, which were nothing to do with his needs on fire at all, now that he saw her distress was real. But he still wanted her.
‘What is your name?’ he said. And as she suddenly stood to leave he grabbed her wrist tight, an unpleasantly needful grip from a man that any young woman would detest, and remember as wrong, but Cribb was drowning, and she could see that, too — as much as she was able to see anything else going on above her own distress.
‘Let me go.’
Wishing her a kindness, he did so, and she was gone.
‘CRIBB IS THE FOULEST MAN I ever met,’ said Stanton. ‘A bullfrog, an ogre. I would cease my cultivation of him if I didn’t need him, and I would tell him that although I am crawling at present, I never heard of him until he wrote of my wools, rather niggardly I must say, and the rest barely a year ago, when my wife popped out her confession.’
There was a movement of brown cape in the crowd to which Stanton answered: ‘There is my wife back again, now that he is gone. She is going around the room asking questions of returned travellers, who arrived in England in boats later than our own. She is terribly heartsick for what was left behind, a breakage, a swelling of that female organ, the heart.’
‘In there is a great mystery,’ agreed Bramley, with a vagueness of wisdom meaning nothing very much, except his dislike of getting away from conversations about livestock. They talked about the wonders of Botany Bay in that regard, where sheep might grow to the size of horses if unchecked, with their wool sarked dense around them as chain mail.
Stanton talked about the wool rush on; if a man had money where it would grow.
‘I do think about the prospects there,’ said Bramley, uncertain whether to broach his plans. He would go on sizing up Stanton until he decided.
‘The entire population of officers and administrators wants a hand in sheep,’ said Stanton. ‘They are mostly great fools. They spend their time scrapping and mending their pride when they should be minding what bleats. All the greatest advancers of their own name are in this room as we speak. One of them is Major Agnew, over there. You are better off talking to me than to him. Be careful he doesn’t impress you. I hear he’s very plausible.’
‘You hear? You don’t know him?’ said Bramley.
‘Hardly at all.’
Bramley was amazed. It would seem that in a small colony gathered at the edge of an unknown continent, where every man must reach a hand to another, or die, suspicion, selfishness, stupidity and exclusivity ruled.
‘I wonder if you know an officer, a man named Rankine?’
‘I might, if pressed,’ said Stanton querulously.
‘A breeder of Spaniards.’
‘It sounds unlikely,’ Stanton paled.
Bramley sensed Stanton’s unwillingness as nothing more came out.
Of course, thought Bramley, there is a hideous Botany Bay etiquette being observed. They have such haughty opinions of each other all round: murderers, gaolers, republicans, shepherds and garrison priests.
Bramley decided to force the subject on.
‘No mention of Rankine by Cribb?’
‘No, why should he?’
‘They were raised together as brothers. Stepbrothers. Cribb is the older.’
Stanton tremblingly shook his head. ‘Rankine, a breeder of Spaniards, you say?’
‘As pure a flock as ever left Spain. The Spanish thousand. Seven hundred of them portioned to Cribb in satisfaction of inheritance disputes. Three hundred shipped to Botany Bay with great care, and I hear most survived. They’ll be up to a good number and thriving by now.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Stanton, staring from a frigid mask. ‘Your Captain Rankine would be pretty well known, to do such a thing, and all on his own. You can’t have best sheep in that place and pretend you don’t. They must have died, or something else.’
‘Never with Moreno.’
‘That is a sheep like any other, if it don’t get food and water.’
‘You misunderstand. Moreno is Rankine’s shepherd. A Spaniard of stolid cunning, brilliant with sheep to the point of uncanny devotion, but in other ways deviously strange. Ingratiating, treacherous, I would have thought, like most foreigners swears by the knife.’
Remembering it all — as a blow to the heart — and seeing the light in Bramley’s eyes, Stanton exclaimed:
‘Have you any idea of the pits, the dazzle of pits in that deceitful country, into which a man might fall?’
‘Tell me,’ said Bramley.
‘Think of a maze, a labyrinth, a meandering confusion drawn in a wiggle, plunged hundreds of feet deep with every entrance a dead end many miles up. All of it thickened with vegetation, thorn bushes, vines, great gum trees growing high as the cliffs they guard, by watercourses choked with boulders, not that there is ever much water in them, but when it comes, how it comes, flood water pouring over the jagged rims and lightning and thunder thrashing. No man, nor beast, nor mortal insect, my lord, can withstand such an onslaught. Except imagine — imagine on the other side of some obstructional wall — some other sort of country.’
Stanton gave these words a low, hissing authority.
‘Some other sort of country? Now this I have heard about,’ thought Bramley, examining his fingernails as if merely considering their shine. Bramley remembered visiting Sir Joseph Banks with Cribb, and the contretemps they walked into was tremendous. The explorer naturalist Marsh was there — having returned from New South Wales with barrels and trunks of specimens. Marsh had been superb in collecting flowers, buds, twigs, animal and bird skins of all sorts, but in other ways had exceeded Banks’s commission and made a pest of himself to his employer — to the extent that fathering a child upon a convict girl and spending his allowance three times over while writing demanding letters was only the beginning point of trouble. There was also a black man, named Mun’mow or Mr Moon, who was accommodated on Banks’s estate. He’d been Marsh’s guide into country far from any known parts of Botany Bay, where Marsh was not allowed to go, and as a reward for that persistent misdemeanour, Marsh had voyaged his Mun’mow to England and kept him as a servant without particular duties. ‘Marsh presents him as a curiosity,’ Bramley recalled Banks objecting. ‘He does not know why he may not keep him, as some of our neighbours do lions and tigers at some expense. He thinks the amusement I have in his conversation will fully repay me. But observe, the polished manners and comfortable living of Englishmen make not the slightest impression on him. He sits huddled in the corner in the cold, with his eyes turned inwards, and I am sending him home forthwith.’
Bramley frowned slightly remembering the account, making a tight pinch above his eyes, by which he was usually able to get a pretty good handle on something heard long ago. It explained what Stanton just said, which Bramley echoed:
‘Some other sort of country already reached?’
‘Well, but it’s never been found,’ said Stanton, looking up so steeply to Bramley that his jowls disappeared into a stiffening of whiteness. ‘Unless by those with maps.’
Stanton felt this inside him, then — that one of those great dry boulders he projected so bitterly onto a cliff edge for Bramley’s impressment did its work and began to move. It teetered on an axis so fine, that the touch of a finger — this finger jabbing Bramley’s bird chest would do — or the push of a slightly expelled breath — this breath Stanton held in, while frothing it with spittle, lest it explode with sensation — both did work and rested on the stone and the stone moved. It started slowly and then went bounding, springing, racing away inside Stanton until it smashed to a thousand fragments on a broad plain and every one of its particles of grit, when the dust cleared, was a fine woolly sheep. And not a single one of them had Stanton’s mark of breed on its forehead.
LIFE WAS SHORT. DREAMS WENT longer. When Cribb woke from his worst fevers into a rational sequence of remembered life he was able to make decisions, or could say, at least, that Jeremy Bramley made decisions and he gave way to them for the sake of this and that.
In doing so, Cribb let slip his old life and began his new, in a break that wasn’t clean, but was progressively complete to the point where there was no turning back. If it wasn’t to be death, for Cribb, in these weeks after coming to London, it was to be like death in the respect that namely, he was the next in line to learn how everything became opposite of what it had been before, when there were dealings to be done on the underside of the world. Call it his stepbrother’s lesson in getting on up. Those that were down were up, their wrongs made right, in a place where governors profited from crime, criminals made themselves rich, Irish gentlemen sprang free of irons, sheep improved themselves in the rough, and ministers of religion ran flocks on a scale of many thousands. While the roads of Botany Bay ran nowhere into its interior, as Cribb was told, he learned in these weeks how one of them led back to London.
Bramley brought Cribb’s son, Johnny, down from Yorkshire. He slept in a cot in a corner of Cribb’s room. Throughout many nights he was up tending the fire. They were always able, those two, to spend time in each other’s company without much conversation at least on the boy’s side, while Cribb made his difficulties that Johnny overcame with his good nature. Yet the son’s nature was better than good — it was greater than Cribb’s, unless Cribb saw to himself in extremis and very fast made himself over decently and agreeably as a changed person. Bramley saw not for the first time how the boy loved Cribb. Bramley trusted Johnny with all his schemes and this was the fuller declaration of an alliance that Johnny waited to seal with his father.
It fooled nobody that Cribb feigned indifference to the fuss being made of his illness and the plans growing out of so much going up and down of stairs and through the banging of heavy doors and unloading of delivery carts blocking a side lane. It was a support to his pride to be as vague in giving way to persuasion. That was about all the resistance Cribb had left in him. The rest was do or die at Botany Bay as Bramley dictated.
The next Cribb knew, Dud Hardcastle, his wife, Rosalind, and Barney, aged ten and a half, and their three little girls, twins, aged seven, and the baby at two and a half, were down from Yorkshire and at Cribb’s bedside telling him their excited news in a milling of awe, screeching, and thumb sucking. They were coming with him.
The much maligned tub the Edinburgh Castle, after discharging its wools on the Humberside, was sailed down into the Thames and was undergoing refitting at Lord Bramley’s expense at London Docks in the Thames upper pool, not far from the Tower of London. A bit more than a spit and a hawk away Cribb lay ill at ease rattling his lungs and possibly dying in Bramley’s spacious residence on Rotten Row. Cribb told Hardcastle: ‘If death wasn’t so desperately ordinary it might be something profound!’
Cribb was indelibly Catholic, though. It went against Hardcastle’s beliefs, but friendship pulled stronger, and the schoolmaster sent for a priest.
At the door a portly, judgemental man, Father Daubenton, looked Hardcastle in the eye. Exiled from Paris since the early days of the revolution, the old priest picked the schoolmaster as an excitable romantic, an English variant of dreamer about as far removed from political realities as a man on the moon.
Cribb and the priest carried on a conversation in French, of which Hardcastle knew enough to know he was treated condescendingly. Soon the room was full of incense and Cribb was coughing out his last confession, as it would be, unless Hardcastle bustled through the room to the window latch and caused an explosion of pigeons by swinging the window open to the rooftops and the best London offered in gulps of pungent air. It was not very good, but was better. The old priest scowled, stroked his grey throat, pulled at his red lower lip, and looked like a turkey gobbler.
Hardcastle went around London with a list of requirements, putting together chests of books, shoes and linen, strong clothes for a family and all the housekeeping conveniences needed for five or six years of adventuring and schoolmastering in an unknown country.
Bramley sent him to see Stanton and get some advice. Hardcastle found a sorry servant ushering him into the small, square parlour of the chapter house with its pallid evangelical contrivances of grey antimacassars and neatly stacked pamphlets of recent sermons lying in wait on every available surface. He picked the pamphlets up and threw them down. There were instructional novels written by literary clergymen, about dairymen’s daughters and Negro servants, telling of new ways of thinking unknown to the human brain except through prayer said a certain way and intoned many times.
Bramley had warned Hardcastle to dampen his rationalism if he wanted sound advice. It was going to be difficult. Bramley had said not to make an outburst as he usually did to clergy about invisible trinities and puerile moralities. In the minutes before he actually met Stanton there was barely a chance to shuffle the literature disdainfully before there came a noise at the door, and the beginning of a shape like a disturbed but inquisitive, black-clad bulky animal backing in. The man who greeted Hardcastle was unshaven, badly dressed, obviously blearily the worse for drink, shrugging into his going-out coat as quickly as he could, ‘to get them to a public house by noon’.
There, it was Stanton’s turn to be amazed, and not just by the amount the curly-headed, boyish Hardcastle was able to drink without affecting his steadiness too much, but by how it mattered, not at all, how venomously entertaining and bitterly sarcastic Stanton became in the advice he gave. The schoolmaster wrote it all down.
‘What should I take?’ said Hardcastle. ‘At my new school, if I start one, I want to teach all the practical arts. With enough land, and the help of my friend Cribb, when he gets back his health, I’ll want to fence in a couple of fields, and show boys and girls how the mental and the physical spheres are one.’
Despite his promise to Bramley, this was a barb to a man of the cloth, which Stanton either ignored or didn’t understand.
‘Iron tools,’ said Stanton, ‘are the rarest commodity in the colony. Iron is worn as decoration by the most prominent men: I refer to ankle iron.’
‘What tools are most wanted?’
‘Hatchets, spades, axes, wedges, reaping hooks, sheep shears, locks, bolts, staples, latches, hold posts, scythes, saws, nails, screws, pots and pans. I did not say rakes, did I?’
‘Rakes,’ scribbled Hardcastle.
‘Take a few rakes, or they will disappear from under you.’
‘I have been learning and observing the habits of bees,’ said Hardcastle.
‘Anything that stings,’ nodded Stanton, ‘does well.’
‘Are square boxes used instead of straw hives, to keep them in?’
