The Ballad of Desmond Kale, page 43
‘Rum, tobacco,’ said a man, grabbing hold of Titus between the legs, and shoving him up against a stanchion, twisting his cods to extract favours, ‘what more does a man want?’ Titus laughed and pushed him away with a hand in his face:
Jack dances and tsings, Jack is always content,
In his vows to his lass he wurrunt failer;
His anchor’s atrip when his coin’s all tspent,
Eeow! tis the life of a tsailor.
It was what he’d learned in the Stanton’s parlour and sung in his fine soprano before his voice deepened, when he’d never seen the sea, nor could imagine what it was, unless like a flood on the biggest river, with treetops drawn into the currents and the only way to get around on the waters to kneel on a strip of bark lashed both ends.
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:
You lecherous whoremasters who practise vile arts,
To ruin young virgins and break parents’ hearts,
Or from the fond husband the wife lead astray —
Let such debauched stallions be sent to the Bay.
(‘Hooray!’)
There’s whores, pimps and bastards, a large costly crew
Maintained by the sweat of a labouring few,
They should have no commission, place, pension or pay,
Such locusts should all go to Botany Bay.
(‘Hooray!’)
Now should any take umbrage at what I have writ,
Or find here a bonnet or cap that will fit,
To such I have only this one word to say:
They are welcome to wear it at Botany Bay.
(‘Hooray!’)
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.
AS AN OFFERING TO HER parents whom she loved, feared, and had despoiled — but to whom there was no word of sorry to be said — Ivy Stanton went to her Bible one day, balanced it on her knee, opened it around five-sixths of the way through, and just as her father was busy mentally predicting which Gospel text she was likely to spout as justification of her deeds (but finding himself unable to, from the distaste of Christianity that had come upon him), she removed a bundle of envelopes from the box where she kept her Book and handed them over to him. There was an intense red coal of hostility in the gesture. The journal of her friend who promised to include details of interest to her father was just as likely to damage him.
‘What is this?’
‘They are my letters from Leah. They were in my Bible box and not even hidden.’ She could not resist asking: ‘Didn’t you look there?’
‘It did not cross my mind,’ he said honestly wicked, appreciatively surprised at himself, with something like his old playful smile from before they set out on their journey to perdition. ‘That body of text is inviolable to my thinking.’
It was the truth. He could not go there even for his own greatest advantage. ‘But what about these letters, my dear? What treasure is in them?’
‘Don’t spill anything,’ Ivy warned, as Stanton left the room to console himself with information.
When tipping the letters open, dried flowers and trickles of coloured earths fell from the bundles onto the writing table in the small side room, dried leaves like veined scimitars, fragile as thin smoked glass — twigs, pebbles, feathers, bird bones and a perfectly miniature snake’s skull cleaned of its flesh by ants and dried white in the sun. Stanton knew every word written would be true when he remembered the eyes of the writer, though when he began the first few sentences of Ivy’s letter cache there was a heightened excitement of vision that only passionate young ladies could express.
For, in Leah Josephs’s account of her life in the New South Wales bush, days were brighter, pace was brisker, nights were starrier. Intensity of attachment was revealed over many lurching weeks’ writing as a waggon proceeded west and south. In Leah’s cleverness of eye. In her rightness of words.
As soon as he could, Stanton closed the door and turned up the lamp to read the pages through, but reached only page two of the small, sloped, characterful handwriting in half an hour. All pages went across in one direction, left to right, and then covered themselves down over the top of what was already written to make the material fiddly to read, like a mesh of twigs. It was how postage and paper were saved but very frustrating. Where were Stanton’s hints and signs as promised if he saved Ivy from his fury? He hunted up and down the frugal lattice. Came through and out the other side of pages one and two. There were many good reasons for rage, now, but he would like to tell Leah Josephs that more was being done to save Ivy than could ever be imagined by her. So give him his secrets!
Upon reaching page three, a while later, Stanton heard the chimes of noon, ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, and went into the hall where the coats were hung. He buttoned his heaviest overcoat, found his warmest (and wornest) boots, checked for his pistol, tucked the letters in a pocket, and set off walking a good pace to the Drayman’s Inn where if any hostelry was comfortable for a livestock-raising country parson to make himself nameless among habitués of steaming dung and hairy hides, then this was the one in the whole of London.
Stanton looked around for the two quick boys he had in his pay. He met them there daily watching the front door and rear passage of the rooms where the cursed lawyer spent his mornings. A dropped key, an impression of one, a duplicate lifted, whatever. The boys reported that Ritchie rarely worked past two of the afternoon, and on days when he hurried to court with a jingle of keys he barely lingered in his office at all. Today was a Wednesday, a court day, and as Stanton settled himself to wait to hear if they had slipped themselves a lock springer, he said good day to his fellows and passed for one who belonged there, by right, a scabbed-looking rotund man from a butcher’s stockyard slaking a bloodied thirst and running fresh foam down his chin.
‘Good cheer to you, sir.’
‘And to you, my good friend.’
It even felt quite homely hearing the Irish brickmen call for their drinks: ‘Would your highness be after granting us a swallow of the craytur, on such a blustery miserable day as it is, beyond these hospitable walls?’
It occurred to Stanton’s battered morality that it rather suited him best of all, this life, standing with an open collar inhaling a farmyard stink in the centre of London. But of course he was not deprived of choice, as some were — his choices were only narrowed down a space, becoming more concentrated, like pitch. Pray they would take fire soon. He’d drunk Burton ale at the Salutation and Cat in Hand Court, but liked the Drayman’s better. He was in the grip of inevitable feeling and no more liable to question inevitable feeling than ever.
Benches in the stableyard allowed daylight to fall on Leah Josephs’s pages where Stanton took his pot of strong beer and flattened the creases with his forearm. Great heroine of the cobwebby-inked narrative was Meg Inchcape, daughter of a convict of old, wife of a convict of new. Rewarded by a mood of forgetfulness inspired by reading her name, Stanton reflected that if Rankine suffered, it pained him, but only through her. He even forgot for a time the crafty promise he’d extracted from the author of the letter. Forgot that his craftiness asked for Leah Josephs’s craftiness in reply, crosswise through Ivy, and if it was not given, he would burst a bag of blood and take what was wanted!
