The Ballad of Desmond Kale (22 page)

‘You will be safer there,' he whispered. ‘Do you understand?'

‘I am a seized bushranger,' Lehane boasted. ‘Your villains shall applaud me, when they hear.'

‘Something like it,' said Stanton. The preferable possibility was they would tear him limb from limb.

He walked with a hand on Lehane's shoulder, a gesture of consolation in captivity. Mick Tornley thought it as decent a show of shepherding as a bestial charlatan ever deserved from a flogging chaplain, and followed along to see what was done. He walked with his bullock led by the nose-ring past the homestead garden, past St Botolph's chapel, past the wool hall with its half shingled roof, belltower, and sheep yards ready for the week's shearing; and so down another dusty two hundred yards to the convict bond men's barracks on the Mundowey track, where Stanton's convict workers lived, under their overseer, Galvin.

The bullock bellowed and swayed. Tornley smacked its side with a whip handle. Lehane was led to the safety of the solitary punishment cell. The bond men were out mustering for the sheepwash and did not see him come in. Only the sergeant of convicts, Galvin, saw him secured. Galvin and a newly arrived shearer, Paul Lorenze, camped under a tree with a blanket, a quart pot, and awaiting the rest of his gang, who last time he saw them were washing their clothes in a mud puddle, and spreading them out on a banksia tree to dry.

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 — R
EVELATION
his source of knowledge in the molten fountain of F
AITH
.

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.'

Arthur seemed to accept whatever his father wanted for him. At the same time, Warren rather sadly guessed that this family had a way of understanding each other, not quite by hand signals, never exactly by looks, hardly even by codes of speech but somehow easily done. It might be by agreement of love — that's what it might be — but say whatever it was, Warren was quite outside the circle of its easy grip while wanting to come in. He had never seen a keener look on the face of a young man, to do what was suggested in the way of skipping off with a new mate and getting an eyeful of filthy water he knew nothing about, except what Warren had already sketched to discourage him.

‘Sure I'll come,' Arthur said, snatching up his blanket, tying a string to his fiddle case and throwing it across his back, looking around for his hat. ‘And if you teach me what you know about wool, I'll drown as many sheep as you want.'

Warren saw the affection of a glance passing to his father, who nodded slowly like a sage, so deep a rejoinder you had to be wise yourself to see it.

‘That's what I like about him,' said Joe. ‘Ain't nobody more willing than Arf. We all agree, me and my boy and my wifey who is coming out to meet you in a minute or I'll say she's rude — that Joe Josephs is your flash expert on silver plate and whether your diamonds is glass, but I have been gulled by wool experts. On our last foray into the bush that was way beyond the coal river, fighting floods and fires and thieving jackasses, I come back with a golden load of trash, for when it was examined and weighed they told me it was only good for stuffing in the roof of a house. They would not let it leave the country, even on a empty ship, of which there was never a one, thanks to this here wool rush that is on. Whether it is my eyesight or what, but I would say I was in the wrong country
by bad choice, except I have my son to depend on for fleeces now, and it might get better.'

Joe startled with a yell — ‘Marfa!'

A short wide woman jumped out from a rumple of firelight and acknowledged her husband with a passing scowl:

‘Choice. That's a good word. We was never anywhere by
choice
, Joe.' She turned to Warren. ‘He is the one that got me lagged for him, when he was already in irons on the filthy Thames, making me his fence without me knowing it, by having passed into my hands, by his cronies, a load of argentry, candlesticks, candelabra, and ancestral plate — not that the judge believed me, love, though I rouged meself scarlet and wiggled my little finger at him, like I seen others done, to get meself a better man than the one that'd led me astray.'

As she spoke, Martha Josephs looked up at Warren from a humorous brown face fringed by greying brown curly hair. She was like a stout pot with a stone on its lid, that gave intense rattles with steam shooting out, every time she spoke. She was the one who gave Arthur his nose, you might say, from hers that was like a jug handle. The excitement of her conversation hit Warren direct, as she thrust her forehead to get against his, to get a hearing from him, and grabbed hard to his elbow and fingered his funny bone, and stepped on his toes as well. Then she grabbed both his cheeks and pinched them hard, muttering ‘luffly boy' before spitting over her shoulder. As he reeled back from her aim, almost to the edge of the fire, she followed him and broke off her attention, bending over and juggling quart pots, sweating over the fierce hot bed of coals as if she had an argument with them for doing what they were wanted to do, throwing up heat. ‘We was both transported — what a lovely voyage we had, on two different ships, me with two of me children,
Arthur and Leah. Our little Solly was the one that was native born because when we arrived, look who was already here waiting on the dockside to fold me in the arms of love — my avid trader with the scabs of ankle irons still on his narrer leg bones — poor creature, me loving Joe Josephs. Seeing as he can't lie straight in bed, we took to this life of sleeping on the ground, to make ourselves a better reputation.'

‘I takes off me hat to her,' said Joe.

‘And what is this now?' Martha Josephs shrilly demanded to know of her son. ‘Where are you going to, Artie?'

‘Not far at all, most likely?' said the boy, with a glance at Warren, who said:

‘To the sheep yards of Laban Vale. There's a long walk in it, but we shall make it sooner if we stride off early. We'll grab a few hours' sleep on the floor of our hut. It is not a bad sort of a bed, the beaten earth. Our cook will wake us with tea and cold mutton chops enough to make us sink in the sheepwash, and we won't be hungry till noon.'

‘Three shillings,' said Arthur, turning to his father, ‘is the last of my debt. When it is paid,' he turned back to Warren, ‘and he gives me what he is holding for me, which if it ain't broken in its box of straw, and there is enough sheep to wash for my money, you will be the most amazed sheep handler that ever drew greasy breath to hear it sing.'

‘What is it?'

‘That would be bad luck to tell, in case the waggon tips. I don't even hardly dare express it in my dreams. But it's —'

‘A harmonica,' said his mother.

‘Ma, I wish you wouldn't say,' said Arthur.

‘I have heard a harmonica,' said Warren, ‘played by an Irish man
and all the best tunes played he pulled with his lungs making the notes. It was like a honeycomb, played along his tongue. We cried tears for old Erin as he sucked and blew.'

Though what old Erin was, Warren had little idea, except it was easy to cry for.

‘That shows what you know,' said Joe's mother, ‘because this harmonica of Art's ain't no mouth organ — it is a model made in Bohemia, by a relative of ours, Herr Josip, and it don't look like notting you could put in your mouth, young man, unless you was a glass-eating dragon. It is a hinstrument consisting of a row of emispherical glasses fitted on an haxis turned by a treadle and dipping into a trough of water, played by the happlication of a finger. It is so delicate the glasses are likely to break.'

‘Thank you, Ma,' said Arthur, who even though he was the one who saved the shillings to pay for what had been sent across the seas, he was not allowed to keep the pleasure of telling all to himself until the right moment. His pride was great but his mother's pride in him was greater, though she seemed she might consume him on the way to expressing it, and have nothing left of him to boast about.

‘We are all walking on feathers for you, Art,' said a voice from over the way.

Warren saw the girl emerge from under the waggon, straighten herself and stand with her back erect against a high waggon wheel. She placed her hands on the small of her back and eased her pain from crouching by leaning back and thrusting her chin at the sky. He expected her to come closer, and she came a few paces, but they were as close to the fire as she seemed to want to come, over there in the starlight. She had a disguised difficulty to her walk, something she wanted to hide, a lurch and it seemed to be that lameness
holding her back. She drew a shawl over her head against the night air, pulled it down to her chin, fingered it getting the folds over her throat. In the firelight her eyes shone dark in Warren's direction without any movement in them, just a long, soft, shining stare like the pull of the moon when it was already way down.

‘Leah, this is our new chum, Warren Inchcape, of Laban Vale,' said Joe.

‘Pleased to meet with you, new chum,' said Leah.

‘Hello,' croaked Warren, feeling very small.