The Ballad of Desmond Kale (40 page)

‘THERE IS A GOOD FLOCK, you know,' said a voice at Stanton's ear, ‘upon the king's lawns.'

‘Yes, well, you are quite right, of royal merinos —' Stanton turned, saw who addressed him, and said, ‘my lord' — then lowered his voice. He would agree to anything at all in the face of one of his betters. But only for a suitable pause.

‘I was talking to the king's cowman, then,' said Stanton. ‘His merinos don't do well, a blind man from Botany Bay could have told him so. I'll stake my walking stick of berryergro-box-tree wood on that; by the look in his eyes when he praised them, they are,' and he tapped the stick knob against the lord's sash buckle, ‘rotted, cottled, and mottled in the staple.'

Bramley turned to Cribb and raised his eyebrows. ‘Are you going to make him known?'

‘The Reverend Matthew Stanton,' Cribb bowed, ever so slightly, as he made the introduction, ‘senior chaplain of Botany Bay.'

‘I am only a simple farmer,' said Stanton. Neither man knew what this meant, except he looked more like one, with his clerical garb awry, than he did a minister of God.

‘I have heard of your wools,' said Bramley, who was a tall, plain-looking man of around forty, with straight black hair and an expression of innocent, enthusiastic surprise. He would always be called ‘young Bramley' even on his deathbed which would not come, surely, until he was around ninety-nine. He was alert as a heron standing in marshland, narrow as a sapling from ankle to chin, with a sharp nose and supple, expressive fingers.

Stanton smiled, squeezing his eyes into rolls of whitish fat, in what seemed a friendly way to the charitably inclined, among whose number Bramley seemed unaccountably to be declaring himself belonged!

‘So you've “heard of my wools”?' said Stanton.

‘Indeed.'

‘There's only one person might have told you,' preened Stanton. ‘He's tight as a clam, except I think he knows my valuable best wool intimately, sir, as you hint, and as I say, quite as close as he once knew my wife — in other circumstances.'

This was fairly astounding! And fearlessly droll.

Bramley was trained up to Cribb's stories of a few husbands' challenges, sometimes dangerous, sometimes sad, but he'd never heard of one so forthrightly put, so woefully out of tune with itself and wrongheadedly fearless either. Here at last was the unlikely evangelist who had won Cribb's love, Dolly Pringle — too many years gone by to count, and Cribb the loser in it, to his enduring heartache and wonder, and to Bramley's mystification, but then, he did not understand the human heart as well as he tried. Rather than gloss over the old affair, as Stanton was privileged to do, as any gentleman ought, the minister played the insulting fool by seeming to blame Cribb for his own victory! It was a ploy of original style leaving Bramley feeling definitely affectionate
towards Stanton, and Cribb oddly seemed to feel the same. It began Bramley thinking of a possible partner for his Botany Bay agricultural company nine-tenths launched: a foot on the ground with Cribb.

‘She chose the better man,' bowed Cribb.

‘That is for heaven to decide at the last trump,' answered Stanton, ‘as we are Christian people, depending altogether on what is written. Now I hear, before he makes his escape, sir, that Cribb is God driven as well.'

‘How so?' wondered Bramley, deciding that Stanton was both monstrously sarcastic and freakishly perceptive. For yes, Cribb could be said to be God driven, in his thinking; anyway his standards of reach were the ideals of creation. At the last trump the last sheep called in over the last hill of Blaise Cribb's world would be a mystical ram with its horns on fire.

‘In the committee rooms where none of our colonial parties were invited — I hear it was to the Lord God he gave credit for our achievements in Botany Bay. Isn't that right, my Lord Bramley? For weren't you there too? As a clergyman, I can hardly argue the point, but as a farmer, Cribb has injured my pride.'

Bramley was astounded. ‘The three of us might indeed have something to share,' he thought. ‘My capital, Stanton's knowledge of Botany Bay sheepwalks, and Cribb's peerless expertise plucked from the lip of the grave.' Looking at his friend tenderly, you might say, Bramley no longer believed that only a little more encouragement was needed and Cribb would agree taking the voyage to New Holland. Because it mattered not at all what Cribb thought, his health gave no alternative. Bramley would exercise his power and organise the sailing, and if need be have Cribb delivered to the ship in an invalid's chair and placed aboard by marshals. Would he
survive the voyage? Death's door was behind Cribb where a beauty lurked — that young woman who'd come around asking after the Lloyd Thomases, and Bramley had told her to go away. But she wouldn't go away. Now Bramley had seen how Cribb stared at her showing what life was in him yet.

‘As I recall, I gave God credit, yes,' said Cribb, ‘to a high degree, as one must, for his creatures.'

It could not be put less pompously! — unless Cribb went back and reinstated the edge of sarcasm he'd given the credit in the committee room.

‘Amen to that,' said Bramley. ‘You are far gone, my friend. Take my arm.'

‘To which I say “amen”,' said Stanton intrusively, and hurried on. ‘While I am loathe to bother you further, Cribb, yet I must say — if you will forgive me before his lordship — for the reason that it is written that the Lord helps those who help themselves, I beg of you to answer: what opinion do you make of my very latest lot of wools? They came on the
Edinburgh Castle
, that slow-going East Indiaman she drove us quite insane, being short-sailed through having miserly owners and rotten spars, overtaken by a pair of vessels that left Port Jackson after we did, one of the ships bearing the sacked governor, Sir Colin Wilkie.'

‘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 impres
sion 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.