The Ballad of Desmond Kale (41 page)

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?'

‘You would have to say so. With iron bars, too.'

‘I once took the trouble to learn shoemaking. I can sew and heel shoes,' said Hardcastle, ‘and can sew patches on. I have leather lasts and tools. As I expect we shall be some miles from any town this will be a great saving of money and trouble, and my boy can help me.'

‘Boots to kick and trample are the thing,' said Stanton.

‘Captain Rankine took a tent,' said Hardcastle, looking up from his page.

‘Did he? I never heard of tents belonging to a man of that stripe.'

‘Well, it was a large one, sent after him, fifteen feet by fifteen with a central pole, lightning rod, and other proper supports. It was erected in a field and bought in complete order. It looked like a cottage with the sides perpendicular, and when sheep ran against it, they couldn't knock it down.'

‘If there's a Rankine,' said Stanton, looking lofty, but troubled, ‘I would say he lives somewhere more solid now. More like a
palace of stone, with a grim roof, and those bars of iron that are indispensable to the quality of advancement where you are going, young man.'

‘You mean he's a prisoner?'

Stanton looked thumpingly glum.

‘I would not know. I do not know. How should I know? Do not ask me.'

THE SICK MAN, CRIBB, AT the centre of a vortex of energetic emigrational enterprise, resolved that when he regained his strength he would oppose his friends; but more and more, in the weeks that followed his collapse, he saw that opposing was only an attitude, a hollow defence. Life lay in agreement and the agreement in this matter was life — to the best chance Cribb had of it, at least. Hardcastle was playing his part with Bramley relishing his position as organiser of enterprises — through his powers of thoroughness, concentration, and unlimited funds.

Hardcastle returned from his meeting with Stanton not much wiser about the needs of a rational colonist, but convinced of Stanton's irrationality. Hardcastle's head whirled from drinking strong ale without any steak and kidney pie to bed his senses down. In the kitchen, where Bramley took food standing up, the two men went over the news about Rankine being imprisoned. So Rankine was in trouble. Cribb should know. They went upstairs and told the Cribbs what they had learned. The sick man listened, absorbing the possibility that a severer form of justice had been dealt to Rankine in the remote geography of exile. Improbably worse than
Cribb's daydreams of revenge. Bramley decided that with no more information being squeezed from Stanton, he would make a call on the returned governor, Sir Colin Wilkie, in lodgings at Chelsea, and take him a gift of best highland whisky, to which he was said to be fatally addicted as an antidote to the shame of being recalled.

The talk of Rankine at last being called to pay for his blithe existence changed Cribb's thinking, as he faced what lay ahead. Just as much, it was the distressed young woman of dusty pale beauty who caused a swerve of direction.

After the vision of Ivy's loveliness and a few feverish lusting hallucinations, came the vision of her life as it truly was, as worth his interest, for her life was something desperate, frightening and fraught. It had all been revealed in that minute when they sat together with hardly any words and certainly no confession that she was how many weeks gone with child, except what feeling showed to be true — what Cribb rapidly deduced. If Cribb was wrong in this reading of her barely restrained alarm, his experience of life went nowhere.

As Cribb had given her Bramley's address and promised aid of whatever vague sort, it was good that one day she came around to Bramley's house in desperation that was not without curiosity and spirit. The Hardcastles were arrived and well settled when she knocked on the door and was received, and Rosalind was presented to her — Rosalind taking one look at her and loving her, asking to see her every day. Rosalind learned from Ivy that her parents mistrusted even a good woman's maid as company for their daughter, and if there was to be any going out Rosalind herself would have to call for Ivy, at least at their beginning, which with some enthusiasm and no persuasion, she did, and brought Ivy back to Bramley's house many times.

There was a back door, a front door, and a side door enabling Ivy to come and go without encountering those she wished to avoid, two of whom, it might be guessed, were soon to be her parents cultivating Lord Bramley and investigating Cribb as hard as they could — but never at the same minute if it could be contrived, as the two were so at odds. While Parson Stanton sought Bramley, Mrs Stanton would look out for Cribb.

Ivy told Rosalind everything she needed to know in desperate confidence while Cribb at the top of the stairs learned some of it. The comet of purpose that watched over Cribb's life swung down its lanigerous tail and brushed him with a better sort of understanding. Rosalind saw the understanding in Cribb and liked it in a man she had often despaired of ever liking for his fickleness. Though she said: ‘Mightn't she almost have been your daughter, in a swerve of life's chances?'

Cribb agreed, having soon learned whose daughter she really was. But there was no helping it. He would wait.

Dolly Stanton came up the stairs one day, carrying a bowl of lamb shank's broth, mooned with yellow fat, and after settling a stool at Cribb's bedside, spooned broth to Cribb's lips as if he were her ailing child. When the napkin was folded and the spoon put away they talked of old acquaintances living and dead, and things went on so ordinarily fine they might only have known each other well enough, and not too passionately, on a distant day, except Dolly was still slightly crazed in the force of her feelings: for wasn't it like her, to appear at Bramley's door encumbered, and burst in with her quart pots of broth, practically swimming with secrets? — none of which she spilled, but the whole house was beginning to know them.

Each day when the Stantons left after making their calls, Cribb, Hardcastle and Rosalind decided on various stratagems to save Ivy.

Their greatest question was wondering if she was safe, not from her parents and society — but as to the likelihood of drowning herself in the Thames or drinking prussic acid. It helped she was colonial born with robustness reassuring to know. She was a young girl of forthright certainty and out of hardship extremes appeared to have grown into something finer. Hardcastle and Rosalind made no judgements of how she was fallen in sin, through Hardcastle's rational theories of passion, that held our bodies were to be enjoyed and the consequences accepted as rational enough. It helped that Ivy was Dolly Pringle's daughter in boldness, said Cribb. It helped that now Ivy — as she related in tears — in placing herself at the mercy of two spiteful spinsters, Catherine and Jessica Lloyd Thomas and their gambling nephew, David Lloyd Thomas, brother of the rakish Valentine, had experienced despicable contempt and slammed doors guarded by unfriendly footmen, and concluded that nothing worse could happen to her.

And so it helped she was thrown back on her parents, to tell them the truth. It helped that the truth she told them was not accepted by them, or if it was, for an interval of disbelieving shock and shame, it was only to collect their thoughts and wonder aloud: ‘What if the child she is having — God save us — is not fathered by Lloyd Thomas as she swears, but by Titus, a black boy?'

 

In the Bramley house it was a daily topic to wonder what material the parents were hammered from. An impression of Parson Stanton emerged as quite monstrously peculiar in the thoughts and deeds he planted on others, including his own daughter.

One day when Lord Bramley went to the ship he made enquiries of Captain Maule, asking what stamp of passenger Stanton had
been, on that vessel, before it changed owners. Bramley found Maule downright uncomfortable and not forthcoming at all. Maule being a good man and true, this was enough of an answer for Bramley to persist with enquiries: and so he set to work putting together the story of the voyage pretty much as it was known to the rest of them coming over. By the time Bramley finished working his investigation on first mate, second mate, the rest of the officers and a few of the remaining men, there was hardly a detail of the business overlooked. He was left with an account of two shepherd boys catapulted into the service of the sea, one of them whipped around decks until he finally leaped overboard, and the other following him into the shades of Brazil. Bramley's opinion of Stanton by then was fairly low, but he continued allowing him to visit his house and quizzing him on sheep husbandry.