The Ballad of Desmond Kale, page 40
‘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.
IT WAS ENOUGH TO KILL decent people stone dead, Ivy’s news. But Stanton and Dolly would survive it, Ivy believed, because while holding themselves to be decent people all through, and going about accordingly among good Christians and bad, the two of them, her parents, were not at all so very decently inclined at all. Their daughter knew it about them better than anyone: unseemliness was their saving grace in regard to her predicament — impropriety the undercurrent of their virtue. She’d learned it from them only to improve on it over them, to make of it something more honest, because they did not know it very well of themselves, if at all. She hardly knew she pitied them this way more than fearing them. She would not go as far as what she’d heard them called. The father tyrannical fool, the mother foolish tyrant. Insupportable labels to bear. Horribilis crumpet was far enough.
Torment came out fairly naked and supported them better than prayer, when her father was without his whips, her mother without her servants, without her saddle horses prancing about like demons, and without their boy Titus to practise passions on. They trod the London stage of their choosing, horribilously roused. While they raged, wept, and asked what was to become of them, they became what they always were, only more so.
At last Stanton got up from his knees and a pointlessness of prayer, wiped his mouth of spittle, and decided theologically speaking what experience showed: that God was not interested in New South Wales, the Devil was, and very much so and should have his own patch entirely. One day Stanton started to say such things as, ‘When I was a good Christian I did so and so, and so on.’ When he heard himself he wept, and after weeping, smiled.
In preparation for the Devil knew what, only with his mind cleared of doubts, Stanton went to a gunsmith and purchased himself a pair of small, fine pistols. One, the larger, he kept in a walnut case under his bed. The other, the smaller more personal of the pair, he carried in his coat pocket where it made a bulge hardly more noticeable than a pottle of brandywine.
They moved from their church quarters into lodgings nearby. It was a small but quite clean house that was going for six weeks renewable, complete with a maid and a man, and was fairly affordable to a minister whose bank account made him a wealthier cleric than any he’d met in the county of his birth or those adjoining, before leaving to minister to convicts. It was all scrimp and save and put aside with country parsons and theirs, even among those who hunted to hounds in the week and had barely the time for their prayers on Sundays.
From a small window Stanton viewed up and down the busy street. Some days he stood there twitching the curtains for hours. He wondered, as he studied the lewd, deprived faces of passersby, what he would do if any one of his principal enemies turned up. It was mostly a speculation but fed his anger pretty well. Would he ask them to turn their backs before firing, or would he shoot them honestly in the face? If they all came at once would it be too many for his pistols which were double-barrelled — he knew it was fancy matter, but flexed his fingers — seeing that the count of betrayers whose lives were forfeit to his brainstorm amounted to a good few more than he listed when he left Parramatta. There was Kale to the fore, there was Captain Rankine, Paolo Moreno alias Paul Lorenze, Clumpsy M’Carty, and Warren Inchcape, of sorry fame, together with Titus Stanton — fled — and Commander Valentine Lloyd Thomas and a few other hangers-on to a young woman’s freshness of beauty who’d raked their eyes over Ivy quite blatantly lustful including the arrogant Blaise Henry Cribb.
There was a limit to alteration, however. Unseemly as Stanton and his wife were, unseemly as everything in their lives had become, they pretty soon decided they could not have a grandchild out of wedlock. That was understood between them. Dolly was never one to vent rage like her husband but in this they were welded back into their marriage vows as one.
‘Suffer, suffer, suffer,’ she cried.
They decided the ragamuffin sinner their daughter whose defiance was quite heart-rending, was inventing her encounter with the lieutenant commander inspector advocate to give grandiloquence to her fall. From Stanton’s description of when he found her under the jolly boat with Titus feeling up to her waistband there was little left to imagine. Ivy did not deny it, you see, neither did she confirm, but sat with her hands in her wilful green lap allowing the little bows in her hair to droop all awry, the slackened curl of an overlooked, abandoned temptress’s sorry locks sticking to her cheek with cold sweat. Altogether their Ivy matched a blowsy image of what she could very well become, in this life, having made a start early on a path of debauch. Unprotected experience had begun for her early — when never at all would have been early enough.
‘You must never go back to Botany Bay,’ said her father — banging his hard stick on the floor and saying never, never to the ghost of a dear gone persuasive child, who’d played out her wiles in a game of consequences, and was now, for the first time! come under his fidgety consideration for a thrashing — from one end of their rented house to the other if he could be sure it wouldn’t be heard by the servants.
‘Certainly we can’t go back there. How could we?’ said her mother. There was one consolation in it. Dolly was at least pleased that her argument to stay in England longer wouldn’t have to be put. It was won by Ivy being enjoyed which she daren’t picture, except with an arm over her eyes. Yet where might they go? It could not be to Yorkshire and several villages of righteous cousins on both sides. There the ancestors of this problem spark dusted their leather-bound Bibles thrice daily and read hard lessons. They had waited almost eighteen years to bless her, they could wait one more! Something would have to be said to explain that delay for eight months or seven until the infant was out, and then, after due search for a good family, taken away from them. It was an area of experience where Dolly shone, the gathering up and farming out of sucklings. And she was sure she meant it, too.
‘Mother?’
‘I have spoken.’
‘Father?’
‘It must be.’
London was a vast, anonymous place, her parents agreed, heads together plotting. Together in want they had always plotted best. When they found their agreement, their truest, strongest marriage was in the creaking bed of pleasure where much if not all was forgotten for minutes apace.
Ivy could hardly disagree that London was where to hide, having traipsed the streets bewildered until she was spurned as a liar by the Lloyd Thomases and saved by Rosalind Hardcastle instead. London was a maze and a thicket, that wondrous dirty town, and if a girl went through the streets with a shawl wrapped around her and a belly getting bigger, who was to care? Already a few old wives sensed it on her, not from her size, but from her desperate pride — it meant only one thing apart from her being a colonial, and so she had nosegays thrust into her hands, wishing her well. They were formed of the daffodils and snowdrops coming in as spring peeped out a warmer eye before shutting it away again. Who could ever be ashamed of due pride? It was something to take anywhere. And so she had returned it, day after day, knocking on the door of Lord Bramley’s house in her mood of courageous abandon; there to be greeted by Rosalind, that energetic, pretty woman of thirty, with golden hair, red cheeks, blue eyes, and greatly mischievous smile. Of the friendship, her parents hoped for the best. Her virtue was no longer a question among Christians let alone freethinkers. After all Ivy could hardly be ruined twice.
Dolly’s mind went racing ahead. ‘We can take rooms in Hampstead, say, and allow we are from the West Indies. I have heard of ladies from there, whose grandfathers were slave owners, and there is a taint they talk about, which is shameful, of course, but of such high colour it’s almost a distinction of shame to be born into it. Or to have a child coloured so. They are good church people, too. Necessity has made me used to hard work,’ she added, ‘if need be.’
‘No need,’ said Stanton sternly, as if it was her fault; he’d provided for her over the years, and still was able.
‘Remember I was born to something else, in a small cottage of weavers and ewe milkers,’ said Dolly. ‘See what I made on the voyage, that turned our daughter so vain. My fingertips are callused with sewing it all. If it wasn’t Titus she loved, green is the colour of a grown man’s envious lust and he wanted what wore it, uncaring as a ram.’
She wept. Stanton comforted her with an arm around. It did little good. But he left it there, dangling.
Dolly thought: ‘This will ruin his respectability and his believability for the final time, they are already rough used, but when we get back to the colony — thank God — everything will be the same if there is no child to justify. I am respected enough. Matthew is often enough disliked, but he does get ahead. He is my strength and keeper. He must get a London parish for a year and bury himself in good works. We shall make forays to Yorkshire separately, satisfying our obligations there. We have the money to keep us while the other one of us keeps watch over Ivy.’
SIR COLIN WILKIE’S LONDON ROOMS were located in a meanly furnished house, close to the river, that Wilkie’s aide-de-camp complained about as below his general’s needs, but that the returning governor assured his visitor would do.
‘I am a great despiser of comforts,’ said Wilkie, ‘having slept enough nights in heather, wrapped in plaid, with icicles formed on the tip of my speculative nose, having my preferences hardened into a vanity of roughness.’
Rotting stained walls, shaky stairs, flaking gilt cornices and a mouldy cellar were small inconveniences after a lifetime of living rough. And this was not even to begin listing his times of campaigning in the Peninsular War, where a staff officer’s billets were as good as they were found, and mostly open to the weather. Wilkie, he told Bramley, had served in Spain with the 88th Foot, later 1st Battalion Connaught Rangers, dubbed by General Picton ‘the Devil’s Own’.
