The Ballad of Desmond Kale, page 41
‘Lord Bramley,’ bowed Wilkie, accepting a pint bottle of the Athol brose Bramley handed him as a gift. He asked his servant to draw the cork and leave the room. Then he raised his glass to the light. ‘It is a good drink for a Scot to taste in the morning.’ The Athol brose was a mixture Bramley had his man prepare. It was made from old whisky, strained honey and sweet cream beaten together in a certain order and in the correct proportions. Men had been known to fight to keep drinking it after being offered their first glass.
After taking a lick, Wilkie continued his theme of tolerance. ‘I have in recent times taken a few damned roistering tours around the prison colony of New South Wales, seeing how it might improve, until the imperatives of my position and not so much the privations of living caught me out. Nobody was willing to live rougher, in that heel end o’the world, and I would not have slept under canvas, either, except a charming captain of rangers convinced me it was better for my aching bones. Later, when I thought about his extreme fastidiousness on my behalf — coming and going and proving he never went anywhere — why, and seducing my handsomest laundrymaid away from me — it came as a warning, and I began to have him watched. There was an outrage involving sheep, and the Irishman, Kale, offensive to every faction of opinion except the prison gangs’. Even after his being watched I trusted him like a son. Will ye take a wee dram of the Athol brose?’
It was ten in the morning as Bramley accepted a brimming glass, and said to the yellow-haired Scot:
‘Might that same captain have been —’ but Wilkie cut him off with a raised hand. Bramley was about to ask, might that same captain have been the one arrested by the ministering magistrate, Stanton, and sent to perish in Van Diemen’s Land? But he would come to it soon enough, as it preyed on his plans.
With a patient expression, like a grazing old horse, looking this way, and that, Wilkie said:
‘I would rather talk about principles than give out names, until I am sure of your protection, sir. Then I shall be glad to confide in you more about the venal factions eating away at my good name, hungrier than the white ants of Parramatta. There is to be a committee of enquiry over my administration, and I need a friend before the table, speaking on my behalf, as I have very few friends left to me any more. Major Agnew is here to do his damnedest. I don’t trust many since the new governor was sent.’
Then Wilkie finally admitted, with a defeated air: ‘While I am happy with the roof over my head, whatever the condition, it tells you I am yesterday’s man, and that is a humiliation.’
‘Where there is talk of livestock,’ said Bramley, ‘I am often called down from Yorkshire, and believe it’s my duty towards His Majesty to oblige. There is much to do over sheep at Botany Bay. I have reasons for asking. Are they the cause of the outrage you mention, committed by that officer you resent, against his own kind? I know the officers all have em, and aren’t they all set against each other over sheep? Are you a herdsman yourself, Sir Colin?’
‘I am a soldier plain and true. The great set against me concerns men as cattle.’ Wilkie narrowed his pale-lashed eyes, apparently willing to go further, now, in the direction Bramley led. ‘In a place of cruel punishments I was regarded as lenient, having invited improved convicts, emancipists, Irish balladeers and ticket o’leave birds to my dinner table as equals. This despite daily floggings and hangings proceeding around me apace. I have signed away hanged men, aye, and women too, and ordered them lashed for all manner of evils, for arson, rape, forgery, buggery, burglary or house breaking in the night-time, housebreaking in the daytime, shoplifting above five shillings, stealing linen from bleaching grounds, stealing sheep and killing sheep maliciously. Y’see, as a Scot, I am a child of the enlightenment, which favours instruction, but as a loyal servant of the king, I am an agent of calibrated punishment. That is the reason I was recalled — as you see me before you, wiping my tears — each and every day a conflict of duty most intolerable to my masters, in their rule books, but to me in my heart. Then at the end I was enraged, and used all the authority I had to bring a man viciously to heel, although I am not sorry. I want you to know that I am not sorry.’
‘I understand. You are not sorry. That is clear but it is the only matter that is clear, Sir Colin.’ Bramley frowned enquiringly and threw back his heady mixture. ‘Who was it you brought to heel, now, can we get to that man?’
Without yet answering Wilkie poured him another, and a larger one for himself, which brimmed over onto the table top, making a brown stain, causing Wilkie to lament under his breath: ‘Ochone.’
The two men did some staring into vacant space as a servant came into the room and cleaned up the sticky spilt drink, Wilkie tugging at his untidy hair to busy the silence, Bramley severely smoothing his stockings at the knee. Bramley was a man of compassion to the extent that he disliked having his conscience pricked. As a landlord of forty thousand acres, and sitting locally as a magistrate, he often had cause to be quite as severe as Wilkie lamented.
The servant backed out a pair of closing doors. Wilkie glared after him and raised his voice an octave:
‘He is no doubt listening, being in the pay of the colonial secretary, may he profit from the nonsense I am peddling you, Lord Bramley.’
‘I am interested to know your opinion of Parson Stanton,’ said Bramley, as they took their glasses over to the window, and talked more confidingly. ‘You see, I wonder whether to join Stanton as a partner, when applying for land in New South Wales.’
‘If he’s not mad, you must be so for considering it.’
‘You think him a doubtful prospect, then?’
‘He is not certifiably insane,’ said Wilkie, ‘I’ve had that looked into by a medical wise head; but he resists careful definition of soundness, by all standards except those of his livestock keeping.’
‘He seems near to weeping over the smallest matters,’ said Bramley. ‘Then he peers out at you, red of eye, to check his advantage. Everything is needful to him in a particular light. I wish that understanding people wasn’t required. He challenges understanding. There is a nakedness to his feelings under the skin, but what are those feelings worth?’
‘Like an owl without feathers,’ said Wilkie, ‘who won’t admit he’s no longer covered, and hoots the day long.’
‘Were you ever so close to him?’ said Bramley.
‘I was, at first, through his tremendous obsequiousness and his wife’s species of charm, which I was rather more drawn to than to his, for it seemed more on fire in the seat of the passions than self-servingly righteous and interfering. We got along well enough until Stanton discovered I was a reformer, that I spoke the Irish tongue through command of Scots’ Gaelic. He was very suspicious of my meaning when I played the pipes. He went around saying I played a little spring in a very ranting manner, as if the force of an opinion carried the logic of a dislike. Yet my first six months there he called me his friend. I could noo get through a day without he or his wife calling in, leaving a mutton ham for my table or requesting some concession or other, which I was glad to sign over. Importation of horses was always on her mind, as much as his was on rams. They had lockfast chests of trade goods, meant for cannibals, which I believe they sold at a profit to smallholders who desperately wanted nutmeg graters and pretty paint boxes to brighten their huts. Conscience walks a wide path in that land, my lord. I’d barely completed my first six months’ rounds of inspection and made out my reports — the tenor of reports that finally brought me down — when Stanton led a case before me, asking the limit of fifty lashes be lifted from a magistrate’s orders. I certainly refused him and would have taken away his power of the lash altogether, had I the reach. While limited to fifty, he worked an art of renewing the lash for a separate offence the next day, or the day after it more, when the scabs were still fresh, and if the offender had information he wanted, it suited him to extract a confession by this means. Always at arm’s length, mind — he’s sworn never to attend a flogging for fear of letting emotion intrude, has my quondam friend.’
‘That is wise, his hide being thick with exposed feeling.’
‘At a quarterly church parade, that Stanton insisted was required to preach governors — under orders he brought with him to the colony many years past, that none of us wanted kept up but he saw no reason to stop — he exceeded good manners as a mark of righteousness, and made me out to be a devil through analogy. It was done with heavy humour. He winkled out that my two regiments were both called the Devil’s Own, you see. As a young man, before I went to the 88th Foot, I was adjutant of a territorial unit called the Inns of Court Rifles. Because it consisted mainly of lawyers, and some good Scots lawyers, the king called us the Devil’s Own as a piece of humour against clever attorneys. The strange effect was, that the wilder the parson raged in his pulpit the more his portrait of the Devil resembled himself. Holding a mirror to hatred he sees his own face. There he is, at the trick of exposing himself naked, that you observed so wisely, scouring me while he scourged himself, and rousing as much pity as amazement. Something about him suggests, och, merit through a debasement of what he stands for. That is about all, and why that is almost worth something, is a mystery that annoys me at the same time as it very reluctantly prevents me from dismissing him utterly to hell. His destructiveness has one undeclared object — himself. And it sustains him. Carries him on. There have been times when I’ve wanted him hung. I think it shall happen, too, before he’s much older. Then he will be complete.’
‘I can’t have a partner on the gibbet,’ said Bramley, closing his fingers over his glass while Wilkie gestured an offer of more, and then helped himself quite generously. ‘Thank you for this warning, anyway. He’s become a regular caller at our house. We are all colonial sheep experience men, of a sudden, lapping up knowledge. We do pump him for facts.’
‘You’ll find no better in flocks.’
Wilkie stared at his glass, asking the question a drinker will beg — a little mair? — and then to sip its peaty medicine, almost reluctantly, as a deserved treat. ‘Weel weel, as you are a livestock man, Bramley, you might do worse. He is conceded best sheep breeder in the colony with the exception of the man at large, Kale, who was his convict shepherd and his bosom friend, when they were all younger, starving for bread and grinding meal from wattle seeds, in the early years of famine.’
‘Kale, I remember being told,’ said Bramley, ‘was the author of Cribb’s most remarkable fleece.’
‘Stanton would rage to hear it,’ said Wilkie. ‘Now did I tell ye: she, I declare — Dolly Stanton — tried to rid me of two little children I fathered by different mothers — all four of whom, mothers and bairns, are now in this house drinking chocolate in the kitchen below stairs. I am proud to claim them as my own, by warrant of the love I bear them.’
The topic of children made Wilkie sentimental, as he wiped away a tear. He was drunk and they had still not arrived at where Bramley wanted to have him.
BRAMLEY WAS NEVER A DRINKING man, and found, as the clock struck eleven, that the dim light entering Wilkie’s poor sitting room broke into crystal points and inexplicably exploded with a quiet, nauseating puff, making it difficult for him to focus his eyes. Wilkie rang the bell and ordered up coffee. The house being near the river, the muds of low tide mingled their smells with the aroma of the brew when it was presented and poured.
‘Do go on,’ Bramley encouraged, when his senses were more settled.
‘Stanton’s obsequiousness when he petitioned a ship more than anything turned my stomach,’ said Wilkie. ‘I refused him a long time. Then I was mickle pleased to get him one with a good captain, but a leaky bottom.’
‘That ship, Edinburgh Castle, let me tell you,’ said Bramley with a bright, defensive smile, ‘is done over snug as a walnut shell and lies in the Thames near Shadwell Basin, and its new owner, for a voyage to Botany Bay, I am pleased to tell you, is the man who sits before you.’
‘Is she still under Captain Maule?’
‘The same.’
‘Then she will do all right. And so will you, Lord Bramley, if you listen hard. Speak for me at Westminster, how I stood for common sense, and I think I may be more useful to you than Parson Stanton shall ever be.’
‘On the question of land for sheep?’
‘I should very much hope so. My career may be over, but I have a resource. I know this much about you, you were born a Tory and became a Whig, through open thinking. You keep in your household a radical dominie, Hardcastle, and his wee wife, Rosalind, who’s from the Borders? You cannot say nae to me on account of heart. For you have one, Bramley, while you strain to keep it hidden. There is also the greatest wool man that ever lived, that you care about, Blaise Henry Cribb, whose life and fortune you are bent on saving by getting him to a dry climate.’
Intrigued, Bramley said that the colonial secretary was not the only one gathering information. ‘Where did you find this out?’
‘Och, it’s a small world, I’ll tell you how much smaller than even you think it is. The quartermaster of those disbanded territorials I spoke about, the first of the Devil’s Own, was a fatherly man to my younger man’s soldiering, a true spirited Scot, a servant of the Inns of Court named Alexander Ritchie. We stayed connected over the years as I rose in the military lists and he attended the courts facing a melancholy truth, that among the variety of actions men are daily liable to commit, no less than one hundred and sixty have been declared by an act of parliament to be felonies without benefit of clergy; in other words, to be worthy of death at the end of a rope.’
‘It is vexing, to say the least. Though the injured, through compassion will often forbear to prosecute.’
‘Ritchie does not like seeing a man hung. He attends the courts with petitions every Tuesday and Wednesday, for little personal reward, except the joy it gives him when a soul is saved hanging. The rest of the week he attends to estates and bonds. He was lawyer to the naturalist, Marsh. He is Marsh’s executor for his last will and testament.’
‘I once met Marsh, at the home of Banks,’ said Bramley, leaning forward with particular interest. ‘He seemed to know more about the outlying parts of your colony than any man alive. Cribb went with me, and obtained a fleece of great beauty and style, which remains his model of excellence. Did Marsh find sheep country, which he never divulged?’
‘It seems none went farther into the interior, but how far is speculation. Now that he is dead, matters have changed, and we are in a position to find out what even Stanton can’t discover by flogging. Marsh’s papers are in Ritchie’s care, awaiting their rightful claimant. The maps were always rumoured, never proven, and to sight them, believe me, would be something of a Holy Grail for our friend.’
‘I would very much like to see them too.’
‘The owner is the boy that Stanton alienated. I hear that Stanton visits Ritchie pushing a claim, making a nuisance and a clamour.’
‘Does he have a case?’
‘By boasting your acquaintance, he blusters to be given materials into his care. He puts forward several arguments, some of them more persuasive than others, but Ritchie gives no ground. Stanton swears he is of your settlers’ party.’
‘I’ve made no offers, as you know. I may have hinted more than was wise. If I took him on, I’d need some way of keeping control, but he’s uncontrollable by nature, so there you are.’
‘Know that he threatens Ritchie with your wealth and influence.’
‘That’s forward, I must say.’
‘He describes the innards of your house and its inhabitants, from the sick man under your roof to the housemaids in your scullery, to prove himself the insider.’
‘How very demeaning,’ said Bramley. ‘But what of the maps and their rightful owner?’
‘It could easily be you.’
‘I daresay,’ said Bramley, restraining emotion. At last he’d come to where he wanted to be with Wilkie. ‘How?’
‘On my long voyage home, which I spent mainly standing on the deck with my arms clasped behind my back and shouting against the elements as they streamed either side of the rails, I made a stop at Rio. The British consul placed me in a villa with a terrace overlooking a sparkling waterway. I learned how Rio is fairly like the world itself, wonderful in perspective but hideously stinking in detail. I was luckier than most, having only a week between sailings. Our Parson Stanton was held there much longer, I believe, and when he sailed, his two boy passengers, adoptees from Botany Bay, one black, one white, were obliged to remain on shore.’
‘I have heard of them,’ said Bramley, ‘from our Captain Maule. It is a desperate low mark against the minister, the way he treated those veritable sons. They are on Maule’s conscience, for obeying his passengers. What happened after they disappeared remains a mystery, still?’
‘No mystery at all. They shipped out on a New Bedford whaler, the Betsy, bound for Pacific waters. The vessel lost crew to the fever at Rio and took on hands. The lads hoped on a voyage to Sydney, if whales can swim that far. I made the arrangements with the captain myself, to be sure they weren’t being hoodwinked. He seemed a good enough man. Their chances of getting home looked pretty fair, as they are brave resourceful lads, and thanks to Stanton making use of them on their voyage, and the attention of Maule to their seafaring knots, they’ve become extremely handy in their own survival.’
‘Did they seek you out?’
‘Not quite. The first I knew of them was a feeling I had, of being selected. Smoking my first cigarillo of the day on my balcony, I found I was watched by a mulatto and his mate. They came down to the port every morning from a hide of thatched banana leaves and oilskin rags where they huddled. The darker of the two boys interested me as a type of Negro I had nae seen before, but when I called him to me, and was in my comparative anatomy lesson, marking flatness of nose, breadth of forehead, curl of lip, and so on, the youth called me “gubna”. I recognised Titus Stanton. The last person I expected to find in South America was a New Holland autochthonous.’
