The Ballad of Desmond Kale (35 page)

FROM LEEDS, ON A WINTRY day, his lordship set forth with Cribb to London, where he was presented before a committee of parliament at Westminster. For the week members and lords were charged with examining the wool trade. A harder to impress, more confidently superior wool master of twitchy disdainfulness could not be imagined being squeezed for a knowledge of Spanish wools and their uses.

And you would think — mused Bramley as he watched his protégé preening and ticking men off — that Cribb was a sworn minister of the Crown himself, hoisting his figure lofty as he could by jacking his heels and rocking forward on his toes, extending his square jaw to his betters. There was sneezing, a wrapping around of scarf ends, a harshness of coughing, but not from any apparent nervousness, more from a skill in commanding attention by turning disadvantage to dramatic effect. Cribb was grossly unwell and after he put away his handkerchiefs the whole chamber leaned forward and attentively breathed with him, wheeze by wheeze, watching as Blaise Henry Rousillon Cribb grabbed his loose grey hair into a bunch behind his neck and allowed it to tumble free with a
grandeur of mane. It was the style of a square-built sleekly devouring carnivore and not the manner of a sick man at all!

Cribb read from a document composed just a bit better than it might have been, polished by a stylist, Dud Hardcastle.

‘Was it true,' he was asked, at the end of his first recitation, ‘that Botany Bay wools were looking better than best Spanish and best Saxon Spanish wools when milled for fine descriptions of cloth?'

Cribb answered reluctantly in a way that made his arguments more tantalising. Colonial wools were indeed looking better, though only in fits and starts. From Spain, he said, came fine wool but deficient in softness; consequently not suited to rich and ornamental cloths. In Saxony, however, Saxon Spaniards, much the same sheep to begin with, were evolved in a more yielding climate under the hand of cleverer breeders to retain the Spaniards' fineness but better them in softness. Thus under the Saxon hand Spanish wool improved in length and soundness of staple, and freeness of fibre. When it was decided to try if it would stand the process of combing, Addison and Roper of Bradford bought lots, through Cribb, and a new description of worsted goods was produced, so light, soft, fine, and rich, as to compete with silks and satins for ladies' dresses.

At Botany Bay, Cribb then agreed — if a study of an outpost through the spyglass of fibres had any fix on its peoples — a fitful improvement had been effected under bad management, incrementally over a few short years. It was more thanks to the climate and to God, he declared, than to the hand of wisdom, and he concluded by asking, as he glared around the room: ‘What results might not be attained with more intelligent husbandry in that distant clime, which had come under the orders of a band of officers without much breeding instinct between them?'

‘Toughly said!' murmured Bramley when Cribb was done, detecting there was more to be unravelled here, from something more held in — a discovery that Cribb was too defiantly proud to tell. None except Bramley knew enough to sense the full man while the rest of the room was satisfied. ‘He's too jealous of Botany Bay, vain of his knowledge,' thought Bramley. ‘What Britain needs to hear most, he keeps to himself — for reasons he can't possibly confess. Having a French mother annoys his patriotism, it can't be helped, and since his brother inherited it's a hundred times worse.'

Bramley made a deduction, later proved correct: that Cribb had tested his more excellent samples and found recent Botany Bay lots giving a milling quality equal to Spain's, with softness equal to Saxony's, and without the defects of either. It was like finding grains of gold in a rusty dish and looking up at a wild mountain knowing they were washed from there, but hardly praising the mountain for what it threw out.

Cribb flicked back his coat tails and sat down. Bramley was beginning to understand there was an even greater fortune in the man hunched in front of him spitting into a bespeckled white handkerchief than he'd already decided. He'd said no to a voyage of investigation, but if persistent in refusal, Bramley would give him no choice.

Bramley waited until Cribb was finished with his lung clearing, completed by hoarse breathing, thumping himself on the breast-plate with his shoulders wide back and nostrils flared.

A fortune, yes, but only if Cribb lived out the year in good enough health to carry on. Then Bramley considered something else: it was not just sheep that gained their feet in Botany Bay privations but men were turned onto her shores rarely better than skeletons and ran to fat fairly soon.

The parliament's tableau was lit by smoking lamps and fugged with tobacco smoke, crowded with representatives jostling for space, with documents piled everywhere on the floor and loose papers bound in scarlet ribbon and men stepping over them. Cribb was their attaché of breeds in waiting.

Hadn't the two men often talked of Cribb getting away from England for his health? — to Egypt, the Levant?

Cribb liked the idea of winter months in hot dry air eating dates and drinking ewe's milk on the decks of a dhow drifting the Nile. Bramley gave him the picture, otherwise it was beyond Cribb's pocket. So nothing came of this either. Bramley was reluctant to annoy his friendship with a prideful man by meeting his bills of travel. It still might be, though, that Cribb's intelligence alone would cover a passage to the right place, because wasn't Botany Bay a veritable Egypt with food of a dry and stimulating nature for stock, but without the miasmata afflicting sheep closer to the Nile (and without any Nile or river like it, it had to be said, that had yet been found)?

Luckily there were no New South Wales gentlemen in the room just then, to hear Cribb imply they were more stupid than they needed to be. But some were in the building having sailed dangerous seas to be there, at risk to their lives and prosperity. Word went around how they were damned (by a man from the north of England), denigrated for their proudest boast, their considerable sheep and their consignments of bouncy wool pressed tight as trusses of hay, alerting them to ask, through somewhat clenched teeth, ‘Which one is Cribb?'

 

After his first evidence, Cribb was taken by Bramley and shown the woolsack from where the country was ruled. He was then steered
by the young lord's elbow to an oak-panelled room and told to wait outside until wanted again. A crowd of men jostling their turn refused to ignore him. Cribb was greeted by alnagers, wool sorters, factors and breeders from the wool counties and breed-of-sheep exhibitions. They thickened the air with their knowing exhalations. Cribb barely acknowledged them, and that was all right among them as Cribb's reputation in wool was matched to a name for high rudeness and temper fits. Such men had been brought to London from their barns and fields for the week of quizzing and gave the room the feeling of a gathering at a fair, getting up a thirst that would be slaked in the evening in a pot house where Cribb would join them and drown his differences in drink — and show less of a temper, it was doubtfully agreed, from mixed experience they had of Blaise Cribb in his cups.

 

Crowding up closer were a few men of a more peculiar sort and prickly with unfathomable pride.

Their faces had the baked skin-flaked appearance of roasted rocks and they were unsteady on their legs, being not long recovered from six to ten months at sea. There was a colonel, a lieutenant — and one so man-in-the-moon-faced ugly as to be remarkable.

This was the Reverend Matthew Stanton — recently landed from the
Edinburgh Castle
, a ship taking longer than most on her voyage to England, being overtaken by two that left Botany Bay well after her, in a voyage dragging on ten months. It was not true that the elements reliably sent westerlies across the wild southern latitudes to whisk a boat home on a broad run. Too often winds rounded from the east and north and set up an opposition. The
Edinburgh Castle
was a leaky, miserable, barnacle-encrusted
vessel fighting contrary winds nearly the whole way and delivering her unhappy pilgrims into a smallpox plague at Rio, where they were delayed eight weeks with careening before beating up the grey Atlantic as winter set in. It was a year of winters if you sailed the southern oceans that plunged from one season to the next with barely an hour's interval and all freezing wet.

STANTON WAS DRESSED IN A lumpy suit of clothes hastily tailored for the occasion, a sprig of dried wattle blossom dangling from a breast pocket to show his origins, en passant, from the Bay. He carried a hefty cane fashioned from hard gum wood. His coin purse was made from the skin of a wallaby kangaroo. His Geneva collar was woven from Bay of Islands flax. From under the folds of his neck protruded the twin flaps singed by an overly hot steaming iron in the London chapter house where he lodged with his wife and daughter. Long expected from Botany Bay among churchmen, thanks to letters boasting his ever delayed coming, Stanton had a curt response to any who asked if he surely had sons as well as a wife and daughter. Wasn't it true there were two boys of around the same age, to be brought along? Boys described as sons?

The answer was a sharp, defensive, ‘No': No sons, and why should you think so?

When there was every reason to think so — from them being boasted of in letters of anticipation, two boys being brought across the seas in an exemplary party of colonials, but had never arrived
with them: two boys dark and light, one the father's favourite, Warren, and one the good wife's pet, Titus, but neither any longer referred to by either party as England bound when enquiring churchmen and interested relatives wondered.

 

Before the Stantons' arrival, advertisements were posted in church annexes and meeting halls, announcing their missionary zeal. There was much interest in how a great matter fared: a sacred adventure guided from London on orders trusted to God. Reports came back too infrequently as a rule, from the Pacific shores, and sometimes even after beloved missionaries had been killed, eaten, or had scandalously gone native indulging their lusts. (God save them all in prayer!)

The Stantons had survived out there a full sixteen years. Word was wanted from the horse's own ministering mouth but nobody quite realised, until they met Matthew Stanton, the extent to which the man had cut his trouble teeth on military commanders and despotic governors, least till he worked his conviction on Church authorities with startling ferocious ease and strutted his opinions on the lecture floor. The churchmen Stanton battled in the archbishop's offices (far less obdurate than a governor's, he found) were for a fact the same sag-bellied authorities who had, over the years, bent to his every whim of conscience when he wrote from Botany Bay seeking guidance, as to whether it was correct to flog convicts and serve commerce by raising flocks. They liked to say there was an arm of the Church flourishing out there on the far edge of imagination, so their answers were always yes, you are on the straight and narrow, sir. But a sense they were well rid of Stanton along with England's most beastly criminals, and Ireland's filth was fairly open in their
attitudes, now that Stanton met with them. They were overly judicious, overly refined. He was out of sight, almost out of mind: and he sensed peculiarly not the right sort but peculiarly the right sort there, to deal with matters beyond their grumbly purview. It was verified a Christian trait to adapt, in a weary world, to fight the Devil with the Devil's own pitchfork — except lucky for the archdeacons it was Stanton pricking the beast not them — using whips and the jealousy of getting on, yea, yea, and nay if the result was fear in men's hearts, Church property made safe from governors' hands, and mission stations properly fed. But did it have to be so openly personified, in a toadish rampager?

 

Thus Stanton was getting (in a few short weeks on land) justly famous for shaping his own role as a churchman and playing it as a right. It was a power of inflated self more comparable with a politician's or a general's: Napoleon being the most recent exemplar of wild confidence on the European stage, and the two men's linkage by analogy not so absurd, when the topic turned to wool, because while Napoleon had destroyed Spain's future in wool by laying waste the land, Stanton was a hope for Botany Bay in answering Spain's loss (to Britain as a supplier) by putting another land under sheep. If you doubted it, ask him, and if his answers wouldn't do, consult Lord Bramley, of scientific fame. He said the same thing.

As Stanton went around London on social calls he found himself despising his old Cambridge mentors as despicably mortal men, while envying their clerical power and cleverer whispers to God. They were getting published in bound volumes of sermons that were selling better than romances and shipwreck tales (though
not as well as wool, he jovially reminded them). While their theology still tied him in knots, how he barked at them and saw them retreat to sherry! Answering about Wilberforce he instructed he was a Wilberforcian too — hated slavery, how could they doubt it? — slaves being abhorrent to a man from Botany Bay because a slave was not punished for any sin, by having his rights withdrawn and his labour sold on a block, only a convict was, for sins that were as cunning as original, but with the benefit of emancipation fairly soon following on good behaviour (if recurrence didn't show). That the colony was growing on unpaid labour was not to call it slave labour at all. ‘Not even taking into account whips and irons, judiciously applied?' The answer again, ‘Not so, sir.'

After prayers at missionary suppers, Stanton told the story of his first days in Botany Bay as a chaplain of convicts, when his poor wife and child almost starved and risked getting their throats cut by rebels. It was a boisterous picture of struggle involving playing down his failure — complete failure, it was — in converting New South Wales native blacks to Christian lives. Only with whips would they bend the pious knee! A small grey fleck of spittle appeared at the corner of the mouth when he said so, which he destroyed with his thumb.

Sheep were mentioned in more favourable tones than souls. It was impressed that breathing dust fleas and chasing wayward ewes was what a missionary mostly cared about.

Stanton's talks were followed by plate suppers with currant buns and five-gallon pots of Cantonese tea. Among good people the rumour grew the larger, the quicker it was strangled in the cot. For it happened that a girl of Ivy Stanton's Bible class, in their London chapter house, pitched tales of a rage-roaring Stanton straddling the decks of his ship. Ivy must have been talking, for her father to arise
quite the demon in clerical garb attacking a black boy with fists until in artful desperation the poor fellow bleeding-mouthed leaped overboard, and his adopted brother, encouraged by Mrs Stanton, leaped in to save him: and that was the last seen of either. The family then sailed away leaving their beloved sons in waters off Brazil!

It was hardly to be believed, even of a disorderly sheep-breeding parson. Whispers were told among small groups of Christians rattling their teacups, until Stanton by instinct came in through their clusters, breaking up the very thought of intrigue with more of his wild stories of life at Botany Bay amid Cockney forgers and Irish radicals brandishing metal rakes.

 

Husband or wife — which had most urged Captain Maule to sail on the tide from Rio, when the wind was right?

The question was one the Stantons asked each other in private, believing it more extremely private a query than any imaginable. ‘Dolly?' ‘Matthew?' They sought each other out, defiant of making a mistake. But they could not blame anyone else, they could only face each other.

For each had had a reason to flee the Rio roads, as much as a reason to delay. That was the trick of it. Well, they had sailed. Each of them had spoken. As a pair they were opposed that day, but Maule heard them give the identical word of consent, that he translated forthwith into orders to sail. Then the wind dropped, making moral judgement of their haste, and they hardly got around a corner past rocks, and were rebuked a little longer by the shore.

So it was in London they found themselves in moods so strangely contrasting to their expectations of how they would feel in the capital of the world.

Stanton left first for Westminster each day with a concentrated purpose in mind, in the dripping foggy weather carrying his noisy gum-wood cane to announce a progress through the murk.

Dolly wrapped herself in a coat and ordered up the two in hand long promised by her husband as a luxury they could use when they got there, if she went along quietly enough in herself.

Well, she was quiet enough in herself to get around, you can believe. Jaws ached from keeping jaws tight clamped. Eyes stung and ears burned from paying attention to a daughter, a problematical splinter, who was not very thrilled by the thought of going to Westminster, except that some officers of Botany Bay were going to be there, she'd heard, with their families — and in case they saw the king. Ivy was titillated by thoughts of royalty and famished for conversation with anyone who knew what she talked about when describing that wide plain of bleached dreams, her childhood residence, Laban Vale, where dust devils blew and paper daisies never faded nor grew slack. Her mother knew as much as this but only a little of the next thing relating to a passion for the land left behind.

Because also Ivy was starved to know, as her most urgent, less sentimental, and definitely very careful and quite clandestine enquiry, if anyone knew of a naval officer named Lieutenant Commander Valentine Lloyd Thomas. Was there anyone from his family known, a sister, a cousin, the Miss Lloyd he mentioned as a favourite cousin? — Oh dear God Ivy must make herself recognised by some, or die of oblivion. When she used that word to herself, oblivion, she meant oblivion not as a cry of being unknown and wanting fame, but of ceasing to exist. Death by knot of Lloyd Thomases. They were judges, lawyers, horseflesh fanciers and gamblers for high stakes. They would know how to deal with a
piece of trouble brought upon them by a sixteen-year-old girl. There was a farming estate in Caermarthenshire where they went at times of the year: to do what, Ivy was uncertain, except she'd heard teach tenants how to grow turnips on neglected lands, and she hoped they were not there now — unable to remember which season they decamped from the city. For didn't Valentine say they had an address kept up in London? Or Miss Lloyd and her mother had? And when he'd said they had, hadn't Ivy too lightly thought of London as a knowable sort of town, larger than Sydney and Parramatta together, of course, but laid out orderly, easy to get around, with its monuments, parks, churches and palaces landmarks you sighted one to the other without losing your direction because the London that mattered was just a few streets — she had seen it in panoramic etchings of river, squares and rows — just a few fine houses, and in those fine houses just a few confident men who stepped out and organised the world? Men such as Valentine Lloyd Thomas, who, though a legal officer of the Royal Navy, a servant of the king, and a confidential enquirer of the governor of New South Wales, did not give a fig for respectability, as he told Ivy while kissing and holding her against a tree in the shadows of flowering moth vines in Rio. Indeed of the two parties of this world — those who thought Lord Byron a scourge, and those who thought him a wag — Valentine was of the latter cabal.

In the afternoons, in the London season, Lloyd Thomases paid visits, taking glasses of wine, gaming at cards, enjoying music, following the toes of dancing masters into the newest steps. Was there somebody from that side who would see in her, in her green discovered eyes, in her secret panic as she passed in the street looking into dimly lit doorways, who she was, what she wanted to say and lay claim to, without her actually having to say so? ‘You
are a gift,' Valentine had said, as he lowered her in the leaf mould of a forest's bed, and proper to a gift unwrapped her with hurried fingers releasing hooks and bows. Now he was at Botany Bay and she was here in trouble.

But the London of her arrival! After her previous imagination Ivy wondered what sort of a place she'd been brought into, nothing but houses and streets look which way she would; nothing but houses when she walked for hours together. It must have been two miles in a straight line and all the time wondering how so many hundreds of thousands of shopkeepers made a living, and yet she had seen nothing of London yet. She had hardly even barely come into a sensation of looking for a needle in a haystack. Where were they? How would they greet her at their door, the Lloyd Thomases, when she knocked at the very last one?

In putting the question to herself Ivy knew the answer would not be favourable. But setback, or even shame, would never stop Ivy Stanton (her father's true daughter, her mother's absolute child) from seeking what she wanted in life because she was fearless in the face of it. Otherwise there was no meaning to her name, she contended, Ivy being the hook of itself, the catch, the snag, the lock. She went climbing life's steep wall until she peered over the top. Although now at the beginning of a great check on fearlessness, having made a sorry mistake, she was very uncertain whether life after a certain date say a month hence would be worth living for the shame revealed. Skinny naked in her mirror she was no more protruding than a piece of string with a knot tied in the middle. But that knot was the tie.