The Ballad of Desmond Kale (39 page)

BLAISE CRIBB'S PHYSICAL APPEARANCE STANTON had strangely imagined into a tall and loosely limbed, irresistibly affectionate man with a burr in his voice that melted milkmaids' reluctance to butter (and this after his wife told him Cribb was pugnaciously intense and moody to a fault).

But then with Cribb pointed out in the halls of Westminster — ‘the one standing rigid, in the short brown coat, holding a handkerchief to his jaw' — it was impossible to remember any previous imagining, including that St Blasius was beheaded after performing his magic on women.

Stanton gave a low moan of alarmed satisfaction. Why, the fellow was no better looking than he should be. In his mind he brayed: ‘I have won the prize of your youth and am the better man for it, sir, having had the joy of your hedgerow bride these seventeen years, and just as my wool must make you bite your elbow, my whole life betters yours to a height unscalable.'

As Stanton was about to go to Cribb, to make himself known, an attendant beadle tapped him on the shoulder and whispered that his wife and daughter were arrived at the door.

Stanton was obliged to attend to Dolly and Ivy, settling them on benches under a high window, where other wives and daughters waited in excitement of getting a look at great persons. It was learned that the king would not be coming with those of his court, as hoped: ‘But the king's cowman is here somewhere,' Stanton offered, ‘he was chaffing me a minute ago, and lives in a lodge opposite the queen's gardens at Frogmore. See over there, a dozen or more under-secretaries and ministers.' At which both mother and daughter stood up and sat down again. There was the excitement of being at the centre of the world even without its crowns and tiaras. They themselves were of interest! — and how these farming aristocrats were unafraid of showing it, despite the snobberies prevailing in England, a contrast, if you would believe, to Botany Bay, where society lived no better than in a camp, divided ten times into ten, and to look at someone with too much interest was to shame your position and betray your safety.

Mother and daughter wore identical brown capes as favoured by evangelists but under hers Ivy wore the ‘grenade silk', her grenadine cloth dress sewn together when they sailed at latitude 45 degrees south. The nap had flashes of cold sea colour matching Ivy's eyes. It was worth remembering she was born on the ocean and came into her second life on the ocean: now she was spilled onto land, a deep-sea treasure. When she loosened the laces at her throat, Stanton helping her off with her cape, he saw how she dazzled the room with her look of flashing eyes and unbonneted fiery hair. ‘I have fathered a beauty,' Stanton reflectively touched his chin, remembering Dolly with something of this appearance, except in humbler fabric and with a more teazled mop, and a higher colour. Ivy looked fearfully pale.

Barely before saying hello to her father, Ivy excused herself and was off on the other side of the room and there embraced Sophia, daughter of an officer who'd bought his founding sheep from Stanton (absolute culls). This was Major James Agnew, who'd gained a ship after Stanton, but wouldn't have managed to do so except by the downfall of the governor. The minister caught Agnew's eye for an ascertaining moment, and when he was sure he was recognised, cut the man off with barely a nod. The whole factional giddy-go-round was somewhat octagonal. Agnew was a sworn enemy of Sir Colin Wilkie, deposed, and on an opposite factional front an opponent of Stanton and therefore of God. Amazing how coming thousands of miles reversed some feelings irrevocably but left other feelings intact. Stanton was sorry for Wilkie now. That officer, Agnew, was one of the party denigrating Stanton's breeders, not to mention his condition of soul, morality, purse, and whatever else, though it was hardly to be known how such officers could judge of anyone higher than themselves, or of a sheep, as they were made rich by dealing in rum, duping governors, befriending judges, and by taking concubines from the female factory to breed their Sophias. Oh, and then to boast lambs from Stanton's originals as a pick of New Holland's bunch, purifying their reputations with wools that weren't even legitimately bred in their own advanced name! It was, as well, a pretty good question if those wools had authentically improved since they went to Agnew. Stanton would like to ask that of Mr Blaise Henry Cribb, for hadn't Cribb said, in the committee rooms, that Botany Bay wools improved but their breeders did not?

‘There is your man,' he whispered to Dolly. She hardly knew whom he meant. ‘Your Blaise Cribb,' he hissed, to awake her, which made her blush and sit up.

‘I say, let me through!' said Stanton as he scuttled into the crowd. There was the feeling of wanting to appease an attacker before a blow was struck. It was how he'd met God as a young convert. It was a feeling he'd had with Kale, but turned on its head.

Stanton pushed through the crush until he reached the less bustling end of the long room, where he seized Cribb by the collar, making a pleadingly sour announcement at the same time as tugging him around:

‘Cribb? Blaise Henry Cribb? Are you the Cribb, agent and wool buyer who sells under the name of Thomas's to Addison and Roper, Garnett, Woods, and Co., on behalf of colonial wools?'

Cribb stared phlegmatic agreement. ‘Who are you?'

‘Lord, I am your best supplier, sir, under the brand of Laban Vale, mark of the twisted horn; I am Stanton, Matthew, Rrreverend, of Botany Bay,' he crowed, turning a few heads nearby who believed there was a person not quite gentlemanly standing in the room. ‘How do you do, sir? How do you do?'

In a gust of breakfasted breath (kidneys, bacon, and scrolls of butter on yeasty baps, well soured on strong coffee) Stanton leaned into Cribb's face and the two men — of the same stumpy height — seemed started on a ritual dominance contest, but then pulled back.

‘I DO, AS YOU SAY, very profitably, I hope,' answered Cribb after long hesitation, with a withdrawn, almost shy smile, and eyeing the other wonderingly, and in some surprise.

The man before him impressed Cribb as so needfully wanting that he challenged his understanding of where to begin. With his wool? With his wife? With an enquiry after the welfare of the engaging Tom Rankine, of Botany Bay? It was too soon for that. The topic of a brother would have to be prepared.

‘I trust that Mrs Stanton is in good health?'

‘She is in strapping condition, as you may see,' the minister nudged Cribb with an elbow, and pointed across the room. ‘Our voyage took a few pounds off, but good roast beef, potatoes and jam puddin's put it back on.'

Cribb gave the room a slow lighthouse sweep.

‘You missed her, sir,' said Stanton in a pandering disappointed tone, as if there was something whisked from Cribb's plate that he wanted to urge amorously and it shook like a jelly and twinkled like sugar, so give it a jab.

And there, not twenty feet away, sitting on a bench facing Cribb, was a woman of improbable grandmotherly age in a pamphleteer's cape wearing a righteously tight bonnet with springy mouse hair poking out. She found herself a pair of spectacles, upending a cloth bag with the combativeness of a bear tipping a jar of honey. Dolly Pringle, it was, in full possession of her character, though not of her domination over Cribb's heart, he was suddenly given to know after too many years of grinding recrimination.

He felt himself examined. Dolly packed her spectacles away. When Cribb looked again she was gone from the room. A paroxysm of coughing left him standing feebly, held up by one hand on Stanton's shoulder, the other clamped over his mouth, not daring to look at his handkerchief lest it was speckled with blood.

 

Cribb excused himself, found a bench, and wondered how he could like Parson Stanton in any reasonable way at all. The minister followed him attentively, helpfully, not finished with him. There was no incentive to be charitable yet Cribb felt himself oddly moved. This minister's nose hung like a bell. His bulging, tortoisey eyes seemed affronted over whatever he said of himself, as if half the time he didn't know what was to come out: a man tied to convulsive self-truthfulness. The few strands of hair combed over his baldness were noble as strings of spittle. Well, either Cribb liked him or was doing some work for the reputation of the woman who'd spurned him those eighteen years ago and was at last welcome to lie in the bed of her own contradictions. Could the ugliness of the man truly be what Dolly Pringle had chosen over him? Stanton must have been handsomer once, more redeemable as a young saint. That, or she was truly perverse. More time than
Cribb could credit had been spent sweating over what the victor was like, and now he could only assume what he'd been told was true, that Dolly had undergone a sincere conversion to Christian aims and the match was designed to further herself with God — who was irreproachable unlike herself or the one she'd liked best to grapple with, in days gone by, on dungheaps.

Cribb swayed where a gush of fresher air came through a door opening. A young woman left the room, showing a crop of hair like a bursting bronze bud. Cribb had the heart-wrenching impression he must have known her before, somehow, somewhere. She had a thin nose, a small chest, pale freckled skin, green eyes, a broad pale forehead. Hers was a beauty of the exhausted kind that argued against beauty and lost. It was dim in here and she was picked out in shadow. Cribb realised that while he went on staring at her it was rude to Stanton. He turned to him.

‘You are getting your good prices, in the main, now, aren't you, reverend, and your Botany Bay confrères? Haven't I just been talking in the other room, advancing your colony's name? Its climate? Its good hard going? Its ability for the Spaniards — whose best wool, after washing, is white without spot? I say the breed is contented there,
il devient citoyen du lieu qu'il habite
.'

‘I suppose that means good,' said Stanton, lowering his eyes. ‘But whose wool is white without spot? Did you say? You see I wasn't there in the committee rooms to hear you talk. The impression going around this room is that you were less than flattering to all.'

What Stanton wanted to ask, but could not manage, if ever! was whether Cribb had lately sorted any over
supremely
fine fleeces from New South Wales and, if he had, what please was their origin by name of grower and address if it wasn't Laban Vale?

To learn he was trumped would be unbearable. Stanton found himself grinning unhappily to know an answer. His lips pulled tight across his teeth. Keeping up appearances was never his strength. As in wools, so in life, vanity to have oneself known would out.

Meantime Cribb, only barely holding his post, stayed mute over what he wanted to ask Stanton on the very same point as Stanton felt towards him blindly — namely, confirmation of his guess: the true origin of that fragrant sample wrapped in filth.

‘Tell me about your life there,' he said.

Stanton set off on a rant. There was the word ‘progress' and the phrase ‘fascinating stage'; there were the words ‘limits of settlement', ‘redcoats', ‘sheep', and ‘drays loaded as ships of the line'. As Stanton spoke he tugged at his clerical collar and with a clatter of studs managed to tear it off without quite meaning to. It was shoved in a pocket. Bit by bit before Cribb's amazed eyes he removed the evidence of his vocation — but obliviously, disregardingly, in a way of his left hand not knowing what was done by the right. It appeared now that Cribb was being delivered a mercantile proclamation in spoken form advancing Botany Bay as the setting for a panorama of breathless purpose in which, Cribb deduced, Stanton was getting ready to raise the value of his wool in every breath. It was a speech propelled in tones of ebullient anxiety, and if not to be endorsed by the listener, then it would be devastating to the speaker. Such was the look of vulnerable pride in Stanton's woeful face when he finished his rant and stood heaving with emotion and lung pressure.

‘How marvellous,' said Cribb, obedient to what was expected, then sank back into his thoughts, his breathing more controlled.

‘I have an idea,' said Stanton, ‘which you may think impossibly foolish. It is a recipe for stupendous excellence of style
through sticking to the one breed and mixing its differences under a suitable sky. The eminence of blood is being disproved every day, though the experts don't think so. I am after good rams if they exist, but only if they suit my habit of crossing like to like. Nobody I think has thought my way before in Botany Bay, I mean, except look at you, your expression says otherwise. Were you born with a frown? No matter. I have taken a few Saxon Spaniards as far as they can go and it's time to bulk them up. One flock at a time, seeing how I go. Nobody has tried it with the pinnacle of the breed and that is where I think thrust will ignite — best to best! Size of frame and quality of fleece! My breeding records are second to none. Copies are in my valise, they go back to the early days of the colony. I have folded them in and in. My steward by paradoxical marvel is a Spaniard — hard to come by, trained in the wool of Estremadura and with a face baked flat as mud in the New South Wales sun. He's a great shearer of sheep and shepherd par excellence.'

‘Where did you find him?' said Cribb.

‘He was sent to me in our last months before we sailed.'

‘Sent?'

‘A disbeliever would say, by fortunate chance. Lorenze, for that is his name, if he's not half sheep is at least half goat and the better part of one — my men are afraid of him, which is all to the good — he leads, orders, knows, and rules. He's keeping the lot in good heart, and consigning wool off to your house every shearing while I'm absent, unless the new governor plays tardy with ships like the old one. Anyway, that is the wonder of our material, don't you agree, it is preservable and can wait unlike ourselves. Am I moving along too fast? I suppose I am. Next I shall be asking if you know that man, over there, see the one —'

‘Lord Bramley?'

‘Bramley!' said Stanton. ‘The cleverest farmer in Yorkshire. All New Holland travellers carry his “Sure Guide”. But he should not listen to every word he is told.'

‘There is a new edition, now.'

Cribb saw Bramley breaking off from the conversation he was in. Bramley would be over in a minute to relieve him of Stanton and the occasion altogether.