The Ballad of Desmond Kale (43 page)

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.'

‘What of the white boy?'

‘Warren Inchcape? You'll have cause to remember that name, as he's George Marsh's natural son and sole inheritor of his maps.'

Before Bramley could ask how this knowledge gave him any advantage, in the way of rights, Wilkie pulled a fold of papers from an inside pocket.

‘Has it ever been your lot, my lord, to severely punish a favourite child, with hideous regret, to damn someone you loved, for a transgression?'

Without waiting for Bramley's answer (which would have been no, he was never so morally divided) Wilkie continued:

‘I have done it. Many true men of the world have found themselves so tangled. Our braw good intentions oft gang awry. For this reason I am prone to go soft on Stanton even for alarming his sons; but what I cannot forgive is the fear, nay the terror, he finally inspired in them — to turn their backs on him, aye, in tears and melancholy confusion, forgoing their long-promised sight of England in his care. For they are changed bitterly against the English as far as two good hearts could ever be, and I, traduced in my own fashion, by my own masters, took upon myself the role of trustee to Warren Inchcape.'

Sir Colin spread out a fold of documents on a side table.

‘Here are sworn papers, notarised by the Portuguese governor of Brazil and countersigned by the British consul, Leatherbridge, to the effect that I, Colin Wilkie, am sole authorised person to represent myself to Alexander Ritchie and take into care letters, papers, journals, maps, and a scrofulous cockatoo, property of said boy, the whole collection of “finery” to be placed in the care of an honourable person bound for Botany Bay — if I cannot carry them to Inchcape myself, which I cannot, some other shall carry them forth where aye he may be found. Soon again at Botany Bay, it is to be hoped. Hoots, I am naming you that person, Lord Bramley.'

‘But I am not travelling to Botany Bay. I am sending Blaise Cribb.'

‘Would you trust your Cribb, as a man of honour, to seek out the rightful heir?'

‘As long as he remains alive, I would,' agreed Bramley.

‘Then let us go and find Ritchie,' said Wilkie, ‘and get this done. Before we do, there's a guid finger of Athol brose waiting to be rinsed on the backstairs of our tongues.'

Bramley watched the great sad man, Wilkie, spooning out the last quantity of drink from the bottom of his glass. As he did so, Wilkie told a further story of sadness impenetrable even to his own deepest understanding.

It was a confession — that an act of justice allegedly committed by Stanton, so frightening to Warren and the black boy, as to drive them off, had not been committed by Stanton at all. It was committed by Wilkie — against the hide of one Captain Tom Rankine, of the N.S. Wales rangers.

What Wilkie hinted around earlier emerged bold and clear.

‘I'd long loved Tom Rankine, as I told you, though had my disquiets, when a scabrous informer, Lehane, threw himself on my mercy having no friends left for his protection. He tipped the balance with uncontestable reports, in sum: while enjoying himself as my boon companion, Rankine, using forged passes, arranged the impersonation of a soldier on guard; stole a prisoner under charge of gaolers; hiding massed sheep from the colonial tally Rankine grazed them on public lands, behaving jauntily while concealing his hand; oh, at the end, entering my rooms within an hour of Lehane, resigned his commission and when faced with my brace of reports made seditious statements tormenting a governor's conscience to his face — to the point where I brought down my hand. Pleased I was to pass sentence upon my own indictment.'

‘That's allowed?'

‘The royal cipher allows it in that country, where justice is rough as the ground is cracked. Many are sentenced just the same by magistrates less kindly. May I continue? In justified anger I condemned Tom Rankine to the prison wastes of Van Diemen's Land. He made no statement, no complaint, merely bowed with acknowledgement of an affidavit signed, by one Patrick Lehane.'

‘He deserved his comeuppance, I am sure,' said Bramley, thinking of Cribb's resentments against Rankine. ‘But isn't Van Diemen's Land the hell on earth of the convict cosmology? Need you have been so harsh, Sir Colin?'

‘What was my thinking, you ask, when Rankine came bursting into my office, resigning his commission and asking pardons for servants, as if my sack of preferments was bottomless? I acted from offence, and when a man acts from offence, he creates in himself possibilities he never knew for anger. There is a souring of justice comes with emotion. That same day, to my intense surprise, my commission as governor was withdrawn; and as Rankine was carried from Sydney to the pretty town of Hobart I heard that even greater cruelties than before were being practised by the new lieutenant governor there, in the name of Christian instruction.'

‘This you told to the boys?' said Bramley.

‘I could not,' said Wilkie, ‘for the love of them and the contempt I had for Stanton, which I would leverage with a pitchfork, if I were able. I left them believing that Stanton was the wurrst of the two of us.'

WHEN WARREN INCHCAPE AND TITUS Stanton signed on with the
Betsy
of New Bedford and sailed towards the whaling grounds of the South Seas they took aboard with them a sea chest containing white shirts, red shirts, cloth trousers and duck trousers, shoes, and several hats. It was near all they owned in the world and not very much. Yet it was heavier to lift than it might have been because Warren, using the tools of the boatman Peres, worked down into the bottom of the chest a neat floor of shaved planks and under that platform concealed bags of gold and silver coin.

For it was not just revulsion at Stanton that decided Warren against the charms of England. There was another reason for putting his faith in Wilkie and giving him power to make the inheritance claim, by means of a few shaky wriggles on parchment paper, and passed across. They were close to desperation the day Wilkie found them watching, when they were hailed as New Hollanders, and soon confessed they were ready to go back there. They were not so poor as they looked, nor so down on their luck as Wilkie said, only haggard for good reason, because of the life they led in the town.

Word was out that a black man was thieving houses in partnership with a thug. A nightwatchman was beaten and tied up, the act done with enough violence and quantity of bruises to carry conviction of purpose. A split skull and a chest full of cracked ribs: such injuries showing that when a beating was called for, it was better to strike with force. Warren, you might say, was educated by his former master in application of force, standing aloof from a result but not from consequences.

One night a man was threatened and submitted to being gagged. He squealed, upon release, that though he hadn't seen his assailants clearly (it was dark, and they wore bandanas on their faces) one of them wasn't a slave. He was a white man.

Afoot past midnight, a moonless night, Warren and Titus circled back to the grandest house of the town. Warren crouched nearby, to whistle warning while Titus scaled walls within. Warren was equal at calming dogs with Titus who was better at passing through bolted doors. A few times, in shadowed rooms, Titus was seen but not grabbed, nor did he rouse an alarm. When he was seen he perfectly made sense they had so little idea of their slaves — once by taking a chamberpot away, emptying it and restoring it; once by holding out a hand and accepting a coin from a lady's devotee in the name of discretion; and always muttering a blessing in Portuguese from the shadows, giving a giggle of high, strange amusement, which made people feel admirable in response, even as it allowed them to be robbed. In one place, a lady cried out and took him into her bed. He said she was ugly but gave him a good ride.

They were shown their great kindness by the former governor when he took them to meet the American captain, Ashcraft. Unheard-of courtesy cured them of desperation. They were saved from the chance of prison or death, the choices Dolly and Matthew
Stanton had left them. Sir Colin Wilkie told the whaling ship captain that Warren and Titus were farm boys in Botany Bay and asked if they might sail with him for the sake of Warren's dear mother — saying she was fine as any good woman on earth. What did the captain think? Would they make it back to the Bay? Ashcraft replied in his wisdom that if whales went there, they might, and there was no better combination suited to his ship, than a farm boy turned sailor, for city boys were often hard cases. Nor did Ashcraft have any objections to taking the black one in, if he proved himself a mariner. They'd had some Negroes in their crew, who died when the fever swept her. And at this, Ashcraft turned solemn.

They learned as the
Betsy
set sail from the Rio roads that a warrant was out for their arrest; and Warren noticed with a glad heart that the boatman hired to row a gendarme out to the vessel was his friend Peres, and the harder Peres pulled at the oars, the wider the gap separating them grew. The more the gendarme waved his arms to attract attention, the less notice was taken by the Americans. At this interesting complication, it was noticeable that Captain Ashcraft engaged in a conversation with the officer of the watch, his back turned to the pursuing boat.

Charles Ashcraft was a New Bedford man of about thirty-five whose entire concentration was upon the whale fisheries and the welfare of his ship. His manners were cordial ashore but catch him in command and there was never a question of his authority being anything but strong. Then his face would redden, his voice lift and twang. They respected and properly feared him though they were soon very remote from him, at the other end of the ship. In this conjuncture of their existence Warren and Titus were lucky what life taught them to beware — that it did not ruin them, when it bewared them of the Stantons — because trust came back, trickle
by drop, and along with trust a few dribbles of happiness. It took so little for it to happen, but there it was — in the sad contortion of their hopeful smiles.

‘How goes it in New Holland?' echoed Warren to his new shipmates, who gawped with open, gullible faces. ‘It goes free and easy — the people go naked, nothin but a bowline round the midships is the rule, made of hooman hair, and a bit of paint here and there.'

‘We don't have no dinners,' said Titus, ‘but keep dinin all day off goannas and snakes. If we wants any puddin we climb a tree where there's honeycomb.'

‘Where do you go to bed?'

‘Anywhere we please, so long as it's under the stars.'

Titus had his reasons and slept wherever he chose on their ship. It was his pledge of freedom and would not be taken from him. On one occasion in a calm, before they left the warm latitudes, he was found up in the cross trees, taking a nap, a hundred feet above the water. Warren feared he was in for a flogging, but soon learned better. Titus was allowed his persistent freedoms in honour of devotion and pluck. Watch him in a storm as they worked on reefing the mainsail, scrambling out along the yards with never a care; listen as their captain declared him a favourite and laughingly opinioned that Titus was quite possibly a Turk in another life, for in the Turkish navy they had no chests but used rugs, in which they wrapped their belongings, and sought no hammocks, but slept, like Titus, wherever they fell on the decks. Warren asked if all American ships were like this one, and was told that for his sins, he was on a lucky one.

 

They heard of a sealing vessel called the
Salamander
of Boston, that was connected to the
Betsy
through a partnership of their
owners, but in no other way compatible. The sealer was under the command of Captain Martin Sykes. The
Betsy
had a commission to meet with Sykes in the South Seas, and take his bundles of sealskins aboard. The
Salamander
was a smart but fearsomely miserable brig, make no mistake, and Warren was told to watch out and beware, when their two ships rafted up in some remote bay. For by bribery, charm or necessity Martin Sykes would do anything to secure himself crew, and once he had them, was reported by the necromancy of his frothing eyes to hold an entire people prisoner, until they were ghosts of their former selves, and destined to haunt whatever seas Sykes sailed them into, even as far as the southernmost quarters of the globe, among icebergs, fogs, and moaning horizontal gales.

On their mess's watch Warren always knew where to find Titus and fetch him to his duty. Warren kept an eye on his friend and cared for him and would die, it was reckoned, before he would allow Titus ever again to be whipped. In this respect Warren was not so much warned as half crazed by recent experience, and would never again be so easy, trusting and straight as those who loved him remembered him. All the strong feeling of his former being was concentrated into the hard, well-nigh murderous omen of his fists, which if Titus was ever whispered against, he raised. Fists threatening like hammers, and mustardy eyes with a smoulder of red.

One person aboard woke up resentment against the two new hands: a junior officer named Harry Dugdale, who was covered over with curled black hairs clustered on the backs of his hands, sprouting from his ears, matted around his low, thick neck, tufted from his knees, and rising from his chest like a spill of inky foam. Those chest hairs in particular collected crumbs of the broken sea biscuit that were called midshipman's nuts by the men. Everyone
called them midshipman's nuts but when Warren did so Dugdale took offence. It was learned he'd been a midshipman on a man o'war before he sailed with Ashcraft.

Harry Dugdale was English born with plenty to say about Botany Bay (where he'd never been). As Dugdale was the boxing champion of the
Betsy
it was unwise to argue with him too much, for he would bend a nose and fell an opponent with a level punch as good as reply to a word, meantime wetting his lips with his biscuity tongue and leering insufferably from large damp eyes. Dugdale said that an uglier set of men and women had never been found in England, as the convicts that were thrown onto hulks and taken to the Bay in 1788. They were about as different from people who went to America as dirt was from cream. Their complexion was shallow and putrid, he said. They had a flatness of feature, caused by want of rations to cushion up their cheeks. They were short as monkeys, with bowed legs, jutting thick jaws, an inability at arithmetic, an inability to write their names, except as a cross, and the only benefit of them was in saving of ropes, as less was needed when they were hung.

‘Your mother was a convict woman, I hear,' said Dugdale. ‘Didn't the captain get told, when he took you aboard, that he could have her as a real beauty, if he liked, by God, when he got to the Bay?'

Warren stared back at Dugdale and said nothing. Only the judgement of his eyes said there was one bad egg in every basket, and he would come to that bad egg when he did the counting. Because otherwise, by a rule of observation, Warren reckoned the
Betsy
was a good enough ship. She was tidy, but not overly so. Warren knew enough to know it was a rule, holding that too tidy a ship meant there was a tyrant at the helm or a tyrant in the person
of a first officer roaming about looking for victims. That would not happen until Harry Dugdale got his promotions.

Warren thanked God there was no chaplain aboard, as they'd had their chaplain in Stanton. Whenever there were prayers to be said, the readings, the business was performed by Captain Ashcraft in good simple order. The fourth of July, a date neither of them had ever heard about as important, they soon learned meant a riot of drinking and boxing matches.

The weather was colder and the captain warned it would be their last chance for a holiday in a long time, as they would need to batten down to round the Horn. He was not as particular as their captain, Maule, of past experience, in keeping the deck spotless at all times, and in all weathers.

But on the morning of the fourth of July there was a great bustle. It was a raw, cold morning, but fairly calm, when the holystones, prayer books, and trumpets came out. Men kicked off their shoes, rolled up their trousers, and knelt to their scrubbing business with good will. They did more scraping of wood and polishing of ring bolts than the ship had seen in a good long time. Indeed they had their noses far down into the grain of her decks where they smelled every strip of whale meat and every dried jot of whale blood and dribbly wasted whale oil that had ever been soaked into her planks and passed into her floating body to keep her prancing across the waves.

Later in the morning, when the weather was reckoned settled and they were lying in the arms of a sheltered enough bay, as ever was found on the coasts of Patagonia, at least, with the anchor holding, and pennants flying from the topmast, the captain ordered a doubling of the allowance of spirits to the men. You can be sure that most were hoarding an extra allowance of rum too, having
brought plenty from shore on the day they left Rio in expectation of their national holiday and other consolations. The decks were given over to drinking and at first it started quietly, with the captain and officers moving among men proposing toasts to presidents and generals, and to a renowned old sailor they had aboard, who'd been a boy when America was won off Britain. They saluted the memory of lost shipmates and those green boys who died in the recent plague; they toasted their wives and sweethearts, if they ever had them, and Warren toasted his mother and Captain Ugly Tom. ‘To freedom!' they roared, and when Warren spoke that word, he felt the irons fall off men far away, though he saw Harry Dugdale sneer in his direction.

Quite soon men settled into more solemn drinking, turning every now and again to remember their American flag, which hung from the stern, and of which they were so proud. A defensiveness crept into the celebrations as the Dutch, French, and Irish sailors they had on board, and a lone German too, remembered they had a nationality, or if they were still under a foreign yoke, would fight any man who said they couldn't have a country of their own. Sailors reeled about the decks singing songs, howling joy, chasing each other with buckets of water, dressing as devils and injuns, and fighting. Bare knuckles were the order of the day and a few old grudges were settled, as well as some clean athletic contests being sorted out; a champion of the ship was to be declared at the next match on the quarter deck, when the bell was rung.

‘Rum, tobacco,' said a man, grabbing hold of Titus between the legs, and shoving him up against a stanchion, twisting his cods to extract favours, ‘what more does a man want?' Titus laughed and pushed him away with a hand in his face:

It was what he'd learned in the Stanton's parlour and sung in his fine soprano before his voice deepened, when he'd never seen the sea, nor could imagine what it was, unless like a flood on the biggest river, with treetops drawn into the currents and the only way to get around on the waters to kneel on a strip of bark lashed both ends.