The Ballad of Desmond Kale (45 page)

AS AN OFFERING TO HER parents whom she loved, feared, and had despoiled — but to whom there was no word of sorry to be said — Ivy Stanton went to her Bible one day, balanced it on her knee, opened it around five-sixths of the way through, and just as her father was busy mentally predicting which Gospel text she was likely to spout as justification of her deeds (but finding himself unable to, from the distaste of Christianity that had come upon him), she removed a bundle of envelopes from the box where she kept her Book and handed them over to him. There was an intense red coal of hostility in the gesture. The journal of her friend who promised to include details of interest to her father was just as likely to damage him.

‘What is this?'

‘They are my letters from Leah. They were in my Bible box and not even hidden.' She could not resist asking: ‘Didn't you look there?'

‘It did not cross my mind,' he said honestly wicked, appreciatively surprised at himself, with something like his old playful smile from before they set out on their journey to perdition. ‘That body of text is inviolable to my thinking.'

It was the truth. He could not go there even for his own greatest advantage. ‘But what about these letters, my dear? What treasure is in them?'

‘Don't spill anything,' Ivy warned, as Stanton left the room to console himself with information.

When tipping the letters open, dried flowers and trickles of coloured earths fell from the bundles onto the writing table in the small side room, dried leaves like veined scimitars, fragile as thin smoked glass — twigs, pebbles, feathers, bird bones and a perfectly miniature snake's skull cleaned of its flesh by ants and dried white in the sun. Stanton knew every word written would be true when he remembered the eyes of the writer, though when he began the first few sentences of Ivy's letter cache there was a heightened excitement of vision that only passionate young ladies could express.

For, in Leah Josephs's account of her life in the New South Wales bush, days were brighter, pace was brisker, nights were starrier. Intensity of attachment was revealed over many lurching weeks' writing as a waggon proceeded west and south. In Leah's cleverness of eye. In her rightness of words.

As soon as he could, Stanton closed the door and turned up the lamp to read the pages through, but reached only page two of the small, sloped, characterful handwriting in half an hour. All pages went across in one direction, left to right, and then covered themselves down over the top of what was already written to make the material fiddly to read, like a mesh of twigs. It was how postage and paper were saved but very frustrating. Where were Stanton's hints and signs as promised if he saved Ivy from his fury? He hunted up and down the frugal lattice. Came through and out the other side of pages one and two. There were many good reasons for
rage, now, but he would like to tell Leah Josephs that more was being done to save Ivy than could ever be imagined by her. So give him his secrets!

Upon reaching page three, a while later, Stanton heard the chimes of noon, ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, and went into the hall where the coats were hung. He buttoned his heaviest overcoat, found his warmest (and wornest) boots, checked for his pistol, tucked the letters in a pocket, and set off walking a good pace to the Drayman's Inn where if any hostelry was comfortable for a livestock-raising country parson to make himself nameless among habitués of steaming dung and hairy hides, then this was the one in the whole of London.

Stanton looked around for the two quick boys he had in his pay. He met them there daily watching the front door and rear passage of the rooms where the cursed lawyer spent his mornings. A dropped key, an impression of one, a duplicate lifted, whatever. The boys reported that Ritchie rarely worked past two of the afternoon, and on days when he hurried to court with a jingle of keys he barely lingered in his office at all. Today was a Wednesday, a court day, and as Stanton settled himself to wait to hear if they had slipped themselves a lock springer, he said good day to his fellows and passed for one who belonged there, by right, a scabbed-looking rotund man from a butcher's stockyard slaking a bloodied thirst and running fresh foam down his chin.

‘Good cheer to you, sir.'

‘And to you, my good friend.'

It even felt quite homely hearing the Irish brickmen call for their drinks: ‘Would your highness be after granting us a swallow of the craytur, on such a blustery miserable day as it is, beyond these hospitable walls?'

It occurred to Stanton's battered morality that it rather suited him best of all, this life, standing with an open collar inhaling a farmyard stink in the centre of London. But of course he was not deprived of choice, as some were — his choices were only narrowed down a space, becoming more concentrated, like pitch. Pray they would take fire soon. He'd drunk Burton ale at the Salutation and Cat in Hand Court, but liked the Drayman's better. He was in the grip of inevitable feeling and no more liable to question inevitable feeling than ever.

Benches in the stableyard allowed daylight to fall on Leah Josephs's pages where Stanton took his pot of strong beer and flattened the creases with his forearm. Great heroine of the cobwebby-inked narrative was Meg Inchcape, daughter of a convict of old, wife of a convict of new. Rewarded by a mood of forgetfulness inspired by reading her name, Stanton reflected that if Rankine suffered, it pained him, but only through her. He even forgot for a time the crafty promise he'd extracted from the author of the letter. Forgot that his craftiness asked for Leah Josephs's craftiness in reply, crosswise through Ivy, and if it was not given, he would burst a bag of blood and take what was wanted!

In a short while Stanton would remember this hour and the emotions it roused. How he stood there with Kale forgotten. Rankine forgiven. He would remember and it would seem a thousand years past he dreamed, drank, and ran his finger along the closely written lines in that warm-hearted ruin, the Drayman's Inn.

‘Meg's hair piled high.' ‘Meg's arms with her sleeves pushed up almost to the knobs of her shoulders.' ‘Meg on her knees washing clothes in a stream.' ‘A clear sparkling stream.'

A clear sparkling stream
? This drew Stanton up short. Where was any clear stream that ever ran in that country of muddy creeks
and stagnant waters? Watercourses when they coursed at all ran mud green, mud brown; thick with clay; when you drank their tea it left a gritty sludge; at best they reduced themselves to chains of ponds clotted with gum leaves and stained with tannins. In the warm heart of winter the stream of Mundowey ran clean over sand, it was true, but it soon dried. Eighteen years in New South Wales and he'd seen too few of those. Soon dried and pugged by animal tracks and the bootprints of heinous man.

Meg slapping washing on clean stones and Leah Josephs valiantly twisting the other end of sheets and shirts and draping them on bushes to dry! How the butterflies and shell-backed beetles flew up! In the mornings small honeyeating birds tossed themselves through treetops like water from flicked fingertips of branches! Meg was some kind of good woman for certain. Back and front as the waggon creaked along, Meg's name travelled fore and aft of the one precious sheet of paper before Stanton turned to the next, numbering them to page five before there was any mention of an illicit passenger, M'Carty.

Some of Mick Tornley's bullocks went missing and there was a long report of it made by M'Carty back to the bullocky. ‘Lost from the duck mole reach, three working bullocks, a brown and white, MT off rump, with lopped horns, very large bell on when lost, one brindle and white, ditto, cocked horns, MT off thigh, one strawberry bullock, snail horns, bullfrog bell on.'

Who needed such a close description? Stanton did. Leah was telling him something. The duck mole reach. Close by a stream of sparkling water. Or was she temptingly mocking him? The bullocks weren't lost in England. There wasn't a notice posting on tavern walls. Only here was the minister, bewitched, raising his eyes to the door and expecting to see bullocks in a powder of dust!
— in a place of that whimsical name, duck mole, meaning platypus. Lord show him a map as a cross reference! Page seven and the bullocks had not yet come back but a note came from a wild man, a bushranger! saying he would return the bullocks and the two horses that went missing when he finished making use of them, which was going to be a while. Oh the honour among interesting thieves in that rivalling country where Stanton wasn't, how he longed to equal them! The bushranger had a limp, a deformed ear, and spoke with a foul mouth. Thus Stanton knew him as well as anyone who'd ever had a curse of precise unspeakableness thrown in their face. Here written in barely decipherable lines was another piece of information conveyed by the girl, and about as useful to Stanton on this side of the world as a sprinkling of fairy dust.

And now there was a boy tugging his sleeve. A boy in moth-eaten rags. With a dirty face. With fathomless eyes. With a curious puckered and whispering mouth.

‘Eh! E's not innit!'

‘Key?'

‘You won't need no key, master.'

STANTON SET DOWN HIS JUG and touched his left side like a man with a not quite unpleasant twinge of colic. The small pistol was there. He followed the boy down the lane and around the corner, along damp cobblestones to the foot of the stairs. The boy ran off.

Stanton climbed three landings and up a count of forty more steps. As he went he primed his pistol, just to be cautious, and stowed it back under his jacket. A loud creak every step of the way. The door stood half open into Ritchie's chambers. ‘Well settled, my boys,' Stanton thought. A daytime lamp spat yellow light onto a green baize table. The rooms were empty and laid wide for his wasting. Closing the door behind him with a satisfying nudge, he was blatantly alone.

But when he edged farther into the chambers he received a shock. At the far end of the table stood Lord Bramley with papers spread out before him. The bald cockatoo sat on his shoulder. Stanton realised he was expected. Perhaps a little early but expected. The cockatoo turned a sorrowful pebble eye on him, itching its bare crown on Bramley's neck. Expected and betrayed.

‘Oh, I say, Parson Stanton!' said Bramley, looking up with tense joviality.

Gathering his papers Bramley leaned forward and scraped his chair on the floor. The sound brought Alexander Ritchie stepping from an alcove. Behind him, heaving with noisy breath, was Cribb.

‘Why, Stanton!'

‘Cribb,' said Stanton, ‘such a sick man, and up a great lot of stairs too.' In a surge of unchecked emotion he found himself drawing the pistol from the inside fold of his jacket. To get this done, Cribb's hulking wellness was a motive. All three of them with their exclusive gaze making him do it. The Devil making him do it until he grinned.

Bramley said, ‘What is your meaning, Stanton? Are you deranged?'

A minister's guise dependably paid out on astonishment. For while they were all three made ready for him in this tableau, it was seen from their pale faces they did not expect his advantage of arms.

‘Give me the maps,' said Stanton. ‘As the fiend is my judge, I must have them.' He raised, and levelled, his pistol.

‘Stanton, be a good man,' said Bramley. ‘This leads the wrong way.'

It was then that Ritchie moved, advancing like an ox. Otherwise even the Devil might have withdrawn to consider. Stanton fired at once, at the Scot, and then following the smoke of that jolt, which appeared to miss Ritchie altogether, only turn him shaky, and smash a cupboard door, Stanton shifted his aim onto Bramley.

‘Do give me the maps,' he said.

‘You have frightened a harmless bird,' said Bramley. An effect of the shot was to send the bald cockatoo clawing up bookshelves
to the ceiling, where it perched in shadows and looked its one hundred years.

The peer maintained such poise with a pistol pointing at his heart, that it was how aristocrats did die, no doubt. Quite deliberately Bramley folded the maps back into their component concertinas, and held them out to Cribb. ‘Very beautifully drawn. Exquisite hachuring style. Marsh was an inspired cartographer. His son should be proud of him.'

‘
Cribb
is to have them?' said Stanton. ‘By what possible right?'

Ritchie dusted his lapels, cleared his throat, and said:

‘By power of attorney vested in Sir Colin Wilkie, by Warren Inchcape, in writing, notarised by the Portuguese proconsul in Brazil, so passed from the boy, missing, to Sir Colin Wilkie to Blaise Henry Cribb, before me, Alexander Ritchie, until such a time as Cribb, travelling to New Holland via Brazil, locates Warren Inchcape and restores him to his rightful estate — maps, papers, and aged cockatoo, as above.'

If Ritchie had wanted a gun, to venge himself on Stanton, he would not have found one to go off in Stanton's face with as much force as this statement.

Stanton turned to Cribb.

‘What is “plotops”?'

‘I have no idea,' said Cribb.

‘But you mentioned it to my wife. It sounded Greek.'

‘It is not Greek,' said Bramley.

‘No? Not Greek for machination, or something like it? Treachery. Conspiracy. Double dealing. Everything done behind my back?'

Cribb coughed, and there the word sounded again: ‘Plotops.'

‘Plotops … platyops … it's platypus,' said Bramley, ‘platty puss is Greek, meaning flat of foot. Why, there is your “plotops”, Stanton.'

Platypus, or duck mole, reach. It was where they all were! It was where the noblest fleece was bundled! — that his wife told him about, not realising what she heard, while making Cribb better! Where Mick Tornley, the Josephs, Meg Inchcape, Clumpsy M'Carty, and quite likely Desmond Kale himself and whatever branded bullocks remaining were camped, all of them, all of them in the place of superlative sheep!

Stanton felt he only needed to fire his pistol again, and when the smoke cleared he would be with them: hailing them from the throw of their campfire's light.

‘A platypus is an enigmatic mole,' said Bramley, ‘duckbilled, that lays an egg. It stays hidden and has poisonous claws. It is normally quite shy, according to the best authorities.'

‘They are everywhere,' said Stanton. ‘Do not give them too much credit for being rare, if you know where to look.'

‘I'd say you don't know where to look, or you shouldn't be here, old fellow,' said Bramley.

This was not appeasing. It was possessive to a hideous level of contempt. Stanton waved his pistol around. Three shies at a fair faced him. Cribb stared back at Stanton from livid, bulging eyes, his shoulders heaving dogwise, as he made ready to jump.

‘Stanton,' he taunted, ‘the finest, densest packet of new wools in God's universe comes from there. From the platypus duck mole reach. Shipped by a man named Tharpe.'

‘There is no such scoundrel in wools.'

‘Of course not. It is Kale's. You brought it with you in the holds of the
Edinburgh Castle
! Kale's wool. Isn't that a great thought, Stanton? To be second-best? Always lagging? And yet up there at the forefront in aiding your rival?'

‘Why, this is insufferable,' said Stanton.

‘You have the gun at our heads,' Bramley pointed out.

At this reminder, Stanton fired his second barrel, without decisive aim, through a blur of angry tears, and Cribb fell down. Smoke cleared and the solid man lay on his back, blood staining his jacket, with Bramley on his knees beside him holding a handkerchief to his heart.

‘Seize him!'

Stanton dropped the pistol to the floor and raised his hands in abashment. His thought was, ‘If Cribb lives, all will be well.'

He did not know why the thought. It was a strange consideration, as Ritchie grappled and held him down.