The Ballad of Desmond Kale (8 page)

‘ANYWAY …' SAID REVEREND MATTHEW STANTON, rather belatedly to his wife, as he emerged from his study where he never liked to be disturbed, through an amount of furious concentration needed for letter writing to the governor (rather than needed for his sermons, which came naturally spouting free):

‘Anyway … my dear … all such matters concerning an escaped convict named Kale … that fellow George Marsh … governors … black boy … renegade sheep-breeding officers … Jews buying wool … convict connivance and superlative sheep — whatever, whatever — they all lead back to the decision to be made about a boy … Warren Inchcape … coming under our roof.'

‘A decision you have made, my dear Matthew?' said Dolly, ‘Come whatever I think?'

‘Nay, the point I would make to you plain,' said Stanton, giving his wife's hand a squeeze and concluding his argument as if logically mapped, ‘is that if I don't have a natural apprentice in my ram sheds, my Saxons won't do, and there is no better way of sealing the matter than binding the boy to our hearts. You see, when he is
around sheep he is a paragon, and I wouldn't want to lose him to anyone who thinks they are better than me.'

The next day Stanton rode to Parramatta and examined Warren Inchcape's mother, Meg, as to her needs in life, about which he found her willing to talk, despite the possibility of some sort of confederacy lingering with Kale. He was interested to discover it by lifting up and looking under every one of her courtesies.

‘I am beating my brains out,' he said, handing the woman a card embossed with a Gospel text, framing a rose of Sharon in a shade of crimson, as a token of good will, ‘to remember where we have crossed paths before.' Except he remembered it very well. She was on Kale's arm when he fell over drunk in the mud, when she was a maid of sixteen, which was to say, at a ripe old age for a lass of convict blood to begin her romps.

As for her memories of Parson Matthew Stanton, they were not being investigated. You could only be fairly sure she knew him everywhere.

Showing him into her hut — the door a canvas flap — Meg Inchcape observed the finer points of etiquette, taking from Stanton's arms his riding crop, his big round hat, his satchel of tracts, and handing him a mug of water that only faintly tasted of clay, as it was drawn from a pitcher standing on a cool shelf, where the mud had settled thanks to the addition of a little ash. He could hardly turn around without brushing her elbow and feeling her warm breath upon him. She had him at a disadvantage with the look of her hazel eyes, only a little guarded like a hawk's and conniving to keep herself humble at his service. Whatever she felt for Kale she hid the feeling, in hopes for her son. Love was strongest when least sensible — Stanton knew — and Kale was a man involved in his own catastrophes, but she would want to save
him from a hanging as far as she could. Safety was in doing what Stanton wanted: handing over her son.

It was an improvised boudoir Stanton found himself in, with an emphasis on a woman's shrewdest commodity in a sprig of wildflowers and a mirrored shawl draped over a rough bench, decorative invitations to the senses. Threadbare as they were, the adornments did not persuade Stanton that Mistress Inchcape was entirely virtuous in the struggle of life, trying for a little decency where she could. On the contrary, the dexterous muting of lechery was implied.

The rough bench doubled as a bed, a deeply comfortable one it appeared to be if a rail was removed and blankets unrolled over a corn-husk mattress with eyes of buttons sewn on. Short of asking for a show of its utility there was no possible way Stanton could position himself to guess whether upon lifting the cushions there was a hidden hinge, and the space under the bed would reveal an empty box or a full one. It was certainly large enough to hold a fugitive. So was a box room at the side of the house, more like a broom cupboard, which Meg told him was occupied by an old convict woman, Mother Hauser — servant to a servant, in a gradation of beggary the colony made possible through its glut of workable felons.

But if Kale were alive, returned from the back country and hidden in the room (a wild supposition to be sure), Meg Inchcape seemed in no hurry to rid herself of her visitor. She was skittish when it came to settling on a figure that would warm her to persuading her boy to come over to Stanton's ram sheds. She asked for the amount of twenty-four pounds a year, twice the figure Stanton paid out on a shepherd, and said with a wry inclination of her head:

‘If I am to shepherd Warren, like you want, so that he always goes home to your fine house, that is the amount I will need to keep
me from other resorts. He should come back to his mother on the Sabbath, too?'

The way she asked it, with a rising intonation of charm, sounded as fine a note of promise as Stanton had ever heard from a woman threatening moral backsliding.

‘If I should let him,' Stanton cautioned.

‘Only after church muster, without a doubt,' Meg Inchcape conceded, as Stanton was known to be soothed by numbers of heads visible in his congregations, better than any bribe of rum or kisses that would turn an ordinary man.

‘Not every week, madam, Lord help me, it is too far a ride from my sheep station into this town.'

Thus Stanton tried to bargain her down, and while he waited each time for her answer (which was always no, she must have the twenty-four), he looked around the interior of her hut, and agreed that although there was a dish of blue delft, and a shiny knife and fork, and those enticing although threadbare declarations of the womanly sort, which made him wonder about a man spreading his limbs there, the place could do with more deserved fortune.

‘How are you getting by? What are those “resorts” you might be thrown back on, apart from being our governor's leading washerwoman?'

‘Only people's favours,' she said, with a foxly lift of her chin. She would do almost anything to avoid or postpone marriage, allowing her that freedom, if it came to anyone putting the question. The reason being that she still, in a part of her feelings barriered from change, suffered from a long-time heartache, stemming from a desertion and a hope of return.

Though her words, as Stanton interpreted them, went entirely another way: they gave the hint that she was a harlot outright under
the pretence of poverty. Or was making the political point, that beggary was the lot of her class. She was native born, with faults of convict blood and habits of consorting with scum implied. Just think of her father. Just think of her mother, Patsy Inchcape, the wildest, most unmanageable screaming foul-mouthed slut that had ever been held down on the flagstones of the female factory to have her hair shorn off.

‘In any case, bless you, you've won me,' he said. ‘Twenty-four pounds it shall be, paid in portions of two each month, beginning after Warren has proved himself happy.

‘No doubt Warren shall always be able to bring you a mutton haunch slung across the saddle, and whatever we might spare from our garden — hush, now I am going to boast to you, Meg Inchcape — we have plantains, loquats, guavas, mandarins, pomegranates and cherimoyas, a fruit from Peru.'

‘Watch out, he will grow fat.'

With their business settled, Meg had the style to ask Stanton if he would take a splash of rum before his ride home.

‘At your leisure,' he answered, taking position near the fireplace of cold ashes, a hearth almost big enough for him to step into, as he was not a tall man, more bulky sideways with a heavy chest and powerful sloping shoulders, a short neck, strong arms and bandy legs. He poked his interfering head in there, and was amused into being metaphorical when she asked him:

‘What are you doing in my chimbley, father, getting yourself all so sooty?'

‘Looking for one of those opossums that gets into narrow places, with a taste for nectar and sugared treats, so that an honest householder will never get rid of him, unless someone does the dirty work and gives him a sharp jab with a stick.'

COMING AWAY FROM MEG INCHCAPE'S row of huts built flat-faced onto the dismal road, Stanton found himself the object of hostile attention from urchins, layabouts, and various known molls passing their day in stupefaction of drink. It quite ruined the mood when a hurled clod passed uncomfortably close to his nose. It made him long for the unpeopled countryside of Laban Vale, where the worst thing to happen to a man was being swooped on by a magpie or bitten by an ant … worst thing if the man's name happened to be Matthew Stanton, that is.

‘Stanton!'

It was indeed his name. He twisted in the saddle to see who called out — a man with a lurching limp and a deformed left arm, moving in the opposite direction, up and down in the receding dust like a bobbin. Then came the curse of the Irish:

‘Stanton! You're the first, you horribilis cunt, and bugger my eyes if I don't get hanged for it.'

Only in his private diaries and never in his letters of complaint to various governors had Stanton recorded that curse. It was the
pledge reserved for him specially — one heard often enough, however, to call it treasonably common as dust and flies.

This day it happened that a constable and a work party were approaching from behind some trees. Never before had a vilifier left himself so exposed.

‘Seize that man!'

In a wild direction the man ran, with Stanton galloping after him. He jumped down from his horse. The constable raised his stick. They backed the man to his knees, while the work party, linked by chains, sat on a bank side.

‘What is your name?' said Stanton.

‘It's Patrick Lehane.'

‘Well known as the useless and hopeless,' said the constable.

He was a miserable, skinny, wasted sort of a man of around thirty, with unshaven sunken cheeks, shifty eyes, and a craven, taunting manner. He had an earlobe stretched almost down to one shoulder, a hole in the middle and dangling from it a piece of shell from the South Sea islands.

‘I never spoke. It was not me. Where was your witnesses, anyway?'

‘Constable, did you hear this man say —'

‘Say what when?' said Lehane.

Stanton could not bring himself to utter the phrase. But he took Lehane by the shirt and said close into his ear, ‘Mr Lehane, within the hour, under statutes of punishments allowed me, I shall have you tied to the triangle and whipped your fifty lashes. And tomorrow I shall come on with another fifty again. And so on until we come to an understanding, and you tell me who minted those words.'

‘Get me a drink,' said Lehane tersely. ‘For I do have sumpthin to tell.'

Within the half hour Stanton sat with Lehane in a private cell in the Parramatta court house. Lehane was quite changed after his capture — companionable and expansive. His ruse in keeping an unruly reputation intact had worked so far, he explained. Stanton gave him a beaker of rum. Lehane offered himself as Stanton's agent.

Stanton made sure they would not be interrupted, by bolting the adjoining door.

‘It is your confessional,' he said. ‘So tell me, what is it you have, and what you wish in return. You took a great risk abusing me. You dared a flogging, you claim, in order to serve me?'

‘As I say, I would rather break stones than be flogged. I almost would honestly rather hang, than feel them knots again.'

‘You have my undertaking you shan't be flogged, not in my jurisdiction, good man.'

‘In writing?'

‘In writing,' said Stanton, after a long moment's hesitation. A promise had nothing to lose, through being made to a malcontent.

‘It was an officer who plucked Kale,' said Lehane.

‘I am already sure of it myself. You have his name?'

‘Naw, but I seen him.'

‘We are only equal so far,' said Stanton. ‘I saw him myself.'

‘In daylight?'

‘That would be better,' admitted Stanton.

‘It may be,' said Lehane, in a flash of pride, ‘that you have heard of a bushranger who goes by the name of “the eye of reason”?'

‘Here, there, bailing people up,' said Stanton, ‘and giving out pamphlets addressing rights and wrongs relating to the Irish rebellion, where he was misrepresented, and betrayed, and so turned to the life of the highwayman, not through any fault of the authorities but through the ostracism of his own good people?'

‘That's me, the very same one.'

‘I have indeed heard of you, over the years, but I can't say a dispute between treasonous rogues leaves me with very much interest in your sympathies.'

‘Be that so, you may have the same enemies as the eye of reason does. The same needs to settle a matter.'

‘That might be better. Only I can't think without names.'

‘Say their first is in king.'

‘Ah, that's a good seditious start. Their next?'

‘It would be in acclaim.'

‘Go on.'

‘Their third in landed, poor landed gent. Their fourth in extreme. Would that make you a name?'

‘It does,' said Stanton. ‘To the letter.'

‘The
eye
has a hideout, a cave overhang in a wild place. It is a long way out.'

‘Which direction?'

‘That I can't say, but I
shall
say, when it's safe. It is hard by a popular ridge beloved by the dark people. Follow them, go with them, sleep in their camps — lie with their willing — and this country falls open to finding in ways you wouldn't believe in.'

‘I am sure you are right, and just as inscrutable as they are you would need to be, in order to thrive with them.'

‘It is through there a redcoat, a king's ranger comes and goes. So far, he's been a way off for personal naming. I couldn't catch up without being seen meself.'

‘Then what is your point with me, Lehane?'

‘Sooner or later that redcoat shall feel a pistol to his neck, and he shan't be asked the question, his money or his life, but asked to ransom his life to ye, sir.'

‘Is that your proposition?'

‘If I am on the loose and have my freedom, it is.'

‘You possessed that freedom before you cursed me.'

‘If the eye of reason is ever pulled in, he shan't be flogged at all?'

‘He has his freedom before my court,' agreed Stanton, ‘but be sure — if betrayed I shall have your eye of reason's spectacles on a string.'

‘As long as he ain't flogged,' said Lehane, ‘you can grill em in butter.'

They made an arrangement about meeting places in the woods beyond Laban Vale homestead. Stanton gave Lehane a purse of holey dollars, as a token of good faith. One through the front entrance of the court house left, the other through the rear walked free.

 

Continuing on his way the minister kept raising his hat in pretence of good feeling to this person or that, while keeping his mouth pulled down in defence of his inner character, which he was able to pass by the filthiest of arguments without any disturbance of steady feeling, as a rule.

It was still high noon. On a far corner, under the sandstone wall of the female factory, there was a milling of people at market, soldiers and hawkers, and a number of good wives with their baskets. Black people of the outer town bargained their trifles of spear and grinding stone, and among them Stanton saw Titus — or was pretty confused certain he did — taller than the rest.

‘Holloa!'

‘Holloa, my boy!'

Yes, it was Titus who stepped clear of the mob and waved to Stanton with lissome ease of his reedlike arms that he raised in a not particularly English way. It was Titus's day of manufactures, Stanton recalled with a frown, and probably as far as Mrs Stanton knew, the lad was at this moment closer to home, boiling up soap with shell lime and washing soda, common resin and mutton-fat potions, keeping them supplied with bars of sweet-smelling soap, some lengths of which he would have parlayed to market that morning, for a hide-bound certainty. He would not make a living but would take one, that was his boy.

Titus's delinquencies and strayings were a blotch on the surname of Stanton — it did not help he was given a stallion to ride, and would take to the ridges like the southerly wind — but there was still a sensation of amused pride to be had from his antics. Such pride was never in doubt, and Stanton was not so lost in lawful firmness as to forget his own heart (and he would like his quondam friend the governor and a few other grousing intimates to know it). Enough was plenty enough, however. There had been some brisk canings around Titus's legs and bottom but never a proper whipping as was fully deserved — now fancied by Stanton as delivering himself, in the good old bullocky style of Mick Tornley, no standing back but shaking the cat free of knots as was carefully done, and baring his teeth in a tight smile in that pause of pity before the lash came down. If it was not to be Lehane it would be this other.

Little doubt Titus would be home before the minister himself, by means of a cross-country flit, leaping logs and womback holes without falter in a flat gallop. Titus wore a white collarless shirt with pantaloon sleeves, tight blue military trousers with red piping, and laceless boots whipped of dust with a neckerchief. His hair was
soft brown rather than wiry black like his tribal cousins' mops, tufty as a cobweb duster when he did not use pomade. Titus dear boy of noble reserved mien with such fantastical features, proud forehead only a little prominent, handsome fall of nose only a little flattened out, refined sneer of upper lip, liquid eyes rather unfathomable, though not sad, only a little heartbreaking, and amused smile flaring only sometimes too hysterical in humour — dear fellow true prince of sable realms of old you are heading for a flogging.

 

On his long ride home, passing through scrublands and dry pastures on sandy tracks littered with clattering scrolls of bark from gum trees, accompanied by noisy calls of white cockatoos attacking poor settlers' Indian corn, Stanton spoke aloud of his accomplishments in this embittered land, of which only his horse could hear, so that he presumed it did not count as a sin to boast:

‘Over the next low ridge we'll see to it, m'lad, the better soil I scratched my head about when it came into my hands, when I ran a few poor seasick Africanner sheep onto it, in the care of a sinner recovering his soul, and the sheep at least thrived. This while I tended to other sorts of flocks — to my eternal merit — in Parramatta and the camp, as my first convict flocks called Sydney Town, as some still do — it was where they were tipped from their convict fleet and set up camp under tatters of canvas.'

The white mare's head pitched and rolled in a rhythm of movement that sent agreement into the whole of Stanton's body. Nothing pleased him more than countryside spiralling itself up through the fork of his legs. How he loved the strong neck of a
horse and the dry hair of its mane rough in his fist when he grabbed it! ‘So little attention was paid to ministers in those days,' he complained in a satisfying way, ‘that religion was made to appear contemptible. I was brought out as a lamb to the slaughter, but as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, I was not dumb. Sometimes I preached in a convict hut, sometimes in a storehouse of corn. Sometimes I did not know where I was to perform on the Sabbath day, which made me quite uneasy and put me out of temper with both the place and the people. Then I came back to my small grant of land, and the shepherd I had there when I started.'