Read Online The Ballad of Desmond Kale by Roger McDonald - Free Book Online Page B

with holy fervour, but don’t they see — it gets Kale flogged more.’
    This said with relish.
    At the time Kale was between severe floggings, his hide a ploughland of punishments. Before he received his next lot oflashes — following a brief spate of freedom — one man at least would make sure, from pity, it would be his last.
    The encounter was barely a year after Rankine arrived in the colony with his bought commission and his Spanish sheep, when garrison duties held him in town and Moreno, out past Toongabbie, walked a wretched landscape watching their sheep do passingly well on stalks and sticks and stones. It was clear by then, that for all his excellence, Moreno might ruin the flock. The Spaniard pushed breeding ideas vainglorious to himself. They were sheep obtained in Spain in unsought violence and the answer against unsought violence came to Rankine as a recompense: it was to let Kale have the sheep and breed up their numbers. The justice would be in the freeing from justice of Kale, and the glorification of his freedom. It was to grant a life, where life was carelessly taken.
    Rankine kept himself fairly sociable in town, among his fellow officers, listening to their rivalries about stock, not arguing their loud opinions back at them and rarely letting on he knew what was a lamb, a ewe, or a wether as distinct from a grub or a flea moving in the distance through the scanty trees around the edges of the settlement. It was not safety he craved in this subtle role, it was danger: truly hazardous fuel for interior justice. His instinct for risky dealing had brought him to the right place when he landed at Botany Bay and found, beyond the prison grid of barracks, stores, and stockades, a wideness of land vaster than oceans — and just about able to support sheep and an officer seeking a fortune in sheep if that officer was one who feinted, baulked, and dodged his way along. Except it had not been clear what to do, at the level of requital Rankine craved, with just a few hundred sheep, plus lambs, until the day he met Kale.
    â€˜Take me to him,’ he said.
    Rankine was led down a set of damp stairs with padlocks closed and iron bolts rammed shut behind him. According to orders he was slated to relieve the under-commandant of the dungeon, but disputed those duties as beyond his obligation. He soon got out of them, too, for there was a manner Tom Rankine had, a charming, airy easiness — something to do with his extremely pale blue eyes, so startling in a poxy face, that always seemed to be playing on matters he was best allowed freedom to follow. Something to do with his closeness with the governor, too, it was said. Both had been in Spain — Wilkie with the 88th Foot, later 1st Battalion Connaught Rangers, dubbed by General Picton ‘The Devil’s Own’. While that closeness was exaggerated, it could not be denied — you were a Sir Colin Wilkie favourite if you dined at government house one day a week, and Rankine sometimes went four. Because where else could you get blithering drunk on quite superior wines, and be witless with horseplay, and establish yourself? Where some others paid coin as a bribe, to get on, or equivalent value in rum in barrack room trade, Tom Rankine at least always started with engaged understanding, charm. It saved his pocket, and if you thought it would take him nowhere in a colony of getting and gaining you did not know Botany Bay well enough. His deepest need, though, was tuned like a lampwick in daylight. It was not plainly seen.
    Of course, a man was the same man all through. Know him better and stubbornness, laziness, and self serving might emerge from behind those keen pale eyes, and a bundle of other qualities, good and bad. There was a stepbrother in Yorkshire kept a resentful record of the worst of him, the two brothers being estranged. Wool was the stepbrother’s expert trade. He’d been left nothing in Rankine’s