Free The Ballad of Desmond Kale by Roger McDonald

father’s will except six silver quaffing cups and a box of ivory dominoes. Rankine gained Oak Farm. He had everything,you might think, yet his feeling of loss, after Spain, drove him to amends.
    To nobody, not even himself, had Tom Rankine been able to say, ‘I am dying to be rescued.’
    Instead, he sailed to Botany Bay and rescued Kale.
    He stood at the bars until let in. The guards left them alone. After Rankine introduced himself Kale spat at his feet.
    â€˜What is this all about?’
    Moving his feet, as if a flea merely hopped over them, Rankine said: ‘It is about wool, Desmond Kale.’
    Kale’s sour expression did not change until Rankine pulled from his pocket a fistful of wool staples. He laid them out on the stones, under the best available light. Then he waited.
    â€˜Are these any good?’
    It was a long time before Kale answered, when he said, in a voice with the melody of his singing in it, and without any lilt of contempt:
    â€˜They are an angelic sepulchre away from the penetration of shite.’

IT WAS BLAISE HENRY CRIBB’S genius to examine fleeces shipped to a Yorkshire sorting floor from four corners of the world and make more sense of them than could be explained in words or read from their careful measurements. Consignments came from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales; from thistly Argentina, snowy Vermont, from regimented Saxony, from painted France, and from golden parched Spain and then increasingly from one place in grisly particular farther flung than the rest — where Cribb was obliged to admit wools flourished supreme.
    But each time the prison colony was listed Cribb cursed:
    â€˜Again?’
    Botany Bay wools clipped tighter than concertinas (in ribbed dusty bundles) were slung from ships’ holds, trolleyed to Thomas’s wool hall and broken open at Cribb’s convenience. He stood at a slatted table gathering their light tumbling splash. He interpreted milling needs between fisted samples, taking his time with thought, tapping his wide forehead with a pencil and wrapping his full, damp lips around its soft chewed end, or snapping a piece of chalk between his fingers, not to be disturbed — then strode along in thelight of cobwebbed glass speaking orders to clerks and carters, receivers and handlers, as sailing ships unloaded and mills were supplied a portion of their wants.
    Cribb’s profession was woolstapler, a word meaning sorcerer or something like it when you looked under his hat. There was an effect quite uncanny on Cribb’s sensibilities, a confusing magic to his touch around wool. The woolstapler’s craft was ordinarily enough explained as bridging between the breeder of wools and the manufacturer of them. The woolstapler purchased the fleece and occasionally sold it in the same state, but oftener assorted it: dividing it into different parcels, according to degree of fineness principally, or the possession of some property fitting for a particular commodity, say for the hatter, the clothier, the hosier, for the maker of men’s suits and coats or for women’s airier stuffs. Was it Cribb’s feel — his hand, his eye — or was it his heart involved mainly? Or was it more his passionate buffeted anger around the matter of wools, his roused intelligence that both frightened, and impressed?
    Blaise Cribb was a stocky man of stumpy commanding figure; he was aged thirty-nine. He was French born, English raised after the age of four, with a large head, penetrating dark eyes, full shapely mouth and chin — strong-nosed, unruly dark-haired, wide-shouldered with a contained gunpowder energy. His impatience, resentment, and ferocious curiosity marked him out as more demonstrably Continental than phlegmatically English. Cribb had the look of an exiled commander in waiting and roused interest accordingly — a harbinger of empire whose time was to come — though when would it come? Blaise Cribb was