Free The Ballad of Desmond Kale by Roger McDonald Page B

midway between Malmaison and Rambouillet, home to France’s best wools — in the year of a glow in the sky, the time of a comet with a lanigerous or woolbearing tail. He was born to a studsman, Wade Cribb, and a woolcombing demoiselle, Yolande Rousillon, who, after the death of her husband (the natural father Cribb barely knew), went over the channel as Sir Hugh’s mistress before her early death. In a passion of mourning her, Sir Hugh made Cribb his son. Then the squire married more equably, if more dully, and fathered Tom Rankine, whose charm finally broke an old man’s promises, and whose core flock of Spanish sheep these some years later promised a breed unrivalled, in the climate of Botany Bay, while Cribb’s apportionment in England all failed.
    At the dockside Botany Bay spilled out its wools — not in great quantities, nor always consistently good, but quite stirring in potential. Something was going on there, you might say, like new stars being born into the darkest corner of the sky. Cribb was drawn back to these improving wools’ traces wherever he turned.
    The two breeders to watch, Cribb early decided, were ‘M. Stanton’ and ‘D. Kale’. They were first seen some years ago as private exhibitors in two bundles of best samples, names on paste-board tags. The very best samples Cribb paid for, but did not put up for sale — keeping them in boxes to be taken out from time to time and looked at in best lights, laid long upon a table, and there parted and eyed, not in any wish for sensation unless as a technical mark of comparison — but always leaving Cribb with an extreme dampness of mouth, an intense physical sensation, an experience of singular lust, or its near relative, abomination.
    So Cribb found himself thinking about Botany Bay and itswools more times than he liked. Without wanting a bar of it, he became the authority on them, and was sought out.
    A contemptible lot would stop him short, send him back to the tables where prentices and foremen gathered and Cribb’s voice thickened with bitter sarcasm — damnable stones in the matted material to give an example, they set him going — wool having crossed the wide oceans carrying scrapes of sour earth, links of shattered chain dumped in, torrents of sand where a sheepwash had failed, carcass of native dog found as makeweight.
    But the ‘M. Stantons’ and the ‘D. Kales’? They were the harbingers. Luminous when washed, the Kale was hardly bigger than an otter’s pelt. It was raised by Kale and trusted by him to Marsh, when the naturalist returned to England, after which there were plenty of ‘Stantons’ but no more ‘Kales’.
    Cribb and George Marsh met under notable circumstances. It had been the first but not the last time Cribb was asked to make guesses about the breeding of New South Wales sheep and found himself paraded before ancient gentlemen wearing the silks and velvets of an earlier day and obsessed over wool. It was during the October Stuffs Balls for the encouragement of woollen manufactures in Leeds. Rankine at that time was newly gone soldiering. Jeremy Bramley, as he was then, later to be Lord Bramley, knew a man who knew a man, and so on. That man was Sir Joseph Banks, instrumental in having the merino sheep introduced into England where it was fated to fail. But Cribb did not know that yet, the degree of its undoing to come: he badly wanted some — and Rankine would gift it from Spain eventually, as if to illustrate the adage, beware what you wish lest it smother you in blessings.
    Bramley and Cribb went by coach more than a hundred miles to meet Banks and learned from Marsh that Sir Joseph was in bedhaving a bad winter of gout and confinement. Bramley was at the beginning of his magnum opus, The Shepherd’s Sure Guide , and was ushered in to Banks for the benefit of his wisdom. There was a great mess of papers in the house and Bramley was