The Ballad of Desmond Kale (46 page)

NEVERTHELESS, SOMETHING OF THE WAY of thinking was in Stanton's argument of defence when he was brought to court two months later — after being refused bail as an attempted murderer and spending his time in Newgate Prison thinking up ways to explain himself; not so much busily justifying himself, either, as anyone knowing Matthew Stanton might have predicted. For you could say that in a world in the business of turning itself around he'd managed a most completely profound rotation. It was not for nothing, the denying fullness of his heart. It always had a purpose.

At Newgate it was said there were only two choices could be made to survive the misery of a gaoling there. One was to sink into misery, the other to study villainy.

But Stanton found a third way, which was to fortify his own sensibility in a place where it was close enough to a picture of hell for him to fancy that hell wasn't so ugly after all.

It was to realise that in getting what he wanted, if he wasn't going to be hung (and that was a fairly large condition), he might after all have come only to a mere halt against these high stone
walls, windowed and grated with the king's iron; and that he was perfectly headed in the right direction to make his life out better than anyone realised. For, in other circumstances, there was no way he could have justified turning around to sail straight back to the colony unless he was a convict. And being back in the colony was where he had to be, as fast as the maps could be taken there. Land grants, a good part of his reason in coming to England, were beyond his reach. Land grabs were not.

The only trouble with his argument was that he was more likely to be hung than not. Even with Cribb recovered. Yet he would face that rope when it dangled. Meantime he learned that fear of shame was hardly possible in a prison yard where the law had no power, religion didn't penetrate, the lewd held court with the lewd, and the audacious provided inspiration in rising above a bad situation.

Newgate was like the streets where he'd already made his introductions to the underworld of knowledge, except of course far worse, being more crowded, diseased, and venal with appetites on a rampage of people gorging themselves stupid. It was like the London streets in miniature with all the milling around being done except Newgate had no exits. It was so entirely criminal, and despairing, and sometimes so vengeful a place, that Stanton feared for his prominence as a dispenser of punishments. Sometimes a man was bludgeoned for his past, knifed or strangled on a whim of resentment. It was not pretty but soon Stanton learned he was respected for his fall more than his rise, admired for his clerical collar reversed as a yoke. He was liked for his posturings of wealth, too, a man with treasure stoked in quantities of land and sheep. ‘I am wealthy as a duke,' he boasted, ‘but cannot get at my treasury. My enemies have made sure of it.' The statement pursued a line so familiar to old lags it made Stanton one of them, and what did it
matter, they liked him even if convinced he was just as big a liar as they were.

Thus Stanton saw himself changed, but not as much as might be. If he didn't hang or die of typhus from the rats biting his toes he might be all right. Certainly he was changed in every conceivable circumstance. But that was from the outside. What a relief it was to be no good! The deed done, his whole life seemed to have been spent in making the journey to greet the wrong. Each day now was spent in a near happiness of filth and sin and the greatest uplifter of himself was his pride in the lowness of Newgate. His face was in the awfulest dirt. He was saved by not being saved.

Newgate was so jostlingly overcrowded that in the first part of his stay there, before he was removed to the press yard, where prisoners were kept waiting to be executed, he got by through remembering sheep yards and how sheep managed being jostled even when they lay down to sleep and how they were trodden in their faces and still got up. By night he gazed out through a hole in the roof avoiding streams of rain and watching for a gap in the clouds where a star came out. There were no cells available and he slept hard by a wall. He remembered how a sheep was held against a wall or on a hurdle being stilled having its throat cut and hoped to be resolute at his end. Each morning he gathered around him a gang whose best reward for crime was going to be transportation. Stanton was far and away the greatest expert in all of Newgate, in all of England, he corrected, in advising convicts how to get on if they reached Botany Bay. He imparted his advice without charge in a place where every sharpish prisoner had something of cost to impart, or extract from a pocket if it wasn't their own.

How Stanton managed to keep himself clean among so many unwashed bodies was an exercise in achievement. He'd always been
fairly deft in that regard and was now more attentive, without being too plagued by the need. They'd all of them lived from one shallow dish of water some years at Laban Vale and none of it very clean. Streaks of human faeces on the stones, decaying food in corners being gnawed by rats: these were the decorations of his new house's carpet, but he gained in weight, wore clean clothes every day (the only one there who was able), and through being privileged to purchase wine from a wardsman was satisfied in his thirst. It was all mainly thanks to the roster of visitors who came bringing baskets every day that he counted himself lucky — his wife, daughter, and the Hardcastles. The Hardcastles proved their merit. They believed in the Devil as little as they believed in God, no matter how much Stanton glared at them to prove them wrong. Just when he went to the bad, here they were assaulting him with good.

They brought news of the preparation of his case, which was being underwritten by Bramley's wealth, leaving unanswered the riddle of how a man wronged was willing to save his attacker while being part of the trial against him. Stanton was changed, but not so soft as to have an answer to such superlative kindnesses as made him believe he was being played along on a leash of condescension. It was one irritation, and the other was that every week a deputation of catechists came to pray with him and their main object was to castigate him and shrive him of his sins. At the same time, they brought the news that he was bit by bit divested of his clerical titles and positions in the Anglican Church. He was spared the discomfort of the bishops and archdeacons coming to tell him this in person by their regal reluctance to make the walk to Newgate, on the grounds that he'd cut himself off from their interest quite wilfully. How they ever understood they were Christians wasn't plain unless it was the case as he'd found in his own
life, that what was pledged wasn't done. Stanton went through the prayers by rote with the catechists, and when they asked him to sink to his knees, he did so, but otherwise his heart was stone. They asked him to think on the suffering son of God, but in the faces of those around him he saw all the suffering, joy, hope and despondency that he ever needed to know, or, because he'd never been close enough to it before (from always standing back to control his purpose) hadn't ever quite seen yet.

Stanton's triumph in prison was in discovering how his strangest intuition was proved right, and that a step over a line brought him to the Devil's domain and living there was less shameful than pushing the limit of Christian understanding. However, it had to be conceded — his mind came back to it — chance had fouled his timing in going to Ritchie's chambers and surely the day would have unfolded otherwise had the Bow Street runners been waiting to warn him off on the outside of the door instead of arriving minutes later than organised by the plotters, to arrest him within. It was the last vestige of his whining, needful self to put forward this explanation, for the strangest part of it was, that while under remand, he spent his days playing chess and skittles, drinking wine and gin that was fairly easily obtainable, and making the acquaintance of his whole new circle of hard-bitten friends and learning that while the wages of sin were death, the wages of pleasure were countable in a few smuggled sovereigns and in the rabid fumbling of fornication in corners and under piles of rags. Whenever Stanton wavered in his faith in the path he'd been thrown upon, and was tempted back to the straight and narrow (it was usually on Sundays) he only needed see how life was lived in the stink of forceful aggravation at the level to which he was reduced. Oh, and he wanted his wife to know (if she ever doubted it) he was not so
disordered in his morals as to be party to fornication, either. He loved her dearly, longed for her visits, and Dolly discovered through heartbreak and humiliation that she loved her husband whichever way he turned.

 

‘“Chance”, Parson Stanton?' said the judge, roused to the point of outrage by a claim. ‘“Chance” in your mounting up those stairs, with primed pistol loaded with hard ball, showing murderous intent? And “plotters”? Weren't you the one plotter, sir? A conspiracy of yourself?'

The judge looked at the statement of charges before him and uttered a tormented sigh. It was plainly understood that if Judge Pidgeon could not have Stanton sentenced by three in the afternoon and hung by morning light, his amazement would then be complete. Until then he was all disbelieving looks. The jury had only to read his face to know their verdict some long time before they retired to consider it.

A constable's timing was the only matter in the whole unravelling affair that depended on chance, answered the prosecution — led by the famous Erskine — not having too much trouble in persuading the judge, either, that it was better not to address the accused by the title of Reverend. It might give the impression that Stanton was some kind of agent of moral force, still, and as justifiable in his ambitions as his defence counsel came close to arguing, but was soon enough discredited. That Stanton was formerly an Anglican priest only proved he was once certified capable of appreciating right from wrong. Therefore was guilty as could be. Wasn't it shown by his years of preaching in Botany Bay, that he was clear on morality? There were several churchmen, witnesses for him,
who, although they had struck him from their register of clerics as soon as they could, volunteered their very fine feeling by testifying they had known the prisoner twenty years and a man more humble, more inoffensive and less likely to commit such an outrage was not within the circle of their acquaintance. There was not much more to be said for him. Major Agnew of His Majesty's N.S. Wales rangers was examined, and although Agnew tried saying his best for Stanton's reputation as a sheep breeder it came out he was a flogger. The information went back to Newgate and Stanton spent an unhappy time being clawed and mocked until his sentencing came around, when he was left alone from pity in the press yard. It was his lowest point. He was like a bag emptied of lumpy seed-potatoes gone wrong and ready to be thrown away, a piece of sacking. That a bullet wound to the chest had opened Blaise Cribb's ribcage and drained his lungs of pestilence while he lay knocked back on the bare boards of Ritchie's rooms, giving him back his health several hundred percentage-wise, so that he sat in the body of the court breathing freely, bright of cheek, quick of step, shining of eye, was not even raised. But that Stanton had loaded his pistol with something a little more powerful than swanshot and powder, which was to say, hard ball, was made much of: the intent to commit murder was plain.

The presence in court of a powerful friend had some slight effect upon the judge in deciding what sentence to pass, but it was not sufficient. That the powerful friend was the same Lord Bramley who'd come under the nose of Stanton's pistol, and indeed that all of Stanton's house remaining, his wife, his daughter, his (too obvious) unborn grandchild, were under the kind protection of Bramley and his friends, including Cribb, the man shot, and the Hardcastles, known reformers, only added a certain urgency to
getting the world rid of the origin of all their misery and charity: the morosely glaring prisoner in the dock, Matthew Stanton.

At the end, a plea was allowed from Alexander Ritchie, on behalf of the prisoner. Ritchie was against the noose even if it was himself shot and killed! Such a statement never having been heard in his court nor in any other the judge knew of, he asked for the jury to retire and consider.

Very soon they were back:

‘
Guilty, Death, aged 53
.'