Martha Peake (25 page)

Seven weeks the voyage took. Martha spoke little, and held aloof from her companions in the hold, poor English families themselves uncertain and subdued; her eyes were turned inward, she was occupied with her own unhappy thoughts to the exclusion of all else. This blankness and passivity, this apparent unfeelingness in the face of catastrophe, all this was merely a mask she wore, I believe, while she adapted herself to her new condition. I believe she was consumed, at times, by the most passionate hatred of her father; but I believe she also came to understand, at some profound level of her being—in her soul, I mean—why he had committed the outrage against her, and understanding, determined that her love for him would not be extinguished. This was no act of the will, it was barely even conscious; it was, rather, the accommodation of her spirit to the compulsion to love him. She had no choice but to love him, nor had she ever questioned that compulsion; and so in her mind a new picture of her father began to form, a picture she would protect from the memory of his crime just as his child would be cherished and protected while it grew in her womb.

I said this to my uncle. He was having none of it, he snorted and told me he knew little of what Martha Peake suffered in America;
and, he might have added, for it was there in his tone, cared less. And I reflected, not for the first time, on the diminishing interest, the indifference, even, in the old man’s account of Martha, this in strong contrast to the copious attention he paid her father. And although I had yet to uncover the mystery he seemed so avid to preserve, I was aware of a swelling irritation, even as I lay abed recuperating from the marsh fever, at his crude attempt to manipulate my credulity. For I was by now convinced that my own understanding of the events he sketched was closer by far to the true heart of the matter than his own inadequate interpretation.

So I pressed the point, I asked him again, did he not think that Martha wanted to forget what her father had done to her? He sighed. He shrugged. He admitted he thought it possible. He knew little of what Martha suffered in America, he said, and it was so long ago, and her letters had not given any sort of a clear picture of her life there—

But where
are
the letters, I cried!

Some flapping of his hand here, and pursing of the lips, and gazing at the ceiling; but for once I was not to be deterred, and with some vehemence, sitting bolt upright in my bed, I requested, nay, I
demanded
that he show them to me! At last he met my eye, and with a sigh he shook his little bell.

Percy duly appeared.

“Bring the letters,” murmured William.

Percy cocked his head, lifted an eyebrow. Things unspoken passed between them.

“Bring them.”

Percy bowed and left us. We waited in silence, William sniffing and sighing, and busying himself with a large handkerchief, my own thoughts growing impatient now at the prospect of at last glimpsing something more intimately connected with Martha Peake than the phantasms of my uncle’s ailing memory. Reading what she herself had written, this would illuminate my understanding, as a stormswept night is illuminated by lightning—I would
know
her, I felt, I
would know her for who she truly was, and I would learn, too, of those events in America of which my uncle, naturally, had no direct knowledge. And how much more capable was I, I thought, to grasp the import of what she had written, than he with his failing powers of mind—!

Oh, but I was sorely disappointed. Sorely disappointed. When Percy returned, and placed a small tin box in my uncle’s hands, I saw at once that it could not contain much of a correspondence. Nor did it, when at last he unlocked the box, and took from it a small packet of letters; which had been so corrupted by time, and damp, and neglect that I knew I would be fortunate to discover much that was legible within. He handed me the letters and with trembling fingers I untied the ribbon which bound them; and even as I did so they began to fall apart.

Fragments. As I picked with growing desperation through those crumbling scraps all I had was fragments. But oh, so tantalizing!—and I turned to my uncle, even as I groped about in the blankets to gather them up, and begged him to help me make a whole of what now was little more than a heap of stained, brittle scraps of paper the colour of damp tobacco, and with only the faintest signs of Martha’s hand upon them, those signs mere shadows—ghosts!—of the mind, the heart, the
presence
of that once ardent spirit!

“Ah no, Ambrose,” he murmured. “No, I cannot do more.”

I began to protest; a hand was lifted, and this time I fell silent.

“I am an old man, Ambrose. Spare me this labour. You have what you wanted.”

And with that I had to be satisfied. He left me soon after, and I lay abed in some dejection, frustrated in my enterprise and unable to understand why so little care had been taken of Martha’s letters. But as the hours passed, and the fire burned low in the hearth, and the wind rose in the trees outside the window, I began to feel—and it is often thus, with me, that the night will bring a fresh clarity to what, by day, has been obscure—I began to feel that all was not lost; that with the aid of these crumbling scraps, and the exercise of my own
sympathetic passions, there might yet be a way of coming at the knowledge of what Martha Peake did in America, and what was done to her; and I came at last to the decision that, like Martha, I would go on alone. I would write her story myself. Armed with these fragments I would trust to my own intuitive grasp of the drift and meaning of her experiences in America, and give them life with my pen.

What choice had I? If Martha Peake’s story were to be told—and I had heard enough by now to know that it must be told, and her place in American history fixed for all time—then only I could tell it. I rang for Percy and had him replenish my inkpot, and my medicines, and struggling to my table, with a blanket round my shoulders, I went to work with fresh resolve.

With the sea-spray frozen in the rigging—I wrote—and icicles hanging in clusters from the shrouds, one clear cold late October morning the
Plimoth
at last came into Massachusetts Bay. When land was sighted the steerage hatches were opened, and the passengers came shuffling up on deck, those who had survived the voyage; and chilled to the bone though they were, great was their excitement, and they cheered loud and long. Greater still was their relief that they would soon be done with wormy bread and bad beef, and would sleep no more on hard dank bunks. Already the air smelled different, it smelled of soil, of trees, of smoke, and for all Martha’s despondency there arose in her a surge, if not of joy, of faint dull hope at the thought of stepping onto dry land. Gulls swooped about the ship, and in the distance Boston was no more than a smoky blur, but as the
Plimoth
stood in toward the harbour the features of the town became ever more distinct, its hills and houses, its wharves and steeples, all hedged round by the masts of ships.

The day was clear, the wind gusting offshore, and the smell of woodsmoke grew stronger. As they passed among the islands seals barked at them from the rocks and slid in groups into the icy waters;
and there was Castle William, its battery studded with cannon, and a company of redcoats passing through the gates. Over the fort the Union Jack flapped and cracked in the wind.

Martha stood at the rail among the other ragged exiles. Boston was like no town she had ever seen, its neat wooden houses and forest of steeples all trimly contained among hills and water—so unlike London, which sprawls in every direction like a great squat toad! Smoke rose from a thousand chimneys into the cold air, and now she could see the big British ships-of-the-line anchored across the mouth of the inner harbour, and skimming and wheeling among them a host of smaller vessels, coasting craft and the like. One of those vessels, a single-masted cutter with white sails billowing fore and aft, was now seen to be clearing the harbor mouth.

Now, it is my belief that aboard this vessel was an officer of the British army then billeted in Boston, a man called Giles Hawkins. It is a name I discovered in several of the letters, or in the remains of them, rather, and it took no great skill on my part to recognize its importance to Martha; for that name, each time it appeared, was printed in capital letters. It is because this man played so large a part in Martha’s life in North America that I introduce him here. For it was aboard the
Plimoth
, I believe, that she first encountered him.

As I see him, Giles Hawkins had something of the fighting cock about him, he was small, portly and pugnacious, and his duty, this day, was to inform the master of the
Plimoth
, an ill-tempered Nantucket mariner called Daniel Bowditch, that he, Bowditch, could not bring his vessel into Boston Harbour. Having come alongside the
Plimoth
, and climbed aboard, Captain Hawkins discharged this duty in a loud, ringing voice such that he was heard by everyone on deck. Up on the bridge Daniel Bowditch turned red.

“And why not?” cried the apoplectic Nantucketer.

“Because the port of Boston is closed.”

“By whose order?”

“By the king’s order, sir!”

He had flashing blue eyes, this stocky Englishman, and he stood
there in the wind, staring up at the enraged Yankee sea captain, with his chin jutting out like a bulldog’s, as Daniel Bowditch expressed sentiments which would have got him hanged in England. Captain Hawkins heard him out.

“Duly noted,” he then said, and turned to the listening passengers. He announced that before allowing them ashore he would interview each of them below. He then ordered the ship to be searched, and the company of redcoats he had brought aboard with him moved forward and opened the hatches, and clattered down to the lower decks.

I need not describe the profound unease all this aroused among the wretched families clustered there on deck, men and women who had spent all they had to get themselves and their children to the New World; and imagine Martha’s feelings! Having crossed the North Atlantic, was she now to be sent back to England on the whim of this one man? Little wonder she printed his name in block capitals.

The mood aboard the
Plimoth
grew uglier by the minute as each family in turn went below to the captain’s cabin in the poop, which the Englishman had commandeered for his purpose, and showed their papers. Martha Peake was left to last. Exhausted though she was by the voyage, dirty and stinking after the grim weeks confined below, she made some order of her hair, she squared her shoulders, and down the staircase she went and stepped into the captain’s quarters in a temper apparently robust and unafraid.

Captain Giles Hawkins sat in the corner of the room in deep shadow. He was less formidable at close quarters than he had been on deck, for here he had no need to strut and shout, but with some civility, rather, he told Martha to shut the door, and then asked her her name. His voice was at once familiar to her, it was like an English hedge, clipped and cultivated, such as she had often heard in the mouths of bucks and rakes who frequented the low London taverns for the dubious pleasure of swimming in alien currents. But this was no fop; Captain Hawkins possessed, rather, the peculiar easy charm
that Martha would later come to understand as the mannered affability of the English gentleman harnessed to the seasoned army officer’s habit of command, and the two not in conflict. Not such a rare type, but new to Martha, and although he showed her kindness she did not, at first, trust him.

With the door closed, and her eyes adjusting to the gloom, she could see him better; and he could see her. He sat back in the captain’s chair, the ferocity of his features softening somewhat, his plump booted legs crossed as he mended his windblown wig with a small tortoiseshell comb. When Martha said her name he leaned forward and scribbled it on the list before him, then tossed the quill into the inkpot. For a moment or two he sat frowning at it, as though he knew the name but was unable to place it. He looked up, gazed at her, and then asked her: “Why are you here, Martha Peake?”

Martha could not stand upright in the little cabin, she was too tall for it. The mariner’s lamp swung to and fro from the beam close to her head as the
Plimoth
rode gently on her anchor cables. She noticed Captain Bowditch’s charts rolled up and pushed into pigeonholes along the wall. The shriek of the gulls came faintly through the closed porthole.

“I have come to live with my mother’s sister and her family.”

“Have you no family in England?”

“No.”

“Your mother and father?”

“They are dead.”

“I am sorry for you. Sit down, Martha.”

This she had not expected, nor that he should then give her a small glass of the captain’s rum. He told her his name was Giles Hawkins, and that he was a Somerset man, and Martha said she knew the county, she had passed through it as a child on her way to London.

“As a child?” he then said. “And are you not a child now, Martha Peake?”