Martha Peake (29 page)

At supper all the Rinds came together at the long table in the kitchen with Silas at the head. What a collection was there, and Martha was somewhat shy, particularly as so many of them were so very curious about her. Maddy had put her beside Sara, but Sara continued cold and aloof. Sara had two younger sisters, and two brothers besides Adam, all of whom sat at the table; also present was Caesar, and a man who worked for Silas called Grizzel Apthorp. Finally there was Silas’ brother, Joshua Rind, the doctor.

He was much respected in the town, this Joshua, as Martha would discover. A small spry fellow with long silver hair swept back off a shining dome of forehead, he resembled his brother but seemed made on a smaller scale, was quicker with his tongue, and had not Silas’ magisterial gravity. The doctor had arrived at the house before supper, limping on account of his gouty foot, so that he could look Martha over with what he called a medical eye. In the course of his examination he gave her a few pats and squeezes before declaring her a fine healthy strapping girl who needed only a little feeding up. Martha was less than happy to have Joshua Rind’s fingers wandering over her person, for her body had secrets it must conceal, and she believed he wanted to get under her clothes with those fingers of his. They were a doctor’s fingers, but they were also a man’s fingers, and for men’s fingers she had an abhorrence now.

Joshua Rind wore thin, wire-framed spectacles on the end of his beaky nose, and he had once, during the war with the French, lanced a boil on the neck of George Washington; and he would, if Martha liked, show her the instrument with which he had performed the operation. The Virginian had a strong-smelling discharge in the boil,
said the doctor, a putrid symptom he had since learned to associate with the qualities of moral fortitude and incorruptibility.

Silas Rind at his own table surprised Martha by becoming almost voluble, and indulging a dry, salty humour. He first muttered a brief grace then welcomed Martha and introduced her to all his children, whom she had of course already met by this time; and in the course of these introductions he indulged his humour at their expense. He then spoke about the unfortunate state of affairs existing between Martha’s country and his own, talking of “her” government and “her” king, and shy though she was to be among so many strangers, after a little of this she grew irritated and told her uncle pretty sharply that they were nothing to do with her, it was not “her” government, she hated them as passionately as he did.

Silas was amused by this retort, for I do not believe his own children were much in the habit of contradicting him, with perhaps the exception of Sara. After that, each time he repeated the slur he would add—“though Martha Peake disclaims all responsibility for the wretches”—to general amusement. I believe he was simply trying to draw out, at that first meal, what opinions if any Martha held about the colonies, and their argument with the king. Was she sympathetic to their cause, he wanted to know, or must he convert her to it?

Oh, but Martha had no thought of causes—she was hungry! She had for weeks had little but oatmeal and bad beef, and now there was roast venison and cod pie and boiled vegetables and milk, and there was more than enough of everything. She ate and refilled her plate, and but for the one outburst spoke not a word unless spoken to, but gazed around her with frank curiosity and listened closely to all that was said. But not until some time later did she have the answer to the question that most intrigued her: who was the man who came in the night to confer with Silas behind the house, and then rode away? Where had he come from, and what was his business? His business, she would learn, was treason; and Silas Rind, merchant, was complicit in that treason.

For several days Martha was excused all household tasks and given leave to wander at will. She was most aware, those first days, of the presence of the sea. The recent weeks aboard ship had been uncomfortable, to say the least of it, but now the sea no longer held her to its will, it no longer flung her about or made her ill as it had during the voyage. Now it was spread out beneath her, and she was on dry land high above it, so that however it raged, with whatever force it flung its great waves against the rocks, and smashed at the walls of black cliff rising sheer from coves and seashore along that coast, it could not harm her. Instead it provided an unending spectacle of power and grandeur, and she was exhilarated by the surge and flow of those waters; the immoderate enthusiasm she felt for the turmoil of this wild stretch of the North Atlantic arising, I believe, from her own condition.

This then is how I see her, her first days in America, usually up on the great cliff, Black Brock, large high white clouds pushing across the sky and the gulls wheeling around a solitary boat returning from a late-season run in defiance of the blockade. There she stands, wrapped in her greatcoat, her cocked hat pulled low on her forehead against the wind, staring out to the horizon and thinking of her father, thinking of Harry, mad and wild, wandering the wilderness around Drogo Hall. She cannot prevent the revulsion and horror rising in her as she remembers what he did to her, nor her anger—nor, at times, the burning irrepressible desire to kill him!—but at the same time he is her father, her
father
, and she holds grimly to this, and tells herself she must forge a fresh link with him, this link an act of the mind and the will, so as to keep him alive, to prevent him drifting off and disappearing into the Lambeth Marsh and ceasing to be real to her anymore. She tells herself she must not forget him, and she furiously nods her head—though how could she forget him, with his child in her womb?—while the wind plucks at
her hair and brings the tears streaming from her eyes with the salt it flings in her face. She looks out over a dark and turbulent sea, and closer in, the harbour, then the town, close-packed wooden houses in which dwell a community of strangers—of Americans!—who do not know her, nor she them.

When it grows so cold she can stand it no longer, and the light is thickening in the mountains, and thunderheads begin to gather among the peaks, she makes her way back down the side of the cliff to the house, where the day’s work is ending and the family is gathering in the great kitchen. There is a loose, rough harmony in the Rind household, each one taking responsibility for a task necessary for the common good, and her aunt Maddy overseeing it all; and her uncle, preoccupied as he always is with his business and his politics, the two now grown inseparable, staring off into the distance as he stands with an elbow on the mantel, smoking his pipe and clutching a glass of Tobago rum, unconscious of his surroundings until some loud noise from a petulant child has him frowning and barking irritably for a little order,
if you please—

One night Silas talked to the table at large of their duty to Martha. She was a part of the family now, he told them, and Martha had the impression, as the Rind children gazed silently at their father, that he had spoken to them already on this subject. And it was then that he turned to Martha and asked her to tell them what had happened to her during her last weeks in England.

For this she was not prepared. She could say nothing. Her uncle said he meant the period after she left Cripplegate Street, and he coaxed her gently to speak. So she talked about her father and how he had become mad and tried to do her harm, and how she had had to flee to Drogo Hall; she said nothing of the rape. Ah, but it took little, now, to make Martha weep when she thought of those days, and soon Maddy Rind and her daughters were weeping with her, as
was Sara, who until that moment had shown Martha only coldness. But when she glimpsed the horrors her cousin had endured, she could sustain her enmity no longer; and as Martha glanced about the table she saw in the candlelight that the tears shone also in Silas’ eyes. She could not help herself, she rose from her chair and ran to her uncle and flung her arms about his neck and sobbed her thanks into his shoulder. He patted her, he murmured words of comfort, then he stood her up before him and gazed into her streaming face.

“You are among friends now, Martha Peake,” he said. “You have come to us at a critical time, and there is darkness ahead for all of us before we can live as we wish to in America. But if you are with us, we will never abandon you.”

Then with all the family—not least the stricken Sara—gazing intently at her, she found herself assuring Silas with no little passion that yes, she was with them, she did not ever want to be abandoned again, for this, now, was her family, this was her country, she would never leave!

Martha never forgot the events of that evening. Had she any last lingering sentiment of affection for England it was dissipated that night. If there was a place where welcome was made to a lost creature in flight—and welcome so generous, so honest as this—then that place must surely be called home. She turned it over in her mind in the following days, and convinced herself she had found her home, that America was her home. And then she told herself: and it will be complete when my father has recaptured his reason and we are together once more.

That was her dearest wish. Despite all that had happened she wanted to see him again. She looked for the ship that would bring him to her. On Black Brock she looked for it, and at other times she stood at the end of the wharf and waited for it to appear in the bay. When the weather was foul she climbed into the tower at the top of the house and kept her vigil there. Many ships she observed out to
sea, in those first days, and all of them English ships, but never his. She did not despair. She held his arrival in some future in her mind, a future of which she never doubted, nor was she impatient of its coming. She believed he knew that she was waiting for him, and she believed he would come when he was his own self once more, and no longer dangerous to her.

21

I
had spent five days in my uncle’s house. I was now, with the aid of his medicines, almost recovered from the fever I had contracted out on the Lambeth Marsh, and had fallen into the habit of writing through the night, after we separated in the small hours, and sleeping most of the day—I had, in short, adopted his own nocturnal rhythm, the quicker to arrive at the end of the thing and ride away from Drogo Hall, leave the accursed place behind me forever.