Martha Peake (31 page)

Ah, but he is not alone, there is movement in the trees above the road, and as he tramps back to London a dark figure shadows him. It is, of course, Clyte. The little gargoyle has not been distracted by Martha’s flight, for it is not Martha he is after. The wind comes up and there is a touch of ice in it this morning, and Harry Peake clutches his thin coat about him. He is sober now, and he feels the cold. Winter is coming on.

Winter was coming on in Cape Morrock too, and Martha would have felt it, as she adapted herself to her new life among the Americans, she would have felt the ice in the wind, and seen a growing fury in the restless sea. That coast had given many of its men to the sea, and in the long hours of darkness, when the winter storms battered the cape, the firesides and taverns of the town were alive with stories of those who had perished and those who had been driven mad by the sea, of whom there were more than a few in the history of New Morrock. Martha listened, and remembered how her father used to talk to her about Cornwall, the men he had known there, their own stories.

I remember my uncle puffing away at his pipe one night in Drogo Hall, his eyes dim and far away, and I knew he was reliving old arguments, he was back in the seventeen-seventies, for he had
been talking about the Americans and, to my astonishment, with some sympathy. I remember how he shook his head, more with sadness, I believe, than anger, when I asked him whether the king had been wrong in his actions toward the colonies; and I then remarked that Martha surely shared his opinion.

At the mention of her name the old man winced, he distinctly winced; and I thought, what raw thing have I fingered here?

Oh, she was for the American cause, he said, after a moment or two, gruff now, sour again; was she not her father’s daughter?

But it was not only Harry who spoke to her of these matters, I said. There was her uncle, and others, too—?

Here he gazed at me through narrowed eyes. He knew what I was after. He nodded once or twice. Adam Rind, he murmured. Oh yes. Of all the proud rebels in Massachusetts, he was the one who fanned the flames of rebellion in the heart of Martha Peake.

This was what I had suspected.

One morning that fall, carrying buckets of steaming hot water from the kitchen to the washtubs outside, where her aunt Maddy was scrubbing sheets and linen, Martha paused and straightened her back, pressing her hands in just above her buttocks, and pushing out her belly, feeling for the secret creature in her womb; and as she stood thus, gazing out over the sea, Adam came up beside her and told her he was going down to the dock and did she want to come with him?

Yes she did, she did indeed, so she asked her aunt and was told she could; and Sara would come too, for the two girls had made their peace now and were fast becoming the best of friends. She pulled on her boots and flung on her greatcoat and cocked hat and off they went, arm in arm, herself in the middle and a cousin on either side.

What a dirty town it was! As they came down the hill they stepped over fish heads and rotting vegetables in which pigs and dogs rooted freely. It was a clear cold day with a strong salty breeze
off the harbour, and when they reached the bottom of the hill they were among the fishermen’s houses, ramshackle structures with woodsmoke drifting from their crooked chimneys and bleached bones nailed to their doors, whales’ jaws and the like. Crab pots were piled up against the walls, also gaffs and harpoons, whose function Adam began to explain to her, till she told him sharply she came from Cornwall, she knew what a gaff was for; and indeed, all she saw that day reminded her of Port Jethro, and in her nostrils the strong rank fishy smell from the flukes where the cod were dried on the rocks nearby.

They met people shuffling off to the dock, or leaning in the doorways of their workshops, big men with long hair and thick beards, and Adam introduced Martha to various of them, Dan Pierce and his brother Nat, who had the tavern; John van Horn, captain of Silas’ trading vessel, the
Lady Ann;
Ben Clapsaddle, Henry Coffin, Mr. Crow, the minister. All were friendly, in their gruff way, except the minister, who regarded her, unsmiling, from ice-blue eyes as though he were drawing back the curtains of her soul so as to take a look inside.

Then they were on Front Street, and there was the harbour. Between the wharves were crowded a great number of fishing boats, sloops for the most part, stubby-masted vessels with two jibs flying from the bowsprit. They saw men talking in small groups on the dock, and women with pipes in their mouths stitching nets; but no boats were going out. Adam spoke with fierce indignation, his arm sweeping across the scene, saying, here are men who should be out fishing, here are seaworthy fishing boats, and here—with a large flourish at the Atlantic—fish! A multitude of fish! It is because of the British that we are idle when we should be catching fish! But Sara and Martha were in no mood for Adam’s fervour, and told him to mind his manners, they did not wish to be
harangued
.

They stopped at the forge. The smith was hard at work, his fire going strong and sparks flying everywhere as he hammered like a very Vulcan. He had straightened out a twisted gun barrel for Adam,
who now stood admiring the man’s handiwork, lifting the musket to his shoulder and sighting down the length of it, muttering about damned redcoats.

Beside the forge a narrow alley snaked off between small wooden houses built close together, and the three made their way up the hill, Adam with his gun on his shoulder. Sara left them halfway up, having errands of her own to run; and Adam returned—he could not help it!—to the topic which had so inflamed him on the dock, that his friends and neighbours were prevented from going to sea and doing the work that men of Cape Morrock had done for the last hundred years!

What is it you catch? Martha asked him.

Cod! he cried. It was cod they caught, which they salted down in barrels and sold in the sugar islands. They came away with sugar and molasses, he said, and made rum from it—here waving a hand at a large building in the town, which Martha would later learn was his father’s distillery. And what did they do with the rum? They sold the rum in Africa, said Adam, and came away with, oh—he was vague—various goods—and here my uncle wheezed with malice—slavers, were they, he cried, these Sons of Liberty?—I ignored this troublesome interruption—which they then sold to those same plantations where they bartered their salt cod. And in this way, said Adam, men grow rich. But now your king threatens our prosperity by levying taxes which obstruct our trade and turn us into smugglers—small wonder we talk of taking up arms to assert our natural rights!

Martha frowned as she listened to this. She had realized the first time she saw it that the cape was well-suited to the requirements of the smuggler, pocked and fissured as it was with natural harbours; so she said this to Adam now, asking him did they not know how to evade the navy, as Cornishmen knew how to evade the Excise?

Oh, and Adam’s pride was stung by this, and soon he was telling her how John van Horn, and Grizzel Apthorp, and Brockden Coffin, and Dan Pierce and others like them—had he himself not crewed
aboard the
Lady Ann
many a time?—how Cape Morrock men had run the blockade again and again, how they had come through under cover of darkness, or fog, or storm, and slipped into concealed bays and coves where their cargo was swiftly unloaded, crates and barrels transferred into wagons which then, by night, were hauled to magazines and depots throughout the colony; and it was not sugar and molasses they brought in now, he told her, oh no, it was powder, and cannon, and muskets, and ball. And who do you think, he said, is the man who organizes the landing of all such contraband on the cape?

Who?

Silas Rind.

This must surely have astonished Martha, to discover that her uncle pursued her father’s old occupation. She told Adam this, and the cousins then spent a happy afternoon talking about the ways of smugglers. Adam later mentioned this to his father, and such was Silas’ respect for Martha Peake, he allowed Adam to invite her to a landing planned for some nights hence, so she could tell him later what she thought—

Tell him what she thought?
Tell him what she thought?

This, of course, was my uncle again; I was giving him my account of Martha’s quickening friendship with Adam Rind, and knowing only that she had indeed attended a landing with him, I had surmised that Silas must have wished to know her opinion of his operation.

The old man was robust in his rejection of this conjecture. Why on earth, he said, would Silas do such a thing? Is not
secrecy
the first rule of the smuggler? Why reveal his secrets to this girl—a newcomer, and English withal?

Because he trusted her—

Trusted her my fat bladder! Trusted her? He trusted no one! Ambrose, use your brains! If you have any left. No, Silas Rind was up to something. That, or Adam brought her along without consulting him.

But as to what Silas might have been “up to,” on this my uncle
would not be drawn, and merely muttered at me to go on, get on with it, if I must.

The upshot was, I said, somewhat shaken, the upshot was, that late one afternoon Martha rode up the coast with Adam, perched behind him on his black mare, her arms wrapped around his waist, to Scup Head, a high rocky headland behind which was concealed a deep narrow channel that a half-mile inland opened into a pool fed by waterfalls and enclosed by steep cliffs, and on the far side a gently shelving beach of black sand. The forest grew thickly to the edge of this narrow beach, and a track ran back into the forest, which some miles farther on quietly merged with the Boston road.

Adam and Martha paused on the cliff above the hidden cove in the last light of a fall day, and there beneath them, lying at anchor, was the
Lady Ann
. All sail had been furled, and the mainmast rose like a crucifix needle from the schooner’s trim hull, throwing long reflections across the still dark waters. A fire of driftwood blazed on the beach and two men stood in a rowboat tied up to the vessel, Caesar and another man, and with lifted arms silently received the powder kegs handed down to them by the crew. They loaded the boat to the gunwales, then Caesar sat to the oars and rowed to shore, where four men waited on the beach.

In they waded up to their knees and lifted the kegs from the boat. They carried them up the beach to a farm wagon hitched to a team of oxen. And all in utter silence, only the soft plash of oars in the black water, and the splashing of the men in the surf, and Martha, on the cliff above, dared not speak, dared not disturb the stillness of the place, nor the solemn activity going on below.

They rode round the headland then picked their way down a path through the woods to the beach. They went ahead of the wagon as it lurched up the track into the forest. It was dank and chill among the ancient trees, and they soon dismounted, the better to warn the others of the ruts and stumps ahead. Slowly through the deepening gloom the wagon bumped along the track. Night fell and they moved through darkness, no moonlight to help them, and several
times the men had to put their shoulders to the wagon, when the oxen foundered or a wheel snagged, and Adam and Martha threw their weight behind the wheel with the others.

At last they glimpsed lights through the trees. For several minutes Martha had been aware of a dull muted roar from off in the woods up ahead, a sound that had insinuated itself so subtly into her mind she did not know when it had started. Then there were shouts, and men with torches coming down the track to meet them, and as they drew closer a long low shed came into view. This was Silas’ sawmill, and the dull roar was the rushing of the cataract that drove the mill’s great wheel.

As Silas’ men unloaded the wagon and carried the kegs into the sawmill they threw long strange shadows in the torchlight. Adam stood by the wide doors of the mill and counted the kegs and crates as they were carried in. The great wheel, shadowy within its scaffolding of logs and planking, was unmoving, and as the moon rose over the trees Martha stood by the creek and saw in the river far below the long flat boats that once had carried her uncle’s milled lumber downstream to the sea. Now she imagined those craft with powder kegs and crates of arms lashed to them, and with that thought the prospect of the fire and destruction to come was all at once brought home to her.