Martha Peake (32 page)

Later, when Silas questioned her as to what she had seen that night—my uncle snorted, but allowed me to continue—she told him that in Cornwall the free-trader worked solely for profit, whereas Silas’ men worked for a cause, and worked all the better for that reason. Silas appeared satisfied with this. My uncle William merely lifted an eyebrow. I could tell he still thought that sly old Silas was “up to” something, and that I was a damned fool not to see it.

The weather grew colder and the sky was often heavy with rolling banks of low gray cloud, and the sea turned an angry dark green, black at times, and so turbulent that the fishing boats, those few that
would risk the blockade, rarely went out anymore. The people of Cape Morrock made their preparations for the rigours of the season to come. They set about securing their houses and barns against winter storms. Boats were dragged to the stony beach hard by the harbour wall, then hauled above the winter tideline and tied up to iron rings in the wall. Maddy Rind inspected her larder and her pantry, counting the crocks of pickled fish and jars of fruit she had laid in over the summer, and everywhere fires were lit in smokehouses, and the last of the season’s fish and meat was cured. When the wind was right the air was filled with smells that set Martha thinking with some passion of her dinner, for she was hungry all the time now.

They burned prodigious quantities of firewood in the kitchen, and the several woodsheds on the property had to be filled before the snow came and drifted deep on the forest floor. Glimpsing these facts of Martha’s new life, I could not but reflect on how close to the elements these people lived, closer certainly than I did in Drogo Hall, where I sat by night writing this account of Martha’s American life in a very storm of creative energy—my back to a blazing fire and a bottle of claret to hand!

But no, clinging to a cliffside with their faces to the sea, and the forest and the mountains at their backs, they had created plenty from this wilderness, and from their surplus had established a thriving commerce. Seeing this through the eyes of Martha Peake, it is easy to imagine how a flame kindled to life within her, a rebel flame, a patriot flame; ah, but tempered, always tempered, by the uneasy thought of the child growing in her womb—

Then one day she awoke to the sound of chopping from the back of the house. Going at once to the window, she saw Adam in the yard below, in boots and britches only, hard at work splitting logs beside the barn. After each blow of the ax he bent down and tossed the chunks of cleft wood into a basket, and she smiled to see his long hair flopping about, and the muscles of his broad white back as they lumped and gleamed in the wintry sunlight. His breath was like smoke in the cold morning air and the sweat came steaming off him
in waves. After some minutes he felt her eyes upon him, for he suddenly turned and saw her there in her nightshirt, with her hair tumbling loose about her shoulders. She at once flung wide the window and shouted some nonsense at him, and he laughed right back then leaned on his ax gazing up at her, panting, and pushing damp strands of hair off his face.

Later she went with him to the barn, and there, in the crisp chill of a November dusk, in the smoky gloom, with the smell of horses thick in their nostrils, and the stamping and snuffling and whinnying all around, she gave him to understand by the general arrangement of her person that she was to be kissed.

He hesitated for only a second or two. Then he seized her in his arms—and she took some seizing, did Martha, she was a big girl—but Adam was bigger—and knocking the wind out of her, he crushed her to his strong young chest. She lifted her laughing face to his, and with some urgency, and no little intensity, he pressed his lips to hers; and when after some moments she began to fight for breath, he released her with a cry of alarm, fearing he had hurt her. She assured him he had not, but that he must allow her to breathe occasionally. He kissed her again, and this time was more tender. Martha’s heart was beating fast, her blood was in turmoil. She pulled away from him, she leaned her back against a beam, and with her eyes afire, and smiling broadly, she set her legs apart, she lifted her arms, and linked her fingers behind her head. She had been kissed before, and she had been handled before, but never in quite the way she was now, never with such passionate uncertainty.

After some minutes more of this she set her palms on Adam’s chest and pushed him back. She did not meet his ardent gaze, but toyed instead with the buttons of his shirt.

“Forgive me,” he said, “I was overcome.”

“I will not,” she said.

Then he kissed her again. His hand was on her hip, on her buttocks, on her thighs—she thought she would melt, she thought she would fall down!—but neither of these things happened. There was
another kiss, and another—would there be no end to this kissing? Her breathing was shallow, her heart beating faster than ever, she was flushed scarlet and glad to be in the shadows where he could not see it. There was a great warmth inside her, and a great rank dampness between them—

“We must stop,” he whispered, and she was on the point of asking him why, indeed the word had risen to her lips, and would have flown out, but some impulse of—what?—prudence, calculation—certainly not virtue!—whatever it was, she paid heed to it and said, breathlessly, “Indeed, sir, we must, and I must be at home”—and with that she ran off, leaving him to pace the barn with his britches bulging and the buttons of his shirt undone all down his chest.

She slept but little that night! She ran upstairs without a candle, her skirt lifted and her hair streaming out behind her. She lay awake with the curtains open and stared at the clouds moving across the moon, and rehearsed in her mind all the details of her evening since she had gone out to the barn. His face before her, his hands on her body, his arms crushing her to him, bending her spine as if she were a sapling!—then her own arms flung about his neck, and her face lifted to his, opening to his, and then the great liquid warmth rising from her womb and filling her whole body so she had to cleave to him if she were not to fall down in a swoon! Oh, she could not be doing with any of that, she would not be overcome—! What would have happened had she allowed the kissing to continue, this she could not imagine, or rather she could imagine, all too well, which is why she slept so little that turbulent night.

Ah, they were young, their animal spirits were healthy, and often after that they met in the barn, high in the gloom beneath the great rafters, amid bound bales of straw where they could not be seen; and they found no good reason to be prudent, nor virtuous either. Afterwards
they would fall back in the straw, laughing, and then they would talk. Martha told him stories about her father, stories of the old days before the gin and the madness.

“By God I hope he comes soon,” said Adam one night, as he rose from the bale on which they lay, a beam of moonlight by chance shafting through the rafters to cover him in a cold yellow glow. “There are others like him all over Europe,” he said, “and when it is time they will join us in their thousands—”

Martha pushed him down on the straw. Much disheveled beneath her open greatcoat, she straddled him with her legs and set her elbows either side of his neck, and gazed into his eyes from but an inch or two above him. The old familiar grin appeared, and the boyish belligerence faded. Adam’s moods shifted and changed like wind on water, and could be read as clearly. He reached up and unpicked the loose knot of her hair, so it fell forward and spread across his face. Martha pushed it aside and set her chin on his chin, their lips an inch apart. Again the mood changed. There was silence now, their thoughts confused by the sudden warmth in their bodies as she spread her fingers across his cheeks and hungrily kissed him—

Thus do I imagine those young lovers, in the very dawn of the Revolution!

23

I
n the wake of my uncle’s recent outburst when I had, it seems, been insufficiently cynical of Silas Rind’s motives, I was less than expansive in the account I gave him of Martha’s blooming romance. I suspected he would say: “Romance?
Romance?
”—then mock me for a
naïf
, and tell me that Martha’s motives were no less self-interested than her uncle’s; and having no desire to hear that brave girl’s honour assailed. I restricted my construction to the pages of my journal. There I allowed the thing to flower—though not, of course, without those obstacles that dog the course of all lovers, but give the thing such sweetness in the consummation.

Naturally I sifted through the crumbling American letters, seeking some stray word or phrase that might throw light upon the matter; though with little success. But as I sifted, peering by candlelight at Martha’s faded handwriting, something rather strange, and wonderful, occurred. For I began to notice, here and there, in the margins of the letters, a drawing she had made, and then repeated, over and over, as though attempting to perfect it. It was a simple thing, a rounded form, anatomical, I supposed, a bended knee, or a breast, perhaps—or a belly. And all at once I saw it—a swelling, spherical belly—a pregnant belly—she was drawing her own belly! Again and again she had sketched that which she must conceal, and so revealed
her secret, perhaps not even aware that she did so. I do not believe my uncle ever noticed these little drawings Martha made of her belly, but I did; and they endeared her to me all the more.

They slipped away from the house whenever they could; not together, of course, for they had to be careful. And if Caesar was busy in the barn then they walked up into the woods, or climbed Black Brock and stamped about on top of the cliff, shouting at the British warships on the horizon. One afternoon he took her to the Old Burying Ground, a large sloping field on the north side of the road down to the harbour. There on a stony windswept hillside the grass clung close to the slope and the grave markers were of wood, the whole exposed and barren place girdled by a wandering picket fence. Victims of war were laid to rest there, victims of disease and, most numerously, of the sea, and it became a favorite pastime for Adam and Martha to drift about among the graves reading aloud the stories of disaster. A great storm ten years previous had claimed the lives of seventeen men from four boats. A storm of a different kind had carried off every member of a family who farmed a valley in the back country, when the father went mad and murdered them one by one with an ax. He walked into the woods and was never seen again. There were victims of the smallpox, the yellow fever, the scarlet fever and the windy fever, and one old woman called Jephtha Stocking who died of boils. Adam and Martha sat by her grave and gazed out to sea, conjuring visions of death by boils. Martha at this period, that is, the late autumn of 1774, was as happy I believe as she had been since leaving England. Were her wounds healing? They were, and Adam did not disturb that slow work going forward in her soul, as she buried the memory of the Harry who had raped her, and raised instead a suffering Harry, a blighted and persecuted Harry, Harry the victim of cruelty and intolerance in that hated place of despots, that
England
—! And then the thought of his unborn child would cast her down into fear and uncertainty once more.