Martha Peake (34 page)

But she was always in the house after dark, and several times during this period a man on horseback cantered into the yard, and Silas would go hurrying out to meet him. A minute or two later the rider came stamping into the kitchen, a heavy leather satchel on his shoulder, his face white with cold, frost in his beard, and rubbing his chilled hands over the fire as the women prepared hot food and drink for him. Having warmed himself at the fire, and created muddy puddles where the snow melted off his boots, he would be led off by Silas to his parlour, and there the two men would shut themselves in. When Martha carried in the tray the stranger would instantly cover up the papers spread on the table, and all talk ceased until she left the room. In vain Martha then pressed her ear against the door to discover what they talked about, for the doors in her uncle’s house were built solid and no sound passed through them. But once, as she was closing the door behind her, she heard the stranger say to her uncle: “That is your English girl then, Silas?”

She did not hear what Silas replied, for as she held the door open a crack he said loudly: “Close the door, Martha”—and she had no choice but to obey.

With each fall of snow the road to Boston became more impassable. By the beginning of January 1775 they had seen the last of that winter’s riders. The ocean was no more friendly than the forest, storms coming up quickly and lashing the cape with great fury before passing on out to sea, but a few intrepid vessels crept up and down the coast in the lulls between the storms, few of them British, for the enemy preferred now to keep his shipping safe in Boston harbour. Only through these brave sailors was Silas kept abreast of the proceedings of the committee in Boston. In this way he learned that the petition sent to the king, demanding the crown’s recognition of the colonists’ rights, had been ignored. It was one more insult. Silas was quietly elated.

“Now they understand,” he said. “Now they know what sort of men we are dealing with.”

For he wished it to be brought home to men in the other colonies that the British had no interest in seeking a peaceful resolution but intended, rather, to
punish
them, for presuming to challenge their masters in London.

It was in this climate of at times unbearably tense anticipation that Martha Peake continued to guard her secret. She calculated that she would come to term in the late spring or early summer, by which time she hoped that the people around her would have events of greater importance to occupy them than her little bastard. But then the situation was dramatically changed, and not by any action of her own. Adam discovered that she was with child. Sara told him.

They had been in the woods together seeing to Adam’s traps. He told his sister that when he had a son he would give him his own land to clear and build upon. He had turned eighteen just before the Thanksgiving holiday, and he passionately resented that he still
lived under his father’s roof. So Sara asked him if he had decided who he wanted to marry, and Adam said: “Martha Peake, of course.”

Martha was upstairs changing sheets and airing the bedrooms when Sara came to her and reported this. She then admitted that she had told Adam that his cousin would soon have need of a husband, and on being pressed, had told him why.

Martha let out a cry and sank onto the bed. After a moment she asked her cousin what Adam had said to that.

Nothing. A great shout of joy was all.

“Joy?” said Martha.

Sara nodded, and Martha at once understood that Adam assumed the child to be his own. Had this possibility not occurred to her before? Indeed, had it not coloured her feelings for Adam from the start? My uncle William would have it so, but I believe not. For I do not think Martha capable of such base calculation in a matter of the heart.

“So he wants the child,” she said.

“Oh yes,” said Sara, beginning to see how badly she had blundered.

Martha gazed at her a moment then looked away. She would not let Sara see what she was thinking. She resumed her work, and cast her cousin only a sour glance as she went at another bolster, throwing wide the window and letting a blast of icy air into the room, and thumping the bolster hard on the sill.

“Go away,” said Martha. “I have work to do.”

Sara ran from the room. As soon as the door closed behind her Martha pulled shut the window and sank onto the bed and began to think of what this meant to her; to her, yes, and to her unborn child. And for the first time, I believe, she thought of her child not as a sinful secret, nor as the manifestation of the evil done to her by her father, but as a living being, rather, who one day soon would require her protection in an uncertain and unfriendly world.

Adam Rind was by nature generous, and his generosity had a practical cast to it. As soon as the weather turned cold he had given Martha a fur hat that kept her head warm all that winter. Everyone wore fur in New Morrock but nobody had a hat as handsome as hers, for it came from a creature with a pelt of shining, flawless whiteness. When she put on her white fur hat, stitched by Adam’s own hand, she felt like the Empress of all the Russias, so rich and thick and soft was that fur.

The next day was Sunday, and Martha went to church with the family and she wore her white fur hat. It was ill-suited to her greatcoat of course, which by this time had been patched and darned a hundred times, beaten with a broom like a mule, streaked with salt and faded gray like the shingles on Silas Rind’s house; but clad thus in fur hat and greatcoat, and stout leather boots, and her plump white face framed by the wild wisps and hanks of hair that, do what she might with pins and combs, would never be contained, so eager were those rebel tresses to be free, as it seemed, in this place where
liberty
the word was never long absent from any pair of lips—thus attired, I say, she tramped down the hill with her cousins as the bell chimed in the steeple, and the gulls screamed about the harbour, and from out of the houses emerged the good people of the town to go to church and pray for the destruction of their enemies. The day was bright and cold, the sky a steady blue, the sea running fast in the harbour below, and the snow still thick on the ground where the feet of men and horses and oxen had not trampled it to slush and mud. Sara—who had since been forgiven for her indiscretion—walked by her side, her arm linked in her cousin’s, this at Martha’s request as she had no wish yet to talk to Adam.

Ah, the poor lad. It was hard not to feel for him, and I had a great sympathy for what Martha was putting him through. For a day now he had been desperate to secure a moment alone with her and she had not allowed it, keeping herself always out of his reach, even when in the same room as him. And how his eyes burned on her! His sisters were not slow to notice this, but even their delight at such evidence
of romantic feeling could not embarrass him, so ardent was he with this news he had had from Sara. But Martha was not ready, she was far from ready, and she kept Sara by her every minute she could, it was the least the girl could do to protect her, having precipitated her into this dilemma at the outset. Sara was as distraught as Adam was! She hated to arouse Martha’s displeasure!

But after the service Sara promptly disappeared; and Adam was quick to seize his opportunity. As Martha trudged through the slush in her fur hat she heard him come up behind her, and then he was at her side. He gripped her arm and they marched on up the hill together.

“But is it true,” he said, with a passionate urgency, “what Sara told me?”

She turned to him. They were close to the house, and she had no doubt they were observed.

“I cannot talk to you in the public road like this,” she said. “We will meet later and you will know everything.”

“But where?”

“I will tell you. Now I must go in.”

And with that she ran away from him, and the last glimpse she had of his face, as she went into the house, it was alive with longing and hope.

She had created for herself a brief interval in which to cast about for some solution but it was in vain, she could see no way out. She would have to allow him to think the child was his, and she would have to marry him. That they should each lose their freedom for a lie—! But for him at least the sacrifice would not appear as such, but rather as the fulfilment of his heart’s desire. Though did it truly not occur to him, I asked myself, that he was not the father?

I thought not. Had he seen more of the world, had he spent any time in a city—had he grown up in London!—the thought would most certainly have occurred to him; but I believe he did not think
the thought, for he was uncorrupted, he was clean; and it was cleanly that he declared his love. They met in the barn later that day. Martha, wrapped in horse blankets, sat shivering in the gloom as Adam paced the floor and made his declaration. Out it came in a great inchoate gush, how Sara had told him the news that had made him the happiest man alive, how he would build her a house when the war was over, and how they would live there in peace and grow rich and old surrounded by their children, and their grandchildren, and more yet in this vein; and when he had finished he stood waiting for her answer. She looked up and told him to sit beside her. She then sank into silence.

“Martha?” he said at last.

She turned away.

“Will you then?” he said.

With her eyes cast down on the floor of the barn, where a tiny puddle of water had frozen, and by some small miracle escaped the boots and hooves that had trod the barn all day—she nodded her head.

He leaped to his feet and with a tiny splintering sound the ice was crushed into muddy splinters as he lifted her to her feet and enfolded her in his arms, and for a second she felt her own bones going the way of the frozen puddle. He whispered her name half-a-dozen times and then she pulled away, and gazing solemnly into the wild streaming happiness of the boy’s face she asked him only that he say nothing for a few days, and he didn’t care, he would have agreed to anything.

They stayed in the barn a little longer and then she told him how cold she was and he hurried her back across the yard with his coat around her shoulders and into the kitchen and the fire. Everyone looked up as they came in but nobody said a word, and when the younger girls could restrain themselves no longer, and began to whisper and snort, Silas silenced them with a short bark—“Enough!”