Martha Peake (35 page)

24

A
nd so another night in Drogo Hall came to an end. Again I had written through the hours of darkness and now, as I rose from my chair and stretched my stiff limbs, I saw the dawn was already picking at the old stiff curtains. I hauled them back and flung open the windows to admit the damp air of the early morning. My room looked out over the stableyard at the back of the house, out to the fields beyond, and the marsh, where a dank white mist hung low to the ground and obscured the distant prospect. I filled my lungs and leaned on my hands on the sill, and allowed my thoughts for some moments to linger on my uncle William, and his strange ideas about the Revolution, ideas which influenced his attitude to Martha Peake, and created distortions in his narrative that I have only with some difficulty been able to correct.

We had argued again, I am afraid. I believe he provoked me for the sheer sport of it, and I daresay I should have refused to be drawn, but he had a way of introducing into our conversations ideas that inflamed me, that set me raging before I realized what he was doing. Earlier in the night he had remarked that only Britain, alone among the nations of the world, had produced a constitution that guaranteed the individual’s liberty against the power of the state.

I began at once to protest, but he asked me what other country
had delivered both liberty and order to so many for so long? Again I began to protest, again he cut me off, saying why did I support an attack on such a nation, merely because a particular set of ministers was corrupt and greedy? Did the Americans truly believe that with their few small communities strung along the Atlantic seaboard, each with its differing interests, they could create a system of government with none of these flaws?

I retorted that this vaunted British liberty of his was more fantasy than fact, and that the bulk of the British people still had no vote to cast in the election of its parliament.

So did I believe, he said, that America, in its system of government, would be
perfect
? Why should America be the exception to the rule of nations?

Because, I cried, it is her destiny!

At once my uncle fell silent, as did I. Where had this come from? It sounded like Adam Rind, or even Tom Paine. Did I believe it? I suppose I did, for I had said it loud enough. My uncle began to wheeze with happy scorn. Oh, her
destiny
, he said, his voice dripping with acid sarcasm. Destiny, is it now? Providence smiles upon the earnest smuggler, eh?

Earnest smuggler, I said, returning his sarcasm with equal acidity, was it an earnest smuggler who drove the redcoats back down the road from Concord that day? Was it an earnest smuggler who prevailed at Trenton, at Saratoga, at Yorktown? Who held together at Valley Forge over the course of a bitter cold hard winter when he had no boots, no rum, and no blanket? Who inspired the world with his defiance of the arbitrary power of an empire, who declared his independence at the risk of life and fortune, who forged a republic from a disparate group of colonies with little in common but a taste for liberty—indeed, I cried, who forged a republic which one day—one day!—will lead all the nations of the world as they clamour for those freedoms every American enjoys by natural right? If this, I cried, is America’s inevitable necessity, her predetermined course, if this is her destiny—then yes, I cried, it is!

My uncle was silent once more, his sly filmy eyes darting from my red impassioned features—I had risen to my feet in the course of this outburst, and stood now, breathing heavy, with my back to the fire—and then away. Your sentiment, he said at last, grows hotter, I see, as the history progresses.

And what man of feeling’s would not?

Man of feeling, yes, murmured the old man, as he picked up his little bell and shook it with some violence.

I flung myself into a chair and snorted loudly. Angrily, I examined my fingernails. Simpering Percy appeared, and was put to work with glass and decanter. I excused myself soon after, and as I closed the door I heard from within the room what could only have been the malicious tittering of those two old ruins. It cut me to the quick, thus to be abused behind my back; seething, I stormed off to my room, and there seized up my quill. I composed myself for narrative.

Trapped, said my uncle William, when next we took up the story together, and I described how Adam proposed to Martha in the barn. Silas Rind saw it, he said, he knew all was not as it should be.

Trapped? I said. Trapped? But how could Silas know? Had he glimpsed how Martha swelled beneath her apron? Was it written on her face? She was then in the first bloom of her young womanhood, I said, and her skin, I know, for you have wasted no opportunity of telling me, was envied by English girls, for by great good fortune she had escaped the pox—could he tell it from her
skin
?

Ah, said my uncle, with a weasel smile, she had a milky skin before she left England, yes, but that milky skin would now be
creamy
—did she not pore over it, each morning, with her little looking-glass propped on the window-sill, and a strong winter light reflecting off a fresh fall of snow in the night? Did she not examine her face for what it showed the world of this, this—a low cackle here—this wondrous little living being within? Was it not soft and white, her face, translucent almost, and plump with health; her
throat delicately veined in blue; and her eyes possessed of a sleepy contentment that belied the anxiety she felt as she endlessly pondered her predicament, as you yourself have so often asserted? And her rebellious red hair, did it not gleam with a lustrous well-being, and all in all, he said—enjoying himself now—did she not give off the look of a well-fed creature in the very thick and marrow of fertility? Eh? No, she looked pregnant, Ambrose, pregnant, for the source and origin of this plump creamy glow of hers was the
foetus in utero
all snug and complete and growing stronger every day. And if her uncle—said my uncle—did not see it for himself, his brother the doctor would not for a moment imagine Martha Peake to be anything other than what she was, a healthy pregnant girl.

He glared at me triumphant.

But they would assume, would they not, said I, that Martha’s unborn child was Adam’s?

Would they? Though she had conceived the child in England? Had they not the arithmetic for it, these world-shaking smugglers of yours?

The next day Joshua Rind came to the house and settled himself beside the fire in the kitchen with a long white pipe and a tumbler of rum. Martha was at the table scouring pewter, keeping her head down and her eyes on her work. Joshua sighed as he eased his gouty foot onto a stool, and murmured to any who would listen that this was the hardest winter he had endured in his more than forty years, not because it was cold, and his horse made such heavy weather of it when he was called out to a remote farm, and the rivers were impossible to ford, and on and on in this vein—no, it was the hardest winter because they could do little but await the great event that would surely occur in the spring.

Martha looked up startled at these words, thinking only of a great event that would occur to
her
in the spring—and the doctor caught it, his little eyes sparked behind their spectacles, and Martha
saw the trick, she saw how he spoke with a double meaning so as to arouse such a reaction in her. He had succeeded. He had stolen a glimpse into her soul. It reminded her of how his fingers had wandered over her body when first he had examined her.

He asked her then was she well, did she require physic of him, and when she told him no, she required nothing of him, he pulled on his pipe and nodded and said no more. They could hear muskets cracking in the woods behind the house, where the militia drilled, and Joshua remarked that Adam had become as good a shot as his father. As Martha bent low over her pewter she could feel the blood come rushing to her cheeks and knew her face was flushed as red as her rebel hair.

That night she was summoned to her uncle’s sanctum. Here was a girl with good broad shoulders and a character as strong and stalwart as any American’s, but what Silas Rind now said to her tested that character to the limit. He told her that Adam had come to him and declared that he loved her, that he wished to marry her, and that she was carrying his child. What did she have to say?

What indeed? Silas sat back in his great chair with his arms folded and contemplated Martha with a small wintry smile that was not without a particle or two of warmth. He asked her did she feel for Adam as he apparently felt for her? Martha had prepared herself for such a question, she had her answer ready. She did not love Adam Rind, not as he loved her, and for that reason alone she would never have married him. But circumstance constrained her now, and she had to think of her unborn child. He must have a father, and she a husband, if their way forward in the New World were not to be blighted from the outset. She had no choice in the matter. Lowering her eyes, and welcoming the rush of blood to her cheeks that came not, as Silas imagined, from modesty and shame, but rather from the effort of deception she was making, she said she did feel as Adam felt.

Silas sat nodding his head, watching her, permitting nothing more than that chill smile to touch his shadowed features. A few seconds passed, an interminable interval of silence it seemed to Martha; and then, as she had seen him do before at such moments, he roused himself suddenly with an exclamation.

“I am pleased,” he cried, sitting forward, setting his hands on his knees and thrusting his head at her in the candlelight, and she saw then that he was smiling broadly.

“If you love him, I welcome you into my family,” he said. “And I will tell you something else, Martha Peake”—he spoke her full name with dry amusement, an indication that he was indeed pleased—“I have been hoping for such a union since first you arrived in this country. You are a strong young woman and we will need you in the days to come. Give us sons, Martha Peake, we need sons.”

She could not look at him when he said this, and down went her head once more, up came the rebel blood.

“Forgive me,” he cried, seeing this, “give us daughters then, if you prefer. So long as they are strong Americans, eh? Come, we will go to the kitchen. Adam is in an agony.”