Martha Peake (39 page)

“Good!” he cried, dropping her hands. “Good. Now we will talk. Sit. Listen.”

The next morning Martha was the first in the kitchen after her aunt. She tended the fire, which was allowed to burn low through the night, and got the water started in the big kettle. She had not slept well. The conversation with her uncle after the captain’s departure had left her worried and confused, uncertain how she was to manoeuvre among the men and still protect herself and her child. When she had gone to the kitchen to fill the jug, she had found Adam and Caesar seated at the table. She had hurried across the room to the rum keg and Adam had risen to his feet, his face alive with questions, eager to know what was going forward, but she could say only that they wanted more rum.

“But what are they saying?” he cried.

The two men gazed at her in silent expectation. Under the scrutiny of their eyes she was clumsy with the spigot, and as she wiped up the spilled rum she said she did not know what was being said for they spoke too quiet. Later she slipped upstairs to bed without encountering Adam, and fortunately her cousins were all fast asleep.

But there was no avoiding him for long. He waylaid her later in the morning, behind the house, as he was about to go off into the woods, and he would not listen when she told him that she must get back to her work in the kitchen. He was hurt not to have been asked to attend the meeting of his father and Captain Hawkins, and the fact of Martha’s presence there, and her long private conversation with Silas after the Englishman had left, all this was a further insult. He wanted to know what had transpired, and Martha saw nothing for it but to tell him the truth.

“Your father has bound me to say nothing,” she said. “I have given him my promise.”

“And have you not given me your promise too?” cried Adam. Oh, she had never seen him so distraught! That his father should bind his Martha with promises of silence—! She had not properly known men’s jealousy before, beyond the unnatural rage she had observed in her father during his madness. Adam did not understand why she was not plain and open with him, and she hated having to be politic with him, she felt a powerful reluctance, a repugnance, even, to deceive him. So she seized his hands and said with some passion: “Yes, I have given you my promise too. And if you would have me honour that promise, you must see that only with your father’s permission can I break my promise to him. Ask it of him! If he will release me, I will tell you everything.”

She knew as she said it that Silas Rind would never release her from her promise. Caesar stood waiting with the horses, and Adam left her, a little relieved, at least, by this evidence of the desperation she so plainly felt.

28

I
paced my room and pondered these developments. My uncle, as I say, would tell me nothing of these events, and grew caustic with me at the mere mention of them. Nor would he acknowledge the extent of Martha’s difficulties. The night after the Englishman’s visit to the Rind house, Martha, on Silas’ instructions, went down the hill to visit an old widow woman who lived near the George, taking her four jars of her aunt’s pickles and a jug of her uncle’s rum. It was a windy night, the moon not yet risen, and the sea rattled on the shingle and crashed against the harbour wall. She was making her way home up a narrow twisting street behind the tavern when she heard someone softly calling her name. She turned to discover Giles Hawkins standing in a doorway in the shadows.

This she had dreaded. She tried to hurry on, but he called her again and asked her if her uncle was well. She said he was. He then said that as the night was dark, might he escort her to her house?

They made their way up through the town. The captain told her he was concerned for her welfare, he wanted to know how she fared among the colonials, he asked her did they mistreat her because she was English. “An unhappy story,” he said, “to lose both your parents, and live among strangers so far from home.” He made no mention of her pregnant belly.

“Not unhappy at all,” she said. “It pleased me to leave England. I am an American now.”

“An American, are you?”

She noticed that as they came up the empty street, the little fishermen’s houses pressed close together on either side, and a narrow strip of cloudy night sky overhead, he glanced constantly about him, into alleys and doorways, and up at windows and roofs, as though he anticipated being at any moment ambushed.

“Have no fear,” said Martha, “you are safe with me.”

This made him laugh quietly.

“Indebted to you, madam,” he said. “Let me offer in return to serve you as a soldier and a gentleman.”

“An English gentleman,” she said. “But it is from English gentlemen that I shall soon require protection.”

“Let us hope,” he murmured, “that it will not come to that.”

“You can hope,” said Martha.

They were up among the big houses by this time, where the merchants and sea captains lived, and as the moon rose over the forest, and spread a pale light on the world, they stopped and turned to look down on the harbour and the sea beyond. They were beneath an ancient oak tree, and cloaked in the gloom of its great bare boughs. The captain turned to her.

“You say this is your home now.”

“It is.”

“It need not be.”

“Where else would I go?”

“I could carry you back to Boston with me. I could find you a place with an English family there.”

“As a servant?”

“At first, yes.”

What did he mean? Was she to be a servant? Or was she, rather, to be his whore? We may imagine how Martha Peake would respond to such an invitation, if indeed it was an invitation; but once again she was politic. She did not lose her temper. She was civil.

“It is not possible, sir. I am to be married here.”

“Ah. That is too bad.”

“It is not too bad for me.”

Silas and Adam were still up when she returned to the house, the pair of them occupied by lamplight with the cleaning of a musket, which had been dismantled and its parts spread across an oilskin on the table. As she hurried through the kitchen Adam watched her with hungry eyes, and Silas flung a quick dark glance in her direction.

The next day she tried to go about her duties in the normal way. She took the children down to the dock but did not push to the front of the crowd, as she had the day before, to watch the men at work on the
Queen Charlotte
’s mainmast. No, this day she hung back and instead watched the captain as he moved about on the wharf. Had he meant what she imagined he meant, the night before? She was less sure in the cold light of day. She gazed at him now, strong brisk capable man that he was, his voice ringing out clear and clipped as he strode about in his white britches, issuing orders to his men. And he saw her, of course he did, and his eyes suggested nothing that would dishonour her, he seemed again the honest fatherly man she had met aboard the
Plimoth
.

She found more errands to perform after dark, again on Silas’ instructions. The old widow woman, Hezebiah Scunthorpe, whose husband had been carried off by the windy fever earlier in the winter, was again the object of her charity. And again Giles Hawkins intercepted her as she made her way home. She did not betray the suspicion he had aroused in her the previous night, instead she played the innocent, and steered the conversation toward topics military and political. She told him what Silas wanted him to hear—that is, that no war preparations were afoot on the cape—and asked him the question Silas wanted answered, in her own way, of course, so as to conceal her true purpose, that question concerning the destination of
the British fleet, when it left Boston; but the captain revealed little, he smiled indulgently, rather, for he saw her game at once.

He then startled her, he startled her greatly, by asking if her father was called Harry. Taken by surprise she said yes. What did he know of Harry Peake?

“We are talking of the humpback Cornishman who fell in with the Earl of Drogo?” he then said, and she said, yes, yes—“for the love of God, sir, tell me what you know!”

Oh, but to hear him talked of by another person, to hear news of him—!

“Little enough.”

They were sitting in an empty stable in back of the saltworks, for the night was wet. Martha in her excitement had seized the captain’s sleeve, her face was close to his, her eyes implored him!

“Tell me!”

“And what,” says he, in kindly tones—in
silken
tones—“will you tell me in return?”

29

T
he captain had indeed heard something of Harry Peake, ah but it lacked any of the detail Martha craved and it smacked, rather, of the gossip of the clubs, an anecdote to amuse the dandies, or prompt Horace Walpole to a
bon mot
for the pleasure of one of his old women. It was correct in its broad essential, but it missed the pathos, the tragedy even of the conclusions I myself had reached. After Martha left Drogo Hall Harry sank fast, I believe, which is not surprising, given how little he had to cleave to, those final days. Martha had been his last hope, the one true prop or strut to which he might have clung in his extremity, and she had fled him. This then was what he had come to, he had driven away all who had once been his friends, nor had he any clear prospect of regaining his footing and rising from the depths. He wandered the streets of London, his only buttress against encroaching darkness his own frail will.

But even after he had taken to the streets I saw him returning time and again to the Lambeth Marsh, to search for Martha in the boggy fields around Drogo Hall; and failing to find her, unable, in his grief, to believe that she had left him, unable even to contemplate the idea. I saw him sitting all night in the graveyard behind the church, rocking back and forth, keening with misery for his lost
child, and when I thought of Harry keening I heard the wolves in the forest behind Black Brock. Easy enough then to imagine this broken man being approached by Clyte—Clyte!—and lured into the house, perhaps with false promises of Martha’s presence within. Lord Drogo would then have sat with him, talked to him quietly, soothed his spirit—and made him an offer.

Yes, made him an offer; and although Harry Peake had lost the right to turn his face to the darkness, turn it he did, for he had not the moral wherewithal to refuse Drogo’s offer. This was what Giles Hawkins was about to tell Martha, and the prospect horrified him, I believe, when he saw what he had aroused in her by talking of her father. He hesitated, he searched for some way out, but she demanded that he speak plainly.

“But my dear,” he said, “did no word reach you of this? All London knows it.”

“But knows
what?
” she cried, for he had spoken only in the broad generality. “For the love of God tell me what you know!”

“Very well,” he said. “They call him Harry America—”

“I know it!” she cried. “Go on!”

“They say Harry America sold his bones to Lord Drogo for the price of a bottle of gin.”