Martha Peake (4 page)

“They have no search warrant,” he shouted.

“They will come in without it—”

“Over my dead body!”

“Over your dead body!”

Only Grace Foy attempted to tell Harry Peake what to do, and often she had her way. But not when he had drink in him, and he had a good deal of drink in him that night. Harry uncoupled the steaming horses from the wagon and ignored what his wife was saying to him.

An hour later, and still the rum was in the cellar. Grace had argued loudly with Harry for some minutes, until prudence dictated she keep quiet, but Harry was adamant, that if he moved the rum he would lose it, and he was damned if the night’s work was to go for nothing. Grace had gone back to bed, Harry had taken the branch of candles into the cellar and breached one of the casks. He sat on the floor with his back to the wall, an elbow on his knee, his hand clamped to his head, in the other hand a cup of rum, and a pipe of tobacco between his teeth. But for all he drank he could not dispel his
foreboding as to the consequences of the night’s botched landing. His eyes closed, and with his head still in his hand he fell asleep. The pipe slipped out of his mouth and broke into pieces on the stones, spilling out burning tobacco. He did not awaken. A few moments later, said my uncle, the straw began to smolder.

Silence as we contemplated Harry in his stupor, and the embers of his pipe catching on the dry straw.

When Harry became aware of the flames, whispered my uncle, they had spread across the floor, already they were licking at the walls! Harry rose to his feet and flung at the fire the contents of his cup, and the flames at once leapt up and caught on a basket of wool. In an instant the cellar was full of oily black smoke. He came charging up the stairs and pushed open the trapdoor, and the flames leapt up beneath him. He flung it shut behind him and began shouting, and Grace came running into the kitchen. A few seconds later she was outside the house with the infant in her arms and the other children clustered about her. Only Martha wanted to go down into the cellar and see the fire.

Outside in the night air Harry stumbled to the stable and let the horses out. He slapped them hard and they cantered off down toward the harbour. After that it all became confusing, and he could never be certain as to what happened next, exactly, though he remembered at one point picking up a barrel of rainwater at the back of the house, and staggering into the kitchen with it, and overturning it at the top of the cellar steps. There was a great hissing and sputtering as the water poured down the steps and spilled across the cellar floor below, but the smoke from the burning wool was so thick he could not see if the flames were doused, and back out he came, and set off up the hill to get help.

Grace and the children were meanwhile going down toward the harbour. Then all at once Grace was crying out for Jonathan, where was Jonathan? Lights began to show, people came out into the street, Grace was screaming for Jonathan now, and running this way and
that with growing panic. Then all at once Harry saw her start back up the hill, and he shouted to her to stop. To no avail; he saw her go running into the house, and barely had he started back down the hill than there came a muffled explosion, and then another, and another, and all at once flames could be seen leaping and licking in the windows—

Harry reached the back door, in he plunged through the smoke and flames, his arms before his face—he saw Grace go darting through the burning house, her nightgown ablaze, crying for her lost child—he had almost reached her when another explosion rocked the house, another—he staggered backwards—

And then a ceiling beam fell, it swung down like a pendulum, with immense force it smashed into Harry’s back and flung him hard onto the floor; then it hung there, over him, blackened and smoking.

For a second or two Harry lay still. Then he was coughing, gasping for air, struggling to rise, but he could not stand, so he crawled toward the door, crawled through the smoke and heat for what seemed an eternity, and then he was lying in the yard behind the house, and he could hear Grace screaming inside. Again he passed out, and this time, when he came to, said my uncle—here he paused—he could hear her screams no more.

3

I
t was late, I was tired, but I could not withdraw now. I begged my uncle to continue. It was with a sort of grim relish that he described how the falling beam had broken Harry’s back in several places, and how very fortunate he was not to have been paralyzed at once. I suppose I should not have been surprised at the morbid gusto with which the old man retailed all this. He had been a surgeon much of his life, and for years had worked closely with one of the most eminent anatomists of his time. The treatment for such a fracture, he said, his tone now briskly impersonal, and far removed from the histrionic excess of a moment before, was the same as it is today. Reduce the fracture by bringing the broken parts back to their normal position. Once the bone is set, hold it in place with a splint, having first bound the part with bandages, preferably linen. A splint to secure a damaged spine must enclose the patient’s entire upper body, so it will be a boxlike engine, its pressure adjustable by a screw, and into this engine he must be strapped with stout canvas belts. Nature will do the rest.

So a box-splint was built for Harry, and for several months he lay in it on a long table in a room off the kitchen at the back of the Admiral Byng. I was appalled at the idea of Harry being screwed into such a machine of torture, and I said to the old man that surely
the months he spent in that hideous box—coffin, more like, I cried!—must have been sheer and utter hell—what had he suffered, knowing that his wife and son were dead, and himself crippled?

Oh, his son was not dead, said the old man, with some surprise; he forgot that I did not know the story. Jonathan had run off down an alley, and did not emerge until the fire had been put out, and nothing was left of the Peake house but its walls of blackened Bodmin granite. I pondered this for some moments, and curiously it made it all seem so much worse, for it meant Grace Foy had died for nothing. Nor was this lost on Harry; and in some dark place in his soul, I believe, a seed of hatred of his son was sowed that tragic night. His own guilt was profound, and he went to terrible lengths to expiate it, but Jonathan’s survival was to mark him forever in his father’s heart. At the time of the fire the boy was seven years old.

None of this would come out for many years. In the aftermath of the fire Harry was entirely absorbed in his own suffering. His spirit was as badly damaged as his body, perhaps more so. He now had ample opportunity to reflect on his life and what it had brought him to, and he reached certain conclusions. He recognized that the shame of Grace’s death would not leave him for the rest of his days, and he realized, too, that he could no longer stay on this wild coast where they had been happy, for he would forever hear her voice in the wind as he tramped over the cliffs, he would glimpse her face in the sunlight on the sea.

When they unbuckled the straps and released him from the box-splint, and helped him off the table and up onto his feet, Harry Peake could barely lift his head above his chest; he could barely
breathe
! His hair and beard had grown long while he lay there, and he seemed a wild man now, a large bent hairy creature with furious burning eyes. There he stood, said my uncle, in no little pain, snorting
loudly, and supported by several of his neighbors, as the doctor examined the damaged spine then asked him to straighten himself up. Every inch cost him infinite torment. Every inch, and the cracking of his spine rang out like gunshots in the back of the silent inn. The sweat poured off him and he cried out so loudly that all Port Jethro heard him, but when they offered him brandy he would not take it. After an hour he had regained as much of his old stature as the doctor believed he ever would.

He was not the man he had been before the fire. His backbone was found to have mended crooked, steeply ridged at each of the several points of breakage, and skewed from the true—bent, in a word—the effect of this being to disturb his gait and to throw his shoulders oddly athwart. He could walk, albeit with a limp, but from any angle, and in any light, he carried now a large flared superstructure of bony matter on his back, and while this rendered him stooped and twisted, it seemed not to diminish his height but rather to exaggerate it, by making him monstrous.

For some weeks he hobbled about the village, and gradually regained the use of his broken body. He did not lift his head; he would meet no man’s eye; he drank only a little water, ate but a crust or two a day, and spent much time in the chapel on his knees. He cut his beard off but not his hair, and on good days, in dry weather, he was able to straighten himself a further inch or two, though it cost him much painful effort to do so. His old friends and neighbors avoided him now, the man they had once loved, for he seemed to them and to himself an accursed being. Edward Penwarden came to see him, but Harry had no appetite for another man’s religion, and he sent the vicar away. As for his children, after the fire they were taken by one of Grace’s sisters to live with her family in Bodmin, where there was great grieving for the lost woman, the Foy sisters having gathered for the funeral, all but Maddy Foy, who some years before had gone to America to work in the household of a Massachusetts merchant called Silas Rind.

One day the children came over the moor in a coach to visit their
father in Port Jethro. They were brought into the parlour of the Admiral Byng with their aunt Mary Carter. A father they barely recognized, dressed in dusty black and leaning on a stick, sat humped on a wooden chair, and gazed at them unsmiling from racked and harrowed features. His infant son began to whimper, little Jonathan stared at his father with barely concealed terror, the others clustered about their aunt’s skirts, and only Martha showed no fear—showed no fear, cried my uncle, she ran to her father, she flung her arms about his neck, she kissed his sunken cheek, and the large strong hands of the smuggler lifted uncertainly, then clasped the child to his breast. Mary Carter seated herself opposite Harry, with the children huddled about her. Harry faced her square, gazed from his haunted eyes into the eyes of the woman whose sister had died because he had been drunk and careless in a cellar filled with spirits. Martha in her dark smock stood by her father and she too gazed squarely at Mary Carter.

The conversation was not easy; nor was it long. Harry agreed that his children should live with the Carter family in Bodmin, and said that he would establish credit for their board and lodging and all other expenses incurred on their behalf. His offer was at once accepted. That done, Mary Carter rose to her feet, bade Harry farewell, and called the children to her. Martha refused to go. She stood by her father and told her aunt that she would not live in Bodmin, and if she were taken back there she would escape as soon as she could and walk to Port Jethro across the moor.