Martha Peake (40 page)

That was all he had heard. It was all Martha needed to know. At once she saw it, she saw what I had seen all along, why Lord Drogo had first come to the Angel, why he had shown such interest in her father, why he had acquiesced in Martha being sheltered in Drogo Hall. There was no impulse of benevolence there, Francis Drogo had known what he wanted the moment he first clapped eyes on Harry Peake. He wanted his bones. He wanted his skeleton so that he could mount it as an anatomical curiosity and install it in his museum. He had used Martha to lure her father to Drogo Hall, and knowing how rapidly he was sinking, had waited until he was within his grasp.

Then he had made his offer.

Oh, and Martha well knew poor Harry was in no state to refuse! After she had fled him nothing remained but gin. Gin cost money, and Drogo was offering him money, money enough to drown in gin. And for what? For that which he would have no further need of when he was dead, I mean his bones. Harry did not decide the issue, for he had dissipated his freedom, and now obeyed the dictates of necessity. Who was master, him or Nature? Nature. Not hard to imagine what happened next. A contract was produced, and I saw my uncle William being present for this part of it, summoned by Clyte as Harry and Lord Drogo sat at wine in the great dining room, the aristocrat doctor and the broken poet who could still however muster wit enough to converse with an educated man.

In came William, less than sanguine, perhaps, about the bargain being struck by his Mephistophelean master, or perhaps not, perhaps he had connived at it from the start; and he carefully laid the contract and quills on the table, the sealing wax, Drogo’s stamp. With little more than a glance at the document Harry put his name to it. How much time did Drogo imagine Harry had left? Whatever the estimate, it must now be amended by the sea of gin that would be purchased and consumed by a man with money in his pocket. What did he get, twenty guineas, fifty? Drogo would have good cause to be generous. The more Harry drank, the quicker death would come, the sooner Drogo could extract from his sodden flesh the strange misshapen bones within.

Drogo was generous, Harry signed away his bones, they sealed the arrangement with a bottle. Did Harry stumble out onto the Lambeth Marsh that same night, the coin clinking in his pocket, to seek out the nearest gin shop? I fear so. Martha, an ocean away, just recently arrived in America, was ignorant of all this of course, and a flame of hope still burned in her, I believe, a scene perhaps occurring to her imagination in which William secretly went after Harry, told him what had become of his daughter, urged him to eschew the gin
shop and instead take ship for America—was such a thing possible? Would William have dared his master’s wrath in such a manner? Would his tenderness for Martha prompt him to this humane act? And if it did, would Harry hear him out, and follow his bidding, and somehow find the means to cross the Atlantic and come to her? All of this she had imagined, stamping about Black Brock those first weeks; and then she would ask herself—was he
at that very moment
somewhere in America and making his way through the wilderness to find her? Oh, she had to believe it, all was otherwise dust and horror—

But that wild hope was now dashed. He had sold his bones for a bottle of gin.

There was worse to come however. Giles Hawkins told her this only after she had given him what he wanted, that is, all she had learned the day she rode with Adam to Scup Head, intelligence regarding powder, muskets, cannon, men. Desperate for news of her father, poor Martha could no longer play the politic game, and spilled it all out in a rush, all her uncle’s secrets. So her bad news cost her dear. She stayed with the captain not a moment longer, and with his words still ringing in her ears she made her way home in a state of great distress. She composed herself before she went into her uncle’s house and made some order of her clothing and her hair. She came into the kitchen and was met by Silas. His face was dark and unreadable. He asked her to come to his room.

And thus did I construe the sad business, sitting till dawn in my room in Drogo Hall, scribbling furiously, in a very frenzy of historical reconstruction, and all the while growing deeper outraged at the treachery of the old man who fluted and whistled away downstairs, and concealed the true facts of the matter from me, indeed would have me believe that he and Drogo meant only to do well by Harry Peake! On I scribbled, till the dawn was breaking, and the story
every hour opened fresh depths of depravity and betrayal to my horrified eye. I was not sure how I would greet my uncle, when next we spoke. I decided that I would say nothing of the conclusions I had arrived at, but allow him instead to exhaust this tissue of lies—his account of Harry’s life, I mean—then tear it down for the false thing it was.

30

A
pril 1775, and it was in the midst of uncertainty and rumour and fear that Martha Peake was married to Adam Rind. The town had been talking about it for weeks, I believe because they wanted to forget, however briefly, the imminent horrors that consumed all their thoughts but could never be spoken of lest they sow seeds of despair in each other’s hearts. This they had learned from Mr. Crow, he had been preaching the lesson from his pulpit every Sunday. Now he was preaching at Martha’s wedding, telling his congregation what this wedding meant, it meant new life—and who could doubt it, I imagined the women whispering to one another, as they nodded at Martha’s belly—and new life, said Mr. Crow, is as a bulwark against the storm of death we know to be approaching.

An audible groan rose from the pews at this, but he silenced it with a lifted hand and told them, in hushed tones, that it was for the sake of this life that they must pass through the coming storm.

“And when the storm is over,” he said, his voice rising, “and its black and bloody clouds no longer fill the sky, and a faint watery sun is glimpsed at last”—then, his voice dropping—“it is upon the heads of the young that its first light will fall.”

A silence here, and Martha heard in his words: they are fighting
for my child, and for his sake they forgive me everything, my Englishness, my difference, my manifest carnality. She would wear no red badge of shame as had the women of Cape Morrock disgraced by their bellies a hundred years before, no, something older than religion and deeper than shame was aroused here. She had become a kind of emblem, at least to some. But it was scant comfort, and she would dearly have loved to share with Sara the information she had had of Captain Hawkins, that stark and ghastly rumour; but she dared tell no one what had passed between him and herself. Oh, my poor dear Martha—she must have seen it all, the hideous drama on the Lambeth Marsh, long since concluded, perhaps, she could not know. The news brought by Captain Hawkins was old news, and by the time she heard it the thing may well have been decided, and her father dead, as the captain assumed him to be. For what was to prevent Clyte dispatching him some dark night on the marsh? Who would miss him, who would go searching for his hacked corpse in the cellars of Drogo Hall? He was at their mercy.

These were the nightmare visions that haunted Martha, I believe, even as she knew a sort of quiet glory as Adam Rind’s betrothed, and the expectant mother of Silas Rind’s first grandchild. Nothing of her torment was apparent, however, in the flushed young woman who stood before the minister that day. The words were spoken, the ring was given, and Martha Peake stepped away from the altar a married woman.

Bride and groom made their way down the aisle, and from the steeple came a sudden pealing of the churchbells, and the people of New Morrock emerged from the church to crowd about them, handsome couple they were, Adam so clear and happy, eager unclouded American youth with his blooming swollen bride beside him—what a fine young man he was becoming! He was tall, and straight as a sapling, with a good long leg and a strong back, and as I thought of him—I was downstairs with my uncle, who at that moment was removing
the stopper from the decanter and pouring himself a large one—it was hard not to recall the words of Henry Adams. I gazed at the ceiling.

“ ‘Stripped for the hardest work,’ ” I murmured, “ ‘every muscle firm and elastic, every ounce of brain ready for use, and not a trace of superfluous flesh on his nervous and supple body, the American stood in the world a new order of man.’ ”

Muffled snort from my uncle, but yes, that was Adam Rind. He wore a black coat cut from a bolt of Manchester velvet he had come upon in his father’s warehouse, and begged a piece of; britches to match, fine black cotton stockings, and his hair tied back with a blue velvet ribbon. With this handsome American husband on her arm, and an American baby in her womb—as they all thought—Martha, that day, and despite her private sorrows, believed that in the eyes of her neighbours she had ceased to be English, that she had finally, properly, irrevocably come over to the American side. Who could doubt that at last she was one of them? Ah, there were some, there were still some who hated her.

But today was her day, as she emerged into chill sunlight and a cold wind, under a sky in which rainclouds were massing in force over the mountains to the west. The militia was there, ready to march for one of its own; there was young Thomas Coffin with the drum slung over his shoulder, rattling off a brisk martial rhythm as two Irish lads from up the Morrock River piped away on their fifes; and with the appearance of the bride and groom they marched off down the hill, muskets shouldered and backs straight, Silas on horseback at their head, and the congregation following after, clutching at hat and skirt as the wind came gusting off the harbour, sweeping the thick slimy briny kelpy stench of the mudflats up the hill in waves. Together they all struggled down the hill to Pierce’s Tavern.

When Martha awoke the next morning, in a bed not her own, she had beside her the unconscious body of Adam Rind. For a second she
was filled with alarm, until she remembered that he was now her husband. He had had more wine than he was accustomed to, and he had got drunk. She had watched him carefully, and taken little herself; having seen the effects of drink on her father she was suddenly afraid that she would glimpse the same demon showing its foul face here too—and hideous the thought that it moved among a people who wanted only to be free of the taint of Europe’s corruption!

Then she remembered how Adam had become merely raucous, in a soldierly way, and soon after grew sleepy, and soon after that laid his head on his arms and snored peacefully as the older men talked on and laughed at him quietly, and the women murmured to Martha that she need expect little from her husband this night, and in their smiles lay the thought unspoken, that there had been nights when he was not unmanned by drink, did she not have the belly to prove it? But it was not with malice that they smiled and whispered and kissed her, and she discovered at last that she was no different, no worse than they were. Not one of them had gone a virgin to the altar, and not a few were pregnant, though not until this night, her wedding night, was she admitted into this deeper truth of life in New Morrock. And again she felt it, that she had come over to these people and was one of them. And forgetting her grief for an hour or two, she allowed herself a tentative confidence that all at last would be well.