Martha Peake (41 page)

That all would be well? She lay beside her snoring husband in the early morning and wondered at her foolishness. All would be well? The world was about to go up in flames! The roads were open, men were marching, men were massing, muskets and cannon and powder were stored and waiting in a thousand barns and sawmills and distilleries, they sat on a powder keg that required but a spark and the end of the world would be upon them! All was well? But in a way it was. She could do nothing more for her father, it was over, she had
learned his fate from Captain Hawkins, and Captain Hawkins, thankfully—for she did not care to dwell upon what she had revealed to him, and had not yet admitted to herself the gravity of those disclosures—Captain Hawkins had sailed away. All she could do now was go forward with the Americans, and assure the survival of her child. She was not alone anymore.

31

T
he spark came, the powder keg exploded, and the end of the world was upon them; the end of the old world, that is. Sitting by the fire with my uncle, snug and warm,
foeti in utero
in Drogo Hall, with a storm howling about the chimneys of the old pile and the great event long since decided—a redemption from tyranny won—and the promise of America no longer a dream, merely—it took a strong imagination to see how it must have been for them, back in the April of 1775, when news first reached them of the slaughter at Lexington Green.

I grew passionate, I admit it, as I recalled the events of that day, or the account of them, rather, that as a child I had had from my mother, for I was not alive when the Revolution began. My uncle William was, of course. He was here in Drogo Hall, where the last act in the tragedy of Harry Peake was still playing out; and as I have more than once suggested, he did not share my own view of the patriots’ struggle, he saw the whole affair as a family squabble which had been allowed to get out of hand.

Were we not all Anglo-Saxons, this was his line; why take up arms? Reasonable Englishmen do not resort to
revolution
! They do not go to war with their own countrymen, people of their own
blood
! Even savages do not make war upon their
families
! In his view it was
a feckless band of Boston hotheads who had turned a simple civil dispute about smuggling into a war of independence. They should have been hanged at the outset, Adams and the rest, and that would have been an end to it. The colonies would still be ours. Asked to sum up in one word his opinion of the greatest event in history since the birth of Christ, that word was: unnecessary.

I never gave up trying to make him see the light. I hoped to rouse him with the picture I had in my mind’s eye of the Lexington militia, sturdy farmers gathering on the green in the hours before the dawn, having been woken by pealing churchbells and the news that a thousand redcoats were marching north to seize the gunpowder they believed to be cached in Concord. Oh, and they had waited in the darkness, men not unlike the men of Cape Morrock, until at last they heard what they had been dreading to hear, the faint trill of the fife, the distant beating of the drums, the grim and awful tramping of a thousand marching men!

An event long expected will often surprise the mind with the force of the shock of its eventual occurrence. So it was with the outbreak of war. They knew it was coming, they had been preparing for it for months, but the day a rider brought the news from Lexington, and as it rapidly spread through New Morrock and into the surrounding country, a great change came over the people. I believe what they felt in the first days was simple terror; Martha did, I am sure, I see her hands flying to her face, and then to her womb—her heart gave a kind of kick—the blood drained from her face. Had she had
hope
? Had
hope
lain coiled in her heart in the darkness where she could not see it? Hope that the parliament in London would draw back from making war on its colonies, that the king, the father, would not shed his children’s blood? Martha Peake, had she properly examined her unspoken assumption, that no father will attack his child, would have seen at once, from her own experience, that it was not so. But her poor father was mad, made mad by drink, and before that by deformity and misfortune, and his violence she understood, and understanding, forgave. But this, this was against Nature, this
was a deliberate war of parent against child, the very deliberation of it was what frightened her. I said this to my uncle and he sniffed with scorn.

But did they not expect it, he said? Had not Lord North two months earlier moved a bill through the parliament declaring the province of Masachusetts to be in a state of rebellion?

Yes, I said, with some bitterness, and had not the king signed it at St. James’ Palace in a mood of celebration, his royal pleasure spiked with contempt of the colonists?

But those who are in a state of rebellion will rebel, said my uncle, and when they do so they must expect to be fired on by soldiers.

I frowned darkly. I shook my head.

Over the days that followed the rest of the story came in bit by bit, to be slowly assembled into a whole as they mulled and argued over it in the kitchens and taverns of Cape Morrock. They could not get enough of the redcoats’ inglorious retreat from Concord, and the valour of the men and women who fought them every inch of the way, throwing up ambush after ambush as the British column limped back along the twisting narrow road to Boston—they were not so fearsome when the battle went against them! And if they had not been rescued, reinforced, that is, by a full brigade, with cannon, that came out of Boston to help them, they would have been destroyed.

News of these events was soon arousing patriots not only in New England but in all the colonies, and the courage of the people of Massachusetts gave heart to all who feared that their liberties were at mortal risk from the military occupation of their country.

Men in their hundreds were making for Boston now, where on the high ground around the town fortifications were going up and an army was coming into being, despite the fact that it had no uniforms, no cannon, and no leader. The British were under siege, and with no provisions arriving by road they had to live on salt cod. This
gave them pleasure in New Morrock, where they knew all about the joys of salt cod. And when news of the British defeat reached London, friends of the American cause rejoiced at it, but the king proclaimed a British victory. This caused still greater amusement, this fresh display of royal folly.

And what of Martha? I am, and I say this without apology, although I can quite well imagine my uncle’s toothless cynic’s grin, I am a man of strong romantic sensibility, and I find it all too easy to be swept along on the torrent of fervour with which the Americans set about their revolution. It would be simple then to forget, that in the stuff and matter of the lives of the individuals caught up in the swift dangerous currents of this history, all was not quite so straightforward as it appears through the gauzy veil of hindsight.

And how true this is of Martha. When I think of her position on the eve of Lexington Green, before that first shot was fired, and the world was changed forever—I glimpse a young woman at last stitched into the fabric of family and community and never again, so it would seem, to play the fugitive, the stranger, the sinner. And being one of them now, as she thought, she did what she could for the Revolution, which was not as much as she would have liked to do, for she was huge and ungainly, and easily tired, so vigorous were the demands of her unborn child.

For she saw that the women must rise to the occasion now. The men would go to war, some had gone already, but the life of the town must not suffer by their absence. And so for the women these were days of endless toil, not only at those activities which sustained their families in time of peace, no, they must also be taught to defend themselves. They were to be taught how to use firearms. Martha insisted on taking part in these drills, despite being so far gone in her pregnancy, determined as she was to learn how to fire a musket properly.

Then with the news from Lexington and Concord her feelings were at once swinging wildly about like a boat unmoored in the wind, her heart the tiller! For an hour she was calm, resolute, secure
in the belief that the justice of the cause would secure an American victory. An hour later she was terrified, she saw only death and fire and smoke, and out of that smoke came first the faint tramp of marching feet—then a faintly beating drum, a single distant fife—then through the swirling mists the first glimpse of soldiers in faded red coats with muskets on their shoulders, and on the face of every man of them a brutish grin of hatred and lust such as she had seen on the face of Clyte, most hideous Englishman of them all! A thousand Clytes advancing on the women of New Morrock, coming down out of the woods in smoke and mist as the women ran out of their houses and lifted their flintlocks, but oh, to little avail against King George’s soldiers, who overran the globe like wild dogs!

Then she would remember that the redcoats were far from indestructible, had they not fallen in their hundreds on the road back to Boston, did they not bleed and die like Americans, when a hail of musket fire ploughed their flesh? Our men are a match for them, she thought, they did well at Concord and will do better in the months to come, as they grow more artful in the ways of war. And having driven out the enemy they will return to their homes, and we will live in peace and plenty in our own free and independent land. And you, she thought, talking to her unborn child, as had become her habit, you will inherit all this, you will be the first citizen of the New World. At such times he gave her strength, and she told herself, it is for you, for you, for you—and pushed away the knowledge that the cause was already betrayed.

Events began to move now at a quickening tempo. News came that Captain Benedict Arnold of New Haven proposed to take a party of men to the lakes above the headwaters of the Hudson, and seize the cannon from the British garrison at Fort Ticonderoga. The call went out for volunteers, and among the men from New Morrock who came forward was Adam Rind.

Martha felt a great ghastly lurch in her belly when he told her
this, and a rising in her throat, and the blood came rushing into her face, the strength of this reaction surprising even herself: and her own uneasy conscience played no small part in her distress, for she felt, somehow, in some powerful, wordless way, that her treachery would recoil upon her husband. Poor Adam, he was unable to meet her eye; and she was so shocked she could barely speak! Not for long. She argued with him, she wept tears of rage, she shouted at him, and at last his head lifted and with blazing eyes he told her the war would be lost before it was properly begun, for the want of a few cannon.

“A few cannon?” she cried. “You think it a matter only of a few cannon? Have you not thought what a cannon can do to a man? Or a musket discharged into a man’s face? Or a bayonet stuck in his guts?” Such injuries she had never considered until this moment, but hearing the boy talk so foolishly her imagination took fire and she quickly terrified the pair of them.