Martha Peake (49 page)

There was no question of continuing along the high road. Silently, their eyes fixed on the scene below, where the flames from the building on Front Street were spreading to its neighbours, they set down their bags and watched. It seemed a dream, the blazing building under the high blue sky, sparks and fragments carried upward on the breeze, and the two ships lying at anchor and rocking on their cables in the harbour mouth. Then more smoke, more booms, and an old house behind the saltworks had its roof stove in, and again they saw the flames come licking up. The British were firing mortar, and balls that came red hot out of the brazier, and the old wood houses round the harbour were going up like kindling.

Pierce’s Tavern was on fire now. Where was Dan Pierce, where were the other men? Martha did not see them on the road; they had stayed behind to resist the enemy. Other women joined them on the road, and they stood together in silence. The ships had cannon the length of their gundecks and they were holding nothing back, now they had found their range. They were hitting other houses, higher in the town now, and the thought in all the women’s minds, as yet unspoken, was that they were trying to hit the church. Did Joshua not realize this? Why did he keep his people in there? Did he think the House of God enjoyed divine protection from cannon and mortar? All at once the women began to cry out these questions to one another, but none of them had an answer, and it was unthinkable to
go back down with death and fire raining from the sky. Only Martha was silent. She stood dumb, like a rock, gazing down, all colour drained from her face, all life gone from her eyes. The churchbell was ringing wildly now.

At last there was a lull in the firing, the bell fell silent, the smoke was carried off by the wind and all was quiet; and into the sudden stillness emerged two women from the church, then others began to come out, but even as they looked about them, some hurrying off toward their homes while others set off up the hill—the firing resumed.

None of those who saw it will forget what happened next. The church was hit, even as women and children came streaming out. They saw them fall. They heard the screams. For a while they could see nothing through the billowing smoke, then all at once they saw that the roof was on fire, and flaming boards and shingles were falling into the church below, where people were still trying to get out, those too sick or slow and those who were helping them. They could see nothing of Joshua, he was still inside when the roof fell in. The fire had caught on the steeple now, the flames were like living things and the blazing steeple was a beacon, or a weapon, rather, a fiery spear thrust at the eye of God!

Smoke now covered the town, and rising from it great showers of sparks and charred floating remnants of books and rags that swirled in the currents of the same wind that had pushed the ships across the bay and now fanned the fires they had brought upon the town. On the high road the women heard great distant crashes as roofs came down, as houses collapsed into the street. All of Front Street was ablaze now, the saltworks and the warehouse, the boatyard and the foundry, and back up the hill the church steeple burned high above the general conflagration. Nor was the devil’s work finished yet, for there came now a series of explosions, great blasts of fiery debris flung high into the air with a violence that outdid all the other furies at work that day, and this was the distillery going up. On the edge
of town a few scattered figures had got clear, they saw them running up the hill, others still down there they glimpsed through the smoke, and this Martha saw, a child with its clothing aflame running screaming along the street, and then collapsing, and writhing in a fiery heap on the hard ground.

How long did it go on? All day so it seemed; all eternity. There came a point when the cannons stopped firing but it meant nothing, the fire was all, the town was alight, the flames had surged up the hill, and the wind only dropped when it was too late to matter anymore. Martha was silent throughout. She stood apart from her aunt and her cousins, stone-faced and rigid while they wept, watching the fire devour her home.

As dusk came on, and darkness descended, the women still watched from the high road. They could not turn their backs on the town so they waited, settling with their children by the roadside for the night, they waited until they could go back down and bury their dead. A blessed rain fell just after midnight, by which time the flames were guttering and dying; the rain extinguished the last of it, and in the moonlight black smoke billowed up in foul-smelling clouds. Few of the women slept. Martha still sat apart from the others, rocking Harry on her breast and staring out to sea with fixed unblinking eyes. The hours of darkness dragged by. Over the sound of the sea came now the wail of a child, now the sob of a woman, quickly stifled. At first light, when Sara came to her with food, Martha seemed not to hear her cousin begging her to eat, she merely pulled her greatcoat closer about herself and her infant, and withdrew deeper into her solitude.

Sara persisted however. For Harry’s sake she must eat, she said, and this raised a response from Martha. Up came her head, she nodded, and Sara sank onto the ground beside her. In silence they ate. A mist had drifted in off the sea and partly obscured the horror below.
The black smoky plumes of midnight were now little more than wispy gray fingers rising here and there into the dawn. In the harbour the two sloops rode gently on their cables, and the surface of the water all around them was scattered with blackened remnants floated high in the currents of yesterday’s hot winds. Martha rose heavily to her feet, leaving Harry bundled on the ground fast asleep. Sara could think of nothing to say to comfort her cousin. Getting up and drawing close to her, she slipped an arm about her shoulder.

Martha seemed at last to awaken. “It is me they have destroyed,” she whispered.

“No, do not say it,” said Sara, her voice hushed and urgent. “After the war we will build it again.”

Martha did not appear to hear this, she was staring out to sea. “It is my doing,” she said.

“How yours—?”

Martha was silent for a long time. She seemed to gasp for air. Her breast heaved, the tears stood out in her eyes. Then at last she turned to Sara, and seizing her hands she poured it all out to her, poured out all the confused welter of emotion she felt for her father, and how he took to drink and lost his soul, yes, and she had had to flee from him, and then he had raped her—this of course Sara did not know, she cried out when she heard it—and she had conceived his child, it was Harry, he was not Adam’s at all, and all this the night before she left England to escape him—

Sara was dismayed beyond words upon hearing of these horrors, but still she did not understand, what had it all to do with the British ships—?

So Martha told her, quieter now, how Captain Hawkins had promised her news of him.

“Of your father.”

“Yes.”

“And?”

He had made her tell him everything first.

“What is everything?” whispered the stricken Sara.

“Where the guns are, and the powder. Everything.”

A long silence here as the two girls gazed into one another’s faces. Out to sea a misty radiance on the horizon announced the sunrise.

“What did he tell you about your father?” said Sara at last.

“That he is
dead
!” cried Martha. For a moment more they stared at one another, even as they became aware of movement and voices nearby, women rising to their feet and pointing at the harbour below. They turned to see a boat being lowered over the side of the
Queen Charlotte
, then soldiers clambering into the boat, followed by a stout figure in a powder-blue coat. Had anyone observed Martha Peake at that moment—and someone did, of course, Sara was watching her intently—she would have seen her body stiffen and her soul come rushing into her eyes, as she recognized Giles Hawkins; and that man seemed all at once to be the source of everything she had suffered, every betrayal she had endured—at his hands, at England’s hands, indeed at
her father’s
hands!—and all the rage in her heart, all the guilt, and bitterness, and grief that was in her, she could contain it no longer. She turned to Sara with wild eyes and there followed a brief tearful conversation during which Martha seized up little Harry and pressed him onto Sara, who took him, all the while pleading with her but to no avail. Then Martha seemed to lose patience, and grabbing Sara’s musket she set off rapidly down the hill, heedless of the cries of alarm from the women gathered on the road.

After several minutes the soldiers begin rowing across the harbour. The women watch in silence as the loaded boat moves toward the ruins of the town. It is still some way out from the wharf when from out of the mist appears a figure, a woman, her face and clothing smeared with ash and smoke. She crosses the dock and strides out along the wharf toward them, her open greatcoat flapping about her and her red hair flying free in the wind. Some astonishment in the English boat, and as Giles Hawkins rises to his feet he sees that the
woman has a musket slung over her shoulder. The boat is drifting in toward the wharf now as the woman fails to heed the captain’s shouted command to stop and lay down her weapon, and on she comes in a kind of trance.

Giles Hawkins’ voice echoes over the water then fades away and a fraught silence settles on the harbour. Up beyond Black Brock the women and children gaze down as the redcoats in the boat level their muskets and Martha approaches the end of the wharf. The boat drifts in closer, oars feathered, over the lapping waters. Again the captain shouts to Martha to stop and still she does not hear him. She reaches the end of the wharf and without hesitation sets her legs apart as she has been taught to and brings the musket to her shoulder.

She fires at Giles Hawkins, and the report of the shot goes out clear across the harbour. The captain is hit, he goes down, there is blood on his coat, but even as he falls, and the boat rocks wildly, the redcoats get off a volley and half-a-dozen musket balls rip into Martha Peake’s body. She drops where she stands and falls dead in a heap on the wharf.

39

S
ilence once more in the harbour, where the water is flat, and still, and greasy-gray, and the smoke from the muskets drifts in toward the town. The captain struggles up with the help of his sergeant, the wound seemingly a slight one, a flesh wound to the shoulder, he is not badly hurt, only winged. The boat drifts in and the silence deepens as the soldiers, having rapidly reloaded, kneel tense with levelled muskets, awaiting the attack that will surely come now; but it does not. The boat bumps against a piling and is tied up to the wharf. The captain lies groaning in the bow. His sergeant clambers up onto the wharf and looks about him, then gingerly touches Martha’s body with his boot.

The sergeant leads his men through the misty ruins and is ignored by the ghostly darting figures of women searching for their dead. He does not interfere with them. He has his orders. He marches his men to Scup Head, where they find the
Lady Ann
riding at anchor in the cove, and they set her ablaze. They follow the track through the woods to the sawmill, but find it empty. It too they set ablaze. They then march to the Old Burying Ground to look for the arms and powder they believe to be buried there. They dig up several graves, but again find nothing, and return to the wharf. They are rowed back out
across the harbour, and within the hour the two sloops have put to sea.