Martha Peake (5 page)

There was, I imagine, a charged silence at this point in the interview, as Mary Carter and Harry Peake questioned one another with their eyes. And out of that silent conversation it emerged that Mary Carter was prepared to leave Martha with her father, if he was prepared to take her; and he was. The comfort he had found in his daughter’s kiss—to a man dying of thirst in a desert of remorse, Martha’s love was life itself. In that moment the thing was decided, and when some minutes later the coach rumbled out of the yard at the back of the Admiral Byng, Martha was not in it.

Came the day they left Port Jethro forever. Only a few of Harry’s old companions turned out to see them go. It was early in the morning, a light rain was falling, a mist coming in off the sea, and Harry sat humped in the back of a wagon with Martha beside him. She held her head high, even if he could not. Their few possessions were stowed in an old cabin trunk. Harry bade a silent farewell to the place where he had tasted happiness, only to have the cup dashed from his lips by his own wicked folly, and the wagon lurched off up the street. A minute later it passed the ruins of the burnt house, and Harry turned his face aside.

4

A
nd that is where I left them, that night. It was late, and all was quiet in Drogo Hall. I was flagging. More than once my eyes had closed, my head had fallen forward onto my chest, and my uncle had had to awaken me. I should have gone to bed hours before, but I confess that in my desire to hear the story I did not. So all this I had from him before I retired that night, though in a form far more sporadic, more fractured and patchy than the orderly account I have rendered here; and much of it formed the stuff of my dreams.

I awoke shivering early the next morning to find that the storm had blown itself out and the sky was clear; but it was arctic in that bedroom, which had not known a fire, I would guess, for decades, and what little warmth I had found beneath the dank blankets had long since dissipated. I struggled at once into my greatcoat and stamped out onto the landing and down the stairs, determined through the vigorous motion of my limbs to get my blood moving once more.

A strange few hours I had of it, wandering the deserted passages of Drogo Hall, and everywhere I felt there were ghosts present, the spirits of those who had been drawn into the influence of the house, and never escaped. Ghosts and secrets: I encountered locked corridors,
sealed rooms, doors that opened onto walls. But I did not encounter Percy, nor any other living soul, although I was aware at times of movement within the house, of low voices murmuring in nearby passages, but whoever they were—my uncle’s servants, I presumed, people from the village who worked in Drogo Hall—they kept apart from me. So I settled myself in my uncle’s study with a volume of Scott and whiled away the daylight hours in pleasant dreams of antiquity.

My uncle did not emerge from his room until late in the afternoon, just as the light was beginning to thicken over the marsh, and we at once retired to his study, where we found a cheerful fire blazing in the hearth, and Percy on hand with the gin and the brandy. Again I gazed at the portrait of Harry Peake that hung over the fireplace. The fate of that flawed man, of whose existence I had been barely aware just twenty-four hours before, had aroused my most sympathetic concern, and I begged my uncle that he not delay, but resume his narrative at once.

He watched me with a thin smile in which I detected a distinct suggestion of scorn. He saw that he had me hooked, and it amused him. He put his fingertips together, in that familiar way of his, and upon them he lightly rested his chin. It is, he said, an extraordinary story—eh? This poet—this as yet unrealized genius—he lifted his fingers, waved vaguely at the painting—and this brave little daughter of his—eh? Clearly the old man did not intend to resume the story without a preamble of some sort, and so I asked him the question that had occurred to me when I reached my room the previous night. What had it all to do with Drogo Hall?

But on this he would not be drawn.

“You will hear everything, my dear,” he fluted, “in its proper order.”

London! Or rather—London. They reached London some weeks later, and this, by my calculation, would be the late summer of
1767 or 1768. They came in on the Oxford Road, and after passing Tyburn Field—no doubt with many a shudder—they made for the river. I have a picture in my mind’s eye of a big humped man picking his way through the narrow streets of the town, his old black coat dusty from the high road, and a cocked hat pulled low over his eyes. He is pushing a wheelbarrow in which a red-headed eight-year-old sits atop a battered cabin trunk, gazing about her in wonder at the sheer confusion of it all. An endless stream of carts and carriages and wagons, and so many people! Crowds of people, crowds upon crowds, all in motion, all with something to sell, arguing, shouting, weeping, singing. Begging, gambling, drinking, whoring. Men stripped to the waist, fighting bare-fisted for the amusement of the crowd. Bonfires burning in the streets, effigies strung up on inn-signs, animals everywhere, pigs, dogs, monkeys, sheep, everywhere poverty, vice, squalor, corruption—oh, I am filled with horror at the very thought of London in those days—the place is bad enough now, but by God it was worse then, and these two, fresh from the distant shores of Cornwall, had never seen anything like it.

As they got closer to the river the streets through which they passed became no better than open sewers, running with filth of all horrid varieties. No fresh breeze of air penetrated those wretched courts and alleys, where the great part of the people were crowded together in dark dilapidated tenements under a poisonous haze of sea-coal fumes, and sickness everywhere flourished like the weeds of the graveyard. Typhus. Rickets. Scurvy. Syphilis. Various fevers, scarlet, bilious, and putrid. Smallpox, confluent and otherwise. Gin lunacy. Dropsy. Gout and gravel. Asthenic defluctions. Palsy, cholera, the plague. Harry must have thought he had arrived in a suburb of Hell.

But then Hell was where he wanted to be. My uncle confessed he did not know much about those early days in the capital, but we may imagine they were grim. Harry had brought away with him a little money only, they had no friends in the town, but somehow they found their way to the docks, and there Harry took lodgings in the
garret of a small dark house close to the Thames. That first night I see them settled in a bare room with warped floorboards and the plaster crumbling off the laths. There is a musty bed in the corner and a small table with a broken leg. The smoky stub of a candle throws out a small pool of dim yellow light. Harry stands at the window, his head bowed, for the ceiling is low, his spine, for once, quiescent, and gazes at the masts of the ships where they rise over the rooftops, and the moon sheds a pale gleam on the river. He is filled with sudden longing for the cliffs and coves of Cornwall, and for his wife. Strange cries reach him from the street below, and in the room the scratching of the rats behind the wainscotting grows so intolerable he flings his shoe at the wall.

He sinks onto a chair and covers his face with his hands. After some minutes he turns to look at Martha where she lies peacefully asleep on the bed. The night is close and sultry and she has kicked off the sheet, which now lies tangled in her legs. No childish snuggling for this little girl, no curling up into a ball with a thumb in her mouth, Martha sprawls there in her nightshirt with her arms and legs flung wide!—and all at once Harry thinks of how this child of his met each new situation on the road, how she faced down barking dogs, drunkards, thunderstorms, jittery horses, and once, a sad old dancing bear in a rusty muzzle. Several times she was hoisted bodily aloft by some jovial fellow enchanted by her dogged, serious little face, and her great untidy mane of hair, and always she detached herself without panic, and without recourse to her father. Only eight years old, but she displayed all the qualities that Harry had loved in her mother. She was curious, and she was unafraid; and she had her mother’s hair, fanned out now across the bolster, long thick tresses the color of old bricks.

Suddenly Harry Peake’s love for his daughter wells up within him with such intensity that he feels the tears starting in his eyes. He heaves a great sigh. It is good, he thinks, as at last he feels the sleep come stealing over him, that she will be beside him for all that lies ahead. She is a wise one, he thinks, an old soul.

Harry Peake was a saintlike figure in those early days, said my uncle. Not a saint, but saintlike. Almost at once he was subject to the cruelty and malice London dispenses to those it does not favor, and I sometimes imagine the only real peace he knew was the time he spent with Martha by the river. Though even then there would be disturbance and interruption, always there would be those who could not leave the poor man to himself, but must ask him questions about his back. Nor was it unusual, said my uncle, that Harry by his mere presence aroused passions in primitive men, who then found the means to taunt and abuse him, he who had done no harm at all to them.

There was one night, he said—and he peered at me with eyes grown suddenly grave and mournful, and spoke with a catch in his voice, as though grieving for humanity’s lost innocence, as indeed in a way he was—there was a night, he whispered—and he told me of the night Harry and Martha were set upon by three or four apprentice boys, all much the worse for drink. They only narrowly escaped serious harm, and that, said my uncle, was in some part due to Martha’s boldness.

I was of course agog to know more. So he described to me how, as the drunken apprentices yelped like hounds behind them, they had run through the darkness, through the narrow streets behind the meat market, their old coats flapping about them, Harry all lurch and shamble and Martha hauling at his arm, crying out to him to hurry. Turning into a courtyard they found themselves before a pair of high wooden gates fastened with a chain—

Trapped?

Trapped.

And—?

The outcome, said my uncle, was this. The apprentice boys rushed upon them, and Harry was thrown bodily to the ground. Martha began to seize up stones from the street and hurl them as hard as she could, screaming at the boys to get away. But the boys
came forward, laughing now; Martha was, oh, nine years old, but she was tall for her years—her figure was formed—and those boys saw it. They saw it. Harry was struggling to his feet, lifting a hand, crying out that he meant them no harm, that he was a poor man, like themselves, he had nothing they wanted—

But he did have something they wanted, whispered William, and that was Martha. So Harry pulled the child behind him and shielded her with his body, and one of the apprentice boys, enraged now, and blind with lust—and how my uncle’s old eyes fired up as he spoke of it!—this apprentice boy suddenly flailed at Harry with a stick, and Harry stepped forward into the blow, and took the force of it full on his shoulder.

The next blow was aimed at his skull, and this one he took on his lifted arm. Again he cried out that he meant them no harm, but they shouted louder for Martha—“Give us the whore!”—and still Harry made no attempt to strike back, and still the blows rained down on his arms and shoulders, while Martha pelted their tormentors with whatever she could find at her feet, and screamed at them with all manner of violent threats. And still Harry came forward, head down and arms outstretched, crying out for mercy; and it was then, said my uncle—and here he paused again, and flung at me a dark glance from lowered eyes—that he took a savage blow to the ribs, and such was the force of it that at last he was provoked to retaliate.