Martha Peake

by Patrick Mcgrath

  The poet was of course Harry Peake; and the description on the handbill of his twisted spine at once aroused the professional curiosity of the great anatomist.

  My uncle William spoke with a kind of wistful fondness of Harry and Martha, as he first knew them. Martha was of an age now to talk to her father about those questions which occur early to young people, that is, those simple, profound questions on the order of why the people they lived among could barely afford the staples of life, while others had so much.

  Nor was she alone in this; for she was growing up among free-thinking men and women, many of whom were her father’s friends, and all of whom were passionate enemies of the corruption then rife in the government. Some wrote pamphlets, attacking the ministry, or the church, or the king, or all three, the printers of the more intemperate of these screeds being hauled off to gaol. Harry not only shared these men’s principles, he intended that one or another of them should publish his ballad when it was done; and indeed, promises to this effect had been made to him. As for Martha, her political sympathies were established early, when as a child she had talked to her father about the free trade; and if the arbitrary power of the king had once been something of an abstraction to her, it was abstract no longer.

  For she knew girls like Mary Magdalen Smith, she knew men with children to feed who could not afford bread. She knew why they robbed, and she had observed the savagery with which the society that first had forced them into penury and desperation then punished them for taking the course of last resort; and there were not a few she had known who ended their days at Tyburn, or were languishing deep in the vaults of Newgate, victims of a penal code which honoured one idea and one idea only, and that was not HUMANITY but PROPERTY. Harry provided no sort of brake of moderation to the political opinions his daughter began to voice; if anything the opposite, he encouraged her.

  My uncle sniffed with distaste as he told me this last, and I understood that these were not opinions he held himself. On being probed a little, he said curtly that the poor would always be with us, and should be put to work at once lest in idleness they acquired tastes they could never afford to indulge. I lifted an eyebrow at this, but I let it pass, eager, rather, to hear more of Martha’s early life. So he sighed, and then described to me the rituals of their day, as he construed them, and after a moment or two a rather soft and silly smile began to twitch at the edges of his thin old lips; I should mention here that my uncle William had never married, and had fathered no children.

  In those days, he said, Harry and Martha lived at the top of the Angel in a pair of adjoining rooms with sloping ceilings and small dormer windows with leaded panes that peered out from beneath the mossy eaves onto the stable yard below. Each room contained a few pieces of old heavy furniture, including, in Harry’s, a canopied bed with swags of rotting curtain hanging off the frame. Also in Harry’s room was a large fireplace, unused during the summer months, whose mantelpiece spilled over with ill-stacked books and papers, as did the table in the middle of the room. By Cripplegate standards these were good lodgings, for which they paid only tuppence a night.

  Martha would come into her father’s room in the evening, and Harry would lay aside his writing or reading, and make himself ready for his work downstairs. He would seat himself on a low chair, legs splayed sideways as he hunched before a looking-glass propped against a book on his table; then peering at his reflection, with practised fingers he selected what he needed from his various jars of theatrical cosmetics.

  As he worked Martha strode about the room and acted out her day for him, becoming now angry, now helpless with laughter as some incident returned to her in the first full passion of its remembering. Those shabby rooms often rang with Martha’s laughter, said my uncle William. He then fell silent. A moment later he closed his eyes. Then a faint whistling came from between his parted lips. I wondered was he musing, or sleeping; or perhaps dying.

  What, I asked him, was Martha Peake like, when he knew her?

  Ah, Martha, he said, opening his eyes, as though I had introduced a new topic into the conversation. He had told me the story was not about her; but now, at the sound of her name, he sat up in his chair, the dim old eyes gleaming, a hand lifted and the spindly fingers trembling as he aroused her in his mind. She was a most unusual creature, he murmured, most unusual. Her father was unusual, and so was she. A robust, broad-shouldered girl, he said, she would sweep into a room like a force of Nature and fling herself onto a chair or a couch as though she had just come back from tramping round the world! She pinned up her hair in a loose bun—glorious shade of red, Martha’s hair—and her flesh was of such plump and pearly whiteness, and so warmly touched with a rising flush, that she glowed, said my uncle, she glowed. I see a stubborn chin uplifted, he whispered, just like her father’s, and a high, white, imperious forehead, large dark shining eyes, the expression one of petulance and challenge, and oh, none of your dimpling coyness there, she was raucous. Loud. Big girl, yes, milky skin, bosom like a pigeon. Flashing eyes. Moody at times, languid and moping, like every young girl. But such heart! Such spirit! She feared no one, you know; not even Drogo.

  Here my uncle shook his head for several moments; clearly the idea of anybody not fearing Drogo was an impressive one, even now, with his lordship apparently dead and buried these last fifteen years.

  And her temper, I said—?

  Oh, she could be formidable, he cried, fierce as a tiger when roused in defence of her father, but then placid in repose; until those last months in London—and here my uncle sank back, a great cloud passing across his mind—when she knew no repose at all. Though this of course I say—he said—in the melancholy knowledge of all that was to come. Martha had no inkling of what was to come, she was aware only that while life might be hard, there were those who had it harder, and who missed what she had, that is, a good father, whom she loved, and a healthy appetite—a cold glance of warning here—for the simple pleasures of life—a posy for her bosom, an orange or two, fresh from the market, a book of verse—

  Spoiled, then?

  Spoiled? Not at all. No, she had character, Martha, there was in her already—he swung round to me, his fingers clutching the arms of his chair—something of the rock, yes, some adamantine element in her nature that would surely equip her for the trials that lay ahead! He fell back triumphantly.

  Harry by now would have gone behind his screen to get dressed. When he emerged, and had donned his hat—a large black tricorn pulled low over his brow, and crowned with glossy black plumage—and his coat of sweeping black velvet, faded at the seams, a shabby thing with silver buttons down the front—and a good deal of crafty padding in the back, to emphasize his deformity—he was no longer the man Martha knew. Black stockings under dark blue velvet britches, also distressed by long use, so the fabric was shiny and thin, and on his feet black leather shoes with stacked heels and tarnished silver buckles. He would gaze gravely down at her in all his painted strangeness, and strike a pose, one hand tucked into his coat, the other cocked akimbo on his hip, and ask her how he looked, and if the people downstairs—now loudly anticipating the appearance of a monster—would like him.

  Martha loved her father with all the passion of which a young girl is capable, and she never saw him as a monster. Oh, she knew how grotesque he could render himself, when he wanted to, for in truth the architecture of his backbone, in the aftermath of its breaking and mending, was of such grandeur, in a certain light, and with padding, that with but the merest touch of theatricality he could make himself quite horrid. But for Martha he was never horrid; and now, hearkening, perhaps, to a fiddle below, he extended a tentative foot, made a step or two of a jig—and Martha needed no more invitation than that, for nothing warmed her quicker than a jig. She unpinned her hair and a moment later the pair of them were happily at it, himself all comical gravity as Martha high-stepped it nimbly about his shuffling legs, her skirt lifted in her fingers and her head flung back, her brick-red tresses streaming out behind h
er! They had only the faint strains of a distant fiddle to drive their jig, but soon the dust was rising, the old boards groaning beneath their feet—until there came that knock at the door, that wheedling voice—“Five minutes!”—and they slowed, and stopped, and gazed at each other with shining eyes and deep dismay.

  Harry returned to his mirror to repair the damage done by the jig, and Martha drifted to the window, which overlooked the yard and the stables that enclosed it; and as she stood there, idly gazing out, pinning her hair and humming the tune to which she had just been jigging, she saw a small black carriage with a nobleman’s coat-of-arms in flaking goldleaf on the door come rattling over the cobbles and into the yard, a spidery creature all in black up on the cab. The sun was setting, shadows were thickening, the air was warm and close and heavy with the smell of malt. This was the evening Lord Drogo came to the Angel.

  Lord Drogo was the first to descend from the carriage. I asked my uncle to describe his lordship, and he told me with what seemed circumspection—could it be that still he feared the man?—that while Drogo’s clothes bore no sign of ostentation, and his tight-curled wig was modest—the ivory cane “tactful”—yet in the marble brow, and superb aquilinity of feature, Martha would have read at once the marks of a high birth and an imperial temper, not to say an intellect of some vigour and cultivation. Drogo glanced about him, said my uncle, and his cold blue eye missed nothing.

  A moment later William himself emerged from the carriage. He stepped down, he told me, with a wheeze of self-mockery, with a good deal less decorum than his master had, and in his wake the carriage shuddered violently on its springs. He too looked about him, frowning, and rubbing the back of his neck where two small hard lumps beneath the skin—this memory apparently giving him pause for reflection—had for some time caused him anxiety.

  Now the Angel Inn—he said—was a genuine fragment of mutilated antiquity, largely constructed in the days of the first Henry Tudor. Having somehow escaped the Great Fire, its oak beams had shifted, over the centuries, and settled to their own comfort rather than the squared elevation of the builder. The slates were shaggy with weeds and moss, and undulated like a body of water agitated by the wind; and so streaked and pocked were the bricks and plaster that the walls had to be constantly caulked, like the hull of a ship, lest they open to the elements and the house sink. The effect, said my uncle, was one of faltering decrepitude, the whole thing like an old man’s frame, kept upright and alive only by the animating inward presence of its tenants. But how the tenants did animate that frame! Shouts and laughter and occasional screams, and through the windows indistinct figures in vigorous confusion could be glimpsed within, and even smelt, despite the strong native odours of the house and the rank stench of horsepiss, emanating from the unwholesome stables at the rear.

  In they came through the back door. The taproom was crowded that night, and oh, it was a hellish place, said my uncle William, with a shudder, all heat and smoke and noise, a large, dark, low room with a flagged stone floor and bowed black beams across the ceiling. It stank, he said, of uncleanliness and spoilage. Great mossy barrels with dripping spigots were stacked on trestles along the wall, and two beefy women in aprons, Moll Goat and her daughter Sal, moved among the company with barks and curses, attempting to serve and control the more than seventy customers milling about down there. They had come for the entertainment, they were there to see Harry Peake, whose fame by this time extended well beyond Smithfield, indeed he was almost as famous as Sal Goat, who was known from Ludgate to the Tower as the tin-toothed trollop with the heart of brass.

  William remembered pushing open the taproom door and gazing with horror at the scene within, the seething crowd of poets and apprentices, footpads and strumpets, butchers, fops and sailors, all now eager for the appearance of the Cripplegate Monster. There was a considerable number of theatre people present, and up at the counter, and drinking hard, stood several regular soldiers in the faded red coats of an infantry regiment, these men bound for the colonies and expecting any day to take ship for Boston, which even then was under British military occupation. Deep in conspiracy at the back of the room, in a dense fog of tobacco smoke, sat a passel of muttering radicals, including a bold, jovial young fellow called Fred Lour; and at a table nearby three old printers wagered farthings racing lice picked with inky fingers from one another’s wigs. A few last dusty beams of sunlight came shafting through the smoke, and a lurid red glow suffused the place and all its patrons.

  Lord Drogo, to whom, it was said, nothing human was alien, joined my uncle in the doorway and lifted an eyebrow at the landlord, a tall, thin man of vicious aspect who worked steady and watchful behind a broad wooden counter, and who, alert to the arrival of quality, now came forward wiping his hands on his apron to inquire as to his lordship’s pleasure. This was Joseph Goat, and he ruled absolute in the Angel.

  Martha no longer attended her father’s performances. Soon after her twelfth birthday Harry had told her of the pain it caused him to think of her watching him as he displayed himself to a paying public, and asked her to stay upstairs. She did not understand this, nor did my uncle seem to know what was in Harry’s mind; but I think it was connected to what William alluded to as Martha’s “ripeness.” For I think Harry no longer regarded Martha as a child. She may not have been a woman yet, but she was no longer a child, and a sort of modesty, I believe, was aroused in him at the thought of her seeing him exhibit his body to strangers. His shame in his own eyes served to remind him of the great wrong he had done, and indeed went some way to expiating that wrong; but he did not want to find his own shame reflected in his daughter’s eyes. And so, to her bewilderment and distress—and after a passionate, tearful entreaty, I would imagine, to which Harry listened with gentle understanding, but no change of heart—he asked her not to watch him perform anymore.

  But she did sit on the stairs where she could listen. Darkness would have fallen by now, branches of candles burning fitfully from wall-sconces as voices continued to rise, and huge turbulent shadows surged over the walls. At the back of the taproom hung a black curtain that screened off a low platform, and she would hear Fred Lour, who was a good friend to both Harry and herself, as he clambered onto this platform and called for silence. He then made his introduction, saying that it was his honour—derisive cheering here from all who knew him—to bring before the esteemed company of the Angel Inn that friend of the people—that towering genius—that most remarkable of men—Mr. Harry Peake; and more in this vein, as the crowd stamped and whistled and shouted.

  Martha would then hear the curtain being drawn back to reveal that the platform contained one piece of furniture only, a great chair covered by an ancient cloth of black and red velvet with a tasseled silver fringe trailing on the floor; and in this chair reclined her father, wearing a pair of spectacles, idly perusing a volume of Dryden, and on his face an expression of such comic aristocratic hauteur that it brought a howl of recognition from his audience. Oh, this crowd had no affection for the nobility—!

  The laughter would die soon after and there would then be a silence, or rather, more than a silence, a distinct inholding of the breath. For Harry’s face was powdered to an unnatural chalky whiteness, and his eyes were blacked with kohl, so they seemed in the candle-flame terrifying caves of darkness, with the merest pinprick of light blazing deep within. It made a haunting spectacle, said William; he seemed something from a dream, or from the realm of the vampires. Much murmuring now, a yelp or two from the dandies present; and then Harry rose to his feet, and turned, and it was at this point that his audience properly saw the shape of his back.

  Harry was right to forbid Martha to watch. My uncle described to me what happened next. Harry, still with his back to the audience, threw off his coat and opened his shirt and pushed it off his shoulders, and they glimpsed in the gloom the strange bony formations, the peaks and ridges that had lifted and skewed his spine, and pushed his shoulders awry, such that his upper torso was a horribly be
nt and broken thing, it was crooked timber; and the effect upon the company, whispered my uncle, was powerful.

  But this, I said, was simply a disfigured man—a man with a twisted spine—?

  Ah, but it seems it was more than that. This was a more primitive age than our own, said my uncle, when Nature was celebrated for her botches rather than her glories, and Harry Peake’s spine disturbed the people’s confidence in the proper shape and form of things, a confidence they had not known they possessed, it was stitched so deep in their sense of the order of the world. There was a collective gasp of horror, and then Harry reclined once more in his chair, lay there in the posture of a weary noble poet before bestirring himself to read a few lines.

  But then, said William, the sparks would fly! For Harry’s voice had matured like old port wine, it was deep and rich and liquid. It was from his own “Ballad of Joseph Tresilian” that he took his readings, and such were the passages chosen, and such the manner in which he spoke them—striding about, now whispering, now thundering,now turning his great back on his audience and peering round it like a man behind a wall—that they might as well have been political tracts, so sharply did he bring them to bear upon that other great question of the day, which was, of course, America, and those themes attendant upon the American question, by which I mean liberty, taxation, and Empire.

  Its subject was the Sea, the greed, the madness and the savagery of the Sea; its setting the New World; and its hero a fisherman who, drowning, strikes a bargain with the Sea, that if he is allowed to live one more year, he will return to the shore with his wife, and the Sea may have them both. It was a story of tyranny, and of how Joseph Tresilian’s wife outwitted the tyrant Sea—already, you see, cried the old man, he was thinking on the grand scale! For by this time, of course, the popular outrage at the assault upon the natural rights of the colonists by a king as mad, savage, and greedy as the Sea itself, grew more passionate with every fresh abuse those people suffered. This, at least, he sniffed, growing quiet after his enthusiasm of a moment before, was the popular view of the thing. He frowned at the fireplace for several seconds before resuming.