Martha Peake

by Patrick Mcgrath

  Imagine the scene, he said. The old man’s enthusiasm returned. He was excited now. He wished to convey to me what he had come to understand as the particular power that Harry had when his genius was in full flood. Harry lifts his head (he whispered), he gazes up into the roof, and silence falls. Oh, and then the breast heaves, and the eyes roll, and Harry’s voice is at once filling the room, it is ringing out with a deep masculine music, it is as though this weary hunchback has been taken up and possessed by a spirit alien to his own nature! His very back seems to grow straight! Wildly now he chants his verses, and his words arouse before the company’s eyes a seacoast they recognize, for it bears resemblance to the familiar shores of England, but it is an English seashore made immense, made terrifying, made to a scale of greatness, like a boy changed into a giant, or a man into a god—a vision of untamed Nature that will inspire Harry Peake to the end of his days, the seacoast of America with its stormswept headlands, its mighty forests, and here the mouth of a great river—as yet it has no name—a river that sweeps through the Wilderness, through the forests and mountains of a distant continent he has never seen, a vast wild land of infinite and awful grandeur, before pouring its waters into the wilful, all-devouring Sea—!

  THE HOUR IS COME BUT NOT THE MAN!

  HE CREEPS UPON THE LUMPEN LAND!

  HE DARE NOT COME WITH OPEN HAND

  TO GIVE THE SEA HIS DUE!

  And so on; and all the while the audience sits spellbound, all but a few, the radicals, who are watching not Harry but the soldiers, who seem however more intent upon their drink, and the whores, than the performance; and they in turn are watched by Francis Drogo, who misses nothing, but who reserves his closest scrutiny for Harry Peake.

  6

  The hour was late, the old man was distinctly tipsy, and growing more florid with every allusion to Harry Peake, and his poem, and his daughter Martha; and I had no wish to stem his flow, I was desperate to hear more of it, for I had begun to suspect what was afoot here, and I wanted to be sure I was right. For if I was—and I had every confidence that I was—then my own future, my own anticipated tenure of Drogo Hall, would be much affected. So I refilled the old man’s glass and poked the fire to life—we were back in his study, and Percy had not appeared for an hour, he must have gone to bed—and asked him if he would go on.

  Oh, he had no wish to retire yet, he said, not with a meeting imminent between Harry Peake and Lord Drogo; and Martha was there too, he cried, oh yes she was!

  I waited with patience for the resumption of the history, for it took my uncle some minutes to compose himself. After the performance, he said, he and Lord Drogo were brought to the top of the house to meet Harry Peake. Before they got there, however, Martha ran upstairs and lit the candles, and opened the window to the breeze, so the room glowed and flickered with a warm low light when her father reached it a few moments later.

  He came in wearily. He dropped his books on the table and touched his daughter’s cheek. Then he sat down before his mirror, tied his hair back and began wiping the paint and powder off his face; and in the wavering candle-flame his skin shone with an unwholesome ghostly pallor. A minute later there came a tap at the door. Martha opened it and there was Fred Lour, grinning broadly at her, and winking, with Lord Drogo and my uncle William behind him. In they came. Harry got to his feet. Fred Lour made the introductions with some flamboyance. Chairs were then set before the table, and the guests were invited to sit. My uncle produced two bottles of claret from one of his pockets, and four slender glasses from the other, and set them on the table. Harry Peake turned his glass upside down as William pulled the first cork.

  Lord Drogo was at his most urbane, said my uncle. Not a tall man, he nonetheless communicated in his bearing and manner a distinct authority, and the clear expectation that he would be accorded deference, if not outright servility. It was at once clear to my uncle, however, that Harry Peake had never in his life felt the impulse to defer to any man.

  Lord Drogo proposed a toast to Harry’s performance below, and his lordship and Fred Lour and my uncle William then drank. Then they sat down, Fred moving to the window, where he deftly hoisted his bottom up onto the sill. Martha—whom my uncle had now glimpsed for the first time, and had recognized, he said, for a most rare creature to find in such a house—Martha had meanwhile retired to a chair by the door, and several times, said my uncle, he turned and smiled at her. I was not surprised by this, and could well imagine the young William Tree leering wetly at a handsome girl like Martha Peake; but mostly, he said, he watched her father. The room was not small, but the presence in it of Harry Peake had the effect, by candlelight, of making it feel constricted. William said that he once again experienced the sense of disorder he had felt below, but now with greater intensity: the furniture seemed skewed out of proportion by the large misshaped man seated in shadow at the table before them. Lord Drogo however showed no sign of the confusion William felt, but gazed keenly at Harry and asked him where he came by his education.

  Harry nodded gravely. “I am the bastard son of a seaweed cutter, my lord,” he said, employing, said William, the rich port-wine tones he had used below, “but from an early age I was given leave to use the library of a gentleman.”

  “And who—”

  “That experience,” said Harry, “taught me that if a poor man is given the chance to read, and then to talk of what he has read, there will be little to distinguish him from the man of superior rank.”

  Harry lifted his chin and gazed with level eyes at the great man seated before him, and Martha proudly raised her own chin.

  “And then we should all be the same,” said Lord Drogo dryly. “But tell me, sir—”

  But again Harry interrupted him, asking his lordship where he came by his education—“for I am aware, my lord”—and his voice grew somber and intimate—“that you have not been content merely to indulge the privilege of your nobility.”

  Here Harry glanced at Martha, and her eyes shone back at him in the candlelight.

  Fred Lour was much amused at this turn in the conversation, and loudly cleared his throat of phlegm. He had recognized that Harry was in the mood for sport. My uncle William saw it too, and was astonished, he said, that a man who had suffered as this man had, and bore such eloquent marks of that suffering, should have preserved in his nature a sense of humour. And not only that. Here was a man close to destitution, as it seemed to my uncle, but so careless was he of his own interest that he was prepared to lose a benefactor by mocking him—and him a lord! Such things did not happen in London.

  Lord Drogo murmured shortly that he had studied with Mr. Hunter in Leicester Fields. “But sir,” he then said, “your own history is of more interest than mine. Tell me, how did you come by your spine?”

  William said that Harry here assumed a most tragic expression. He dropped his eyes. He leaned his head upon his hand. He gave out a small moan. A whiff of pathos came off him, delicate as juniper. After a moment he lifted his face, and in the candlelight his eyes were shining damply. He began to speak in a halting whisper, his voice catching, a haunted quality in him now that had them all straining to catch every last sound that dropped from his trembling lip.

  “There was a night, my lord,” he whispered, “when my mother had carried me close to term, and was returning to her hut on the shore through the dark streets of the village.”

  A long pause here; William said the poor man was clearly overwhelmed by the thought of his mother; or pretending he was.

  “Go on, sir,” murmured Drogo.

  “She was descending a narrow set of steps close to the harbour, with but the moon to light her way,” said Harry, becoming dramatic now, lifting a hand, and his voice rising slightly, such that they at once pictured the scene, the hapless weary woman struggling alone down those steep stone steps with the crashing waves loud in her ears, now pausing for breath, one hand on the wall and the other on her belly.

  “Suddenly,” said Harry, slapping his hand on th
e table so they all jumped—“a man emerged from a doorway above!”

  They saw him, and were as startled by his appearance as the woman on the steps.

  “This man’s shadow,” said Harry, growing warmer still, “cast upon the wall, was made huge by the lamplight from the open door behind him. And so monstrous, so unnatural, did it appear to my mother”—he paused again—nobody breathed—“she fainted dead away.”

  Another long pause. “And then, sir?”

  Harry leaned forward across the table. “The impression of this monstrous shadow,” he hissed, “was stamped so deep in her sensorium,that by means of the vital fluids it was carried down to her womb, and there, my lord, it had its influence on the foetus.”

  My uncle William said that on hearing this—he recognized it at once as the famous doctrine of the “forming faculty”—he fully expected his master to express with some vigour his skepticism as to a great shadow being the cause of a man’s deformity; to express, indeed, his skepticism toward all such traffic of the imagination, his lordship having often declared that the true relation of the mind and the body must forever remain a mystery. But clearly he had no desire to argue with Harry Peake for a mystery, and so said nothing.

  There was another silence. “Quite extraordinary,” murmured William at last. “Will you take a glass now, sir?”

  Harry shook his head. He awaited Lord Drogo’s reaction to this inspired nonsense of his. But Drogo suspected he was being made a fool of, as indeed he was, and merely asked Harry, did he have a wife? Ah, but this time Harry was genuinely affected, though nobody saw it but Martha. Briefly he told Lord Drogo that his wife had died, so he and his daughter had left Cornwall, and come to London—“and so you find us today.”

  At this my uncle William twisted about in his chair and, pointing to the back of the room where Martha sat with her hands folded in her lap, said: “And this is your daughter, sir?”

  “Come forward, Martha,” said Harry, so she did.

  She came forward boldly and stood before the gentlemen, who had both now turned in their chairs. William was friendly and him, he said, she liked. But it was at once apparent to her that Lord Drogo was a fish who swam in much colder waters. The great man positioned her before him and then inspected her in a close unsmiling manner. “Well-made child, by the look of her at least,” he murmured. “How old are you, child?”

  “Fifteen, my lord,” she said. “How old are you?”

  His lordship stiffened visibly at this impertinence. He stood up, took Martha by the shoulders, and turning her about, placed the flat of his hand between her shoulder blades and ran it down her back. He then remarked to William that she showed nothing of her father’s peculiar endowment. His fingers lingered on her buttocks and squeezed them for firmness.

  For a moment Martha was taken quite aback, but only for a moment. She shook off Lord Drogo’s fingers and rounded on him, fiery with outrage, and demanded to know, was he accustomed to handling women like livestock? Fred Lour could not restrain a shout of laughter, at which Martha turned to her father, who lifted his hand and said to Lord Drogo: “Her back is straight, my lord. My wife’s confinement was not unsettled as my mother’s was.”

  “Indeed,” said Lord Drogo, regarding Martha coldly and tapping his cane smartly on the floor as she stood before him with her hair adrift, her blood up, and her fists clenched tight. He made a small gesture of acquiescence, and turned again to Harry.

  “And are you often in pain, sir?” then said his lordship.

  Oh, that question! There was a reason Harry Peake’s great face was as knobbed and wedged with chunks of fisted muscle as it was, said William, why as harrowed and scoured, pocked and warted as some wild moorscape of the west country—what a thing that face was! But it had been carved thus by pain, when his spine, as it did periodically, threw up howling storms of torment from between its ill-matched plates, and the fine vessels were trapped and crushed between them. Martha had seen her father twisting on the floor, arching his ridged backbone as it tore him apart, she had seen him in Hell, his eyes clamped tight shut and every muscle bulging in his head, every vessel bursting, the sweat breaking from him in torrents as he fought to endure the unendurable. He had shouted for ardent spirits at such times, and Martha had brought him water. He had dashed the jug from her hands—again he had cried out for strong drink—and she had held him, she had held him until the spasms subsided and the poor exhausted man could fall away into sleep, to awaken, please God, in some relief from his agonies. Was he often in pain? Oh, he was.

  “At times I suffer it, my lord.”

  “No pain bites like that which has its source in the spine—nec mordat dolor hic spinus spinorum, eh, William?”

  “Indeed, my lord,” said William.

  “Can you cure him?” said Martha.

  “Dear girl, there are none can ‘cure’ a spine like this. But physic is not altogether derelict here. You are a scholar, sir, you sit late with your books, smoking your pipe in a closed room. Am I right?”

  “You are right,” said Harry.

  “You eat meat and you take strong drink. Am I right?”

  “I eat meat, my lord, but I take no drink.”

  “That is wise. Drink milk. Take the air. Live ascetic. Live as a monk. This is all I can tell you.”

  “Will it grow worse?”

  “You have consulted other surgeons?”

  “I have consulted nobody.”

  So they talked then of what a surgeon could and could not do; and a little later Lord Drogo and my uncle William took their leave. But before they did so, Drogo told Harry he would be pleased to see him again, to talk about his pain, and indicated that he intended to think further on the subject.

  Martha watched from the window as Drogo and William emerged from the back door of the Angel and crossed the courtyard to their carriage. The same spidery figure dressed in black—it was Clyte, of course—held the door for them, then scuttled up onto the cab and took the reins in one hand, the whip in the other. But before the carriage moved off, he turned and stared straight up at the window. Martha did not step away, but held the creature’s gaze. A most peculiar sensation, I imagine, difficult to describe, precisely, although I believe I can guess the sentiments Clyte aroused in Martha’s heart: she felt the same shiver move up her spine that she had known when Lord Drogo touched her earlier. It was not her first glimpse of Clyte, but it was the first time I believe that she sensed the sheer evil rising off him like a gas. A moment later the carriage rumbled out of the courtyard and into the night. Harry resumed wiping his face clean of paint and powder, and soon was laughing quietly, as he remembered Martha’s fiery indignation toward Lord Drogo. Then he remembered being asked about Grace Foy, and at once he grew quiet.

  7

  It was past midnight by this time and my uncle showed no inclination to retire. It ocurred to me that over the years of his isolation here in Drogo Hall he had developed the habits of a nocturnal, and that his vitality was aroused only in the small hours when the rest of the world slept. I speculated now that he might be a user of opium. It was an established fact that within the medical profession the practice was a good deal more common even than in the artist class, largely as a function of availability and temperament: your doctor is a melancholy fellow, as a rule.

  Now I reviewed what facts I had. The rapid mood changes, the tendency to drift and dream, the coming to life in the hours of darkness—above all, the grandiosity of certain elements of his story and, at the same time, the minute knowledge he seemed to possess of events he had not witnessed—it all suggested a narcotic influence, and I believe it was at this point in the narrative that it first occurred to me that I could no longer altogether trust him. His story, it is true, had held together well enough, given the generous assistance of a sympathetic imagination like my own, but I had detected certain omissions, certain small inconsistencies, and anomalies, and all at once the old man’s cavalier references to the vagaries of a failing memory see
med suspect. For when I pressed him he simply threw his hands in the air, and gazed at me with an expression of almost comic mystification, accompanied by much shrugging of those bony little birdlike shoulders; and I had had no choice but to accept him at his word.

  But now the voice of skepticism within me could no longer be ignored, even as the story assumed the most somber of tones. Over the next hour or so he brought me forward to what he called the “precipitating accident,” and this event convinced me, if I needed further convincing, that information was being withheld from me. How else to explain the mystery of Harry’s changing habits, his sudden desire to walk by night?

  Now Harry Peake had always loved to walk. In Cornwall he had tramped across the cliffs or over the moors when he had business to conduct in a distant village, glad of the chance to swing a stout stick and shout at the sky. Since coming to London he had had to abandon these rambles of his, for he could no longer move as he had before his back was broke. But he could still go down to the docks with Martha, and frequently the two were to be seen making their way through the narrow streets of Smithfield, Harry huge and bent in his old black coat, and his hat pulled low, and Martha—who was not bent at all, of course, said my uncle, but seemed rather to crest the morning, like a vessel under sail!—Martha striding along beside him, a shawl flung over her shoulders and her hair pinned up in a chaotic bun. They made a striking couple, he said. Harry had become a familiar figure in this part of the town, and he was warmly hailed by many of those they met; and those who did not know him stared and whispered and were then informed by their companions as to the identity of the great bowed poet in black, and the tall red-haired girl walking with him.