Martha Peake

by Patrick Mcgrath

  Why did they go down to the docks?

  They went down to the docks, said my uncle, because the sight of ships gave Harry comfort. To gaze upon the merchant shipping that crowded the Thames in those days, this, he said, somehow, to some degree, satisfied Harry’s yearning to discover the world he had described in his ballad, and the life of simplicity in Nature it seemed to promise him. For he had come to regard London as a corrupt place, indeed all England was corrupt in Harry’s view, because governed by corrupt men; and he dreamed that he and Martha might one day escape that corruption and find a place where the evil inherent in man’s nature—and had he not glimpsed such evil in himself, and worked and suffered these many years to cleanse himself of it?—where human evil withered and fell away, and the natural virtuous man within could stand forth. That place, that great good place, he called America.

  My uncle gazed at me with soured features, licking his lips as though he had just bit into a lemon. He had delivered all this in the ironical tones of an old sniffing cynic for whom the idea of man’s natural virtue was but a chimerical wisp dreamed up by boys and poets.

  The morning was cool and the sky clear as they passed under the slender wooden bridges that connected the great timbered warehouses on either side of the street, and came out onto a broad cobblestoned thoroughfare by the river. Much noise now, cranes creaking and pulleys rattling, men shouting, and the rumble of wheels, as they made their way through the bustle and tumult of the port to a bench in front of the Red Cock Tavern. There Harry smoked a pipe, and Martha peeled an apple, while aproned porters pushed barrows of fish, and plump carters rumbled by atop wagons piled with sacks of grain. And ships! A wilderness of ships! A forest of masts and yards, a chaos of rope and rigging, pennants and ensigns fluttering in the breeze, and all manner of cargo, bales and barrels, sheep and cows, rising from their holds and swinging aloft in nets. For this was the giant’s stomach, and into it flowed the wealth of the world.

  It was the ships they had come to see. Martha knew little enough about ships beyond what she remembered of the fishing boats of Port Jethro, but these towering vessels, these great three-masters tied up at every wharf, and rocking on their cables in the stream, all streaked with salt and bleached by the sun, and sunburnt men with wild faces padding their decks and with strange cries darting about the rigging—they aroused her imagination with ideas of places with names like Surinam and Chandrapoor and Senegal and Trinidad and Philadelphia. Harry knew more of course, he knew the sea, but his were the eyes of a poet and the sea spoke to him now of epic themes, of storms and wrecks, mutiny and piracy, vessels becalmed in alien waters and attended by weird portents. Oh, they could amuse themselves for hours, those two, and they did. But their mood changed later in the morning, for as they lingered on their bench in the sunshine a regiment of infantry passed by, the Duke of Richmond’s Foot, on its way to take ship for the colonies.

  They had been aware of them for some time. The drums of course, always the drums, and then the dull shuffling thunder of the foot-soldiers of the Empire as they came marching along the river from the direction of Westminster. The troopships were some way off, but Harry and Martha had for more than an hour watched as the last stores and provisions were swung into the vessels’ holds, barrels of beer and ship’s biscuit and pickled beef; filthy stuff, said Harry, the quartermasters kept the best back for their own profit. Officers had gathered on the quayside, manifests were perused, men in bright uniforms spoke briskly one to another, one pointing his finger in one direction, another in another; and soon a crowd of the idle and the curious had gathered to watch the redcoats embark.

  Tramp tramp tramp came the soldiers, and soon they were marching past the Red Cock, where Harry and Martha had been joined on their bench by their friend Fred Lour. Harry remarked on how young the soldiers were, only boys, he said, coarse rough fellows, yes, but boys for all that, and Fred agreed, he said the sergeants filled them with ale in country inns and when they were drunk enlisted them for a shilling. On they came, four abreast, the sergeants shouting and cursing them for lazy useless dogs, and worse, and the officers on horseback, proud fellows in splendid coats and great colored sashes across their breasts. On they came, rank after rank, company after company, hundreds of men and boys, then thousands, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes they marched past the Red Cock with no break in the ranks. Harry was made sad by the spectacle. They did not know where they were going, he said, nor why they were going there, but Martha felt no pity for those rough boys. Did not each one of them carry a musket? And would he not use it to kill a colonist? Harry supposed she was right. They watched as the first ranks of redcoats marched up the gangplank and disappeared below decks. A little later there was some disturbance in the crowd, they could hear men shouting for the American cause, scuffles broke out, and Harry, who feared riot above all things, rose to his feet and with Martha beside him, her arm in his, set off back to Smithfield, after saying good-day to Fred Lour, who thought he might stay awhile and see what happened, make a little mayhem of his own, perhaps.

  Such was the temper of their days, in the spring of 1774. But now something altered in Harry’s behaviour, and my uncle was at a loss to explain it. Harry had grown “despondent,” he said. Despondent? Why would Harry grow despondent? What had changed? Had he, perhaps, dreamed of Grace Foy, after Lord Drogo’s question that recent night? No answer was forthcoming, and I suspected my uncle was again withholding information from me.

  But it seems that soon after Drogo’s visit Harry began to leave the Angel at night, and did not return for hours. I could well believe that he wanted to escape the constriction of those shabby rooms, but Martha was filled with a profound apprehension at this development, for it had never been her father’s habit to leave her alone and go out by night, and Harry, surely, was aware of this.

  Where he went nobody knew. I imagine him striking out for the fields to the north of Smithfield, or perhaps crossing the river and making his way into the countryside beyond Southwark. But wherever he went, that big shambling figure must first have passed through gloomy courts, and winding alleys, ever darker and more scuttling, and heard soft siren voices from doorways, from windows, from cellars, calling to him to come in, come down, come drink—

  But I imagine he ignored them, for it was not drink he craved, nor the company of women. No, I imagine he reached open fields, and at last filled his labouring lungs with air that was free of the filth of the town. Perhaps he found a great tree, an oak in the middle of a field of wheat that cast a pool of shade in the moonlight, and perhaps he sank down beneath it, and gazed at the night sky and dreamed of America—? But whatever it was he did in those lost hours, he returned to the Angel at first light, and found Martha sitting up waiting for him. With what tenderness did father and daughter then embrace!

  It became a frequent occurrence, Harry’s aimless nocturnal rambling, and I think he may have wandered some nights for miles along the river, and perhaps come upon the hay barges moored down by London Bridge, the boys sprawled sleeping on their harvest in the moonlight, with not a care beyond the getting of a fair price for their hay and drinking some London ale before returning into the countryside. Such yearning we may glimpse in Harry’s heart when he saw such a scene—could this be why he grew “despondent”? He wished only to live as a free man upon the fruits of his labour, and grow old in the natural rhythms of the earth; instead of which he was cursed, so he felt, always to be an object of disgust, or horror, which is only disgust with a portion of fear superadded—always to be in the eyes of the world a monster. He sometimes talked to Martha of these things, by night, in his room, and in the candlelight his eyes shone with unshed tears, and she knew he ached and bled and raged in his heart not merely because he wished these things for himself, but because he wished them for her too.

  One night he took a drink. I suppose the temptation, down on the docks, by the great ships with their masts rising slender in the moonlight, and the men and women loudly spilling out of th
e riverside taverns and cellars—in the end it was too much for him. He took a pot of ale. He intended that it be only the one. Oh, but there were men drinking there who had such stories to tell, and being men who had seen much of the world, and were not easily surprised, they accepted him and made no more than passing friendly inquiry as to his spine. That he had read so much, that he was an educated man, a poet, this mattered not at all, for Harry Peake was entirely without pride or presumption. No, what mattered was that they did not see him as a monster. They made no gesture of exclusion, and he was able to sit with them and smoke his pipe, and drink his ale, and listen with deep pleasure as tales were told of foreign shores, and the voyages undertaken to reach those shores, and the men who worked the ships that sailed there. Then came the songs, and the hornpipes, the jigs and the fiddles, and Harry Peake in silly beery disarray was soon cavorting like a boy among these sons of the sea.

  And what a sorry sight, when at last he returned in the full glare of the morning! For with the coming of day the brief idyll that darkness and drink had permitted—it vanished; and home at last the poet must come, the heady fumes of the night no longer magic, now no more than an aching pain in an irritable brain, compounded by the guilt he felt at having succumbed to temptation; that guilt tempered in its turn by anger that he must always deny himself the pleasures enjoyed by other men; though sweetened withal, I believe, by the secret unspoken prospect of enjoying it all once more, when darkness fell.

  Martha did not reproach him, but told him that she had not slept, such had been her anxiety for his safety; and detecting by the smell of him that he had drunk only ale, and been made soft and sleepy by it, asked him to think hard upon what he was doing, and what greater harm it might lead him into. This last annoyed Harry, who wanted only to sleep and be free of the pain in his head and the compound of unhappy feelings that had arisen in him; and he raised his voice in anger, glaring at her with grief and fury before stumbling to his bed and pulling closed his curtain. He lay there separate from her, moaning quietly and sweating out the fluids of the night in the full stifling heat of noon.

  He awoke in a state of great sadness, having dreamed of the fire in which Grace Foy perished; and not, I believe, for the first time. For an hour Martha attempted to cheer him but to no avail. He was inconsolable. All lost, he cried, and the idea set off an association of thoughts that confirmed a deep-lying conviction in him of his own worthlessness. Martha suggested that they walk by the docks but Harry said no, and then declared he would never work in this damned sink again, never again would he show his back.

  “Then what are we to do?” cried Martha, but she received no answer, and she left him to himself.

  She paced her room in a state of some agitation. Several hours passed. She could not go to him, for he had locked the door between their rooms. She shouted at him through the door, but still received no answer. This had never happened before, never had he locked her out—locked her in, rather, for the only door giving onto the passage and the stairs was in his room—and again she asked herself what was to become of them, if he would not work? For this, she knew, was no idle threat on Harry’s part, Harry was not a man who made idle threats. Her mind at once raced to the worst of all possible outcomes. Were they to join the growing ranks of ragged castaways who begged and thieved in the streets of London, until gin, or hunger, or disease, or the gallows ended their misery for good?

  8

  In the days that followed Martha remained deeply alarmed by her father’s mood. Never before had she seen him so cast down, and not merely cast down, something in him had died. She stood before him and gazed long and hard into his eyes as he sat, one evening, staring into the empty fireplace, and where once she had always found a spark of gentle recognition, even when he was deeply preoccupied—where once he would absently reach a hand toward her, and gather her into his arms, and seat her in his lap, without disturbing his meditation—now it seemed he did not see her at all. So extensive was the destruction wrought in that man’s soul by the awakened memory of the loss he had suffered, and the grief and guilt attendant upon that loss, there was little capacity left to sustain the love of his daughter.

  Martha demanded nothing of him. She understood that he must be allowed to ruminate to the full upon the tragedy, which for many years he had consigned to the cellars of his mind, whence the memory of it had now suddenly emerged; he must ruminate on it, she believed, before he could rise again with fresh resolve. Fred Lour appeared as usual, but Harry sent him away, insisting that he would never again submit himself to public display, and instructing him to cancel all performances. So Fred and Martha left Harry to grieve in peace, and went off about the town together.

  Early one morning a few days later Martha entered her father’s room and found him asleep, fully clothed, on the bed. On the floor beside the bed were half-a-dozen empty bottles. She sank onto a chair and covered her face with her hands. At last she looked up, and gazed at her father sprawled there, stinking of wine and snoring loudly. She was too young ever to remember seeing him in this condition, but she remembered well enough him speaking about the evil of drink, and about his own weakness.

  Harry woke up some hours later, put his feet on the floor, but could get no further, and sat there groaning and clutching his head. Martha went to him with hot tea and murmured quietly to him as he sipped it, and he nodded, and after a time he turned to her with the tears streaming down his face and pulled her to his breast and held her there, moaning and rocking. Soon enough he had recovered sufficiently to make his way to his wash bowl and there, having stripped off his shirt, he doused his head in cold water and then lifted it with a shout, flung his head up so that the water showered off him, and the shout he shouted was: “Never again!”—and shortly after: “I am not beat yet!”—and more in this vein, and Martha looked on with a smile that was by no means free of anxiety. I think he was probably still drunk.

  Ah, but there he stood bent over his bowl, and in the late afternoon sunlight the ridged hump of his back seemed almost translucent, so delicate a structure was it, like a fin, the skin so white, stretched taut upon its fragile outcrop of flaring bone. It was seldom that Harry took his shirt off in front of Martha, and she was fascinated by his spine. Watching him, loving the sheer strength and bigness of him, she did not see it as abnormal, and could, rather, believe she inhabited a world in which all men had ridged spines, and her father’s the most handsome of them all. It was so unfair; and him so handsome, as he stood bowed over his bowl and sponged from his body the sweat and filth of the night.

  For some days, said my uncle, resuming his narrative, Harry was as good as his word. He seemed to be shifting his gaze from the terrible wound which had opened in his heart, and was expressing tentative sentiments of hope. He even began to write a little, although he remained adamant in his refusal to perform in the taproom below. But what mattered now, as Martha told him, was that he bear up under his misfortune, and begin to make some plan for the future, and not drink.

  A return, then, to the routine of their old life, Harry smoking his pipe and reading newspapers in the coffee shops, often lifting his head and drifting into distant contemplative reverie; and Martha going about her tasks, her washing and darning, her sweeping and cleaning, husbanding the small reserve of money they possessed. In the evening Harry would tell her what he had read that day, and through directed argument, with patience and humour, instructed his daughter in the practice of thinking so that, as he said, she might learn to distinguish Reason from that which merely masqueraded as Reason; and of the latter, he said, the world was full. Only by Reason—Reason tempered with natural benevolence—could any person, he said, man or woman, hope to live peaceably with others; and without the constraints, he might well have added, of governments, or churches, or kings.

  He told her about the argument between the colonists and the crown, saying darkly that war would surely come soon; and hearing this I asked my uncle what Harry thought about the coming war, this m
an who hated violence? My uncle sniffed. It displeased him, he said, to have to tell me this, but Harry sided with the rebels. He had been an early advocate of American independence from the Empire, and he understood that blood must be shed for that independence to be won. And rightly so, I thought, though I did not say this to my clucking frowning uncle.

  Lord Drogo came once to visit Harry during this period. As before, he came with William in the small black carriage with the coat-of-arms in flaking goldleaf on the door; as before, Clyte was their driver; and as before, they arrived at the Angel at twilight. Finding that there was no performance, his lordship sent my uncle upstairs to request an audience; which Harry granted.

  The distinguished visitors spent almost an hour with Harry in his room. Lord Drogo wished to examine his spine, and did so. I asked my uncle what it looked like; and it has always seemed to me to be distinctly sinister that William Tree, although a surgeon, was in agreement with Martha in the strange idea that Harry’s spine was beautiful.

  Beautiful—?

  But why, he cried, should it not be? Was it not constituted of flesh and bone, such as all our bodies are made of? This question he put to me in a tone of spry challenge, but I would not argue with him. And was this spine, he said, so strange, after all? Those struts and ribs of bone, were they not forms found in all of Nature, and indeed in the human form, although disposed elsewhere and otherwise? Why by this mere accident of organization must we think him ugly, or grotesque, or monstrous? Were he a landscape we would not be slow to pronounce him sublime!