Martha Peake

by Patrick Mcgrath

  These are the minutes of greatest danger, and they pass with unspeakable slowness. If Harry is still conscious, if he has not passed out against a headstone in the graveyard, he may well be watching the house, alert for this very occurrence, an attempt by his daughter once more to escape him. And if he does see the black carriage moving out of the shadows of the house, will he not come down to the road and attempt to stop it? Seize the bridle, throw William aside, haul open the door, reach in for her—?

  The carriage rumbles around the side of the house, the horses splashing through the puddles, then out past the lake. The hooves and wheels though muffled seem thunderous to Martha, but no shout comes, no sound of pursuit, no sign at all that her departure is detected. Perhaps Harry does indeed see them, perhaps he stands among the trees on the hillside, a shadow among shadows, and watches them go, and does nothing—but then, does she not have Clyte to fear as well, will the little gargoyle, knowing his master’s scheme, allow Martha simply to slip away from Drogo Hall—or does he no longer need her, and the bound wheels and hooves are all a masquerade for Martha’s benefit, to arouse in her a false perception of her own desperate predicament?—oh, the plotting was devious, devious, wheels within wheels—

  At last they reach the road at the far end of the village, and there, in the darkness beneath the trees, William solemnly climbs down and removes the rags from hoof and wheel. The last of the clouds drifts into the east and now beneath a full moon and a clear sky they move off across the marsh at a good brisk trot. Soon the horses are going at the gallop, and the black carriage sways and lurches as they toss their manes and lift their jaws to the moon, and their flashing hooves splatter through the puddles, throwing up showers of mud and water. Martha, flung this way and that in the rocking carriage, turns her head, and through a small oval opening in the canvas behind her she sees the rearing form of Drogo Hall etched sharp and black against the sky, but receding from her, growing smaller with every moment. She has no reason to think she will ever see the accursed place again.

  The carriage raced across the Lambeth Marsh, and after some time Martha heard a tolling bell. Her head lifted, and a faint light of hope sprang up in her face. By God she had pluck! Only hours before, the one man she had ever loved had subjected her to the most vile and violent attack, and her poor heart must have been in an utter chaos of shock and revulsion—and she was in bodily pain, yes, she had been assaulted with great force—her world was upended, and here she was, about to leave England for a country of which she knew little beyond that her own countrymen were preparing to make war upon it. Yet she showed nothing of this to my uncle. He discovered only much later what Harry had done to her in the graveyard.

  They crossed the river at Westminster and were soon clattering along cobblestoned streets. She heard men shouting, bodies buffeted against the carriage, and at each blow Martha’s own body stiffened, as though she had taken the impact directly, as though even the slightest shock had the power to awaken the recent outrage she had suffered, and undo the numbness that was already stealing over her soul. When the carriage at last came to a halt it was light outside, and she emerged blinking onto the London docks. Then, with the trunk carried between them, and many an anxious glance cast this way and that, they hurried across the crowded quay and into a narrow alley and so to a public house, where shortly afterwards my uncle left her. Martha spent the rest of the day in a small room at the top of the house, waiting for him to return.

  What she endured over the next hours it is hard to imagine; but because her mind could not at once contemplate the shock of what she had just suffered, I believe she maintained a sort of eerie stillness, for a while; but then, becoming suddenly fearful, she paced and fretted, she talked to herself, she wept, she hammered the table with her fist; at last making herself calm again, and sitting silently at the window watching the ships, her heart and mind a blank; until the panic came again. But she did not leave the room.

  At last William returned, and they left the house together. Hurrying across the quay, with their coats wrapped about them, and their heads covered against spying eyes, they reached a flight of old stone steps which descended the seawall to the river, where a boat was tied up to a ring in the stone. To the west the sky was a glowing mass of piled gray clouds, lit from within by the sinking sun, and rising against it the masts of the massed merchant shipping. William helped Martha down the steps and at the bottom, in a damp gusty wind, with the choppy gray waters lapping at their feet, they embraced. It then began to rain.

  Out on the river small vessels slid under the bows of large, and the darkening sky was netted with ropes and rigging. Flags and ensigns stirred at the mastheads. Martha was suddenly overcome; for a second the crust round her heart broke open, and she made a strange, strangled cry. She seized William round the neck and pulled him to her. She hugged him fiercely. When they broke apart the tears were coursing down my uncle’s cheeks as well.

  “God speed you, Martha Peake,” he whispered.

  Martha clambered into the boat, where a waterman with a red kerchief tied about his skull sat waiting to take up the oars. Huddled now in the depths of her greatcoat, only a strand or two of hair escaping from under her old cocked hat, she settled herself in the boat as William stowed the trunk behind her in the stern. The lanthorn was lit, the waterman pushed off, and then she was out in the river, ships towering like buildings on all sides of her and casting great shadows in the dusk.

  The waterman pulled with easy strokes, murmuring a song to himself, as the oars cleft the dark unquiet water. The further out he rowed the fresher the wind grew, and soon it was gusting strongly, spitting rain in their faces. Martha’s hair was flying out from under her hat and plastering itself all over her face. She closed her eyes and lifted her head and in her mind she told the wind it could do what it wanted, she didn’t care anymore, and if it wanted to blow her all the way to America then it could. After a while, and the sky now darker still, the boat drew close to a brig with two masts, a great looming thing, one of several such vessels rocking at anchor in the middle of the river, and she saw it was the Plimoth.

  Then she twisted around and, peering back at the shore, tried to catch sight of William. Through the gloom, through the shifting chaos of rope and spar she found again the flight of steps she had put off from. On the quay braziers were burning now, lamps glowed dull yellow in the windows of warehouses, all light was splintered in the dank wet dusk. At the top of the steps she believed she could make out the motionless figure of William Tree, his arm lifted above his head in a sort of salute. She lifted her hand and answered his salute, then turned back and cried out to the waterman to pull harder—harder, for the love of God!

  The waterman pulled, the wind blew stronger, night came on. Where was Harry? Was he even then lurching down to the river, shouting for a boat, rearing from the prow like an agent of Nemesis sent to obstruct his daughter’s escape to America and vent again his awful passion upon her—?

  But he did not come. He was out there somewhere, perhaps he was on the docks, perhaps he even saw her; but he did not show himself. And Martha, having clambered up a rope ladder to the deck of the Plimoth, and been hauled aboard by an American sailor, stood at the rail while her trunk came up after her, and contemplated the last of London. She began to tremble. She was seized with a great convulsion of the heart, she gasped with pain as though she had been kicked, such was the force of it, and a hand went at once to her belly, while with the other hand she held herself upright against the rail. It was nothing, she told herself, as she was taken below to join her fellow passengers in steerage, but it was not nothing, it was a sudden gust of heat in the icy numbness settling upon her spirit, the first grim augury of the misery and guilt that would come to haunt her for her desertion of her father.

  18

  Upon Martha’s plight I would have much time to ponder in the days to come. I left her safe aboard the Plimoth as the waterman, having delivered his passenger, pulled away through the darkness,
long oars sweeping and dipping, for the lights of the shore. Now it was to her father that my thoughts fled; and I could not but wonder, when Harry next opened his eyes—when next he sobered, and remembered what he had done—what wild interior landscape of hellish guilt was then revealed to him? Even a man of unbent strength and fortitude would stumble and fall, so what was I to think of Harry’s prospect, enfeebled in the moral part as he was by gin and isolation? Then all at once I saw his prospect, and again I rose up from my bed, seized by a premonition, as with terrible clarity I glimpsed him in my mind’s eye far out on the Lambeth Marsh, far in the distance on some desolate tract where only wild dogs and crows lived, where the cold winds cut across the empty land and flapped his rags about him—strung up on a dead tree and turning slowly on the end of a rope!

  My uncle peered at me with keen bright eyes. He told me to rest. Rest? I had no need of rest! Did Harry hang himself from a tree? The old man denied it, but his assurances did little to settle the storm aroused in me and later, after Percy had come to me with a sleeping draught, I dreamed wildly of Harry’s death out on the Lambeth Marsh.

  But on awakening I thought: there was—there must have been—some small flickering ember of self-love that smouldered still in his charred soul, by which dim glow he found a reason not to hang himself. Did he first sink into darkness and intoxication in some night-cellar, not returning to the surface world for some days? Did he attempt to extinguish the voice of his conscience, and pursue the oblivion which drink holds out to those who lack the will to destroy themselves at a single stroke? I do not know; I think it likely.

  I can only imagine, never having crossed the Atlantic myself, what Martha endured for the next weeks, down in the hold where poor emigrant families were crowded together and only rarely allowed to come up into the fresh air. It was late in the season and the weather was bad. There was disease rampant on the lower decks, and the air was foul with the stink of rotting hemp and damp timbers; there was the awfulness of the night-soil buckets, and the sea-sickness, and the ceaseless wailing misery of the children. The crack of flapping sails, the massive screaming beams, heavy seas dashed with immense force against the pitching hull—all of it reduced Martha at times, I believe, to a state of such distress that she slept fitfully at best, and waking in the darkness, on her narrow bunk, mere inches from the planking of the bunk above, and no glimmer of light in that foetid space to tell her she was not entombed, she was terrified; and in her terror she wrapped her arms about her knees and huddled there shivering. Hers was a spoiled body, in her own eyes, and she wanted to be held.

  At other times, when the captain allowed the passengers up on deck, I see her standing by the rail in the late afternoon, wrapped in her greatcoat, numb within and gazing out to sea. She was disturbed by the sea, by its restless violence and careless power, and the American sailors I believe were amused by her, and asked her did she pine for a sweetheart left behind in England? She roused herself sufficiently to tell them them there was nothing in England for which she pined, the very opposite, she said, her thoughts were all with what lay ahead, with America.

  But it was not true. She did not think about America, for all through the voyage her womb remained dry; and so she became certain she had indeed conceived. She lay on her back on the hard bunk and spread her hands across her belly. She lacked any ability to awaken feeling in herself for this new life nested inside her, as she herself lay nested in the darkness in the belly of the ship, which heaved and yawed through the North Atlantic swells, vessel within vessel within vessel.

  Seven weeks the voyage took. Martha spoke little, and held aloof from her companions in the hold, poor English families themselves uncertain and subdued; her eyes were turned inward, she was occupied with her own unhappy thoughts to the exclusion of all else. This blankness and passivity, this apparent unfeelingness in the face of catastrophe, all this was merely a mask she wore, I believe, while she adapted herself to her new condition. I believe she was consumed, at times, by the most passionate hatred of her father; but I believe she also came to understand, at some profound level of her being—in her soul, I mean—why he had committed the outrage against her, and understanding, determined that her love for him would not be extinguished. This was no act of the will, it was barely even conscious; it was, rather, the accommodation of her spirit to the compulsion to love him. She had no choice but to love him, nor had she ever questioned that compulsion; and so in her mind a new picture of her father began to form, a picture she would protect from the memory of his crime just as his child would be cherished and protected while it grew in her womb.

  I said this to my uncle. He was having none of it, he snorted and told me he knew little of what Martha Peake suffered in America; and, he might have added, for it was there in his tone, cared less. And I reflected, not for the first time, on the diminishing interest, the indifference, even, in the old man’s account of Martha, this in strong contrast to the copious attention he paid her father. And although I had yet to uncover the mystery he seemed so avid to preserve, I was aware of a swelling irritation, even as I lay abed recuperating from the marsh fever, at his crude attempt to manipulate my credulity. For I was by now convinced that my own understanding of the events he sketched was closer by far to the true heart of the matter than his own inadequate interpretation.

  So I pressed the point, I asked him again, did he not think that Martha wanted to forget what her father had done to her? He sighed. He shrugged. He admitted he thought it possible. He knew little of what Martha suffered in America, he said, and it was so long ago, and her letters had not given any sort of a clear picture of her life there—

  But where are the letters, I cried!

  Some flapping of his hand here, and pursing of the lips, and gazing at the ceiling; but for once I was not to be deterred, and with some vehemence, sitting bolt upright in my bed, I requested, nay, I demanded that he show them to me! At last he met my eye, and with a sigh he shook his little bell.

  Percy duly appeared.

  “Bring the letters,” murmured William.

  Percy cocked his head, lifted an eyebrow. Things unspoken passed between them.

  “Bring them.”

  Percy bowed and left us. We waited in silence, William sniffing and sighing, and busying himself with a large handkerchief, my own thoughts growing impatient now at the prospect of at last glimpsing something more intimately connected with Martha Peake than the phantasms of my uncle’s ailing memory. Reading what she herself had written, this would illuminate my understanding, as a stormswept night is illuminated by lightning—I would know her, I felt, I would know her for who she truly was, and I would learn, too, of those events in America of which my uncle, naturally, had no direct knowledge. And how much more capable was I, I thought, to grasp the import of what she had written, than he with his failing powers of mind—!

  Oh, but I was sorely disappointed. Sorely disappointed. When Percy returned, and placed a small tin box in my uncle’s hands, I saw at once that it could not contain much of a correspondence. Nor did it, when at last he unlocked the box, and took from it a small packet of letters; which had been so corrupted by time, and damp, and neglect that I knew I would be fortunate to discover much that was legible within. He handed me the letters and with trembling fingers I untied the ribbon which bound them; and even as I did so they began to fall apart.

  Fragments. As I picked with growing desperation through those crumbling scraps all I had was fragments. But oh, so tantalizing!—and I turned to my uncle, even as I groped about in the blankets to gather them up, and begged him to help me make a whole of what now was little more than a heap of stained, brittle scraps of paper the colour of damp tobacco, and with only the faintest signs of Martha’s hand upon them, those signs mere shadows—ghosts!—of the mind, the heart, the presence of that once ardent spirit!

  “Ah no, Ambrose,” he murmured. “No, I cannot do more.”

  I began to protest; a hand was lifted, and this time I fell sile
nt.

  “I am an old man, Ambrose. Spare me this labour. You have what you wanted.”

  And with that I had to be satisfied. He left me soon after, and I lay abed in some dejection, frustrated in my enterprise and unable to understand why so little care had been taken of Martha’s letters. But as the hours passed, and the fire burned low in the hearth, and the wind rose in the trees outside the window, I began to feel—and it is often thus, with me, that the night will bring a fresh clarity to what, by day, has been obscure—I began to feel that all was not lost; that with the aid of these crumbling scraps, and the exercise of my own sympathetic passions, there might yet be a way of coming at the knowledge of what Martha Peake did in America, and what was done to her; and I came at last to the decision that, like Martha, I would go on alone. I would write her story myself. Armed with these fragments I would trust to my own intuitive grasp of the drift and meaning of her experiences in America, and give them life with my pen.

  What choice had I? If Martha Peake’s story were to be told—and I had heard enough by now to know that it must be told, and her place in American history fixed for all time—then only I could tell it. I rang for Percy and had him replenish my inkpot, and my medicines, and struggling to my table, with a blanket round my shoulders, I went to work with fresh resolve.

  With the sea-spray frozen in the rigging—I wrote—and icicles hanging in clusters from the shrouds, one clear cold late October morning the Plimoth at last came into Massachusetts Bay. When land was sighted the steerage hatches were opened, and the passengers came shuffling up on deck, those who had survived the voyage; and chilled to the bone though they were, great was their excitement, and they cheered loud and long. Greater still was their relief that they would soon be done with wormy bread and bad beef, and would sleep no more on hard dank bunks. Already the air smelled different, it smelled of soil, of trees, of smoke, and for all Martha’s despondency there arose in her a surge, if not of joy, of faint dull hope at the thought of stepping onto dry land. Gulls swooped about the ship, and in the distance Boston was no more than a smoky blur, but as the Plimoth stood in toward the harbour the features of the town became ever more distinct, its hills and houses, its wharves and steeples, all hedged round by the masts of ships.