Martha gave a shout of joy that startled them all. Sara asked her why she was happy and she told her. George Washington was a most passionate friend of liberty, she said. He was a tall well-made man, she said, with broad shoulders, and he rode a horse well. Joshua Rind said dryly he knew many tall men who rode a horse well. But Martha had long held a picture in her mind of George Washington, and had come to believe he was a man like her father. Not bent and anguished, no, but with her father’s spirit, whole and straight, the new man rising—the American within.
I sat at my table that night with pen poised and dripping and thought of the portrait of Harry Peake hanging in my uncle’s study. I am my mother’s son and I too have an American within, but oh, he is trapped, as Harry’s American was trapped; and like Harry’s American he can only be conjured to life in art, which of course is no life at all!
36
The next they heard—the next I heard, the following day, my uncle, to my astonishment, having decided to take up the reins of the story once more, and carry it through to the end, so he said, claiming it had all “come back” to him—the next they heard, he said, George Washington had arrived at Dorchester Heights and taken command of the Continental Army, while down below—in the besieged town of Boston, he meant—the British were suffering terrible hardship. The flux raged, order was breaking down, floggings and executions every day, houses torn down for firewood, horses butchered for food, and still the troopships promised for the army’s evacuation failed to appear. The only Americans left in Boston, he said, were loyalists and traitors and a few rebel spies.
And in New Morrock?
Ah, New Morrock. Some shaking of the head here. Some drumming of the fingers. Flux there too, he said, Joshua Rind went from house to house but there was little he could do. Nothing to eat! A few scraps of salt pork, a few early vegetables, what fish they could catch in the harbour. And that, said my uncle, here assuming the gravest of tones, and looking me straight in the eye, was how things stood when two British sloops appeared out to sea early one morning in June.
Now this really was the most extraordinary thing. Not the British sloops—their arrival might have been anticipated—no, I mean my uncle William’s involving himself once more in what he had always dismissed as “the American adventure.” I was at a loss to explain it. And he did not speak in a scornful manner, nor was there any of the hesitation you might expect in a man whose memory was stirring to life after a long period of slumbering inactivity. He spoke, rather, in a way I had not heard him speak before: slowly, clearly, and with great seriousness, such that I set down my glass and sat forward, listening close, all my faculties concentrated upon what he said.
The townspeople, he began, became aware at first light of the presence of the enemy vessels, when the churchbell started ringing before its time and woke them from sleep. They had long been prepared for this. Martha had heard the men talking about the chances of the Lady Ann or another vessel being intercepted and searched on her way in; or, in some moment of indiscretion, a Cape Morrock man being overheard by some loyalist spy; and they had argued over what tactics the militia should employ, if a British ship did come.
But they had no militia now. The militia was a part of the Continental Army a hundred miles away. Nor had they much in the way of weapons, nor any clear idea what they could do to oppose a British landing party other than blaze away at them from their houses. In the Rind household there were two muskets, two pistols, and an old blunderbuss, all primed and loaded and standing against the wall by the window at the front of the house, and if the soldiers came the women intended to fire on them, as they had been taught to. There was haste and some panic in the town as the churchbell rang, and the two ships, out close to the horizon, were now seen to be making for the coast under full sail. By good fortune a few men who had come up from Boston were still in the town, and a meeting was called in the church.
Joshua Rind sent a boy up to the house to tell them to come at once, so Martha bundled Harry in her shawl, and she and Sara hurried out with the rest. Five minutes later they were standing at the back of the church among the other women and children. Dan Pierce, brother of Nat, attempted to keep order, but it was not a tranquil meeting. The first excitement had subsided somewhat, but the church was alive with anger and fear. Some were angry that Silas Rind had left none of his militiamen behind, although this line of argument was quickly abandoned, planning rather then recrimination being required now. Some said they should simply surrender, so that they might save their homes and live to fight another day, but this idea did not catch the spirit of the women, who discovered once they had come together that they were in no mood to concede a thing to the British, let alone meekly surrender. The mood softened somewhat when Joshua suggested they evacuate the town, simply collect what they could carry in the way of food and bedding and go south on foot. This plan was more attractive but it raised a serious question, and the women rose one after another to speak to it: what would happen to the very young, the aged, and the sick?
Martha, said my uncle, his voice heavy with feeling now, and his old eyes shining in the firelight, listened to all this with growing horror. She could no longer pretend to herself that her conversation with Giles Hawkins had been inconsequential. There was little doubt in her mind now as to what those ships had come for. She stood there with Harry in her arms, apparently listening intently to all that was said, but in fact hearing not a word, aware instead only of the storm of feeling within her. Oh, a great, great sorrow—she did not want this place smashed up by the British, she did not want these people turned out of their houses and forced to suffer God knows what ravages at the hands of men whose brutality was familiar to them all—they were women and children, with a mere handful of old muskets between them, what could they do against a company of redcoats? And this, said my uncle, was the question to which the town meeting was attempting to find an answer—when all at once the door of the church was hauled open, and a boy ran in, clutching a spy-glass and shouting something about the ships.
Here the old man paused for some moments, breathing fast.
Confusion now, he whispered, when he had composed himself once more, as all debate ceased and the women cried at the boy to tell what he knew, but the poor lad was soon bewildered, no sooner starting to answer a question than another was flung at him, and after a minute or two he simply stood there in the aisle with his mouth hanging open. Then Dan Pierce called him up to the front and at once there was silence. The boy walked between the silent pews and when he reached the front of the church he was sat down in a chair and Dan Pierce spoke to him quietly, then listened to the boy’s whispered reply.
Dan Pierce straightened up, frowning, and turned to face the people. He was a big raw-boned fisherman with a face so burnt by the sun and blasted by the wind it resembled old boot-leather. He gazed at them for a second and the silence grew profound.
“This boy,” he said, “has seen the names of the British ships.”
They waited.
“One is called the Bristol.”
The name meant nothing.
“The other is the Queen Charlotte.”
Uproar at this—the Charlotte! Oh, now Martha’s heart sank utterly and she felt the colour flood into her face. All the women were talking at once, and it seemed they were reaching the same conclusion. They were turning to where Martha stood at the back of the church, they were pointing at her, their faces were distorted by hatred and rage, on their lips was one name only—and that was hers!
37
Martha Peake shrank against the back wall of the church, clutching her infant to her breast; and it was at this dramatic juncture in the history, with herself seemingly undone at last, that my uncle, gasping for breath, lifted a trembling finger, and pleading fatigue—declared it was enough, and shook his little bell!
A small cry escaped my lips, as I lurched forward in my chair, twitching, in a very fervour of desperation to know what happened next!—barely had he resumed t
he narrative, and already he was tiring! I begged him not to leave me like this, but he sighed, and shook his head, and I knew there was no point in harassing him once he had begun to fade. I paced the floor as he sat waiting for Percy to come and take him off to bed. I myself was not in the least tired, having ingested a liberal dose of the medicines I took nightly now so as to avoid a recurrence of the marsh fever.
My mind worked quickly. I watched as old bent Percy came shuffling in, mumbling to himself, clutching a lamp, a sparse white stubble on his cheekbones and a line of spittle down his chin. William was ready for him. They had a sort of ritual, a sort of mating dance in which my uncle would seize Percy’s arms and then, rocking himself backwards and forwards, build sufficient momentum to launch himself out of his chair, to be held and steadied by Percy, the pair having first reeled back together before finding their balance and at the last standing panting face to face in the weak glow of the fire. Then they hobbled off out the door, William gripping Percy’s arm and Percy holding up the lamp before them. Muttering and wheezing they shuffled away down the darkened corridor in a small flickering nimbus of gloomy lamplight.
I watched them go, then closed the door and strode about the room, a glass in my hand, pausing to stir up the fire, replace my uncle’s blanket on his chair, and gaze a moment or two at the portrait of Harry Peake, who had gazed down at me these last nights with what I now understood to be supplication. Yes, I had at last fathomed the mystery of the great knotted brow, of the deep dark eyes, the grim set jaw. It is, perhaps, the most dangerous of illusions, to imagine that one can ever know another human being, particularly a dead one; but at that moment I felt I knew Harry Peake.
The moon had set when I left the house, the sky was that eerie starless blue of the hour before the dawn, the air was chill and the ground damp. Faint coils and tendrils of an early mist drifted over the gravel and weeds, and off among the trees a bird cried out, there was a scuffling in the branches, then silence. Drogo Hall loomed over me vast and dark. Keeping to the shadows by the wall I made my way with some stealth to the courtyard at the back of the building, sure that I would find there a set of steps down to the cellars where the bodies were prepared. Had not Martha Peake entered the house by way of those steps, when first she fled her father and came to Drogo Hall?
They were there; but disused these twenty years, and overgrown with grass and moss and weeds, and treacherous with slime underfoot. I descended with great trepidation, feeling my way, my hands on the bricks, the soles of my boots tentative on the slippery stones. I reached the bottom and the darkness was total, and in my nostrils a rank stench of putrefaction, as though dead things had been left there to soften to carrion to be eaten. I pushed at the door; it did not budge. I pushed again; it was shut tight and unyielding. I pushed for the third time, harder now, and it scraped an inch inward, the bottom of the door rotted away in places with damp, and grating horribly on the uneven stone floor. Then I put my shoulder to it, and a moment later had it wide enough that I could squeeze sideways into the pitch blackness within.
Heart thumping now, blood racing in my veins, I stood inside the cellar to which I had been unable to gain access from above. The air was stale, dead, foetid. From my pocket I took a stub of candle and a flint, and in a moment I had a small flame in the darkness, though at first it gave me no sense of what kind of place I had entered. Why am I here, what do I hope to find in these foul-smelling cellars—is his museum, in truth, here below? These were questions I had already pondered, and having searched Drogo Hall without success, both the house itself and the older buildings which clung to its walls, I had suddenly seized upon this dawning insight, that once Drogo possessed the bones of Harry Peake he would wish to display them only to a trusted few, fearing to make public the fact that the great haunted poet, as familiar a London figure in his decline as in his better days, had fallen into his lordship’s clutches and been boiled down for a skeleton.
I moved forward slowly over old damp flagstones, my stubby candle held before me, and giving me only walls of brick and stone. A vast deep brooding silence suffused this desolate subterranean place, but like all vast deep brooding silences after some minutes it betrayed to the ear a host of small sounds which together constituted that silence, and as I edged uncertainly forward I now became aware of a symphony of tiny furtive scrapings, distant creaks and timbered wheezings, vague throbs which vanished when I brought my senses to bear upon them and which might well have issued from within my own bodily edifice. What large old house is not an asylum for myriad species of bird, mammal, and insect life: the delicate twilight pipistrelles in the attic, the sparrows and martins, the rats, mice, moths, beetles, weevils, lice, mites, fleas, earwigs and spiders—oh, many many spiders—not to say, in this wet place, toads, natterjack toads, all these the house supported as well as its two old men and a number of elderly feral cats dedicated to gluttony and sloth rather than any useful predatory work. Given this organic fiber in the very walls and beams, floors and chimneys, attics and drains of Drogo Hall, then any silence one heard at dead of night was in reality alive with discreet activity, and my ear soon became attuned to it. That noisy silence was then shattered by a huge muffled distant thump.
I froze. I was aware of a sort of tremor briefly running through the building around me, transmitted beam by beam and stone by stone in an instant and then gone, followed by a silence that was for some seconds absolute—before the scratchings and scamperings, the borings and chewings and throbbings resumed. Rigid, petrified, I watched my candle-flame tremble in the cold air and then burn steady again. The sound was not repeated. I dared not move. Surely a great beam had fallen? Some vast solid piece of timbered furniture come down upon a planked floor in a remote chamber? A block of stone toppled from the battlements, to plunge to a courtyard below?
I began to move forward once more, a sick sensation of fluids in disorder churning within me, my hand unsteady and my hair prickling upon my scalp, as I summoned every last part of courage my heart would furnish me for this suddenly parlous undertaking.
I need not weary you with the horrors of my exploration that night, my slow advance through those chill malodorous passages that riddled the vaults and cellars of Drogo Hall; suffice it to say that when I came upon the door I knew, despite the profound obscurity that pressed upon me from all sides, despite the panic that rose constantly from within my own mind, suppressed only by the most vigorous exercise of the will—despite all this I knew at once, when I encountered it in a small vaulted chamber, flanked by iron sconces set into the wall, studded and sturdy within its recessed arch—that through this door lay the dark heart of this malignant dying house where Drogo’s treasure was laid up, the heaped booty of a lifetime of plundering in the name of science—ha!
I paused, panting, before the door; I set my candle to the sconces, and was rewarded with a crackle of tarry flame, a plummet of black smoke, and a flaring illumination which, dim though it was, was brighter by far than what I had had from my stub of candle. I sat a moment on a bench of cold stone, bent forward with my hands on my knees and my head turned toward the door. I knew what I would find within; or rather, I dreaded to have confirmed that which I anticipated finding within, for over the days and nights I had been in Drogo Hall I had spent many hours resurrecting the past, making a sense and order of it, enough time, certainly, to glimpse the inevitable end to which the history had been drawing ever closer.
Harry Peake had been the victim of Drogo and Clyte. He had died with a bottle of gin in his hand; or perhaps they could not wait for the gin to do its work, poison being too slow for them, and had lured him into the big house instead, and some howling midnight Clyte did the deed himself; I do not know. But in my mind’s eye I could see what he had become, I saw his bones all brown and yellowy from the rapid boiling away of the flesh, and constructed anew, an articulated skeleton with screws and wires in his joints to hold him all together. I saw him in a glass cabinet in the central gallery of Lord Drogo’s Museum
of Anatomy, displayed in such a manner that every visitor could examine at his leisure the structural peculiarities of the spine. There he would be, old Harry, with an iron rod to keep him upright and a hundred tiny screws drilled into his bony matter that he might stand in death as he never stood in life—
I had opened the door without much difficulty, and pushed it back across the flagstones sufficient that the flaring light from the smoking sconces cast a dim glow into the museum beyond; and I had gone in, at last, I thought, to confront the skeletal remains of Harry Peake. I wandered down a gallery lined the length of both vaulted walls with ancient glass-fronted cabinets, thick now with dust and cobwebs and fingery incursions of that familiar black lichen which, being wiped or scraped away with my sleeve, revealed the rotting trophies of Drogo’s organic researches, his restless probing into the very structure of those creatures he had slaughtered and dissected and labeled and organized and displayed; all now turning to slime.
Yes, slime. For when first I had pushed open the museum door I had been met with a soft whoosh!, like a gasp, the last breath of spirit escaping its long confinement in this deathly cell, leaving behind only dank emptiness. And with that final exhalation those specimens began the last rapid movement of their decay, spoiling even as I peered at them with my candle to the glass, structure collapsing and tissue turning viscous until nothing remained but the husks and ichors of a hundred plundered organs. Oh, there were bony specimens too, the skeletal claw of a grizzly bear, the skull of a hydrocephalic cretin, the amputated shinbone of a syphilitic negro. But no high cabinet stood in place of honour with Harry’s bones within, no giant humpback skeleton reared like a lord over the lower specimens. No, I was deceived, he was elsewhere, I had penetrated Drogo’s house—Drogo’s soul!—to its depths, so I thought; but I had not gone deep enough.
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