Martha Peake

by Patrick Mcgrath

  Martha seemed at last to awaken. “It is me they have destroyed,” she whispered.

  “No, do not say it,” said Sara, her voice hushed and urgent. “After the war we will build it again.”

  Martha did not appear to hear this, she was staring out to sea. “It is my doing,” she said.

  “How yours—?”

  Martha was silent for a long time. She seemed to gasp for air. Her breast heaved, the tears stood out in her eyes. Then at last she turned to Sara, and seizing her hands she poured it all out to her, poured out all the confused welter of emotion she felt for her father, and how he took to drink and lost his soul, yes, and she had had to flee from him, and then he had raped her—this of course Sara did not know, she cried out when she heard it—and she had conceived his child, it was Harry, he was not Adam’s at all, and all this the night before she left England to escape him—

  Sara was dismayed beyond words upon hearing of these horrors, but still she did not understand, what had it all to do with the British ships—?

  So Martha told her, quieter now, how Captain Hawkins had promised her news of him.

  “Of your father.”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  He had made her tell him everything first.

  “What is everything?” whispered the stricken Sara.

  “Where the guns are, and the powder. Everything.”

  A long silence here as the two girls gazed into one another’s faces. Out to sea a misty radiance on the horizon announced the sunrise.

  “What did he tell you about your father?” said Sara at last.

  “That he is dead!” cried Martha. For a moment more they stared at one another, even as they became aware of movement and voices nearby, women rising to their feet and pointing at the harbour below. They turned to see a boat being lowered over the side of the Queen Charlotte, then soldiers clambering into the boat, followed by a stout figure in a powder-blue coat. Had anyone observed Martha Peake at that moment—and someone did, of course, Sara was watching her intently—she would have seen her body stiffen and her soul come rushing into her eyes, as she recognized Giles Hawkins; and that man seemed all at once to be the source of everything she had suffered, every betrayal she had endured—at his hands, at England’s hands, indeed at her father’s hands!—and all the rage in her heart, all the guilt, and bitterness, and grief that was in her, she could contain it no longer. She turned to Sara with wild eyes and there followed a brief tearful conversation during which Martha seized up little Harry and pressed him onto Sara, who took him, all the while pleading with her but to no avail. Then Martha seemed to lose patience, and grabbing Sara’s musket she set off rapidly down the hill, heedless of the cries of alarm from the women gathered on the road.

  After several minutes the soldiers begin rowing across the harbour. The women watch in silence as the loaded boat moves toward the ruins of the town. It is still some way out from the wharf when from out of the mist appears a figure, a woman, her face and clothing smeared with ash and smoke. She crosses the dock and strides out along the wharf toward them, her open greatcoat flapping about her and her red hair flying free in the wind. Some astonishment in the English boat, and as Giles Hawkins rises to his feet he sees that the woman has a musket slung over her shoulder. The boat is drifting in toward the wharf now as the woman fails to heed the captain’s shouted command to stop and lay down her weapon, and on she comes in a kind of trance.

  Giles Hawkins’ voice echoes over the water then fades away and a fraught silence settles on the harbour. Up beyond Black Brock the women and children gaze down as the redcoats in the boat level their muskets and Martha approaches the end of the wharf. The boat drifts in closer, oars feathered, over the lapping waters. Again the captain shouts to Martha to stop and still she does not hear him. She reaches the end of the wharf and without hesitation sets her legs apart as she has been taught to and brings the musket to her shoulder.

  She fires at Giles Hawkins, and the report of the shot goes out clear across the harbour. The captain is hit, he goes down, there is blood on his coat, but even as he falls, and the boat rocks wildly, the redcoats get off a volley and half-a-dozen musket balls rip into Martha Peake’s body. She drops where she stands and falls dead in a heap on the wharf.

  39

  Silence once more in the harbour, where the water is flat, and still, and greasy-gray, and the smoke from the muskets drifts in toward the town. The captain struggles up with the help of his sergeant, the wound seemingly a slight one, a flesh wound to the shoulder, he is not badly hurt, only winged. The boat drifts in and the silence deepens as the soldiers, having rapidly reloaded, kneel tense with levelled muskets, awaiting the attack that will surely come now; but it does not. The boat bumps against a piling and is tied up to the wharf. The captain lies groaning in the bow. His sergeant clambers up onto the wharf and looks about him, then gingerly touches Martha’s body with his boot.

  The sergeant leads his men through the misty ruins and is ignored by the ghostly darting figures of women searching for their dead. He does not interfere with them. He has his orders. He marches his men to Scup Head, where they find the Lady Ann riding at anchor in the cove, and they set her ablaze. They follow the track through the woods to the sawmill, but find it empty. It too they set ablaze. They then march to the Old Burying Ground to look for the arms and powder they believe to be buried there. They dig up several graves, but again find nothing, and return to the wharf. They are rowed back out across the harbour, and within the hour the two sloops have put to sea.

  After they had gone, the women on the hill above Black Brock came down to load into carts those bodies not entirely devoured by the fires, having first wrapped them in blankets. They hauled them up to the Old Burying Ground, and gave them a funeral, of sorts. Maddy and Sara took responsibility for Martha. Only a few went into unmarked graves. It was in the course of this melancholy work that they discovered the graves desecrated by the redcoats.

  Then the women went away and left the ruins of New Morrock to the gull and the wolf and whatever other scavenger crept out of the woods at dusk and padded silently down the hill to sniff the ashes and carry off what it could find.

  40

  I awoke in my bed in Drogo Hall and for a moment or two I remembered nothing. I lay there blinking at the gray daylight sifting through the gaps where the great rotting curtains on the window had come away from the rail. Then all at once the events of the night came back to me and I sat up with a cry of alarm, the cry I believe I did not utter when that large cold hand clamped my shoulder in its iron grip. Whose hand was it? Mortal it was, of this I had no doubt, but what mortal? What had he done to me? And how had I got back to my bedroom, with no memory of what had happened in the meanwhile? My cry aroused Percy; and a minute later the key turned in the lock and in he came, rubbing his hands together and his little wizened face clouded with apparent concern, though I was not so blind as to miss the disdain that lay beneath.

  I was sitting up in bed and shouting my questions at him before he could even cross the floor. His answers were far from satisfactory. It seems I had fainted in the cellars. They had found me down there, shivering and delirious. Fearing a recurrence of the marsh fever, they had somehow got me back upstairs and into bed, those two decrepit creatures, and after administering medicines had left me to sleep. How did I feel now?

  With some heat I told the little man that I was not suffering from marsh fever, I had been attacked! Somebody had tracked me into the cellars, I cried, and crept up behind me with great stealth, and laid the chill hand of death on me! I had been supremely terrified, that was all, I was not ill! I demanded to know where my uncle was, and Percy told me he was in his sitting room. He did not know I was awake.

  “Then tell him!” I shouted, and Percy, bowing, withdrew.

  I climbed out of bed and confirmed that I indeed had no fever, nor any injury, although my shoulder throbbed and burned where the hand had gripped me. No, whatever violenc
e my assailant had intended for me, something or someone had dissuaded him from it, and clearly I had had a very narrow escape. I was in no doubt that my uncle could throw light on these events and when, some minutes later, he appeared, shuffling forward in his old leather slippers, his brocade dressing gown shrouding his birdlike frame, and on his face that same expression of false concern I had earlier detected on Percy’s face, I was already half-dressed, and in no mood for any of his footling nonsense.

  “Somebody was down there,” I said, keeping my rage under control, determined to get to the bottom of the thing, “and he intended to do me harm.”

  “Oh no, dear boy,” he began.

  “Oh yes, dear boy,” I said firmly. “Oh yes indeed. Did you not hear him?”

  He lifted his hands, palms upward, he lifted his eyes to the ceiling, he struck a comical pose of utter bewilderment and started to shake his head. This was precisely the sort of footling nonsense for which I had no patience.

  “How could you not have heard him?” I cried. “You heard me, did you not? What brought you down there, if you heard nothing?”

  “Oh, we heard you, indeed we did, you made a deal of noise,” he said, “but we heard nothing else.”

  “What noise did I make?”

  “Opening doors, stamping about and, I’m afraid to say it, jabbering like a monkey.”

  “What about?”

  “When we found you?”

  “Yes, when you found me!”

  “You were not yourself, dear boy. You were excited, oh, very excited. You were convinced Lord Drogo intended to murder you.”

  At this I fell silent. I had spoken Drogo’s name, had I? I will not pretend to you that the thought had not crossed my mind that Francis Drogo was still alive, though I had as yet to fathom what reason he could have for wishing to deceive the world as to the fact. Then what had caused me to speak his name when I was out of my mind with terror? Had I heard something, seen something, felt or smelt or perhaps touched something that raised him up from the recesses of my mind? Had I perhaps turned, had I stood face to face with the man, and fainted at the very shock of it, the memory at once wiped from consciousness it was so hideous?

  By this time I was fully dressed and had no wish to linger in a cold damp bedroom. My uncle suggested I eat, but I did not want food, I wanted a good fire, and a large brandy, and a chance to think, I said, so he led me downstairs to his sitting room and there I sat gazing into the fire as the brandy did its work and my uncle for once held his peace.

  I sank back at last into the armchair and rubbed my head. I no longer knew what to believe. Could I have been wrong? The hand on my shoulder—some creature, a small ape, perhaps, which years ago had escaped from Drogo’s menagerie and lived like a troglodyte in those labyrinthine cellars—dropping on me from a high ledge—were there apes in the cellars?—I wanted to know.

  “Apes?” said my uncle. “What kind of apes?”

  I heaved a great sigh. Whatever he knew, he was not being frank with me, and I had no means of winkling it out of him. I must have more time.

  “Tell me,” I said, “what happened to Martha Peake.”

  And that is how I learned of her death; and if it devastated me, to my astonishment it devastated my uncle William also, indeed he sobbed like a child when he reached the end! And this the man who had claimed indifference to the American adventure!—whose cold eye was cast upon friend and foe alike—!

  When news of the burning of New Morrock spread through the country, said my uncle, having brought his emotion under control, a rumour followed it that an English girl had betrayed the town to the enemy. And it seems that on learning of this rumour Silas Rind, encamped with the Continental Army in the hills above Boston—whom we would expect to be fiercest in his condemnation of Martha—instead issued a robust denial. He then, said William, put his considerable authority behind an effort to promote a different version of the story, one in which Martha played not the traitor but the patriot; and no ordinary patriot at that. Martha Peake, he made it known, was a heroine, and a martyr to the cause—

  Silas responsible, I cried—? Silas? But Silas more than anyone would have known—

  But my uncle would say no more about it then, and I was left to ponder the mystery of Silas Rind declaring Martha Peake a patriot and a martyr, she who had brought about the destruction of his town.

  It was a long hard winter. How desperately they grieved for New Morrock. Maddy Rind was a broken woman. She had lost more than a home, she had lost a world. Joshua Rind was dead, crushed in the church when the roof fell in, along with many friends and neighbours of the Rinds. The men who had come back, Dan Pierce and the rest, they too had died in the fires. Their mourning was protracted through the long months they huddled in a farmhouse in Cratwich, with the great trees all around blocking out the sky, and the sun going down early, and nothing but darkness and candlelight in which to reflect on those they had lost.

  Sara’s grief was all for Martha. She often walked in the forest, before the snows came. She wondered at its great age, and its mystery, and remembered the many tales she had told Martha of the Indian tribes who lived deep in these woods; but her feelings were not aroused as they had been when, with Martha, she climbed to the top of Black Brock and there learned to see the great Atlantic through her cousin’s eyes, and to love its stormy presence on their bleak New England shores. Ah, but Sara was young, the spirit was alive in her, and over the long dark months of the winter, confined in the ancient forest and grieving for her lost friend, she at last grew weary of her situation and decided that when the British left Boston, and it was possible to travel the roads once more, she would quit Cratwich and take her motherless nephew to find Adam.

  For she was Harry’s mother now, and she did for him what Martha would have done, with the exception of the breast; with the result that despite everything, despite being orphaned, Harry was thriving. Already his character had announced itself in clear firm tones. They often rose from the table hungry, that winter, and Harry went short of food even with what Sara fed him from her own plate, but he never complained. And he displayed even then strong powers of concentration. A complex object could absorb his attention for hours, as he turned it over in his fingers, or put it between his lips and chewed on it. He loved any sort of small machine. He made people smile, so serious he seemed, but when he became aware of being smiled at he would happily respond with a brief gurgling toothless grin, which at once faded as he resumed what Sara imagined to be the lofty thoughts going forward in that huge red dome of a head of his. As for his gibbous spine, it grew as his body grew, the skin lost its translucence, and the bones of his back became as hard and strong as the rest of his little skeleton.

  They heard that winter that Captain Arnold was making an expedition to Quebec, his object to seize its walled fortress and assure American control of the Saint Lawrence River, which otherwise would serve the British in their attempt to seize the Hudson and thus split the colonies in two. Sara, like Martha, had been concerned at Adam joining the Ticonderoga expedition, and was still more agitated by this news, which involved greater danger and was being undertaken in the dead of winter; no season, I imagine, to be campaigning in the north woods!

  But she had a blind faith that her brother would come back alive from Canada, and she intended to meet him when he reached Boston. She would comfort him in his loss, and present little Harry to him. Maddy Rind protested loudly when she heard this plan, but Sara was adamant. She urged her brothers and sisters for their mother’s sake to be strong, for as Maddy’s mind inevitably dwelled not only on what she had already lost, but on the prospect of losing Silas and Adam as well, she would need their support in the months to come. Sara then urged her mother to be strong for her children’s sake, to teach them what a woman must suffer in this world, and how that suffering must be borne. And when they were all together in the evening, by the fire in the kitchen, and the weeping began, she urged them then to think of what Martha had given her li
fe for, and asked them to believe that it had not been given in vain, and to think how best they could follow her example and thus do honour to her memory and to their country both.

  So they did not collapse into hopelessness and misery, they rallied; and later Maddy thanked Sara for what she had done, and apologized for failing properly to comfort her for her own loss.

  Another farewell! Did war bring anything but farewells? It brought more farewells even than it brought deaths. The familiar scene, this time outside a tavern in Cratwich, one clear day in the early spring of 1776, horses harnessed to wagons and men with muskets on their shoulders, and rum, and much bravado, hearty laughter, oaths and promises, and a small crowd of women and children to see them off to war. Maddy Rind and her children watched the final preparations, the sergeant of militia testing the ropes on the wagons, counting his men, who had fallen in in ranks, each with the family musket slung on his shoulder. With them went Sara Rind and the infant Harry.

  A tearful departure it was. Sara said good-bye to her mother, and then to her brothers and sisters, who had begun to laugh again with the coming of spring and the surge of hope that season arouses in young hearts; and this she took as her lesson, as she departed, that it was not an ending, that a new town would rise from the ashes of the old, first of a new nation. She said of the burning of New Morrock what she had said of Martha’s death, that it must not have been for nothing. They would honour the town as they would honour Martha, as a sacrifice offered gladly for the cause.