Martha Peake

by Patrick Mcgrath

  Then there was kissing and embraces and yet more tears, and at last she mounted the horse she had been lent for the journey by her friends in Cratwich, with Harry strapped securely to her breast and their few possessions stowed in the saddlebags. She rode out of Cratwich with the soldiers, to the music of the fife and drum, the children running beside them, cheering them on.

  After less than a day travelling south on the Boston road, Sara learned that over the winter the story of the burning of New Morrock had spread widely through all the colonies; and that Martha figured vividly in every account of the town’s destruction. The shot she fired at the captain, and the death she suffered as a consequence, all this was common knowledge, but Sara was astonished to discover that not one person she talked to voiced the suspicion that the women of New Morrock had harboured, that is, that Martha Peake was responsible for the British bombardment of the town. Somehow, she did not know how—though my uncle, of course, was in no doubt as to how it had come about—an entirely new construction had been placed upon that event; and she realized with some amazement that the story of Martha’s death had become inspirational, that to a people staring into the teeth of defeat and ruin it lifted the spirit, it allowed them to glimpse a higher purpose for their suffering. Several times during the first days she was asked had she known the red-haired English girl from New Morrock, who alone and unaided had gone up against a company of redcoats; and understanding now the popular version of events she soon had her listeners crying out with admiration for Martha’s courage.

  All along the road she saw signs that her homeland was at war, and that the British blockade of the coast was biting hard. It grew worse the closer she approached Boston. The country thereabouts had been depleted of men, crops, lumber, animals, and machines, which had gone to serve the army laying siege to Boston. But the army was no longer at Boston, for after the departure of the British by sea Washington had marched south to New York to meet the enemy there.

  She saw women and children out in the fields, but no longer was Massachusetts a peaceful and prosperous province of hard-working farmers in small towns of well-made houses. The land had been neglected, walls and fences and buildings were in disrepair, and the road was full of travellers like herself, shabby, weary folk pushed this way and that by the random currents of war.

  But she saw no despair. She saw a people ragged and hungry, grim-faced and burdened with cares, but they willingly gave what they could to their soldiers, and if they had nothing to spare from their larders and cellars they gave encouragement and gratitude, and Sara’s rough companions told them they would surely drive the British out, had not Martha Peake shown them the way?

  They came in by way of Charlestown Neck, where new building had begun on the site of the town burnt down by the British during the battle at Bunker Hill. There Sara took her leave of the soldiers, who had warmed to this brave determined girl. She gave up her horse to a Cratwich man and boarded the ferry, burdened now with both Harry and their small stock of belongings.

  She stepped off on the other side in Boston, and was soon directed to Foley’s Tavern. And so, as the sun slipped down the sky, and twilight stole over the town, she set off to discover what news there was of her brother.

  41

  She wandered through the town for an hour searching for the tavern. The streets were not lit, and everywhere she saw the ravages of the recent occupation by the British. She saw the foundations and chimneys of houses that had been torn down for firewood, ruins that would have cast a melancholy chill over her soul had she not been so alive to the prospect of finding Adam. Shadowy figures shuffled past her clutching parcels and bundles, a few barrel staves for the fire, a coil of dirty hemp, a cabbage, a newspaper, a scrawny chicken for an empty pot. They passed taverns near the harbour in which Sara heard neither song nor laughter, but the sound of men arguing their politics; and churches silent as the grave. She heard moans of sickness, she heard a man shouting drunkenly from the window of a mean dark house down the end of an alley. She glimpsed crowded houses and crowded rooms, and everywhere she smelled waste and filth and rotting fish. She saw horses without flesh on their ribs, she saw starving dogs with their noses in the filth.

  But she also saw handbills pasted onto walls, and even in the gloom their words were like fire.

  O! YE THAT LOVE MANKIND! YE THAT DARE

  OPPOSE NOT ONLY THE TYRANNY BUT THE

  TYRANT, STAND FORTH! EVERY SPOT OF

  THE OLD WORLD IS OVERRUN WITH

  OPPRESSION. FREEDOM HATH BEEN HUNTED

  ROUND THE GLOBE. ASIA AND AFRICA HAVE

  LONG EXPELLED HER. EUROPE REGARDS

  HER AS A STRANGER AND ENGLAND HATH

  GIVEN HER WARNING TO DEPART. O!

  RECEIVE THE FUGITIVE AND PREPARE IN

  TIME AN ASYLUM FOR MANKIND—COMMON

  SENSE.

  At last she found the street. Street, I say; four buildings only stood on the one side, five on the other, with large gaps between, like two great toothless mouths grinning at each other across a narrow stretch of broken cobbles. On the corner of the street was a tavern, and over the door hung the name Thomas Foley. Candlelight shone through the bubbled panes of the low small windows, voices could be heard from within. It was an old house and it had seen recent rough treatment. Empty window panes on the upper floors were patched with paper. Shingles in places had been torn off the wall, exposing the boards beneath. The top of the chimney had been shot away. The moon was above the houses now, and as Sara gazed at this damaged building, and saw its broken chimney and wavering roofline sharp against the moonlit sky, she asked herself could this truly be the house where her father had stayed when he came to Boston for business? But she could stand there no longer, for Harry was stirring in her arms, and announcing his hunger.

  They came into a taproom lit by a few dim tallow candles and populated by a number of men sitting at a long table, others leaning against the wall close by, still others against the counter, all engaged in a loud conversation; that conversation ceasing abruptly, however, with the entrance of Sara and Harry. All faces were turned toward her. These were sober, frowning men, plainly dressed in black and brown, respectable, serious men; and she realized at once that she had nothing to fear from them, for she could imagine her father a member of this company. Only one man stood out from the rest, a shabby fellow with a hook nose and wild hair, his coat coming apart at the shoulder seams and his linen far from clean, and his hand upon a sheaf of papers on the table. He sat smoking a long clay pipe and staring at her from fierce, unblinking, red-rimmed eyes, and something in his manner told her that this was no Boston man, this was an Englishman.

  Still they watched her. She stepped into the room, latching the door behind her, and approached the table. Setting her bag on the floor, and hitching Harry higher on her breast, she told them she was Sara Rind, eldest daughter of Silas Rind; she had lived in New Morrock until the British burnt it, and had come from Cratwich to find her brother.

  She was right to think these men were her father’s friends. At once several of them rose to their feet, a hubbub of talk broke forth, a chair was pulled out for her, and the man with the hook nose stared at her more intently still. In the midst of this welcome, feeling a great wave of relief sweeping over her as she sat down, and had a glass of wine poured for her, she saw one of the men slip away from the table and run up the staircase at the back of the room. Questions were coming at her from all sides at once, and in her bewilderment she could only look from one man to another. Then suddenly she heard a shout of pleasure, and turning, saw her brother come bounding down the staircase.

  A second later Sara and Adam were in each other’s arms, clinging together with Harry between them, as the men at the table murmured their satisfaction at this reunion.

  Oh, but he had changed! Where was her boy? He was a man—more than a man, a soldier. There was no embracing for long with Harry at her breast, and Adam, after staring into his sister’s face, shifted his eyes to the
child. Sara lifted him high on her breast, she displayed him, and Adam and Harry gazed solemnly at one another as he took the little face between his fingers and turned it up to the dim glow of the candlelight. As he did so, as he examined Harry, Sara examined him; and yes, he had become a man, in the year he had been away he had grown up. It was in his eyes, first; gone, the languid dewy wondering look of the youth, in its place a brow knotted by weather and hardship and death—the death, above all, of Martha Peake.

  It was in the mouth, the lips were set now, closed firm, the tiny lines about them etched with the effort of self-control called up repeatedly in the face of God knew what horrors. He was leaner and harder, his hair was cut short, there was a few days’ growth of dark beard on his cheeks, and the fingers cupping Harry’s face were strong and scarred. He lifted his eyes from Harry to Sara and grinned his horsey grin—and there he was, her Adam, still there within the man.

  Now the other men were standing about them, peering gravely at little Harry, who peered gravely back at them. Harry was then introduced to the company, Adam becoming formal as he spoke the names, some of which would long be remembered in the annals of the struggle for independence, while others—those of men who would play parts of no less importance in these great events—History would forget; coming at the last to him of the hook nose and the blazing red-rimmed eyes, who rose to his feet and shuffled forward, as Adam told the infant boy that this man, this man, had so well caught the spirit of the American Revolution that Harry would dine out for a lifetime on it, when it was known he had shaken his hand.

  That gnarly hand was now extended, and the fierce wild face of the Englishman peered into Harry’s placid eyes; and Harry, for the first time in all the days of hard travelling he had endured, and to general amusement, burst into a howl of misery even as Adam introduced him to Mr. Tom Paine.

  A little later, after she had eaten, Sara went with Adam to a room separate from the others where they could talk. She laid Harry in a drawer in the corner and at once he fell asleep. Two candles burned on a table with papers and pamphlets spread across it, a quill lying on a sheet in the middle. Bare floorboards with bunches of drying herbs hanging from hooks in the old ceiling beams, and a shelf loaded with books and papers. A pair of boots by the door, and a peg above from which hung a muddy cloak and a battered hat. Adam flung himself into a chair.

  “By Christ I am glad you are safe, Sara!” he cried, not for the first time that night.

  “I came from Cratwich with the soldiers,” she said, wandering about the room. “I could come to no harm with them.”

  A snort at this, a manly snort, a snort that knew soldiers. He stood up and went to the chair to gaze some more at the sleeping Harry.

  “He is exhausted,” he said.

  “We have been on the road for days. The country is starving.”

  Still he stood gazing at the sleeping boy.

  “A handsome child,” he said. “He looks well. He has the Peake spine.”

  “Oh, he is well,” said Sara. “He is strong as an ox, and as heavy.”

  She sat down at the table. His back was still to her.

  “He will need to be strong,” he murmured, and then, without turning: “Not mine?”

  It had to come, good that it came at once.

  “No,” she said, “not yours.”

  They sat up late talking in the candlelight. Sara told her brother everything. Oh, she was happy he had become a man, he had seen so much of human nature since they were last together, she needed to explain little but the bare facts of the thing and he understood. In the last year he had seen strong men turn into animals under the hardships of campaigning against the British. He had seen brave men weeping like children after a musket ball had shattered a bone, or a bayonet had sheared their flesh, left them gazing in astonishment at a mangled limb or an opened belly with the guts spilling out. He knew the limits beyond which even the strongest could not go without the sacrifice of their humanity. He spoke of all this, saying that what he had learned in the north woods did not incline him to judge Martha harshly, nor her father either. Sara was strongly affected, and in a second her eyes were brimming with tears; and when he reached across the table and took her hands in his own, her heart heaved and the tears came streaming down. She took a little wine. She had come to the heart of the thing.

  “So you will give him your name? He will be your son?”

  He sat gazing at the table, and the wavering candle-flame brought out the new-made clefts and knottings in his face and brow. For an eternity of seconds he sat like that, still as death. Then his head came up, his hands reached for hers once more, and she saw with a great leaping of the heart that he understood, that the answer was yes. Ah, her brother, her beloved brother—he understood. And understanding, accepted, and in that draughty ill-lit room in Foley’s Tavern, as directly beneath them Mr. Tom Paine, citizen of the world, drank brandy and talked on through the night—Harry’s future as an American was assured.

  Some months later, in the autumn of 1776, Sara met her father in that same room in Foley’s Tavern. Sara knew the truth, of course, Martha had told her everything, but for the sake of little Harry she had determined that only Adam would know why Martha had done what she did. So she held her peace as Silas talked. He knew, he said, that Martha betrayed the town to the British, but he also knew that she was no enemy of the Revolution. Why then had she done it? Because, he said, she was seduced by Captain Hawkins. The Englishman slipped into her heart like a snake, he said, and like a snake he poisoned her, and so she gave up her secrets to him. And only when the town was in flames did she understand how he had repaid her. It drove her mad, said Silas, the Englishman’s treachery, and so she took a musket and loaded it with powder and ball and went to the harbour to shoot down the man who had used her so ill.

  Silas’ own responsibility in this had not escaped him, though when Sara questioned him closely—asked him why he had sent Martha to Scup Head with Adam that day, and then thrust her into the captain’s way, armed as she was with intelligence that had to stay hidden from the British—Silas was evasive. He shook his head. He muttered the Englishman’s name. Ah, but she only winged him, he said, lifting his dark eyes to hers, and now she is a martyr of the Revolution. Sara began to speak, but he silenced her at once. He laid a hand flat on the table and stared into his daughter’s face.

  “And so she must remain,” he said. “So she must remain.”

  He then explained to Sara why she must speak of this to nobody, saying that the Revolution required a martyr. We need her, he said, we need her legend, which every day spreads further into the country, and wherever it spreads it rouses the people. With every new telling of it they love their country the more and the British the less; indeed, he said, their hatred of the British burns with a fierce heat when they think of what was done to New Morrock, and to Martha Peake; and that hatred will win the war, if we can sustain it. She is the spirit of the Revolution, said Silas, and so she must remain. She destroyed the town, but she will make us a generous compensation, for the story of Martha Peake’s courage on the wharf that day will be a rallying call when we are without bread or boots, and have little ammunition left, and Washington is leading us deeper into the back country, to keep us from being destroyed by the enemy on an open field. This war will not be won easy, he said, and we must have gestures to lift our spirit and drive our purpose forward. Sara, he said—and she found her father staring intently at her in the wavering candle-flame—you see it does not matter that the legend is a lie?

  Sara nodded. She knew all about lies now. Silas rose heavily to his feet. He paused at the door, then he went out, and she heard his footsteps on the stairs. She got up from the table and leaned over the sleeping Harry.

  42

  I slept late into the afternoon after my nightmare experience in the cellars, and by the time my uncle had finished describing the bombardment of New Morrock, and Martha’s magnificent fatal gesture, the clock in the hall downstairs was
chiming midnight. I had for some time been anticipating her end, but when it came I confess I was profoundly shocked, and sprang up from my chair with a shout of dismay. My uncle, as I have said, was no less distressed; and as I paced the room, pushing my hand through my hair, the tears came, yes, they came in floods, so real had she become to me; nor did he remain dry-eyed for long.

  “Shot down,” I whispered, “in cold blood, by Englishmen—!”

  William applied a large white handkerchief to his streaming face, murmuring: “She fired on them first.”

  “Ach, she stood no chance at all. And she did not kill him?”

  The old man shook his head.

  “Then let us hope the wound festered,” I said darkly. “Let us hope it went bad, and he perished slowly, and in great agony.”

  My uncle lifted an eyebrow but said nothing; and I think, for once—indeed, for the first time!—we two were in agreement.

  Oh, I could not think of sleep, my mind was in turmoil! I drank more brandy, indeed I made free with the bottle, for the first time in my life I used the fiery liquour to still the turbulence that roiled and seethed within me. It had the effect, however, over the course of the next hour or so, not of stilling but of inflaming, rather, my passions, and I admit that I wept a good deal during that time, the memory of my own horrid ordeal lending heat and fire to my dawning horror as I tried to take hold of the fact of Martha’s death. Oh, the mind could grasp it, it was the heart that rebelled, and time and again I rose from my chair and wandered about my uncle’s room, crying—“Why? Why?”—and finishing with my head against the wall, pummelling the panelling with my fist.

  My uncle stayed with me throughout, and for once he allowed that better part of his nature to come forth, the doctor in him, that is, buried beneath the scaly skin of the cynic. He slowed me in my fervid consumption of his brandy, and allowed me to talk, and oh, my rebel heart overflowed that night, and William Tree for once proved himself a friend to his agitated nephew.