Martha Peake

by Patrick Mcgrath

  Came the moment at last when I was drained of emotion, weak and ready for sleep, as in the hall below the clock chimed out the melancholy hour of four. I murmured something to this effect, and rose up out of my chair, only to lurch sideways, and seize the mantelpiece so as not to fall down. I was not sober. I stood a moment, gripping the mantel with both hands, my head bowed and my eyes all damply red with brandy and spent passion, gazing unseeing at the ash and embers in the fireplace. I felt my uncle’s hand on my arm.

  “Come, Ambrose,” he said gently, “I will take you up.”

  I allowed him to do so. Slowly we ascended the old staircase, him holding the candle, myself clutching his arm. Our progress was halting and uncertain; more than once I had recourse to the banister, and leaned heavily upon it as my head spun and my stomach heaved. I was not accustomed to strong liquour in such quantity. At last we reached my door. I stumbled in, old William behind me, and as I flung myself on the bed he lit the candle on my nightstand. There I lay, panting and groaning, and he gazed down at me, the candle throwing up a trembling illumination such that his features seemed benign, and wise, and all-comprehending. I tried to raise myself, I lifted a hand, I wished to tell him that I loved him, but I had not the strength, and I fell back on my pillow even as he whispered his goodnight. I heard his shuffling slippers on the floorboards, and then the creaking of the door, and then—the key turning in the lock.

  I sobered in an instant. No sound had ever chilled my heart as that sound did. I remembered then with a shock of dismay that when Percy had come to wake me earlier, he had first to unlock the door—and I struggled up from my bed, this one idea now suddenly athrob in my spinning brain, that I was locked in—I was a prisoner in Drogo Hall!

  Oh, what a fool I was, to be deceived by old William Tree—he had not my welfare at heart, no, he had other plans for me—plans hatched, I could not doubt it now, in the malign brain of Francis Drogo, who had disturbed me even as I penetrated the secret places in the cellars of his house.

  Unsteadily I stood up. My situation was grave indeed. What had I to fear? Perhaps the worst, perhaps that I would share the fate of Harry Peake and the countless others who had been butchered on Drogo’s table. I paced the room, my step soon as firm and straight as ever, and my mind racing forward, burning with clarity and urgency and yes, no little fear, but they would not surprise me again! By the light of the candle I explored the room minutely, seeking some means of escape. There was none. The window would not yield, shut tight these fifty years, and the sashes warped and swollen with time and weather and neglect, and even if it could be opened it offered nothing but a sheer drop forty feet to a stone courtyard below, and no pipe, no ledge, no climbing ivy to allow of a descent.

  I slumped into my chair, despair beginning to announce itself at the outskirts of thought, but the mind still working, working rapidly for a means of release from a suddenly mortal predicament. And then an idea. The night before, descending into the cellars, I had of course taken the precaution of concealing about my person my pistol. I had had no chance to use it, my assailant having come silently at me from behind. But my uncle or his servant had undressed me—had he also disarmed me? The next moment I was across the room and fumbling at the inner pocket of the coat I had been wearing. The pistol was not there. A last possibility—I flung open the drawer of the nightstand—and opening the walnut box, there it lay, I saw the barrel gleaming faintly in the candlelight, I saw the glint of mother-of-pearl—and I lifted it to my lips, I pressed my lips to the cold gray metal; and then I ascertained that, yes, it was still primed and loaded with ball.

  Little for it now but to wait, to wait and scheme. I dragged an armchair into the middle of the room, facing the door, and established myself with a blanket over my knees, and under the blanket the pistol. I had thrown off the effects of the brandy, I had dismissed for the present the figure of Martha Peake, wild-haired and maddened by betrayal as she strode down Rind’s Wharf that day intending to kill Giles Hawkins, ay, and her father too, for what he had done to her, and England, for making him do it—to kill everything, in short, that twined about her ankles and kept her from the freedom that had seemed possible for herself and her child in America—no, my nerves were of steel now, and I possessed in addition the element of surprise. For whatever it was they planned for me—and I had begun to suspect that Drogo’s researches were far from ended, and that a young body, quick with life, like my own, was a prize not to be passed up—whatever their plan, when they came for me they would not expect to find me alert and armed.

  An hour passed, and I began to doze. Images rose in clusters in my mind, images of Martha, Martha dancing with her father in the garret in Cripplegate Street, Martha searching for her father in the horrid sinks and dens of the London docks, Martha taking ship for America … and I remembered then my mother talking about Martha Peake when I was a child, and her words at last came back to me, her story of the English girl who saved the Revolution—

  It was then I heard the footsteps. I came awake with a start, every sense, every faculty trembling at the unmistakeable sound of those same tramping footsteps I had heard some nights before. I brought the pistol out from under the blanket and cocked its hammer in my lap. On came the footsteps, yes, and stopped outside my door. I reached for the candle, which was almost burnt down, and with a silent breath I blew it out. In the darkness I turned the pistol toward the door.

  Time then seemed to elongate, to stretch itself beyond its accustomed duration, a second an eternity as I anticipated the sound of the key catching in the lock. There it was. The key was turning. I lifted the pistol and pointed it at the middle of the door, at Drogo’s black heart, ha! The key turned. The first creak of the hinges. Another second, another eternity, but oh, the stealth of the intruder was no match for the cunning of the host within! In the blackness a thin bar of gray slid across the dusty floorboards as the door swung slowly open.

  The pistol did not tremble, my grip was strong and unwavering, I held it straight before me in both hands. A few inches more, and then in the gloom of the half-opened door I had him in full view and I pulled the trigger, the pistol kicked up, I fired!

  The night exploded with the discharge of the pistol! In the sudden smoky flare of light I saw the figure in the doorway stand for a moment as though stunned, and then crumple, his hand on his chest—he seemed almost to be bowing to me!—then his head sank down, an arm was flung out, the hand groped for the doorframe and then slowly, slowly he fell forward into the room, white hair flapping about him as he went down. I was on my feet now, breathing fast, the sound of the gunshot still hammering in my ears, the room dark once more and thick with smoke and the acrid stink of burnt powder. Now my hand trembled, the pistol clattered to the floorboards, and from far off, from a distant passage, I heard the cry of an old man in distress.

  I turned aside and was violently sick. I sank to my knees, clutching the arms of the chair, as I emptied my stomach of its foul contents, all swimming in brandy. I heaved, I retched, I gasped for air, as another and another convulsion racked my frame; and this is how they found me. I was not aware of the scurrying footsteps of my uncle and his servant, and I only turned when I heard William cry out with grief, and kneeling over my own stinking vomitus I saw the two old men, on their knees as I was, attending to the corpse of my enemy.

  “It is over,” I muttered, spitting flecks and gobs of excreta from my lips.

  My uncle stared at me, his face white and his eyes wide, and the ridiculous red nightcap askew on his wispy dome.

  “You do not know what you have done,” he whispered.

  “I have rid the world of a monster,” I said, and for an instant I felt a kind of peace in my soul. “Drogo is no more.”

  Silence in that trembling room, and then my uncle spoke.

  “It is not Drogo you have murdered,” he said. “He has been dead these fifteen years.”

  I stared back at him, the peace of my soul dying like a shadow on water.

>   “It is Harry you have murdered,” he said. “You have murdered Harry Peake.”

  43

  There is little left to tell. I did not murder Harry Peake, but I may as well have done. When the pistol kicked the shot went high, and tore a gouge in the panelling above the door. But Harry was old, and weakened by recurrent bouts of marsh fever, and he collapsed with the shock.

  The morning after, as he lay gravely ill in his bed in the west wing, we sat in the kitchen, my uncle and I, drinking tea and talking about the past. Or rather, he talked, he told me how he had suffered this last half-century in the knowledge that he it was who had sent Martha to America, to her death; the circumstances of which he learned from Sara Rind, when the war was over. To her death, he moaned, and I the one who set it in train! You wonder why I would not speak of her time in America!

  We were gentle with each other now, William and I. But you intended, I said, to save her from Harry.

  Ay, the intention was good, he said; but the outcome was evil.

  Was it evil, I murmured, for the republic—?

  Damn the republic, that girl was worth a hundred republics!

  Up came the old head, the rheumy eyes spat fire at me for a second or two; and then grew soft once more. Ambrose, Ambrose, he murmured, we will not quarrel anymore. You also have produced an evil effect, which I know you did not intend.

  He nodded. I nodded. No, we would not quarrel. We were the same. I asked him then what had happened to Harry after Martha took ship for Boston. Oh, we lured him in off the marsh, he said, we could not bear to listen to him any longer.

  To listen to him?

  To listen to his keening. That autumn they had heard him night after night, his heart and spirit broken, howling into the wind for his lost daughter. And nothing, said my uncle, nothing he had ever heard could express the sheer depths of misery and torment of that lonely howling in the night. But at last they succeeded in drawing him in, for Lord Drogo could not sleep, he barely touched food, so great was his own pain at the suffering of the poor wretch outside his walls. And what a pitiful sight he was, when once they had him in the house. They sat him in the kitchen, by the great fireplace, and he shivered and jabbered, his garments mere rags and so often soaked by the autumn rains that they would never dry; and his flesh all wasted off his great frame, which had preserved him only by virtue of its native constitutional strength.

  At the mention of Harry’s great frame I remembered my conviction that Lord Drogo had pursued him solely for the sake of his bones. I said this.

  Ah no, said my uncle. He gazed at me sadly. Lord Drogo was no monster, he said. He did not care for glory, the applause of the world was nothing to him. No, he hated pain, and he gave his life to the mysteries of the human anatomy so that pain and sickness might be understood, and being understood, overcome. He wished only to bring Harry back to health, and allow him to resume writing the poetry that had made so strong an impression on his lordship when first he heard him in the Angel.

  I pondered this. Lord Drogo as the benefactor of Harry Peake, as his patron—large structures were collapsing in my mind. And Harry allowed Lord Drogo to shelter him under his roof?

  Harry was a sick man when we brought him in, said William. He had the marsh fever, it was raging in him, it would have killed any other man, and he was weak. Much of the time he did not understand where he was, nor what was happening to him. We put him to bed and we nursed him back to health. He was at death’s door, but death would not let him in.

  I was apprehensive of asking my uncle if I could visit Harry, but in the event I need not have been. Late that afternoon, as we sat together by the fire, Percy slipped in and whispered into my uncle’s ear. I knew this concerned me, for William’s eyes were upon me as Percy delivered his message.

  “Percy has just come from Harry,” he said. “He has asked if you will go to him.”

  William accompanied me to the west wing. Our progress was slow, for he seemed to have aged another twenty years in the past twenty-four hours, and we paused several times on each staircase, and he clung to my arm as he shuffled along the dusty corridors of the old parts of the house. Much wheezing, and wherever a chair had been placed in a passage he would sit down for several minutes to gather his failing strength. At last we arrived at Harry’s door. Percy had heard us coming, and now he opened the door and brought us in.

  It was a large room with a southern exposure over the marsh, misty this day, the hills and woods indistinct in the far distance. I felt at once the warmth and comfort, intimacy even, peculiar to the room long occupied by this remarkable tenant, a man of simple tastes and bookish inclinations. There was a rug on the floor, a fire blazing in the wide hearth, a table beneath the window covered in papers, and one wall occupied by a massive glass-fronted bookcase. On the wall over the fireplace, and facing the bed, hung a portrait of a young woman who could only be Martha Peake, and painted by the same hand as “The American Within.” All this I took in at a glance. My eye then came to rest on the great bed, piled high with bolsters, against which reclined the august figure of Harry Peake.

  “Ambrose Tree,” he murmured, or lisped, rather, in the manner of old men who lack for teeth. “Who taught you to fire a pistol?”

  It took me a second to understand that this was a joke. Ah, he was benign!

  “Come here by me,” he said.

  There was a chair by the bed. I crossed the room and sat down, and Harry lifted a huge hand. I gave him my hand, and he grasped it, enclosed it, rather, swallowed it up in his own, and held it so firmly I did not believe he would ever let me go. He gazed at me for several moments before releasing me, and I held his eye. It was all there in his face, all I had seen in the portrait below, but faded and bloated by time, the starkness softened by a webbing of tiny lines, hatched and cross-hatched in the loose gray elephant skin that hung now from jowl and cheekbone and bagged about the mouth and beneath the chin. The great clefts were visible still in the gaunt structural joists of that massive face, but superimposed on every flap and wedge of baggy flesh the relentless crow’s-foot markings of the years. The hair was white as snow now, pulled back from a peak high on his forehead and tied in a ponytail, and the large ears with their long droopy lobes flowered from the sides of his huge head, pale gray and translucent within. Oh, it was an atlas, Harry’s face, and in it might be located every destination to which the human spirit ever travelled.

  Thus did I regard him as I returned the gaze of those old dark eyes within which a flame yet burnt, though weakly now. As for his spine, it was hidden in his heap of pillows, but in his posture, as he sat up in the bed, a bentness was evident at once, a stooping or hollowing of the frame. I told him at once and with some feeling how sorry I was to have shot my pistol at him.

  He continued to gaze at me, a smile playing about his thin old lips, collapsed now upon their toothless gums. He waved away my apology with a majestic indifference.

  “You have seen my Martha?” he whispered, indicating the painting.

  I said I had.

  “A strong likeness, do you think?”

  My mouth hung open; I had been about to say I had never laid eyes on his daughter, she died before I was born, but I paused, I reflected that I did know her, had I not aroused her in my imagination and followed her from Cornwall to Cape Morrock, and been present at her death?

  “A good likeness,” I said.

  “Do you see her mother in her?”

  “Indeed I do,” I said, and I did; wondering, which of us is the mad one here, him, to be asking this, or me, to be answering?

  “And do they still remember her?”

  His wispy voice cracked a little as he said this. It had begun stronger, not strong as I imagined it when he strode about the taproom of a Cripplegate tavern and declaimed his ballad, but it lost more of its power with every succeeding question, and was now but a shadow of a whisper.

  “She will not be forgotten,” I said, and I meant it. For his sake I would make her name live
again as it had during the Revolution, for I could not tolerate the thought that all this suffering was for nothing.

  “God bless,” whispered Harry, and sank back and closed his eyes. I found that he had taken my hand once more, and as he lay breathing deep with his eyes closed, his grip on me was as strong as it had been before. So I sat there, leaning forward, and the minutes passed. At last William silently approached the bed, extricated my fingers from Harry’s grasp, and led me from the room.

  In the hours after my visit Harry sank fast. Again I came to his bed, but he did not at first take my hand, nor did his eyes show the fire they had the day before, there was but an ember in them now, the faintest glow. When he spoke I could barely hear him, and I put my head close to his face.

  Now his hand fell upon mine, and held it in a grip more steely even than before. I asked him to repeat what he had said, and he gasped it out with no small difficulty.

  “We burn!”

  “We burn?”

  “We burn!”

  And that was all.

  44

  The hours and days immediately after Harry’s death are almost too painful for me to contemplate. What made my own remorse so intolerably poignant was observing the profound grief of both my uncle and his servant, Percy. They had loved the old poet dearly. For half-a-century they had sheltered him in Drogo Hall, far from the temptations of the London gin shops, and well beyond the reach of those of his countrymen who would taunt and abuse him for his physical deformity.

  We buried him two days later. The minister had lived in the village for many years, and had known Lord Drogo well. He understood what his lordship had done for Harry, and he understood too, for William had explained it to him, the circumstances of Harry’s death. I insisted of course on being a coffin bearer; and so, with nine strong men from the village, I helped carry him from the church to his final resting place, a grave he himself had selected, not far from the Vault of the Drogoes, and but a few feet from the tree beneath which he had committed his own great crime against Nature. I tossed earth onto the massive coffin, when it had been lowered into the ground, and made no attempt to stanch the flow of my tears. Nor was I alone in my grief, for when I looked up I saw that the old men gathered at the graveside, William, and Percy, and the minister, as well as several dozen men, women, and children from the village, all were weeping as copiously as I was. During the long years of his seclusion in Drogo Hall Harry had been loved by all who knew him, and his gentle spirit was already missed.