Martha Peake (10 page)

“Fifteen, my lord,” she said. “How old are you?”

His lordship stiffened visibly at this impertinence. He stood up, took Martha by the shoulders, and turning her about, placed the flat of his hand between her shoulder blades and ran it down her back. He then remarked to William that she showed nothing of her father’s peculiar endowment. His fingers lingered on her buttocks and squeezed them for firmness.

For a moment Martha was taken quite aback, but only for a moment. She shook off Lord Drogo’s fingers and rounded on him, fiery with outrage, and demanded to know, was he accustomed to handling women like livestock? Fred Lour could not restrain a shout of laughter, at which Martha turned to her father, who lifted his hand and said to Lord Drogo: “Her back is straight, my lord. My wife’s confinement was not unsettled as my mother’s was.”

“Indeed,” said Lord Drogo, regarding Martha coldly and tapping his cane smartly on the floor as she stood before him with her hair adrift, her blood up, and her fists clenched tight. He made a small gesture of acquiescence, and turned again to Harry.

“And are you often in pain, sir?” then said his lordship.

Oh, that question! There was a reason Harry Peake’s great face was as knobbed and wedged with chunks of fisted muscle as it was, said William, why as harrowed and scoured, pocked and warted as some wild moorscape of the west country—what a thing that face was! But it had been carved thus by pain, when his spine, as it did periodically, threw up howling storms of torment from between its ill-matched plates, and the fine vessels were trapped and crushed between them. Martha had seen her father twisting on the floor, arching his ridged backbone as it tore him apart, she had seen him in Hell, his eyes clamped tight shut and every muscle bulging in his head, every vessel bursting, the sweat breaking from him in torrents as he fought to endure the unendurable. He had shouted for ardent spirits at such times, and Martha had brought him water. He had
dashed the jug from her hands—again he had cried out for strong drink—and she had held him, she had held him until the spasms subsided and the poor exhausted man could fall away into sleep, to awaken, please God, in some relief from his agonies. Was he often in pain? Oh, he was.

“At times I suffer it, my lord.”

“No pain bites like that which has its source in the spine—
nec mordat dolor hic spinus spinorum
, eh, William?”

“Indeed, my lord,” said William.

“Can you cure him?” said Martha.

“Dear girl, there are none can ‘cure’ a spine like this. But physic is not altogether derelict here. You are a scholar, sir, you sit late with your books, smoking your pipe in a closed room. Am I right?”

“You are right,” said Harry.

“You eat meat and you take strong drink. Am I right?”

“I eat meat, my lord, but I take no drink.”

“That is wise. Drink milk. Take the air. Live ascetic. Live as a monk. This is all I can tell you.”

“Will it grow worse?”

“You have consulted other surgeons?”

“I have consulted nobody.”

So they talked then of what a surgeon could and could not do; and a little later Lord Drogo and my uncle William took their leave. But before they did so, Drogo told Harry he would be pleased to see him again, to talk about his pain, and indicated that he intended to think further on the subject.

Martha watched from the window as Drogo and William emerged from the back door of the Angel and crossed the courtyard to their carriage. The same spidery figure dressed in black—it was Clyte, of course—held the door for them, then scuttled up onto the cab and took the reins in one hand, the whip in the other. But before the carriage
moved off, he turned and stared straight up at the window. Martha did not step away, but held the creature’s gaze. A most peculiar sensation, I imagine, difficult to describe, precisely, although I believe I can guess the sentiments Clyte aroused in Martha’s heart: she felt the same shiver move up her spine that she had known when Lord Drogo touched her earlier. It was not her first glimpse of Clyte, but it was the first time I believe that she sensed the sheer evil rising off him like a gas. A moment later the carriage rumbled out of the courtyard and into the night. Harry resumed wiping his face clean of paint and powder, and soon was laughing quietly, as he remembered Martha’s fiery indignation toward Lord Drogo. Then he remembered being asked about Grace Foy, and at once he grew quiet.

7

I
t was past midnight by this time and my uncle showed no inclination to retire. It ocurred to me that over the years of his isolation here in Drogo Hall he had developed the habits of a nocturnal, and that his vitality was aroused only in the small hours when the rest of the world slept. I speculated now that he might be a user of opium. It was an established fact that within the medical profession the practice was a good deal more common even than in the artist class, largely as a function of availability and temperament: your doctor is a melancholy fellow, as a rule.

Now I reviewed what facts I had. The rapid mood changes, the tendency to drift and dream, the coming to life in the hours of darkness—above all, the grandiosity of certain elements of his story and, at the same time, the minute knowledge he seemed to possess of events he had not witnessed—it all suggested a narcotic influence, and I believe it was at this point in the narrative that it first occurred to me that I could no longer altogether trust him. His story, it is true, had held together well enough, given the generous assistance of a sympathetic imagination like my own, but I had detected certain omissions, certain small inconsistencies, and anomalies, and all at once the old man’s cavalier references to the vagaries of a failing memory seemed suspect. For when I pressed him he simply threw his
hands in the air, and gazed at me with an expression of almost comic mystification, accompanied by much shrugging of those bony little birdlike shoulders; and I had had no choice but to accept him at his word.

But now the voice of skepticism within me could no longer be ignored, even as the story assumed the most somber of tones. Over the next hour or so he brought me forward to what he called the “precipitating accident,” and this event convinced me, if I needed further convincing, that information was being withheld from me. How else to explain the mystery of Harry’s changing habits, his sudden desire to
walk by night
?

Now Harry Peake had always loved to walk. In Cornwall he had tramped across the cliffs or over the moors when he had business to conduct in a distant village, glad of the chance to swing a stout stick and shout at the sky. Since coming to London he had had to abandon these rambles of his, for he could no longer move as he had before his back was broke. But he could still go down to the docks with Martha, and frequently the two were to be seen making their way through the narrow streets of Smithfield, Harry huge and bent in his old black coat, and his hat pulled low, and Martha—who was not bent at all, of course, said my uncle, but seemed rather to
crest
the morning, like a vessel under sail!—Martha striding along beside him, a shawl flung over her shoulders and her hair pinned up in a chaotic bun. They made a striking couple, he said. Harry had become a familiar figure in this part of the town, and he was warmly hailed by many of those they met; and those who did not know him stared and whispered and were then informed by their companions as to the identity of the great bowed poet in black, and the tall red-haired girl walking with him.

Why did they go down to the docks?

They went down to the docks, said my uncle, because the sight of ships gave Harry comfort. To gaze upon the merchant shipping that crowded the Thames in those days, this, he said, somehow, to some degree, satisfied Harry’s yearning to discover the world he had
described in his ballad, and the life of simplicity in Nature it seemed to promise him. For he had come to regard London as a corrupt place, indeed all England was corrupt in Harry’s view, because governed by corrupt men; and he dreamed that he and Martha might one day escape that corruption and find a place where the evil inherent in man’s nature—and had he not glimpsed such evil in himself, and worked and suffered these many years to cleanse himself of it?—where human evil withered and fell away, and the natural virtuous man within could stand forth. That place, that great good place, he called America.

My uncle gazed at me with soured features, licking his lips as though he had just bit into a lemon. He had delivered all this in the ironical tones of an old sniffing cynic for whom the idea of man’s natural virtue was but a chimerical wisp dreamed up by boys and poets.

The morning was cool and the sky clear as they passed under the slender wooden bridges that connected the great timbered warehouses on either side of the street, and came out onto a broad cobblestoned thoroughfare by the river. Much noise now, cranes creaking and pulleys rattling, men shouting, and the rumble of wheels, as they made their way through the bustle and tumult of the port to a bench in front of the Red Cock Tavern. There Harry smoked a pipe, and Martha peeled an apple, while aproned porters pushed barrows of fish, and plump carters rumbled by atop wagons piled with sacks of grain. And ships! A wilderness of ships! A forest of masts and yards, a chaos of rope and rigging, pennants and ensigns fluttering in the breeze, and all manner of cargo, bales and barrels, sheep and cows, rising from their holds and swinging aloft in nets. For this was the giant’s stomach, and into it flowed the wealth of the world.

It was the ships they had come to see. Martha knew little enough about ships beyond what she remembered of the fishing boats of Port Jethro, but these towering vessels, these great three-masters tied up at every wharf, and rocking on their cables in the stream, all streaked
with salt and bleached by the sun, and sunburnt men with wild faces padding their decks and with strange cries darting about the rigging—they aroused her imagination with ideas of places with names like Surinam and Chandrapoor and Senegal and Trinidad and Philadelphia. Harry knew more of course, he knew the sea, but his were the eyes of a poet and the sea spoke to him now of epic themes, of storms and wrecks, mutiny and piracy, vessels becalmed in alien waters and attended by weird portents. Oh, they could amuse themselves for hours, those two, and they did. But their mood changed later in the morning, for as they lingered on their bench in the sunshine a regiment of infantry passed by, the Duke of Richmond’s Foot, on its way to take ship for the colonies.

They had been aware of them for some time. The drums of course, always the drums, and then the dull shuffling thunder of the foot-soldiers of the Empire as they came marching along the river from the direction of Westminster. The troopships were some way off, but Harry and Martha had for more than an hour watched as the last stores and provisions were swung into the vessels’ holds, barrels of beer and ship’s biscuit and pickled beef; filthy stuff, said Harry, the quartermasters kept the best back for their own profit. Officers had gathered on the quayside, manifests were perused, men in bright uniforms spoke briskly one to another, one pointing his finger in one direction, another in another; and soon a crowd of the idle and the curious had gathered to watch the redcoats embark.

Tramp tramp tramp came the soldiers, and soon they were marching past the Red Cock, where Harry and Martha had been joined on their bench by their friend Fred Lour. Harry remarked on how young the soldiers were, only boys, he said, coarse rough fellows, yes, but boys for all that, and Fred agreed, he said the sergeants filled them with ale in country inns and when they were drunk enlisted them for a shilling. On they came, four abreast, the sergeants shouting and cursing them for lazy useless dogs, and worse, and the officers on horseback, proud fellows in splendid coats and great colored sashes across their breasts. On they came, rank after rank, company
after company, hundreds of men and boys, then thousands, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes they marched past the Red Cock with no break in the ranks. Harry was made sad by the spectacle. They did not know where they were going, he said, nor why they were going there, but Martha felt no pity for those rough boys. Did not each one of them carry a musket? And would he not use it to kill a colonist? Harry supposed she was right. They watched as the first ranks of redcoats marched up the gangplank and disappeared below decks. A little later there was some disturbance in the crowd, they could hear men shouting for the American cause, scuffles broke out, and Harry, who feared riot above all things, rose to his feet and with Martha beside him, her arm in his, set off back to Smithfield, after saying good-day to Fred Lour, who thought he might stay awhile and see what happened, make a little mayhem of his own, perhaps.