Martha Peake (3 page)

By the age of seventeen Harry had yet to cross the Tamar, and to the idle glance of the stranger he would have seemed no more than a big handsome strapping lad who smelled of the harbour and the alehouse, a boisterous, good-natured boy with a tough body and a strong will and a quick eager mind. But to those who knew him—and by this, said my uncle, turning toward me, I mean the few educated men in those parts—he was an unusual, even an exceptional youth, whom some believed to be destined for great things.

I interrupted him at this point. For several minutes I had been aware of his growing warmth as he spoke of the young Harry Peake, that warmth now rising to a pitch almost of rhapsody as he described Harry’s attainments and possibilities. I had no wish to puncture the old man’s enthusiasm, but as yet I did not altogether share it, and so I asked him, how had he learned of the precocious talents of this barely literate Cornish fisherman?

I need not have worried that I would deflate him. His mood shifted like quicksilver. Gone, the warbling fustian, again he turned to me, this time with eyes that glinted coldly in the candlelight, and asked me briskly, did I doubt it?

I lifted my hands and said nothing.

Very well then, he said, I ask you to imagine this—

But I imagined nothing, for at that moment Percy entered the room to refill our glasses and poke the fire into fresh life, and to report to my uncle on the severity of the rainstorm now howling about the house, and the status of various leaks in various of the upper rooms. When he had left us I discovered that my uncle’s mood had changed once more, and that he wore now an expression of some despondency. I begged him to continue. Another sigh, and after a moment or two he resumed, and told me that despite his wild ways—or perhaps, he said, because of them—Harry Peake won the heart of a fine young woman from a remote farm on the Bodmin Moor. Her name was Grace Foy, and after a brief tempestuous courtship they were married. Harry was then eighteen years old, Grace a year younger.

Grace brought with her a small dowry, and that, along with the money Harry had saved from his work on the boats, and his other endeavors—a glance here from my uncle, did I take his meaning?—they acquired a house made of stone with a steep slate-hung roof, halfway up the hill behind the harbour. They moved in at once, and six months later Grace bore Harry a daughter. They called her Martha. About Martha Peake, said my uncle, we know a great deal, but about her mother much less, beyond that she came from a family of sisters, that she was a tall proud laughing woman with broad shoulders and a loud voice, that she had a head of flaming red hair, and that her temper was as fierce as Harry’s own. With two such passionate natures, said my uncle, peering at me now like an owl, it will not surprise you to learn that their marriage was a turbulent one.

Some sad nodding here.

The sad nodding was followed by head shaking, glances were cast at the painting over the fireplace, and a deep frown appeared in the
parchment skin of my uncle’s forehead. Ah, but there was a flaw in Harry’s nature, he said, it had announced itself during his childhood, and then more dramatically when his mother died. Perhaps it arose in reaction to the teeming energies of his imagination, perhaps the seeds of madness were already in him at birth, passed on by Maggie Peake; we will never know. But as he entered upon his manhood a sort of fevered restlessness was observed in him, a wildness in his words and actions that had not been there before, and at such times it seemed to those who knew him that his very spirit was on fire. By this time he owned a pair of horses, and would spend his days galloping along the cliffs, so close to the edge that his life was despaired of; or he drank himself into oblivion, after talking in the Admiral Byng for hours to anyone who would listen to him; or he stripped his clothes off and flung himself into a heavy sea, for the sheer pleasure of getting out safe again.

But after some days of this there would come a sudden precipitous collapse into the blackest melancholy, and for a period he would be morose, silent, smoldering, dangerous. Harry’s dirty weather, they called it in Port Jethro, and it was first evident, said my uncle, his tone low and rapid now, and inflected with the darkness that permeated the matter of his narrative, to his companions in the Admiral Byng during a severe winter when the gales howled about the village day and night, and great seas dashed themselves against the cliffs, and no boat went out for weeks on end. There were many nights, that winter, when Harry showed more interest in his drink than he did in the sport of his roistering friends, and it became apparent that he was drinking harder than the others, that he did not want to go home when the landlord called time, and that his mood darkened the more he drank. He lost his temper one night and flung himself on a man who he believed had insulted him, and the two were only with difficulty separated. There were other fights that winter, and there were nights when Harry sat off by himself, staring into the fire, sullen and muttering, brooding on matters he would
speak of to nobody. It was said that he often quarrelled with his wife, and that he was not settling well to the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood, indeed voices raised in anger were heard that winter from the slate-roofed house up behind the harbour, where Grace had given him another child, a son called Jonathan.

Come the spring, and the return of warmer weather, and longer hours of daylight, Harry’s spirits lifted and he was something like his old self again. But a certain gladness, a certain lightness of spirit had gone from him forever, and he now showed signs in his face of anxiety, of conflict, and of pain. Often he drank to excess, and his friends left him to himself at such times. He would sit in the shadows at the back of the inn, and the drink gave him no release from his demons, whoever or whatever they were.

Seven years passed, and Grace Foy bore Harry three more children. His temper improved, and in time he came to believe that he had shaken it off, the black mood that had dogged his spirit through that terrible winter. He prospered, bought his own boat, and came in time to be regarded as one of the first men of Port Jethro. For Grace and her children these were happy years, and there were times in Martha’s early life that she would never forget. Often she went out with her father on his boat, Harry being that unusual creature, a fisherman who took pleasure in sailing, and the stronger the wind the better he liked it.

He took her up on his horse with him, when he had business in Bodmin, and together they galloped across the moor, the big laughing man and the little girl gripped between his knees and hanging on to the saddle for dear life—her face to the wind like her father’s, and no more fear in her than he had in him. They tramped the cliffs together, and told endless stories, each one wilder than the one before. Harry loved his wife with a strong and jealous intensity, and if they fought and stormed it was because their passions were at root
the passions of attachment; but he loved his Martha no less passionately, for she took after her mother, she had her bones, she had her spirit, she had her flaming red hair.

Then late one night, said my uncle—and here his narration grew dramatic indeed, up came his hand, his fingers seeming to mold the figure of the poet in the glow of the fire—late one night Harry came home from a landing—a ship from the West Indies on her way up to Bristol—with a dozen casks of rum stowed in the back of his wagon—

Again I interrupted him, but even as I began to ask the question I glimpsed the answer, and my uncle paused to remind me that in those days there was not a man, not a
family
in Cornwall which was not involved in the free trade, and Harry Peake was no exception; indeed, said my uncle, Harry was the leader of a loose association of men who worked that stretch of the coast, which was known for its many sheltered bays and inlets, its caves, its hidden beaches, its myriad natural harbours where on a moonless night a small coasting vessel, or even a merchantman could offload hundreds of gallons of spirits—not to say tobacco, lace, glass, tea, silk, satin, and china—and every local man was ready to help bring the cargo ashore, to carry it up the shingle, to load it into carts and wagons, and see it safely cached inland, all before dawn.

But that night everything had gone wrong, they had been surprised by a cutter from the Excise, the landing had been abandoned in confusion, and Harry had been lucky to escape unobserved with his wagon. The night was dark, no moon at all, and he had come away up the track from the beach as though the very devil himself were after him, standing astride the buckboard and flailing with the whip, the terrified horses rearing and stumbling on the slope, but once on the high ground galloping wildly across the cliffs. Behind him, in a narrow shingled cove, a man lay dead, all the rest were scattered,
and several hundred casks of rum and sugar were in the hands of the damned Excise.

He brought the wagon in off the road that ran down to the harbour, he wheeled the horses into the yard at the back of the house, he pulled them up to a clattering halt, and sweating and cursing he jumped down off the wagon and stamped in through his own back door and hauled up the trapdoor to his cellar. Down he went with a cask of liquor on his shoulder, breathing hard, the sweat still streaming down his face, and set it on the straw-covered stones of the cellar floor. He did not rest. One after another the casks were lifted from the wagon and hefted onto his shoulder, each one eight gallons of liquor, and stowed in the cellar. At last he was done, he let down the trapdoor, and he knelt on the floor, panting, to secure the bolts. Grace Foy, awoken by his noise, and with an infant in her arms, unlatched the kitchen door and found him there on the floor. Still kneeling, wiping his forehead, he told her that the Excise had disturbed them, the merchantman had had to cut her cables and make a run for it.

“We came away with nothing,” he shouted, careless of his sleeping children—“Nothing!”—and in his rage, for he had been drinking earlier that night, he hammered his fist on the floorboards.

“Nothing at all?” murmured Grace. She was still half-asleep. She sat down on a chair and her head sank forward as she gave the infant her breast.

“Some bloody rum is all.”

“Where is it now?” Grace yawned.

“Here below,” said Harry.

That woke her up.

“You brought it here?” she cried, rising to her feet, as the infant began to wail. “You brought it here? They will come here, Harry, what were you thinking of?”

Harry shoved home the last bolt but still he knelt there on the trapdoor, his hands flat on the floor, staring at the wooden boards. A
single branch of candles sputtered and flared on the sideboard at the back wall. He muttered that he would move them in the morning, the Excise men were all over the countryside. He did not say there was a man dead on the beach.

“Why did you not leave it there?”

But Harry in his temper was careless of all risk. Nor did he have any patience for Grace’s fears, he had seen how childbirth tamed a woman. He stamped out through the back door to look to the horses and she followed him out, a shawl about her shoulders and the infant screaming in her arms. She told him he must get the liquor out of the house, for if the Excise were about they would surely come looking for him in Port Jethro. She did not care where he put it but it must be moved.