Martha Peake (30 page)

No, I would never return, this decision had been maturing over the days I had spent there, and the expectation I had once entertained of inheriting it, this I had abandoned. I wanted nothing more to do with that unhappy pile, once the story was over. And why? I am not a suggestible man, and my imagination, while strong, is disciplined; I would have you bear that in mind when I tell you: some creature walked in Drogo Hall by night; though whether living or dead, this I could not know.

I do not say this lightly. I have examined the facts, I have turned the thing over in my mind, I have heeded the empirical methods of Drogo himself, his exhortation to skepticism, his reliance on the senses alone, stripped of all obfuscating theoretical impedimenta—and still the answer is the same. And my evidence? It was the sounds, to begin with, the tramping footsteps distinctly audible in distant
corridors. Oh, I remember all too clearly when they started, I believe it was the second night I spent under my uncle’s roof, and he was describing to me the poet’s early days in London, when he and Martha were living in simple, sober contentment at the top of the Angel in Cripplegate Street, and she was maturing into her young womanhood. Even as the old man rambled on, his narrative stream broken only by a frequent recourse to the decanter, and the occasional ministrations of his man Percy, who like an old dame fussed about his master, adjusting the blanket on his knees and stoking up the fire, in terror that the doctor might take a chill—so yes, there was old William Tree, one claw quivering in the firelight—when all at once he stopped dead, his white-wisped head twitching as his eyes darted from side to side—and I heard it too, the clump of boots sounding faintly down far-off halls and staircases of the house—sounding down the very years, as it seemed!—and himself plainly in a state of acute alarm.

“What is that?” I said, rising to my feet. “Have you a visitor? An intruder, perhaps?”—and I thought at once of the pistol I had brought with me across the marsh, which at that moment lay wrapped in a dark blue velvet cloth, in a walnut box, in the drawer of the table at the side of my bed.

“Sit down!” hissed the old man with some heat, and in a tone I had not imagined him capable of, so brisk and peremptory was it—that I at once obeyed, and sank back into my chair, by now as alarmed as he was. When I attempted a question he silenced me in a manner no less forceful, and I was thus constrained to sit, like him, and listen, as the ghostly clumping footsteps tramped their dusty corridor and at last faded away in a charged and trembling silence. With some courage I spoke once more.

“Who was it?” I whispered; for I knew the slinking Percy to be incapable of such a footfall; and at that very moment a coal fell in the fire—a heap of sparks leaped up—and the clock in the hallway struck three.

“It was nobody,” said my uncle, when the chimes died away, still
sitting up rigid, his large batlike ears perceptibly straining to catch every last crumb of sound to be had in this mausoleum of a house.

“Nobody?” said I.

He turned to me then.

“Nobody!” he cried hoarsely. “There is nobody here, do you understand me, Ambrose?”

“Then what—”

But I was not allowed to finish the question. He silenced me with a ferocious glare, a lifting of the head and a great flashing of the eye, there in the gloom, with but a coal fire and a few candles burning. Later, in my room, I asked myself what this could mean, and his “Nobody!” rang still in my head with all the fierce conviction he had invested in the word; and I asked myself, did he mean it? Could that footfall have been caused by “nobody”? Who then was this “nobody” who tramped the corridors of Drogo Hall at the dead of night, for tramp he did—
I heard him with my own ears
.

Thus did it begin. There was, however, so much else to occupy my mind in the hours and days that followed—I mean of course the story of Martha Peake—that I gave little further thought to the
nobody
who had so disturbed my uncle. Until, that is, the next time I heard him.

I was lying abed, sweating freely, convulsed with fever and barely able to lift a hand to my wine glass. Again it was very late at night, and my uncle had left me only a short time before. I could not sleep, for the medicines he prescribed me, which I drank without inquiring as to what they were, had the unfortunate effect of stimulating my mind, even as they brought on the sweating that he assured me was essential to rid my body of the toxins with which I had been infected on the marsh. So there I lay, turning my head from side to side as the perspiration streamed from my pores and soaked through the bedsheets and into the blankets. My mind wandered freely, throwing up vivid pictures of Martha in flight from her mad father—Martha taking
ship for America—Martha’s first glimpse of New Morrock, from the top of the cliff they called Black Brock—when all at once my reverie was broken by that same tramping footfall I had heard two nights before.

I ceased my restless turning in the bed. Martha Peake vanished from my mind. My senses were at once concentrated on the sound, for this time it issued not from some distant corridor, no, it was far closer than that, by God it was very close indeed, there was somebody outside my door! I lay there in a terror, the sweat now coming off me in sheets, and I doubted I had the strength to rise from my bed, and cross the room—pistol in hand!—to discover once and for all who it was that moved about the house by night, who this
nobody
was who had plainly alarmed my uncle as much as he now did me! I flung a hand out and groped for the drawer in the bedside table, but succeeded only in knocking over my wine glass—it shattered on the floorboards—then all was silent once more.

What did this mean? Had he fled, whoever, or whatever, he was? Or did he even now lurk outside my door, the shattering glass having alerted him to my presence here within? I was seized with desperation, and with desperation came strength, strength I did not know I possessed. I struggled out of my soaking bed, I opened the drawer—a single candle had been left burning, and a few dim embers still glowed in the fireplace—and with trembling fingers I unlocked the walnut box and took from it my pistol. With no small difficulty I then primed and loaded the weapon—cocked it—and thus armed, in my nightshirt, fevered, trembling and terrified, I advanced to the door of my bedroom—paused a second, listening—heard nothing—flung open the door, and stepped into the passage, ready to fire!

Nobody was there. A window some way down the passage admitted a shaft of moonlight, and I was able to confirm that in the gray gloom no lurking figure waited to fall on me and do me harm. I advanced a few steps along the passage to be certain; it was deserted—

And then—a noise—a door creaked slowly open at the far end of the passage! My heart was pealing like a dozen churchbells. I lifted the pistol, my finger trembling on the trigger—the pistol shook wildly as I raised it as high as my shoulder—I gripped my wrist in a vain attempt to still the tremor—

Then coming through the door, a candlestick held aloft, and followed a moment later by Percy—it was my uncle. With some relief I lowered the pistol.

“Dear boy,” he cried, “whatever are you doing? Back to bed at once!”

“He was here!” I cried. “He was outside my door!”

With Percy close behind him my uncle came shuffling along the passage. He wore a dressing gown that seemed to have been cut from an old carpet, or a set of curtains, on his feet his Turkish slippers, and the red nightcap askew on his skull. I cried out wildly once more that I had heard a man outside my door, but no, no, there is nobody here but us; and without further ado he shepherded me back to bed, having taken my pistol from me and replaced it in the drawer by my bed. He laid a hand on my febrile brow, while Percy mixed a sleeping draught. I was not disturbed again.

The next morning I was much recovered, the events of the night having seemingly provoked the fever to its crisis. I was permitted to get up for a few hours in the late afternoon, and as soon as I was left alone in my room I looked to see if my pistol had been confiscated. It had not.

I joined my uncle in his study that evening. He was vague, he seemed distracted, and I assumed he was troubled, as I was, at these recent occurrences in the night. Nonetheless I began at once to question him about Martha, and I remember his truculent insistence that he was too tired for this American adventure, as he called it. So I desisted, somewhat offended by the brusqueness of his manner toward me.

After several minutes of uneasy silence, himself making curious sucking noises with his mouth, while I glared frowning at the fire, he at last looked up and resumed talking as though no interruption had occurred. But he did not talk about Martha, his mind was busy, rather, with the fate of her father; for while he had had no involvement in Martha’s life after arranging her passage to America, he had played a large part in Harry’s last days, instrumental as he was in the furthering of Lord Drogo’s black scheme; and uneasy slept the conscience of that close and secretive man, so uneasy, in fact, that he was haunted by what he had done—and here it came to me with a clap of thunder, and a dazzling jag of light—
this
was the source and origin of the mysterious footfall in the night: deep in the ancient gloom of Drogo Hall a restless spirit, with work unfinished, was stirring to life! But if so—what sort of spirit—and
what sort of work?

This came as no small shock, I must tell you. What to do now? I sat forward in my chair as my mind raced forward, a flurry of ideas, questions, possibilities tumbling into the light, but nothing certain, I must know more, I must wait and be sure. I decided to let my uncle go forward with Harry’s story before I challenged him. I decided to show him nothing of what I now knew, or suspected I knew. And so we went forward; that is, he rambled, often erratically, over the matter at hand, with many a digression and, as always, a frequent application to the Hollands-and-water, while I, later, in my room, gave literary flesh to what I had heard, bringing to bear upon his few sticks of ill-remembered fact the full powers of imagination—intuition—sympathy—and art—that as a sometime poet I possessed in no small measure. Thus did his sticks come to life; thus did they flower.

22

S
o what
of
Harry, what of that poor lost fellow? This I have thought about a good deal, what happened to Harry Peake after Martha left Drogo Hall, and I have not been helped by my uncle, who I fear did not steer me straight in this. I suspect that when Martha fled Drogo Hall, Harry did indeed watch the black carriage cross the marsh in the moonlight, but made no attempt to intercept it. I believe he remained in the graveyard all that night, and I cannot imagine what he suffered. He did not commit suicide, William has assured me of this and I am inclined, at least on this point, to take him at his word. If he did not commit suicide then he must have gone on, but newly burdened, with a fresh load of guilt to carry on his bent spine, and it is a measure of the man’s spirit that he
could
go on, that life, for all the bitter fruit he had tasted, seemed still the better thing—because of Martha? Because while she lived, he would love her, he must love her? Perhaps he would never see her again, but what he desired no longer mattered. It was for him only to love her, and whether or not that act of love, sustained as long as he drew breath, did any
good
—this he could not know. This he must take on trust. What choice had he? His love might be of some use to her, wherever she was, and he had not the right to deny her it, he had
lost the right—and it must have cost him dear, to recognize this—to turn his face to the darkness.

Thus I imagine the wordless currents of the spirit of the ragged madman slumped among the gravestones on the hill above Drogo Hall. Come the dawn, and the last of the gin dissipated, he knows she has gone. It is time for him to leave this place, there is nothing more for him here. I see him then, as the first light steals over the marsh, a faint figure moving through the mist, limping off toward the town, whose distant domes and steeples can be picked out now against the gray sky.