Martha Peake

by Patrick Mcgrath

  ACCLAIM FOR PATRICK McGRATH’S

  Martha Peake

  “Chilling, psychologically penetrating.… McGrath’s novels of obsession have a way of becoming obsessions.”

  —USA Today

  “Impassioned writing and imaginative re-creations.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “A totally engrossing page-turner.… With each book McGrath’s stories have gotten bigger, and his writing more assured, his take on the Gothic more sophisticated and convincing.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “McGrath is the best Gothic novelist since … who? Mary Shelley? Forget it. McGrath may be the best Gothic novelist ever.”

  —The Observer

  “Succeeds so much so as to call up a howling wind on a dark night—even when read on the calmest day.”

  —New York Daily News

  “A harrowing tale.… McGrath looks at the American Revolution through eyes that understand the hard realities of 18th-century life.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “In its historical scope and imaginative reach this is certainly [McGrath’s] most ambitious novel yet.… Beautifully precise and elegant prose.”

  —The Sunday Times

  “A historical novel in the very best sense, taking the movements and sensibilities of a period, playing with them masterfully, and transmuting them by this process into something quite new.”

  —Literary Review

  “This wonderful novel has the diversity and strength of a morality play.”

  —Glasgow Herald

  “Wonderful.… If it seems over-the-top, that is part of the pleasure.”

  —Newsday

  “Splendid.… McGrath is terrific at fashioning surprises—not only a surprise ending, but surprises all the way through.”

  —The Star-Ledger

  “Very artfully told indeed.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  PATRICK MCGRATH

  Martha Peake

  Patrick McGrath was born in London and grew up near Broadmoor Hospital, where for many years his father was medical superintendent. He is the author of The Grotesque, Blood and Water and Other Tales, Spider, Dr. Haggard’s Disease, and Asylum. He lives in New York City and London and is married to the actress Maria Aitken.

  ALSO BY PATRICK McGRATH

  Blood and Water and Other Tales

  The Grotesque

  Spider

  Dr. Haggard’s Disease

  Asylum

  The New Gothic (with Bradford Morrow)

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MAY 2002

  Copyright © 2000 by Patrick McGrath

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:

  McGrath, Patrick.

  Martha Peake / Patrick McGrath.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76445-4

  1. United States—History—Colonial Period, ca. 1600–1775—Fiction.

  2. United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3563.C3663 M37 2000

  813′.54—dc21 00-029064

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  For Maria

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Crooked Timber

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Cape Morrock

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Drogo Hall

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Reading Group Guide

  1

  It is a black art, the writing of a history, is it not?—to resurrect the dead, and animate their bones, as historians do? I think historians must be melancholy creatures, rather like poets, perhaps, or doctors; but then, what does it matter what I think? This is not my story. This is the story of a father and his daughter, and of the strange and terrible events that tore them apart, so it is to those two unhappy souls that I would direct your gaze. As for me, I shall soon sink from sight, and you will forget me altogether. No, I am merely the one who happened upon the story, as you might happen upon, say, a cache of letters in the attic of an ancient uncle’s country house; and blowing away the dust of decades, and untying the ribbon that binds them, finding within those crumbling pages a tale of passion so tragic, yet so sublime—as to transform, in that instant, the doddering relict in the bath-chair below to a spirited youth with a fiery heart and the blood of a hero racing in his veins!

  Now in those days, as it happens, I did indeed have an ancient uncle, and for some time I had been aware that his health was failing; and being his only surviving relation, I had speculated that his property would come to me when he passed on. The old man had been living a life of seclusion ever since the death of his benefactor, the great anatomist Lord Drogo, so when I received his letter, asking me to come to him at once, I wasted no time. I need not describe to you the journey I took across the Lambeth Marsh, nor the house itself, for both Drogo Hall and its drear landscape will emerge strongly in what follows. Suffice to say that I rode across the marsh alone, and carried a loaded pistol with me; and upon arriving at dusk, I was admitted by a little bent man called Percy, who took me up the great staircase to my uncle’s study and then vanished without a word.

  I found the old doctor seated close to a blazing coal fire in a small gloomy room with a heavy Turkey carpet on the floor and thick dark curtains on the windows. He had a blanket on his knees, a tome in his lap, and a jorum of Hollands-and-water close to hand. As he turned toward the door I saw at once that he could not be long for this world, so frail did he appear, his skin in the firelight as white and brittle as paper. But on recognizing me a light came up in those dim and milky eyes, he fixed me with a gimlet stare and cried to me to come in—come in, for the love of God!—for the draft was a chill one; and he pointed with a trembling finger to the aged leather armchair on the other side of the fireplace.

  But still I stoo
d there in the open door, rooted to the spot. I was transfixed by the painting hanging over the mantelpiece. I had never seen it before. It was the portrait of a robust, broad-shouldered man of between thirty and forty years. He stood against a wild moorland scene, a pine flattening in the gale on the brow of a distant hill, and rags of black cloud flying across the sky. He wore neither hat nor wig, and his long hair was tied at the back with a blue ribbon, a few strands torn free by the wind. His shirt was open at the throat, his skin was pale, and his eyes were like great dark pools, full of life and full of pain but hooded, somehow, lost in shadow as they gazed off into some unknown horizon. It was not a handsome face, it was carved too rough for that, but it was a strong, complicated face, hatched and knotted with sorrow and passion, a big stubborn chin uplifted—the whole head uplifted!—lips unsmiling and slightly parted, and the expression one of defiance, yes, and purpose. I felt at once that the artist, for all that he had caught some fleeting expression of this fierce, romantic spirit, could not have done him justice, nobody could have done justice to this man. My uncle William nodded at me with a pursed smile as I closed the door behind me and moved to the chair by the fire, my gaze still fixed on the painting, and slowly sat down.

  “You know who he is, eh?”

  “No, sir,” I said, “I do not.”

  “No? Then shall I tell you?”

  It was Harry Peake.

  The name clawed at the skirts of memory as I sat down by the fire and warmed my jaded heart on the image of that proud rough man. America—for some reason as I gazed at him I thought of America—I thought of the revolutionary war, and of all that I had learned of that great conflict from my mother, herself an American who pined in exile for her country every day of my childhood. An incident by the sea—a burning village filled with women and children—a red-haired girl with a musket at her shoulder—these ideas tentatively emerged from out of the mind’s mist, but all else remained shrouded and obscure. I found myself sitting forward in my chair and staring into the fire as I tried to remember. At last I looked up, and told my uncle I saw a village in flames somewhere on the coast of North America, but no more than that. For some moments there was little sound in the room but the hiss of the coal in the hearth, and the wind rising in the trees outside.

  “Come, Ambrose, sit closer to the fire,” he murmured at last, turning away from me, seizing up the bottle of Hollands at his elbow. “Here, fill your glass. You shall hear it all. I have held it in my heart too long. It has blighted me. I am withered by it. He never got to America. God knows he wanted to.”

  My uncle put his fingertips together beneath his chin and closed his eyes. Silence.

  “Many a man,” I murmured, “has never got to America.”

  A sort of sigh, at this, and then silence again. I waited. When next he spoke it was with a clipped asperity that belied the desperate pathos of what he told me. To know Harry Peake, he said, you must first know what he suffered. Then you will understand why he fell. Why he turned into a monster.

  “A monster—!”

  “ ‘Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families’—eh?”

  He was quoting an author, but I missed the allusion.

  “He devoured his young—?”

  Then I had it. Tom Paine.

  “Lost his mind. What a waste. What a mind.”

  “But who was he?”

  Here my uncle turned to me, and again fixed me with that gimlet eye. “One of those cursed few,” he said, “to whom Nature in her folly gave the soul of a smuggler, and the tongue of a poet.”

  And so it began. Much of the detail I have had to supply from my own imagination, that is, from the ardent sympathetic understanding of the tragic events my uncle William described. His recall was patchy, for time had worn his memory through as though it were an old coat. The seams had split open, there were fragments of alien fabric, rudely stitched, and everywhere the pattern was obscured by foreign substances, such as those that were liberally splattered about the papers I later received from him, blood, soil, gin, etc. So I was forced to expand upon the materials he gave me. But when it was over I felt that I understood, I understood the extraordinary life not only of Harry Peake, but of his daughter also, of Martha Peake, who died at the hands of her own countrymen, and who, by her sacrifice, helped to create the republic to which my mother swore allegiance, and whose spirit I have come to love.

  Later that evening the wind came up, it started to rain, and I was glad indeed of the shelter of Drogo Hall, for I had no desire to be out on the Lambeth Marsh in such conditions. We supped in the grand dining room downstairs, and a strange meal it was, the two of us up at the end of the table, a single branch of candles to light us, the wind howling about the house and that peculiar little man Percy, now wearing a ratty scratch wig, presumably on account of the formality of the occasion, serving us with silent swiftness, appearing suddenly out of the darkness with tureen or decanter and just as suddenly vanishing again. From the high, dark-panelled walls of the dining room the portraits of the earls of Drogo of centuries past peered down at us through the gloom, and our conversation seemed at times to struggle forward as though burdened by the span of years that separated us from the events of which we spoke, indeed that separates me now from that dismal stormy night so long ago.

  My uncle sat in the great chair at the head of the table, a tiny slumped figure against the vast gloom behind him, and picked at his food with sharp little jabs like a bird. We ate cold mutton and boiled potatoes. He had frequent recourse to the decanter, which was filled with a sweet Rhenish wine, and with every glass his speech grew more fluting, more rapid, and more inflected with the fancies of a failing mind, such that I had constantly to steer him away from the wild places where he seemed inclined to wander, and back to the track of his narrative. And all the while the silent Percy flickered in and out of the candlelight like a moth, again and again refilling my uncle’s tall crystal goblet with that undrinkable sweet white wine.

  Oh, we talked on long after the last dish had been removed, and the candles had burned down to guttering stubs, and still the wind could be heard out on the marsh, and the boughs of the trees slapped against the high windows of the house. Later I made my way upstairs with a candle, to a cold room with a damp bed where I lay sleepless for many hours as the storm exhausted itself and I attempted to digest not only my uncle’s mutton but his story as well.

  2

  We know only a little, said William, of the circumstances of Harry Peake’s early life, but that little is enough, certainly, to point the way forward. It all began in the west of England, in Port Jethro, a remote fishing village on the north coast of Cornwall, where sometime in the 1730s Harry was born the bastard child of a wild and lonely woman called Maggie Peake. This poor ragged soul lived on the seashore near the harbour, in a shack built of fishing net and ship’s planking. She scraped a living cutting seaweed on the beaches thereabouts, which she sold for a few pence the cartload to a farmer inland, to spread on his fields. Maggie Peake, in her pitiful dwelling, reared her child with a fierce protective devotion, and Harry grew into a robust and healthy boy. Hearing this, I remarked to my uncle that it did not surprise me, for there is often more love to be had in a hovel than a palace.

  Quite so, he said shortly, eager, clearly, to get on; I think it was not a truth he cared to dwell upon.

  By the age of five young Harry was often to be seen out on the beach with his mother, in the early morning when the tide was low, the pair of them barefoot, bent over their work with rake and pitchfork, filling their baskets with good fresh stinking seaweed swept in on the tide overnight. They emptied their baskets into a rickety cart harnessed to a donkey. Later they set off along the beach, and what a picturesque spectacle they made, I imagined, on that vast stretch of damp sand, beneath the high cliffs, the little boy and his workworn mother walking beside their old cart, which groaned with its load of shining seawrack, the gulls all flapping and screaming abou
t them—!

  At the age of seven Harry was put to work on the boats, and their lives at once changed for the better. I should have liked to tell you, said my uncle—and here he cast upon me a long lugubrious gaze, the meaning of which escaped me—that even at this tender age the poetry rose in Harry like a clear fresh spring, and that he could no more hold back the flood of it than he could stop the beating of his heart—but alas, he murmured, it was not so. No, he showed no marks of genius, young Harry, he was distinguished, if by anything, only by his wickedness.

  Wickedness!—what kind of wickedness?

  But it was merely the wickedness of a boy. Harry was a scoundrel, said my uncle, he was a thief and a liar, he recognized no authority, and he would fight with anyone in the village who crossed him, or tried to block him, for he was a wilful child who was accustomed to getting his own way. Hardly remarkable, said my uncle, given that his mother was a whore and a drunkard, and probably mad. Here he sniffed, and I detected in that sniff of his a moral opprobrium, which was distasteful to me, and I would have challenged him had I not been avid to hear more. So I asked him to go on, and he told me that Harry was soon popular on the boats, for he was strong, he was a natural sailor, he understood the fishing, and he amused the men.

  How did he amuse the men?

  He told them the stories his mother told him, said William, for Maggie Peake had a great trove of old tales and legends which she passed on to Harry by the fire on the long winter evenings. Ah, but Harry told his mother’s stories with embellishments all his own, and wove into them the boats and men he knew in Port Jethro, the cliffs and coves thereabouts, the fish and the birds and the changing seasons,and it amused them to recognize their own world in his stories. How Harry acquired such powers of invention nobody knew, but in later years, when he recited, say, a passage of his “Ballad of Joseph Tresilian,” he could seize the imagination of an entire London pothouse, hold a company of seventy or eighty men and women in a rapt silence, not a cough to be heard, nor the scrape of a chair-leg, for many minutes together, until he had finished; whereupon the whole house would erupt with a great shout of applause—