Martha Peake

by Patrick Mcgrath

  He peered at me with rare earnest sincerity, but I had no answer for him. Harry was no landscape, he was a man. Why then must his life be twisted so far from what others had, on account of his back?

  Martha saw the visitors as they were leaving, having stationed herself outside her father’s door so as to hear what she could of what went on inside. Drogo nodded at her with cold disdain and went on down the staircase. My uncle William paused, however, and asked her how she did, and Martha was unable to hold her feelings in check, but told him all their recent misfortune.

  My uncle said that on glimpsing the depth of her distress he resolved there and then that he would be a friend to this unhappy girl. He took her chin in his hand, he said, and looked into her eyes, and told her with great seriousness that if ever she were in need, she must come to him, and he would help her. Oh, I can see the old man now, as he dwelled upon this offer of help he made, still quite as intoxicated with his own gallantry as he was fifty years before! There he sat, dwarfed in his great armchair, sitting up with no small effort to be sure I understood what he had done, and in his excitement spilling his wine.

  “I liked the girl, you see,” he cried, fixing me with a watery eye, and lifting a trembling hand, “she had spirit!”

  He talked on through the night. Again I sat in rapt attention, attempting to make sense of his digressions and asides, and to allow for what I was now beginning to recognize as a subtle attempt to misrepresent the truth of the thing and make me believe that Lord Drogo was interested solely in the welfare of Harry Peake. About this last I was starting to harbour serious doubts, which were not allayed by the description he gave me of the visit Harry made to Drogo Hall later that summer. For my uncle would have me believe that Harry was welcomed, that he was treated with respect. My own construction was somewhat different, and I will tell you why.

  I had begun to ponder Harry’s decision not to show himself in the taproom of the Angel. This of course was why he was impelled to cross the Lambeth Marsh to Drogo Hall, Joseph Goat having not been slow to remind him that a man in search of pleasure by night will avoid a house where none is to be had; making it clear that Harry’s refusal to work was damaging the interest of the house, which was Joseph Goat’s interest. Harry must work, or he must pay for his board and lodging in full; and if he did neither, he would soon find himself unwelcome at the Angel.

  But this was on the material level only. What intrigued me about the poet was his soul. And it is my conclusion that Harry Peake, in the wake of Lord Drogo’s first visit, and the recurrence of his dreams of the Port Jethro fire, had changed, and the man who before had willingly painted his face, and indulged the coarse curiosity of the public, so as to make restitution for the death of his wife—that man now shuddered with revulsion at the very thought of such self-exposure. In short, his penance was over.

  His penance was over. He had atoned for his sin. The man he had been was no more, this is my conclusion; a new man had begun to come into being, that man intent now upon turning his mind to higher matters of the spirit, and thus, in a sense, a weaker man than his predecessor. Harry was attempting to forge a new relation to his twisted spine. He was coming to understand that his body was but an accidental membrane sheathing a soul that in all its proportions and lineaments was not disfigured. His brief period of confusion and despair had opened his eyes, and he could not go back to what he was. I can find no other reason for this most independent of men to walk out to Drogo Hall and ask for money.

  Now, it seems Lord Drogo was that day entertaining a group of medical men, and that on being informed by my uncle William that Harry Peake had come to the house seeking an interview with him, he left his guests and came to the poet where he waited in the hall, having at once guessed the reason for his presence there. He quickly confirmed that, yes, Harry came as a supplicant, and made clear that he would be willing to help him, and generously at that; but that he asked one favour in return.

  What was Harry to say? The long walk across the Lambeth Marsh, and the approach to the great house, were enough to rock the resolution of the stoutest heart, and put a man in a subordinate position before he had even encountered the master. When his lordship agreed to answer the request put to him, and then asked but one favour, the petitioner would of course accede at once. And what was that favour? Merely, said Lord Drogo, that he might show Harry’s back to a group of medical men; purely, of course, that the advancement of learning might go forward, and the good doctors be fully apprised of Nature’s variety in the matter of twisted spines. Harry Peake’s misgivings were overwhelmed by the sense of indebtedness that he felt toward Lord Drogo; and so he agreed.

  Oh, the presumption, the arrogance of inherited privilege! I can only imagine the humiliation Harry suffered. But that it was extreme, given the fragile state of his soul at that time, is amply indicated by his subsequent behaviour. My uncle described how he was stripped of his shirt and brought into the Theatre of Anatomy, where a group of perhaps fifteen doctors had assembled. And I imagine that Lord Drogo, who had been friendly enough to Harry when talking to him in the great hall outside the theatre, became at once brisk and cold, he became the man of science attending to what was nothing more than a specimen. Harry’s history, as he had given it to Lord Drogo, was recounted in stark, abbreviated form; his story of how he had been born deformed was mentioned, and much laughter was heard in the amphitheatre at the very idea of great shadows being responsible for anything but great nonsense.

  But I wonder, now—was it such nonsense? Must we all now defer to the upstart Reason, and bend the knee before His Precocious Majesty?—and ignore the promptings of an ancient Knowledge which has guided mankind since the dawn of time?—why should not a great shadow, glimpsed in terror by a pregnant woman, deform the foetus in her womb? Does it not make eminent sense? To me, yes, it does—but enough. Harry Peake, hearing himself mocked in front of men of vastly more formal education than himself, and feeling himself more monstrous, as Lord Drogo turned him this way and that before the company, pointing out this or that feature of his spine, than he ever did when showing himself in the taproom of an inn—Harry suffered more in that hour, I believe, than he had suffered in the previous ten years. He became no more than a bent back. Man he was not. Of humanity he had none. He was cattle, worse than cattle, for his value lay only in that which was abnormal.

  When Lord Drogo had finished, the doctors came forward to examine for themselves the anatomical curiosity. They fingered his spine, they measured it, they probed and kneaded and squeezed it. They asked him questions, but not as if he were a man, as if he were the mere porter or guardian of his own deformity! They talked among themselves of what they saw and what they thought of him as though he were not present. And when they had satisfied their curiosity, Lord Drogo dismissed Harry with a wave of his hand, and my uncle William took him to the kitchen and there gave him money, and a plate of food, and a glass of wine.

  A glass of wine. Harry left Drogo Hall with money in his pocket and rage in his heart. He had his money, but he had sold his soul for it, so he felt, he had allowed himself to be handled as an animal, and all that distinguishes the animal from the man is the soul, no? He had for that interminable hour in the Theatre of Anatomy been a creature devoid of a soul. They had purchased his soul, and he had agreed to the terms of the contract. He was dirtied by the transaction, brought low by it; he felt himself a nothing, as he walked away from Drogo Hall that day, and set his steps across the Lambeth Marsh toward the distant spires of the town; and with the taste of wine on his lips, and money in his pocket, he was soon established in a tavern, and by nightfall he had moved on to gin.

  The rest may be predicted.

  9

  Is it premature to voice my suspicions as to what Lord Drogo truly wanted from Harry Peake? It was not a simple matter of examining his spine, nor of displaying it to his medical friends. No, Drogo had a far more—imperial—project in view. I believe he wanted to own Harry’s spine. He wanted him for hi
s Museum of Anatomy, he wanted him among his exhibits. Not so unusual a thing in those days, when any anatomist of distinction prided himself on his collection of anatomical curiosities, and vied with his peers in the range and oddity of the specimens he could display. Lord Drogo was no better than the rest, and I believe it had occurred to him when first he heard Clyte read the handbill discovered in the pocket of Mary Magdalen Smith, that here might be his pièce de résistance—the skeleton of the Cripplegate Monster.

  Was he disappointed in Harry’s backbone? Was it not as floridly bent as he had hoped? This was not a question I could ask my uncle William. But whatever the expectation, nobody could deny that here was a man with a most peculiar spinal formation; and Drogo wanted it. What then of my uncle William? Was he innocent of all this? I do not think he could have been. I think he was as complicit in Drogo’s designs as Clyte was. He knew what was happening, he knew that Harry was the object of Lord Drogo’s ambition. What none of them could have predicted of course was that Harry should then have come out to Drogo Hall to ask for money. But see how Drogo capitalized on his good fortune, see how he humiliated the poet when he was at his most vulnerable. And see how my uncle William, having given poor Harry the money he asked for, sent him on his way with a glass of wine. You may imagine the skepticism with which I attended my uncle’s narration after I had reached these conclusions.

  That glass of wine led him by nightfall to move on to gin, and Harry Peake was no match for a bottle of gin. A bottle of hock, a pot of ale, of these he had shown himself the equal, when he drank for an hour or two and then came home. But the gin, no, with the gin it was different, and it was bad gin they drank in those days, distilled fast, a crude and impure liquour. It masked his soul, or killed it, rather, for the period of the intoxication; and it had the effect then of urging him to renew the intoxication before it had worn off properly, before the fumes had cleared, so it was that much harder for him, when he did become sober, to recover his own self, and resume life in the person he had been.

  But he did not become sober for a number of days, nor did he return to the Angel during that time. When he did come back he was in a most pitiable condition indeed. All the money he had had from Lord Drogo was spent, and so was he: his humanity was burnt up inside him, he was nothing but ashes and heat, smouldering with bitterness, now and then flaring without warning, then just as suddenly subsiding into a state of muttering introspection. Explosive energies seethed and roiled within his torched frame, within the ruin he had made of himself in his few days down by the docks.

  Martha had heard her father talk often, in his sober years, about what drink did to him. He said there was a demon at work in him when he drank, he said he could see it, a ghastly black creature that sat on top of him, that hunkered slavering on his spine, urging him to fresh excess, and him a hollow thing in which the demon words reverberated and turned to din without meaning, and nothing left inside him with which to oppose its malign influence. That help must come from Martha. She must never, he said, allow him to drink. It was a responsibility that should never have been placed upon the shoulders of one so young. They were broad shoulders, Martha’s, and she bravely attempted to do what he asked. But in the end the demon was too strong for her.

  Each night of his absence she went into the town to look for him. It was nasty perilous work. A man on gin tends to drift eastward, and the further east a man goes, the lower he sinks. She searched the pot-houses and night-cellars around the docks, to which she guessed he would gravitate, given his old deep attraction to the river. She had only to open the door of those places and glimpse what lay within—the thick smoke, the lifted faces, the haunted eyes—for the insults, the compliments, the invitations, the curses to be flung at her like so many darts dipped in filth. In she went however, fixed in her resolve, she moved through the gloom until she was sure he was not there, and then on to the next one.

  At last she found him. Emerging at dawn onto a deserted dock, by way of a covered alley with an arched opening, she saw a disused wharf stretching into the river on ancient mossy spiles. A light mist lay on the river, the few ships at anchor were spectral and unmoving in the stream. At the end of the wharf sat a humped figure singing a broken ballad. There was a bottle beside him on the planks.

  She approached with some diffidence. Halfway out along the wharf, the damp rotten planks sagging and splintering beneath her feet, he heard her. Wheeling his head about with painful slowness he watched his daughter approach. His eyes were red smears in shadowy caverns, and a hopeless, amiable grin pulled apart his jaw and lent him the appearance of a donkey. He lifted a hand and shouted what might have been “Hail the dawn!”

  Martha could not know his temper. She picked her way along the wharf until she was close to him.

  “Father,” she said.

  Nothing.

  “Father, you must come home now.”

  A streaming confusion of words from Harry now, an incomprehensible stew in which could be detected scraps of poetry and fragments of thought, but all mixed in with nonsense like chunks of beef in a puddle of vomitus. The tone, however—the tone remained friendly.

  “I’ve come to take you home, Father.”

  A last few sputtering ribbons of indigestible verbiage. Then silence. He spoke not to her but direct to the river, which was calm and oily where the mist in patches opened upon its surface. The great head sank forward now, and the hands were limply folded in the lap. A bell clanged mournfully from a ship in the stream, its masts and cross-trees visible above the mist. A breeze came up, and the vessels rocked gently at their moorings. The head sank forward, and the great back lifted. He had no coat, his shirt was torn open at the throat and somewhere he had lost a shoe. Then with a shake of the shaggy head he sat up straight and stretched his arms high above his head, and opened his jaws to yawn, and take in a few large gulps of the morning. He turned then toward Martha.

  “Home, is it?” he said, absently scratching his chin.

  “Home, Father.”

  There came now something in Latin, and then, with no small effort, and a good deal of pain, he managed to winch himself onto a knee, and from there, after a heaving pause of several seconds, to his feet. He swayed a moment, like a tree when the saw has come clean through, but the trunk retains a precarious balance on its stump; then flung out an arm, and held on to Martha’s shoulder; and thus crutched by his daughter he began the slow grim lurch through the morning to Cripplegate.

  For some days he barely stirred from his room. He was not drinking hard now. He had gin by him, but he took it sparingly; sufficient to maintain the smouldering husks of a morbid vitality. He paced the floor. He read, and at times scribbled furiously at his table, though he destroyed much of what he wrote, setting it afire in the grate. Martha watched him with wary eyes, ever-vigilant, awaiting an explosion she feared could come at any time from this stooped glowering figure with the dead red eyes. She was living with a wild creature of unpredictable temper; when would it show its claws, its fangs, in anger?

  Martha watched her father in his decline with a grief and at times a rage that remained, however, impotent, for he refused to tolerate for a moment any attempt she made to interfere with his drinking. Ah, she watched the man; she should have watched the bottle. Had she properly understood the pattern of his drinking she would have anticipated the crisis. For there came a quickening, as he tired of whatever control was employed in maintaining the brooding semi-intoxication of the last several days. Now came a day—it was a Sunday—when she heard, in the early evening, just as twilight descended, and the murmur from the taproom below grew loud, and the first songs were sung to the first scrapings of the fiddle—a sudden shout from his room.

  She looked up from her stitching. Muffled curses through the door now; he was in pain. This she had been dreading: that while he was in this gin-sodden condition he should suffer an attack of those torments of the spine which at intervals felled him and left him in a state of wrecked exhaustion. With gin
in him, what then would happen when the pain came? Would it drive him into a frenzy, into mania proper; and what was he capable of then?

  She put aside her work and crossed the room to her father’s door, and without knocking she went in. There had indeed been a sudden increase in his drinking, and it had been accompanied, so it appeared, by a furious bout of writing. Sheets of paper were scattered all over the table, every sheet covered with his distinctive flowing hand, and not a few stained with spilt gin. There were papers on the floor, and no attempt had been made to gather or collate them, as though the act of writing was what mattered here rather than the verse generated, if verse it was; as though he were attempting to expel the demon through the medium of ink, and the more furiously he wrote the more gin he must drink to sustain the flow.

  But he had been brought to an abrupt stop. He stood swaying over the table, staring at his thumb, from which blood was gouting onto his papers, staring at it with his lips pulled back from his teeth and his eyes wide with horror. He was obstructed even in his attempt to empty his poor teeming brain of its frenzy! Quills he had worn down and thrown aside were scattered on the floor, along with the shavings from repeated sharpenings of their nibs; and now in his sharpening he had sliced open his thumb. Blood spouted everywhere, onto his shirt, onto the table, and onto the sheets of writing, where it mingled with the fresh ink, creating blots and rivers of red and black.

  Martha ran to him with a cry of alarm, pushed him back down in his chair, seized tight his thumb and held it aloft. Harry sat there dumbly, staring at his table, as Martha bandaged the wound with a handkerchief. He seemed then to awaken to his surroundings: the papers, the blood, the quills, the bottles, the ink.

  “Am I mad?” he murmured, frowning, lifting a sheet of his own writing and trying to read it. He shook his head as though unable to comprehend what the words meant. He looked at Martha. “Am I mad? What is the matter with me?”