Martha Peake

by Patrick Mcgrath

  My poor Martha, the tears were flowing unchecked now, at this first sign in so many days of his reason returning.

  “No, father, no,” she cried, “not mad, no; drunk is all, only drunk.”

  “Only drunk,” he said, absently lifting his hand once more as Martha directed him to. “For how long?” he said.

  “Some days.”

  “Oh God.”

  At this point he laid his face on the table, among his sodden verses, and wrapped his fingers together on top of his skull; and Martha stroked her father’s head as he sobbed into the table.

  “Is it the ballad?” she whispered; and at the sound of her voice a wonderful event occurred. Her father’s head came up off the table and he stared at her and for the first time in what seemed an eternity—saw her. He saw her.

  “Martha,” he said, and lifted his bandaged hand to his tear-stained face, so that all his mouth and jaw were covered by his fingers, but his eyes gazed at her direct. And gone, gone, the deadness! It was him.

  “Martha,” he said again, and pushing back his chair, opened his arms to her. She clambered into his lap and threw her arms around his neck and clung to him.

  “Is it over?” she whispered.

  Her father’s face was buried in her shoulder, her head was pressed against his great head, held tight by his fingers. He murmured into her shoulder and her face filled with hope at the thought that it was over, and he was his own self again.

  He was very tired. Martha led him into her own room and had him take his shirt off, and washed him as he sat nodding and dozing in the chair, and every moment he threatened to fall asleep and topple onto the floor. She put him into her own bed and then set about making order of the chaos he had created. She stood his jugs and bottles in ranks by the door, and organized the papers strewn about the room. Harry had made no attempt to number his pages or otherwise indicate their sequence, nor was that flowing hand legible as it once had been. Under the influence of gin, letters, whole words, strings of words even, had bled into each other so there was no telling where the one ended and the next began, this difficulty exacerbated by the smudging of ash from his pipe, the holes burned by falling embers, and elsewhere blots and runnings where gin or blood or tears had mingled with the ink. She would make out perhaps three or four words, a phrase, a sentence, then lose its meaning because she was unable to understand what it led to and where it had come from. It was a wild incoherent screed, and after some minutes of inspection, in which she tried to elicit some meaning from the soiled pages, it occurred to her that perhaps they had no meaning at all, beyond the flickering transient impulses of a mind unmoored and exiled from reason and mastered, rather, by the demon resident in a bottle of gin.

  So she gathered them up, and flung sawdust on those still damp, and made a pile of them, and left them in the middle of his table with the ink bottle on top as a paperweight, and beside it the jar containing his uncut quills; then went into the other room. She dragged the chair to the bedside and sat there listening to the snores of an exhausted man surrendering at last to sleep.

  It may be true that what a king is in the moral universe, a monster is in the physical, and that Harry Peake, in gin, behaved with all the violent intemperance of a tyrant. This is how my uncle would have it, and perhaps he attempted to impose this view on Martha too. Later, after she reached America, I believe she came to understand why her father acted as he did and, understanding, forgave him. But at the time, in London, in the late summer of 1774, she could not simply wait for the day when Harry, drunk, did serious damage to himself or to her.

  For it was not over, Martha soon realized this; she had tried to convince herself that this was but some transient condition, some temporary disturbance of the soul which her father would shake off as a dog shakes off water; or which would simply pass over like a patch of bad weather. But no. She saw that it would never be over; she would have been unable to say why she knew this, but she had seen a man begin to try and change his nature, to forget who he was and what he had been, and move toward some new state or stage of being. He had glimpsed it; he had touched the lodestar of his own soul, and knew its heft and value; and he had thought that he could change his destiny and make himself anew.

  He could not. For he remained trapped within the grotesque body. The world still knew him for a monster. However fresh the springs of the spirit within him, this could not be overcome, for this, his body, in the eyes of the world was his nature; and glimpsing this, in his bitterness, and spite, he had jettisoned his humanity and embraced the monster. Martha understood this as a child understands such things: darkly, in the obscure regions of the mind, those places from which occasionally truth will rise without preamble or argument. But that truth did not ravage her as perhaps it might have done, and for one simple reason: her father loved her. She cared for nothing else, and this I believe to be the very engine of her fate, that in all the tumult of her childhood he had been home and harbour, the source of love. She had seen it when he looked at her and the deadness was gone; and this, to her, poor child, was all that mattered.

  The last sobering lasted no longer than the one before, and by then it had become clear to Martha that her father was sinking fast. My uncle said he did not wish to weary me with Harry’s later outrages; suffice it to say that despite all his good intentions in the wake of the last bout, he had resumed drinking. He brooded in his room for hours at a time, he paced the floor like a creature in a cage. Martha listened through the door as he moaned to himself in the night. Sometimes he thumped the wall so hard with his fist that the plaster was dislodged on her side, and clouds of powder drifted about in the moonlight. She had been growing more and more apprehensive, she had even tried to tell him that he had been seduced by a phantom, and was not the world full of that which merely masqueraded as Reason? Was there better magic in the bottle than in the embrace of a loving daughter? All this she said to him, but he paid no attention, instead he left her, and went clattering off down the stairs, for in truth he was now at war with love, only darkness answered to his temper now.

  Martha sat in his room, waiting for him to return, and for the first time she quarreled with herself, she told herself it was her fault he went off drinking, why could she not stop him? This brought her to tears, but in a moment her grief turned to passionate indignation and she reminded herself how hard she had thought about what she should do, and with nobody to advise her she could only do what her common sense told her was right, and how unjust, how bitter, to think that this was her fault—!

  And now, said my uncle William—it was three in the morning, I remember hearing the old clock chime the hours in the hallway below—now comes one of the blackest episodes in the whole unhappy tale. Martha was awoken late that night by the sound of muffled grunting, and the creak and scream of woodwork in motion, the sound of a ship under sail, so it seemed, or some other great timbered machine. She sat up in her bed, straining to hear, and all at once the creaking stopped. She heard a voice, her father’s, raised in anger; and then came another voice, a woman’s voice, and in that voice she heard terror.

  Martha ran to the door between the two rooms and pressed her ear to it. She heard her father shouting incoherently; then silence; then all at once a bottle shattering against a wall. She flung open the door. The room was dark, only one candle was burning. Her father sat naked on the side of his bed, bent forward and breathing hard, his back like a huge pale hood thrown up behind him, rising and falling as his lungs laboured, and his great horse-penis hanging black in the shadows between his legs. As Martha stared in astonishment from the doorway his head lifted and he glared at her from eyes that were blazing with drink and rage, and there was something else there too, that same deadness she had seen in him before, that black opacity in which she could find no reflection of herself, no answering flicker of feeling, as though he were a stranger, or worse, a creature not fully human, one possessed by brute animal instinct and with no higher faculty capable of employing reason or sy
mpathy to temper its impulse.

  That impulse had but a moment before been one of violence. Now Martha glimpsed a movement, and all at once she saw standing in the corner of the dark room the shadowy figure of a woman, clutching a chair as though to defend herself from attack—and it was Sal Goat, beefy Sal! She was panting hard. The candle-flame caught a dull glint from the tin in her mouth. Martha felt her skin go cold; never before had her father brought a woman back to their lodgings. But her next impulse was for Sal’s safety.

  “Get out, Sal!” she whispered; then more loudly, “Go!”

  Sal Goat coolly hitched her skirt up with one hand and with her eyes never leaving Harry she moved to the door into the passage. At the door she flung a curse at him and was gone.

  Martha at once went to her father, who sat staring fixed at the wall where the wine still streamed down the plaster. His jaw was working, bone grinding on bone, as though he searched for words, as though the animal nature dimly groped for what was yet human within its clouded brain. There he sat, breathing heavy, his hands clamped to his bare knees and his feet planted wide apart on the floorboards such that he seemed a piece of snorting statuary, a braced and strutted thing that burned within, and could be set in violent motion again, given due cause.

  All at once he became aware of Martha in her nightshirt. His laboured breathing was the only sound in that room that reeked of wine and violence, in which the very air seemed throbbing and alive and in tumult still with his rage. Martha’s weary temper frayed at last, she felt she could stand no more, and it was with an anger that had been fermenting in her for weeks that she began to berate him for the bottle smashed against the wall—

  Harry’s head snapped up. His eyes now burned as with the very fires of Hell—windows of Hell, his eyes were now, at the sound of Martha’s voice. Oh, and what happened next would never be forgotten, I believe, by either one of them. He rose from the bed with a grunt and in one swooping step had seized up his daughter and held her before him, Martha clamped now and struggling in her father’s huge hands, shouting into her father’s face, that face twisted with fury, fumes of bad gin surging from between his bitter lips, the horse-penis up stiff now, hard as a rock and all athrob, great thick thing it was pushing at her thighs. All at once with a deliberate grunt he slammed her against the wall, with such force that the air was dashed from the girl’s body.

  The bruises on her upper arms, the distinct and separate marks of her father’s fingers, would take many days to fade. She was screaming now, as Harry brought his face in close to hers, the burning eyes, the grinding teeth, the rage, the gin—and the next thing was Sal Goat running at him with a broomstick, screaming at him to let Martha go—she thought he would bite the girl’s head off, bite her head off and throw her out of the window! For there was passion enough in him that the deed would be done in the impulse of an instant and then forever regretted.

  Sal Goat flailed at Harry as if she were beating a carpet, and he took a step backwards, stumbling over the chair she had flung down earlier. He released Martha, who scrambled away, Sal seizing her by the wrist and dragging her into the other room, glancing as she did so at Harry, where he sat now on the floor with his head in his hands, oblivious to their withdrawal. A moment later, with Martha sobbing loudly on the bed, Sal pushed a chair up against the door. It could not have stopped him had he chosen to come through, but some gesture of defence seemed necessary.

  They did nothing that night. They did not try to reach the passage, for they feared rousing him to fresh violence. They lay in bed watching the door. After a while they heard him moving around, and Sal grew alarmed.

  “He will sleep it off,” whispered Martha, as the two girls clung together beneath the bedclothes, “then he will be himself again.”

  They held each other close, and at last they fell asleep.

  No further movement was heard that night. When Martha awoke it was broad daylight, and she was alone. She saw that the chair Sal had pushed against the door was no longer there. A little later Sal appeared.

  “He has gone out,” she said. “He has swept away the broken glass. He has put the room to rights.”

  Some comfort this, not much.

  He returned in the late afternoon, she heard him come in. The door between their rooms was not locked. It swung open. He stood in the doorway, huge and crumpled and broken. He tried to talk but he could not. Martha gazed at him with steady eyes.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  His voice was barely more than a whisper. “I want to be forgiven.”

  He sank to his knees in the doorway, not without pain, and opened his arms. He stank of drink and tobacco and worse.

  “Martha,” he whispered, “I am sorry.”

  Martha was silent.

  “Forgive me.”

  Silence.

  Harry’s face was a damp mess, running with tears, and with the dilute grime he had attracted to himself in the hours of his dissipation. Martha stood by the window. He gave out a sort of choked sob and, with one hand on the doorframe for support, rose unsteadily to his feet. Martha shrank back. Harry gazed at her with a face of such piteous misery that her heart was ripped wide open by it; but she did not move. He turned then and withdrew into his own room, and the door closed softly behind him. A little later he thumped the wall hard; then he clattered off down the staircase, and she knew that when he returned he would not be sober.

  10

  And so ended the second night of my uncle’s storytelling. He would have continued, I know; fuelled by whatever drug it was that sustained the vital flame in him, he would have talked till dawn about his demented poet and the poet’s handsome daughter, but I could not have listened. I was exhausted. Unlike him, I had risen at an early hour of the morning and now I could barely keep my eyes open. Pleading fatigue, I asked if we might go on tomorrow.

  The old man took this to be a lamentable lack of stamina on my part. He was wearing, that night, a maroon velvet smoking jacket beneath his dressing gown, and maroon velvet slippers; and on his head a curious sort of skullcap with a silk tassel hanging down over his ear. This skullcap he now removed, and briskly rubbing his liver-spotted skull and its few wisps of hair, he said he supposed he could amuse himself until his own bedtime; and bade me goodnight.

  Bad dreams again that night; and again I awoke shivering early in the morning, and at once leapt out of bed and threw on my clothes, those that I had not been sleeping in. Standing at the window, and rubbing my hands for warmth, I saw that the day was clear and cold, with only a few clouds off to the west, and I decided that I would take my horse out for a gallop across the marsh, so as to clear my mind of all the grim events I had been told of in the night. The house was as empty as it had been the day before. I made my way downstairs and out through the kitchen to the stables at the back without encountering a living soul, and saddled up without assistance. At that time I owned a brown cob, a good strong animal with a sweet disposition, and when I led her out of the stable and into the yard I knew she was as ready for a gallop as I was.

  We trotted out through the village to the London road, where we turned to the south, and with just a touch she was off like the wind. Oh, it was a fine smoky morning, and it was more than fine to be galloping through that empty landscape, getting clear away from Drogo Hall and my ancient dusty uncle! The road was dry and we came along at a fine clip through stubble fields, in the distance ahead low hills crowned with leafless trees. After a few miles we turned off the main road and cantered along to a village where I was sure I would find a good breakfast.

  And so I did; and a good fire, in front of which I warmed my bottom, then flung myself into a chair and stretched my legs before settling to a plate of steamed kidneys, Colchester oysters, bread and butter, and strong tea. Then I turned my chair to the fire once more, and pondered Harry Peake awhile, and turned over in my mind the suspicion I was harbouring as to Lord Drogo’s designs upon the man, his desire to have his backbone for display; and all at o
nce it occurred to me that behind one of those locked doors I had encountered in Drogo Hall, or at the bottom of a sealed staircase, Drogo’s Museum of Anatomy must still exist. It must still exist, I realized, sitting bolt upright as the idea took hold, maintained by my uncle, and containing such horrors as I could barely imagine, but including the skeletal remains of Harry Peake. If I were to inherit Drogo Hall—and to this possibility my uncle had made only one oblique reference thus far—what lay in store for me, when I opened that room to the light of day? What monstrous things awaited me in the bowels of the house?

  With these unsettling thoughts somewhat damping the good spirits engendered in me by the fresh air and the exertions of the morning, I left the inn to find that the day had grown overcast; and even as I trotted away I felt the first spots of rain. Uncertain whether we were in for a brief shower or a sustained downpour, I did not at once turn back to Drogo Hall, but continued to make for the high ground to the south.

  An hour later I was standing with my horse beneath the flimsy cover of a few bare trees as the heavens opened on all sides and the rain came down in a torrent. In the distance I could see the rooftops of London, where the storm raged with still greater fury. From out of the bellies of lowering black thunderclouds—those same clouds I had seen off to the west, and thought so harmless—came jagged flashes of lightning, followed a second later by the rumble of thunder. I was soon soaked through; and as there seemed little point in simply standing there beneath a leafless tree, I remounted and set off back to Drogo Hall.

  The road was a quagmire now, and our progress was a good deal slower than it had been earlier. A sorry sight we made, I am sure, horse and rider both with heads bowed, chilled and dripping as we picked our way across the Lambeth Marsh in the rain, which by this point had settled to a steady downpour, and made the world obscure. When at last we reached Drogo Hall I was somewhat comforted to be met at the front steps by Percy with an umbrella, and a boy from the village, and while I was brought into the house with much clucking and sympathy, my poor wet cob was led off round the back to the stables.