Martha Peake

by Patrick Mcgrath

  But this was not a house in which a man was easily made warm and dry, after such a soaking as I had suffered; and although I was sat down by a fire with my feet in a tub of hot water, and given a steaming cup of tea laced with lemon and rum, I was soon sneezing and shivering and feeling distinctly feverish; and by the time my uncle had appeared, and assumed an attitude of brisk solicitude, I knew that I would be packed off to bed, and even that damp contraption seemed welcoming now. The fire was lit, a tray was prepared, and I settled among my dank bedclothes with my uncle perched on the chair by the bed.

  He seemed cheered that I was giving him a bit of doctoring to do. He chattered away as I lay there barely able to comprehend him, but when I understood that he had resumed his narrative, as though we were as usual in his study below, I made an effort to grasp what he was saying. He was talking about Martha’s flight from her father, and her eventual appearance here in Drogo Hall; and fevered though I was, I reacted to this development with a cry of horror, and attempted to rise up out of my bed, as though by some effort of my own I could warn her of the danger! I wanted to tell her that Drogo meant her no good, he only craved her father’s bones, his house was a trap from which she would never escape!

  Some kind of delirium, I suppose; my uncle abruptly broke off, and a few minutes later Percy appeared with a small glass of some ill-smelling fluid which I was persuaded to drink; and within moments I was deeply asleep.

  That night while her father was out, Martha slipped away from the Angel. Through the hours of darkness she walked the streets. She heard the bell of an unknown church chiming the hours—was it St. Giles?—and the incessant barking of a distant dog; and as she walked she reviewed in her mind’s eye the chain of events since first she had come to Cripplegate Street with her father, examining each for some hint it might contain as to how she should go forward. She remembered my uncle William, and that man’s face was all at once before her eyes, the face of a gentle man, a kind man—had he not looked upon her with favour, called her a fine girl, taken pains on both occasions to engage her in talk—and had he not told her that should she ever need his help she must come to him?

  My uncle preened, I remember, as he told me this, for of course it reflected well upon him, at least it did in his view of the matter. But I no longer altogether trusted his memory, nor indeed his motives; though whether he was deliberately deceiving me, or unwittingly deceiving himself, this I had yet to establish, and weakened as I was with fever, and unable to leave my bed, there was little I could do now but listen in passive resignation as he went forward with the story.

  11

  In the early hours of the morning Martha set out for the Lambeth Marsh. She knew only that Drogo Hall lay somewhere in that vicinity. All she owned, all her books and clothes, were packed in her battered cabin trunk and left behind in the Angel. As to her state of mind, she should, I suppose, have been sunk in truly dismal spirits but somehow, perhaps it was the crisp damp tang of the mist in the early morning, somehow I cannot help feeling there was a spark or two of confidence in her as she set her steps to the west. She crossed the river over the new bridge at Westminster and was soon through the village on the Surrey bank, and onto the marsh itself.

  The Lambeth Marsh in those days was in some part grazing land for sheep and cattle, but in the main was made up of bogs and fens and stands of reeds and bulrush; and though deadly treacherous to the traveller should she stray from the road at night, or fall foul of a highwayman, it was safely crossed in the daylight hours. In her greatcoat, then, and a cocked hat she had had from Fred so as to lend herself, in her vulnerable state, something of the masculine, Martha gazed out over an empty flat expanse of open marshy land with here and there in the distance a cottage, a barn, a stand of trees to break the line of the horizon. She saw sheep, she saw wading birds, cranes and herons, others she could not identify. The road across the marsh was made of raised earth covered with gravel and buttressed at the sides with logs.

  It was colder out there on the unprotected marsh than it had been in the town, and pulling her coat about her she set off due south. The sky was hazy and the mist clung to the marsh like a soft white sheet that drifted and thickened in places, such that the scene was leached of all clarity and definition and rendered oddly dreamlike in its indistinctness; earth and water, air and sky all come together in a diffuse milky immateriality. No bird cried out in that blank expanse, no sound was heard at all. Into the marsh Martha advanced, the buoyancy she had felt earlier now subdued by the whiteness and silence of this strange world. An hour later she reached the top of a shallow rise and in the distance, to the east, and sheltered by a low wooded hill, she made out a group of buildings clustered about a large white house. This was Drogo Hall.

  Another hour and she could see it more clearly. Drogo Hall was an imposing building in those days, and small wonder it had intimidated her father. It was a large square house of white stone with a pillared portico, the whole a thing of elegant classical proportions in that style we would now call Early Georgian. It seemed to gaze out arrogantly, imperturbably over the marsh, like a monarch, perfect in the authority of its formal design, a piece of flawless reasoning in stone, although as yet unfinished, and hedged about with the builder’s scaffolding. It did not stand alone, nor did the buildings around it conform to the austerities of its own cold logic. It was flanked by a Norman church with a spiky steeple, behind which lay a walled graveyard in whose high grass were crowded families of ancient tilting stones. There were cottages—outbuildings—a forge—an inn—a village, in short, huddled about the skirts of the great house, and out front a small lake in which Lord Drogo kept various species of foreign fish. And all these older buildings, some of which actually abutted and were a part of the fabric of Drogo Hall itself, the original hall, that is, were built in a manner suggestive not of the Age of Reason but of an earlier age, a Dark Age, rather—I speak of crockets and gargoyles, wavering roof lines and shaggy brickwork, turrets, and a tower, and Martha surely asked herself, was this queer hybrid house a sanctuary? Would she find shelter here from the storm of her father’s madness?

  Coming through the village she was regarded with frank suspicion; Lord Drogo’s tenants recognized her for what she was, a supplicant, and as such, seeking to appropriate a share in that patrician bounty they considered their own. She came round the lake, and shunning the front of the house with its sweeping staircase, its colonnades and high windows, made her way round the side of the building, where a man in a leather apron stopped her beneath an archway giving onto a cloistered alley that opened into a large courtyard with outbuildings on three sides. Martha told the man that she had come to see Dr. William Tree, and he told her to come no further, he would inquire within. Martha asked him did he not wish to know who she was?

  “Who are you then?” he said.

  “I am Martha Peake,” she said, and lifted her chin, for she was almost in tears, being close, at last, as she thought, to safety. “Please tell him that I must speak to him at once.”

  Martha waited beneath the arch for an hour, and it began to rain; she was glad to be off the marsh, where she would have been quickly soaked. She saw much activity both in and around the house, several men emerging from the top of a flight of stone steps from the cellars, carrying buckets; and a little later a wagon loaded with crates rumbled past her down the alley and into the courtyard, where those same men, having disposed of their buckets somewhere at the back of the house, then unloaded the crates in the rain and manhandled them into the house.

  Several gentlemen on horseback arrived, clattering through the archway, past Martha and down the echoing alley before dismounting in the courtyard. Then some minutes later she saw a familiar figure standing at the top of the cellar steps in his shirtsleeves, wiping his hands on his apron and gazing at her; and she at once ran to him, her greatcoat flapping behind her, and flung herself upon him.

  My uncle William remembered the meeting well, or as well as he remembered anything. Marth
a had plainly been making a great effort of self-control for some time, he said, and she was now overwhelmed with relief to find a friend, as she thought. To see Martha overwhelmed, said my uncle dryly, was to see an instance of the tumultuary blood in full flow. She was some inches taller than he, and when she threw her arms around him it took some time for him to detach her from his person.

  “Martha Peake,” he said at last, and here his recall was rich with detail. “Now can I guess what brings you to Drogo Hall? I confess I am not surprised to see you. Will you come in? Have you walked out from the town all this way? You must be famished. Let us see what we can find in the kitchen.”

  And with that, he said, he had her follow him through a scullery and along a flagged passage, and so into a vast kitchen where half-a-dozen women were at work. He told me it was obvious that this plucky child (he always called her a child) was deeply frightened, and needed first to be brought among the women of the household, to be warmed and fed.

  In a great hearth on the far side of the room a fire burned, various pots simmered on the hob, and a large dog lay sleeping on the stones before it; and hanging from racks and pulleys above, various creatures for those pots, rabbits and chickens, pheasants and fish.

  “Patience Cogswell, what have you there for a hungry traveller?” said William, and a stout woman came forward sucking her teeth and straightening her cap; her hands were white with flour.

  Ten minutes later Martha was seated at the end of a long table of scrubbed oak with benches down each side. She had before her a bowl of hot tripe soup, a plate of cold beef, a jug of milk. She made a hearty dinner of it while in low tones telling my uncle about her father’s collapse. William had produced a white clay pipe and sucked at it now in a contemplative manner, nodding and frowning. Martha told him more than once she wanted him to understand the danger her father was in, for William remembered at one point taking the pipe from between his lips and saying gravely: “And not only him, Martha, yourself too”—and her saying: “Yes, without me, what then would become of him?”

  My uncle William pondered the matter, he told me. He set his elbows on the table, placed his chin in his hands, put his pipe between his teeth, and pondered the matter. He took out his pipe and rubbed the back of his neck. “Martha,” he said at last, “what am I to do with you?”

  “It doesn’t matter about me,” she said, “I do not believe he will hurt me again. But he will hurt himself.”

  “So I understand.”

  “It is the drink. He cannot help it.”

  “Then what will happen to him?”

  Long pause here. “I think,” she said, “in a few days I will go back to him, and talk to him.”

  “You are a brave girl, Martha Peake,” William said, “and you are clever, and you have spirit—by God you have spirit, I have seen it.” He pressed his lips tight together in what, in my uncle, passed for a smile, and briefly patted her hand.

  “I will help you, it is in my power to do so and I want to do so. But you will have to do what I say. This house may be out of the town, but much of the town comes to it. I will hide you here and you will stay out of sight. And then we will think what to do.”

  Even after she reached America, and safety, Martha, I believe, still dreamed of Drogo Hall, and of its tenants, and of what occurred there; and in her dreams there was chaos and darkness and only fractured impressions, each one associated with strong feeling, dread, or terror, just as she experienced it as a bewildered girl of fifteen. They were days of great uncertainty, great fear. At first she feared what lay outside Drogo Hall, the things that howled on the Lambeth Marsh by night, and only later did she come to fear what lay within—what stood waiting in the dark places of that house, the endless echoing passages, the empty landings, the obscure staircases and sudden unexpected chambers she encountered when she was bold enough by daylight to make tentative exploration of this new world of hers.

  Now, though, as she sat in that warm kitchen, having her hand stroked by my uncle William, and being told what a bold, clever, spirited girl she was, the relief was writ large and clear upon her face, and she felt a warm joy to be under William’s protection, and under the roof of Drogo Hall.

  12

  I had been in bed for several days but I was at last beginning to feel stronger; and I asked my uncle if I could see the room where Martha Peake stayed during her time at Drogo Hall. Of course, he murmured, waving a regal hand, Percy will show you tomorrow. And so the next day Percy, in his dusty coat and britches, led me out of the kitchen by way of a pantry which gave onto a narrow passage with a flagged stone floor, and so to another passage, and then up a twisting flight of stairs, and more of this, gloomy passages and narrow stairs, until at last we fetched up in a tower, in an obscure west wing of the house neglected and untenanted for years; ever since, I imagined, Martha had been here, although I was not able to have Percy confirm this. Everywhere broken windows, great droopy swags of cobweb, thick thick dust, the droppings of bats, and mice, and other creatures that had made their home in this dilapidated region of the house. Gamely but grimly we plodded down those passages, and up those narrow twisting stone staircases, Percy and I, until at last he flung open a door and ushered me into what had once briefly been Martha’s home.

  It was a circular room, a tower room, long neglected, but with the vigorous application of a broom, and water and scrubbing brushes, I suppose it could have been made comfortable. What at once caught my attention was the window seat, set in an alcove three feet deep with a prospect clear across the marsh to the spires and towers of London, where in the dusk a few lights were already winking. I imagined my uncle leaving Martha here and returning with candles, soap, bed linen, firewood, and other necessities. As for the bed, it was no servant’s bed, it was vast, the dark wood of its heavy frame carved into a menagerie of creatures leaping and climbing among exotic vines that twisted up the posts and ran the length of the upper frame before descending to the headboard and there rioting in glorious grotesque profusion; and in my mind’s eye I saw Martha fling herself onto the mattress, to be at once lost in the dust that rose up from it in a cloud. Oh, it was only a tower room in a forgotten wing of an old, old house, but the thought that Martha Peake had lived here before she left for America, this was strangely exciting to me. Treading the same boards she had trod, I was able all the more intimately to inhabit her experience.

  So this was the room my uncle moved her into. I imagined Martha, later that night, sitting alone by the fire and reviewing the day’s events. Her relief was great; and as she sat there in the candlelight, darning her stockings perhaps, the needle catching the flame and throwing off sparks of light into the gloom, she thought: this is how it used to be, for us, of an evening. But how much has changed! Am I not harrowed by the loss of my father? Where is he, out there somewhere in the London night, at the mercy of some diabolical power that has choked his will, that squats upon his very soul—how can I darn stockings, all tranquil in the candlelight? But what choice do I have?

  I understand now that Harry, by shifting as he had beyond the reach of reason—by embracing the monster—had, in a certain way, for Martha, died. But she persisted in thinking of him as he was before he turned against her, and even now her thoughts were only for his welfare; and with herself beyond his clutches he was, she believed, safe; and so, for a time, she was at peace. She slept soundly and awoke early and at once went to the window, where she clambered into the alcove on her knees and peered out at the first light as it came spreading across the marsh.

  Martha set to work that first morning to make her quarters clean and comfortable. My uncle visited her at noon, she heard his footsteps ascending the narrow wooden staircase for some minutes before he reached her room. She ran down the passage to greet him, and this, he told me, gave him inordinate pleasure, to be treated by Martha as an uncle, almost as a father. He had a particular fondness for her, and she knew this, I suspect, and made sure, whenever he was present, to be at her most spirited.<
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  He brought her further supplies of household necessities, and food from the kitchen; also some books, which she had asked for; and then she questioned him intently as to her security in the house, and he gave her reassurance, nodding his head as she poured forth her worries, and rubbing his neck, and then telling her what she needed to hear. She was much cheered by William’s visit, and the time fled quickly by, and before she knew it she was lighting candles and dusk was creeping over the marsh. That night she saw Clyte below her window.

  Clyte—that whispering principle of negation—that resurrection man—oh, he has long haunted me, he haunts me still! Thin as a rake, long of jaw and hollow of cheek, dressed in rusty black and no wig on his cropped blue skull, Clyte was the sort who moved always to the shadows, who sought the darkest part of any place he found himself in. He was a creature who slunk, who stole away before his person had properly been registered, who was known, in fact, more for his absence than for his presence. This had much to do with the line of work he pursued—if work it can be called—but also with the very kidney of the man, for by nature he was more shadow than substance, an instrument of darkness who served a master in constant need of precisely the services Clyte alone could provide. I speak of course of Lord Drogo.

  There she was, squeezed into her alcove in the window, her back pressed against one wall and the soles of her feet against the other, knees bent and arms wrapped about them, gazing across the marsh toward the town, when she caught from the corner of her eye some small movement in the shadows of the courtyard below. Glancing down, she saw him leaning against the wall with his legs crossed and his hands in his pockets—and staring straight up at the window! Martha had not a furtive bone in her body. Deception and subterfuge were alike alien to her. She did not pull back at once, like some guilty thing surprised, although perhaps she should have done.