Martha Peake

by Patrick Mcgrath

  Then she was taken to Foley’s Tavern, a dark wooden house near the docks, where they were to spend the night before setting off for New Morrock early the next morning.

  It is fruitless to speculate as to what Silas Rind expected to meet on Long Wharf that day in the person of Martha Peake. In the autumn of 1774 the English were roundly despised in Boston, or rather their king was, him and the soldiers he had sent to occupy the town. My uncle was vague as to what he had written to Silas Rind, beyond that Martha was in the most grave peril and had to flee England. But it occurs to me now that even before her arrival her plight had earned her the sympathy of her American relatives, who were themselves in a sense in a similar predicament. So whether or not they were sensible of the particulars of her situation, they knew at least that she was in bad trouble through no fault of her own, and I can imagine Silas telling his friends that this English girl was no less the victim of cruelty and misfortune than they were themselves.

  Several of those friends arrived at Foley’s as the New Morrock party was finishing an early supper. In they came, four or five men who were, to Martha’s eye, like Silas himself, serious, sober, unsmiling men. They sat down and subjected the weary Martha to a close scrutiny as she cleared the plates from the table. When she returned from the kitchen they were in close conversation over a bottle of rum, and spoke too low for her to make much sense of what they said. She settled herself by the window and watched the street, yawning, eager for her bed but as yet uncertain where she was to sleep. Adam cast a number of glances in his cousin’s direction, but he did not leave the table, intent as he was on what the men were saying.

  Then she saw Silas Rind lean over to his son and whisper something in his ear; and Adam nodded, and pushed his chair back, and came and sat down next to her at the window. He was serious now, his mood in accord with that of the men at the table. He laid a hand on hers and told her he understood how strange it must be for her, thus to arrive in a country she did not know, which was even then approaching a great crisis, perhaps its greatest ever.

  “Will there be war, then?” she asked him, withdrawing her hand.

  He said there would be, that they had gone too far to turn back now. Even as he said it, his manly gravity began to crumble and the raw excitement of the youth shone through.

  “But have you an army?”

  “We will have an army. Would that we had a navy too.”

  “And are all the colonies united now?”

  “You understand our situation, Martha Peake. No, we are not united, which is why we go slow.”

  He stretched his long legs, crossed them at the ankle and regarded her with some interest from those lively eyes of his. He tore a splinter from the table and began to pick his teeth with it.

  “My father,” he said, “is not aware that you are familiar with the difficulties we face.”

  “We have not spoken properly to one another.”

  “So are you a friend of ours?”

  “I am no friend of England, sir!”

  “Then you are with us.”

  Grinning now he offered her his hand, and she took it. He rose to his feet and stood nodding at her. He then returned to the men at the table. Martha frowned. Had she just joined a rebellion against the king? She supposed she had. Was she now a traitor to her country? She rather thought she was. She liked the idea, yes, it gave her an odd feeling of comfort, to think she was a rebel and a traitor and an enemy of the crown. Perhaps, she thought, this was the one place in the world where a girl might yet meet with kindness and understanding; a girl, that is, in the kind of trouble she was in.

  The journey to New Morrock took the best part of five days, and what Martha remembered of it—what I was able, that is, to make of her account of it, from those first letters of hers, or rather, from what my uncle remembered of them before they fell to pieces—beyond a constant jolting over rough roads, and the steaming horses, and the cold weather, and the thunderstorms—was the endless depths of forest they passed through as they made their way north. Though these they did not properly penetrate until the second or third day. The first day, after leaving Boston at dawn, they passed through towns that rang with the sound of hammers and saws. New houses and barns and churches were going up on every side. She saw fields recently harvested, their furrows straight and their fences in good repair, and men, women and children hard at work in those fields. The Americans she encountered were hardy, industrious folk, raw-boned and sinewy, dressed in plain garments and somewhat taciturn in manner, so there was always, somehow, to Martha’s taste, the distinct tang of vinegar about them. But she saw none of that idleness and debauchery that so disfigures the English countryside, and reflects so ill upon our national character, and I remember mentioning this to my uncle when first we spoke of America.

  He was a cynical fellow, my uncle William, and at times he affected a weariness of the world and a most bleak view of the human nature; and how he acquired this character I do not know but I suspect that a lifetime spent among cadavers had something to do with it. He sniffed at my enthusiasm and observed tartly that the American, by nature, in his experience, was no better than the Englishman, and that he himself would rather die in Surrey than in the Kaaterskill Mountains; so I did not press the point. But on reflection I see that this difference of opinion marked the beginning of our long disagreement on the subject of America, and of the meaning of the Revolution in particular.

  Martha was thrown together with Adam Rind for a good deal of the journey. Silas and Caesar always had men to see in the towns and villages through which they passed, and preferred to sit up front when they travelled. At such times she talked to her cousin about the colonists’ argument with the king, and he told her with a rising passion of the various outrages the British had committed to his certain knowledge; each of which involved the impounding of an American vessel, and the impressment into the navy of men who had defied the naval blockade—had not a number of his friends in New Morrock—had not he himself?—narrowly escaped just such a fate? In the course of these conversations Martha discovered that despite his clowning temper her cousin had an ardent enthusiasm for the fighting they all seemed certain was soon to come; nor did it occur to him, after their talk in Foley’s that night, that she might feel different.

  For this she was grateful. She did not properly understand what was happening here. She knew only that she would soon face her own great crisis, when it became apparent that she was with child, but without husband.

  “Cousin Martha,” said Adam one morning, as they bumped along an old ox track, with fields on either side and mountains in the distance, the two of them stretched out upon sacks of grain in the back of the open wagon, gazing up at the clouds with their hands behind their heads.

  “Cousin Adam.”

  “Cousin Martha, are you not happy to have left England behind you?”

  “I am not happy to have left those I loved.”

  “Ah, so you loved.”

  Martha had grown fond of this odd cousin of hers, and already thought of him as a kind of brother. She groaned at this weak sally, and did not answer him. He tried again.

  “But is not England rotten with luxury and vice?”

  “There are good people in England,” she said, purely for the sake of being contrary, “as there are everywhere.”

  “Why then do they abuse us so? We only want what is ours by natural right.”

  Martha lifted herself onto an elbow and peered at him. She had heard this phrase before, her father had used it.

  “What is a natural right?” she said.

  “Why, what is ours because we are men.”

  “I am not a man.” She paused. “Nor are you.”

  Now he too rose on an elbow. His anger was not a man’s anger but a boy’s. He spluttered. He began to tell her what he could do with an ax, with a gun, with a horse—

  “But are you a man, for all that?”

  “What is a man, then, tell me that, Martha Peake?”

/>   Martha thought of her father. He was a man. Could she tell her cousin about him? Oh, but she wanted to, how she wanted to tell him about Harry, and how he was brought low, and what he had suffered—and then all at once the confusion, and anguish, and rage were rising in her, almost overwhelming her—and as she pushed these feelings away, pushed them down, she glimpsed something of what had mystified her.

  “Is it a man’s natural right to be judged not for his body but his character?”

  “Of course!”

  “Then I believe in natural rights.”

  “And so do I!”

  His own anger departed as quickly as it had come, and gave way once more to lazy amusement. But still he sat up on his elbow gazing at her, a spark in his eye.

  “So we are in agreement,” he said.

  “We are,” said Martha; and with that he flung himself back on the sacks and lay there grinning at the sky.

  By the afternoon of the third day they had left the rolling farmland and neat white villages far behind them, and had entered a wild region of hills and forest that stretched as far as the eye could see, and off to the west a range of mountains rising like a spinal column from the great broad back of the land. How civilized the English countryside has become, I reflected, in comparison to the giant landscape I aroused in my imagination, those magnificent tracts of wilderness Martha passed through, for in England the woodlands have largely disappeared, and what remains of the countryside is enclosed by fences and hedgerows; and what is worse, we are afflicted by a plague of mills and collieries, with high brick chimneys that belch out clouds of black smoke and sulphur.

  But America, now this was stuff for the soul, this truly was God’s country, and soon they had plunged into a dense forest whose dying autumnal foliage was as fiercely aflame with colour as any painter could desire. Did Martha glory in the majesty of it all, the great trees crowding in upon the shoulders of their narrow road, that now dropped into steep dank ravines with gurgling brooks rushing over rocks and rotting tree-trunks, and now climbed onto broad plateaux from which the surrounding country offered itself to the eye for miles around, vast sweeping vistas of gold and scarlet, and no sign anywhere of the hand of man, save, perhaps, for a scrap of white, far below, the jibsail of a gundalo on some distant river, or a rough log cabin in a valley by a stream, with a thin plume of woodsmoke rising from its chimney? I do not know; she had much besides the landscape to occupy her thoughts. But when she forgot her troubles I imagine her heart did lift, that she did gaze with wonder and awe at this natural grandeur, and remembered, perhaps, her father’s descriptions of it in his ballad of the tyrant Sea.

  On the afternoon of the fifth day, after a spell of fine weather, the clouds moved in and the heavens opened; and so torrentially did the rain come down that not even the forest canopy could save them from a drenching. It cleared after an hour and they were able to continue on their way; Martha, soaked and wretched, and by this time deeply unhappy with her lot, and Adam, dripping and grinning, saying to her that it was surely a fine thing for an English girl like herself to be caught in a real American rainstorm. The road was slick and muddy now, and the going was slow indeed. The afternoon was well advanced, and the light was starting to fade, and still Martha had seen no sign that they were close to any human settlement. But she would not display weakness by asking questions of the men.

  Dusk was coming on and bats swooped and flitted through the gloom before them. The woods seemed every minute to crowd in closer upon them. The desolate howling of the wolves in the forest did little for the temper of the horses, nor for Martha’s either. A half-hour later it was dark, and Martha was convinced they were lost in the depths of a wild and chartless forest, where they would perish and be eaten by wild animals. But even as she thought this thought she became aware of a dull roar, distant but sustained, and she strained to identify it. Then she had it, it was the ocean, they were close to the ocean, and in a sudden access of joy she shouted to Adam that this road would surely bring them out on the coast—!

  But the road continued to deteriorate, and was soon little better than a cart track, mired in mud and puddles and treacherous with roots, stumps, and ruts. The moon rose into the evening sky, and after the grim damp obscurity of the last miles they now had at least a pale lunar glow sifting through the boughs high above their heads. It was close to midnight when at last they emerged from the forest onto a ledge of rock overlooking the ocean.

  Martha gazed down in wonder and relief. The coastline was a wide jagged arc from north to south, with at either end a headland rearing like a sentinel. Tatters of black cloud flew across the sky and concealed the moon, but then all at once the clouds parted, and the moonlight shone full upon a small fishing port huddled in the most sheltered cove along this wild coast. There must have been a hundred houses down there, with narrow twisting alleys between, narrow wharves stretching out to the deep water, fishing boats tied up at the wharves and scattered about the harbour. There were buildings on stilts around the dock, and a thin white spike of a steeple rising from the church. The bay beyond was dotted with islands, and beyond the bay the moonlight spilled out across the vastness of the heaving black Atlantic.

  But as Martha looked down on those slumbering houses, I now wonder, did she know a tremor of unease? Did she perhaps remember Cornwall? Was there a sense of foreboding, even, a feeling that this was a town without welcome or warmth, jealous of what little it had clawed from the cold black sea that gives life, and just as surely takes it back—was she gripped by the conviction that she had stumbled upon a place of the dead? I do not know; it is possible, given all that followed.

  The wagon lurched to a halt, there on the headland, and Martha with a shiver flung off these somber thoughts and climbed down. Adam stood beside her and the pair of them gazed at the dark place below. She told him something of her unease, for after five days together she had fallen into the habit of sharing her thoughts with him, those that did not touch upon her father, or her child.

  “But the forest,” he said, “is darker by far than whatever may await you below.”

  She told him she did not fear the forest.

  “Nor anything it contains?”

  “No, nor that.”

  He laughed then, turning away, but glancing back at her every few moments such that she began to feel her temper rising and knew she should soon shout at him. But she told herself that her cousin was a foolish boy who always spoke in jest.

  Slowly they descended the hill, and came into New Morrock over the old flint road across the mudflats. Then there was a bewildering crowd of strangers—her aunt Maddy, the children, various others—who brought Martha into their home and made her welcome.

  Her sleep was only once disturbed, that first night in New Morrock. She was awoken by a sound from outside the house. She sat up in bed and had no idea where she was; then, remembering, and hearing the murmur of men’s voices, she padded across to the window, between the beds of her sleeping cousins. The window looked out over a barn. There was a moon that night, and by its light she saw Silas Rind directly beneath her with a man in a greatcoat to his ankles, his collar up by his ears, and a cocked hat pulled so low she could see nothing of his face. In his hand he gripped a riding whip, which he slapped softly against his leg as he spoke, while Silas frowned and nodded.

  Then Caesar emerged from the barn leading a horse saddled and bridled for the road. The stranger shook the hands of both Silas and Caesar then swung himself into the saddle and touched the whip to the horse’s flank. He cantered gently out of the yard. Silas turned back to the house, and Caesar went back in the barn. It all reminded Martha of her childhood, she remembered her father, in Port Jethro, and visitors who similarly came in the night and left before dawn. She got back into bed and was at once asleep.

  20

  All this I discussed with my uncle, and he supposed, he said, that this was how it might have happened, there was little here he could take exception to. It was plausible, he allowed
, his tone suggesting that plausibility was but a poor cousin to truth. But truth being a prize beyond our grasp—as I then said to him—then plausibility, surely, was as good as we could hope for?

  To this question came no reply but rather a series of pinchings and pursings about the mouth and nostrils expressive of resignation and fatigue. Hardly encouraging, but I pressed on, and what I pressed on with was Silas Rind and his family. Born with nothing, I began, Silas had made a fortune in the cod fishery, then built a large house some way above the harbour on a lot of several acres backing onto the forest, where his family was spared the stench that rose from the waterfront when the tide was low and the mudflats were exposed to the wind off the harbour. It was a solid foursquare wooden house sheathed in gray shingles and streaked with salt from the many storms it had endured. It had a gambrel roof and a small tower where Silas could gaze out to sea with his spy-glass and look for his returning vessels. The inside of the house was organized round a great stone chimney with fireplaces in several rooms, the main one in the kitchen. Maddy Rind had pots perpetually boiling on the kitchen fire, and that large room, the heart of the house, saw endless cleaning and washing, chopping and skinning, all the multitude of tasks the household required; with which she had the help of her daughters and her neighbours, who this day were avid with curiosity to see the English arrival.