Martha Peake

by Patrick Mcgrath

  Because he trusted her—

  Trusted her my fat bladder! Trusted her? He trusted no one! Ambrose, use your brains! If you have any left. No, Silas Rind was up to something. That, or Adam brought her along without consulting him.

  But as to what Silas might have been “up to,” on this my uncle would not be drawn, and merely muttered at me to go on, get on with it, if I must.

  The upshot was, I said, somewhat shaken, the upshot was, that late one afternoon Martha rode up the coast with Adam, perched behind him on his black mare, her arms wrapped around his waist, to Scup Head, a high rocky headland behind which was concealed a deep narrow channel that a half-mile inland opened into a pool fed by waterfalls and enclosed by steep cliffs, and on the far side a gently shelving beach of black sand. The forest grew thickly to the edge of this narrow beach, and a track ran back into the forest, which some miles farther on quietly merged with the Boston road.

  Adam and Martha paused on the cliff above the hidden cove in the last light of a fall day, and there beneath them, lying at anchor, was the Lady Ann. All sail had been furled, and the mainmast rose like a crucifix needle from the schooner’s trim hull, throwing long reflections across the still dark waters. A fire of driftwood blazed on the beach and two men stood in a rowboat tied up to the vessel, Caesar and another man, and with lifted arms silently received the powder kegs handed down to them by the crew. They loaded the boat to the gunwales, then Caesar sat to the oars and rowed to shore, where four men waited on the beach.

  In they waded up to their knees and lifted the kegs from the boat. They carried them up the beach to a farm wagon hitched to a team of oxen. And all in utter silence, only the soft plash of oars in the black water, and the splashing of the men in the surf, and Martha, on the cliff above, dared not speak, dared not disturb the stillness of the place, nor the solemn activity going on below.

  They rode round the headland then picked their way down a path through the woods to the beach. They went ahead of the wagon as it lurched up the track into the forest. It was dank and chill among the ancient trees, and they soon dismounted, the better to warn the others of the ruts and stumps ahead. Slowly through the deepening gloom the wagon bumped along the track. Night fell and they moved through darkness, no moonlight to help them, and several times the men had to put their shoulders to the wagon, when the oxen foundered or a wheel snagged, and Adam and Martha threw their weight behind the wheel with the others.

  At last they glimpsed lights through the trees. For several minutes Martha had been aware of a dull muted roar from off in the woods up ahead, a sound that had insinuated itself so subtly into her mind she did not know when it had started. Then there were shouts, and men with torches coming down the track to meet them, and as they drew closer a long low shed came into view. This was Silas’ sawmill, and the dull roar was the rushing of the cataract that drove the mill’s great wheel.

  As Silas’ men unloaded the wagon and carried the kegs into the sawmill they threw long strange shadows in the torchlight. Adam stood by the wide doors of the mill and counted the kegs and crates as they were carried in. The great wheel, shadowy within its scaffolding of logs and planking, was unmoving, and as the moon rose over the trees Martha stood by the creek and saw in the river far below the long flat boats that once had carried her uncle’s milled lumber downstream to the sea. Now she imagined those craft with powder kegs and crates of arms lashed to them, and with that thought the prospect of the fire and destruction to come was all at once brought home to her.

  Later, when Silas questioned her as to what she had seen that night—my uncle snorted, but allowed me to continue—she told him that in Cornwall the free-trader worked solely for profit, whereas Silas’ men worked for a cause, and worked all the better for that reason. Silas appeared satisfied with this. My uncle William merely lifted an eyebrow. I could tell he still thought that sly old Silas was “up to” something, and that I was a damned fool not to see it.

  The weather grew colder and the sky was often heavy with rolling banks of low gray cloud, and the sea turned an angry dark green, black at times, and so turbulent that the fishing boats, those few that would risk the blockade, rarely went out anymore. The people of Cape Morrock made their preparations for the rigours of the season to come. They set about securing their houses and barns against winter storms. Boats were dragged to the stony beach hard by the harbour wall, then hauled above the winter tideline and tied up to iron rings in the wall. Maddy Rind inspected her larder and her pantry, counting the crocks of pickled fish and jars of fruit she had laid in over the summer, and everywhere fires were lit in smokehouses, and the last of the season’s fish and meat was cured. When the wind was right the air was filled with smells that set Martha thinking with some passion of her dinner, for she was hungry all the time now.

  They burned prodigious quantities of firewood in the kitchen, and the several woodsheds on the property had to be filled before the snow came and drifted deep on the forest floor. Glimpsing these facts of Martha’s new life, I could not but reflect on how close to the elements these people lived, closer certainly than I did in Drogo Hall, where I sat by night writing this account of Martha’s American life in a very storm of creative energy—my back to a blazing fire and a bottle of claret to hand!

  But no, clinging to a cliffside with their faces to the sea, and the forest and the mountains at their backs, they had created plenty from this wilderness, and from their surplus had established a thriving commerce. Seeing this through the eyes of Martha Peake, it is easy to imagine how a flame kindled to life within her, a rebel flame, a patriot flame; ah, but tempered, always tempered, by the uneasy thought of the child growing in her womb—

  Then one day she awoke to the sound of chopping from the back of the house. Going at once to the window, she saw Adam in the yard below, in boots and britches only, hard at work splitting logs beside the barn. After each blow of the ax he bent down and tossed the chunks of cleft wood into a basket, and she smiled to see his long hair flopping about, and the muscles of his broad white back as they lumped and gleamed in the wintry sunlight. His breath was like smoke in the cold morning air and the sweat came steaming off him in waves. After some minutes he felt her eyes upon him, for he suddenly turned and saw her there in her nightshirt, with her hair tumbling loose about her shoulders. She at once flung wide the window and shouted some nonsense at him, and he laughed right back then leaned on his ax gazing up at her, panting, and pushing damp strands of hair off his face.

  Later she went with him to the barn, and there, in the crisp chill of a November dusk, in the smoky gloom, with the smell of horses thick in their nostrils, and the stamping and snuffling and whinnying all around, she gave him to understand by the general arrangement of her person that she was to be kissed.

  He hesitated for only a second or two. Then he seized her in his arms—and she took some seizing, did Martha, she was a big girl—but Adam was bigger—and knocking the wind out of her, he crushed her to his strong young chest. She lifted her laughing face to his, and with some urgency, and no little intensity, he pressed his lips to hers; and when after some moments she began to fight for breath, he released her with a cry of alarm, fearing he had hurt her. She assured him he had not, but that he must allow her to breathe occasionally. He kissed her again, and this time was more tender. Martha’s heart was beating fast, her blood was in turmoil. She pulled away from him, she leaned her back against a beam, and with her eyes afire, and smiling broadly, she set her legs apart, she lifted her arms, and linked her fingers behind her head. She had been kissed before, and she had been handled before, but never in quite the way she was now, never with such passionate uncertainty.

  After some minutes more of this she set her palms on Adam’s chest and pushed him back. She did not meet his ardent gaze, but toyed instead with the buttons of his shirt.

  “Forgive me,” he said, “I was overcome.”

  “I will not,” she said.

  Then he kissed her again. H
is hand was on her hip, on her buttocks, on her thighs—she thought she would melt, she thought she would fall down!—but neither of these things happened. There was another kiss, and another—would there be no end to this kissing? Her breathing was shallow, her heart beating faster than ever, she was flushed scarlet and glad to be in the shadows where he could not see it. There was a great warmth inside her, and a great rank dampness between them—

  “We must stop,” he whispered, and she was on the point of asking him why, indeed the word had risen to her lips, and would have flown out, but some impulse of—what?—prudence, calculation—certainly not virtue!—whatever it was, she paid heed to it and said, breathlessly, “Indeed, sir, we must, and I must be at home”—and with that she ran off, leaving him to pace the barn with his britches bulging and the buttons of his shirt undone all down his chest.

  She slept but little that night! She ran upstairs without a candle, her skirt lifted and her hair streaming out behind her. She lay awake with the curtains open and stared at the clouds moving across the moon, and rehearsed in her mind all the details of her evening since she had gone out to the barn. His face before her, his hands on her body, his arms crushing her to him, bending her spine as if she were a sapling!—then her own arms flung about his neck, and her face lifted to his, opening to his, and then the great liquid warmth rising from her womb and filling her whole body so she had to cleave to him if she were not to fall down in a swoon! Oh, she could not be doing with any of that, she would not be overcome—! What would have happened had she allowed the kissing to continue, this she could not imagine, or rather she could imagine, all too well, which is why she slept so little that turbulent night.

  Ah, they were young, their animal spirits were healthy, and often after that they met in the barn, high in the gloom beneath the great rafters, amid bound bales of straw where they could not be seen; and they found no good reason to be prudent, nor virtuous either. Afterwards they would fall back in the straw, laughing, and then they would talk. Martha told him stories about her father, stories of the old days before the gin and the madness.

  “By God I hope he comes soon,” said Adam one night, as he rose from the bale on which they lay, a beam of moonlight by chance shafting through the rafters to cover him in a cold yellow glow. “There are others like him all over Europe,” he said, “and when it is time they will join us in their thousands—”

  Martha pushed him down on the straw. Much disheveled beneath her open greatcoat, she straddled him with her legs and set her elbows either side of his neck, and gazed into his eyes from but an inch or two above him. The old familiar grin appeared, and the boyish belligerence faded. Adam’s moods shifted and changed like wind on water, and could be read as clearly. He reached up and unpicked the loose knot of her hair, so it fell forward and spread across his face. Martha pushed it aside and set her chin on his chin, their lips an inch apart. Again the mood changed. There was silence now, their thoughts confused by the sudden warmth in their bodies as she spread her fingers across his cheeks and hungrily kissed him—

  Thus do I imagine those young lovers, in the very dawn of the Revolution!

  23

  In the wake of my uncle’s recent outburst when I had, it seems, been insufficiently cynical of Silas Rind’s motives, I was less than expansive in the account I gave him of Martha’s blooming romance. I suspected he would say: “Romance? Romance?”—then mock me for a naïf, and tell me that Martha’s motives were no less self-interested than her uncle’s; and having no desire to hear that brave girl’s honour assailed. I restricted my construction to the pages of my journal. There I allowed the thing to flower—though not, of course, without those obstacles that dog the course of all lovers, but give the thing such sweetness in the consummation.

  Naturally I sifted through the crumbling American letters, seeking some stray word or phrase that might throw light upon the matter; though with little success. But as I sifted, peering by candlelight at Martha’s faded handwriting, something rather strange, and wonderful, occurred. For I began to notice, here and there, in the margins of the letters, a drawing she had made, and then repeated, over and over, as though attempting to perfect it. It was a simple thing, a rounded form, anatomical, I supposed, a bended knee, or a breast, perhaps—or a belly. And all at once I saw it—a swelling, spherical belly—a pregnant belly—she was drawing her own belly! Again and again she had sketched that which she must conceal, and so revealed her secret, perhaps not even aware that she did so. I do not believe my uncle ever noticed these little drawings Martha made of her belly, but I did; and they endeared her to me all the more.

  They slipped away from the house whenever they could; not together, of course, for they had to be careful. And if Caesar was busy in the barn then they walked up into the woods, or climbed Black Brock and stamped about on top of the cliff, shouting at the British warships on the horizon. One afternoon he took her to the Old Burying Ground, a large sloping field on the north side of the road down to the harbour. There on a stony windswept hillside the grass clung close to the slope and the grave markers were of wood, the whole exposed and barren place girdled by a wandering picket fence. Victims of war were laid to rest there, victims of disease and, most numerously, of the sea, and it became a favorite pastime for Adam and Martha to drift about among the graves reading aloud the stories of disaster. A great storm ten years previous had claimed the lives of seventeen men from four boats. A storm of a different kind had carried off every member of a family who farmed a valley in the back country, when the father went mad and murdered them one by one with an ax. He walked into the woods and was never seen again. There were victims of the smallpox, the yellow fever, the scarlet fever and the windy fever, and one old woman called Jephtha Stocking who died of boils. Adam and Martha sat by her grave and gazed out to sea, conjuring visions of death by boils. Martha at this period, that is, the late autumn of 1774, was as happy I believe as she had been since leaving England. Were her wounds healing? They were, and Adam did not disturb that slow work going forward in her soul, as she buried the memory of the Harry who had raped her, and raised instead a suffering Harry, a blighted and persecuted Harry, Harry the victim of cruelty and intolerance in that hated place of despots, that England—! And then the thought of his unborn child would cast her down into fear and uncertainty once more.

  Ah, but they did not go unobserved. In this small world, eyes were always watching, tongues whispering, small minds busy with scandal and malice. Martha’s friendship with Adam Rind had aroused strong resentment in certain of the townspeople, and she was made aware of it the day she celebrated her first Thanksgiving in America.

  The morning dawned damp and cloudy, a strong breeze off the sea that spat rain against the windows and promised worse by nightfall. Adam had brought in turkeys from the forest, which were plucked and cleaned by the women, and now as they roasted in the fire they filled the house with smells which Martha had never smelled before. By noon the house was crowded, the men gathered in Silas’ parlour drinking Tobago rum and smoking Virginia tobacco as they talked about one thing only, that being the present public emergency. Martha made it her task to replenish the men’s glasses as they talked, and in this way she overheard much of what they were saying. She heard Nat Pierce loud with indignation that when twenty thousand patriots marched on Boston, Samuel Adams turned them back. Silas was in regular correspondence with Mr. Adams, and supported him now, saying that the moment to strike had not yet arrived. He argued that there were many in the colonies who had not come as far along the road to arms as had the people of Massachusetts. He feared they would fight on the side of the British. He feared a civil war, which the patriots would surely lose.

  Joshua Rind was present. As his brother talked of those men in other colonies who would remain loyal to the crown, he interrupted, saying: “Civil war? I think not, Silas. I think a revolutionary war.”

  “Will we have a revolution then, Joshua?”

  “God help us, I believe w
e will,” said the doctor, “and if we lose it we shall all be off to London to wear the king’s rope.” He gingerly fingered his throat.

  Also present was the minister, the small, thin, excitable John Crow, who worked alongside the other men six days of the week, and drilled with the militia up on Colchester Fields. This Thanksgiving Day he had preached a blistering sermon, taking as his text the first verse of Lamentations, and voicing the memorable sentiment that Resistance to Tyranny was Obedience to God. Now he spoke with no less ardour about the stupidity of the British government.

  “Free trade is all we ever asked!” he cried in tones he usually employed to depict the rigours of Hell. “They grew rich, they would have grown richer, selling their goods in America, but no, they must tax us, and they will lose the profits of trade, and they will not get their taxes either. Why are they blind?”

  “The king is mad,” said Nat Pierce, and spat a gob into the fire, where it hissed like a snake.

  “They have deformed the constitution,” said Joshua Rind. “Theirs is an old rotten state, and our own health demands we separate ourselves from them before we become sick with their distemper.”

  Still fingering his throat he frowned most darkly.

  “And they think us raw, cowardly men!” he then cried. “They think we will easily be beat in the field!”

  “But that is all to the good,” murmured Silas, pushing himself off the mantel and pacing the floor, the other men all watching him now as Martha filled their glasses from her jug.

  “We shudder at the prospect of blood, and rightly so. But we are in a state of nature now, and we must take up arms against them. Not yet, however. We must await the moment. Then you will have your revolution, Joshua.”

  Martha had filled their glasses, her jug was empty, but still she dawdled by the door, unwilling to be out of the room if something truly dramatic was said. But she heard no more then, for Sara came looking for her, saying she was needed in the kitchen. Reluctantly Martha returned to the women, who were occupied with tasks that were at once of lesser and greater importance than those being discussed by the men; that is, they were making the dinner. The back door was propped wide open but even so the room was hot and steamy and full of the smells of roasting turkey, and her aunt Maddy was basting the birds as the other goodwives of New Morrock worked around her, and the children were put to work too, laying the table and pulling corks from bottles and the like.