Martha Peake

by Patrick Mcgrath

  Here the mood was different. As the women worked they talked, and they talked of their husbands and brothers and sons, and in their voices Martha heard the fears that none of the men dared speak aloud. They feared that a great army would come, an army of men deeper blooded in war and better armed than their own men, an army that had seen battle in much of the world and had always emerged victorious. They did not doubt their men’s courage, but they knew they were not soldiers, they were fishermen and farmers, rather, and although many of the older men had served in the war against the French they had been commanded by English officers. Now those same officers would be ranged against them. The women in Maddy Rind’s kitchen did not deceive themselves. They saw no good reason to believe that the patriot cause would be victorious when the smoke cleared and the last of the bodies was hauled away in a cart.

  Martha heard all this with growing agitation, for she believed the colonists must take up arms, no other course was open to them, this she had learned from her father; and if in some part of her mind a voice told her that it was not her place to speak her thoughts, she paid it no attention.

  “But they will not be beat,” she burst out at last, “why do you say such things?”

  There was a sudden silence, a sudden stillness in that steamy kitchen.

  “Martha,” said her aunt Maddy, in her kindly, worried way; but she was interrupted by a sour widow called Purity Clapsaddle.

  “Martha Peake,” said Goodwife Clapsaddle in a sneering tone which dripped with spite and contempt. “And what does our English cousin think she knows?”

  Now Martha had never concerned herself much with what others thought of her, this too she had learned from her father. Small wonder then that she had taken little notice of the reaction to her arrival of those beyond the Rind family circle, in particular women like Purity Clapsaddle and her daughter Ann, a girl of Martha’s age with a spirit as pinched and pickled in brine as her mother’s, and who was also in Maddy Rind’s kitchen that Thanksgiving Day.

  “What do I know?” retorted Martha. “I know that your men will risk their necks on an English gallows so you can live as free people here.”

  The sentiment was not new. It was spoken a hundred times a day in the kitchens and taverns of New Morrock. But these women did not expect to be told such a thing, in such a way, by a newcomer, a stranger—an English stranger! Nor was this Martha’s worst offence in their eyes. She and Adam had been seen up in the Old Burying Ground together, and it was much talked of that he had taken her with him to his father’s sawmill the night the Lady Ann was landed under Scup Head. Adam Rind was the eldest son of the richest man in town. The question of whom he would marry had long engaged the busy tongues of the New Morrock goodwives. Among those thought to be a suitable match was Purity Clapsaddle’s daughter Ann; and although Adam had shown little interest in Ann Clapsaddle, older wiser heads were quietly confident that good sense would prevail. Until, that is, this red-haired English hussy threw all their calculations into disarray.

  “And you know better, do you?” said Purity Clapsaddle, moving toward Martha with flames of malice leaping from her eyes. “You who have come here with the stink of London still upon you.”

  “English whore,” said Ann Clapsaddle, as her mother stood bristling and jutting at Martha, who had straightened up from the fire and stood now with her chin up glaring at this little snake of a woman spitting poison at her. Her colour was up, and her face was as red as her hair. The other women stared at Martha with fierce stony eyes, all but Sara, who at once ran to her cousin’s side, and Maddy, who was astonished at what was going on in her own kitchen.

  “Ann, you be silent!” cried Maddy.

  “She shall not be silent,” hissed Purity Clapsaddle, “and neither shall I. You scarlet creature—”

  What would have happened next, had not the men at that moment been heard shuffling out of Silas’ parlour, their voices loud with joy at the smells coming from the kitchen, I do not know. But in an instant the women were back at their work and the men were rumbling in, rubbing their hands, none of them with any idea that but a moment before Martha had almost been set upon by their own wives and daughters.

  In stamped the men, then, their spirits well-lifted with rum and the heady talk of revolt. Now they bantered with their womenfolk and were chided like children, and laughed it off, buoyed with the feeling that great doings were afoot. Martha’s temper subsided, in her mind she consigned the Clapsaddle women to a place of darkness, and she paid attention once more to the men. Later it occurred to her that if she could arouse such anger merely with her words, what would happen when her belly started to show?

  The weeks went by, the weather grew colder, and it became ever more difficult for Martha to hide her condition. The day after Thanksgiving Sara had come to her and told her that she must never doubt the love and friendship that she, Sara, felt for her. Martha was much affected by this, as she had been by Sara’s coming to her side during the argument in the kitchen. She saw something of her own spirit in this girl, something of the adamantine element, and by God she wanted a friend. The two embraced, they clung together, Sara was surprised by Martha’s strength of feeling but she returned it, for she had recognized a quality in her cousin, she could not describe it precisely, a sort of wholeness, a directness, an unshakeable integrity of purpose; Sara had it too, I believe, but hers was an inner flame, whereas Martha’s whole being was imbued with it, she gave it off to the world as the sun gives heat, and she could no more hide her nature than change it. Sara loved her for it, and she also feared for her. One day when the two were washing linen in the great tub behind the house, Martha suddenly felt weak and had to sit down. Sara wanted to fetch her uncle Joshua, but Martha could not allow her to. Sara began to insist, and Martha shyly told her she was with child.

  Sara was at once full of curiosity, and asked if she might listen to the child’s heartbeat. There was nothing to hear, cried Martha, laughing now, but her cousin would not be denied, and so they went into the barn and Martha pulled up her skirt, and Sara laid her head on her belly. After some moments, and with shining eyes, she told Martha she had heard her baby’s heart beating. Martha said this was surely not possible, but Sara, laughing, insisted it was true, and as Martha pulled her skirt down, Sara stopped her hand and asked to hear it again. Martha allowed her, then pushed her off and sat up, and as Sara lay there dreamily gazing at her cousin she said her breasts were bigger than they had been when she arrived from England. Martha told her this was because of the child, and they hugged one another, laughing like a pair of happy lovers.

  Some days later the two girls were wandering barefoot along the seashore at low tide on a cold and overcast day. They were carrying a basket between them into which they tossed anything they could find in the way of crabs and mussels. The sand was cold and gritty beneath their feet, and a breeze was coming off the sea in short damp chilly gusts. Martha must have told Sara something of her fear at the prospect of her belly betraying her, and Sara was silent for a while. Then she spoke.

  “I know who the father is,” she said.

  Martha stopped in her tracks.

  “Who?” she whispered.

  The girl smiled shyly at her.

  “Who?” shouted Martha, and Sara shrank away from her.

  “Sara, who?” said Martha, gently now.

  “Adam,” said Sara. “It is Adam. You must tell him, and he will marry you.” Poor dear Sara, it all seemed so simple to her.

  Martha said nothing more, and hid her confusion by stooping to seize up from a rock pool a little scuttling crab, and dropped it in her basket with the rest.

  Martha found that the swelling of her belly went unnoticed if she wore her clothes loose and tied her apron slack, and invented frequent reasons to haul on her boots and greatcoat and work in the yard. She spent many a frosty morning that winter out behind the house, up to her elbows in a basin of hot water and lye, her face flushed red with cold and steam, scrubbing sheets and shirts
so as to escape the kitchen, and the goodwives of New Morrock, who went in and out of each other’s houses with bewildering frequency, having some kind of sixth sense as to when extra pairs of hands were wanted.

  But she was always in the house after dark, and several times during this period a man on horseback cantered into the yard, and Silas would go hurrying out to meet him. A minute or two later the rider came stamping into the kitchen, a heavy leather satchel on his shoulder, his face white with cold, frost in his beard, and rubbing his chilled hands over the fire as the women prepared hot food and drink for him. Having warmed himself at the fire, and created muddy puddles where the snow melted off his boots, he would be led off by Silas to his parlour, and there the two men would shut themselves in. When Martha carried in the tray the stranger would instantly cover up the papers spread on the table, and all talk ceased until she left the room. In vain Martha then pressed her ear against the door to discover what they talked about, for the doors in her uncle’s house were built solid and no sound passed through them. But once, as she was closing the door behind her, she heard the stranger say to her uncle: “That is your English girl then, Silas?”

  She did not hear what Silas replied, for as she held the door open a crack he said loudly: “Close the door, Martha”—and she had no choice but to obey.

  With each fall of snow the road to Boston became more impassable. By the beginning of January 1775 they had seen the last of that winter’s riders. The ocean was no more friendly than the forest, storms coming up quickly and lashing the cape with great fury before passing on out to sea, but a few intrepid vessels crept up and down the coast in the lulls between the storms, few of them British, for the enemy preferred now to keep his shipping safe in Boston harbour. Only through these brave sailors was Silas kept abreast of the proceedings of the committee in Boston. In this way he learned that the petition sent to the king, demanding the crown’s recognition of the colonists’ rights, had been ignored. It was one more insult. Silas was quietly elated.

  “Now they understand,” he said. “Now they know what sort of men we are dealing with.”

  For he wished it to be brought home to men in the other colonies that the British had no interest in seeking a peaceful resolution but intended, rather, to punish them, for presuming to challenge their masters in London.

  It was in this climate of at times unbearably tense anticipation that Martha Peake continued to guard her secret. She calculated that she would come to term in the late spring or early summer, by which time she hoped that the people around her would have events of greater importance to occupy them than her little bastard. But then the situation was dramatically changed, and not by any action of her own. Adam discovered that she was with child. Sara told him.

  They had been in the woods together seeing to Adam’s traps. He told his sister that when he had a son he would give him his own land to clear and build upon. He had turned eighteen just before the Thanksgiving holiday, and he passionately resented that he still lived under his father’s roof. So Sara asked him if he had decided who he wanted to marry, and Adam said: “Martha Peake, of course.”

  Martha was upstairs changing sheets and airing the bedrooms when Sara came to her and reported this. She then admitted that she had told Adam that his cousin would soon have need of a husband, and on being pressed, had told him why.

  Martha let out a cry and sank onto the bed. After a moment she asked her cousin what Adam had said to that.

  Nothing. A great shout of joy was all.

  “Joy?” said Martha.

  Sara nodded, and Martha at once understood that Adam assumed the child to be his own. Had this possibility not occurred to her before? Indeed, had it not coloured her feelings for Adam from the start? My uncle William would have it so, but I believe not. For I do not think Martha capable of such base calculation in a matter of the heart.

  “So he wants the child,” she said.

  “Oh yes,” said Sara, beginning to see how badly she had blundered.

  Martha gazed at her a moment then looked away. She would not let Sara see what she was thinking. She resumed her work, and cast her cousin only a sour glance as she went at another bolster, throwing wide the window and letting a blast of icy air into the room, and thumping the bolster hard on the sill.

  “Go away,” said Martha. “I have work to do.”

  Sara ran from the room. As soon as the door closed behind her Martha pulled shut the window and sank onto the bed and began to think of what this meant to her; to her, yes, and to her unborn child. And for the first time, I believe, she thought of her child not as a sinful secret, nor as the manifestation of the evil done to her by her father, but as a living being, rather, who one day soon would require her protection in an uncertain and unfriendly world.

  Adam Rind was by nature generous, and his generosity had a practical cast to it. As soon as the weather turned cold he had given Martha a fur hat that kept her head warm all that winter. Everyone wore fur in New Morrock but nobody had a hat as handsome as hers, for it came from a creature with a pelt of shining, flawless whiteness. When she put on her white fur hat, stitched by Adam’s own hand, she felt like the Empress of all the Russias, so rich and thick and soft was that fur.

  The next day was Sunday, and Martha went to church with the family and she wore her white fur hat. It was ill-suited to her greatcoat of course, which by this time had been patched and darned a hundred times, beaten with a broom like a mule, streaked with salt and faded gray like the shingles on Silas Rind’s house; but clad thus in fur hat and greatcoat, and stout leather boots, and her plump white face framed by the wild wisps and hanks of hair that, do what she might with pins and combs, would never be contained, so eager were those rebel tresses to be free, as it seemed, in this place where liberty the word was never long absent from any pair of lips—thus attired, I say, she tramped down the hill with her cousins as the bell chimed in the steeple, and the gulls screamed about the harbour, and from out of the houses emerged the good people of the town to go to church and pray for the destruction of their enemies. The day was bright and cold, the sky a steady blue, the sea running fast in the harbour below, and the snow still thick on the ground where the feet of men and horses and oxen had not trampled it to slush and mud. Sara—who had since been forgiven for her indiscretion—walked by her side, her arm linked in her cousin’s, this at Martha’s request as she had no wish yet to talk to Adam.

  Ah, the poor lad. It was hard not to feel for him, and I had a great sympathy for what Martha was putting him through. For a day now he had been desperate to secure a moment alone with her and she had not allowed it, keeping herself always out of his reach, even when in the same room as him. And how his eyes burned on her! His sisters were not slow to notice this, but even their delight at such evidence of romantic feeling could not embarrass him, so ardent was he with this news he had had from Sara. But Martha was not ready, she was far from ready, and she kept Sara by her every minute she could, it was the least the girl could do to protect her, having precipitated her into this dilemma at the outset. Sara was as distraught as Adam was! She hated to arouse Martha’s displeasure!

  But after the service Sara promptly disappeared; and Adam was quick to seize his opportunity. As Martha trudged through the slush in her fur hat she heard him come up behind her, and then he was at her side. He gripped her arm and they marched on up the hill together.

  “But is it true,” he said, with a passionate urgency, “what Sara told me?”

  She turned to him. They were close to the house, and she had no doubt they were observed.

  “I cannot talk to you in the public road like this,” she said. “We will meet later and you will know everything.”

  “But where?”

  “I will tell you. Now I must go in.”

  And with that she ran away from him, and the last glimpse she had of his face, as she went into the house, it was alive with longing and hope.

  She had created for herself a brief interval
in which to cast about for some solution but it was in vain, she could see no way out. She would have to allow him to think the child was his, and she would have to marry him. That they should each lose their freedom for a lie—! But for him at least the sacrifice would not appear as such, but rather as the fulfilment of his heart’s desire. Though did it truly not occur to him, I asked myself, that he was not the father?

  I thought not. Had he seen more of the world, had he spent any time in a city—had he grown up in London!—the thought would most certainly have occurred to him; but I believe he did not think the thought, for he was uncorrupted, he was clean; and it was cleanly that he declared his love. They met in the barn later that day. Martha, wrapped in horse blankets, sat shivering in the gloom as Adam paced the floor and made his declaration. Out it came in a great inchoate gush, how Sara had told him the news that had made him the happiest man alive, how he would build her a house when the war was over, and how they would live there in peace and grow rich and old surrounded by their children, and their grandchildren, and more yet in this vein; and when he had finished he stood waiting for her answer. She looked up and told him to sit beside her. She then sank into silence.

  “Martha?” he said at last.