She turned away.
“Will you then?” he said.
With her eyes cast down on the floor of the barn, where a tiny puddle of water had frozen, and by some small miracle escaped the boots and hooves that had trod the barn all day—she nodded her head.
He leaped to his feet and with a tiny splintering sound the ice was crushed into muddy splinters as he lifted her to her feet and enfolded her in his arms, and for a second she felt her own bones going the way of the frozen puddle. He whispered her name half-a-dozen times and then she pulled away, and gazing solemnly into the wild streaming happiness of the boy’s face she asked him only that he say nothing for a few days, and he didn’t care, he would have agreed to anything.
They stayed in the barn a little longer and then she told him how cold she was and he hurried her back across the yard with his coat around her shoulders and into the kitchen and the fire. Everyone looked up as they came in but nobody said a word, and when the younger girls could restrain themselves no longer, and began to whisper and snort, Silas silenced them with a short bark—“Enough!”
24
And so another night in Drogo Hall came to an end. Again I had written through the hours of darkness and now, as I rose from my chair and stretched my stiff limbs, I saw the dawn was already picking at the old stiff curtains. I hauled them back and flung open the windows to admit the damp air of the early morning. My room looked out over the stableyard at the back of the house, out to the fields beyond, and the marsh, where a dank white mist hung low to the ground and obscured the distant prospect. I filled my lungs and leaned on my hands on the sill, and allowed my thoughts for some moments to linger on my uncle William, and his strange ideas about the Revolution, ideas which influenced his attitude to Martha Peake, and created distortions in his narrative that I have only with some difficulty been able to correct.
We had argued again, I am afraid. I believe he provoked me for the sheer sport of it, and I daresay I should have refused to be drawn, but he had a way of introducing into our conversations ideas that inflamed me, that set me raging before I realized what he was doing. Earlier in the night he had remarked that only Britain, alone among the nations of the world, had produced a constitution that guaranteed the individual’s liberty against the power of the state.
I began at once to protest, but he asked me what other country had delivered both liberty and order to so many for so long? Again I began to protest, again he cut me off, saying why did I support an attack on such a nation, merely because a particular set of ministers was corrupt and greedy? Did the Americans truly believe that with their few small communities strung along the Atlantic seaboard, each with its differing interests, they could create a system of government with none of these flaws?
I retorted that this vaunted British liberty of his was more fantasy than fact, and that the bulk of the British people still had no vote to cast in the election of its parliament.
So did I believe, he said, that America, in its system of government, would be perfect? Why should America be the exception to the rule of nations?
Because, I cried, it is her destiny!
At once my uncle fell silent, as did I. Where had this come from? It sounded like Adam Rind, or even Tom Paine. Did I believe it? I suppose I did, for I had said it loud enough. My uncle began to wheeze with happy scorn. Oh, her destiny, he said, his voice dripping with acid sarcasm. Destiny, is it now? Providence smiles upon the earnest smuggler, eh?
Earnest smuggler, I said, returning his sarcasm with equal acidity, was it an earnest smuggler who drove the redcoats back down the road from Concord that day? Was it an earnest smuggler who prevailed at Trenton, at Saratoga, at Yorktown? Who held together at Valley Forge over the course of a bitter cold hard winter when he had no boots, no rum, and no blanket? Who inspired the world with his defiance of the arbitrary power of an empire, who declared his independence at the risk of life and fortune, who forged a republic from a disparate group of colonies with little in common but a taste for liberty—indeed, I cried, who forged a republic which one day—one day!—will lead all the nations of the world as they clamour for those freedoms every American enjoys by natural right? If this, I cried, is America’s inevitable necessity, her predetermined course, if this is her destiny—then yes, I cried, it is!
My uncle was silent once more, his sly filmy eyes darting from my red impassioned features—I had risen to my feet in the course of this outburst, and stood now, breathing heavy, with my back to the fire—and then away. Your sentiment, he said at last, grows hotter, I see, as the history progresses.
And what man of feeling’s would not?
Man of feeling, yes, murmured the old man, as he picked up his little bell and shook it with some violence.
I flung myself into a chair and snorted loudly. Angrily, I examined my fingernails. Simpering Percy appeared, and was put to work with glass and decanter. I excused myself soon after, and as I closed the door I heard from within the room what could only have been the malicious tittering of those two old ruins. It cut me to the quick, thus to be abused behind my back; seething, I stormed off to my room, and there seized up my quill. I composed myself for narrative.
Trapped, said my uncle William, when next we took up the story together, and I described how Adam proposed to Martha in the barn. Silas Rind saw it, he said, he knew all was not as it should be.
Trapped? I said. Trapped? But how could Silas know? Had he glimpsed how Martha swelled beneath her apron? Was it written on her face? She was then in the first bloom of her young womanhood, I said, and her skin, I know, for you have wasted no opportunity of telling me, was envied by English girls, for by great good fortune she had escaped the pox—could he tell it from her skin?
Ah, said my uncle, with a weasel smile, she had a milky skin before she left England, yes, but that milky skin would now be creamy—did she not pore over it, each morning, with her little looking-glass propped on the window-sill, and a strong winter light reflecting off a fresh fall of snow in the night? Did she not examine her face for what it showed the world of this, this—a low cackle here—this wondrous little living being within? Was it not soft and white, her face, translucent almost, and plump with health; her throat delicately veined in blue; and her eyes possessed of a sleepy contentment that belied the anxiety she felt as she endlessly pondered her predicament, as you yourself have so often asserted? And her rebellious red hair, did it not gleam with a lustrous well-being, and all in all, he said—enjoying himself now—did she not give off the look of a well-fed creature in the very thick and marrow of fertility? Eh? No, she looked pregnant, Ambrose, pregnant, for the source and origin of this plump creamy glow of hers was the foetus in utero all snug and complete and growing stronger every day. And if her uncle—said my uncle—did not see it for himself, his brother the doctor would not for a moment imagine Martha Peake to be anything other than what she was, a healthy pregnant girl.
He glared at me triumphant.
But they would assume, would they not, said I, that Martha’s unborn child was Adam’s?
Would they? Though she had conceived the child in England? Had they not the arithmetic for it, these world-shaking smugglers of yours?
The next day Joshua Rind came to the house and settled himself beside the fire in the kitchen with a long white pipe and a tumbler of rum. Martha was at the table scouring pewter, keeping her head down and her eyes on her work. Joshua sighed as he eased his gouty foot onto a stool, and murmured to any who would listen that this was the hardest winter he had endured in his more than forty years, not because it was cold, and his horse made such heavy weather of it when he was called out to a remote farm, and the rivers were impossible to ford, and on and on in this vein—no, it was the hardest winter because they could do little but await the great event that would surely occur in the spring.
Martha looked up startled at these words, thinking only of a great event that would occur to her in the spring—and the doctor caught it, his little eyes spark
ed behind their spectacles, and Martha saw the trick, she saw how he spoke with a double meaning so as to arouse such a reaction in her. He had succeeded. He had stolen a glimpse into her soul. It reminded her of how his fingers had wandered over her body when first he had examined her.
He asked her then was she well, did she require physic of him, and when she told him no, she required nothing of him, he pulled on his pipe and nodded and said no more. They could hear muskets cracking in the woods behind the house, where the militia drilled, and Joshua remarked that Adam had become as good a shot as his father. As Martha bent low over her pewter she could feel the blood come rushing to her cheeks and knew her face was flushed as red as her rebel hair.
That night she was summoned to her uncle’s sanctum. Here was a girl with good broad shoulders and a character as strong and stalwart as any American’s, but what Silas Rind now said to her tested that character to the limit. He told her that Adam had come to him and declared that he loved her, that he wished to marry her, and that she was carrying his child. What did she have to say?
What indeed? Silas sat back in his great chair with his arms folded and contemplated Martha with a small wintry smile that was not without a particle or two of warmth. He asked her did she feel for Adam as he apparently felt for her? Martha had prepared herself for such a question, she had her answer ready. She did not love Adam Rind, not as he loved her, and for that reason alone she would never have married him. But circumstance constrained her now, and she had to think of her unborn child. He must have a father, and she a husband, if their way forward in the New World were not to be blighted from the outset. She had no choice in the matter. Lowering her eyes, and welcoming the rush of blood to her cheeks that came not, as Silas imagined, from modesty and shame, but rather from the effort of deception she was making, she said she did feel as Adam felt.
Silas sat nodding his head, watching her, permitting nothing more than that chill smile to touch his shadowed features. A few seconds passed, an interminable interval of silence it seemed to Martha; and then, as she had seen him do before at such moments, he roused himself suddenly with an exclamation.
“I am pleased,” he cried, sitting forward, setting his hands on his knees and thrusting his head at her in the candlelight, and she saw then that he was smiling broadly.
“If you love him, I welcome you into my family,” he said. “And I will tell you something else, Martha Peake”—he spoke her full name with dry amusement, an indication that he was indeed pleased—“I have been hoping for such a union since first you arrived in this country. You are a strong young woman and we will need you in the days to come. Give us sons, Martha Peake, we need sons.”
She could not look at him when he said this, and down went her head once more, up came the rebel blood.
“Forgive me,” he cried, seeing this, “give us daughters then, if you prefer. So long as they are strong Americans, eh? Come, we will go to the kitchen. Adam is in an agony.”
Adam’s joy knew no bounds, now that he was free to express it. And was it, Martha wondered, as she found herself being warmly embraced by the girls, was it really so little she had won here? She would be the wife of the son of the first man in town, and her child would have a security she had never known; no, nor her father either, who was born a bastard and made a monster. So she began to think she had done well after all. She sat in the firelight with happy Adam beside her, and her uncle standing over her, and everyone wreathed in smiles, and she thought—all will be well.
Only then did it occur to her to look for Joshua Rind; and there he was, outside the family circle, leaning against the wall in the shadows with his arms folded across his chest, watching her with an expression not of delight but of scorn.
Martha was now permitted a brief period of calm, and as though in harmony with her new mood the weather became unseasonably mild. The snow began to melt, and though the winds still blew wet and cold, and the sea lashed the coast with its accustomed ill-humour, and the fire was banked high in the hearth of an evening, something in the morning air, something in the light, suggested if not spring then at least the hint of a possibility of the beginning of the end of winter. And as the old season died, and Martha prepared for her wedding in the spring, she was at last liberated from the necessity of keeping her condition concealed. She showed off her belly to her aunt and her cousins, she allowed herself to be treated with special consideration, to be excused the heavy work, to be fed and rested as one who carried not only the future of the family but also—and this was a reflection of that strange, fraught season—the very future of the country, as though she carried America herself in her womb. But no, it was simply that the child of a patriot, himself the child of a patriot, in the last weeks of the peace had a near-sacred status among the people of the town; and Martha discovered she had become, if not popular, accepted, at least.
Though not by all. A number of women, Purity Clapsaddle and her daughter Ann being foremost among them, remained her adamant antagonists, hating her for her English trickery, as they saw it, in capturing the heart of Adam Rind. They concealed their hatred when they were in Maddy Rind’s kitchen, but Martha was aware, when she was down at the port, of the hissing and muttering that followed her. She paid it no notice. She believed she had a far more dangerous enemy in New Morrock, and that was Joshua Rind.
One day, seeking solitude in which she might unburden herself with no hostile eye upon her, she climbed up onto Black Brock, where she had spent so much time in the fall. A stiff wind was blowing and the sky was gray, but strips and streaks of pale watery sunlight here and there broke through the clouds and for the first time in months it was possible to be outdoors without being chilled or soaked to the bone. Even the character of the Atlantic seemed changed, for a brisk sea was running, dark green with whitecaps, a sea that surely invited the intrepid privateer to make a dash down the coast in defiance of the blockade. But she saw no sail out there on the horizon, and so much watery waste was almost enough to lull her into believing all the world was as desolate and empty, as devoid of passion and conflict as the rolling waters and stately clouds of this North Atlantic seacoast.
Ah, but in the affairs of men a climax was approaching. Shots would soon be fired, blood spilt. That blustery afternoon when Martha gazed out to sea from the top of Black Brock was the last day of February 1775.
She would have no more such expeditions, for soon she found it difficult to make her way up and down the steep paths onto the flat places atop the cliffs and headlands. So she walked on the seashore, close to the chill salt Atlantic breakers as they came flooding and frothing across the black sand and the pebbles, to be then sucked back into the ocean’s belly leaving flotsam and bladderwrack and great bulbed tendrils of seaweed beached and shining damply in their wake, the froth blinking on the sand until the next wave came hissing in. The sound of it too, and the wind catching at her skirt and her hair, and the gulls wheeling and screaming about her—somewhere deep in her body she heard a call which answered the sea, it came from the small sea she carried within her own body, in which was floated her own precious cargo, smuggled into America under the very eyes of the authorities!—such whims and follies would often slip into her mind and briefly distract her from the planning, the reasoning, the worrying and watching which were the occupations she was accustomed to practise, treading her parlous path among the colonists even as they prepared to rush blazing down the high road to liberty. That, or extinction.
Her breasts and belly astonished her daily now. Her child moved and kicked inside her, a sensation that filled her with a joy she could not compare to any experience she had known before. Maddy Rind and the other women looked after her with brisk skill, and whatever misgivings any of them had about her character, these were set aside as they looked to the business of ensuring the health of the little American in her womb. Martha was happy to submit to their ministrations and instructions. These women had seen many an infant safe into the world, and she knew they would do no l
ess for hers.
Soon the road to Boston was open once more and men on horseback set out on the hundred-mile journey every day or so. The movement of shipping remained dangerous, and reports came in of vessels searched and impounded by British ships. More men were impressed into the British navy straight off American fishing boats, this yet another outrage to add to the daily-lengthening list.
Martha saw the first of many departures when a group of Cape Morrock men marched off from the dock one morning. In the fighting to come, which would often demand of the patriot army that they cross bodies of water under cover of darkness so as to avoid confrontation with the British, or engage the British while preserving the element of surprise, the seamanship of men from Cape Morrock and elsewhere on the Rum Coast would more than once be the saving of the Continental Army.
How it would begin, none of them could know. But that it would come soon, nobody was in any doubt at all. There was talk now that the militia would be called up soon and brought close to Boston so as to join there with a larger force; and a new idea began to dominate all talk in the Rind kitchen, that the British would attempt to destroy New England at the earliest opportunity, perhaps this very spring, for this was where the loudest of rebel voices were to be heard. Put down New England and the other colonies would soon come into line, this must be the British plan, and to do that, to cut New England off from the rest of the country, control of the Hudson River was vital. If the British held the Hudson the country would be cut into two parts, which they could then subdue one after the other at their leisure. They already controlled the Atlantic coast. They must not be allowed to control the Hudson also. If they did, the people of New England would be caught in a vise and surely crushed.
25
I was pacing about my uncle’s room while Percy fussed with the old man’s blanket, mulling the plight of the Americans—caught in a vise, and surely crushed!—when I found myself standing at the fireplace absently gazing at the painting of Harry Peake. It was not the first time I had stared up into those harrowed features, but now a question arose in my mind, and I did not understand why it had not occurred to me before. The man in the picture had a straight back. Behind me the usual clucking and muttering went on, and as I turned to ask the question my uncle gave out a high-pitched yelp of irritation as Percy tightened his cravat, and flapped at him like an angry goose. I turned back to the painting; and saw what I had overlooked before, that amid the leafy excesses of its gilt frame a tiny brass nameplate was screwed into the woodwork.
Martha Peake Page 22
