Martha Peake

by Patrick Mcgrath

  After the funeral I returned to the house with my uncle. He had put it about that Harry Peake, after a short illness, had succumbed at last, in the weakness of age, to the marsh fever. Nor would Percy reveal the truth of the matter. The two old men continued deeply saddened by the tragedy, but in their sadness there was no anger directed toward me, nor even blame; they only wished that Harry had followed William’s instruction, that he was not to show himself to me until Martha’s story was at an end. I asked my uncle why he had given Harry this instruction, and he told me that if he were to answer that question he would have to tell me something of the years Harry had spent in Drogo Hall.

  “Then tell me,” said I, “for my presence is not required elsewhere.”

  So my uncle began once more to talk, and although everything was changed now, it was as though this were a night like those which had preceded it, when we sat by the fire in his panelled study, the trolley clinking and clanking as Percy pushed it over to my uncle’s elbow, and from the wall above the mantelpiece the proud features of Harry Peake gazed out across the wild windswept moors of his youth.

  It was another picture of Harry Peake that William painted for me that night, and as he talked so did my own grief, and the remorse that came hard upon it, rise in waves within me, and I suffered the first and fiercest of the pangs that would harrow me in the months to come, indeed that harrow me to this very day. He described to me how they cleaned Harry up, Drogo and himself, how they burned his filthy rags of clothing, then bathed him, and shaved him, and cut his fingernails. They gave him new clothes, and hot food, and within a day he was already beginning to rally. Although his mind was still alienated, said my uncle, and he had no proper grasp of his own history or identity.

  I was moved by this. The simple kindness of those two men, to a ragged lunatic in his last extremity—and Percy too, my uncle murmured, do not forget Percy, he it was who followed Harry in his mad wanderings, he who slowly won his trust and brought him in; Harry would doubtless have perished, but for Percy’s vigilance. Percy’s vigilance!—I was seeing my uncle’s servant in a new light, as I was seeing everything in a new light. Oh, large structures were collapsing in my mind, but new structures were rising to take their place.

  It was fortunate, said William, when we had refreshed ourselves, that Lord Drogo had recently started upon a course of study in the diseases of the mind, realizing, as no other anatomist of his day would do, that the mental faculty was in principle no different from the other faculties of the human integral, and no less subject to disorder; and that the investigation of such disorder was the royal road to an understanding of the structure and function of the mind.

  He became a student of madness?

  Among his many and various scientific pursuits, yes. And he undertook to effect a cure for Harry’s madness, Harry’s bodily ailments disappearing rapidly when he began to eat again, and had excreted the last of the gin that was in him. Lord Drogo believed that Harry’s powers of mind were no less formidable than those of his body, and that they had only to be roused to their former vitality for the madness to dissipate like so much smoke in a closed room, after the windows are opened.

  So he walked with Harry, and they talked, hour after hour they talked. After breakfast William would see them go off across the marsh together, and a strange sight they were too, Harry huge and bent, and still thin as a stick, Lord Drogo marching beside him, short and compact, and swinging a cane, each man in cloak and hat, two natural philosophers taking to the countryside. Only it was not natural philosophy they discussed, it was the wild imaginings of Harry’s disordered mind, and these Lord Drogo listened to, and gently questioned, and day by day it became more apparent that Harry was recapturing his reason, which for so long had been fugitive.

  I listened in rapt silence to these wonders.

  In the fullness of time, said my uncle, Harry came to understand all that had transpired since the day he first walked away from Drogo Hall, and returned across the marsh to London with Lord Drogo’s coin clinking in his pocket, and gave himself over to the gin. Oh, and the suffering he then endured! Harry Peake, said my uncle, had a large tumultuary heart, and his horror at his own actions knew no moderation. We had to watch him closely during this time, he said, for fear he would do harm to himself. Percy never slept, he was Harry’s very shadow, for when Harry understood what he had done to his beloved Martha, how he had driven her from him with the violence of his suspicions, and then, at the last, attacked and ravished her in the graveyard—he wept like a child, he wept all one long night and all of the following day; and when his tears were dry he demanded the means to take ship for America, so that he could find Martha and make his peace with her; and he was cast into a deeper despair on learning that we were at war with the colonies, and that such a journey was impossible.

  “Then I will join the king’s army,” cried Harry, “and once on American soil, I will desert the army and look for my lost girl.”

  And he fully intended to do it.

  But it was not to be. Lord Drogo persuaded Harry to wait until the hostilities had come to an end, which it was thought at the time would be a matter of months only, the Americans being regarded as poor soldiers, lacking in organization, money, materials of war, courage adequate to their purpose, and the will to persevere. Drogo was of course wrong in his estimate of the colonists’ determination to be free, but he was not alone in this; and by the time they understood their mistake, said William, it was already too late, for news had come of Martha’s death, and Harry sank into a more bleak despair than any they had yet seen.

  Again I was seized up by my uncle’s narrative, and again I had to be patient to know more; for soon after midnight he announced that the events of the past forty-eight hours had exhausted him, and he could talk no more. I did not protest, I made no attempt to detain him, I saw clearly the exhaustion in his pale drawn features; and having shaken his little bell, he went off to bed with the faithful Percy Clyte—whom I had so maligned in my imagination!—leaving me once more to pace the floor and ponder all he had told me.

  The years passed, he said, when next we met, and Harry, having once more, and this time successfully, renounced all desire for strong drink, regained his full former powers of mind. He and Lord Drogo became boon companions, and until his lordship’s death they would meet each evening for dinner, and talk late into the night about their work; Lord Drogo being by this time well-embarked upon his researches into the diseases of the mind, while Harry had resumed his “Ballad of Joseph Tresilian.” Martha’s death was no longer for Harry the source of such acute distress as once it had been, the pain having mellowed, rather, to a gentle sorrow which never left him, and which aroused in all who met him sentiments of pity and affection.

  He spoke often and wistfully of the son he had never met, but by this time he had become so rooted in Drogo Hall that he would never attempt the journey to the United States; unsure, also, of the reception he could expect from Harry Rind Peake, should he be able to find him.

  Harry Rind Peake. As I run my eye over these pages today I am aware there is much to tell about that American original; but this is not the place, nor I the one to tell it. For I know nothing of Harry Rind Peake, and I prefer to know nothing, and would have him, rather, as I imagine him, bearing old Harry’s spine. I never spoke to my uncle of my conviction that little Harry’s spine was deformed, nor of the joy I imagined Martha taking in this sign of a connection between the father she had left behind in England, and the son she had borne him in America; and certainly, I have no proof of it, no evidence with which to support my conviction. But I have something of far greater value. I have imagination. I have poetic intuition. I have the weight of symbolic necessity bearing down upon me. All of which tells me that Harry Peake’s great back, the mark both of his shame and of his glory, was indeed copied in the body of his son. And to think of that giant constitution, in all its magnificent imperfection, being replicated in the new America—now that is sublimity inca
rnate.

  So Harry Rind Peake is another story, and one day I might tell it, if I am strong enough, which I doubt.

  And so we fetched up at my own arrival in Drogo Hall, a mere fortnight earlier, that fortnight seeming now an age. Harry by this time was an old man, of course—they were all old men—and contented himself sitting on a bench in the village and talking to whoever had the time to pass an idle hour with him. He had a particular fondness for children, and they seemed strangely drawn to the big humped wreckage who sat in the shade of an ancient oak, leaning on his stick, now and then producing from a pocket of his capacious coat an apple fresh picked in the orchards of Drogo Hall.

  Into this placid household I had come, then, summoned by my uncle, who wished to introduce me to Harry, first, he said, by way of telling me the man’s history, so that when he, William, died—and he knew, he said, that his time was drawing near—I would sustain the old poet in Drogo Hall, and not permit him to be disturbed in the westering of his days.

  And so he had embarked upon the narrative; and I had questioned it, and doubted it, and reached my own wild conclusions about it; and Harry, aware of my presence in the house, and of my conversations each night with my uncle, had waited in an agony of impatience until the story was told, and he could meet this young man who was responding with such passionate sympathy to the events of his own early life, and to the later adventures of his daughter.

  But alas, said William, poor Harry could not wait. He wanted to visit you at night, and tell you his own account of the story, which he did not trust me to narrate, for I had witnessed so little of it at first hand. He followed you down to the cellars when you went in search of his bones. You did indeed faint, dear boy; and it was in the arms of Harry Peake that you were carried back to your chamber that night, and set down with infinite tenderness upon your bed.

  At this I could restrain myself no longer, and burst forth in a flood of hot tears, the idea that Harry himself had lifted me like a child in his strong arms and carried me up from the cellars, and brought me safe to my own bed—it was too much for me, and I wept freely for some minutes. When I was finished I lifted my head and saw my uncle gazing at me in the firelight, his sad old eyes gleaming with a compassionate understanding, and at last I was able to tell him what I had intended to, the night I waited for Drogo to come to my room. I told him I loved him.

  He nodded for some moments, he sighed, he reached for his little bell.

  “It is over, Ambrose,” he said, “and I am deathly tired.”

  45

  My uncle was almost done. He was exhausted, exhausted by the story he had told me, exhausted by the tragedy of Harry Peake’s death, exhausted by life itself; and if, when first I came to Drogo Hall it appeared that he was not long for this world, he was closer than ever now to his end. I saw him reach for his bell, but I stayed his hand, and begged him to answer one question. Then I would never ask him to talk of these things again.

  His old eyes rested briefly on me. He was too weak now to do anything but acquiesce, he did not have it in him to struggle with me anymore. Very well, he said; and so I asked him, did it come out as Silas Rind predicted it would, did Martha Peake, through her legend, indeed save the Revolution?

  The old man cocked his head to one side, he pursed his lips and expelled air, he gave a little shrug. It was late, a storm was blowing up out on the marsh, and gusts of wind came sweeping down the chimney and fanned the fire into brief surges of flame. Did she save the Revolution? Could any one person be said to have saved the Revolution? Another shrug. But by 1777, he said, the war was going badly for the Americans. The Year of the Gibbet, they called it—too many defeats, too many hangings, too much death. They were realizing the immensity of their presumption in challenging the armies of the British Empire, and many were losing faith, and drifting away, and those voices calling for a reconciliation with the crown were growing louder.

  But I will tell you this, he said. In the years of struggle that followed Martha’s death, as Washington led his ragged army the length of the island of Manhattan, and into New Jersey, and on into Pennsylvania, many of them without boots, without blankets, without anything but loyalty to their leader and faith in the cause, there were two items in every patriot soldier’s pack that did more to keep him alive and marching than any pair of boots.

  And what two items were those?

  The first, said William, would be a dog-eared copy of Common Sense, which the soldiers read to one another over their campfires each night, many indeed having committed long passages to memory. And when their spirits faltered, when they lost the will to go on, even as they suffered through that bitterly cruel winter at Valley Forge, it was Tom Paine who kept alive their determination to drive the British from their shores and never again live under the dead hand of tyranny.

  And the second item?

  Ah, the second.

  The old man smiled a soft sad smile I had never seen on his withered lips before. That would be a much-folded piece of paper, perhaps tucked into the pages of Mr. Paine’s pamphlet, an engraving which depicted Martha Peake on the wharf in New Morrock that famous day. For if Common Sense spoke to their minds, Martha spoke to their hearts. She came to represent for every patriot soldier the unspoken promise he had made to his country. Seeing her standing at the end of the wharf, a musket at her shoulder, as the hated redcoats fired on her, they felt the courage rise in them, they felt the compulsion to honor the sacrifice she had made. And in all the campaigns to come, no man ever forgot what Martha Peake had done for her country, nor did he forget his resolve to do no less. So of all the heroines of the Revolution—and to my astonishment my uncle seemed to know the story of every single one—Molly Pitcher, and Dicey Langston, Deborah Sampson and Experience Bozarth, and of course the cunning Mrs. Murray of New York—in all this pantheon of heroic women, Martha Peake’s fame burned the brightest.

  Or so, at any rate—and here my uncle turned to me with a sly grin—I have been told.

  A brief cackle, and then he fell silent. Somewhere in the house a shutter slammed against a wall, and a great gust of rain was flung at the window. His eyes closed, his breathing became slow and laboured. I allowed him a minute to compose himself. At last he opened his eyes, and his trembling fingers once more reached for his little bell.

  46

  Ah, but time ruins everything. All this was written long ago, and my memories of the strange few days I spent here with my uncle William have begun to fade and decay. The sense of a flowing continuum is lost, certain incidents emerge like mountain peaks to dominate the prospect, while others sink into glades of forgetfulness, and end their days in a dismal swamp of oblivion. I am the master of Drogo Hall now, and as I look back over the pages I wrote during those fraught days which culminated in Harry Peake’s death I wonder that I am still sane. For at times, now, I glimpse a past that is no more than a catalogue of sacrifice and abomination and heroism and resolve and victory, and sunk in shadow are the lies and muddles and myriad random workings of chance in the thing, and to bring it all together in one coherent whole—why, the human mind is not up to it! And I am convinced that history can unhinge the brain, that a man may be driven mad by history—!

  No, it is an effort to remember what actually happened, and I must struggle with the inclinations of my own heart lest I forget the truth. What is the truth? The truth is, that in death Martha Peake grew to a stature she never knew in life. The truth is, that the impact she had on her country of adoption, the America to which she came in the very birth pangs of its nationhood—that impact cannot be measured. But it could be argued that with her sacrifice Martha Peake did save the Revolution, and with it the republic.

  I choose to believe it; and I revere her memory accordingly. Indeed, I have made her chamber my own, and often sit, as she once sat, in the deep window alcove, and gaze out over the marsh to the domes and steeples of the great toad smoking and stinking in the distance, I mean London. I watch the sun go down, I watch darkness fall,
the lamps are lit, old Percy, faithful Percy, eternal Percy comes in with my tray and my medicines, and I sit at my table with my back to the fire and spread out my books and papers before me. The hours drift by, and close to dawn I retire to bed, and lie where Martha lay, beneath the high carved headboard where snakes and lizards and other strange creatures sport amid a vegetation that never flourished in English soil.

  But before I slip into a restless doze, which is all I know of sleep these days, I gaze at the painting of Martha which hung once on her father’s wall, and now is mine. And I see again those proud features, executed in the manner of a northern master, with terra rossa for the half-tones, and the underpainting in white lead—and her hair, of course, her glorious red hair—and I imagine her in this very room, her heart in a tumult of dread, and grief, and rage, and determination, as she prepares to take ship for America, and there meet her destiny.

  It is all I have left of her. And so I haunt the chambers and passages of Drogo Hall, counting the days until I can sink into darkness with the others. And if Harry’s spirit still wanders the Lambeth Marsh, as I believe it does, for I hear him at times when the wind is up, and the rain hammers at the windows, and the wild dogs howl—then I know that Martha rises from the Old Burying Ground, and ascends the great headlands of the cape, whence her spirit flies out to him across the North Atlantic, and they are, at last, and forever, as one—ha!