Martha Peake Page 12

  My uncle went to the west wing early the next morning and told Martha all that had happened. She at once recognized that the risk to herself was if anything greater than it had been before.

  “You have no relation, I suppose, who could shelter you? Somewhere your father could not find you?” said William, after he and Martha had worried at this question for several minutes.

  Martha thought then of her brothers and sisters, and of the rest of her family in Cornwall. At times she remembered them as though she had parted from them but the day before, and was filled with a wistful longing to see them again. But then she would not think of them for months at a time. She would not go to them now. Her father would soon find her if she did.

  “My mother had an older sister,” she said doubtfully, “Maddy Foy—”

  “And where, pray,” said my uncle, “does that good woman reside?”

  13

  Hard upon the big winds the night of Harry Peake’s visit to Drogo Hall, said my uncle—the hour was late, still we talked on, each in his own way intent upon the outcome of the thing—came the first bad weather of the autumn. The sky was filled with large dark clouds that hung low overhead and roiled and galloped about in the wind before unleashing their waters in furious gusting storms that hammered the house without mercy, exposed as it was out there on the marsh. But though the house was exposed, said my uncle, isolated it was not, oh no; and despite the fact that the road across the marsh was reduced to a quagmire, and whole tracts of the Lambeth Marsh were under water, and the roofs of the old parts of Drogo Hall admitted the rain in a hundred places, still an unending stream of visitors made their way out there, seemingly drawn by one thing alone, and that was the genius of Francis Drogo.

  They came from all over the country, and beyond. Martha often heard, as she crept about the house, for she had soon grown impatient, said my uncle, of her confinement, the broad incomprehensible gutturals of Scotsmen, and the lilt and trill of the Dublin men, all of whom, and many more besides, came to learn from his lordship. Then there was Cyrus Hamble, the American, a man remarkable for the plainness of his dress and, as Martha heard from her friends in the kitchen, his refusal to take strong drink. But for the most part the visitors were English doctors: dressed in somber, heavy clothes, bewigged (though not elegantly so), equipped with silver-topped canes and narrow watchful eyes, and for the most part sober, they greeted one another in the entrance hall with sly formality, and observed with a scrupulous punctilio those delicate calibrations of rank and status so vital to the Englishman’s sense of propriety. They then filed into the Theatre of Anatomy and listened with close attention as the great man of medicine cut up another poor devil who but an hour or two previous had worn King George’s rope before being brought away by Clyte.

  Drogo Hall was a house often permeated by strange smells. Later, in America, when the whiff of an unfamiliar nostrum or an exotic specific reached her nose, Martha was affected with all the strangeness and unhappiness of those dark days after she lost her father. But in Drogo Hall her inclination on detecting some rank incomprehensible odour, as she crept along an unfamiliar corridor, was to follow it to its source; which was not easy, rank incomprehensible odours being as a rule closely attended at source by adults.

  On one occasion she penetrated from the old west wing into the main body of the house, where her nostrils were all at once assailed with a most peculiar smell, one that she associated with overripe fruit; and tracking it with no little curiosity, she suddenly found herself at the head of the main staircase, a sweeping thing of gray stone which descended to the entrance hall with its vast fireplace, its hanging arms and armour, its flagged floor on which the heels of a man’s boots could ring with a satisfying solidity. She crouched behind the balustrade, from which concealed position she peered down into the hall and identified the source of the horrid smell.

  At the back of the hall a pair of tall doors stood slightly ajar beneath a shallow stone arch, and from beyond came a single voice, oddly amplified, and she knew the voice to be Lord Drogo’s. Down the sweep of stone stairs she came. This was perilous now, for she had no place to hide herself should anyone appear. From the bottom of the stairs she must cross the hall to reach the tall doors out of which emanated both Lord Drogo’s voice and the smell.

  Without a second’s hesitation Martha ran across the flagged stone floor and slid between the doors, so that she was neither in the hall nor in the room beyond, but in the shadow, rather, of the doors that stood ajar.

  Ah, Drogo! In my mind’s eye I can see him now, as Martha saw him that day so long ago—not as he was at the end, no, but as he was then, when he was in full possession of all his diabolical powers! Physically he was unremarkable: not a tall man, but built firm and compact, with small hands, a large domed skull, and hair cropped to a gray-flecked stubble. A nose hooked and arched in the Imperial Roman manner, a prominent chin, an air of distinct forbidding authority even when, as now, he is without a wig or finery of any kind, and wearing a black leather apron, smeared and stained with the proud excrementa of a thousand operations, strapped on over a white shirt open at the throat with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows. There he stands in the well of a crowded semicircular room of steeply tiered seats with a gallery above, preparing to lecture to the eminent men of medicine of his day.

  This is Lord Drogo’s Theatre of Anatomy. As he stands there he does not meet the forty pair of eyes gazing down upon him with no little anticipation. This is a man acknowledged as one of the great surgeon-anatomists then at work in London, a man at ease in the company of Cheselden, Smellie, Pott, the Hunters—the giants. And his reputation he holds so dear that his every public appearance is a drama in which he must play his role to the hilt, and that role is—the great man of medicine!

  Never married, and with no taint of scandal attaching, he possessed a capacity for hard work that was said to be extraordinary. And his curiosity toward all forms of life was legendary: he could be found at his table at four o’clock every morning, they said, already hard at it dissecting, for instance, a beetle, for no other reason than to acquire knowledge of the creature’s anatomy. The fire in his eyes, his restless hands, his quick temper, the quickness of all his movements—he was in such haste—he had such greed—to know all that could be known, ignorance was to him anathema and he must overcome it through relentless application of reason to observed fact, and he disdained all that smacked of metaphysics.

  Though he did not leave a book. He left a museum, but not a book. He collected abnormalities. He claimed that such phenomena, by displaying wrong action in a part, could illustrate normal function. Hence his interest in Harry Peake. Interest, I say—he pursued that man, dogged him to his death, ay, to his death, and beyond—!

  So this is the man who stands now behind the table in the well of his crowded Theatre of Anatomy, and gazes down at a corpse fresh from Tyburn Field, courtesy of course of Clyte. He taps his knuckles on the table and the room falls silent. Without a word to his audience he touches the dead man’s belly. He then brings his face down close to the body. He sniffs the length of it, small precise twitches of that hawk’s beak of a nose. He then lays his ear upon the chest. He listens. As he listens he places a fingertip on the head of the penis. He remains in this curious position for several moments.

  At last the great man of medicine lifts his head, and as he rakes the amphitheatre with a fierce stare that has several doctors shifting uneasily and turning their faces aside—Francis Drogo has friends here but he also has enemies, he knows who they are and they know he knows—he touches his fingertip to his lips, and registers the taste with a comical pucker.

  “Gentlemen,” he says.

  A pause. Utter silence. The voice is cultivated. Men strain to hear him.

  “Let us cut this poor fellow open. Let us”—he pauses, he eyes the assembled doctors—“see what he is made of.”

  With that he stretches a hand, palm open, toward my uncle William—who has been standing to
one side all the while—and William gives him the knife. God help him if it is not sharp as Old Scratch himself!

  It seemed he would make the first cut now. But he paused, even as the tip of the knife sat snug in the notch in the dead man’s sternum. Again he looked up at his audience.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “I beg your leave. You came to see a man cut open, and cut open he shall be, and his every organ inspected as to its size, shape, situation and structure. Then we shall have the facts. But perhaps we are already in possession of facts relating to this man, and it is those facts we first should examine.”

  There was some murmuring among the medical men. What new tack was this? These perorations of Lord Drogo were warmly anticipated by those who loved him. Others suffered silent resentment. Drogo put down his knife and examined the cadaver.

  “We have lividity and swelling of the face. The eyelids are swollen and blue. The eyes themselves, gentlemen, are remarkable. They are red, and they protrude from their cavities. There is a bloody froth at the lips. The fists are clenched. There has been expulsion of faeces and urine. And one thing we would be foolish to overlook. There is a deep wound to the neck extending from below the left ear and under the chin. So deep is this wound that the vertebrae are exposed.”

  Lord Drogo delicately peeled back the torn flesh and probed the wound with his fingers. Again there was some sniffing.

  “Is it not a fact that a month ago this man rode a horse? I am aware that the horse was not his own, but we are not here to dissect his morals. That is the prerogative of a power superior even to that of Surgeons’ Hall.”

  Uneasy laughter here; Drogo was indulging his famously sardonic sense of humour. Why did he not cut? He had set down the knife and was leaning on the table on his palms and gazing frankly at his audience.

  “A month ago he rode a horse. A week ago he entertained a certain lady in Newgate Gaol.”

  All eyes shifted to the cadaver’s genitalia.

  “Was the lady sound?” said Drogo, laying a hand upon the private parts, not so private now. “We shall see. But the point is, gentlemen, that he showed no sign of any sickness to suggest that within the week he would be—as we see him now.”

  He lifted his hand and there was a brief murmur as every doctor in the Theatre of Anatomy contemplated the malodorous body on the table, whose pallor had assumed a distinct tinge of green.

  “I employ a sensitive instrument, gentlemen.” He held up his hand, palm outwards. He laid it on the dead man’s forehead. He said: “Cold.”

  He stood nodding at his audience, who now shuffled with some discomfort, suspecting themselves mocked.

  “Cold. Gentlemen, this man has lost his vital heat. The loss of vital heat can have only one consequence.”

  More nodding, more shuffling. Then a cane was tapped smartly on the floor and a voice from high in the amphitheatre, up in the gallery, an amused voice, a voice quite as cultivated as Drogo’s, said: “Come, my lord, do not tease us. Tell us what you mean to say.”

  “Ah. Mr. Eliot. You would have my meaning, would you? Well, I tell you, sir: the man is dead.”

  Laughter here.

  “The fact is self-evident, my lord.”

  “And the cause of death? That too?”

  “He’s had his neck broke at Tyburn Tree.”

  “But he has lost his vital heat. Now blood, surely, is responsible for the body’s natural heat. Deprive a body of circulation and the external parts become cold. Ergo, the man is dead. What tree, sir?”

  “You jest too subtle for me, my lord.”

  “I only say, that to speak of a principle of vitality is a nonsense, when a fact is before us. He is cold. His neck is torn. So it is safe to infer that he has been hanged, and being hanged, asphyxiated. I reason it thus, from the use of these instruments”—he touched his eyes—“these”—he lifted his hands—“I have employed this”—his nose—“these”—his ears—“I have even used this”—he stuck out his tongue. “Gentlemen, there are no vital principles here. The evidence of our senses, this is enough. The body is cold. It is dead. There is a severe wound to the neck. Modest things, gentlemen. Make no assumption. Question all theory. Above all, be skeptical.”

  The expression on the faces of a number of men present suggested that this last advice had been heeded already.

  “I am told that this man was sprightly over his last few days of life, but given to periods of anxious introspection. I am told he was prone to outbursts of sudden anger. No doubt a superfluity of the cold wet humor. Too much black bile discharging from the spleen. Best stick a clyster up his arsehole.”

  This last was said with such ponderous gravity that the entire room roared, even those from whose lips the same words might have slipped easily but the day before. Many now warmed to Lord Drogo’s theme, for it was at last becoming clear where he steered them.

  “I should have liked to see his urine.”

  The laughter is uneasy this time. These doctors take their urine seriously.

  “Nonsense! The man was to be hanged and he knew it. This much we know. This is his history. This we remember, but nothing more, as we enter the chambers and alcoves”—here growing ironical once more—“of the human mansion. So let us examine the organs within. Let us know their design, and infer their function. For if they exist in Nature, they must have both design”—and here he picked up the knife once more—“and function.”

  And thus the meagre philosophy of the great anatomist. No vital heat indeed! What then of passion? What of the flaming heart, le coeur flamboyant?

  Martha stood in the shadow of the doorway of the Theatre of Anatomy, watching Lord Drogo as he set the knife in the notch at the base of the dead man’s chest. She saw the blade sink into the flesh. She saw the blood well up and spill sluggish across the pallid skin. And then, behind her, she heard a noise. She turned. Squatting by the front door like a grotesquely embellished umbrella stand, and watching her with what she at once recognized as a kind of gloating contempt—it was, of course, Clyte. He lifted his hands from his knees and opened them wide, as though to say: what now?

  Then he grinned at her, and she knew, too, what that grin expressed: lechery. Clyte was a lecher and Martha was the object of his lechery. Without taking her eyes off him for a second she boldly crossed the hall to the staircase, and still with her eyes fixed on the foul creature, who squatted there still, and still displayed his ghastly yellowing incisors, like the rabid runt of a sick vixen’s litter—she darted up the stairs, not pausing until she reached the gallery at the top. There she turned again, and he was gone.

  Her composure deserted her. She ran back to the west wing in a panic, pausing only when she reached her door, and there brought herself under control.

  She sat that night in the window, watching the marsh in the moonlight, alert to movement in the yard below; but there was none. She was confused and frightened by what she had seen that day, and she had no one to whom she could confide her feelings. Would God protect her? Doubtful. Could my uncle William? Doubtful also, if the suspicion was aroused in her, as it had certainly been aroused in me, that her father was bound for the dissecting table in Lord Drogo’s Theatre of Anatomy, and that her own presence in Drogo Hall would be instrumental in bringing about that abomination.

  14

  I had grown stronger under the care of my uncle, but he advised me to stay in bed a few days longer; these marsh fevers, he said, had a way of turning putrid unless a proper term of convalescence was observed. So I lay abed, and despite some aching in my joints, and a persistent headache, and the occasional bout of delirium, enjoyed a welcome respite from my duties in town. I perused volumes of history and literature from the library downstairs, and undertook some light correspondence. And late every afternoon, as the light thickened over the marsh outside my window, there came a knock on the door, and then in came the mothlike Percy, wheeling a clanking contraption of metal and wood which contained various bottles and glasses, pipes and jars, that were ade
quate to my needs and, more important, those of my uncle, during the hours of narrative that were to follow. Candles were lit, fresh coal was laid on the fire, and when all was in readiness—my uncle’s chair must be positioned just so, lest he strain his eyes with an excess of gloom, or take a chill from being placed at too great a distance from the fire—Percy rang a small silver bell and a few minutes later in shuffled the old man in his tasselled skullcap and velvet slippers, and I would lie back into my pillows as his story once more rolled over my skeptic ear.

  I now knew that plans had been laid for Martha’s departure. One night William spoke to her about what was to happen.

  “You cannot stay here,” he said. “He is sure to find you. Lord Drogo encourages him to visit again.”

  Martha was silent. She could not but feel that events had slipped beyond her control, and her desperation, I believe, was fuelled by wild thoughts that came to her as she sat watching the marsh by night, and filled her with forebodings about the man who sheltered her.

  “He knows you are here,” whispered my uncle. “You must get far, far away from here, somewhere he will never follow you.”

  Martha said nothing.

  “You are not safe here,” he hissed, insistent, “he has said he will murder you, you have heard it yourself. He came here to find you, and but for me he would have done.”

  Still she said nothing. She would not look at him. But at last, unable any longer to hold her tongue, and my uncle still insisting that she agree with him, she told him she did not believe that her father intended to murder anybody. Nor did she intend to let anyone murder him!—though whether she said this I do not know.