Martha Peake Read online

  16

  It was another of those dismal and overcast afternoons of which they had so many that autumn; and having used the trellis at the far end of the walled garden to get out into the fields, she skirted round the back of Drogo Hall, using what cover she found out there. She had no idea what the other wing looked like, beyond her memory of the church with the thin steeple standing off to the right as you approached the house on the London road, and which connected it in both body and spirit to the village clustered about its walls.

  So she made a wide arc out behind the house, where the land was elevated and dry, and scattered with stones and boulders, and covered in short coarse grass on which Lord Drogo’s sheep grazed, their droppings heaped in piles like the cannonballs of some Lilliputian artillery. Cold winds came sweeping over those pastures and cut her to the bone, and there was little more than a crumbling stone wall to break their force. Martha kept low behind the wall until she was well off to the far side where the land began to climb, gently at first and then more steeply, the slope heavily wooded with fir and ash. Once in the shelter of the trees she could move more quickly, and soon she had climbed far enough up the hill that she could pause and survey the world spread below her.

  She had a clear view of the house, the village, and the marsh; London was but a faint gray smoky mass in the distance. She saw the roofs of Drogo Hall, the shallow slope of roof of the new house with its white balustrade, and around it the steep-pitched gables of the older adjoining structures, moss between the slates, chimneys rising in clusters, fine octagonal stacks with lancet openings, all patterned, moulded, gargoyled even, and in strange contrast to the austere lines of the new white building rising among them. The church, too, from this fresh point of vantage, was a thing of simple, soaring grace, and older, in turn, than the house which it served. And there behind it, tucked away, hidden between the church itself and the hillside on which Martha now sat, was the graveyard.

  The grass was high between the cracked and fallen stones, and the wall surrounding it was six foot high and overhung on the church side by the boughs of great trees. There was a gate in the wall, and Martha at once realized that here was a place close to Drogo Hall which nobody visited, the high grass was ample indication of that. It was protected by a wall and accessible through a gate on the wooded side. She made her way back down the slope to the gate, which she was able to push open easily, and then for an hour she wandered among the tombstones and read their inscriptions, most of which however had faded with time, now nothing more than faint smudged marks on old pocked stone. Although there was one structure which rose from the high grass at the far end of the graveyard, and seemed to dominate among these ancient tombs, and that, of course, was the Vault of the Drogoes.

  Martha left the graveyard as dusk was coming on, and in the thickening light she returned the way she had come, through the trees and then across the pasture at the back of the house. Approaching the walled garden she heard a brief sharp whistle from over by the elms where she had met Harry that first night. It was him; he was there; and she ran to him and flung her arms about him where he stood beneath a tree, just as she had first seen him from her window. He was not sober. He was fuddled, and gentle, and did little but cradle his bottle and grin at her. Breathlessly she told him of her discovery of the graveyard, and he nodded happily, and said he knew the place, and she told him she would be there tomorrow in the afternoon. More happy nodding, another hug, another endearment, and she had to leave him there, and make her way, with many a backward glance, across the field to the walled garden; and when, some minutes later, she reached her room, she climbed at once into the window alcove and peered out.

  Did she see him? In the late twilight she could not be sure. Where did he go? Where did he sleep? How did he eat? What did he do for money for gin? That poor, shambling, benighted fellow, she was wracked with anguish at the thought of him shuffling about the streets of London with nobody to protect or succour him. And in her anguish there was guilt. Despite everything, she knew she could help him, but she did not know how.

  The next day the weather was unchanged, and having done her chores she left William poring over the diaries of a gentleman-planter from Virginia, and his account of that colony’s pestilential swamps, and retraced her steps of yesterday afternoon. Oh, and he was there, he was there, sitting with his back against a gravestone and smoking a white clay pipe with a broken stem. She sat down beside him and they talked, and as they talked they ate, for she had smuggled from the kitchen some cold beef and pickles. He told her something of his life since last they had been together in the Angel. With sadness he described how he had reacted to her flight from the Angel, and his eyes were pools of misery as he stared at the grass growing over the stones.

  Martha asked him if he had really said he would kill her. He lifted his eyebrows a little and gave a small shake of the head. He did not know. He supposed it likely. He certainly remembered having the conviction that she had taken his money. She asked him if he still believed that; and now the great head came round and he peered at her closely. He asked her if she had taken it, and she told him that of course she had not taken his money, did he really think she would do such a thing? This she asked him with some heat. She was no thief! She would not think of stealing from him!

  She said all this—and then she saw it; she saw it rise all at once in his eyes, and for a moment or two he shook off the blanket of fuddlement he had assumed as a sort of protective garment, so it seemed, and his whole being burned with a mad black flame. He had told her he was mad, that at times he could not account for his actions. Now she saw the madness. Now she saw the monster. Now she believed him. She had forgotten it, she had forgotten that it had frightened her so much that she was flying to America to escape it. Oh, it frightened her now, and she scrambled away from him, but more than that it mystified her. Where did it come from? How did he sustain it, this mad hatred?—and this was the thought she came away with, after their first meeting in the graveyard.

  All this I heard as I lay in bed and struggled against the depredations of the marsh fever I had contracted in the rain the day I rode out from Drogo Hall. I should say, rather, in the interest of that candour I have tried to bring to this history, that all this I believe I heard while lying abed; for at times my mind wandered in delirium, and waking, sweating, from the brief fitful dozes which followed upon such episodes, I could not be sure that what I remembered had actually been told me by my uncle, or was, rather, mere tissue I had manufactured to flesh the bare bones of his own spare narrative.

  It matters little; for I had by this time plumbed the depths to which Martha and Harry had been sunk in their misfortune, and when my uncle was not with me I began to scribble the outlines of the thing into a small notebook I carried always upon my person. That notebook provided a valuable aid to me in the subsequent composition of this history. A few fevered jottings, clawed from the chaos that illness wreaks in the mind, and from which a full rich body of memory springs forth, at leisure, and in retrospect, I have subjected to the rigours both of reason and of the sympathetic passions, and thus rendered coherent.

  A few days later William told Martha that he had secured her passage aboard an American vessel called the Plimoth which sailed for Boston in ten days’ time; and that letters had already been dispatched to New Morrock informing her relations of it. William had assiduously laboured to encourage in Martha an enthusiasm for the American plan. Often in the late afternoon they sat at the table with their heads together over a book or a print or a map, and at night he regaled her, unwisely in my opinion, with startling anecdotes about white women seized by savages, and extraordinary feats of survival in the Wilderness; though he spoke also of the paradise of clean water and clean air and good cheap arable land that awaited the intrepid settler on the frontier, a theme familiar to her from her father’s dream of America, and his poetry.

  But Martha was too preoccupied, too full of conflicting feelings properly to give herself over
to these ideas. Of course she wished to be stirred by stories of the New World, but at the same time she could not forget her father’s welfare, of which William made little further mention.

  I believe she came to despise my uncle for this. I believe she thought him heartless and cold. She grew to think that he felt nothing for the sufferings of the poor old wreckage she spent her afternoons with in the graveyard. And with this thought, I believe, so did the first impulse of rebellion arise in her heart.

  But then came a most sinister development. Coming away from the graveyard late one afternoon, she discovered Clyte leaning against the wall by the gate and smoking a short black pipe.

  “What do you want?” she cried, shocked to come upon him like that, and recoiling as though she had almost trod on a snake. He did not answer, all he gave her was a display of those dog’s teeth of his, yellow and pointed and out of all proportion to the weasely thin face with its stubbled skull and eyes like slits of oil. She asked him again, and again he shook his head, and she went back to the house in a state of great unease. Clyte was not spying on her, she realized, he was spying on her father, and what he learned he passed on to Lord Drogo.

  Why did this disturb her? Because she suspected that Lord Drogo meant her father no good, and that Clyte was his agent in whatever scheme was being hatched in the cellars of Drogo Hall? Harry had not dined with his lordship apart from that one night, so if he could not be lured in by a warm fire and good talk, as apparently he could not, then he must be tracked by Clyte, this was Martha’s surmise. When next she saw her father she warned him to beware of Clyte but he seemed unconcerned, he grinned the toothless donkey grin and she could not guess what was in his mind.

  Martha grew quiet as the moment of departure drew near. I believe my uncle knew she was seeing her father, for Clyte would surely have told him, but he did not know of her dilemma, nor did he hear the pitiful sounds of that lost girl weeping into her pillow each night. All those years of happiness and calm, all swept away in the space of a few weeks, it was little wonder her heart had at first frozen over with the shock of it. And little wonder that when the ice began to crack she would be overcome with grief.

  Ah, but out of that grief emerged a decision: I will not go. This is my conviction. I will not go. William knew nothing of it, when I suggested it, but why would he? She would have hidden it from him, of course she would.

  And so the last days passed. William spoke to her of the rigours of an Atlantic crossing so late in the season, and much else besides, and Martha listened, though her mind and heart were now decided against an American future. She remained committed, rather, to the skeletal figure haunting the marsh, whom she continued to meet in the graveyard. The day of departure from Drogo Hall was now imminent, and Martha was determined to see her father the night she was to leave the house, and tell him of the plan she had made. She could not leave him. She felt she did little enough for that poor man, and if that little were taken away, then what would be left? He would surely die. He never told her about his life in the town, nor did he answer her questions as to how he fed himself, and where he slept, and by what means he had money, but it was not hard to guess these things. Did Clyte know? He probably did. He too haunted the marsh, watching, always watching, and Martha had no doubt he followed her father back to whatever sordid night-cellar he spent the night in, after drinking his fill of bad gin.

  But these last days he had not been drinking, and was instead sunk in a weary, watchful state of melancholy, almost as though he knew she was about to leave him. And it was that night, the last time she saw him, that a catastrophe befell her whose repercussions she would feel for the rest of her short life.

  It happened in the graveyard. The night was windy, and the moon was obscured by clouds. Martha had slipped out of Drogo Hall unobserved, and tramped up the hill, and found him slumped against his customary headstone and stinking foully of gin. She had never seen him so bad. He lay there staring into the high branches of the graveyard elms as they whipped and thrashed about in the wind. The jug was corked and lay beside him in the grass. He raised himself as she approached, lifted an arm and called to her to lie beside him.

  She had so much to tell him! She had made her decision, she could not leave him, she would stay, she would help him, they would be together as they had been before. But oh, she was shocked at his appearance. At their last meeting he had been three days sober, and she had glimpsed the faint outline of the real man within, and upon that glimpse she had begun to build—again!—a small tentative structure of hope. That hope was now dashed. The strength he had acquired in his brief period of sobriety had been put to service in the work of drinking, and with the drinking had come, once more, the turning to the darkness, the embrace of the monster, the disdain of love in the face of a world that would not love him but denied his humanity, rather, and pushed him out.

  Martha settled herself in the grass beside him with some apprehension, wrapping her arms round her knees as he rambled at the sky. She made no attempt to understand his dark chaotic chains of thought, all commingled with a scrap of Milton, a snatch of his own verse, fragments of memory rising like tiny silvered fish then sinking forever to the depths below. He began upon the fire, and oh, there was for him no forgetting the fire, the fire he had caused in his drunkenness that took Grace Foy’s life and ruined his own. Despite his incoherence, the slur and garble of his muttering, he did not fail to arouse in Martha, when she remembered the death of her mother, feelings of the most profound grief, and soon he had her weeping, and he, sentimental creature he was, and all the more so when in drink, he wept with her, tears of gin, and they were soon clutching each other in their unhappiness as Martha stroked his face, and kissed him over and over, and attempted through her own tears to find some words of comfort for him.

  That was when he turned. The animal passion flared up like a bed of coals deep in the furnace of his being, and he was so far beyond the reach of reason—so defiantly had he turned his face from the light—that he did not know her as his daughter and his friend, she was nothing but a creature weaker than himself on whom the aroused passion intended now to spend its force. He did not know who she was, he did not hear her screams, he did not heed the fingernails she buried in his face, this sudden conflagration deep in his animal body burned so fierce there was nothing in him now but a storm of lust that must out—and Martha was its object. He overwhelmed her without difficulty, he pinned her down, and her struggles were to no avail as he hoisted her skirt then freed from his ragged britches that great horse-penis of his, now thick as a fisted arm—

  She did not know what happened to him when he was done with her. She ran away from him through the graveyard, through the shrieking wind and the flailing trees, beneath the moonless sky, sick and bleeding and desperate only to reach the sanctuary of her room. She burst in through the door and flung herself on the bed. When she had recovered a little she washed herself in the shadowy recess of the room, and found on her body and her garments eloquent marks of what she had been made to endure; and by then her plan to slip away from Drogo Hall that very night, and join her father, lay in ruins.

  Nor was this the worst of it. For in her shame, in her pollution, she fastened on that which was to her even more terrible than the rape itself, and that was the deep sure knowledge that when her father spent himself inside her she had conceived his child.

  17

  My uncle’s story had been growing darker and more terrible with every fresh burden he loaded upon the young shoulders of Martha Peake, but this was too much.

  “What? Conceived his child?” I cried, rearing up from the bed and thoroughly startling the old man. “And she knew?”

  Seemingly she did. Women often do, or so William would have me believe. There is, he said, a sort of leaping sensation in the womb, which is felt as the leaping of life. And everything that followed, everything that Martha suffered in America, was the direct consequence of it—of, that is, her father’s act of brutal ravage in a
dark graveyard not a stone’s throw from the very room in which I now lay in weakened and feverish condition as my uncle fluttered in wild-eyed excitement at the horror of what he was telling me.

  Go on, go on, I cried!

  Ah, but Martha could not think of staying now, I reflected, as he talked on, Harry had made a mockery of her hopes, revealed them for the empty fantasies they were, shown himself a brute, worse than a brute, even brutes—did not Tom Paine say it himself?—even brutes do not devour their young.

  I saw her kneeling in a patch of moonlight by the window of her tower room in the west wing of Drogo Hall. No tears flood down her face, as she packs her few possessions into the small trunk that followed her from the Angel, she is, rather, dry-eyed, stony-faced, no apparent anger, only a furious concentration on what she is doing. She descends the staircase canted backwards, clutching the leather straps of her trunk, not an easy thing, for it is dark, the stairs are narrow and uneven, the old stone treacherously smooth in places. Draped in her dragging greatcoat, step by clumsy step she struggles down to the bottom.

  She reaches the courtyard. The storm has blown itself out, and the moon is intermittently visible through the ragged clouds that drift across a night-sky which seems rinsed, now, and exhausted. In the shadows of the courtyard with his back to her stands a slight figure in a bulky riding coat, his hat pulled low over his face, attending to a pair of horses harnessed to the black carriage. It rocks on its springs as the horses shift and stamp, but there is almost no sound, for the wheels are bound in rags, as are the horses’ hooves; an old smuggler’s trick. The figure turns, and it is of course my uncle William.

  Martha pulls open the door of the carriage and pushes the trunk in, then climbs in after. William gets up onto the cab and the carriage shudders into motion. As they roll out of the courtyard Martha sits forward to pull the window blind aside an inch or two and look out across the marsh, fearing any sign of discovery which might impede her flight. For a moment the moonlight falls full upon her upturned face, and it is not hard to imagine the stark stony sorrow there; then she sinks back into the gloom of the carriage’s interior.