Martha Peake Page 16

  The day was clear, the wind gusting offshore, and the smell of woodsmoke grew stronger. As they passed among the islands seals barked at them from the rocks and slid in groups into the icy waters; and there was Castle William, its battery studded with cannon, and a company of redcoats passing through the gates. Over the fort the Union Jack flapped and cracked in the wind.

  Martha stood at the rail among the other ragged exiles. Boston was like no town she had ever seen, its neat wooden houses and forest of steeples all trimly contained among hills and water—so unlike London, which sprawls in every direction like a great squat toad! Smoke rose from a thousand chimneys into the cold air, and now she could see the big British ships-of-the-line anchored across the mouth of the inner harbour, and skimming and wheeling among them a host of smaller vessels, coasting craft and the like. One of those vessels, a single-masted cutter with white sails billowing fore and aft, was now seen to be clearing the harbor mouth.

  Now, it is my belief that aboard this vessel was an officer of the British army then billeted in Boston, a man called Giles Hawkins. It is a name I discovered in several of the letters, or in the remains of them, rather, and it took no great skill on my part to recognize its importance to Martha; for that name, each time it appeared, was printed in capital letters. It is because this man played so large a part in Martha’s life in North America that I introduce him here. For it was aboard the Plimoth, I believe, that she first encountered him.

  As I see him, Giles Hawkins had something of the fighting cock about him, he was small, portly and pugnacious, and his duty, this day, was to inform the master of the Plimoth, an ill-tempered Nantucket mariner called Daniel Bowditch, that he, Bowditch, could not bring his vessel into Boston Harbour. Having come alongside the Plimoth, and climbed aboard, Captain Hawkins discharged this duty in a loud, ringing voice such that he was heard by everyone on deck. Up on the bridge Daniel Bowditch turned red.

  “And why not?” cried the apoplectic Nantucketer.

  “Because the port of Boston is closed.”

  “By whose order?”

  “By the king’s order, sir!”

  He had flashing blue eyes, this stocky Englishman, and he stood there in the wind, staring up at the enraged Yankee sea captain, with his chin jutting out like a bulldog’s, as Daniel Bowditch expressed sentiments which would have got him hanged in England. Captain Hawkins heard him out.

  “Duly noted,” he then said, and turned to the listening passengers. He announced that before allowing them ashore he would interview each of them below. He then ordered the ship to be searched, and the company of redcoats he had brought aboard with him moved forward and opened the hatches, and clattered down to the lower decks.

  I need not describe the profound unease all this aroused among the wretched families clustered there on deck, men and women who had spent all they had to get themselves and their children to the New World; and imagine Martha’s feelings! Having crossed the North Atlantic, was she now to be sent back to England on the whim of this one man? Little wonder she printed his name in block capitals.

  The mood aboard the Plimoth grew uglier by the minute as each family in turn went below to the captain’s cabin in the poop, which the Englishman had commandeered for his purpose, and showed their papers. Martha Peake was left to last. Exhausted though she was by the voyage, dirty and stinking after the grim weeks confined below, she made some order of her hair, she squared her shoulders, and down the staircase she went and stepped into the captain’s quarters in a temper apparently robust and unafraid.

  Captain Giles Hawkins sat in the corner of the room in deep shadow. He was less formidable at close quarters than he had been on deck, for here he had no need to strut and shout, but with some civility, rather, he told Martha to shut the door, and then asked her her name. His voice was at once familiar to her, it was like an English hedge, clipped and cultivated, such as she had often heard in the mouths of bucks and rakes who frequented the low London taverns for the dubious pleasure of swimming in alien currents. But this was no fop; Captain Hawkins possessed, rather, the peculiar easy charm that Martha would later come to understand as the mannered affability of the English gentleman harnessed to the seasoned army officer’s habit of command, and the two not in conflict. Not such a rare type, but new to Martha, and although he showed her kindness she did not, at first, trust him.

  With the door closed, and her eyes adjusting to the gloom, she could see him better; and he could see her. He sat back in the captain’s chair, the ferocity of his features softening somewhat, his plump booted legs crossed as he mended his windblown wig with a small tortoiseshell comb. When Martha said her name he leaned forward and scribbled it on the list before him, then tossed the quill into the inkpot. For a moment or two he sat frowning at it, as though he knew the name but was unable to place it. He looked up, gazed at her, and then asked her: “Why are you here, Martha Peake?”

  Martha could not stand upright in the little cabin, she was too tall for it. The mariner’s lamp swung to and fro from the beam close to her head as the Plimoth rode gently on her anchor cables. She noticed Captain Bowditch’s charts rolled up and pushed into pigeonholes along the wall. The shriek of the gulls came faintly through the closed porthole.

  “I have come to live with my mother’s sister and her family.”

  “Have you no family in England?”

  “No.”

  “Your mother and father?”

  “They are dead.”

  “I am sorry for you. Sit down, Martha.”

  This she had not expected, nor that he should then give her a small glass of the captain’s rum. He told her his name was Giles Hawkins, and that he was a Somerset man, and Martha said she knew the county, she had passed through it as a child on her way to London.

  “As a child?” he then said. “And are you not a child now, Martha Peake?”

  No, she was not.

  They talked then of Cornwall, and somehow, she did not know how or why it happened, she found herself telling him the story of her mother’s death. Ah, but it must be remembered that after the weeks at sea—and given her late ordeal in England—Martha responded with strong feeling to a warm smile and a kindly voice, she could not help herself. She had the strength of character to stand alone, but she was not accustomed to it, and Giles Hawkins saw this at once. I believe she aroused a real sympathy in him, and that he questioned her closely about her family in America so as to assure himself that she would be cared for when she went ashore. But he was, at the same time, part of an occupying force in a rebellious colony, and he knew Martha’s uncle for an influential merchant, and a patriot; and his display of fatherly concern masked, I believe, a shrewd probing of the girl. Martha had nothing of value to tell him of course, nonetheless it was a complicated transaction, which culminated in Martha shedding tears, and Captain Hawkins comforting her as he would one of his own daughters.

  Later I told my uncle that this I imagined to be what passed between Giles Hawkins and Martha Peake at their first meeting. The old man may have wished to be spared the labour of thinking about Martha anymore, but he was not slow to criticize my own account of her experience. At once, and with some heat, he contradicted me. Could I not imagine an Englishman offering simple kindness to a young creature in distress, as Martha was? Did I think he was bound to attempt to take advantage of her?

  Frankly, I said, yes, I did.

  He frowned at me then looked away. He rubbed his thumb against his fingers in his agitation, and made small inarticulate noises as he licked his lips with little rapid flickers of his dry old tongue. And did I think Martha so foolish that she would not see this? Did I not remember the glorious destiny which she was even then approaching? Why, this was the girl who would save the Revolution—was she not made of sterner stuff than a mere—

  Child?

  You said it, I did not! Is this your heroine? Is this your proud rebel?

  I shrugged. It was not the character of Martha Peake he defended, but
that of the English officer. I did not trouble to point this out to him.

  The Boston waterfront was as crowded with people as the harbour was with shipping. Martha was brought in with the last passengers, sitting on her trunk in the stern of the boat. She heard men shouting from ship to shore and shore to ship as the gulls flapped and screamed overhead. All was movement and noise, and then they were gliding in, and a rope was flung up onto the wharf. She waited her turn to climb up the short wooden ladder and set foot on the New World. Her trunk came up after her, and there at last she stood, gazing about her with some astonishment as her fellow exiles clambered up onto the wharf beside her, some to be met by tearful relatives, others, like herself, stranded there, bewildered. She could hear drumming not far off, over the hubbub of dockside commerce, and a whistling fife, and she knew it for the fife and drum of the redcoats. The Americans paid her no notice at all, but thronged about, doing their business, merchants and clerks, porters and carters, such as might be seen any day on the London docks, although these men were larger, leaner, louder, their voices strange to her ear and their clothing coarse and homespun. There were some wigs to be seen, but many preferred to grow their hair long and tie it at the back with a scrap of ribbon. Martha seized up her trunk by the straps, and weak though she was after her time at sea, off she plodded down Long Wharf to the crowded street that fronted the harbour.

  And did Giles Hawkins lean on the taff-rail of his cutter, and watch her as she disappeared into the crowd? Oh, I believe he did.

  But such figures she glimpsed then, in her first minutes in Boston—! She had read about the savages of North America, she had seen illustrations of them; but to meet them at once in the flesh, this was something else, and she set down her trunk and gawped at a group of Iroquois braves who stood silently staring out across the harbour to the open sea. Dressed from head to toe in the skins of animals, with long-barrelled muskets at their sides, knives and hatchets in their belts, their garments beaded and feathered, and with wild shaggy manes of black hair sprouting from the crowns of their shaved skulls, they seemed to Martha not so much savages, in their dignity, and stature, and straightness, as princes. She was later told that these men were employed by the British as scouts and trackers in the forests to the north.

  There were still more people milling about on the dock than on the wharf, and they were an agitated crowd, for moving through them in a small tight squad were a dozen redcoats, an officer on horseback riding alongside them. At the head of this tight little column stepped the drummer she had heard, a boy ten years old beating out a brisk tattoo; and as the redcoats passed by they were closely watched by various clusters of men on the dock who seemed to have no business to do, but were waiting, so it appeared, for something to happen.

  Martha was familiar with this, men standing in doorways, on street corners, waiting and watching, though for what they might be waiting and watching here in Boston she had no idea. Young men for the most part, they stood about in small groups outside shops and taverns, and their mood was easy to read, they were mocking, and their mockery was directed at the redcoats. They muttered together and shouted to one another, they laughed loudly, they moved about from group to group, all the while watched carefully by the officer on horseback as he rode by. Even the busy merchants paused, and regarded him and his soldiers with undisguised contempt.

  All this I gleaned from the fragments of what I took to be Martha’s first letters from America; for nowhere could I find a date, nor any other indication of the sequence in which the letters had arrived at Drogo Hall. But it was, I felt, enough, and I was confident that what I imagined was indeed what Martha observed that blustery day in the autumn of 1774; and observing it, remembered what she had heard of Massachusetts, of how the province had renounced allegiance to the crown some weeks before and been placed under martial law. And as her curiosity came sparking faintly to life she sensed a rising emotion in her heart, she did not know what it was, exactly, but it responded to what she was seeing and hearing all about her on the Boston dock that day. But she had no chance to think more about it, for all at once she heard her name called.

  19

  After her weeks at sea Martha was not an impressive spectacle. She was bedraggled and exhausted. She was pale from lack of sunlight and fresh food, her hair was matted, her clothes filthy and stinking. She had lost a tooth and she itched all over with ship-lice.

  “Martha Peake!”

  There it came again, through all the noise of the port, and as she peered about her she saw a broad-shouldered youth as tall as her father detach himself from a group of men standing about a capstan and come loping toward her down the dock. Martha stood by her trunk, clutching her hat to her head, for the breeze off the harbour was brisk. The big lad advancing on her was dressed in a sturdy brown coat which flapped about him over a high-buttoned waistcoat; black britches; black stockings; solid muddy leather shoes without buckles; and a cocked hat pushed to the back of his head so the peak pointed at the sky. His long hair was pulled back from high in the middle of his forehead and tied in a ponytail with a blue ribbon. She watched him come, she saw how he jigged through the crowd, a grin on his face, this strong loose-limbed fellow just a year or two older than herself. He fetched up in front of her, panting slightly, set his hands on his hips, and looked her up and down with some amusement.

  “Cousin,” he said.

  He then swept his hat off his head and made a groveling mockery of an Englishman’s formal bow. There was life and spirit in his shining eyes, those eyes set deep in a wide, ruddy, big-chinned face, and Martha stared at him with mild astonishment, thinking, is this an American? But he did not displease her; until, that is, he seemed to catch a whiff of her, and all at once slapped a hand, not clean, to his face, and peered at her as though uncertain he had the right girl here.

  “I believe you to be Martha Peake,” he said.

  “Who are you?” she said.

  “I am Adam Rind, eldest son of Silas Rind, Esquire, of New Morrock, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to which King Charles granted the charter in the Year of Our Lord sixteen hundred and twenty-nine.”

  He could talk, then.

  “Are you to carry my trunk?”

  To this imperious question he responded with a large grin, a large display of large discoloured teeth that aroused at last a small smile in Martha’s stern countenance.

  “She favours me,” he said, and took her hand gravely. He made a small sober bow. “There is my father, sitting up in that fine wagon with his servant. He trembles at your coming.”

  He pointed at a high sturdy wagon drawn up outside a chandler’s shop, a team of four horses harnessed to it. People were passing along the dock between them, and she could not clearly see the figure to whom her cousin pointed, for he was leaning down from the buckboard in close conversation with some men in the street. Up on the wagon beside him sat a negro in a blue coat whom Adam identified as his father’s servant Caesar, his own good friend. He then hoisted Martha’s trunk onto his shoulder and offered her his arm, but she would not take it. They set off across the busy street, she with her shabby English greatcoat flapping about her.

  “How do you like Boston?” he cried, and then, in a tone of mock cultivation: “A damned fine town but for all the bloody English in it”—and still pushing briskly on, he turned to her and again gave her the horsey grin. Martha wondered whether he ate oats and had to be rubbed down at the end of the day.

  Now Silas Rind was a good deal more formidable than his husky son. Let me attempt to classify the parts of that complicated man, as I have come to understand him. I know something of the Puritan temperament, I believe, and I suspect that Silas Rind had a distinct tendency toward the introspection of that sect, being a man who restlessly scoured and abluted the dark impulses of his masculine heart. But he was not narrow, no, he had a good mind, he was curious about all branches of learning, and he could converse with ease with the best-educated men in Boston, many of whom were his frie
nds. Then, too, he had a vigorous instinct for commerce, and had grown rich from his various enterprises; and he was, in addition, a fierce patriot, long outraged at the despotism of a distant empire and a distant king. These aspects of his character were not at war with one another. Rather, his several commitments to virtue, to learning, to commerce, and to the political future of his country, these coexisted in complex balance one with the other, no part becoming dominant but some other part would moderate it. As for his person, he was a lean, dark, broody sort of a man of middling height and middling age, dressed in a plain brown coat and britches. He wore no wig, his hair gathered at the back in a simple blue ribbon like his son’s.

  He climbed down off the wagon and they shook hands, he and Martha, and had a good long look at one another. His eyes at once told her that a temper was in him that she never wanted directed at her; though this thought was enough to arouse in Martha the distinct whisper of a desire to challenge him. He asked her about her voyage, all the while scanning the crowd on the dock, which allowed her the opportunity to inspect him more closely; and it was as though the broad, raw-boned features of the son were here glimpsed in an original which bore marks of a natural nobility lost in transmission across the generation. He had a high forehead and temple, a hawklike nose, thin lips clamped tight, a firm jaw; and the handsome bones of this fine proud head admirably framed its manly features. It occurred to Martha that if he ever became her enemy he would surely destroy her, but there was withal a sort of confidence to him that she liked, even a wintry warmth. She told him that the Plimoth had not been allowed to unload its cargo. She suspected that this would anger him, and it did. He lifted his eyes and gazed into the sky as though an explanation of this folly was written in the clouds. He frowned at her, and she knew he was contemplating her Englishness, asking himself how deep it went. Ah well, Martha Peake, he said, a new home, eh? A new home in New England.