Martha Peake Page 2

  But all that, said my uncle, was still many years in the future. So there we have him, he said, a tall strong boy with a shock of wild black hair, always panting from his exertions, his eyes afire, his spirit hungry for life, and he could have gone any way, any way at all. Oh, he could have had his own boat in a year or two, had he wanted it, or he could have lit out for London, as he sometimes talked of doing—or he could have gone to the bad. And after his mother died—he would have been twelve years old then, and he had loved old Maggie Peake, loved her despite her drinking, and all the fishermen she brought back to that squalid hovel—after she died it looked as though he would go to the bad. One night at around that time a sinister incident occurred in Padstow, an affray in a yard behind a tavern that left one man badly injured and another blind in one eye. A small sum of money was stolen, not so small however that the thief would not have gone to the gallows for it; and although nothing came of it, it was rumored darkly that Harry Peake had been involved.

  Curious, I murmured, and his mother just gone, but my uncle was not listening. His eyes were closed, his mind was already far away. A minute passed, and then another—

  But then the boy was saved!

  All at once the old man came to life once more, and spoke now with some animation. It seemed that Harry was to have a guardian, for the vicar of the parish, the Reverend Edward Penwarden, a cleric and scholar, a man of good sense and few illusions about the character of his congregation, had long recognized that here was a boy of singular intelligence, and he chose this moment, just when Harry looked set to ruin himself, to intervene. He brought him up to the vicarage and gave him a room in the house. He set about teaching him to read and write, and opened his library to the boy; and soon, said my uncle, whenever the weather prevented the boats going out, Harry was to be found poring over an old volume of Milton, or a traveller’s journal, or some such, in the vicar’s library, and within a few months he was much altered. So it was, that as the last years of Harry’s childhood passed, and he stayed safe under the wing of his new friend and protector, his imagination ripened, and began to stray from the wild north Cornish coast into regions of the earth he had encountered only in books.

  By the age of seventeen Harry had yet to cross the Tamar, and to the idle glance of the stranger he would have seemed no more than a big handsome strapping lad who smelled of the harbour and the alehouse, a boisterous, good-natured boy with a tough body and a strong will and a quick eager mind. But to those who knew him—and by this, said my uncle, turning toward me, I mean the few educated men in those parts—he was an unusual, even an exceptional youth, whom some believed to be destined for great things.

  I interrupted him at this point. For several minutes I had been aware of his growing warmth as he spoke of the young Harry Peake, that warmth now rising to a pitch almost of rhapsody as he described Harry’s attainments and possibilities. I had no wish to puncture the old man’s enthusiasm, but as yet I did not altogether share it, and so I asked him, how had he learned of the precocious talents of this barely literate Cornish fisherman?

  I need not have worried that I would deflate him. His mood shifted like quicksilver. Gone, the warbling fustian, again he turned to me, this time with eyes that glinted coldly in the candlelight, and asked me briskly, did I doubt it?

  I lifted my hands and said nothing.

  Very well then, he said, I ask you to imagine this—

  But I imagined nothing, for at that moment Percy entered the room to refill our glasses and poke the fire into fresh life, and to report to my uncle on the severity of the rainstorm now howling about the house, and the status of various leaks in various of the upper rooms. When he had left us I discovered that my uncle’s mood had changed once more, and that he wore now an expression of some despondency. I begged him to continue. Another sigh, and after a moment or two he resumed, and told me that despite his wild ways—or perhaps, he said, because of them—Harry Peake won the heart of a fine young woman from a remote farm on the Bodmin Moor. Her name was Grace Foy, and after a brief tempestuous courtship they were married. Harry was then eighteen years old, Grace a year younger.

  Grace brought with her a small dowry, and that, along with the money Harry had saved from his work on the boats, and his other endeavors—a glance here from my uncle, did I take his meaning?—they acquired a house made of stone with a steep slate-hung roof, halfway up the hill behind the harbour. They moved in at once, and six months later Grace bore Harry a daughter. They called her Martha. About Martha Peake, said my uncle, we know a great deal, but about her mother much less, beyond that she came from a family of sisters, that she was a tall proud laughing woman with broad shoulders and a loud voice, that she had a head of flaming red hair, and that her temper was as fierce as Harry’s own. With two such passionate natures, said my uncle, peering at me now like an owl, it will not surprise you to learn that their marriage was a turbulent one.

  Some sad nodding here.

  The sad nodding was followed by head shaking, glances were cast at the painting over the fireplace, and a deep frown appeared in the parchment skin of my uncle’s forehead. Ah, but there was a flaw in Harry’s nature, he said, it had announced itself during his childhood, and then more dramatically when his mother died. Perhaps it arose in reaction to the teeming energies of his imagination, perhaps the seeds of madness were already in him at birth, passed on by Maggie Peake; we will never know. But as he entered upon his manhood a sort of fevered restlessness was observed in him, a wildness in his words and actions that had not been there before, and at such times it seemed to those who knew him that his very spirit was on fire. By this time he owned a pair of horses, and would spend his days galloping along the cliffs, so close to the edge that his life was despaired of; or he drank himself into oblivion, after talking in the Admiral Byng for hours to anyone who would listen to him; or he stripped his clothes off and flung himself into a heavy sea, for the sheer pleasure of getting out safe again.

  But after some days of this there would come a sudden precipitous collapse into the blackest melancholy, and for a period he would be morose, silent, smoldering, dangerous. Harry’s dirty weather, they called it in Port Jethro, and it was first evident, said my uncle, his tone low and rapid now, and inflected with the darkness that permeated the matter of his narrative, to his companions in the Admiral Byng during a severe winter when the gales howled about the village day and night, and great seas dashed themselves against the cliffs, and no boat went out for weeks on end. There were many nights, that winter, when Harry showed more interest in his drink than he did in the sport of his roistering friends, and it became apparent that he was drinking harder than the others, that he did not want to go home when the landlord called time, and that his mood darkened the more he drank. He lost his temper one night and flung himself on a man who he believed had insulted him, and the two were only with difficulty separated. There were other fights that winter, and there were nights when Harry sat off by himself, staring into the fire, sullen and muttering, brooding on matters he would speak of to nobody. It was said that he often quarrelled with his wife, and that he was not settling well to the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood, indeed voices raised in anger were heard that winter from the slate-roofed house up behind the harbour, where Grace had given him another child, a son called Jonathan.

  Come the spring, and the return of warmer weather, and longer hours of daylight, Harry’s spirits lifted and he was something like his old self again. But a certain gladness, a certain lightness of spirit had gone from him forever, and he now showed signs in his face of anxiety, of conflict, and of pain. Often he drank to excess, and his friends left him to himself at such times. He would sit in the shadows at the back of the inn, and the drink gave him no release from his demons, whoever or whatever they were.

  Seven years passed, and Grace Foy bore Harry three more children. His temper improved, and in time he came to believe that he had shaken it off, the black mood that had dogged his spirit throu
gh that terrible winter. He prospered, bought his own boat, and came in time to be regarded as one of the first men of Port Jethro. For Grace and her children these were happy years, and there were times in Martha’s early life that she would never forget. Often she went out with her father on his boat, Harry being that unusual creature, a fisherman who took pleasure in sailing, and the stronger the wind the better he liked it.

  He took her up on his horse with him, when he had business in Bodmin, and together they galloped across the moor, the big laughing man and the little girl gripped between his knees and hanging on to the saddle for dear life—her face to the wind like her father’s, and no more fear in her than he had in him. They tramped the cliffs together, and told endless stories, each one wilder than the one before. Harry loved his wife with a strong and jealous intensity, and if they fought and stormed it was because their passions were at root the passions of attachment; but he loved his Martha no less passionately, for she took after her mother, she had her bones, she had her spirit, she had her flaming red hair.

  Then late one night, said my uncle—and here his narration grew dramatic indeed, up came his hand, his fingers seeming to mold the figure of the poet in the glow of the fire—late one night Harry came home from a landing—a ship from the West Indies on her way up to Bristol—with a dozen casks of rum stowed in the back of his wagon—

  Again I interrupted him, but even as I began to ask the question I glimpsed the answer, and my uncle paused to remind me that in those days there was not a man, not a family in Cornwall which was not involved in the free trade, and Harry Peake was no exception; indeed, said my uncle, Harry was the leader of a loose association of men who worked that stretch of the coast, which was known for its many sheltered bays and inlets, its caves, its hidden beaches, its myriad natural harbours where on a moonless night a small coasting vessel, or even a merchantman could offload hundreds of gallons of spirits—not to say tobacco, lace, glass, tea, silk, satin, and china—and every local man was ready to help bring the cargo ashore, to carry it up the shingle, to load it into carts and wagons, and see it safely cached inland, all before dawn.

  But that night everything had gone wrong, they had been surprised by a cutter from the Excise, the landing had been abandoned in confusion, and Harry had been lucky to escape unobserved with his wagon. The night was dark, no moon at all, and he had come away up the track from the beach as though the very devil himself were after him, standing astride the buckboard and flailing with the whip, the terrified horses rearing and stumbling on the slope, but once on the high ground galloping wildly across the cliffs. Behind him, in a narrow shingled cove, a man lay dead, all the rest were scattered,and several hundred casks of rum and sugar were in the hands of the damned Excise.

  He brought the wagon in off the road that ran down to the harbour, he wheeled the horses into the yard at the back of the house, he pulled them up to a clattering halt, and sweating and cursing he jumped down off the wagon and stamped in through his own back door and hauled up the trapdoor to his cellar. Down he went with a cask of liquor on his shoulder, breathing hard, the sweat still streaming down his face, and set it on the straw-covered stones of the cellar floor. He did not rest. One after another the casks were lifted from the wagon and hefted onto his shoulder, each one eight gallons of liquor, and stowed in the cellar. At last he was done, he let down the trapdoor, and he knelt on the floor, panting, to secure the bolts. Grace Foy, awoken by his noise, and with an infant in her arms, unlatched the kitchen door and found him there on the floor. Still kneeling, wiping his forehead, he told her that the Excise had disturbed them, the merchantman had had to cut her cables and make a run for it.

  “We came away with nothing,” he shouted, careless of his sleeping children—“Nothing!”—and in his rage, for he had been drinking earlier that night, he hammered his fist on the floorboards.

  “Nothing at all?” murmured Grace. She was still half-asleep. She sat down on a chair and her head sank forward as she gave the infant her breast.

  “Some bloody rum is all.”

  “Where is it now?” Grace yawned.

  “Here below,” said Harry.

  That woke her up.

  “You brought it here?” she cried, rising to her feet, as the infant began to wail. “You brought it here? They will come here, Harry, what were you thinking of?”

  Harry shoved home the last bolt but still he knelt there on the trapdoor, his hands flat on the floor, staring at the wooden boards. A single branch of candles sputtered and flared on the sideboard at the back wall. He muttered that he would move them in the morning, the Excise men were all over the countryside. He did not say there was a man dead on the beach.

  “Why did you not leave it there?”

  But Harry in his temper was careless of all risk. Nor did he have any patience for Grace’s fears, he had seen how childbirth tamed a woman. He stamped out through the back door to look to the horses and she followed him out, a shawl about her shoulders and the infant screaming in her arms. She told him he must get the liquor out of the house, for if the Excise were about they would surely come looking for him in Port Jethro. She did not care where he put it but it must be moved.

  “They have no search warrant,” he shouted.

  “They will come in without it—”

  “Over my dead body!”

  “Over your dead body!”

  Only Grace Foy attempted to tell Harry Peake what to do, and often she had her way. But not when he had drink in him, and he had a good deal of drink in him that night. Harry uncoupled the steaming horses from the wagon and ignored what his wife was saying to him.

  An hour later, and still the rum was in the cellar. Grace had argued loudly with Harry for some minutes, until prudence dictated she keep quiet, but Harry was adamant, that if he moved the rum he would lose it, and he was damned if the night’s work was to go for nothing. Grace had gone back to bed, Harry had taken the branch of candles into the cellar and breached one of the casks. He sat on the floor with his back to the wall, an elbow on his knee, his hand clamped to his head, in the other hand a cup of rum, and a pipe of tobacco between his teeth. But for all he drank he could not dispel his foreboding as to the consequences of the night’s botched landing. His eyes closed, and with his head still in his hand he fell asleep. The pipe slipped out of his mouth and broke into pieces on the stones, spilling out burning tobacco. He did not awaken. A few moments later, said my uncle, the straw began to smolder.

  Silence as we contemplated Harry in his stupor, and the embers of his pipe catching on the dry straw.

  When Harry became aware of the flames, whispered my uncle, they had spread across the floor, already they were licking at the walls! Harry rose to his feet and flung at the fire the contents of his cup, and the flames at once leapt up and caught on a basket of wool. In an instant the cellar was full of oily black smoke. He came charging up the stairs and pushed open the trapdoor, and the flames leapt up beneath him. He flung it shut behind him and began shouting, and Grace came running into the kitchen. A few seconds later she was outside the house with the infant in her arms and the other children clustered about her. Only Martha wanted to go down into the cellar and see the fire.

  Outside in the night air Harry stumbled to the stable and let the horses out. He slapped them hard and they cantered off down toward the harbour. After that it all became confusing, and he could never be certain as to what happened next, exactly, though he remembered at one point picking up a barrel of rainwater at the back of the house, and staggering into the kitchen with it, and overturning it at the top of the cellar steps. There was a great hissing and sputtering as the water poured down the steps and spilled across the cellar floor below, but the smoke from the burning wool was so thick he could not see if the flames were doused, and back out he came, and set off up the hill to get help.

  Grace and the children were meanwhile going down toward the harbour. Then all at once Grace was crying out for Jonathan, where was Jonathan? Light
s began to show, people came out into the street, Grace was screaming for Jonathan now, and running this way and that with growing panic. Then all at once Harry saw her start back up the hill, and he shouted to her to stop. To no avail; he saw her go running into the house, and barely had he started back down the hill than there came a muffled explosion, and then another, and another, and all at once flames could be seen leaping and licking in the windows—

  Harry reached the back door, in he plunged through the smoke and flames, his arms before his face—he saw Grace go darting through the burning house, her nightgown ablaze, crying for her lost child—he had almost reached her when another explosion rocked the house, another—he staggered backwards—

  And then a ceiling beam fell, it swung down like a pendulum, with immense force it smashed into Harry’s back and flung him hard onto the floor; then it hung there, over him, blackened and smoking.

  For a second or two Harry lay still. Then he was coughing, gasping for air, struggling to rise, but he could not stand, so he crawled toward the door, crawled through the smoke and heat for what seemed an eternity, and then he was lying in the yard behind the house, and he could hear Grace screaming inside. Again he passed out, and this time, when he came to, said my uncle—here he paused—he could hear her screams no more.

  3

  It was late, I was tired, but I could not withdraw now. I begged my uncle to continue. It was with a sort of grim relish that he described how the falling beam had broken Harry’s back in several places, and how very fortunate he was not to have been paralyzed at once. I suppose I should not have been surprised at the morbid gusto with which the old man retailed all this. He had been a surgeon much of his life, and for years had worked closely with one of the most eminent anatomists of his time. The treatment for such a fracture, he said, his tone now briskly impersonal, and far removed from the histrionic excess of a moment before, was the same as it is today. Reduce the fracture by bringing the broken parts back to their normal position. Once the bone is set, hold it in place with a splint, having first bound the part with bandages, preferably linen. A splint to secure a damaged spine must enclose the patient’s entire upper body, so it will be a boxlike engine, its pressure adjustable by a screw, and into this engine he must be strapped with stout canvas belts. Nature will do the rest.