Martha Peake Read online

  Harry sank groaning to his haunches and wrapped his arms about his head. Martha knelt before him, clutching his wrists.

  “What have they done to you?” she cried.

  He muttered something, he shook his head.

  “Father—!”

  Now his face came up.

  “I would have killed them, had they touched you,” he whispered.

  “Father, they were animals—”

  “They were men. I want no man’s blood on my hands, have I not done enough harm?”

  A half-hour later Harry sat in the garret, stripped to the waist, while Martha sponged his poor bruised body and wiped the blood from his face and hands. After a while she began to speak angrily about their recent ordeal, but Harry at once silenced her, he would have no more talk of it.

  Nor, said my uncle, after we had sat some minutes in silence, was this the only occasion when Harry suffered bodily assault. But while he understood that cruelty toward a deformed creature like himself was in the nature of some men, it cost him constantly to step away, to turn the other cheek; there was conflict in him over this, as there will be in any being whose pride urges him one way, but whose reason counsels caution, and reminds him of the likely outcome should he turn and fight. And this was not the only form of self-restraint he practised. He allowed himself none of his accustomed pleasures, those he had once enjoyed in the taverns and bawdy houses of Bodmin and Padstow, for he was intent, now, on demanding of himself the sternest retribution possible. So it seems, said my uncle, that for a considerable period of time Harry avoided almost all human society, other than that which he had to endure when he began to work the street fairs and taprooms of the town.

  All human society? I had to interrupt him here. Did he not count Martha? So no, not all human society, for he did have Martha, and but for her, I believe, he would surely have gone mad. But what a curious couple they must have made, I reflected, Harry Peake with his great bent back, and his eyes always shadowed by the brim of his hat, shuffling along with his quarterstaff, more phantom, in those roistering filthy streets, than man; and from somewhere nearby, always the sound of a fiddle, or a song, to remind him of the good times he had forsworn. I said this to my uncle and he replied that more distressing by far to Harry’s ears was the constant rattle of the fife and drum. There were always redcoats in the streets in those days, he said, and the sight of them disturbed Harry profoundly.

  Why did the sight of soldiers disturb him?

  Why do you think? Smuggling had been his livelihood, of course he hated the soldiery. Not only that, but somewhere—a small indignant snort from my uncle here—somewhere Harry had come upon the idea that a standing army was the first tool of the tyrant.

  Well, so it is, I began; but he glared at me with such utter astonishment that I did not think it prudent to pursue the question. His heart was not strong.

  So yes, the picture of Harry shuffling through those dangerous streets, and Martha beside him with her head up, her quick eyes darting this way and that, missing nothing and alert both to danger and to opportunity, like a blind man’s minder. And indeed, I reflected, Harry was a sort of blind man, his eyes turned ever inward upon the spectacle of his own guilt. They found friends, of course they did, among castaways and fugitives like themselves, the tramps and beggars and one-legged fiddlers who eked a living from the streets and quays around the London docks. With these unfortunates they would share a crust or two, but Martha saw how her father soon grew restless in any company but her own, and after a short time they would be on their way.

  Martha was a talkative child, but living constantly in her father’s company she learned to be quiet when he was sunk deep in his own suffering, and unable to escape the idea he had of himself as a flawed and fallen creature with his sin carried incorporate on his spine, that spine the outward manifestation of a spiritual deformity within. But when they sat side by side on the end of a damp wharf, perhaps, as the sun went down over the river, and ate their frugal supper—then she would ask him to talk to her, and the stories would come.

  Oh, he told her about the free trade, he told her about ships he had sailed in with double bulkheads and false floors, he talked to her about landing parties, and this he knew well, having commanded such parties on many a moonless night, though he never spoke of the one that went wrong, the last one.

  One night he told her the story of Ned Ratcliff, the man who attended his own funeral. Martha’s imagination was at once fired by this.

  “But Father,” she said, in that firm, direct way she had, a small knot gathering between her eyes, her chin coming up and her lips pressed tight together, consternated, “it is not possible for a man to attend his own funeral.”

  Harry sat at the table, bent forward to relieve his spine, one hand flat on the table with the arm arched sharp to support it, and his chin rested in his palm. Such twisted postures were necessary for him now.

  “It is possible, and I will tell you how.”

  Martha set her own elbow on the table, her own chin in her palm, and sat angled at the table like her father. Harry observed this with silent pleasure.

  “Well, go on then,” she said.

  “Well, I will then,” he said. And he told her how this Ned Ratcliff had half-a-dozen kegs of good French brandy hidden in his house, which he wanted to move inland to a customer, a wealthy man in those parts, who was growing impatient for it.

  “Then why did he not carry them in a wagon?”

  “Because an Excise man was living in the village,” said Harry, “and he was watching him.”

  “Oh.”

  So Ned put it about that he was ill, indeed that he was dying. The doctor, another one fond of French brandy, said there was no hope. The vicar was seen leaving Ned’s cottage, sadly shaking his head.

  “But he was not really ill at all,” said Martha.

  “He was not.”

  “So what happened?”

  “The next thing they knew,” said Harry, “poor Ned was dead.”

  Martha gave a shout of laughter. “But he wasn’t!”

  “He was not.”

  “So they had a funeral,” cried Martha, “and he came to it!”

  Harry nodded. Martha frowned.

  “But Father,” she said, “why?”

  “What do you think was in his coffin?”

  “The brandy!”

  Then she had it; and by the time Ned Ratcliff’s funeral procession reached the graveyard, with Ned himself bringing up the rear—dressed all in black, his face powdered white, and wailing loud, a ghastly sound!—not only had the Excise man fled in terror, and locked his doors, and pulled his shutters closed, convinced that the wailing figure could only be Ned Ratcliff’s ghost—so had the rest of the village, all but Ned’s friends, and the vicar of course, and the doctor; and they made sure the six kegs of brandy were on their way to their rightful owner before the first spade of earth landed on Ned’s coffin.

  Martha was entertained by this tale for many weeks, and when they were out on the streets together, among the crowds that thronged the docks, she liked to find somebody to whom she could tell the story of the man who attended his own funeral. Few could resist her, and those who did not grasp the excellence of the story at first hearing had it repeated and explained. Martha never tired of listening to tales of her father’s smuggling days, and I daresay the smuggling was in her blood. Had she stayed in Cornwall I believe she would have been active in the trade herself. One day, after thinking deeply on the question, she asked Harry why the Excise men did not like him landing cargoes. “Because otherwise,” she said, “you could do it during the day.”

  Now here was a question, but Harry was equal to it. He explained that if the cargo were landed at Bristol, then the customer would have to pay much more for it. And the reason for that was, because the king wanted the extra money.

  Why did the king want the extra money?

  To fight the French.

  Martha pondered this for some minutes.
She wanted to know why the king wanted to fight the French.

  Harry said he did not know, but that he himself had no argument with the French, indeed, did he not do business with the French? He began quietly to laugh. Martha gazed at him astonished. He had not laughed since the fire. But now it came, like molasses from a barrel, hoarse, low and dirty, a deep rumbling amusement—did he not do business with the French? It was infectious, Martha began shouting with laughter, soon the pair of them were slapping the table.

  And that was where they left it; though Martha would return to the question often in the months to come, and as she began to answer it for herself, so a first political idea stirred to life within her; and as you might imagine, in a firebrand like Martha Peake, it was radical. I suggested this to my uncle. Quite possible, he said.

  Thus did father and daughter amuse themselves in their lonely garret. Ah, but a man of Harry’s temperament could play the holy outcast only for so long, and as time passed, and he became familiar with London and its ways, so his natural sociability gradually asserted itself. He still met with mockery, he met with abuse, but he learned to defuse a situation with his wit, and became an adept of that curious form of discourse known as London banter. And as he was slowly drawn back into the current of life, so he became aware of a need for more substantial intellectual fare than the chatter of Martha and the endless circuits of his own dark thoughts. He began to sit in the coffee houses and read newspapers, and talk with other men about the urgent issues of the day—oh, the food riots, the slave trade, the brotherhood of man—the large issues that inflamed the political temper of those turbulent years. And his old humour stood him in good stead, as he recovered his spirits, for if he was no longer the robust man he had been in his youth, he found he had a sharp eye for folly and corruption, the folly and corruption, in particular, of the milords who lived west of Westminster and came east only for their pleasures. In time he became something of a character, the big, quiet, sardonic man with the strangely humped back, and although he was often asked how he had “come by” his back, he spoke of the fire to nobody, though he took a perverse pleasure in devising other accounts of his disfigurement.

  As for his work, he had known for some time how he would earn their bread in London, when the money he had was gone. He would show off his backbone to paying audiences in the inns and taverns of the poorer parts of the town. This he saw as a spiritual labour, a kind of penance. To humiliate himself before the crowd was to invite the contempt and disgust he felt he deserved. For he wanted to cauterize his soul, he wanted to burn off all that was in him that stank of indulgence and pride, having, as he saw it, a great debt to discharge before he was fit once more to call himself a man.

  This then was the life they established during the first hard years in London. Harry was no stranger to the tavern, nor indeed was Martha, she had been with him often in the taproom of the Admiral Byng. But the inns and pot-houses of London were unlike anything they had known in Cornwall—the nightly displays, I mean, of drunken violence in smoky low-ceilinged barns where ale and gin were consumed in vast quantities by a populace worn down and worn out by the sheer misery of their lives. Into those roiling noisy taprooms Harry would go to make a few pennies showing off his backbone. He quickly discovered how best to arouse the interest of the crowd, how to talk to them, how to play them as though they were fish, until their curiosity was keen and impatient, and then, before he removed the final veil—until, that is, his shirt came off—round went the hat, and the coins clinked sweetly.

  This was Martha’s job, taking the hat round, and she was no less adept than her father at working the crowd. Who could deny this child a penny? Many could, of course, but others, well along in drink, and beaming with sad rheumy eyes at the red-haired girl stamping about the taproom with her father’s cocked hat held out before her—oh, there was usually a farthing to be found in one pocket or another.

  Seven years passed, said my uncle William, since first they had arrived in London; and he paused, his eyes grew milky, and he drifted away, as though the very idea of seven years, so short a measure in such a history, yet such a span in a man’s life, had overwhelmed him with grim intimations of his own mortality. Seven years, he said, and in all those years Harry never touched a drop of spirits, nor any wine or beer. No, though he worked the taprooms and pot-houses where the drink flowed like water, he stayed sober; and in time he became a familiar figure all along the river, down past Shadwell Dock and Limehouse Reach to the Isle of Dogs and beyond. But he made his home in Smithfield, hard by St. Luke’s, where he was known as the Cripplegate Monster.

  And what, I said gently, of Martha?

  Martha, said my uncle, distractedly, Martha—matured; and curiously,he said—though it was not curious to me—curiously, he said, she was untouched by the vice that flourished everywhere around her, but grew straight and strong, clear and honest, and with all the vigor and appetite her father had possessed in his youth.

  Appetite?

  The old man lifted his hand, the fingers flickered in the firelight, ah yes, appetite, he murmured, she matured early, she was a ripe girl.… Again he drifted off, lost in some vapour of vagueness at the thought of Martha’s ripeness.

  A ripe girl?

  Now he flared. Ambrose, he snapped, do not make me say it. A ripe girl, yes, a girl with appetite, yes, will you make me speak of the natural functions? The story is not about her!

  It was then, at that moment—the hour was late, I had just heard the clock in the hall strike two—that it first occurred to me that what I wanted to hear from my uncle was perhaps not what he wished to tell me. But I let it pass, I said no more of Martha’s ripeness, of her appetite, and could only speculate that he meant she discovered the pleasures of being touched by a man; that she danced, perhaps, in the natural overflow of her abundant animal spirits, and that when her blood was warmed—and I speak of Martha at fourteen or fifteen, ripe Martha, I speak of now—she might be minded to loosen her bodice, lift her skirt, perhaps, for a clean young fellow who had pleased her—?

  Or perhaps not. Perhaps, living in such close quarters with her father, she found little opportunity to indulge her dawning “appetite,” perhaps Harry actively discouraged her, and held her to his own standard of chastity. But I wonder, did he not observe, as she washed herself in the corner of the room, or sat in his lap, as she had done since she was small, that she was fast becoming a woman? Did he not anticipate the day when he must relinquish her to a boy with a straight back, and find himself replaced in her affections?

  But my uncle’s rectitude forbade me to speak with frankness of such things, and I held my tongue.

  Harry, meanwhile, had returned to those habits he had first learned in the library of Edward Penwarden, that is, of reading, and writing, and he found now that the work of writing came easy to him, that all he had known in his thirty-some years was as fuel to the fire of an awakened imagination; and that the stories from his boyhood in Port Jethro, when he had sat at the knee of Maggie Peake in that windswept hut of netting and ship’s timbers, now came to him charged, as it seemed, with new meanings. It was around this time, I believe, the winter of 1773, that he began work on his “Ballad of Joseph Tresilian.”

  One night he incorporated into his act a few lines he had scribbled the night before; and to his surprise he was wildly applauded. He pondered this later, he discussed it with Martha, he saw that an opportunity presented itself and, old smuggler he was, he could not pass it up. And while he had renounced that greed for profit which he had come to see as the root of the evil whose fruit was the death of his wife, to live better, materially, he felt, could not be wrong, and Martha was wholeheartedly with him on this.

  Ah, but when he awoke the next morning he at once dismissed these thoughts with a shudder of disgust; had he not turned his back on all such temptation? And besides, what more did he want? He and Martha had taken lodgings at the top of the Angel, a large public house on Cripplegate Street, close to the Smithfield m
arket, where Harry performed nightly in the taproom. There they had been living for some months, in tranquil mutual affection. And thus, no doubt, they would have continued to live, had it not been for the intrusion into their lives of Lord Francis Drogo and his assistant, Dr. William Tree; that is, my uncle William.

  5

  By the summer of 1774 my uncle had been assisting Lord Drogo in his anatomical work for some years, and was certainly familiar with the means by which his lordship secured the bodies he needed to do that work. They came from a slinking, diminutive creature called Clyte. Clyte was a resurrection man, by which I mean he was a dealer in fresh cadavers, one who was not scrupulous as to how he came by the cadavers in which he dealt; and it was around this time he acquired one such. Mary Magdalen Smith, an actress, a girl no older than Martha Peake, had gone to the gallows for lifting a snuff-box from a rich man’s pocket in Drury Lane. As no friend came forward to claim her body it was cut down from the scaffold at Tyburn Field and purchased from the hangman by Clyte. That night, said my uncle, Clyte brought Mary Magdalen Smith’s body out across the Lambeth Marsh to Drogo Hall—yes, to this very house, he said, at my cry of surprise—where he himself took delivery of it. He and Clyte then prepared it for Lord Drogo to dissect before an audience of medical men the following afternoon.

  The dissection went off well, and later, when the Theatre of Anatomy was dark once more, and the sawdust all swept away, in an ill-lit scullery with a guttered slate floor the two surgeons washed the gore from their bodies as Clyte went through the clothing of a girl who—and here my uncle peered at me with an air of jaunty humour—having but the day before lost her life, had since lost her organ tree and much else of her innards besides. In a pocket of her skirt Clyte came upon a folded handbill, and finding that it advertised, of all things, a poet, who displayed himself nightly in the Angel at Cripplegate, he began to read aloud; and Lord Drogo paused in his ablutions—the noble head lifted—and he listened close.