Martha Peake (2 page)

“You know who he is, eh?”

“No, sir,” I said, “I do not.”

“No? Then shall I tell you?”

It was Harry Peake.

The name clawed at the skirts of memory as I sat down by the fire and warmed my jaded heart on the image of that proud rough man. America—for some reason as I gazed at him I thought of America—I thought of the revolutionary war, and of all that I had learned of that great conflict from my mother, herself an American who pined in exile for her country every day of my childhood. An incident by the sea—a burning village filled with women and children—a red-haired girl with a musket at her shoulder—these ideas tentatively emerged from out of the mind’s mist, but all else remained shrouded and obscure. I found myself sitting forward in my chair and staring into the fire as I tried to remember. At last I looked up, and told my uncle I saw a village in flames somewhere on the coast of North America, but no more than that. For some moments there was little sound in the room but the hiss of the coal in the hearth, and the wind rising in the trees outside.

“Come, Ambrose, sit closer to the fire,” he murmured at last, turning away from me, seizing up the bottle of Hollands at his elbow. “Here, fill your glass. You shall hear it all. I have held it in
my heart too long. It has blighted me. I am withered by it. He never got to America. God knows he wanted to.”

My uncle put his fingertips together beneath his chin and closed his eyes. Silence.

“Many a man,” I murmured, “has never got to America.”

A sort of sigh, at this, and then silence again. I waited. When next he spoke it was with a clipped asperity that belied the desperate pathos of what he told me. To know Harry Peake, he said, you must first know what he suffered. Then you will understand why he fell. Why he turned into a monster.

“A monster—!”

“ ‘Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families’—eh?”

He was quoting an author, but I missed the allusion.

“He devoured his young—?”

Then I had it. Tom Paine.

“Lost his mind. What a waste. What a mind.”

“But who was he?”

Here my uncle turned to me, and again fixed me with that gimlet eye. “One of those cursed few,” he said, “to whom Nature in her folly gave the soul of a smuggler, and the tongue of a poet.”

And so it began. Much of the detail I have had to supply from my own imagination, that is, from the ardent sympathetic understanding of the tragic events my uncle William described. His recall was patchy, for time had worn his memory through as though it were an old coat. The seams had split open, there were fragments of alien fabric, rudely stitched, and everywhere the pattern was obscured by foreign substances, such as those that were liberally splattered about the papers I later received from him, blood, soil, gin, etc. So I was forced to expand upon the materials he gave me. But when it was over I felt that I
understood
, I understood the extraordinary life not
only of Harry Peake, but of his daughter also, of Martha Peake, who died at the hands of her own countrymen, and who, by her sacrifice, helped to create the republic to which my mother swore allegiance, and whose spirit I have come to love.

Later that evening the wind came up, it started to rain, and I was glad indeed of the shelter of Drogo Hall, for I had no desire to be out on the Lambeth Marsh in such conditions. We supped in the grand dining room downstairs, and a strange meal it was, the two of us up at the end of the table, a single branch of candles to light us, the wind howling about the house and that peculiar little man Percy, now wearing a ratty scratch wig, presumably on account of the formality of the occasion, serving us with silent swiftness, appearing suddenly out of the darkness with tureen or decanter and just as suddenly vanishing again. From the high, dark-panelled walls of the dining room the portraits of the earls of Drogo of centuries past peered down at us through the gloom, and our conversation seemed at times to struggle forward as though burdened by the span of years that separated us from the events of which we spoke, indeed that separates me now from that dismal stormy night so long ago.

My uncle sat in the great chair at the head of the table, a tiny slumped figure against the vast gloom behind him, and picked at his food with sharp little jabs like a bird. We ate cold mutton and boiled potatoes. He had frequent recourse to the decanter, which was filled with a sweet Rhenish wine, and with every glass his speech grew more fluting, more rapid, and more inflected with the fancies of a failing mind, such that I had constantly to steer him away from the wild places where he seemed inclined to wander, and back to the track of his narrative. And all the while the silent Percy flickered in and out of the candlelight like a moth, again and again refilling my uncle’s tall crystal goblet with that undrinkable sweet white wine.

Oh, we talked on long after the last dish had been removed, and
the candles had burned down to guttering stubs, and still the wind could be heard out on the marsh, and the boughs of the trees slapped against the high windows of the house. Later I made my way upstairs with a candle, to a cold room with a damp bed where I lay sleepless for many hours as the storm exhausted itself and I attempted to digest not only my uncle’s mutton but his story as well.

2

W
e know only a little, said William, of the circumstances of Harry Peake’s early life, but that little is enough, certainly, to point the way forward. It all began in the west of England, in Port Jethro, a remote fishing village on the north coast of Cornwall, where sometime in the 1730s Harry was born the bastard child of a wild and lonely woman called Maggie Peake. This poor ragged soul lived on the seashore near the harbour, in a shack built of fishing net and ship’s planking. She scraped a living cutting seaweed on the beaches thereabouts, which she sold for a few pence the cartload to a farmer inland, to spread on his fields. Maggie Peake, in her pitiful dwelling, reared her child with a fierce protective devotion, and Harry grew into a robust and healthy boy. Hearing this, I remarked to my uncle that it did not surprise me, for there is often more love to be had in a hovel than a palace.

Quite so, he said shortly, eager, clearly, to get on; I think it was not a truth he cared to dwell upon.

By the age of five young Harry was often to be seen out on the beach with his mother, in the early morning when the tide was low, the pair of them barefoot, bent over their work with rake and pitchfork, filling their baskets with good fresh stinking seaweed swept in on the tide overnight. They emptied their baskets into a rickety cart
harnessed to a donkey. Later they set off along the beach, and what a picturesque spectacle they made, I imagined, on that vast stretch of damp sand, beneath the high cliffs, the little boy and his workworn mother walking beside their old cart, which groaned with its load of shining seawrack, the gulls all flapping and screaming about them—!

At the age of seven Harry was put to work on the boats, and their lives at once changed for the better. I should have liked to tell you, said my uncle—and here he cast upon me a long lugubrious gaze, the meaning of which escaped me—that even at this tender age the poetry rose in Harry like a clear fresh spring, and that he could no more hold back the flood of it than he could stop the beating of his heart—but alas, he murmured, it was not so. No, he showed no marks of genius, young Harry, he was distinguished, if by anything, only by his wickedness.

Wickedness!—what kind of wickedness?

But it was merely the wickedness of a boy. Harry was a scoundrel, said my uncle, he was a thief and a liar, he recognized no authority, and he would fight with anyone in the village who crossed him, or tried to block him, for he was a wilful child who was accustomed to getting his own way. Hardly remarkable, said my uncle, given that his mother was a whore and a drunkard, and probably mad. Here he sniffed, and I detected in that sniff of his a moral opprobrium, which was distasteful to me, and I would have challenged him had I not been avid to hear more. So I asked him to go on, and he told me that Harry was soon popular on the boats, for he was strong, he was a natural sailor, he understood the fishing, and he amused the men.

How did he amuse the men?

He told them the stories his mother told him, said William, for Maggie Peake had a great trove of old tales and legends which she passed on to Harry by the fire on the long winter evenings. Ah, but Harry told his mother’s stories with embellishments all his own, and wove into them the boats and men he knew in Port Jethro, the cliffs and coves thereabouts, the fish and the birds and the changing seasons,
and it amused them to recognize their own world in his stories. How Harry acquired such powers of invention nobody knew, but in later years, when he recited, say, a passage of his “Ballad of Joseph Tresilian,” he could seize the imagination of an entire London pothouse, hold a company of seventy or eighty men and women in a rapt silence, not a cough to be heard, nor the scrape of a chair-leg, for many minutes together, until he had finished; whereupon the whole house would erupt with a great shout of applause—

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.