Martha Peake (22 page)

Now, he said, he was not so sure. That night, when she was settled in her room, he locked the door himself, and pocketed the key. In the days that followed he continued this practice, and by these means gave her little chance to get out of the house and look for Harry in the marsh. She could only keep a vigil in her window alcove, watch for him and pray he would be patient, that he would wait for her. She did not expect this surveillance of William’s to be sustained for many days, and sure enough, once he began bringing her books about America from Lord Drogo’s library, he became himself so engrossed in them, sitting with her of an evening, that he soon forgot to lock her in and she was gradually able to return to her old independent ways.

Still, it was daunting to go out onto the marsh at night, although it was not difficult during the day to slip across the courtyard and into the walled garden, which was almost always deserted at this time of the year, with little growing there but witch-hazel and catkin; and from there she would make exploratory sweeps of the surrounding country. In this way she first came upon the graveyard.

16

I
t 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.