Martha Peake (43 page)

Nobody will ever take you from me, this was the promise she had made to her unborn child. But somebody would take him from her, and soon, too, for she had almost come to term. She had been visited several times by Hester Winthrop the midwife, who seemingly had delivered every infant in New Morrock for the past forty years. She had strange ways, old Hester, but the women of the town attested to her great art at pulling them out whole and screaming, and few were lost, they said, mother or child, with Mistress Winthrop attending. She was a vast ancient crone with a black mole the size of a penny on her upper lip from which sprouted a cluster of black hairs, and what few teeth remained in that collapsing jaw were yellow with decay. She carried about her compendious person numerous malodorous herbs and plants which she gathered in the forest, and she would produce from deep within her many layers of shawl and skirt a few stems or leaves of some green or brown or black thing and make a tea of it, which must be drunk no matter how foul the taste and stink of it. She had probed and poked Martha with her bent old fingers, the soil of her garden caked thick beneath the nails, and pronounced her strong and the boy within—she was at once certain of his sex, you see—as “curious big.” Mistress Winthrop eyed her with some interest, from under her shaggy brows, and Martha did not know what she meant by “curious big.”

She thought no more of it; she was eager now to be done with
this pregnancy of hers, she wanted to move again, do her work, get outside, climb the hill—be mistress of her own body, which more and more felt like a ponderous great ship heaving into harbour, holds bursting with cargo and her planking beginning to split. Darling boy, she thought, I am weary of carrying you, I want you out in the world where I can hold you in my arms and gaze into your eyes and find your father there.

The day grew near and now she could only sprawl in her uncle’s great chair, which had been carried into the kitchen, no other chair being big enough for the galleon Martha Peake had become. She lay there panting and flushed as the child stirred and kicked inside her, as eager, I believe, to be out, as Martha was to have him out. She drank what she could of Hester Winthrop’s tea and poured away the rest. Her cousins were far more excited than she was. She had not the strength for excitement, she had ceased to be herself, she had become a simple docile creature capable of nothing but the rudimentary functions of the cow. She was a cow, in her own eyes, she was a beached whale—you have done to me, she murmured to her belly, what no man ever has, you have made me soft and slow and dull and stupid. Her emotions began to grow vague, and in those last days of her pregnancy she could barely arouse anxiety for Adam at all, or for her father, or for the American army gathered on the hills round Boston. She ate and slept and little else.

She awoke on the first day of May to heavy rain and thunder and knew at once that he was ready. She knew too that it would be a slow and stately progress, his entry into the world, and she did not hurry to send word to Mistress Winthrop, but waited until noon, sure that they would be many hours about the business. She was in her uncle’s great chair when her water broke, buckets of it, and her aunt Maddy became at once brisk with authority and dispatched her daughters on various errands; Sara to get the great kettle boiling on the fire, Ann
for clean sheets and towels, Hester to summon the goodwives who would assist Mistress Winthrop in her work. She did not trouble to send word to Joshua Rind, this was woman’s work, but none of them doubted that the doctor would make an appearance regardless. As for Martha, she was ordered to bed, with warming pans, and told not to move, and the bedroom became for the next hours a busy place indeed, the very eye of a storm of womanly activity that matched the lashing rain and thunder and the gusts of a freshening gale, and Martha was happy for all the attention, not because she felt she needed it—it is surely not so very hard to push a baby out of your belly, she thought—but because it marked her own child’s birth for the profoundly solemn occasion it was.

And so she allowed herself to lie languid on a great heap of pillows, feeling in her warm clean nightshirt like a queen of sorts and reflecting on what sweet pleasure it was to have others waiting on her, alert to every whim and desire that she might chance to entertain. Maddy Rind saw this and remarked that she had better not get used to it, it was her child they attended, all she must do is stay alive, as he would shortly want her milk, and after the buckets of water that had flowed in the great chair he was sure to be a big one.

Soon enough he announced his intention of dominating this drama as muscular events beyond Martha’s control dispelled her pleasant languor and had her heaving and sweating and crying out with pain. Mistress Winthrop now held the floor but did little as yet, taking Martha’s hands tightly in her own and murmuring words she could not understand, she was so intent on trying to obey the manifest demands of her own body. Mistress Winthrop continued to murmur to her, and all Martha knew from her murmuring, for she was working hard, harder than she remembered working in all her life, was that all was well, all was going forward as it should.

She was pushing now, and the pushing seemed never to end, and strong as she was she had to stop every minute to catch her breath. Her aunt Maddy hovered over her and wiped the sweat off her face,
which she was later told had turned a shade of red so deep it had never before been seen on human skin. Scarlet, then, wet with sweat and God knows what other nameless fluids that had seeped or flooded from her, surrounded by watchful murmuring women as the wind hammered at the windows and the house creaked like a ship, and aware now and then of Hester Winthrop’s fingers down beneath the tented sheets, she tried to push a great thing out of what she knew to be an impossibly narrow opening, and it was like forcing a pig through a fence, the pain of it warning her that the fence must splinter for the pig to get through; and she was so sore and tender down there that the thought of her body being torn open filled her with terror, soon forgotten in the sheer bloody labour of sustaining the rhythm of her heaving muscles, which continued to perform the task given them by Nature with scant regard for her pain. She was soon desperate for it to be over, and when next she paused and had her face wiped she weakly asked how much longer and heard a cackle from the midwife and a muttered response that gave her no great reassurance, something about a pumpkin.

It got worse. There was some screaming, she barely heard it herself, and in a small calm place in her mind she wondered who was screaming, and why they were screaming, and why nobody gave them comfort, but it was her, it was her, she was no longer a rational conscious being but a woman utterly under the tyranny of her own body. And so it went on, seemingly forever—and then it changed! It changed. There was an intense sudden pain as though a hot poker had been thrust against her sex, there was a hideous sensation of
ripping
—and after that a sort of relief, for the first time a lessening in the intolerable pressure within her, but she could not rest, she could not pause, even, the contractions were coming closer and closer now, and when she cried out to the midwife the old woman did not cackle but said they were on the last mile, for his head had appeared, and a big one it was too.

His head! In the waves of relief all commingled with pain that
came with the appearance of his head she seemed to recover her ability to think thoughts and feel feelings other than mere effort and torment, for the very idea of his head filled her with wild joy, his head, his body, his heart, his mind, his soul, so ran her thoughts—it was then that the promise of this child with which she had lived so long gave way to an idea a thousand times more powerful, which was his real and actual
presence
, her child, her son, and it was with
him
that she worked now to finish the business, she was now a
mother
helping her child in his first enterprise, and she spoke to him, whether in her mind or out loud, whether with clarity or in gasps and cries she did not know, but from then on they worked together, Martha Peake and her little Harry, and she whispered, Harry, Harry, come now, Harry, be strong, Harry, this time, Harry—

By now the storm had passed, the rain fell steady on the roof and all the world was wet. It was growing dark outside. Lamps were lit and one of the women said quietly that the doctor waited below, should he be wanted. Mistress Winthrop only snorted and asked for wine, and still working, peered down at Martha and asked her how she did. Martha, panting, told her she did well and the midwife said she was a strong girl and they should soon be done. The rest was completed an hour later, by which time Martha was exhausted, and her brief ecstasy of communion with her son had passed, as again the sheer labour of the thing obliterated the possibility of all other sensation. She heard him screaming! She heard his first tiny screams, and she struggled up from the pillow with what little strength remained to her to get a glimpse of him. There was silence in the room now, for Martha’s baby had soon stopped screaming and instead spluttered and sneezed, his eyes tight shut like a little monkey and his tiny fists clenched. The women stood gazing at him and said nothing.

Darkness had fallen, the wind had dropped, and in the wavering candle-flame Martha saw that all was not as it should be, that Hester Winthrop was frowning and clucking as she turned the infant about in her old clawed hands and the blood and the slime and some curious
white stuff dripped off his slathered little body, and the cord from his belly yet hung between them. Martha propped herself up on her elbows, and as she gazed, exhausted, at her child, she saw with a flare of strange joy that he was indeed a little Harry, he had his father’s spine.

33

F
rancis Drogo had been dead for many years, this my uncle had told me, and I had no reason to doubt him. Yet one had the sense (and Drogo Hall is not the only house, in my experience, to have nourished the spirit of a late dominant master)—one had the sense that the house was not yet empty of him, or that he was not yet ready to quit it, for his presence still hung heavy about the place; and William and Percy being mere feeders upon the sepulchral animation of the house, there was little vitality beyond my own to help dispel these ghostly intimations of a former time. The footfall I had heard outside my room in the night: I had turned the thing over in my mind, I had examined it from every possible point of vantage, and no other explanation was satisfactory.

Once already I had left my room in the early morning, during that period of exalted creation, as I now think of it, when Martha gave birth, and with my pistol in my pocket I had come downstairs into the entrance hall and spent some time in Drogo’s Theatre of Anatomy, where the bodies of Mary Magdalen Smith and countless others had come under the master’s knife, and the steep-tiered benches rising in a semi-circle almost to the ceiling were filled with doctors all of whom had long since passed away. I found it thick with
dust and festooned with cobwebs, the early sunshine that drifted through the bespattered skylight providing but meagre illumination for any operation that might now be attempted on the dissecting table below, where the blood of Drogo’s cadavers had stained the woodwork black in patches. There was much scuttling behind the wainscots and paneling, and the tiny bones of a small bird that had somehow found its way into the room, and then been unable to get out again, lay scattered among a few feathers in the dust and droppings on the floor.

The door creaked loudly when first I entered, and the boards groaned as I descended into the well of the room. The air was stale and stank of mildew, and it was not hard to imagine those eminent men of medical science coming to this grim place to hear his lordship lecture, and see him cut. A recessed door, leading, I believe, to the cellars, was locked, and having no idea where its key was kept I determined to find another way to get down there. And why? For this reason. I had come to the conviction that there remained one service I could still perform for Harry Peake. For yes, in the hours of my inspiration my mind had ranged widely across the matter of my history, and I had at last arrived at an understanding of the final weeks of that poor man’s life.