Martha Peake (7 page)

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 market, 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

B
y 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.

The poet was of course Harry Peake; and the description on the handbill of his twisted spine at once aroused the professional curiosity of the great anatomist.

My uncle William spoke with a kind of wistful fondness of Harry and Martha, as he first knew them. Martha was of an age now to talk to her father about those questions which occur early to young people, that is, those simple, profound questions on the order of why the people they lived among could barely afford the staples of life, while others had so much.

Nor was she alone in this; for she was growing up among free-thinking men and women, many of whom were her father’s friends, and all of whom were passionate enemies of the corruption then rife in the government. Some wrote pamphlets, attacking the ministry, or the church, or the king, or all three, the printers of the more intemperate of these screeds being hauled off to gaol. Harry not only shared these men’s principles, he intended that one or another of them should publish his ballad when it was done; and indeed, promises to this effect had been made to him. As for Martha, her political sympathies were established early, when as a child she had talked to her father about the free trade; and if the arbitrary power of the king had once been something of an abstraction to her, it was abstract no longer.

For she knew girls like Mary Magdalen Smith, she knew men with children to feed who could not afford bread. She knew why they robbed, and she had observed the savagery with which the society
that first had forced them into penury and desperation then punished them for taking the course of last resort; and there were not a few she had known who ended their days at Tyburn, or were languishing deep in the vaults of Newgate, victims of a penal code which honoured one idea and one idea only, and that was not HUMANITY but PROPERTY. Harry provided no sort of brake of moderation to the political opinions his daughter began to voice; if anything the opposite, he encouraged her.

My uncle sniffed with distaste as he told me this last, and I understood that these were not opinions he held himself. On being probed a little, he said curtly that the poor would always be with us, and should be put to work at once lest in idleness they acquired tastes they could never afford to indulge. I lifted an eyebrow at this, but I let it pass, eager, rather, to hear more of Martha’s early life. So he sighed, and then described to me the rituals of their day, as he construed them, and after a moment or two a rather soft and silly smile began to twitch at the edges of his thin old lips; I should mention here that my uncle William had never married, and had fathered no children.

In those days, he said, Harry and Martha lived at the top of the Angel in a pair of adjoining rooms with sloping ceilings and small dormer windows with leaded panes that peered out from beneath the mossy eaves onto the stable yard below. Each room contained a few pieces of old heavy furniture, including, in Harry’s, a canopied bed with swags of rotting curtain hanging off the frame. Also in Harry’s room was a large fireplace, unused during the summer months, whose mantelpiece spilled over with ill-stacked books and papers, as did the table in the middle of the room. By Cripplegate standards these were good lodgings, for which they paid only tuppence a night.

Martha would come into her father’s room in the evening, and Harry would lay aside his writing or reading, and make himself ready for his work downstairs. He would seat himself on a low chair, legs splayed sideways as he hunched before a looking-glass propped
against a book on his table; then peering at his reflection, with practised fingers he selected what he needed from his various jars of theatrical cosmetics.