Martha Peake (12 page)

A return, then, to the routine of their old life, Harry smoking his pipe and reading newspapers in the coffee shops, often lifting his head and drifting into distant contemplative reverie; and Martha going about her tasks, her washing and darning, her sweeping and cleaning, husbanding the small reserve of money they possessed. In the evening Harry would tell her what he had read that day, and through directed argument, with patience and humour, instructed his daughter in the practice of thinking so that, as he said, she might learn to distinguish Reason from that which merely masqueraded as Reason; and of the latter, he said, the world was full. Only by Reason—Reason tempered with natural benevolence—could any person, he said, man or woman, hope to live peaceably with others; and without the constraints, he might well have added, of governments, or churches, or kings.

He told her about the argument between the colonists and the crown, saying darkly that war would surely come soon; and hearing this I asked my uncle what Harry thought about the coming war, this man who hated violence? My uncle sniffed. It displeased him, he said, to have to tell me this, but Harry sided with the rebels. He had been an early advocate of American independence from the Empire,
and he understood that blood must be shed for that independence to be won. And rightly so, I thought, though I did not say this to my clucking frowning uncle.

Lord Drogo came once to visit Harry during this period. As before, he came with William in the small black carriage with the coat-of-arms in flaking goldleaf on the door; as before, Clyte was their driver; and as before, they arrived at the Angel at twilight. Finding that there was no performance, his lordship sent my uncle upstairs to request an audience; which Harry granted.

The distinguished visitors spent almost an hour with Harry in his room. Lord Drogo wished to examine his spine, and did so. I asked my uncle what it looked like; and it has always seemed to me to be distinctly sinister that William Tree, although a surgeon, was in agreement with Martha in the strange idea that
Harry’s spine was beautiful
.

Beautiful—?

But why, he cried, should it not be? Was it not constituted of flesh and bone, such as all our bodies are made of? This question he put to me in a tone of spry challenge, but I would not argue with him. And was this spine, he said, so strange, after all? Those struts and ribs of bone, were they not forms found in all of Nature, and indeed in the human form, although disposed elsewhere and otherwise? Why by this mere accident of organization must we think him ugly, or grotesque, or monstrous? Were he a landscape we would not be slow to pronounce him sublime!

He peered at me with rare earnest sincerity, but I had no answer for him. Harry was no landscape, he was a man. Why then must his life be twisted so far from what others had, on account of his back?

Martha saw the visitors as they were leaving, having stationed herself outside her father’s door so as to hear what she could of what went on inside. Drogo nodded at her with cold disdain and went on
down the staircase. My uncle William paused, however, and asked her how she did, and Martha was unable to hold her feelings in check, but told him all their recent misfortune.

My uncle said that on glimpsing the depth of her distress he resolved there and then that he would be a friend to this unhappy girl. He took her chin in his hand, he said, and looked into her eyes, and told her with great seriousness that if ever she were in need, she must come to him, and he would help her. Oh, I can see the old man now, as he dwelled upon this offer of help he made, still quite as intoxicated with his own gallantry as he was fifty years before! There he sat, dwarfed in his great armchair, sitting up with no small effort to be sure I understood what he had done, and in his excitement spilling his wine.

“I liked the girl, you see,” he cried, fixing me with a watery eye, and lifting a trembling hand, “she had spirit!”

He talked on through the night. Again I sat in rapt attention, attempting to make sense of his digressions and asides, and to allow for what I was now beginning to recognize as a subtle attempt to misrepresent the truth of the thing and make me believe that Lord Drogo was interested solely in the welfare of Harry Peake. About this last I was starting to harbour serious doubts, which were not allayed by the description he gave me of the visit Harry made to Drogo Hall later that summer. For my uncle would have me believe that Harry was welcomed, that he was treated with respect. My own construction was somewhat different, and I will tell you why.

I had begun to ponder Harry’s decision not to show himself in the taproom of the Angel. This of course was why he was impelled to cross the Lambeth Marsh to Drogo Hall, Joseph Goat having not been slow to remind him that a man in search of pleasure by night will avoid a house where none is to be had; making it clear that Harry’s refusal to work was damaging the interest of the house,
which was Joseph Goat’s interest. Harry must work, or he must pay for his board and lodging in full; and if he did neither, he would soon find himself unwelcome at the Angel.

But this was on the material level only. What intrigued me about the poet was his soul. And it is my conclusion that Harry Peake, in the wake of Lord Drogo’s first visit, and the recurrence of his dreams of the Port Jethro fire, had changed, and the man who before had willingly painted his face, and indulged the coarse curiosity of the public, so as to make restitution for the death of his wife—that man now shuddered with revulsion at the very thought of such self-exposure. In short, his penance was over.

His penance was over. He had atoned for his sin. The man he had been was no more, this is my conclusion; a new man had begun to come into being, that man intent now upon turning his mind to higher matters of the spirit, and thus, in a sense, a weaker man than his predecessor. Harry was attempting to forge a new relation to his twisted spine. He was coming to understand that his body was but an accidental membrane sheathing a soul that in all its proportions and lineaments was not disfigured. His brief period of confusion and despair had opened his eyes, and he could not go back to what he was. I can find no other reason for this most independent of men to walk out to Drogo Hall and ask for money.

Now, it seems Lord Drogo was that day entertaining a group of medical men, and that on being informed by my uncle William that Harry Peake had come to the house seeking an interview with him, he left his guests and came to the poet where he waited in the hall, having at once guessed the reason for his presence there. He quickly confirmed that, yes, Harry came as a supplicant, and made clear that he would be willing to help him, and generously at that; but that he asked one favour in return.

What was Harry to say? The long walk across the Lambeth Marsh, and the approach to the great house, were enough to rock the resolution of the stoutest heart, and put a man in a subordinate position before he had even encountered the master. When his lordship
agreed to answer the request put to him, and then asked but one favour, the petitioner would of course accede at once. And what was that favour? Merely, said Lord Drogo, that he might show Harry’s back to a group of medical men; purely, of course, that the advancement of learning might go forward, and the good doctors be fully apprised of Nature’s variety in the matter of twisted spines. Harry Peake’s misgivings were overwhelmed by the sense of indebtedness that he felt toward Lord Drogo; and so he agreed.

Oh, the presumption, the arrogance of inherited privilege! I can only imagine the humiliation Harry suffered. But that it was extreme, given the fragile state of his soul at that time, is amply indicated by his subsequent behaviour. My uncle described how he was stripped of his shirt and brought into the Theatre of Anatomy, where a group of perhaps fifteen doctors had assembled. And I imagine that Lord Drogo, who had been friendly enough to Harry when talking to him in the great hall outside the theatre, became at once brisk and cold, he became the man of science attending to what was nothing more than a specimen. Harry’s history, as he had given it to Lord Drogo, was recounted in stark, abbreviated form; his story of how he had been born deformed was mentioned, and much laughter was heard in the amphitheatre at the very idea of great shadows being responsible for anything but great nonsense.

But I wonder, now—was it such nonsense? Must we all now defer to the upstart Reason, and bend the knee before His Precocious Majesty?—and ignore the promptings of an ancient Knowledge which has guided mankind since the dawn of time?—why should not a great shadow, glimpsed in terror by a pregnant woman, deform the foetus in her womb? Does it not make eminent sense? To me, yes, it does—but enough. Harry Peake, hearing himself mocked in front of men of vastly more formal education than himself, and feeling himself more monstrous, as Lord Drogo turned him this way and that before the company, pointing out this or that feature of his spine, than he ever did when showing himself in the taproom of an inn—Harry suffered more in that hour, I believe, than he had suffered
in the previous ten years. He became no more than a bent back. Man he was not. Of humanity he had none. He was cattle, worse than cattle, for his value lay only in that which was abnormal.

When Lord Drogo had finished, the doctors came forward to examine for themselves the anatomical curiosity. They fingered his spine, they measured it, they probed and kneaded and squeezed it. They asked him questions, but not as if he were a man, as if he were the mere porter or guardian of his own deformity! They talked among themselves of what they saw and what they thought of him as though he were not present. And when they had satisfied their curiosity, Lord Drogo dismissed Harry with a wave of his hand, and my uncle William took him to the kitchen and there gave him money, and a plate of food, and a glass of wine.

A glass of wine. Harry left Drogo Hall with money in his pocket and rage in his heart. He had his money, but he had sold his soul for it, so he felt, he had allowed himself to be handled as an animal, and all that distinguishes the animal from the man is the soul, no? He had for that interminable hour in the Theatre of Anatomy been a creature devoid of a soul. They had purchased his soul, and he had agreed to the terms of the contract. He was dirtied by the transaction, brought low by it; he felt himself a nothing, as he walked away from Drogo Hall that day, and set his steps across the Lambeth Marsh toward the distant spires of the town; and with the taste of wine on his lips, and money in his pocket, he was soon established in a tavern, and by nightfall he had moved on to gin.

The rest may be predicted.

9

I
s it premature to voice my suspicions as to what Lord Drogo truly wanted from Harry Peake? It was not a simple matter of examining his spine, nor of displaying it to his medical friends. No, Drogo had a far more—imperial—project in view. I believe he wanted to
own
Harry’s spine. He wanted him for his Museum of Anatomy, he wanted him among his exhibits. Not so unusual a thing in those days, when any anatomist of distinction prided himself on his collection of anatomical curiosities, and vied with his peers in the range and oddity of the specimens he could display. Lord Drogo was no better than the rest, and I believe it had occurred to him when first he heard Clyte read the handbill discovered in the pocket of Mary Magdalen Smith, that here might be his
pièce de résistance
—the skeleton of the Cripplegate Monster.

Was he disappointed in Harry’s backbone? Was it not as floridly bent as he had hoped? This was not a question I could ask my uncle William. But whatever the expectation, nobody could deny that here was a man with a most peculiar spinal formation; and Drogo wanted it. What then of my uncle William? Was he innocent of all this? I do not think he could have been. I think he was as complicit in Drogo’s designs as Clyte was. He knew what was happening, he knew that Harry was the object of Lord Drogo’s ambition. What
none of them could have predicted of course was that Harry should then have come out to Drogo Hall to ask for money. But see how Drogo capitalized on his good fortune, see how he humiliated the poet when he was at his most vulnerable. And see how my uncle William, having given poor Harry the money he asked for, sent him on his way
with a glass of wine
. You may imagine the skepticism with which I attended my uncle’s narration after I had reached these conclusions.