Martha Peake (18 page)

What could her father do—argue with him, contradict him? His position would be delicate now. Swimming in gin as he was, could he muster the wit to keep his mouth shut and avoid giving offence? Not altogether; not as she heard it told later by William. Harry had apparently come straight to the point.

“Is she here, my lord?” he said.

Lord Drogo, had he chosen to, could have regarded this as a gross affront. He chose not to. William said that Lord Drogo had at once understood the extent of Harry’s moral decline and knew him not to be responsible for all that he said. He was curious, in fact, as to how far gone in drink Harry was; Harry’s state of health had become a matter of some importance to him, and yes indeed, I thought, so it should be. He glanced at William.

“We have not seen her, sir,” he said. “She did not come to me.”

Now the poet’s head, his rheumy bloodhound eyes, swung round to William.

“Not to you, my lord,” said Harry. “To him.”

Drogo did not blink.

“We cannot help you, sir, neither I nor William. She is not here. If you doubt my word, however”—and here he permitted a pause, so as to invite Harry to wave aside at once any suggestion that his lordship’s word might be doubted—“I offer you the freedom of my house.”

The invitation was made in tones which indicated that to accept
would be an impertinence; and Harry, now, hesitated to antagonize Lord Drogo, from whom he had already had assistance and could hope to have more. He turned from William to his lordship, anger, confusion, desperation all working across his harrowed features.

“Forget her,” said Lord Drogo.

“She has stolen my money, my lord.”

“I shall give you money. Forget her.”

Imagine Martha’s reaction when William told her all this! Harry was silent now. Had he the will for it, he could have searched the house from cellar to attic. Drogo’s authority alone prevented him. He turned again to William, and again subjected him to a scrutiny which troubled him sorely, for my uncle disliked deception—so he claimed, ha!—particularly with a man in as pitiful a state as her father was; for he felt, so he said, a genuine sympathy for the man.

Darkness fell on Drogo Hall. Lights were lit, and in the kitchen there was much heat and noise and toil, as there was every night when Patience Cogswell prepared to feed the many and various individuals lodging in and around the great house. Martha waited in a state of no little apprehension.

Downstairs, Harry was explosive, said William. Every impulse, every intuition of that intelligent but befuddled man told him his daughter was here. But every impulse of caution and self-preservation told him to acquiesce in the lie he was being told. Fearless when sober, drunk he was reckless, and he might have pressed the point. But he did not.

Then Lord Drogo all at once clapped his hands and gave out a brisk bark of laughter. “Enough, Harry Peake,” he cried, “do not take on so, sir! Are you the first man had his daughter run away from him? Many would think it a blessing. Come and eat, and we will talk more. Come!”

Lord Drogo was a charming man, when he chose to be so; he now affected the genial good heart of the rustic squire taking his guest to
table, and he would brook no argument. Harry reluctantly relinquished his cause, albeit temporarily, and allowed himself to be led off to the dining room.

He slept in the house that night. Martha knew this because she was watching for him, and he did not appear. And as the hours passed, it became clear that he would not appear, not that night. The howling started up out on the marsh, and Martha stirred with unease. Around ten the wind freshened and soon was blowing hard, and it muffled the howling but aroused instead a symphony of strange noises there in the high regions of the tower in the west wing. Amid the creakings and thumpings and rattlings, the bangings and gustings and crashings, would she hear the approaching footsteps—the laboured breathing outside the door—?

This is what she feared, poor Martha, who had learned at her father’s knee to fear nothing. Now she would sit up and keep watch, so with book and candle she made herself comfortable in her window alcove as the wind came up ever stronger and howled among the turrets and chimneys of the old hall.

The hours passed and her eyelids grew heavy; she could concentrate no longer on her book. As she sat there in the window she imagined herself the only soul in the house still alert. No longer infected with despair, and strangely soothed by the howling wind, and pleased to think that everyone in the house was asleep but her—she began to wish that her father would come. How she wanted to see him—! She still believed that she could drive out the madness that was in him. She would do it by the power of her love. He was not a free man. He did the will of another. From that other she would liberate him, she would restore him to himself, to the man he had been, the father she had known, the wise, gentle, melancholy poet in the warmth of whose love she had grown and flourished—

She fell asleep in the window and dreamed wildly; and waking at dawn, shivering with the cold, and stiff in every joint, she stumbled
into bed fully clothed. When next she awoke it was broad daylight. She opened her eyes and sat up in the bed; then leapt out and dashed to the window, and peered out over the marsh. Some mist still, but clarity enough to see there was no one on the road.

A voice spoke from the open doorway.

“He left at dawn,” said my uncle William.

“At dawn—?” She turned toward him.

“You are safe now.”

Martha said nothing more. He had left at dawn—but she had awoken at dawn! She might have seen him, and if she had, she would, she knew, have gone out and run after him. And then what? Would she indeed have liberated him from his demon? In the cold morning light she still believed she could.

It was from my uncle William that she learned of her father having dined with Lord Drogo that night; how the great man had had William on one side of him, and Harry Peake on the other, at the head of the table in the grand dining room where in recent days I myself had more than once supped. There was nobody else present, and Harry had been treated, as an honoured guest, with every courtesy. They had drunk claret with the roast beef, and mead with the pheasant, and Riesling with the fish, and cider with the apple pie, and port with the nuts and cheese; and Harry, given the chance of conversation with a man of learning, seized upon it, and rose to the occasion, although fresh draughts of wine did nothing to improve his nerves. Every so often, said my uncle, there would be a sudden
bang!
, and plates and glasses rattled, as one or other of Harry’s knees swung suddenly violently sideways into a leg of the table, an effect of old gin still sluicing about his body; or his fist would suddenly clench tight, quite involuntarily, or some odd spasm would seize upon his upper body and for a moment he was rocked back and forth with the force of it.

Lord Drogo observed all this, said William, with that intense curiosity
he brought to bear on all pathological phenomena, and questioned Harry closely about the state of his health, in particular the effects of sustained gin drinking on the intellectual and poetic functions; after which they returned to matters of literature and history, and Harry Peake’s powerful mind had little trouble overcoming the influence of the wine he had drunk; and then the two men parted for the night, Lord Drogo excusing himself on the pretext that he had further work to do, but inviting Harry to make free of his library, and to sleep in the house.

William accompanied his master down to the cellars, lighting their way with a branch of candles. Lord Drogo, despite his affability at table, then displayed considerable irritation toward my uncle.

“You are fortunate,” he said in tones of ice as they descended into the cellars, “that our friend believed you.”

Lord Drogo of course referred to William’s denial of Martha’s presence in the house.

“Why should he not, my lord?”

“Do not play me for a fool, sir!” cried Drogo in a surge of sudden rage. Then, calmer: “Do not play me for a fool. There is nothing in this house escapes me, do you not understand that? Keep her out of sight!”—and with that he stripped off his coat, and strapped on his apron, and went at his work with his usual ferocity.

So Lord Drogo knew about her after all. He knew about her, and tolerated her under his roof. Because at heart he was a good man who recognized that he had an obligation toward her? Or because it was his interest that Harry Peake not revenge himself upon his daughter for some imaginary wrong she had done him? For if that were to happen, others would lay claim to Harry Peake and he would be lost to Lord Drogo forever. Thus did I construe the meaning of his lordship’s actions that night. He was prepared to protect Martha, this was clear enough, but not for her own sake, for her father’s. Or rather, for his own.

My uncle went to the west wing early the next morning and told
Martha all that had happened. She at once recognized that the risk to herself was if anything greater than it had been before.

“You have no relation, I suppose, who could shelter you? Somewhere your father could not find you?” said William, after he and Martha had worried at this question for several minutes.

Martha thought then of her brothers and sisters, and of the rest of her family in Cornwall. At times she remembered them as though she had parted from them but the day before, and was filled with a wistful longing to see them again. But then she would not think of them for months at a time. She would not go to them now. Her father would soon find her if she did.

“My mother had an older sister,” she said doubtfully, “Maddy Foy—”

“And where, pray,” said my uncle, “does that good woman reside?”

13

H
ard upon the big winds the night of Harry Peake’s visit to Drogo Hall, said my uncle—the hour was late, still we talked on, each in his own way intent upon the outcome of the thing—came the first bad weather of the autumn. The sky was filled with large dark clouds that hung low overhead and roiled and galloped about in the wind before unleashing their waters in furious gusting storms that hammered the house without mercy, exposed as it was out there on the marsh. But though the house was exposed, said my uncle, isolated it was not, oh no; and despite the fact that the road across the marsh was reduced to a quagmire, and whole tracts of the Lambeth Marsh were under water, and the roofs of the old parts of Drogo Hall admitted the rain in a hundred places, still an unending stream of visitors made their way out there, seemingly drawn by one thing alone, and that was the genius of Francis Drogo.

They came from all over the country, and beyond. Martha often heard, as she crept about the house, for she had soon grown impatient, said my uncle, of her confinement, the broad incomprehensible gutturals of Scotsmen, and the lilt and trill of the Dublin men, all of whom, and many more besides, came to learn from his lordship. Then there was Cyrus Hamble, the American, a man remarkable for the plainness of his dress and, as Martha heard from her
friends in the kitchen, his refusal to take strong drink. But for the most part the visitors were English doctors: dressed in somber, heavy clothes, bewigged (though not elegantly so), equipped with silver-topped canes and narrow watchful eyes, and for the most part sober, they greeted one another in the entrance hall with sly formality, and observed with a scrupulous punctilio those delicate calibrations of rank and status so vital to the Englishman’s sense of propriety. They then filed into the Theatre of Anatomy and listened with close attention as the great man of medicine cut up another poor devil who but an hour or two previous had worn King George’s rope before being brought away by Clyte.