Martha Peake (23 page)

Martha grew quiet as the moment of departure drew near. I believe my uncle knew she was seeing her father, for Clyte would surely have told him, but he did not know of her dilemma, nor did he hear the pitiful sounds of that lost girl weeping into her pillow each night. All those years of happiness and calm, all swept away in the space of a few weeks, it was little wonder her heart had at first frozen over with the shock of it. And little wonder that when the ice began to crack she would be overcome with grief.

Ah, but out of that grief emerged a decision: I will not go. This is my conviction. I will not go. William knew nothing of it, when I suggested it, but why would he? She would have hidden it from him, of course she would.

And so the last days passed. William spoke to her of the rigours of an Atlantic crossing so late in the season, and much else besides, and Martha listened, though her mind and heart were now decided against an American future. She remained committed, rather, to the skeletal
figure haunting the marsh, whom she continued to meet in the graveyard. The day of departure from Drogo Hall was now imminent, and Martha was determined to see her father the night she was to leave the house, and tell him of the plan she had made. She could not leave him. She felt she did little enough for that poor man, and if that little were taken away, then what would be left? He would surely die. He never told her about his life in the town, nor did he answer her questions as to how he fed himself, and where he slept, and by what means he had money, but it was not hard to guess these things. Did Clyte know? He probably did. He too haunted the marsh, watching, always watching, and Martha had no doubt he followed her father back to whatever sordid night-cellar he spent the night in, after drinking his fill of bad gin.

But these last days he had not been drinking, and was instead sunk in a weary, watchful state of melancholy, almost as though he knew she was about to leave him. And it was that night, the last time she saw him, that a catastrophe befell her whose repercussions she would feel for the rest of her short life.

It happened in the graveyard. The night was windy, and the moon was obscured by clouds. Martha had slipped out of Drogo Hall unobserved, and tramped up the hill, and found him slumped against his customary headstone and stinking foully of gin. She had never seen him so bad. He lay there staring into the high branches of the graveyard elms as they whipped and thrashed about in the wind. The jug was corked and lay beside him in the grass. He raised himself as she approached, lifted an arm and called to her to lie beside him.

She had so much to tell him! She had made her decision, she could not leave him, she would stay, she would help him, they would be together as they had been before. But oh, she was shocked at his appearance. At their last meeting he had been three days sober, and she had glimpsed the faint outline of the real man within, and upon that glimpse she had begun to build—again!—a small tentative
structure of hope. That hope was now dashed. The strength he had acquired in his brief period of sobriety had been put to service in the work of drinking, and with the drinking had come, once more, the turning to the darkness, the embrace of the monster, the disdain of love in the face of a world that would not love him but denied his humanity, rather, and pushed him out.

Martha settled herself in the grass beside him with some apprehension, wrapping her arms round her knees as he rambled at the sky. She made no attempt to understand his dark chaotic chains of thought, all commingled with a scrap of Milton, a snatch of his own verse, fragments of memory rising like tiny silvered fish then sinking forever to the depths below. He began upon the fire, and oh, there was for him no forgetting the fire, the fire he had caused in his drunkenness that took Grace Foy’s life and ruined his own. Despite his incoherence, the slur and garble of his muttering, he did not fail to arouse in Martha, when she remembered the death of her mother, feelings of the most profound grief, and soon he had her weeping, and he, sentimental creature he was, and all the more so when in drink, he wept with her, tears of gin, and they were soon clutching each other in their unhappiness as Martha stroked his face, and kissed him over and over, and attempted through her own tears to find some words of comfort for him.

That was when he turned. The animal passion flared up like a bed of coals deep in the furnace of his being, and he was so far beyond the reach of reason—so defiantly had he turned his face from the light—that he did not know her as his daughter and his friend, she was nothing but a creature weaker than himself on whom the aroused passion intended now to spend its force. He did not know who she was, he did not hear her screams, he did not heed the fingernails she buried in his face, this sudden conflagration deep in his animal body burned so fierce there was nothing in him now but a storm of lust that must
out
—and Martha was its object. He overwhelmed her without difficulty, he pinned her down, and her struggles were to no avail as he hoisted her skirt then freed from his
ragged britches that great horse-penis of his, now thick as a fisted arm—

She did not know what happened to him when he was done with her. She ran away from him through the graveyard, through the shrieking wind and the flailing trees, beneath the moonless sky, sick and bleeding and desperate only to reach the sanctuary of her room. She burst in through the door and flung herself on the bed. When she had recovered a little she washed herself in the shadowy recess of the room, and found on her body and her garments eloquent marks of what she had been made to endure; and by then her plan to slip away from Drogo Hall that very night, and join her father, lay in ruins.

Nor was this the worst of it. For in her shame, in her pollution, she fastened on that which was to her even more terrible than the rape itself, and that was the deep sure knowledge that when her father spent himself inside her she had conceived his child.

17

M
y uncle’s story had been growing darker and more terrible with every fresh burden he loaded upon the young shoulders of Martha Peake, but this was too much.

“What? Conceived his child?” I cried, rearing up from the bed and thoroughly startling the old man. “And she
knew
?”

Seemingly she did. Women often do, or so William would have me believe. There is, he said, a sort of
leaping
sensation in the womb, which is felt as the leaping of life. And everything that followed, everything that Martha suffered in America, was the direct consequence of it—of, that is, her father’s act of brutal ravage in a dark graveyard not a stone’s throw from the very room in which I now lay in weakened and feverish condition as my uncle fluttered in wild-eyed excitement at the horror of what he was telling me.

Go on, go on, I cried!

Ah, but Martha could not think of staying now, I reflected, as he talked on, Harry had made a mockery of her hopes, revealed them for the empty fantasies they were, shown himself a brute, worse than a brute, even brutes—did not Tom Paine say it himself?—even brutes do not devour their young.

I saw her kneeling in a patch of moonlight by the window of her tower room in the west wing of Drogo Hall. No tears flood down her
face, as she packs her few possessions into the small trunk that followed her from the Angel, she is, rather, dry-eyed, stony-faced, no apparent anger, only a furious concentration on what she is doing. She descends the staircase canted backwards, clutching the leather straps of her trunk, not an easy thing, for it is dark, the stairs are narrow and uneven, the old stone treacherously smooth in places. Draped in her dragging greatcoat, step by clumsy step she struggles down to the bottom.

She reaches the courtyard. The storm has blown itself out, and the moon is intermittently visible through the ragged clouds that drift across a night-sky which seems rinsed, now, and exhausted. In the shadows of the courtyard with his back to her stands a slight figure in a bulky riding coat, his hat pulled low over his face, attending to a pair of horses harnessed to the black carriage. It rocks on its springs as the horses shift and stamp, but there is almost no sound, for the wheels are bound in rags, as are the horses’ hooves; an old smuggler’s trick. The figure turns, and it is of course my uncle William.

Martha pulls open the door of the carriage and pushes the trunk in, then climbs in after. William gets up onto the cab and the carriage shudders into motion. As they roll out of the courtyard Martha sits forward to pull the window blind aside an inch or two and look out across the marsh, fearing any sign of discovery which might impede her flight. For a moment the moonlight falls full upon her upturned face, and it is not hard to imagine the stark stony sorrow there; then she sinks back into the gloom of the carriage’s interior.

These are the minutes of greatest danger, and they pass with unspeakable slowness. If Harry is still conscious, if he has not passed out against a headstone in the graveyard, he may well be watching the house, alert for this very occurrence, an attempt by his daughter once more to escape him. And if he does see the black carriage moving out of the shadows of the house, will he not come down to the road and attempt to stop it? Seize the bridle, throw William aside, haul open the door, reach in for her—?

The carriage rumbles around the side of the house, the horses splashing through the puddles, then out past the lake. The hooves and wheels though muffled seem thunderous to Martha, but no shout comes, no sound of pursuit, no sign at all that her departure is detected. Perhaps Harry does indeed see them, perhaps he stands among the trees on the hillside, a shadow among shadows, and watches them go, and does nothing—but then, does she not have Clyte to fear as well, will the little gargoyle, knowing his master’s scheme, allow Martha simply to slip away from Drogo Hall—or does he no longer need her, and the bound wheels and hooves are all a masquerade for Martha’s benefit, to arouse in her a false perception of her own desperate predicament?—oh, the plotting was devious, devious, wheels within wheels—