Martha Peake (26 page)

No, she was not.

They talked then of Cornwall, and somehow, she did not know how or why it happened, she found herself telling him the story of her mother’s death. Ah, but it must be remembered that after the weeks at sea—and given her late ordeal in England—Martha responded with strong feeling to a warm smile and a kindly voice, she could not help herself. She had the strength of character to stand alone, but she was not accustomed to it, and Giles Hawkins saw this at once. I believe she aroused a real sympathy in him, and that he questioned her closely about her family in America so as to assure himself that she would be cared for when she went ashore. But he was, at the same time, part of an occupying force in a rebellious colony, and he knew Martha’s uncle for an influential merchant, and a patriot; and his display of fatherly concern masked, I believe, a shrewd probing of the girl. Martha had nothing of value to tell him of course, nonetheless it was a complicated transaction, which culminated in Martha shedding tears, and Captain Hawkins comforting her as he would one of his own daughters.

Later I told my uncle that this I imagined to be what passed between Giles Hawkins and Martha Peake at their first meeting. The old man may have wished to be spared the labour of thinking about Martha anymore, but he was not slow to criticize my own account of her experience. At once, and with some heat, he contradicted me. Could I not imagine an Englishman offering simple kindness to a young creature in distress, as Martha was? Did I think he was
bound
to attempt to take advantage of her?

Frankly, I said, yes, I did.

He frowned at me then looked away. He rubbed his thumb against his fingers in his agitation, and made small inarticulate noises as he licked his lips with little rapid flickers of his dry old tongue. And did I think Martha so foolish that she would not see this? Did I not remember the glorious destiny which she was even then approaching? Why, this was the girl who would save the Revolution—was she not made of sterner stuff than a mere—

Child?

You said it, I did not! Is this your heroine? Is this your proud rebel?

I shrugged. It was not the character of Martha Peake he defended, but that of the English officer. I did not trouble to point this out to him.

The Boston waterfront was as crowded with people as the harbour was with shipping. Martha was brought in with the last passengers, sitting on her trunk in the stern of the boat. She heard men shouting from ship to shore and shore to ship as the gulls flapped and screamed overhead. All was movement and noise, and then they were gliding in, and a rope was flung up onto the wharf. She waited her turn to climb up the short wooden ladder and set foot on the New World. Her trunk came up after her, and there at last she stood, gazing about her with some astonishment as her fellow exiles clambered up onto the wharf beside her, some to be met by tearful relatives, others, like herself, stranded there, bewildered. She could hear drumming not far off, over the hubbub of dockside commerce, and a whistling fife, and she knew it for the fife and drum of the redcoats. The Americans paid her no notice at all, but thronged about, doing their business, merchants and clerks, porters and carters, such as might be seen any day on the London docks, although these men were larger, leaner, louder, their voices strange to her ear and their clothing coarse and homespun. There were some wigs to be seen, but many preferred to grow their hair long and tie it at the back with a scrap of ribbon. Martha seized up her trunk by the straps, and weak though she was after her time at sea, off she plodded down Long Wharf to the crowded street that fronted the harbour.

And did Giles Hawkins lean on the taff-rail of his cutter, and watch her as she disappeared into the crowd? Oh, I believe he did.

But such figures she glimpsed then, in her first minutes in Boston—! She had read about the savages of North America, she had
seen illustrations of them; but to meet them at once in the flesh, this was something else, and she set down her trunk and gawped at a group of Iroquois braves who stood silently staring out across the harbour to the open sea. Dressed from head to toe in the skins of animals, with long-barrelled muskets at their sides, knives and hatchets in their belts, their garments beaded and feathered, and with wild shaggy manes of black hair sprouting from the crowns of their shaved skulls, they seemed to Martha not so much savages, in their dignity, and stature, and straightness, as princes. She was later told that these men were employed by the British as scouts and trackers in the forests to the north.

There were still more people milling about on the dock than on the wharf, and they were an agitated crowd, for moving through them in a small tight squad were a dozen redcoats, an officer on horseback riding alongside them. At the head of this tight little column stepped the drummer she had heard, a boy ten years old beating out a brisk tattoo; and as the redcoats passed by they were closely watched by various clusters of men on the dock who seemed to have no business to do, but were waiting, so it appeared, for something to happen.

Martha was familiar with this, men standing in doorways, on street corners, waiting and watching, though for what they might be waiting and watching here in Boston she had no idea. Young men for the most part, they stood about in small groups outside shops and taverns, and their mood was easy to read, they were mocking, and their mockery was directed at the redcoats. They muttered together and shouted to one another, they laughed loudly, they moved about from group to group, all the while watched carefully by the officer on horseback as he rode by. Even the busy merchants paused, and regarded him and his soldiers with undisguised contempt.

All this I gleaned from the fragments of what I took to be Martha’s first letters from America; for nowhere could I find a date, nor any
other indication of the sequence in which the letters had arrived at Drogo Hall. But it was, I felt, enough, and I was confident that what I imagined was indeed what Martha observed that blustery day in the autumn of 1774; and observing it, remembered what she had heard of Massachusetts, of how the province had renounced allegiance to the crown some weeks before and been placed under martial law. And as her curiosity came sparking faintly to life she sensed a rising emotion in her heart, she did not know what it was, exactly, but it responded to what she was seeing and hearing all about her on the Boston dock that day. But she had no chance to think more about it, for all at once she heard her name called.

19

A
fter her weeks at sea Martha was not an impressive spectacle. She was bedraggled and exhausted. She was pale from lack of sunlight and fresh food, her hair was matted, her clothes filthy and stinking. She had lost a tooth and she itched all over with ship-lice.

“Martha Peake!”

There it came again, through all the noise of the port, and as she peered about her she saw a broad-shouldered youth as tall as her father detach himself from a group of men standing about a capstan and come loping toward her down the dock. Martha stood by her trunk, clutching her hat to her head, for the breeze off the harbour was brisk. The big lad advancing on her was dressed in a sturdy brown coat which flapped about him over a high-buttoned waistcoat; black britches; black stockings; solid muddy leather shoes without buckles; and a cocked hat pushed to the back of his head so the peak pointed at the sky. His long hair was pulled back from high in the middle of his forehead and tied in a ponytail with a blue ribbon. She watched him come, she saw how he jigged through the crowd, a grin on his face, this strong loose-limbed fellow just a year or two older than herself. He fetched up in front of her, panting slightly, set his hands on his hips, and looked her up and down with some amusement.

“Cousin,” he said.

He then swept his hat off his head and made a groveling mockery of an Englishman’s formal bow. There was life and spirit in his shining eyes, those eyes set deep in a wide, ruddy, big-chinned face, and Martha stared at him with mild astonishment, thinking, is this an American? But he did not displease her; until, that is, he seemed to catch a whiff of her, and all at once slapped a hand, not clean, to his face, and peered at her as though uncertain he had the right girl here.

“I believe you to be Martha Peake,” he said.

“Who are you?” she said.

“I am Adam Rind, eldest son of Silas Rind, Esquire, of New Morrock, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to which King Charles granted the charter in the Year of Our Lord sixteen hundred and twenty-nine.”

He could talk, then.

“Are you to carry my trunk?”

To this imperious question he responded with a large grin, a large display of large discoloured teeth that aroused at last a small smile in Martha’s stern countenance.

“She favours me,” he said, and took her hand gravely. He made a small sober bow. “There is my father, sitting up in that fine wagon with his servant. He trembles at your coming.”

He pointed at a high sturdy wagon drawn up outside a chandler’s shop, a team of four horses harnessed to it. People were passing along the dock between them, and she could not clearly see the figure to whom her cousin pointed, for he was leaning down from the buckboard in close conversation with some men in the street. Up on the wagon beside him sat a negro in a blue coat whom Adam identified as his father’s servant Caesar, his own good friend. He then hoisted Martha’s trunk onto his shoulder and offered her his arm, but she would not take it. They set off across the busy street, she with her shabby English greatcoat flapping about her.

“How do you like Boston?” he cried, and then, in a tone of mock
cultivation: “A damned fine town but for all the bloody English in it”—and still pushing briskly on, he turned to her and again gave her the horsey grin. Martha wondered whether he ate oats and had to be rubbed down at the end of the day.

Now Silas Rind was a good deal more formidable than his husky son. Let me attempt to classify the parts of that complicated man, as I have come to understand him. I know something of the Puritan temperament, I believe, and I suspect that Silas Rind had a distinct tendency toward the introspection of that sect, being a man who restlessly scoured and abluted the dark impulses of his masculine heart. But he was not narrow, no, he had a good mind, he was curious about all branches of learning, and he could converse with ease with the best-educated men in Boston, many of whom were his friends. Then, too, he had a vigorous instinct for commerce, and had grown rich from his various enterprises; and he was, in addition, a fierce patriot, long outraged at the despotism of a distant empire and a distant king. These aspects of his character were not at war with one another. Rather, his several commitments to virtue, to learning, to commerce, and to the political future of his country, these coexisted in complex balance one with the other, no part becoming dominant but some other part would moderate it. As for his person, he was a lean, dark, broody sort of a man of middling height and middling age, dressed in a plain brown coat and britches. He wore no wig, his hair gathered at the back in a simple blue ribbon like his son’s.