Martha Peake (28 page)

On the afternoon of the fifth day, after a spell of fine weather, the clouds moved in and the heavens opened; and so torrentially did the rain come down that not even the forest canopy could save them from a drenching. It cleared after an hour and they were able to continue on their way; Martha, soaked and wretched, and by this time deeply unhappy with her lot, and Adam, dripping and grinning, saying to her that it was surely a fine thing for an English girl like herself to be caught in a real American rainstorm. The road was slick and muddy now, and the going was slow indeed. The afternoon was well advanced, and the light was starting to fade, and still Martha had seen no sign that they were close to any human settlement. But she would not display weakness by asking questions of the men.

Dusk was coming on and bats swooped and flitted through the gloom before them. The woods seemed every minute to crowd in closer upon them. The desolate howling of the wolves in the forest did little for the temper of the horses, nor for Martha’s either. A half-hour later it was dark, and Martha was convinced they were lost in the depths of a wild and chartless forest, where they would perish and be eaten by wild animals. But even as she thought this thought she became aware of a dull roar, distant but sustained, and she strained to identify it. Then she had it, it was the ocean, they were close to the ocean, and in a sudden access of joy she shouted to Adam that this road would surely bring them out on the coast—!

But the road continued to deteriorate, and was soon little better than a cart track, mired in mud and puddles and treacherous with roots, stumps, and ruts. The moon rose into the evening sky, and after the grim damp obscurity of the last miles they now had at least a pale lunar glow sifting through the boughs high above their heads. It was close to midnight when at last they emerged from the forest onto a ledge of rock overlooking the ocean.

Martha gazed down in wonder and relief. The coastline was a wide jagged arc from north to south, with at either end a headland rearing like a sentinel. Tatters of black cloud flew across the sky and concealed the moon, but then all at once the clouds parted, and the moonlight shone full upon a small fishing port huddled in the most sheltered cove along this wild coast. There must have been a hundred houses down there, with narrow twisting alleys between, narrow wharves stretching out to the deep water, fishing boats tied up at the wharves and scattered about the harbour. There were buildings on stilts around the dock, and a thin white spike of a steeple rising from the church. The bay beyond was dotted with islands, and beyond the bay the moonlight spilled out across the vastness of the heaving black Atlantic.

But as Martha looked down on those slumbering houses, I now wonder, did she know a tremor of unease? Did she perhaps remember Cornwall? Was there a sense of foreboding, even, a feeling that this was a town without welcome or warmth, jealous of what little it had clawed from the cold black sea that gives life, and just as surely takes it back—was she gripped by the conviction that she had stumbled upon a place of the dead? I do not know; it is possible, given all that followed.

The wagon lurched to a halt, there on the headland, and Martha with a shiver flung off these somber thoughts and climbed down. Adam stood beside her and the pair of them gazed at the dark place below. She told him something of her unease, for after five days together she had fallen into the habit of sharing her thoughts with him, those that did not touch upon her father, or her child.

“But the forest,” he said, “is darker by far than whatever may await you below.”

She told him she did not fear the forest.

“Nor anything it contains?”

“No, nor that.”

He laughed then, turning away, but glancing back at her every few moments such that she began to feel her temper rising and knew
she should soon shout at him. But she told herself that her cousin was a foolish boy who always spoke in jest.

Slowly they descended the hill, and came into New Morrock over the old flint road across the mudflats. Then there was a bewildering crowd of strangers—her aunt Maddy, the children, various others—who brought Martha into their home and made her welcome.

Her sleep was only once disturbed, that first night in New Morrock. She was awoken by a sound from outside the house. She sat up in bed and had no idea where she was; then, remembering, and hearing the murmur of men’s voices, she padded across to the window, between the beds of her sleeping cousins. The window looked out over a barn. There was a moon that night, and by its light she saw Silas Rind directly beneath her with a man in a greatcoat to his ankles, his collar up by his ears, and a cocked hat pulled so low she could see nothing of his face. In his hand he gripped a riding whip, which he slapped softly against his leg as he spoke, while Silas frowned and nodded.

Then Caesar emerged from the barn leading a horse saddled and bridled for the road. The stranger shook the hands of both Silas and Caesar then swung himself into the saddle and touched the whip to the horse’s flank. He cantered gently out of the yard. Silas turned back to the house, and Caesar went back in the barn. It all reminded Martha of her childhood, she remembered her father, in Port Jethro, and visitors who similarly came in the night and left before dawn. She got back into bed and was at once asleep.

20

A
ll this I discussed with my uncle, and he supposed, he said, that this was how it might have happened, there was little here he could take exception to. It was
plausible
, he allowed, his tone suggesting that plausibility was but a poor cousin to truth. But truth being a prize beyond our grasp—as I then said to him—then plausibility, surely, was as good as we could hope for?

To this question came no reply but rather a series of pinchings and pursings about the mouth and nostrils expressive of resignation and fatigue. Hardly encouraging, but I pressed on, and what I pressed on with was Silas Rind and his family. Born with nothing, I began, Silas had made a fortune in the cod fishery, then built a large house some way above the harbour on a lot of several acres backing onto the forest, where his family was spared the stench that rose from the waterfront when the tide was low and the mudflats were exposed to the wind off the harbour. It was a solid foursquare wooden house sheathed in gray shingles and streaked with salt from the many storms it had endured. It had a gambrel roof and a small tower where Silas could gaze out to sea with his spy-glass and look for his returning vessels. The inside of the house was organized round a great stone chimney with fireplaces in several rooms, the main one in the
kitchen. Maddy Rind had pots perpetually boiling on the kitchen fire, and that large room, the heart of the house, saw endless cleaning and washing, chopping and skinning, all the multitude of tasks the household required; with which she had the help of her daughters and her neighbours, who this day were avid with curiosity to see the English arrival.

Now Maddy Rind was a woman forever occupied with the running of a large house, and the care of young children, and the demands of an autocrat husband—Silas, that is—to whom she had come from Cornwall as an indentured servant, and later married when his first wife died. But despite her air of constant harried distraction Maddy Rind reminded Martha strongly of her mother; and she felt an immediate loving affection for this tall, thin, restless aunt of hers, and lost no time in expressing it, in both looks and words. Maddy in turn welcomed her niece with great warmth, and was eager to know all that had happened to her, having heard only vague scraps of rumour over the years. And so, that first morning in New Morrock, they sat together at the kitchen table with Maddy’s eldest daughter, Sara, and Martha told them about her childhood in Port Jethro, and the death of her mother.

Maddy Rind remembered her sister Grace as though they had parted but a week before; and as Martha talked of the fire, Maddy grew distraught, and covered her face with her hands. Sara Rind, however, who was a few months younger than Martha, sat dry-eyed as she listened, and when Martha described how her father had been injured trying to save Grace from the flames, Sara interrupted her.

“But it was he who started the fire.”

“He did not mean to.”

“But had he not been drunk it would never have happened.”

“I am not defending him, I am telling you what he suffered!”

“And did Grace Foy not suffer more?”

The two girls had risen to their feet. Sara was as tall as Martha, but where Martha was fleshy and ample, Sara was lean and slender
and bony. She had long, pale features, and dark shining eyes, and a head of raven hair; a striking creature, with an intensity of manner only rarely glimpsed in her bluff brother; and she saw no reason now to mask her thoughts from this new English cousin of hers, to whom she had already formed a strong dislike. But Maddy at once seized her daughter’s hand and clasped it to Martha’s, and though Sara tried to pull her hand away, her mother held her fast. Maddy gazed from one to the other with astonishment.

“Is this how you mean to treat one another?” she cried. “Have we not enough enemies that we must make more, and under our own roof?”

“I do not see that I must feel pity—”

“Enough, Sara!”

Maddy turned sharply toward her daughter but Sara did not flinch.

“You will say no more!”

“I will speak my mind!”

And with that she tore her hand from her mother’s grip and ran from the room.

The first service Maddy Rind performed for Martha was to transform her from what she had been to something more like her own daughters. Martha had come off the
Plimoth
with her clothes in dire disrepair, held together by her own stitching, done in bad light below decks with a blunt sailcloth needle and coarse black thread begged from a sailor. Her body was covered with sores and bruises, and after the journey from Boston she was filthier even than she had been when she disembarked. Her teeth hurt and her hair was falling out in places. At least she was healthy, or rather, despite all she had been through, she was not afflicted with any flux or fever.

Maddy Rind and her younger daughters, both of whom were as dark and slender as Sara, were warmly dismayed at the condition
of their English cousin, and later that first morning Martha was taken out and had her rags stripped off her, even her linen, such as it was. There she stood, shivering in the wind behind the house, plump, ruddy, and buxom in her nakedness, and she took no small pleasure in being thoroughly scrubbed with hot soapy water in the big iron washtub in the yard. She was then hurried back into the kitchen, wrapped in a towel, and in front of the fire Maddy rubbed various ointments and salves into her skin, while the girls brushed out her long red hair, which was clean now, and picked free of lice.

She was given a cotton shift and a dress of thick dark wool, high at the neck and tight to the waist, which fitted her well, and an apron, and a cap, and new boots and gray worsted stockings that came up her thighs. Also a shawl; and Maddy Rind then demanded her old clothes so that she could burn them. Martha happily surrendered all but her cocked hat and her muddy greatcoat, which still smelled of tobacco and London rain, and was now permeated with the odours of the
Plimoth
as well. She could not give that up, it was connected to her father, and however violently she may have swung between hatred and longing for Harry she clung to his greatcoat with a blind wilful dogged unflinching insistence.

Her younger cousins clustered about her and it was agreed by all that now she looked just like one of them. And so she did, she was a Cape Morrock woman with cap and apron and bell-like skirt from waist to floor. She was given a comb and a small mirror, and her own candlestick, and other small items for her toilet. Maddy said that Martha Peake had to be set up as a young lady of the town, for to this rank she was surely accustomed, and they all howled with laughter at the idea of anything of the world of fashion counting for much in New Morrock. But she now had a wardrobe and a clean bed and much else to be thankful for besides, and when all was complete she sat by the fire and laughed with the sheer joy of feeling once more like a human being rather than a wild creature in flight; and she forgot
for a time her growing worry about the child in her womb. Maddy and her daughters were moved by her emotion and they too laughed. Then they hugged one another and tearfully told Martha she was welcome, and a part of their family now. Sara Rind took no part in any of this.