Martha Peake (50 page)

After they had gone, the women on the hill above Black Brock came down to load into carts those bodies not entirely devoured by the fires, having first wrapped them in blankets. They hauled them up to the Old Burying Ground, and gave them a funeral, of sorts. Maddy and Sara took responsibility for Martha. Only a few went into unmarked graves. It was in the course of this melancholy work that they discovered the graves desecrated by the redcoats.

Then the women went away and left the ruins of New Morrock to the gull and the wolf and whatever other scavenger crept out of the woods at dusk and padded silently down the hill to sniff the ashes and carry off what it could find.

40

I
awoke in my bed in Drogo Hall and for a moment or two I remembered nothing. I lay there blinking at the gray daylight sifting through the gaps where the great rotting curtains on the window had come away from the rail. Then all at once the events of the night came back to me and I sat up with a cry of alarm, the cry I believe I did not utter when that large cold hand clamped my shoulder in its iron grip. Whose hand was it? Mortal it was, of this I had no doubt, but what mortal? What had he done to me? And how had I got back to my bedroom, with no memory of what had happened in the meanwhile? My cry aroused Percy; and a minute later the key turned in the lock and in he came, rubbing his hands together and his little wizened face clouded with apparent concern, though I was not so blind as to miss the disdain that lay beneath.

I was sitting up in bed and shouting my questions at him before he could even cross the floor. His answers were far from satisfactory. It seems I had fainted in the cellars. They had found me down there, shivering and delirious. Fearing a recurrence of the marsh fever, they had somehow got me back upstairs and into bed, those two decrepit creatures, and after administering medicines had left me to sleep. How did I feel now?

With some heat I told the little man that I was not suffering from marsh fever, I had been attacked! Somebody had tracked me into the cellars, I cried, and crept up behind me with great stealth, and laid the chill hand of death on me! I had been supremely terrified, that was all, I was not ill! I demanded to know where my uncle was, and Percy told me he was in his sitting room. He did not know I was awake.

“Then tell him!” I shouted, and Percy, bowing, withdrew.

I climbed out of bed and confirmed that I indeed had no fever, nor any injury, although my shoulder throbbed and burned where the hand had gripped me. No, whatever violence my assailant had intended for me, something or someone had dissuaded him from it, and clearly I had had a very narrow escape. I was in no doubt that my uncle could throw light on these events and when, some minutes later, he appeared, shuffling forward in his old leather slippers, his brocade dressing gown shrouding his birdlike frame, and on his face that same expression of false concern I had earlier detected on Percy’s face, I was already half-dressed, and in no mood for any of his footling nonsense.

“Somebody was down there,” I said, keeping my rage under control, determined to get to the bottom of the thing, “and he intended to do me harm.”

“Oh no, dear boy,” he began.

“Oh yes, dear boy,” I said firmly. “Oh yes indeed. Did you not hear him?”

He lifted his hands, palms upward, he lifted his eyes to the ceiling, he struck a comical pose of utter bewilderment and started to shake his head. This was precisely the sort of footling nonsense for which I had no patience.

“How could you not have heard him?” I cried. “You heard me, did you not? What brought you down there, if you heard nothing?”

“Oh, we heard you, indeed we did, you made a deal of noise,” he said, “but we heard nothing else.”

“What noise did I make?”

“Opening doors, stamping about and, I’m afraid to say it, jabbering like a monkey.”

“What about?”

“When we found you?”

“Yes, when you found me!”

“You were not yourself, dear boy. You were excited, oh, very excited. You were convinced Lord Drogo intended to murder you.”

At this I fell silent. I had spoken Drogo’s name, had I? I will not pretend to you that the thought had not crossed my mind that Francis Drogo was still alive, though I had as yet to fathom what reason he could have for wishing to deceive the world as to the fact. Then what had caused me to speak his name when I was out of my mind with terror? Had I heard something, seen something, felt or smelt or perhaps
touched
something that raised him up from the recesses of my mind? Had I perhaps turned, had I stood face to face with the man, and fainted at the very shock of it, the memory at once wiped from consciousness it was so hideous?

By this time I was fully dressed and had no wish to linger in a cold damp bedroom. My uncle suggested I eat, but I did not want food, I wanted a good fire, and a large brandy, and a chance to
think
, I said, so he led me downstairs to his sitting room and there I sat gazing into the fire as the brandy did its work and my uncle for once held his peace.

I sank back at last into the armchair and rubbed my head. I no longer knew what to believe. Could I have been wrong? The hand on my shoulder—some creature, a small ape, perhaps, which years ago had escaped from Drogo’s menagerie and lived like a troglodyte in those labyrinthine cellars—dropping on me from a high ledge—were there
apes
in the cellars?—I wanted to know.

“Apes?” said my uncle. “What kind of apes?”

I heaved a great sigh. Whatever he knew, he was not being frank with me, and I had no means of winkling it out of him. I must have more time.

“Tell me,” I said, “what happened to Martha Peake.”

And that is how I learned of her death; and if it devastated me, to my astonishment it devastated my uncle William also, indeed he sobbed like a child when he reached the end! And this the man who had claimed indifference to the American adventure!—whose cold eye was cast upon friend and foe alike—!

When news of the burning of New Morrock spread through the country, said my uncle, having brought his emotion under control, a rumour followed it that an English girl had betrayed the town to the enemy. And it seems that on learning of this rumour Silas Rind, encamped with the Continental Army in the hills above Boston—whom we would expect to be fiercest in his condemnation of Martha—instead issued a robust denial. He then, said William, put his considerable authority behind an effort to promote a different version of the story, one in which Martha played not the traitor but the patriot; and no ordinary patriot at that. Martha Peake, he made it known, was a heroine, and a martyr to the cause—

Silas responsible, I cried—?
Silas?
But Silas more than anyone would have known—

But my uncle would say no more about it then, and I was left to ponder the mystery of Silas Rind declaring Martha Peake a patriot and a martyr, she who had brought about the destruction of his town.

It was a long hard winter. How desperately they grieved for New Morrock. Maddy Rind was a broken woman. She had lost more than a home, she had lost a world. Joshua Rind was dead, crushed in the church when the roof fell in, along with many friends and neighbours of the Rinds. The men who had come back, Dan Pierce and the rest, they too had died in the fires. Their mourning was protracted through the long months they huddled in a farmhouse in Cratwich, with the great trees all around blocking out the sky, and the sun
going down early, and nothing but darkness and candlelight in which to reflect on those they had lost.

Sara’s grief was all for Martha. She often walked in the forest, before the snows came. She wondered at its great age, and its mystery, and remembered the many tales she had told Martha of the Indian tribes who lived deep in these woods; but her feelings were not aroused as they had been when, with Martha, she climbed to the top of Black Brock and there learned to see the great Atlantic through her cousin’s eyes, and to love its stormy presence on their bleak New England shores. Ah, but Sara was young, the spirit was alive in her, and over the long dark months of the winter, confined in the ancient forest and grieving for her lost friend, she at last grew weary of her situation and decided that when the British left Boston, and it was possible to travel the roads once more, she would quit Cratwich and take her motherless nephew to find Adam.

For she was Harry’s mother now, and she did for him what Martha would have done, with the exception of the breast; with the result that despite everything, despite being orphaned, Harry was thriving. Already his character had announced itself in clear firm tones. They often rose from the table hungry, that winter, and Harry went short of food even with what Sara fed him from her own plate, but he never complained. And he displayed even then strong powers of concentration. A complex object could absorb his attention for hours, as he turned it over in his fingers, or put it between his lips and chewed on it. He loved any sort of small machine. He made people smile, so serious he seemed, but when he became aware of being smiled at he would happily respond with a brief gurgling toothless grin, which at once faded as he resumed what Sara imagined to be the lofty thoughts going forward in that huge red dome of a head of his. As for his gibbous spine, it grew as his body grew, the skin lost its translucence, and the bones of his back became as hard and strong as the rest of his little skeleton.

They heard that winter that Captain Arnold was making an expedition to Quebec, his object to seize its walled fortress and assure American control of the Saint Lawrence River, which otherwise would serve the British in their attempt to seize the Hudson and thus split the colonies in two. Sara, like Martha, had been concerned at Adam joining the Ticonderoga expedition, and was still more agitated by this news, which involved greater danger and was being undertaken in the dead of winter; no season, I imagine, to be campaigning in the north woods!

But she had a blind faith that her brother would come back alive from Canada, and she intended to meet him when he reached Boston. She would comfort him in his loss, and present little Harry to him. Maddy Rind protested loudly when she heard this plan, but Sara was adamant. She urged her brothers and sisters for their mother’s sake to be strong, for as Maddy’s mind inevitably dwelled not only on what she had already lost, but on the prospect of losing Silas and Adam as well, she would need their support in the months to come. Sara then urged her mother to be strong for her children’s sake, to teach them what a woman must suffer in this world, and how that suffering must be borne. And when they were all together in the evening, by the fire in the kitchen, and the weeping began, she urged them then to think of what Martha had given her life for, and asked them to believe that it had not been given in vain, and to think how best they could follow her example and thus do honour to her memory and to their country both.

So they did not collapse into hopelessness and misery, they rallied; and later Maddy thanked Sara for what she had done, and apologized for failing properly to comfort her for her own loss.