Martha Peake
A Novel of the American RevolutionBy Patrick McGrathSound Library
Copyright © 2005 Patrick McGrath
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780792737001
Chapter One
It is a black art, the writing of a history, is it not??to resurrect the dead,and animate their bones, as historians do? I think historians must be melancholycreatures, rather like poets, perhaps, or doctors; but then, what does it matterwhat I think? This is not my story. This is the story of a father and hisdaughter, and of the strange and terrible events that tore them apart, so it isto those two unhappy souls that I would direct your gaze. As for me, I shallsoon sink from sight, and you will forget me altogether. No, I am merely the onewho happened upon the story, as you might happen upon, say, a cache of lettersin the attic of an ancient uncle's country house; and blowing away the dust ofdecades, and untying the ribbon that binds them, finding within those crumblingpages a tale of passion so tragic, yet so sublime?as to transform, in thatinstant, the doddering relict in the bath-chair below to a spirited youth witha fiery heart and the blood of a hero racing in his veins!
Now in those days, as it happens, I did indeed have an ancient uncle, and forsome time I had been aware that his health was failing; and being his onlysurviving relation, I had speculated that his property would come to me when hepassed on. The old man had been living a life of seclusion ever since the deathof his benefactor, the great anatomist Lord Drogo, so when I received hisletter, asking me to come to him at once, I wasted no time. I need not describeto you the journey I took across the Lambeth Marsh, nor the house itself, forboth Drogo Hall and its drear landscape will emerge strongly in what follows.Suffice to say that I rode across the marsh alone, and carried a loaded pistolwith me; and upon arriving at dusk, I was admitted by a little bent man calledPercy, who took me up the great staircase to my uncle's study and then vanishedwithout a word.
I found the old doctor seated close to a blazing coal fire in a small gloomyroom with a heavy Turkey carpet on the floor and thick dark curtains on thewindows. He had a blanket on his knees, a tome in his lap, and a jorum ofHollands-and-water close to hand. As he turned toward the door I saw at oncethat he could not be long for this world, so frail did he appear, his skin inthe firelight as white and brittle as paper. But on recognizing me a light cameup in those dim and milky eyes, he fixed me with a gimlet stare and cried to meto come in?come in, for the love of God!?for the draft was a chill one; and hepointed with a trembling finger to the aged leather armchair on the other sideof the fireplace.
But still I stood there in the open door, rooted to the spot. I was transfixedby the painting hanging over the mantelpiece. I had never seen it before. It wasthe portrait of a robust, broad-shouldered man of between thirty and fortyyears. He stood against a wild moorland scene, a pine flattening in the gale onthe brow of a distant hill, and rags of black cloud flying across the sky. Hewore neither hat nor wig, and his long hair was tied at the back with a blueribbon, a few strands torn free by the wind. His shirt was open at the throat,his skin was pale, and his eyes were like great dark pools, full of life andfull of pain but hooded, somehow, lost in shadow as they gazed off into someunknown horizon. It was not a handsome face, it was carved too rough for that,but it was a strong, complicated face, hatched and knotted with sorrow andpassion, a big stubborn chin uplifted?the whole head uplifted!?lips unsmilingand slightly parted, and the expression one of defiance, yes, and purpose. Ifelt at once that the artist, for all that he had caught some fleetingexpression of this fierce, romantic spirit, could not have done him justice,nobody could have done justice to this man. My uncle William nodded at me with apursed smile as I closed the door behind me and moved to the chair by the fire,my gaze still fixed on the painting, and slowly sat down.
"You know who he is, eh?"
"No, sir," I said, "I do not."
"No? Then shall I tell you?"
It was Harry Peake.
The name clawed at the skirts of memory as I sat down by the fire and warmed myjaded heart on the image of that proud rough man. America?for some reason as Igazed at him I thought of America?I thought of the Revolutionary War, and ofall that I had learned of that great conflict from my mother, herself anAmerican who pined in exile for her country every day of my childhood. Anincident by the sea?a burning village filled with women and children?ared-haired girl with a musket at her shoulder?these ideas tentatively emergedfrom out of the mind's mist, but all else remained shrouded and obscure. I foundmyself sitting forward in my chair and staring into the fire as I tried toremember. At last I looked up, and told my uncle I saw a village in flamessomewhere on the coast of North America, but no more than that. For some momentsthere was little sound in the room but the hiss of the coal in the hearth, andthe wind rising in the trees outside.
"Come, Ambrose, sit closer to the fire," he murmured at last, turning away fromme, seizing up the bottle of Hollands at his elbow. "Here, fill your glass. Youshall hear it all. I have held it in my heart too long. It has blighted me. I amwithered by it. He never got to America. God knows he wanted to."
My uncle put his fingertips together beneath his chin and closed his eyes.Silence.
"Many a man," I murmured, "has never got to America."
A sort of sigh, at this, and then silence again. I waited. When next he spoke itwas with a clipped asperity that belied the desperate pathos of what he told me.To know Harry Peake, he said, you must first know what he suffered. Then youwill understand why he fell. Why he turned into a monster.
"A monster?!"
" 'Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon theirfamilies'?eh?"
He was quoting an author, but I missed the allusion.
"He devoured his young??"
Then I had it. Tom Paine.
"Lost his mind. What a waste. What a mind."
"But who was he?"
Here my uncle turned to me, and again fixed me with that gimlet eye. "One ofthose cursed few," he said, "to whom Nature in her folly gave the soul of asmuggler, and the tongue of a poet."
And so it began. Much of the detail I have had to supply from my ownimagination, that is, from the ardent sympathetic understanding of the tragicevents my uncle William described. His recall was patchy, for time had worn hismemory through as though it were an old coat. The seams had split open, therewere fragments of alien fabric, rudely stitched, and everywhere the pattern wasobscured by foreign substances, such as those that were liberally splatteredabout the papers I later received from him, blood, soil, gin, etc. So I wasforced to expand upon the materials he gave me. But when it was over I felt thatI understood, I understood the extraordinary life not only of Harry Peake, butof his daughter also, of Martha Peake, who died at the hands of her owncountrymen, and who, by her sacrifice, helped to create the republic to which mymother swore allegiance, and whose spirit I have come to love.
Later that evening the wind came up, it started to rain, and I was glad indeedof the shelter of Drogo Hall, for I had no desire to be out on the LambethMarsh in such conditions. We supped in the grand dining room downstairs, and astrange meal it was, the two of us up at the end of the table, a single branchof candles to light us, the wind howling about the house and that peculiarlittle man Percy, now wearing a ratty scratch wig, presumably on account of theformality of the occasion, serving us with silent swiftness, appearing suddenlyout of the darkness with tureen or decanter and just as suddenly vanishingagain. From the high, dark-panelled walls of the dining room the portraits ofthe earls of Drogo of centuries past peered down at us through the gloom, andour con- versation seemed at times to struggle forward as though burdened by thespan of years that separated us from the events of which we spoke, indeed thatseparates me now from that dismal stormy night so long ago.
My uncle sat in the great chair at the head of the table, a tiny slumped figureagainst the vast gloom behind him, and picked at his food with sharp little jabslike a bird. We ate cold mutton and boiled potatoes. He had frequent recourse tothe decanter, which was filled with a sweet Rhenish wine, and with every glasshis speech grew more fluting, more rapid, and more inflected with the fancies ofa failing mind, such that I had constantly to steer him away from the wildplaces where he seemed inclined to wander, and back to the track of hisnarrative. And all the while the silent Percy flickered in and out of thecandlelight like a moth, again and again refilling my uncle's tall crystalgoblet with that undrinkable sweet white wine.
Oh, we talked on long after the last dish had been removed, and the candles hadburned down to guttering stubs, and still the wind could be heard out on themarsh, and the boughs of the trees slapped against the high windows of thehouse. Later I made my way upstairs with a candle, to a cold room with a dampbed where I lay sleepless for many hours as the storm exhausted itself and Iattempted to digest not only my uncle's mutton but his story as well.
Continues...
Excerpted from Martha Peakeby Patrick McGrath Copyright © 2005 by Patrick McGrath. Excerpted by permission.
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