Martha Peake (11 page)

Such was the temper of their days, in the spring of 1774. But now something altered in Harry’s behaviour, and my uncle was at a loss to explain it. Harry had grown “despondent,” he said. Despondent? Why would Harry grow despondent? What had changed? Had he, perhaps, dreamed of Grace Foy, after Lord Drogo’s question that recent night? No answer was forthcoming, and I suspected my uncle was again withholding information from me.

But it seems that soon after Drogo’s visit Harry began to leave the Angel at night, and did not return for hours. I could well believe that he wanted to escape the constriction of those shabby rooms, but Martha was filled with a profound apprehension at this development, for it had never been her father’s habit to leave her alone and go out by night, and Harry, surely, was aware of this.

Where he went nobody knew. I imagine him striking out for the fields to the north of Smithfield, or perhaps crossing the river and making his way into the countryside beyond Southwark. But wherever he went, that big shambling figure must first have passed through gloomy courts, and winding alleys, ever darker and more scuttling,
and heard soft siren voices from doorways, from windows, from cellars, calling to him to come in, come down, come drink—

But I imagine he ignored them, for it was not drink he craved, nor the company of women. No, I imagine he reached open fields, and at last filled his labouring lungs with air that was free of the filth of the town. Perhaps he found a great tree, an oak in the middle of a field of wheat that cast a pool of shade in the moonlight, and perhaps he sank down beneath it, and gazed at the night sky and dreamed of America—? But whatever it was he did in those lost hours, he returned to the Angel at first light, and found Martha sitting up waiting for him. With what tenderness did father and daughter then embrace!

It became a frequent occurrence, Harry’s aimless nocturnal rambling, and I think he may have wandered some nights for miles along the river, and perhaps come upon the hay barges moored down by London Bridge, the boys sprawled sleeping on their harvest in the moonlight, with not a care beyond the getting of a fair price for their hay and drinking some London ale before returning into the countryside. Such yearning we may glimpse in Harry’s heart when he saw such a scene—could this be why he grew “despondent”? He wished only to live as a free man upon the fruits of his labour, and grow old in the natural rhythms of the earth; instead of which he was cursed, so he felt, always to be an object of disgust, or horror, which is only disgust with a portion of fear superadded—always to be in the eyes of the world a monster. He sometimes talked to Martha of these things, by night, in his room, and in the candlelight his eyes shone with unshed tears, and she knew he ached and bled and raged in his heart not merely because he wished these things for himself, but because he wished them for her too.

One night he took a drink. I suppose the temptation, down on the docks, by the great ships with their masts rising slender in the moonlight, and the men and women loudly spilling out of the riverside taverns and cellars—in the end it was too much for him. He took a pot of ale. He intended that it be only the one. Oh, but there
were men drinking there who had such stories to tell, and being men who had seen much of the world, and were not easily surprised, they accepted him and made no more than passing friendly inquiry as to his spine. That he had read so much, that he was an educated man, a poet, this mattered not at all, for Harry Peake was entirely without pride or presumption. No, what mattered was that they did not see him as a monster. They made no gesture of exclusion, and he was able to sit with them and smoke his pipe, and drink his ale, and listen with deep pleasure as tales were told of foreign shores, and the voyages undertaken to reach those shores, and the men who worked the ships that sailed there. Then came the songs, and the hornpipes, the jigs and the fiddles, and Harry Peake in silly beery disarray was soon cavorting like a boy among these sons of the sea.

And what a sorry sight, when at last he returned in the full glare of the morning! For with the coming of day the brief idyll that darkness and drink had permitted—it vanished; and home at last the poet must come, the heady fumes of the night no longer magic, now no more than an aching pain in an irritable brain, compounded by the guilt he felt at having succumbed to temptation; that guilt tempered in its turn by anger that he must always deny himself the pleasures enjoyed by other men; though sweetened withal, I believe, by the secret unspoken prospect of enjoying it all once more, when darkness fell.

Martha did not reproach him, but told him that she had not slept, such had been her anxiety for his safety; and detecting by the smell of him that he had drunk only ale, and been made soft and sleepy by it, asked him to think hard upon what he was doing, and what greater harm it might lead him into. This last annoyed Harry, who wanted only to sleep and be free of the pain in his head and the compound of unhappy feelings that had arisen in him; and he raised his voice in anger, glaring at her with grief and fury before stumbling to his bed and pulling closed his curtain. He lay there separate from her, moaning quietly and sweating out the fluids of the night in the full stifling heat of noon.

He awoke in a state of great sadness, having dreamed of the fire in which Grace Foy perished; and not, I believe, for the first time. For an hour Martha attempted to cheer him but to no avail. He was inconsolable. All lost, he cried, and the idea set off an association of thoughts that confirmed a deep-lying conviction in him of his own worthlessness. Martha suggested that they walk by the docks but Harry said no, and then declared he would never work in this damned sink again, never again would he show his back.

“Then what are we to do?” cried Martha, but she received no answer, and she left him to himself.

She paced her room in a state of some agitation. Several hours passed. She could not go to him, for he had locked the door between their rooms. She shouted at him through the door, but still received no answer. This had never happened before, never had he locked her out—locked her
in
, rather, for the only door giving onto the passage and the stairs was in his room—and again she asked herself what was to become of them, if he would not work? For this, she knew, was no idle threat on Harry’s part, Harry was not a man who made idle threats. Her mind at once raced to the worst of all possible outcomes. Were they to join the growing ranks of ragged castaways who begged and thieved in the streets of London, until gin, or hunger, or disease, or the gallows ended their misery for good?

8

I
n the days that followed Martha remained deeply alarmed by her father’s mood. Never before had she seen him so cast down, and not merely cast down, something in him had died. She stood before him and gazed long and hard into his eyes as he sat, one evening, staring into the empty fireplace, and where once she had always found a spark of gentle recognition, even when he was deeply preoccupied—where once he would absently reach a hand toward her, and gather her into his arms, and seat her in his lap, without disturbing his meditation—now it seemed he did not see her at all. So extensive was the destruction wrought in that man’s soul by the awakened memory of the loss he had suffered, and the grief and guilt attendant upon that loss, there was little capacity left to sustain the love of his daughter.

Martha demanded nothing of him. She understood that he must be allowed to ruminate to the full upon the tragedy, which for many years he had consigned to the cellars of his mind, whence the memory of it had now suddenly emerged; he must ruminate on it, she believed, before he could rise again with fresh resolve. Fred Lour appeared as usual, but Harry sent him away, insisting that he would never again submit himself to public display, and instructing him to
cancel all performances. So Fred and Martha left Harry to grieve in peace, and went off about the town together.

Early one morning a few days later Martha entered her father’s room and found him asleep, fully clothed, on the bed. On the floor beside the bed were half-a-dozen empty bottles. She sank onto a chair and covered her face with her hands. At last she looked up, and gazed at her father sprawled there, stinking of wine and snoring loudly. She was too young ever to remember seeing him in this condition, but she remembered well enough him speaking about the evil of drink, and about his own weakness.

Harry woke up some hours later, put his feet on the floor, but could get no further, and sat there groaning and clutching his head. Martha went to him with hot tea and murmured quietly to him as he sipped it, and he nodded, and after a time he turned to her with the tears streaming down his face and pulled her to his breast and held her there, moaning and rocking. Soon enough he had recovered sufficiently to make his way to his wash bowl and there, having stripped off his shirt, he doused his head in cold water and then lifted it with a shout, flung his head up so that the water showered off him, and the shout he shouted was: “Never again!”—and shortly after: “I am not beat yet!”—and more in this vein, and Martha looked on with a smile that was by no means free of anxiety. I think he was probably still drunk.

Ah, but there he stood bent over his bowl, and in the late afternoon sunlight the ridged hump of his back seemed almost translucent, so delicate a structure was it, like a fin, the skin so white, stretched taut upon its fragile outcrop of flaring bone. It was seldom that Harry took his shirt off in front of Martha, and she was fascinated by his spine. Watching him, loving the sheer strength and bigness of him, she did not see it as abnormal, and could, rather, believe she inhabited a world in which all men had ridged spines, and
her father’s the most handsome of them all. It was so unfair; and him so handsome, as he stood bowed over his bowl and sponged from his body the sweat and filth of the night.

For some days, said my uncle, resuming his narrative, Harry was as good as his word. He seemed to be shifting his gaze from the terrible wound which had opened in his heart, and was expressing tentative sentiments of hope. He even began to write a little, although he remained adamant in his refusal to perform in the taproom below. But what mattered now, as Martha told him, was that he bear up under his misfortune, and begin to make some plan for the future, and not drink.