Martha Peake (14 page)

So she gathered them up, and flung sawdust on those still damp, and made a pile of them, and left them in the middle of his table with the ink bottle on top as a paperweight, and beside it the jar containing his uncut quills; then went into the other room. She dragged the chair to the bedside and sat there listening to the snores of an exhausted man surrendering at last to sleep.

It may be true that what a king is in the moral universe, a monster is in the physical, and that Harry Peake, in gin, behaved with all the violent intemperance of a tyrant. This is how my uncle would have it, and perhaps he attempted to impose this view on Martha too. Later, after she reached America, I believe she came to understand why her father acted as he did and, understanding, forgave him. But at the time, in London, in the late summer of 1774, she could not simply wait for the day when Harry, drunk, did serious damage to himself or to her.

For it was not over, Martha soon realized this; she had tried to convince herself that this was but some transient condition, some temporary disturbance of the soul which her father would shake off as a dog shakes off water; or which would simply pass over like a patch of bad weather. But no. She saw that it would never be over; she would have been unable to say why she knew this, but she had seen a man begin to try and change his nature, to forget who he was
and what he had been, and move toward some new state or stage of being. He had glimpsed it; he had touched the lodestar of his own soul, and knew its heft and value; and he had thought that he could change his destiny and make himself anew.

He could not. For he remained trapped within the grotesque body. The world still knew him for a monster. However fresh the springs of the spirit within him, this could not be overcome, for this, his body, in the eyes of the world
was
his nature; and glimpsing this, in his bitterness, and spite, he had jettisoned his humanity and
embraced the monster
. Martha understood this as a child understands such things: darkly, in the obscure regions of the mind, those places from which occasionally truth will rise without preamble or argument. But that truth did not ravage her as perhaps it might have done, and for one simple reason: her father loved her. She cared for nothing else, and this I believe to be the very engine of her fate, that in all the tumult of her childhood he had been home and harbour, the source of love. She had seen it when he looked at her and the deadness was gone; and this, to her, poor child, was all that mattered.

The last sobering lasted no longer than the one before, and by then it had become clear to Martha that her father was sinking fast. My uncle said he did not wish to weary me with Harry’s later outrages; suffice it to say that despite all his good intentions in the wake of the last bout, he had resumed drinking. He brooded in his room for hours at a time, he paced the floor like a creature in a cage. Martha listened through the door as he moaned to himself in the night. Sometimes he thumped the wall so hard with his fist that the plaster was dislodged on her side, and clouds of powder drifted about in the moonlight. She had been growing more and more apprehensive, she had even tried to tell him that he had been seduced by a phantom, and was not the world full of that which merely masqueraded as Reason? Was there better magic in the bottle than in the embrace of a
loving daughter? All this she said to him, but he paid no attention, instead he left her, and went clattering off down the stairs, for in truth he was now at war with love, only darkness answered to his temper now.

Martha sat in his room, waiting for him to return, and for the first time she quarreled with herself, she told herself it was her fault he went off drinking, why could she not stop him? This brought her to tears, but in a moment her grief turned to passionate indignation and she reminded herself how hard she had thought about what she should do, and with nobody to advise her she could only do what her common sense told her was right, and how unjust, how bitter, to think that this was
her
fault—!

And now, said my uncle William—it was three in the morning, I remember hearing the old clock chime the hours in the hallway below—now comes one of the blackest episodes in the whole unhappy tale. Martha was awoken late that night by the sound of muffled grunting, and the creak and scream of woodwork in motion, the sound of a ship under sail, so it seemed, or some other great timbered machine. She sat up in her bed, straining to hear, and all at once the creaking stopped. She heard a voice, her father’s, raised in anger; and then came another voice, a woman’s voice, and in that voice she heard terror.

Martha ran to the door between the two rooms and pressed her ear to it. She heard her father shouting incoherently; then silence; then all at once a bottle shattering against a wall. She flung open the door. The room was dark, only one candle was burning. Her father sat naked on the side of his bed, bent forward and breathing hard, his back like a huge pale hood thrown up behind him, rising and falling as his lungs laboured, and his great horse-penis hanging black in the shadows between his legs. As Martha stared in astonishment from the doorway his head lifted and he glared at her from eyes that were
blazing with drink and rage, and there was something else there too, that same deadness she had seen in him before, that black opacity in which she could find no reflection of herself, no answering flicker of feeling, as though he were a stranger, or worse, a creature not fully human, one possessed by brute animal instinct and with no higher faculty capable of employing reason or sympathy to temper its impulse.

That impulse had but a moment before been one of violence. Now Martha glimpsed a movement, and all at once she saw standing in the corner of the dark room the shadowy figure of a woman, clutching a chair as though to defend herself from attack—and it was Sal Goat, beefy Sal! She was panting hard. The candle-flame caught a dull glint from the tin in her mouth. Martha felt her skin go cold; never before had her father brought a woman back to their lodgings. But her next impulse was for Sal’s safety.

“Get out, Sal!” she whispered; then more loudly, “Go!”

Sal Goat coolly hitched her skirt up with one hand and with her eyes never leaving Harry she moved to the door into the passage. At the door she flung a curse at him and was gone.

Martha at once went to her father, who sat staring fixed at the wall where the wine still streamed down the plaster. His jaw was working, bone grinding on bone, as though he searched for words, as though the animal nature dimly groped for what was yet human within its clouded brain. There he sat, breathing heavy, his hands clamped to his bare knees and his feet planted wide apart on the floorboards such that he seemed a piece of snorting statuary, a braced and strutted thing that burned within, and could be set in violent motion again, given due cause.

All at once he became aware of Martha in her nightshirt. His laboured breathing was the only sound in that room that reeked of wine and violence, in which the very air seemed throbbing and alive and in tumult still with his rage. Martha’s weary temper frayed at last, she felt she could stand no more, and it was with an anger that
had been fermenting in her for weeks that she began to berate him for the bottle smashed against the wall—

Harry’s head snapped up. His eyes now burned as with the very fires of Hell—windows of Hell, his eyes were now, at the sound of Martha’s voice. Oh, and what happened next would never be forgotten, I believe, by either one of them. He rose from the bed with a grunt and in one swooping step had seized up his daughter and held her before him, Martha clamped now and struggling in her father’s huge hands, shouting into her father’s face, that face twisted with fury, fumes of bad gin surging from between his bitter lips, the horse-penis up stiff now, hard as a rock and all athrob, great thick thing it was pushing at her thighs. All at once with a deliberate grunt he slammed her against the wall, with such force that the air was dashed from the girl’s body.

The bruises on her upper arms, the distinct and separate marks of her father’s fingers, would take many days to fade. She was screaming now, as Harry brought his face in close to hers, the burning eyes, the grinding teeth, the rage, the gin—and the next thing was Sal Goat running at him with a broomstick, screaming at him to let Martha go—she thought he would bite the girl’s head off, bite her head off and throw her out of the window! For there was passion enough in him that the deed would be done in the impulse of an instant and then forever regretted.

Sal Goat flailed at Harry as if she were beating a carpet, and he took a step backwards, stumbling over the chair she had flung down earlier. He released Martha, who scrambled away, Sal seizing her by the wrist and dragging her into the other room, glancing as she did so at Harry, where he sat now on the floor with his head in his hands, oblivious to their withdrawal. A moment later, with Martha sobbing loudly on the bed, Sal pushed a chair up against the door. It could not have stopped him had he chosen to come through, but some gesture of defence seemed necessary.

They did nothing that night. They did not try to reach the passage, for they feared rousing him to fresh violence. They lay in bed
watching the door. After a while they heard him moving around, and Sal grew alarmed.

“He will sleep it off,” whispered Martha, as the two girls clung together beneath the bedclothes, “then he will be himself again.”

They held each other close, and at last they fell asleep.

No further movement was heard that night. When Martha awoke it was broad daylight, and she was alone. She saw that the chair Sal had pushed against the door was no longer there. A little later Sal appeared.

“He has gone out,” she said. “He has swept away the broken glass. He has put the room to rights.”

Some comfort this, not much.