Martha Peake (15 page)

He returned in the late afternoon, she heard him come in. The door between their rooms was not locked. It swung open. He stood in the doorway, huge and crumpled and broken. He tried to talk but he could not. Martha gazed at him with steady eyes.

“What do you want?” she said.

His voice was barely more than a whisper. “I want to be forgiven.”

He sank to his knees in the doorway, not without pain, and opened his arms. He stank of drink and tobacco and worse.

“Martha,” he whispered, “I am sorry.”

Martha was silent.

“Forgive me.”

Silence.

Harry’s face was a damp mess, running with tears, and with the dilute grime he had attracted to himself in the hours of his dissipation. Martha stood by the window. He gave out a sort of choked sob and, with one hand on the doorframe for support, rose unsteadily to his feet. Martha shrank back. Harry gazed at her with a face of such
piteous misery that her heart was ripped wide open by it; but she did not move. He turned then and withdrew into his own room, and the door closed softly behind him. A little later he thumped the wall hard; then he clattered off down the staircase, and she knew that when he returned he would not be sober.

10

A
nd so ended the second night of my uncle’s storytelling. He would have continued, I know; fuelled by whatever drug it was that sustained the vital flame in him, he would have talked till dawn about his demented poet and the poet’s handsome daughter, but I could not have listened. I was exhausted. Unlike him, I had risen at an early hour of the morning and now I could barely keep my eyes open. Pleading fatigue, I asked if we might go on tomorrow.

The old man took this to be a lamentable lack of stamina on my part. He was wearing, that night, a maroon velvet smoking jacket beneath his dressing gown, and maroon velvet slippers; and on his head a curious sort of skullcap with a silk tassel hanging down over his ear. This skullcap he now removed, and briskly rubbing his liver-spotted skull and its few wisps of hair, he said he supposed he could amuse himself until his own bedtime; and bade me goodnight.

Bad dreams again that night; and again I awoke shivering early in the morning, and at once leapt out of bed and threw on my clothes, those that I had not been sleeping in. Standing at the window, and rubbing my hands for warmth, I saw that the day was clear and cold, with only a few clouds off to the west, and I decided that I would take my horse out for a gallop across the marsh, so as to clear
my mind of all the grim events I had been told of in the night. The house was as empty as it had been the day before. I made my way downstairs and out through the kitchen to the stables at the back without encountering a living soul, and saddled up without assistance. At that time I owned a brown cob, a good strong animal with a sweet disposition, and when I led her out of the stable and into the yard I knew she was as ready for a gallop as I was.

We trotted out through the village to the London road, where we turned to the south, and with just a touch she was off like the wind. Oh, it was a fine smoky morning, and it was more than fine to be galloping through that empty landscape, getting clear away from Drogo Hall and my ancient dusty uncle! The road was dry and we came along at a fine clip through stubble fields, in the distance ahead low hills crowned with leafless trees. After a few miles we turned off the main road and cantered along to a village where I was sure I would find a good breakfast.

And so I did; and a good fire, in front of which I warmed my bottom, then flung myself into a chair and stretched my legs before settling to a plate of steamed kidneys, Colchester oysters, bread and butter, and strong tea. Then I turned my chair to the fire once more, and pondered Harry Peake awhile, and turned over in my mind the suspicion I was harbouring as to Lord Drogo’s designs upon the man, his desire to have his backbone for display; and all at once it occurred to me that behind one of those locked doors I had encountered in Drogo Hall, or at the bottom of a sealed staircase, Drogo’s Museum of Anatomy
must still exist
. It must still exist, I realized, sitting bolt upright as the idea took hold, maintained by my uncle, and containing such horrors as I could barely imagine, but including the skeletal remains of Harry Peake. If I were to inherit Drogo Hall—and to this possibility my uncle had made only one oblique reference thus far—what lay in store for me, when I opened that room to the light of day? What monstrous things awaited me in the bowels of the house?

With these unsettling thoughts somewhat damping the good
spirits engendered in me by the fresh air and the exertions of the morning, I left the inn to find that the day had grown overcast; and even as I trotted away I felt the first spots of rain. Uncertain whether we were in for a brief shower or a sustained downpour, I did not at once turn back to Drogo Hall, but continued to make for the high ground to the south.

An hour later I was standing with my horse beneath the flimsy cover of a few bare trees as the heavens opened on all sides and the rain came down in a torrent. In the distance I could see the rooftops of London, where the storm raged with still greater fury. From out of the bellies of lowering black thunderclouds—those same clouds I had seen off to the west, and thought so harmless—came jagged flashes of lightning, followed a second later by the rumble of thunder. I was soon soaked through; and as there seemed little point in simply standing there beneath a leafless tree, I remounted and set off back to Drogo Hall.

The road was a quagmire now, and our progress was a good deal slower than it had been earlier. A sorry sight we made, I am sure, horse and rider both with heads bowed, chilled and dripping as we picked our way across the Lambeth Marsh in the rain, which by this point had settled to a steady downpour, and made the world obscure. When at last we reached Drogo Hall I was somewhat comforted to be met at the front steps by Percy with an umbrella, and a boy from the village, and while I was brought into the house with much clucking and sympathy, my poor wet cob was led off round the back to the stables.

But this was not a house in which a man was easily made warm and dry, after such a soaking as I had suffered; and although I was sat down by a fire with my feet in a tub of hot water, and given a steaming cup of tea laced with lemon and rum, I was soon sneezing and shivering and feeling distinctly feverish; and by the time my uncle had appeared, and assumed an attitude of brisk solicitude, I knew that I would be packed off to bed, and even that damp contraption seemed welcoming now. The fire was lit, a tray was prepared, and I
settled among my dank bedclothes with my uncle perched on the chair by the bed.

He seemed cheered that I was giving him a bit of doctoring to do. He chattered away as I lay there barely able to comprehend him, but when I understood that he had resumed his narrative, as though we were as usual in his study below, I made an effort to grasp what he was saying. He was talking about Martha’s flight from her father, and her eventual appearance here in Drogo Hall; and fevered though I was, I reacted to this development with a cry of horror, and attempted to rise up out of my bed, as though by some effort of my own I could warn her of the danger! I wanted to tell her that Drogo meant her no good, he only craved her father’s bones, his house was a trap from which she would never escape!

Some kind of delirium, I suppose; my uncle abruptly broke off, and a few minutes later Percy appeared with a small glass of some ill-smelling fluid which I was persuaded to drink; and within moments I was deeply asleep.

That night while her father was out, Martha slipped away from the Angel. Through the hours of darkness she walked the streets. She heard the bell of an unknown church chiming the hours—was it St. Giles?—and the incessant barking of a distant dog; and as she walked she reviewed in her mind’s eye the chain of events since first she had come to Cripplegate Street with her father, examining each for some hint it might contain as to how she should go forward. She remembered my uncle William, and that man’s face was all at once before her eyes, the face of a gentle man, a kind man—had he not looked upon her with favour, called her a fine girl, taken pains on both occasions to engage her in talk—and had he not told her that should she ever need his help she must come to him?

My uncle preened, I remember, as he told me this, for of course it reflected well upon him, at least it did in his view of the matter.
But I no longer altogether trusted his memory, nor indeed his motives; though whether he was deliberately deceiving me, or unwittingly deceiving himself, this I had yet to establish, and weakened as I was with fever, and unable to leave my bed, there was little I could do now but listen in passive resignation as he went forward with the story.

11

I
n the early hours of the morning Martha set out for the Lambeth Marsh. She knew only that Drogo Hall lay somewhere in that vicinity. All she owned, all her books and clothes, were packed in her battered cabin trunk and left behind in the Angel. As to her state of mind, she should, I suppose, have been sunk in truly dismal spirits but somehow, perhaps it was the crisp damp tang of the mist in the early morning, somehow I cannot help feeling there was a spark or two of confidence in her as she set her steps to the west. She crossed the river over the new bridge at Westminster and was soon through the village on the Surrey bank, and onto the marsh itself.

The Lambeth Marsh in those days was in some part grazing land for sheep and cattle, but in the main was made up of bogs and fens and stands of reeds and bulrush; and though deadly treacherous to the traveller should she stray from the road at night, or fall foul of a highwayman, it was safely crossed in the daylight hours. In her greatcoat, then, and a cocked hat she had had from Fred so as to lend herself, in her vulnerable state, something of the masculine, Martha gazed out over an empty flat expanse of open marshy land with here and there in the distance a cottage, a barn, a stand of trees to break the line of the horizon. She saw sheep, she saw wading birds, cranes and herons, others she could not identify. The road across the marsh
was made of raised earth covered with gravel and buttressed at the sides with logs.

It was colder out there on the unprotected marsh than it had been in the town, and pulling her coat about her she set off due south. The sky was hazy and the mist clung to the marsh like a soft white sheet that drifted and thickened in places, such that the scene was leached of all clarity and definition and rendered oddly dreamlike in its indistinctness; earth and water, air and sky all come together in a diffuse milky immateriality. No bird cried out in that blank expanse, no sound was heard at all. Into the marsh Martha advanced, the buoyancy she had felt earlier now subdued by the whiteness and silence of this strange world. An hour later she reached the top of a shallow rise and in the distance, to the east, and sheltered by a low wooded hill, she made out a group of buildings clustered about a large white house. This was Drogo Hall.

Another hour and she could see it more clearly. Drogo Hall was an imposing building in those days, and small wonder it had intimidated her father. It was a large square house of white stone with a pillared portico, the whole a thing of elegant classical proportions in that style we would now call Early Georgian. It seemed to gaze out arrogantly, imperturbably over the marsh, like a monarch, perfect in the authority of its formal design, a piece of flawless reasoning in stone, although as yet unfinished, and hedged about with the builder’s scaffolding. It did not stand alone, nor did the buildings around it conform to the austerities of its own cold logic. It was flanked by a Norman church with a spiky steeple, behind which lay a walled graveyard in whose high grass were crowded families of ancient tilting stones. There were cottages—outbuildings—a forge—an inn—a village, in short, huddled about the skirts of the great house, and out front a small lake in which Lord Drogo kept various species of foreign fish. And all these older buildings, some of which actually abutted and were a part of the fabric of Drogo Hall itself, the original hall, that is, were built in a manner suggestive not of the Age of Reason but of an earlier age, a Dark Age, rather—I speak of
crockets and gargoyles, wavering roof lines and shaggy brickwork, turrets, and a tower, and Martha surely asked herself, was this queer hybrid house a sanctuary? Would she find shelter here from the storm of her father’s madness?