Martha Peake (21 page)

How could Martha have known this? I have no idea, and neither did my uncle. But she knew it, because one night she stayed awake, waiting until the house was asleep, and then she slipped out of bed, and throwing on her greatcoat over her nightshirt—the coat she had had from her father, and which, though it stank of tobacco still, and the sleeves were so long she had to fold the cuffs back several times to get her fingers out, was yet a good warm coat for a chill September night—and with her boots and stockings on, and a shawl over her head, and her hair all brushed out and spilling down her back—she was tolerably warm for the vigil that lay ahead.

She rubbed her hands before the fire, which was dying, then
clambered into her window alcove and there arranged herself as comfortably as she could. It was a clear night, and there was a moon, and she knew, somehow, that this night she would discover for certain whether he was out there or not.

Moonlight seemed to bleach the marsh, to render it palely gleaming, this tract of waterland that stretched for miles in all directions, its ghostly haunted vastness broken only by the occasional stark outline of a leafless elm, and now and then the flicker and flare of the will-o’-the-wisp. This night it was silent. Nothing was moving. Only the mist, delicate as gossamer, stuff of dreams, coiled and drifted in the low-lying bogs where standing water gave back the moon’s reflection in strips and bars of tainted radiance. In the distance the town was no more than a dark massy presence with tiny scattered spots of light; and nothing in any other direction. Martha sat in her high window with her arms wrapped round her knees and watched over it all. She had a candle with her in the window: she was a beacon, shining in the night; if he was out there, he would see her.

Oh, but she found it hard, after an hour or two, to stay awake. Her head would start to slide off her knees and she would wake with a start, not knowing how long she had been asleep, a minute or an hour, until she saw how the candle burned; and then once more she looked out over the marsh, so still in the clear cold moonlight.

But soon she was fast asleep, curled up in her big bed with the birds and the lizards scuttling about in the foliage on the headboard.

Three nights later she saw him. There was heavy cloud that night, and some fog, for they had had rain that evening, and a wind, too, and the marsh was much different from what it had been a few nights earlier, altogether darker and wilder, alive with movement, though there was no saying what that movement was, wind on water, shifting fog, animals, spirits, or man. He was among the elm trees. Martha’s candle was burning, her beacon was lit. He did not
move, merely stood there among the trees gazing straight up at the house.

She was ready. She was wearing her greatcoat. With her boots clutched in one hand, the candlestick in the other, she stepped silently to the door and, turning the key, for now she locked herself in at night, she slipped out into the corridor, where she set down the candle and pulled her boots on. Then away she went down the staircase and through the dark passages of the west wing, then down to a door that opened into the courtyard below her window, where she put out the candle and hid it behind a barrel. Clyte was now the danger, him and the dogs; but as she crept along the wall she heard nothing but the soughing of the wind out on the marsh.

She pressed her back against the bricks for a few minutes, then darted across the yard to a gate that opened into a walled garden behind the stables where she knew she should be safe. Again she paused; again she heard nothing to alarm her. Then she was running, clinging to the deeper shadows by the wall, until she reached the far end, where a sturdy trellis fastened to the brickwork gave her an easy climb up over the wall, and a simple drop to the ground on the far side.

Only a fence or two now separated her from the marsh itself, and the stand of elms where she had earlier seen a tall bent figure among the trees. Then she was running, or squelching, rather, across a cow pasture, mud splashing her nightshirt, the greatcoat streaming out behind her. She was slipping and sliding but determined to reach the fence on the far side without once stopping.

She reached it. She hung there, panting. She glanced over her shoulder: nothing pursued her. She glanced about her: nothing moved. In the darkness—heavy clouds had rolled across the moon—the stand of elms was a dense black mass half-a-mile away. She could see no figure there now. The ground between was boggy and uneven, a dangerous place to cross on a dark night after rain. What was that to Martha Peake? She would pick her way with care. Off she went
with beating heart, slow and cautious, feeling her way among tufted clumps of earth with dark mucky pools between, and she had to step from one to the next but not before testing with her boot that it was firm enough to take her weight. Perilous work; and more than once she slipped and felt her leg sink in up to the knee, and she hauled it clear but not without difficulty, for the ooze clung and sucked at her, eager to take her down.

Now there was some noise on the marsh, her own: her cries of surprise and frustration, her grunts of exertion, the ghastly sucking sounds of her leg being hauled up out of the bog. She couldn’t help it. She didn’t care. She was determined to reach the stand of elms where the ground was higher and she had seen, so she thought, her father waiting for her.

The grassy hillocks grew fewer and farther apart and she was scrambling now from one to the next, clawing in the darkness with her hands to secure if not firm footing, at least a grip on something solid. She was wet to her groin. Her greatcoat now dragged about her like a damp sack, a burden she would happily have abandoned but for the wind, which was beginning to spit cold rain in her face. The half-mile from the fence to the trees now seemed a very Atlantic in its vastness. She may have wept but she did not stop. She could not stop. She had no confidence in her ability to turn herself around and find the way back. She had at least the trees in front of her now, she could see where she was going. But she could not see her father.

It grew worse. She was wading through bog now, but slowly, painfully slowly, it was all she could do to keep moving, to get a boot up and out of the bog and take another step. She was wet and cold and miserable. Her strength was flagging. A wave of despair swept over her—

Then she saw him! She saw him. He was tramping toward her through the muck as though it were no more than a puddle. It splattered about him as he came shouldering through. A moment later he had her round the waist and was lifting her clear of the mud, and
turning and ploughing back the way he had come, and a little later still they heaved up onto firmer ground and he set her down among the elms. She sat there panting. He squatted at the foot of a tree. He looked old and thin and ill. He had lost several teeth. His cheeks were sunken, his long black hair was matted with dirt and straw, his clothes were in rags. His eyes shone with a peculiar brightness: gin, she thought. His hands trembled. He looked wild. He looked mad. Her father. But the monster was not in him, no, it was his own soul she glimpsed burning dimly within.

“I knew you were out here,” she said. She was filled with a quiet happiness. “I knew you were watching the house.”

For a long time he said nothing. Then, at last: “Are you reading your books?” His voice was changed; cracked and husky now, but still it sounded like old leather.

She did not find the question odd. “I read his books,” she said. “He has a library.”

“I know it.”

“Aren’t you cold?”

“No.”

“I am.”

He had fewer clothes on than she had, but he pulled the cold damp girl to him and wrapped his arms around her. He was very smelly. She wanted to tell him about America but she could not.

“Do you mean to murder me?” she whispered, clutching his collar.

This provoked a hoarse hack of laughter. He shook his head.

“I have gone mad, Martha. At times I cannot account for what I do. But I have no wish to kill you.”

“What will you do?”

No answer to this.

“Are you still living at the Angel?”

“No.”

“Will you visit Lord Drogo again?”

“Drogo!”

His grip on her tightened. He struggled with his anger, she felt it rising in him. She was shivering now, her teeth were chattering.

“I will take you back,” he said, growing suddenly quiet again. “When I am not mad I think of you.”

“I think of you too.”

“Better forget me.”

“No!”

She shifted herself about in his arms until she could look him in the face, and as she did so the clouds fled from the moon and she saw him for a few seconds with some clarity. The face she saw before her in the moonlight was more scored and hatched with pain than ever, and about the eyes there was a sort of hollowing, a deepening of the sockets and a strange clearness of the brow that somehow unmistakably spelled lunacy. Even Martha, child though she was, could read that; oh, and a hundred other signs of a weakening fiber, the twitching, the muttering that went on constantly under his breath; the hand that trembled in the darkness above her head, and then returned, like a bird disturbed from the nest, to encircle her waist and hold her close. Tears shone damply in his eyes.

“Does your back still hurt?” she said.

“I have no more care of pain.”

She rubbed her cheek against his face. There was a thick beard on him and it scratched her. She pulled back sharply with a cry.

A little later he led her back to the house, bringing her round the boggy part, firm ground all the way. They held hands, and a strange sight they would surely have made, had there been any eye to see them, the big shuffling humpback in rags, and his daughter, in greatcoat and boots, and with mud to her waist, out beneath an angry sky, at the dead of night, walking hand in hand in a marsh. Close to the house he left her, and she stood by the wall watching him as he lumbered toward the London road. She found her way back
to her room without mishap, where she cleaned herself as best she could before climbing into bed. It seemed all a dream, and perhaps it would have been, but for the mud she had brought back with her and the burn on her cheek where she had rubbed against his beard.

In the morning the bed was filthy and my uncle was in a state of no little irritation when he discovered that she had gone out on the marsh in the night. She did not tell him about meeting her father. She told him she liked to go out at night, and this made him angry. There were dogs, he said, wild dogs, did she not hear them howling? Martha reassured him, although it irked her sorely that he should attempt to lord it over her like this. But she avoided promising to stay inside the house at night.

And this is how it started, the strange late phase in Martha’s relationship with her father. It was unfortunate that her expedition out-of-doors should have been discovered so quickly, for at one blow she had lost her guardian’s trust. William knew well enough that she was a wilful, headstrong girl, but he had presumed she understood the precariousness of her situation in Drogo Hall, and that she would not jeopardize her tenuous security by rash acts.