Martha Peake (44 page)

Clyte, I feel sure, was always present, Clyte would never have let Harry out of his sight, after the contract was signed, but tracked him across the marsh and through the town, lurking in the shadows in the night-cellars where Harry spent Drogo’s coin, watching over him when he sank into stupor, and later following him back out onto the Lambeth Marsh; Harry having forgotten, if he had ever truly known it, that his daughter had fled from Drogo Hall forever. And with every day that passed, so did the weather worsen. The rain that fell on the marsh was cold and hard, and not even the bullish strength that had sustained him this long, not even his giant constitution could withstand the cruel autumn rainstorms, nor the scything winds; and he weakened. But knowing what I did of the man, I could not believe that even in a weakened state he would willingly
give himself to the darkness at the end. No, I believe there arose in him a last magnificent impulse of defiance, a rising of the spirit, and with it a turning away from the diabolical bargain he had made with Drogo, and with that, perhaps—and here I truly speculate, for I myself have not the Christian faith, I worship in a very different church—with that recognition of the frailty of his own will—a turning toward God? Toward a merciful Saviour? Not as uncommon as you might imagine, in men who find themselves as utterly alone as Harry was, as they draw near to death.

And if he did indeed turn, did a prospect open in his benighted mind, indeed more than a prospect, a
vision
—a vision of the Last Day, the dead everywhere rising from their graves, to stand before the Lord, and be judged? I think it not impossible. Harry Peake, having failed to achieve the spiritual renewal he once thought could be his; having failed to overcome the mortal antagonist, his own body; and having with that failure sunk to the depths of Nature, become a
prisoner
of Nature—Harry Peake, I believe, glimpsed at the last the possibility of redemption. He glimpsed a way to stand before the Almighty and seek election to Paradise. And I believe that he then went to Drogo, and pleaded with him to be released from his contract—and Drogo said no. Drogo denied him. Drogo had paid for those bones, and he would have them.

What then—a rage, a great wild storm of destruction that had Drogo and William retreating up the staircase, and Clyte cowering in some high place, atop a lofty wardrobe, like a distressed bat, while Harry laid about him in a fury? I think not. I think when Harry saw the chance of redemption he became quiet, he sobered, he wished to keep the idea before him with some clarity. So no, no great act of destruction, instead he crossed the hall and walked out of the front door and down the steps and onto the marsh; and Clyte, from a distance, with caution and cunning, was, as ever, his shadow. And when at last Harry’s time came, when alone, in some cold damp garret room, he turned his face to the wall—Clyte was below, waiting for him in the small black carriage.

So Harry went to his death without even the comfort of believing that he would rise again on the Last Day, to stand whole and shining before the God of Love. But I would defy my uncle, yes, and Clyte, and Drogo most of all, I would give Harry that comfort, I would take his scavenged bones and secure a Christian burial for them, and where?—in the old graveyard by the church.

Ah, but first I had to find them! That morning while the house slept I had done little more than explore those rooms and corridors that were not locked against me. Everywhere I came upon the remnants of Drogo’s fine furnishings, phantom glimpses of what the house had been in its days of glory. Neglect and damp were responsible for the damage, for not only did the house stand chill and unheated winter after rainy winter, with the exception of the few rooms my uncle used, but the roofs leaked in various places and no effort had been made to repair them. This accounted for the smell of mildew and the presence of lichen and moss clinging to the floorboards and creeping up the walls. Many of the old Turkey carpets had been ruined, and as for the great paintings, the old masters and such, smoked by time and clustering thickly in baroque gilded frames on Drogo’s walls and staircases—on close inspection, with the aid of a good wax candle, I found them to be covered with a soft furry coat of black lichen which fed upon the oil in the paintwork.

Nor had Drogo’s collection of statuary escaped the parasites. Fine sculptures of classical figures standing in handsome long rows along the corridors of the public rooms downstairs were discoloured and patchy, colonized like so much else of the house by the creeping lichens that needed only a good damp climate, a cool temperature, and gloom, to flourish and proliferate; and it occurred to me, when first I became aware of the extent of the damage done here by damp, that this house would be hard to burn down. All that was flammable—furniture, carpets, bedclothes, the many thousands of Drogo’s books, including the old ones shelved behind glass—the
very stuff and fabric of the house—it would be impossible to set fire to it, and whatever end Fate had chosen for Drogo Hall, a charred ruin it would never be.

Thus my thoughts in the long reaches of the night, thoughts that I could not of course share with my uncle William, for he had been complicit in all this—had he not produced the inkpot and quill when the contract was signed? Was he not desperate to see Harry as the crowning achievement of the Museum of Anatomy? Did he not eagerly feed his master’s appetite for strange bones? So when next I saw him—I still had not located the museum—when next we met, as we did each day at four, in his study, to continue with this edifice of history we were constructing, which encompassed now the first phase of the struggle of the American people to free themselves from precisely the sort of imperial bondage that Drogo practised on Harry Peake—when next we met I was more than ever guarded, circumspect, alert to every devious shift and feint in what the old man said, always correcting against the bias, against the
skew
, groping through the boggy twilight of obfuscation for the truths that gleamed like pearls within.

34

M
artha Peake sat up in her bloody bed with her arms stretched out to her newborn son and the tears streaming down her cheeks as her heart overflowed with waves of love of a power and purity she had never known before. They wanted to take him and swaddle him before she could have him but she cried out fiercely, her fatigue and pain forgotten, and the women at last shifted their astonished eyes from her child to herself and hearing her claiming him, looked at one another, and even Maddy Rind for once did not know what to do.

But Hester Winthrop did. She came to the bed with the infant in her arms and tenderly gave him to Martha. She received him with wondering gratitude and sank back on her pillows with her little Harry on her breast and her fingers on his tiny spine. What a mess he was! She took an edge of the sheet and wiped his head clean—his skull was covered in a fine soft down of the palest red imaginable—and then she wiped his back, and how could she think of that delicate flare of tiny bone as a flaw, the thought did not occur to her, he was beautiful, he was a kind of miracle, inexplicable, a mystery, she would not have believed anything so perfect could be created in this world had he not been lying in her arms, alive. Asleep! He had fallen
asleep! He made her laugh, little man exhausted by his labours when it was she who had done all the work!

He slept. She stroked the great soft dome of his skull, she stroked his little curved twig of a backbone, she wept and laughed and clucked and murmured and when at last she looked up, the women stood in a clutch in the candlelight gazing at her, all but Mistress Winthrop, who was busy with her herb bag.

“He is called Harry,” she whispered, for she did not want to wake him. None of the women uttered a word.

“What’s the matter?” she whispered. Still nothing. She grew alarmed.

“What’s wrong?” she said. “Is he not well?”

“He is well,” said Mistress Winthrop, not looking up.

“Then what is it?”

Maddy Rind spoke at last. “It is this, Martha, we are surprised, we did not expect—”

“What?” She truly did not understand.

“His back,” she said, and fell silent, gazing at Martha now with damp eyes that seemed imploring or compassionate, she could not tell which.

“He has my father’s back,” she said.

“But what a sad thing,” said Maddy Rind, sitting by the bed, laying a hand on Martha’s cheek, gazing at her with eyes like pools, she was that close to tears.

“I am not sad,” said Martha.

“But think of Adam.”

Adam? What had he to do with this? She was perplexed, but it was a mere breath of a breeze on the deep strong warm wordless flow of love that rose inside her. This talk of Adam was unimportant, she had her son in her arms! She turned away from her aunt and gazed once more at the little miraculous being asleep on her breast. She smelled his skin and felt his tiny shallow gulps of breath. Was that all? If he was strong and well as Mistress Winthrop said, what else
mattered? Maddy Rind glanced at the other women and they turned away and one after another silently left the room.

Maddy then stood gazing uncertainly down at Martha, and Martha was filled with love for her too. She took her aunt’s hand and brought it to her lips. She thanked her. She glowed, she was radiant, she was all love. Maddy smiled down at her niece but her forehead was a knot of worried questions. Martha tried to reassure her, she laid her aunt’s hand gently on her baby’s skull and covered it with her own.

“Adam will be happy,” she said.

“I hope so, Martha,” said Maddy. She sat down again and, still stroking his head, stared hard at the sleeping infant.

“I hope so,” she said again, and still Martha heard those worried questions in her voice.

A little later Martha’s cousins were allowed to come and see her infant son. They did not stand back as the women had, they were curious, they were filled with wonder, they were adoring. They looked at Martha with new eyes, they had not dreamed their loud cousin from England could create a little being with eyes and hands who spluttered and clenched his tiny fingers, who had hair as soft as spun silk and skin as clear as light. Very gently they traced the curve of the little hump on his back, and were astonished at how soft the little bones were. They declared him perfect and Martha lay there bathing in their pleasure and allowed Sara to hold him in her arms, and oh, she was so careful, there was no need to warn her what a precious cargo she held. She gazed down at his face with great seriousness.

“Little man,” she whispered.

None of the women had asked to hold him, but the Rind girls were eager to, and as one by one they lifted him into their arms Martha wondered why the women had behaved so strangely. Did they think the child bewitched? Did they think the hand of Satan was in the making of his backbone? She had heard similar nonsense in her few months in New Morrock, for the beliefs of a century past lived on in certain minds which had had no benefit of education—did they think she had lain with the devil? It suddenly made her want to shout with laughter, that an idea so ridiculous could still be taken seriously when a new age of reason was teaching men that old beliefs, like old systems of government, must be swept away—and for a minute or two a passion stirred in her, a spark or two drifted up from the slumbering embers—until she remembered again the infant in her arms; and when this blindly groping little creature sought her breast and began to suckle, she lay back and thought of nothing, and all ideas of Progress and Reason slipped away like so many pieces of flotsam drifting on the tide.