Martha Peake (47 page)

Here the old man paused for some moments, breathing fast.

Confusion now, he whispered, when he had composed himself once more, as all debate ceased and the women cried at the boy to tell what he knew, but the poor lad was soon bewildered, no sooner starting to answer a question than another was flung at him, and after a minute or two he simply stood there in the aisle with his mouth hanging open. Then Dan Pierce called him up to the front and at once there was silence. The boy walked between the silent pews and when he reached the front of the church he was sat down in a chair and Dan Pierce spoke to him quietly, then listened to the boy’s whispered reply.

Dan Pierce straightened up, frowning, and turned to face the people. He was a big raw-boned fisherman with a face so burnt by the sun and blasted by the wind it resembled old boot-leather. He gazed at them for a second and the silence grew profound.

“This boy,” he said, “has seen the names of the British ships.”

They waited.

“One is called the
Bristol
.”

The name meant nothing.

“The other is the
Queen Charlotte
.”

Uproar at this—the
Charlotte
! Oh, now Martha’s heart sank utterly and she felt the colour flood into her face. All the women were talking at once, and it seemed they were reaching the same conclusion. They were turning to where Martha stood at the back of the church, they were pointing at her, their faces were distorted by hatred and rage, on their lips was one name only—and that was hers!

37

M
artha Peake shrank against the back wall of the church, clutching her infant to her breast; and it was at this dramatic juncture in the history, with herself seemingly undone at last, that my uncle, gasping for breath, lifted a trembling finger, and pleading fatigue—declared it was enough, and shook his little bell!

A small cry escaped my lips, as I lurched forward in my chair, twitching, in a very
fervour
of desperation to know what happened next!—barely had he resumed the narrative, and already he was tiring! I begged him not to leave me like this, but he sighed, and shook his head, and I knew there was no point in harassing him once he had begun to fade. I paced the floor as he sat waiting for Percy to come and take him off to bed. I myself was not in the least tired, having ingested a liberal dose of the medicines I took nightly now so as to avoid a recurrence of the marsh fever.

My mind worked quickly. I watched as old bent Percy came shuffling in, mumbling to himself, clutching a lamp, a sparse white stubble on his cheekbones and a line of spittle down his chin. William was ready for him. They had a sort of ritual, a sort of mating dance in which my uncle would seize Percy’s arms and then, rocking himself backwards and forwards, build sufficient momentum to launch himself out of his chair, to be held and steadied by
Percy, the pair having first reeled back together before finding their balance and at the last standing panting face to face in the weak glow of the fire. Then they hobbled off out the door, William gripping Percy’s arm and Percy holding up the lamp before them. Muttering and wheezing they shuffled away down the darkened corridor in a small flickering nimbus of gloomy lamplight.

I watched them go, then closed the door and strode about the room, a glass in my hand, pausing to stir up the fire, replace my uncle’s blanket on his chair, and gaze a moment or two at the portrait of Harry Peake, who had gazed down at me these last nights with what I now understood to be
supplication
. Yes, I had at last fathomed the mystery of the great knotted brow, of the deep dark eyes, the grim set jaw. It is, perhaps, the most dangerous of illusions, to imagine that one can ever know another human being, particularly a dead one; but at that moment I felt I knew Harry Peake.

The moon had set when I left the house, the sky was that eerie starless blue of the hour before the dawn, the air was chill and the ground damp. Faint coils and tendrils of an early mist drifted over the gravel and weeds, and off among the trees a bird cried out, there was a scuffling in the branches, then silence. Drogo Hall loomed over me vast and dark. Keeping to the shadows by the wall I made my way with some stealth to the courtyard at the back of the building, sure that I would find there a set of steps down to the cellars where the bodies were prepared. Had not Martha Peake entered the house by way of those steps, when first she fled her father and came to Drogo Hall?

They were there; but disused these twenty years, and overgrown with grass and moss and weeds, and treacherous with slime underfoot. I descended with great trepidation, feeling my way, my hands on the bricks, the soles of my boots tentative on the slippery stones. I reached the bottom and the darkness was total, and in my nostrils a rank stench of putrefaction, as though dead things had been left there to soften to carrion to be eaten. I pushed at the door; it did not budge. I pushed again; it was shut tight and unyielding. I pushed for
the third time, harder now, and it scraped an inch inward, the bottom of the door rotted away in places with damp, and grating horribly on the uneven stone floor. Then I put my shoulder to it, and a moment later had it wide enough that I could squeeze sideways into the pitch blackness within.

Heart thumping now, blood racing in my veins, I stood inside the cellar to which I had been unable to gain access from above. The air was stale, dead, foetid. From my pocket I took a stub of candle and a flint, and in a moment I had a small flame in the darkness, though at first it gave me no sense of what kind of place I had entered. Why am I here, what do I hope to find in these foul-smelling cellars—is his museum, in truth, here below? These were questions I had already pondered, and having searched Drogo Hall without success, both the house itself and the older buildings which clung to its walls, I had suddenly seized upon this dawning insight, that once Drogo possessed the bones of Harry Peake he would wish to display them only to a trusted few, fearing to make public the fact that the great haunted poet, as familiar a London figure in his decline as in his better days, had fallen into his lordship’s clutches and been boiled down for a skeleton.

I moved forward slowly over old damp flagstones, my stubby candle held before me, and giving me only walls of brick and stone. A vast deep brooding silence suffused this desolate subterranean place, but like all vast deep brooding silences after some minutes it betrayed to the ear a host of small sounds which together constituted that silence, and as I edged uncertainly forward I now became aware of a symphony of tiny furtive scrapings, distant creaks and timbered wheezings, vague throbs which vanished when I brought my senses to bear upon them and which might well have issued from within my own bodily edifice. What large old house is not an asylum for myriad species of bird, mammal, and insect life: the delicate twilight pipistrelles in the attic, the sparrows and martins, the rats, mice, moths, beetles, weevils, lice, mites, fleas, earwigs and spiders—oh, many many spiders—not to say, in this wet place, toads, natterjack
toads, all these the house supported as well as its two old men and a number of elderly feral cats dedicated to gluttony and sloth rather than any useful predatory work. Given this organic fiber in the very walls and beams, floors and chimneys, attics and drains of Drogo Hall, then any silence one heard at dead of night was in reality alive with discreet activity, and my ear soon became attuned to it. That noisy silence was then shattered by a huge muffled distant
thump
.

I froze. I was aware of a sort of tremor briefly running through the building around me, transmitted beam by beam and stone by stone in an instant and then gone, followed by a silence that was for some seconds absolute—before the scratchings and scamperings, the borings and chewings and throbbings resumed. Rigid, petrified, I watched my candle-flame tremble in the cold air and then burn steady again. The sound was not repeated. I dared not move. Surely a great beam had fallen? Some vast solid piece of timbered furniture come down upon a planked floor in a remote chamber? A block of stone toppled from the battlements, to plunge to a courtyard below?

I began to move forward once more, a sick sensation of fluids in disorder churning within me, my hand unsteady and my hair prickling upon my scalp, as I summoned every last part of courage my heart would furnish me for this suddenly parlous undertaking.

I need not weary you with the horrors of my exploration that night, my slow advance through those chill malodorous passages that riddled the vaults and cellars of Drogo Hall; suffice it to say that when I came upon the door I knew, despite the profound obscurity that pressed upon me from all sides, despite the panic that rose constantly from within my own mind, suppressed only by the most vigorous exercise of the will—despite all this I knew at once, when I encountered it in a small vaulted chamber, flanked by iron sconces set into the wall, studded and sturdy within its recessed arch—that through this door lay the dark heart of this malignant dying house where
Drogo’s treasure was laid up, the heaped booty of a lifetime of plundering in the name of science—ha!

I paused, panting, before the door; I set my candle to the sconces, and was rewarded with a crackle of tarry flame, a plummet of black smoke, and a flaring illumination which, dim though it was, was brighter by far than what I had had from my stub of candle. I sat a moment on a bench of cold stone, bent forward with my hands on my knees and my head turned toward the door. I knew what I would find within; or rather, I dreaded to have confirmed that which I anticipated finding within, for over the days and nights I had been in Drogo Hall I had spent many hours resurrecting the past, making a sense and order of it, enough time, certainly, to glimpse the inevitable end to which the history had been drawing ever closer.

Harry Peake had been the victim of Drogo and Clyte. He had died with a bottle of gin in his hand; or perhaps they could not wait for the gin to do its work, poison being too slow for them, and had lured him into the big house instead, and some howling midnight Clyte did the deed himself; I do not know. But in my mind’s eye I could see what he had become, I saw his bones all brown and yellowy from the rapid boiling away of the flesh, and constructed anew, an articulated skeleton with screws and wires in his joints to hold him all together. I saw him in a glass cabinet in the central gallery of Lord Drogo’s Museum of Anatomy, displayed in such a manner that every visitor could examine at his leisure the structural peculiarities of the spine. There he would be, old Harry, with an iron rod to keep him upright and a hundred tiny screws drilled into his bony matter that he might stand in death as he never stood in life—

I had opened the door without much difficulty, and pushed it back across the flagstones sufficient that the flaring light from the smoking sconces cast a dim glow into the museum beyond; and I had gone in, at last, I thought, to confront the skeletal remains of Harry Peake. I wandered down a gallery lined the length of both vaulted walls with ancient glass-fronted cabinets, thick now with dust and
cobwebs and fingery incursions of that familiar black lichen which, being wiped or scraped away with my sleeve, revealed the rotting trophies of Drogo’s organic researches, his restless probing into the very structure of those creatures he had slaughtered and dissected and labeled and organized and displayed; all now turning to slime.

Yes, slime. For when first I had pushed open the museum door I had been met with a soft
whoosh!
, like a gasp, the last breath of spirit escaping its long confinement in this deathly cell, leaving behind only dank emptiness. And with that final exhalation those specimens began the last rapid movement of their decay, spoiling even as I peered at them with my candle to the glass, structure collapsing and tissue turning viscous until nothing remained but the husks and ichors of a hundred plundered organs. Oh, there were bony specimens too, the skeletal claw of a grizzly bear, the skull of a hydrocephalic cretin, the amputated shinbone of a syphilitic negro. But no high cabinet stood in place of honour with Harry’s bones within, no giant humpback skeleton reared like a lord over the lower specimens. No, I was deceived, he was elsewhere, I had penetrated Drogo’s house—Drogo’s
soul
!—to its depths, so I thought; but I had not gone deep enough.

He was not there. He was not there. I had failed to see the thing whole, I had missed a fragment, I had erred in my estimate of Harry’s courage, perhaps, or of Drogo’s cunning. The bones were elsewhere.

And so I shuffled out of the Museum of Anatomy, and pulled the door behind me, so all could rest in peace within. It creaked and screamed on its ancient hinges as it scraped across the flagstones, it resisted my force, and I paused, the better to seize hold of the iron ring. And then, in the silence, with a last flare in the shivering gloom, one wall sconce in the antechamber gave out with a sputtering sigh—and then, a second later, the other—and in the sudden darkness,
a hand fell on my shoulder
.