Martha Peake (9 page)

Harry was right to forbid Martha to watch. My uncle described to me what happened next. Harry, still with his back to the audience, threw off his coat and opened his shirt and pushed it off his shoulders, and they glimpsed in the gloom the strange bony formations, the peaks and ridges that had lifted and skewed his spine, and pushed his shoulders awry, such that his upper torso was a horribly bent and broken thing, it was crooked timber; and the effect upon the company, whispered my uncle, was powerful.

But this, I said, was simply a disfigured man—a man with a twisted spine—?

Ah, but it seems it was more than that. This was a more primitive age than our own, said my uncle, when Nature was celebrated for her botches rather than her glories, and Harry Peake’s spine disturbed the people’s confidence in the proper shape and form of things, a confidence they had not known they possessed, it was stitched so deep in their sense of the order of the world. There was a collective gasp of horror, and then Harry reclined once more in his chair, lay there in the posture of a weary noble poet before bestirring himself to read a few lines.

But then, said William, the sparks would fly! For Harry’s voice had matured like old port wine, it was deep and rich and liquid. It was from his own “Ballad of Joseph Tresilian” that he took his readings, and such were the passages chosen, and such the manner in which he spoke them—striding about, now whispering, now thundering,
now turning his great back on his audience and peering round it like a man behind a wall—that they might as well have been political tracts, so sharply did he bring them to bear upon that other great question of the day, which was, of course, America, and those themes attendant upon the American question, by which I mean liberty, taxation, and Empire.

Its subject was the Sea, the greed, the madness and the savagery of the Sea; its setting the New World; and its hero a fisherman who, drowning, strikes a bargain with the Sea, that if he is allowed to live one more year, he will return to the shore with his wife, and the Sea may have them both. It was a story of tyranny, and of how Joseph Tresilian’s wife outwitted the tyrant Sea—already, you see, cried the old man, he was thinking on the grand scale! For by this time, of course, the popular outrage at the assault upon the natural rights of the colonists by a king as mad, savage, and greedy as the Sea itself, grew more passionate with every fresh abuse those people suffered. This, at least, he sniffed, growing quiet after his enthusiasm of a moment before, was the popular view of the thing. He frowned at the fireplace for several seconds before resuming.

Imagine the scene, he said. The old man’s enthusiasm returned. He was excited now. He wished to convey to me what he had come to understand as the particular power that Harry had when his genius was in full flood. Harry lifts his head (he whispered), he gazes up into the roof, and silence falls. Oh, and then the breast heaves, and the eyes roll, and Harry’s voice is at once filling the room, it is ringing out with a deep masculine music, it is as though this weary hunchback has been taken up and possessed by a spirit alien to his own nature! His very back seems to grow straight! Wildly now he chants his verses, and his words arouse before the company’s eyes a seacoast they recognize, for it bears resemblance to the familiar shores of England, but it is an English seashore made immense, made terrifying, made to a scale of greatness, like a boy changed into a giant, or a man into a god—a vision of untamed Nature that will inspire Harry Peake to the end of his days, the seacoast of America
with its stormswept headlands, its mighty forests, and here the mouth of a great river—as yet it has no name—a river that sweeps through the Wilderness, through the forests and mountains of a distant continent he has never seen, a vast wild land of infinite and awful grandeur, before pouring its waters into the wilful, all-devouring Sea—!

THE HOUR IS COME BUT NOT THE MAN!
HE CREEPS UPON THE LUMPEN LAND!
HE DARE NOT COME WITH OPEN HAND
TO GIVE THE SEA HIS DUE!

And so on; and all the while the audience sits spellbound, all but a few, the radicals, who are watching not Harry but the soldiers, who seem however more intent upon their drink, and the whores, than the performance; and they in turn are watched by Francis Drogo, who misses nothing, but who reserves his closest scrutiny for Harry Peake.

6

T
he hour was late, the old man was distinctly tipsy, and growing more florid with every allusion to Harry Peake, and his poem, and his daughter Martha; and I had no wish to stem his flow, I was desperate to hear more of it, for I had begun to suspect what was afoot here, and I wanted to be sure I was right. For if I was—and I had every confidence that I was—then my own future, my own anticipated tenure of Drogo Hall, would be much affected. So I refilled the old man’s glass and poked the fire to life—we were back in his study, and Percy had not appeared for an hour, he must have gone to bed—and asked him if he would go on.

Oh, he had no wish to retire yet, he said, not with a meeting imminent between Harry Peake and Lord Drogo; and Martha was there too, he cried, oh yes she was!

I waited with patience for the resumption of the history, for it took my uncle some minutes to compose himself. After the performance, he said, he and Lord Drogo were brought to the top of the house to meet Harry Peake. Before they got there, however, Martha ran upstairs and lit the candles, and opened the window to the breeze, so the room glowed and flickered with a warm low light when her father reached it a few moments later.

He came in wearily. He dropped his books on the table and
touched his daughter’s cheek. Then he sat down before his mirror, tied his hair back and began wiping the paint and powder off his face; and in the wavering candle-flame his skin shone with an unwholesome ghostly pallor. A minute later there came a tap at the door. Martha opened it and there was Fred Lour, grinning broadly at her, and winking, with Lord Drogo and my uncle William behind him. In they came. Harry got to his feet. Fred Lour made the introductions with some flamboyance. Chairs were then set before the table, and the guests were invited to sit. My uncle produced two bottles of claret from one of his pockets, and four slender glasses from the other, and set them on the table. Harry Peake turned his glass upside down as William pulled the first cork.

Lord Drogo was at his most urbane, said my uncle. Not a tall man, he nonetheless communicated in his bearing and manner a distinct authority, and the clear expectation that he would be accorded deference, if not outright servility. It was at once clear to my uncle, however, that Harry Peake had never in his life felt the impulse to defer to any man.

Lord Drogo proposed a toast to Harry’s performance below, and his lordship and Fred Lour and my uncle William then drank. Then they sat down, Fred moving to the window, where he deftly hoisted his bottom up onto the sill. Martha—whom my uncle had now glimpsed for the first time, and had recognized, he said, for a most rare creature to find in such a house—Martha had meanwhile retired to a chair by the door, and several times, said my uncle, he turned and smiled at her. I was not surprised by this, and could well imagine the young William Tree leering wetly at a handsome girl like Martha Peake; but mostly, he said, he watched her father. The room was not small, but the presence in it of Harry Peake had the effect, by candlelight, of making it feel constricted. William said that he once again experienced the sense of disorder he had felt below, but now with greater intensity: the furniture seemed skewed out of proportion by the large misshaped man seated in shadow at the table before them. Lord Drogo however showed no sign of the confusion
William felt, but gazed keenly at Harry and asked him where he came by his education.

Harry nodded gravely. “I am the bastard son of a seaweed cutter, my lord,” he said, employing, said William, the rich port-wine tones he had used below, “but from an early age I was given leave to use the library of a gentleman.”

“And who—”

“That experience,” said Harry, “taught me that if a poor man is given the chance to read, and then to talk of what he has read, there will be little to distinguish him from the man of superior rank.”

Harry lifted his chin and gazed with level eyes at the great man seated before him, and Martha proudly raised her own chin.

“And then we should all be the same,” said Lord Drogo dryly. “But tell me, sir—”

But again Harry interrupted him, asking his lordship where he came by
his
education—“for I am aware, my lord”—and his voice grew somber and intimate—“that you have not been content merely to indulge the privilege of your nobility.”

Here Harry glanced at Martha, and her eyes shone back at him in the candlelight.

Fred Lour was much amused at this turn in the conversation, and loudly cleared his throat of phlegm. He had recognized that Harry was in the mood for sport. My uncle William saw it too, and was astonished, he said, that a man who had suffered as this man had, and bore such eloquent marks of that suffering, should have preserved in his nature a sense of humour. And not only that. Here was a man close to destitution, as it seemed to my uncle, but so careless was he of his own interest that he was prepared to lose a benefactor by mocking him—and him a lord! Such things did not happen in London.

Lord Drogo murmured shortly that he had studied with Mr. Hunter in Leicester Fields. “But sir,” he then said, “your own history is of more interest than mine. Tell me, how did you come by your spine?”

William said that Harry here assumed a most tragic expression. He dropped his eyes. He leaned his head upon his hand. He gave out a small moan. A whiff of pathos came off him, delicate as juniper. After a moment he lifted his face, and in the candlelight his eyes were shining damply. He began to speak in a halting whisper, his voice catching, a haunted quality in him now that had them all straining to catch every last sound that dropped from his trembling lip.

“There was a night, my lord,” he whispered, “when my mother had carried me close to term, and was returning to her hut on the shore through the dark streets of the village.”

A long pause here; William said the poor man was clearly overwhelmed by the thought of his mother; or pretending he was.

“Go on, sir,” murmured Drogo.

“She was descending a narrow set of steps close to the harbour, with but the moon to light her way,” said Harry, becoming dramatic now, lifting a hand, and his voice rising slightly, such that they at once pictured the scene, the hapless weary woman struggling alone down those steep stone steps with the crashing waves loud in her ears, now pausing for breath, one hand on the wall and the other on her belly.

“Suddenly,” said Harry, slapping his hand on the table so they all jumped—“a man emerged from a doorway above!”

They saw him, and were as startled by his appearance as the woman on the steps.

“This man’s shadow,” said Harry, growing warmer still, “cast upon the wall, was made huge by the lamplight from the open door behind him. And so monstrous, so
unnatural
, did it appear to my mother”—he paused again—nobody breathed—“she fainted dead away.”

Another long pause. “And then, sir?”

Harry leaned forward across the table. “The impression of this monstrous shadow,” he hissed, “was stamped so deep in her sensorium,
that by means of the vital fluids it was carried down to her womb, and there, my lord, it had its influence on the foetus.”

My uncle William said that on hearing this—he recognized it at once as the famous doctrine of the “forming faculty”—he fully expected his master to express with some vigour his skepticism as to a great shadow being the cause of a man’s deformity; to express, indeed, his skepticism toward all such traffic of the imagination, his lordship having often declared that the true relation of the mind and the body must forever remain a mystery. But clearly he had no desire to argue with Harry Peake for a mystery, and so said nothing.

There was another silence. “Quite extraordinary,” murmured William at last. “Will you take a glass now, sir?”

Harry shook his head. He awaited Lord Drogo’s reaction to this inspired nonsense of his. But Drogo suspected he was being made a fool of, as indeed he was, and merely asked Harry, did he have a wife? Ah, but this time Harry was genuinely affected, though nobody saw it but Martha. Briefly he told Lord Drogo that his wife had died, so he and his daughter had left Cornwall, and come to London—“and so you find us today.”

At this my uncle William twisted about in his chair and, pointing to the back of the room where Martha sat with her hands folded in her lap, said: “And this is your daughter, sir?”

“Come forward, Martha,” said Harry, so she did.

She came forward boldly and stood before the gentlemen, who had both now turned in their chairs. William was friendly and him, he said, she liked. But it was at once apparent to her that Lord Drogo was a fish who swam in much colder waters. The great man positioned her before him and then inspected her in a close unsmiling manner. “Well-made child, by the look of her at least,” he murmured. “How old are you, child?”