Martha Peake (36 page)

Adam’s joy knew no bounds, now that he was free to express it. And was it, Martha wondered, as she found herself being warmly embraced by the girls, was it really so little she had won here? She would be the wife of the son of the first man in town, and her child would have a security she had never known; no, nor her father either, who was born a bastard and made a monster. So she began to think she had done well after all. She sat in the firelight with happy Adam beside her, and her uncle standing over her, and everyone wreathed in smiles, and she thought—all will be well.

Only then did it occur to her to look for Joshua Rind; and there he was, outside the family circle, leaning against the wall in the shadows with his arms folded across his chest, watching her with an expression not of delight but of scorn.

Martha was now permitted a brief period of calm, and as though in harmony with her new mood the weather became unseasonably mild. The snow began to melt, and though the winds still blew wet and cold, and the sea lashed the coast with its accustomed ill-humour, and the fire was banked high in the hearth of an evening, something in the morning air, something in the light, suggested if not spring then at least the hint of a possibility of the beginning of the end of winter. And as the old season died, and Martha prepared for her wedding in the spring, she was at last liberated from the necessity of keeping her condition concealed. She showed off her belly to her aunt and her cousins, she allowed herself to be treated with special consideration, to be excused the heavy work, to be fed and rested as one who carried not only the future of the family but also—and this was a reflection of that strange, fraught season—the very future of the country, as though she carried
America herself
in her womb. But no, it was simply that the child of a patriot, himself the child of a patriot, in the last weeks of the peace had a near-sacred status among the people of the town; and Martha discovered she had become, if not popular, accepted, at least.

Though not by all. A number of women, Purity Clapsaddle and her daughter Ann being foremost among them, remained her adamant antagonists, hating her for her English trickery, as they saw it, in capturing the heart of Adam Rind. They concealed their hatred when they were in Maddy Rind’s kitchen, but Martha was aware, when she was down at the port, of the hissing and muttering that followed her. She paid it no notice. She believed she had a far more dangerous enemy in New Morrock, and that was Joshua Rind.

One day, seeking solitude in which she might unburden herself with no hostile eye upon her, she climbed up onto Black Brock, where she had spent so much time in the fall. A stiff wind was blowing and the sky was gray, but strips and streaks of pale watery sunlight here and there broke through the clouds and for the first time
in months it was possible to be outdoors without being chilled or soaked to the bone. Even the character of the Atlantic seemed changed, for a brisk sea was running, dark green with whitecaps, a sea that surely invited the intrepid privateer to make a dash down the coast in defiance of the blockade. But she saw no sail out there on the horizon, and so much watery waste was almost enough to lull her into believing all the world was as desolate and empty, as devoid of passion and conflict as the rolling waters and stately clouds of this North Atlantic seacoast.

Ah, but in the affairs of men a climax was approaching. Shots would soon be fired, blood spilt. That blustery afternoon when Martha gazed out to sea from the top of Black Brock was the last day of February 1775.

She would have no more such expeditions, for soon she found it difficult to make her way up and down the steep paths onto the flat places atop the cliffs and headlands. So she walked on the seashore, close to the chill salt Atlantic breakers as they came flooding and frothing across the black sand and the pebbles, to be then sucked back into the ocean’s belly leaving flotsam and bladderwrack and great bulbed tendrils of seaweed beached and shining damply in their wake, the froth blinking on the sand until the next wave came hissing in. The sound of it too, and the wind catching at her skirt and her hair, and the gulls wheeling and screaming about her—somewhere deep in her body she heard a call which answered the sea, it came from the small sea she carried within her own body, in which was floated her own precious cargo, smuggled into America under the very eyes of the authorities!—such whims and follies would often slip into her mind and briefly distract her from the planning, the reasoning, the worrying and watching which were the occupations she was accustomed to practise, treading her parlous path among the colonists even as they prepared to rush blazing down the high road to liberty. That, or extinction.

Her breasts and belly astonished her daily now. Her child moved and kicked inside her, a sensation that filled her with a joy she could not compare to any experience she had known before. Maddy Rind and the other women looked after her with brisk skill, and whatever misgivings any of them had about her character, these were set aside as they looked to the business of ensuring the health of the little American in her womb. Martha was happy to submit to their ministrations and instructions. These women had seen many an infant safe into the world, and she knew they would do no less for hers.

Soon the road to Boston was open once more and men on horseback set out on the hundred-mile journey every day or so. The movement of shipping remained dangerous, and reports came in of vessels searched and impounded by British ships. More men were impressed into the British navy straight off American fishing boats, this yet another outrage to add to the daily-lengthening list.

Martha saw the first of many departures when a group of Cape Morrock men marched off from the dock one morning. In the fighting to come, which would often demand of the patriot army that they cross bodies of water under cover of darkness so as to avoid confrontation with the British, or engage the British while preserving the element of surprise, the seamanship of men from Cape Morrock and elsewhere on the Rum Coast would more than once be the saving of the Continental Army.

How it would begin, none of them could know. But that it would come soon, nobody was in any doubt at all. There was talk now that the militia would be called up soon and brought close to Boston so as to join there with a larger force; and a new idea began to dominate all talk in the Rind kitchen, that the British would attempt to destroy New England at the earliest opportunity, perhaps this very spring, for this was where the loudest of rebel voices were to be heard. Put down New England and the other colonies would soon come into line, this must be the British plan, and to do that, to
cut New England off from the rest of the country, control of the Hudson River was vital. If the British held the Hudson the country would be cut into two parts, which they could then subdue one after the other at their leisure. They already controlled the Atlantic coast. They must not be allowed to control the Hudson also. If they did, the people of New England would be caught in a vise and surely crushed.

25

I
was pacing about my uncle’s room while Percy fussed with the old man’s blanket, mulling the plight of the Americans—caught in a vise, and surely crushed!—when I found myself standing at the fireplace absently gazing at the painting of Harry Peake. It was not the first time I had stared up into those harrowed features, but now a question arose in my mind, and I did not understand why it had not occurred to me before. The man in the picture had a straight back. Behind me the usual clucking and muttering went on, and as I turned to ask the question my uncle gave out a high-pitched yelp of irritation as Percy tightened his cravat, and flapped at him like an angry goose. I turned back to the painting; and saw what I had overlooked before, that amid the leafy excesses of its gilt frame a tiny brass nameplate was screwed into the woodwork.

I peered at it. I had some difficulty reading it, for it had seen neither cloth nor polish for many years. But even as I deciphered the faded copperplate my uncle spoke the words I read there.

“ ‘The American Within.’ ”

The American within—Harry Peake with his back straight. I seized upon its meaning at once, of course, but who had commissioned the portrait—how had the artist known what Harry looked
like—was it done after his death? I turned again and found my uncle gazing at me with glittering eyes.

“I wonder you did not see it before,” he said. “I made a wager with Percy that you would not. He has more faith in your intelligence than I do.”

A dry wheeze here. I nodded wearily, I had grown used to these merry barbs of his.

“Lord Drogo commissioned the painting,” he said, “and titled it himself. And he it was who gave the painter Harry’s likeness.”

This statement raised more questions than it answered, but I set them aside for the time being.

“Did Harry believe,” I said, “that there was an American inside him who looked like that?”

“Harry came to believe that his spirit was American, and that it was an accident of birth and circumstance that made him an Englishman. He felt he was trapped in England as he was trapped in his body.”

“He knew by then where Martha had gone?”

“It was a comfort to him. At times he tormented himself that he was not with her in America, but no, it gave him comfort. Odd, eh, Ambrose?”

Comfort? I turned again to the painting. This was how Harry saw himself; or rather, how Lord Drogo saw him. But I knew better than to pursue the subject, for my uncle always became evasive and oblique when I tried to establish what happened to Harry after Martha left England. He had something to hide, and he made no attempt to pretend otherwise, which did not surprise me. Harry Peake’s last days were miserable indeed, and my uncle bore a large responsibility for that misery; in his position I should have been oblique and evasive myself. Still, there was a certain poetic beauty in the depiction of that tragic figure in his self-made identity with the American people. So much of what they suffered, he suffered. So much of what they aspired to, he aspired to. And his broad back,
with its ridge of peaks down the spine—was it not the very image, in miniature, of the land itself? Was he not himself a
living map
of America? Oh, he would have fought alongside them, he would have spoken out in their assemblies, he would have given his life, had they asked it of him. As it was, he had given his daughter. Was this the reason this most tortured of Englishmen was comforted to know that he had driven his daughter into the arms of the Americans, indeed into the very teeth of their revolution? I believe it was. I believe that in his last days he found comfort in the thought that whatever of him was in his daughter, it was now with the Americans.

Although I doubt he knew that what there was of him in his daughter was a foetus, and that this, his unborn child, was the real American within—!

Then came a most dramatic development.

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