Martha Peake Read Free

would have seemed no more than a big handsome strapping lad who smelled of the harbour and the alehouse, a boisterous, good-natured boy with a tough body and a strong will and a quick eager mind. But to those who knew him—and by this, said my uncle, turning toward me, I mean the few educated men in those parts—he was an unusual, even an exceptional youth, whom some believed to be destined for great things.
    I interrupted him at this point. For several minutes I had been aware of his growing warmth as he spoke of the young Harry Peake, that warmth now rising to a pitch almost of rhapsody as he described Harry’s attainments and possibilities. I had no wish to puncture the old man’s enthusiasm, but as yet I did not altogether share it, and so I asked him, how had he learned of the precocious talents of this barely literate Cornish fisherman?
    I need not have worried that I would deflate him. His mood shifted like quicksilver. Gone, the warbling fustian, again he turned to me, this time with eyes that glinted coldly in the candlelight, and asked me briskly, did I doubt it?
    I lifted my hands and said nothing.
    Very well then, he said, I ask you to imagine this—
    But I imagined nothing, for at that moment Percy entered the room to refill our glasses and poke the fire into fresh life, and to report to my uncle on the severity of the rainstorm now howling about the house, and the status of various leaks in various of the upper rooms. When he had left us I discovered that my uncle’s mood had changed once more, and that he wore now an expression of some despondency. I begged him to continue. Another sigh, and after a moment or two he resumed, and told me that despite his wild ways—or perhaps, he said, because of them—Harry Peake won the heart of a fine young woman from a remote farm on the Bodmin Moor. Her name was Grace Foy, and after a brief tempestuous courtship they were married. Harry was then eighteen years old, Grace a year younger.
    Grace brought with her a small dowry, and that, along with the money Harry had saved from his work on the boats, and his other endeavors—a glance here from my uncle, did I take his meaning?—they acquired a house made of stone with a steep slate-hung roof, halfway up the hill behind the harbour. They moved in at once, and six months later Grace bore Harry a daughter. They called her Martha. About Martha Peake, said my uncle, we know a great deal, but about her mother much less, beyond that she came from a family of sisters, that she was a tall proud laughing woman with broad shoulders and a loud voice, that she had a head of flaming red hair, and that her temper was as fierce as Harry’s own. With two such passionate natures, said my uncle, peering at me now like an owl, it will not surprise you to learn that their marriage was a turbulent one.
    Some sad nodding here.

    The sad nodding was followed by head shaking, glances were cast at the painting over the fireplace, and a deep frown appeared in theparchment skin of my uncle’s forehead. Ah, but there was a flaw in Harry’s nature, he said, it had announced itself during his childhood, and then more dramatically when his mother died. Perhaps it arose in reaction to the teeming energies of his imagination, perhaps the seeds of madness were already in him at birth, passed on by Maggie Peake; we will never know. But as he entered upon his manhood a sort of fevered restlessness was observed in him, a wildness in his words and actions that had not been there before, and at such times it seemed to those who knew him that his very spirit was on fire. By this time he owned a pair of horses, and would spend his days galloping along the cliffs, so close to the edge that his life was despaired of; or he drank himself into oblivion, after talking in the Admiral Byng for hours to anyone who would listen to him; or he stripped his clothes off and flung himself into a heavy sea, for the sheer pleasure of getting out safe again.
    But after