Martha Peake (51 page)

Another farewell! Did war bring anything but farewells? It brought more farewells even than it brought deaths. The familiar scene, this time outside a tavern in Cratwich, one clear day in the early spring of 1776, horses harnessed to wagons and men with muskets on their
shoulders, and rum, and much bravado, hearty laughter, oaths and promises, and a small crowd of women and children to see them off to war. Maddy Rind and her children watched the final preparations, the sergeant of militia testing the ropes on the wagons, counting his men, who had fallen in in ranks, each with the family musket slung on his shoulder. With them went Sara Rind and the infant Harry.

A tearful departure it was. Sara said good-bye to her mother, and then to her brothers and sisters, who had begun to laugh again with the coming of spring and the surge of hope that season arouses in young hearts; and this she took as her lesson, as she departed, that it was not an ending, that a new town would rise from the ashes of the old, first of a new nation. She said of the burning of New Morrock what she had said of Martha’s death, that it must not have been for nothing. They would honour the town as they would honour Martha, as a sacrifice offered gladly for the cause.

Then there was kissing and embraces and yet more tears, and at last she mounted the horse she had been lent for the journey by her friends in Cratwich, with Harry strapped securely to her breast and their few possessions stowed in the saddlebags. She rode out of Cratwich with the soldiers, to the music of the fife and drum, the children running beside them, cheering them on.

After less than a day travelling south on the Boston road, Sara learned that over the winter the story of the burning of New Morrock had spread widely through all the colonies; and that Martha figured vividly in every account of the town’s destruction. The shot she fired at the captain, and the death she suffered as a consequence, all this was common knowledge, but Sara was astonished to discover that not one person she talked to voiced the suspicion that the women of New Morrock had harboured, that is, that Martha Peake was responsible for the British bombardment of the town. Somehow, she did not know how—though my uncle, of course, was in no doubt as to how it had come about—an entirely new construction had been
placed upon that event; and she realized with some amazement that the story of Martha’s death had become inspirational, that to a people staring into the teeth of defeat and ruin it lifted the spirit, it allowed them to glimpse a higher purpose for their suffering. Several times during the first days she was asked had she known the red-haired English girl from New Morrock, who alone and unaided had gone up against a company of redcoats; and understanding now the popular version of events she soon had her listeners crying out with admiration for Martha’s courage.

All along the road she saw signs that her homeland was at war, and that the British blockade of the coast was biting hard. It grew worse the closer she approached Boston. The country thereabouts had been depleted of men, crops, lumber, animals, and machines, which had gone to serve the army laying siege to Boston. But the army was no longer at Boston, for after the departure of the British by sea Washington had marched south to New York to meet the enemy there.

She saw women and children out in the fields, but no longer was Massachusetts a peaceful and prosperous province of hard-working farmers in small towns of well-made houses. The land had been neglected, walls and fences and buildings were in disrepair, and the road was full of travellers like herself, shabby, weary folk pushed this way and that by the random currents of war.

But she saw no despair. She saw a people ragged and hungry, grim-faced and burdened with cares, but they willingly gave what they could to their soldiers, and if they had nothing to spare from their larders and cellars they gave encouragement and gratitude, and Sara’s rough companions told them they would surely drive the British out, had not Martha Peake shown them the way?

They came in by way of Charlestown Neck, where new building had begun on the site of the town burnt down by the British during the battle at Bunker Hill. There Sara took her leave of the soldiers, who had warmed to this brave determined girl. She gave up her
horse to a Cratwich man and boarded the ferry, burdened now with both Harry and their small stock of belongings.

She stepped off on the other side in Boston, and was soon directed to Foley’s Tavern. And so, as the sun slipped down the sky, and twilight stole over the town, she set off to discover what news there was of her brother.

41

S
he wandered through the town for an hour searching for the tavern. The streets were not lit, and everywhere she saw the ravages of the recent occupation by the British. She saw the foundations and chimneys of houses that had been torn down for firewood, ruins that would have cast a melancholy chill over her soul had she not been so alive to the prospect of finding Adam. Shadowy figures shuffled past her clutching parcels and bundles, a few barrel staves for the fire, a coil of dirty hemp, a cabbage, a newspaper, a scrawny chicken for an empty pot. They passed taverns near the harbour in which Sara heard neither song nor laughter, but the sound of men arguing their politics; and churches silent as the grave. She heard moans of sickness, she heard a man shouting drunkenly from the window of a mean dark house down the end of an alley. She glimpsed crowded houses and crowded rooms, and everywhere she smelled waste and filth and rotting fish. She saw horses without flesh on their ribs, she saw starving dogs with their noses in the filth.

But she also saw handbills pasted onto walls, and even in the gloom their words were like fire.

O! YE THAT LOVE MANKIND! YE THAT DARE
OPPOSE NOT ONLY THE TYRANNY BUT THE
TYRANT, STAND FORTH! EVERY SPOT OF
THE OLD WORLD IS OVERRUN WITH
OPPRESSION. FREEDOM HATH BEEN HUNTED
ROUND THE GLOBE. ASIA AND AFRICA HAVE
LONG EXPELLED HER. EUROPE REGARDS
HER AS A STRANGER AND ENGLAND HATH
GIVEN HER WARNING TO DEPART. O!
RECEIVE THE FUGITIVE AND PREPARE IN
TIME AN ASYLUM FOR MANKIND—COMMON
SENSE
.

At last she found the street. Street, I say; four buildings only stood on the one side, five on the other, with large gaps between, like two great toothless mouths grinning at each other across a narrow stretch of broken cobbles. On the corner of the street was a tavern, and over the door hung the name Thomas Foley. Candlelight shone through the bubbled panes of the low small windows, voices could be heard from within. It was an old house and it had seen recent rough treatment. Empty window panes on the upper floors were patched with paper. Shingles in places had been torn off the wall, exposing the boards beneath. The top of the chimney had been shot away. The moon was above the houses now, and as Sara gazed at this damaged building, and saw its broken chimney and wavering roofline sharp against the moonlit sky, she asked herself could this truly be the house where her father had stayed when he came to Boston for business? But she could stand there no longer, for Harry was stirring in her arms, and announcing his hunger.

They came into a taproom lit by a few dim tallow candles and populated by a number of men sitting at a long table, others leaning against the wall close by, still others against the counter, all engaged
in a loud conversation; that conversation ceasing abruptly, however, with the entrance of Sara and Harry. All faces were turned toward her. These were sober, frowning men, plainly dressed in black and brown, respectable, serious men; and she realized at once that she had nothing to fear from them, for she could imagine her father a member of this company. Only one man stood out from the rest, a shabby fellow with a hook nose and wild hair, his coat coming apart at the shoulder seams and his linen far from clean, and his hand upon a sheaf of papers on the table. He sat smoking a long clay pipe and staring at her from fierce, unblinking, red-rimmed eyes, and something in his manner told her that this was no Boston man, this was an Englishman.

Still they watched her. She stepped into the room, latching the door behind her, and approached the table. Setting her bag on the floor, and hitching Harry higher on her breast, she told them she was Sara Rind, eldest daughter of Silas Rind; she had lived in New Morrock until the British burnt it, and had come from Cratwich to find her brother.

She was right to think these men were her father’s friends. At once several of them rose to their feet, a hubbub of talk broke forth, a chair was pulled out for her, and the man with the hook nose stared at her more intently still. In the midst of this welcome, feeling a great wave of relief sweeping over her as she sat down, and had a glass of wine poured for her, she saw one of the men slip away from the table and run up the staircase at the back of the room. Questions were coming at her from all sides at once, and in her bewilderment she could only look from one man to another. Then suddenly she heard a shout of pleasure, and turning, saw her brother come bounding down the staircase.

A second later Sara and Adam were in each other’s arms, clinging together with Harry between them, as the men at the table murmured their satisfaction at this reunion.

Oh, but he had changed! Where was her boy? He was a man—more than a man, a soldier. There was no embracing for long with Harry at her breast, and Adam, after staring into his sister’s face, shifted his eyes to the child. Sara lifted him high on her breast, she displayed him, and Adam and Harry gazed solemnly at one another as he took the little face between his fingers and turned it up to the dim glow of the candlelight. As he did so, as he examined Harry, Sara examined him; and yes, he had become a man, in the year he had been away he had grown up. It was in his eyes, first; gone, the languid dewy wondering look of the youth, in its place a brow knotted by weather and hardship and death—the death, above all, of Martha Peake.