Martha Peake: A Novel of the American Revolution by Patrick McGrath

Author:Patrick McGrath [McGrath, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307764454
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-15T12:00:00+00:00

For several days Martha was excused all household tasks and given leave to wander at will. She was most aware, those first days, of the presence of the sea. The recent weeks aboard ship had been uncomfortable, to say the least of it, but now the sea no longer held her to its will, it no longer flung her about or made her ill as it had during the voyage. Now it was spread out beneath her, and she was on dry land high above it, so that however it raged, with whatever force it flung its great waves against the rocks, and smashed at the walls of black cliff rising sheer from coves and seashore along that coast, it could not harm her. Instead it provided an unending spectacle of power and grandeur, and she was exhilarated by the surge and flow of those waters; the immoderate enthusiasm she felt for the turmoil of this wild stretch of the North Atlantic arising, I believe, from her own condition.

This then is how I see her, her first days in America, usually up on the great cliff, Black Brock, large high white clouds pushing across the sky and the gulls wheeling around a solitary boat returning from a late-season run in defiance of the blockade. There she stands, wrapped in her greatcoat, her cocked hat pulled low on her forehead against the wind, staring out to the horizon and thinking of her father, thinking of Harry, mad and wild, wandering the wilderness around Drogo Hall. She cannot prevent the revulsion and horror rising in her as she remembers what he did to her, nor her anger—nor, at times, the burning irrepressible desire to kill him!—but at the same time he is her father, her father, and she holds grimly to this, and tells herself she must forge a fresh link with him, this link an act of the mind and the will, so as to keep him alive, to prevent him drifting off and disappearing into the Lambeth Marsh and ceasing to be real to her anymore. She tells herself she must not forget him, and she furiously nods her head—though how could she forget him, with his child in her womb?—while the wind plucks at her hair and brings the tears streaming from her eyes with the salt it flings in her face. She looks out over a dark and turbulent sea, and closer in, the harbour, then the town, close-packed wooden houses in which dwell a community of strangers—of Americans!—who do not know her, nor she them.

When it grows so cold she can stand it no longer, and the light is thickening in the mountains, and thunderheads begin to gather among the peaks, she makes her way back down the side of the cliff to the house, where the day’s work is ending and the family is gathering in the great kitchen. There is a loose, rough harmony in the Rind household, each one taking responsibility for a task

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