Free Martha Peake by Patrick McGrath

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?”
    “Fifteen, my lord,” she said. “How old are you?”
    His lordship stiffened visibly at this impertinence. He stood up, took Martha by the shoulders, and turning her about, placed the flat of his hand between her shoulder blades and ran it down her back. He then remarked to William that she showed nothing of her father’s peculiar endowment. His fingers lingered on her buttocks and squeezed them for firmness.
    For a moment Martha was taken quite aback, but only for a moment. She shook off Lord Drogo’s fingers and rounded on him, fiery with outrage, and demanded to know, was he accustomed to handling women like livestock? Fred Lour could not restrain a shout of laughter, at which Martha turned to her father, who lifted his hand and said to Lord Drogo: “Her back is straight, my lord. My wife’s confinement was not unsettled as my mother’s was.”
    “Indeed,” said Lord Drogo, regarding Martha coldly and tapping his cane smartly on the floor as she stood before him with her hair adrift, her blood up, and her fists clenched tight. He made a small gesture of acquiescence, and turned again to Harry.
    “And are you often in pain, sir?” then said his lordship.

    Oh, that question! There was a reason Harry Peake’s great face was as knobbed and wedged with chunks of fisted muscle as it was, said William, why as harrowed and scoured, pocked and warted as some wild moorscape of the west country—what a thing that face was! But it had been carved thus by pain, when his spine, as it did periodically, threw up howling storms of torment from between its ill-matched plates, and the fine vessels were trapped and crushed between them. Martha had seen her father twisting on the floor, arching his ridged backbone as it tore him apart, she had seen him in Hell, his eyes clamped tight shut and every muscle bulging in his head, every vessel bursting, the sweat breaking from him in torrents as he fought to endure the unendurable. He had