Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

“He did not seem to miss ye at all,” said Dick comfortably.

“He ate every scrap on his plate,” said Mag proudly.

“He was as happy as a lark in my company,” said Peg with a sly flash of triumph.

His knees began to buckle; Richard sank into a chair near the counter and cuddled his son close again. The fine tremor had gone. Oh, William Henry, what are you thinking? Did you decide that Dadda was never coming back? Until today Dadda has never been away from you for more than an hour or two, and did anybody remember to tell you that Dadda would be home at twilight? No, nobody did. Including me. And you did not cry, or refuse to eat, or display concern. But you thought I was never coming back. That I would not be here for you. “I will always be here for you,” he whispered against William Henry’s ear. “Always and always.”

“How did it go?” asked Peg, who could still, after eighteen months of watching Richard with William Henry, find herself amazed at her husband’s-weakness?-softness? It is not healthy, she thought. He needs our child to feed something in himself, something I have no idea of. Well, I love William Henry every bit as much as he does! And now is my chance to have my son for me.

“It went well,” said Richard, answering her question, then looked at Dick, his gaze a little remote. “I have earned two pounds today, Father. A pound for you and a pound for me.”

“No,” said Dick gruffly. “Ten shillings for me, thirty for you. That much will see me through even when the day brings no custom at all. Pay me two shillings more for your family’s board, and bank the other twenty-eight shillings for yourself. He means to pay ye every Saturday, I hope? None of this by-the-month business, or when he is paid for the goods?”

“Every Saturday, Father.”

That night when Richard turned to find Peg and carefully roll up her nightgown, she slapped his hands away nastily.

“No, Richard!” she whispered fiercely. “William Henry is not asleep yet, and he is old enough to understand!”

He lay in the darkness listening to the rumbles and wheezes from the front room, weary to the bone from an unaccustomed kind of labor, yet wide awake. Today had been the beginning of many new things. A job at work he loved, separation from a child he loved, separation from a wife he loved, the realization that he could hurt people he loved all unknowing. It should be so simple. Nothing drove him save love-he had to work to support his family, to make sure they did not want. Yet Peg had slapped his hands away for the first time since they had married, and William Henry had trembled a cat’s purr.

What can I do? How can I find a solution? Today I have unwittingly opened up a chasm, though for the best of reasons. I have never asked for much nor expected much. Just the presence of my family. In that is happiness. I belong to them, and they belong to me. Or so I thought. Does a chasm always open up when things change? How deep is it? How wide?

“Senhor Habitas,”he said as dawn broke on his second day of work, “how many muskets do ye expect me to make in a day?”

Not a blink; Tomas Habitas rarely blinked. “Why, Richard?”

“I do not want to stay from dawn to dusk, sir. It is not as it was in the old days. My family have need of me too.”

“That I understand,” said Senhor Habitas gently. “The dilemma is insoluble. One works to make money to ensure the comfort and well-being of one’s family, yet one’s family needs more than money, and a man cannot be in two places at the same instant of time. I am paying you per musket, Richard. That means as many or as few as ye care to make.” He shrugged, an alien gesture. “Yes, I would like fifteen or twenty in a day, but I am prepared to take one. It is your choice.”

“Ten in a day, sir?”

“Ten is perfectly satisfactory.”

So Richard walked home to the Cooper’s Arms in mid afternoon, his ten muskets completed and successfully tested. Senhor Habitas was pleased; he would see enough of William Henry and Peg as well as bank enough to make that house on Clifton Hill a reality. His son was walking; soon the allurements of Broad Street would beckon through the open tavern door and William Henry would go adventuring. Better by far that his footsteps led him along paths perfumed with flowers than paths redolent with the stench of the Froom at low tide.

But it was neither Peg nor William Henry who reached him first when he walked in; Mr. James Thistlethwaite leaped up from “his” table to envelop Richard in a massive hug.

“Let me go, Jem! Those pistols will go off!”

“Richard, Richard! I thought I’d not see ye again!”

“Not see me again? Why? Had I worked from dawn to dusk-and as you see, I am not-you would still have seen me in winter,” said Richard, detaching himself and holding out his arms to William Henry, who toddled into them. Then Peg came, smiling an apology with her eyes, to kiss him full upon the lips. Thus when Richard sat down at Jem Thistlethwaite’s table he felt as if his world had glued itself back together again; the chasm was not there.

When Dick handed him a tankard of beer he sipped at it, liking the slightly bitter taste but not desperate for it. The son of a temperate victualler, he too was temperate, drank only beer and then never enough to feel it. Which, had he realized, was why-apart from natural affection-Senhor Tomas Habitas prized him so. The work called for steady, skillful hands properly connected to a fresh, sharp mind, and it was rare to light upon a man who did not drink too much. Almost everybody drank too much. Mostly rum or gin. Threepence bought a half-pint of rum or, depending upon its quality, as much as a full pint of gin. Nor were there any laws on the books to punish excessive drinking, though there were laws to punish almost everything else. The Government made too much money from excise taxes to want to discourage drinking.

In Bristol more rum was made and consumed than gin; gin was what the poorest folk drank. Chief importer of sugar to the whole British Isles, Bristol quite naturally made itself the capital of Rum. As to strength, there was little difference between the two spirits, though rum was richer, lasted longer in the system and was more bearable the morning after.

Mr. Thistlethwaite drank rum of the best kind, and had settled upon the Cooper’s Arms as his home-away-from-home because Dick Morgan bought from the rum house of Mr. Thomas Cave in Redcliff; Cave’s rum was peerless.

So by the time that Richard walked in, Mr. Thistlethwaite was well away, more so than usual by three o’clock. He had missed Richard, as simple as that, and had assumed that from now on Richard would never be there before five and it came time for him to leave. That five was his inflexible rule represented a last instinct for self-preservation; he knew that were he to stay for one minute more, he would end lying permanently in the gutter which ran down the middle of Broad Street.

Delighted that Richard was still going to be a part of each tavern day, he righted himself unsteadily and prepared to take his leave. “Early, I know, but the sight of you, Richard, has quite overcome me,” he announced, weaving his way to the door. “Though I do not know why,” came the sound of his voice from Broad Street. “I really do not know why, for who are ye, save the son of my tavern-keeper? It is a mystery, a mystery.” His head, battered tricorn at a rakish angle, appeared around the jamb. “Is it possible that the eyes of a drunken man can plumb the future? Do I believe in premonitions? Hur hur hur! Call me Cassandra, for I swear I am a silly old woman. Ho ho ho, and off into the Beotian air go my Attic lungs!”

“Mad,” said Dick. “Mad as a March hare.”