Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

“I am not a fixture, and I am leaving!”

“Oh, sit down, man, sit down! And stop this prize-fighting posturing! We are not your adversaries,” said Richard. He looked stern. “Sit, Jem, and tell us why.”

“Ahah!” said Mr. Thistlethwaite, doing as bidden. “So you can come out of that timid shell. Does my going mean so much?”

“It is hideous,” said Richard. “Father, give me a beer and Jem some of Cave’s best.”

Dick got up and did as he was told.

“Now what’s amiss?” asked Richard.

“I am fed up, Richard, that is all. I have done my dash in Bristol. Who is there left to lampoon? Old Bishop Newton? I’d not do that to someone with wit enough to call Methodism a bastardized form of popery. And what else can I do to the Corporation? What more stinging quip is there than to say that Sir Abraham Isaac Elton is all jaw and no law, John Vernon is all law and no jaw, and Rowles Scudamore neither law nor jaw? I have exposed Daniel Harson for the Dissenting minister he once was, and John Powell for the medical man on a slaver he once was. No, I have shot my Bristol bolt, and I have a mind to seek greener pastures. So I am off to London.”

How to say tactfully that a shining light in Bristol might find itself obscured by the fog of a place twenty times larger than Bristol? “It is such a vast place,” Richard ventured.

“I have friends there,” Mr. Thistlethwaite countered.

“Ye’ll not change your mind?”

“I will not.”

“Then,” said Dick, reviving a little, “I drink to your good luck and good health, Jem.” He lifted his lip. “At least I will save the expense of quills and ink.”

“You will write to tell us how you are?” asked Richard somewhat later, by which time Mr. Thistlethwaite’s truculence had changed to maudlin self-pity.

“If you write to me.” The Bard of Bristol sniffled, wiped a tear away. “Oh, Richard, the world is a cruel place! And I have a mind to be cruel to it on a larger canvas than Bristol offers.”

Later that evening Richard sat William Henry on his lap and turned the child to face him. At two and a half, he was strongly knit and tall, and had, his father fancied, the face of a stern angel. It was those eyes, of course, so large and unique-truly unique, for no one could remember ever seeing their ale-and-pepper mix-but also the planes of his bones and the perfection of his skin. No matter where he went, people turned to look and marvel at his beauty, and this was not the judgment of a doting parent. By anybody’s standard, William Henry was a ravishing child.

“Mr. Thistlethwaite is going away,” Richard said to his son.

“Away?”

“Aye, to London. We will not see him again very often if at all, William Henry.”

The eyes did not fill with tears, but they changed in a way Richard had learned meant inward grief, secret and sensitive. “He does not like us anymore, Dadda?”

“He likes us very well. But he needs more room than he can find in Bristol, and that has nothing to do with us.”

Listening to them, Peg plucked at the bars of her own cage, a structure as hidden as whatever went on inside William Henry’s mind. After that one vindictive reaction against Richard’s right to touch her, she had disciplined herself into conjugal obedience, and if Richard noticed that her response to his lovemaking was more mechanical than of yore, he had not commented. It was not that she loved him any less; her emotional withdrawal was founded in her guilt. Her barrenness. Her womb was shriveled and empty, incapable of carrying more than her menses, and here she was married to a man who loved his children almost too much. Who needed a tribe of children so that he could not heap all his eggs into a basket named William Henry.

“My love,” she said to Richard as they lay in bed reassured by the snores from the front room and by the deep sound of William Henry’s sleeping respiration, “I fear that I will never conceive again.” There. It was out at last.

“Have you talked to Cousin James-the-druggist?”

“I do not need to, nor is it something he would know the answer to. It is the way God made me, I just know it.”

He blinked, swallowed. “Well, we have William Henry.”

“I know. And he is healthy, remarkably so. But, Richard”-she lifted herself up to sit-“it is on that head I wish to speak.”

Richard sat up too, linked his arms around his knees. “Then speak, Peg.”

“I do not want to move to Clifton.”

He leaned sideways, struck the tinder and lit their candle so that he could see her face. Round, softly pretty and strained with anxiety, its big brown eyes looking hunted. “But for the sake of our only child, Peg, we must move to Clifton!”

Her hands clenched, she suddenly resembled her son-whatever she felt, she would not find the right words to express. “It is for William Henry’s sake that I speak. I know that you have the money to buy a very nice cottage a little way up the hills, but I would be alone in it with William Henry and there would be no one to call on in an emergency.”

“We can afford a servant, Peg, I have told you that.”

“Yes, but a servant is not family. Here I have your parents to turn to-there are three of us to make sure that William Henry is all right, Richard.” She ground her good, hard-water-nourished teeth. “I am having nightmares. I see William Henry going down to the Avon and falling in because I was busy making bread and the servant busy fetching water from Jacob’s Well. I see it over and over again-over and over again!”

The flame glittered off a sudden rush of tears; Richard put the candle on the clothes chest beside the bed and pulled his wife into his arms. “Peg, Peg… These are dreams. I have them too, my love. But my nightmare is of William Henry crushed beneath the runners of a geehoe, or William Henry taken with the bloody flux, or William Henry falling down an open manhole. All things that cannot happen in Clifton. If it worries you so much, then we will have a nursemaid for him too.”

“Your nightmares are all different,” she wept, “but mine is ever the same. Just William Henry leaping into the Avon at the gorge, William Henry terrified of something I cannot see.”

He gentled her until she quietened and finally fell asleep in his arms. Then lay, the candle guttering, fighting his own grief. This was a family conspiracy, he knew it. His mother and father were getting at Peg, Mag because she adored William Henry and loved her niece like a daughter, Dick because-well, perhaps in his heart of hearts he had decided that once Richard was living in Clifton, those twelve shillings a day would cease; a man who is master of his own house has many additional expenses. All his instincts urged that he ignore these pressures and remove his wife and child to the clean air and verdant hills of Clifton, but what Dick Morgan deemed softness in Richard was in fact an ability to understand and commiserate with the actions of others, especially his family. If he insisted upon that cottage in Clifton-and he had found the right one, roomy, beautifully thatched, not too old, with a separate kitchen in its backyard to guard against fire and a garret for the servants-if he insisted upon that cottage in Clifton he knew now that Peg had made up her mind not to thrive in it. She had made up her mind to hate it. How odd, in a farmer’s daughter! Not for one moment had he dreamed that she would not espouse a more rural style of living as eagerly as he, a city man born and bred. His lips quivered, but in the privacy of the night marches Richard Morgan did not weep. He simply steeled himself to accept the fact that he would not be moving to Clifton.

Dear God on high, my wife thinks that William Henry will drown in the Avon were he to live in Clifton. Whereas I have a dread foreboding that it is Bristol will kill him. I pray Thee, I beg Thee to protect my son! Grant me this one child! His mother says that there will be no more, and I believe her.