Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

For Peg, Richard felt an enormous pity tempered by the icy wind of his own common sense. William Henry had flown from the nest, and could never be confined again. But how much of what he had displayed in the stunning space of one small day had he harbored through the years? One day could not possibly have produced so many new thoughts, for all that it had endowed him with a new code of behavior. William Henry is not the saint I deemed him after all. William Henry, God bless him, is an ordinary little boy.

And so he tried to tell Peg, but without success. No matter how he attacked her, Peg refused to accept the fact that her son was alive and well and hugely enjoying a brand-new world. She sought refuge in tears and suffered such black depressions that Richard despaired, tired of her waterworks and having no idea of the depth of her guilt, her consciousness that she had failed in the only task a woman truly had: to give birth to children. His patience with her never diminished, but on the day that he caught her drinking a mug of rum it was sorely tried.

“This is no place for you,” he said kindly. “Let me buy that house in Clifton, Peg, please.”

“No, no, no!” she screamed.

“My love, we have been married for fourteen years and ye’ve been my friend as well as my wife, but this is too much. I do not know what ails your heart, but rum is no cure for it.”

“Leave me alone!”

“I cannot, Peg. Father is growing annoyed, but that is not the worst of it. William Henry is old enough to notice that his mama is behaving strangely. Please, try to be good for his sake.”

“William Henry does not care about me, why should I try for his sake?” she demanded.

“Oh, Peg, that is not true!”

Round and round in circles, that was how it seemed to be; not sweet reason nor Richard’s patience nor Dick’s irritation served to help placate whatever monsters chewed at her mind, though she did abandon the rum when William Henry asked her outright why she was falling-down drunk. The directness of his question appalled her.

“Though why I do not know,” said Dick to Richard later that day. “William Henry is a tavern-keeper’s child.”

Late inFebruary of 1782, Mr. James Thistlethwaite sent Richard a letter by special courier.

“I write this on the night of the 27th, my dear friend, and I am the richer by £1,000. Paid by a draft on my hapless victim’s bank. It is official! Today the Parliament voted to discontinue offensive warfare against the thirteen colonies, and soon we will begin to withdraw our troops.

“I blame all of it on Franklin’s fur hat. The Frogs have proven themselves staunch allies, between Admiral de Grasse and General de Rochambeau-which goes to show that if a man captivates the French sense of fashion, anything is possible. George Washington and the Frogs ran rings around us at Yorktown, though I think what decided the Parliament was the fact that Lord Cornwallis surrendered. Yes, I realize that Clinton was having too good a time of it in New York to sail down and relieve Cornwallis, and I realize that it was the French navy enabled Washington and his land Frogs to force Yorktown, but that does not diminish the magnitude of surrender. Burgoyne all over again. London is shamed into heartbreak over it.

“Spread the news, Richard, for my courier will reach Bristol first, and do not neglect to say that your source is James Thistlethwaite, late of Cornwallis’s Bristol.

“Do I hear you ask what I am going to do with £1,000? Buy a pipe of rum from Mr. Thomas Cave’s distillery-and I do know that a pipe contains 105 gallons! I will also stroll down to the Green Canister in Half Moon Street, there to buy a gross of her finest cundums from Mrs. Phillips. These London whores are runny with the pox and the clap, but Mrs. Phillips has come up with the world’s most important invention since rum. I shall be able to poke my properly encundumed sugar stick with impunity.”

It was another year-March of 1783-before Senhor Tomas Habitas was obliged to let Richard go. The Bristol Bank held over £3,000 by then, scarcely a penny of it touched. Why should he spend it? Peg would not move to Clifton and his father (whom he had tried to talk into taking the Black Horse Inn on Clifton Hill) professed himself happy at the Cooper’s Arms. Not all those twelve shillings a day which Richard had paid him for over seven years had been used up, Dick explained ingenuously. He could afford to wait the hard times out right where he was, on Broad Street, in the thick of things.

Yes, the American war was over and in time a treaty would confirm that fact, but prosperity had not returned. Part of that was due to chaos in the Parliament, wherein Charles James Fox and Lord North screamed the roof down about the unwarranted concessions Lord Shelburne was making to the Americans. No one was worrying about mundanities like government. Short-lived administrations distinguished by wrangling and power plays wreaked havoc in Westminster; the truth was that no one, including the half-crazed King, knew what to do with a war debt of £232 million and falling revenues.

Food riots broke out among Bristol’s sailors, who were paid thirty shillings per month-provided that they were at sea. On shore, not a penny. The situation was so desperate that the Mayor managed to persuade ship owners to give their sailors fifteen shillings per month while on shore. In 1775 the number of ships paying the Mayor’s Dues had been 529: by 1783, that number had shrunk to 102. As most of these ships were Bristol based and lying idle along the quays and backs as well as downriver around Pill, several thousand sailors were a force to be reckoned with.

In Liverpool, 10,000 of the 40,000 inhabitants were depending upon the slender charitable resources of that city, and in Bristol the Poor Rates had soared 150 per cent. The Corporation and the Merchant Venturers had no choice other than to start selling off property. New and stringent ordinances were brought in to deal with the ever-increasing flow of rural poor into Bristol, there to throw themselves upon the parishes and eat at least. Some of those caught defrauding the parishes were publicly pilloried and whipped before being banished; yet the flood continued to pour in faster than an Avon tide.

“Did yousee this, Dick?” asked Cousin James-the-druggist, calling in on his way home from his Corn Street shop. He waved a sheet of flimsy. “An advertisement from our felons in the Newgate, if you please! Announcing that they cannot afford to eat on their twopence a day-it is a disgrace, with bread at sixteen pence the quartern loaf.”

“A penny a day if they are still awaiting trial,” said Dick.

“I shall see Jenkins the baker and send them however much bread they need. And cheese and ox cheeks.”

Dick grinned slyly. “What, Jim, no shillingses tipped into their outstretched hands?”

Cousin James-the-druggist blushed. “Yes, ye were right, Dick. They did indeed drink it up.”

“They always will drink it up. To send them bread is sensible. Just make sure that your philanthropic cronies do likewise.”

“How is Richard now that he is not working? I never see him.”

“Well enough,” said Richard’s father curtly. “The reason he is invisible is up there on his bed.”

“Drunk?”

“Oh, no. She stopped that after William Henry asked her outright why she guzzled rum.” He shrugged. “When William Henry is not here, she lies on the bed and stares at nothing.”

“And when William Henry is here?”

“She behaves herself.” Mine Host hawked and spat copiously into his sawdust. “Women! They are very queer fish, Jim.”

A mental picture of his vaporish wife and their two bracket-faced spinster daughters swam before Cousin James-the-druggist’s eyes; he smiled wryly and nodded. “I have often wondered,” he said, “why the world should choose to liken a face to a bracket?”