Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

In himself,Richard was managing, though he chafed at the tiny amount of time he had to spend with William Henry. Sundays were infinitely precious. Occasionally Richard varied the route of their walk so that William Henry would get to know every part of Bristol, but their favorite destination remained Clifton, where the cottage Richard had almost bought mocked him. Of his own choice he might have gone elsewhere than Clifton, but William Henry adored the place.

“Mr. Parfrey told us a new one yesterday,” said William Henry, skipping along.

Stifling a sigh, Richard resigned himself to another paean about this paragon of a teacher who managed to turn boring old Latin into a game of puns and mnemonics; William Henry’s Latin was far more advanced than Richard’s had been at the same age.

“What?” he asked dutifully of his son.

“Caesar adsum iam forte-Caesar had some jam for tea.”

“And can you translate it?”

“ ‘As it so happened, and quite by chance, Caesar was at hand.’ ”

“Very good! He is a wit, your Mr. Parfrey.”

“Yes, he is very funny, Dadda. He makes us laugh so much that the Head and Mr. Prichard disapprove. I do not think they really like it that Mr. Parfrey never uses the cane either.”

“I am surprised Mr. Parfrey has survived at Colston’s,” said Richard dryly.

“We are all so good at our Latin,” William Henry explained. “We have to be! Otherwise we would get Mr. Parfrey into trouble with the Head. Oh, Dadda, I do like him! He smiles a lot.”

“In which case, William Henry, ye’re very lucky.”

At theend of May all the pieces of the puzzle at Cave’s distillery fell into place.

William Thorne had done one of his disappearing tricks and the acolytes who danced attendance on the stills had also disappeared, the latter rather in the manner of mice after cheese, twitching with apprehension but determined to consume the prize. In the case of Mr. Cave’s employees the prize was rum. Not the good rum which went into holding casks and would be blended by none save Mr. Cave himself, but the feint-ridden second distillate; no one would notice if a little were siphoned off the second receiver tub.

In no need of rum or company, Richard continued with his work. The huge room had so many corners, nooks and crannies that it was difficult to assign it a shape, and this was particularly true of its back regions, into which Richard was expressly forbidden entry. Nor would he have entered, had he not heard the unmistakable hiss of liquid escaping under pressure. A careful check of the rows of paired stills and their confusing network of pipes revealed nothing, but as he approached the last pair in the back row he became convinced that the noise was coming from somewhere behind. So he hauled himself up onto the uncomfortably warm bricks of the furnace and squeezed between the left and right still, ducking his head to avoid the receiver tubs.

It was then that he noticed some pipes which ought not to have been there, and stiffened. For a full minute he stood without moving and let his eyes accustom themselves to the gloom, then he looked upward and found a number of pipes hidden among festoons of spider-web and what might have passed at a casual glance for hempen lagging come adrift. Each of these pipes came off a receiver tub which held the final distillate, not at its bottom but well up its side-at a point, in fact, which would allow a runoff only if the tub were full to its tapping level. No valve was attached to each of these unwarranted pipes; once the contents of a tub reached the level of the pipe, the liquid ran off down it into the darkness at the back of the chamber.

There, hidden behind a false section of wall, were two rows of 50-gallon hogsheads. Lips pursed in a silent whistle, Richard calculated how much excise-free spirit was flowing off each and every day-no wonder that William Thorne always drained the final distillate from its receiver tub! Only a skilled distiller with experience elsewhere would have wondered at the slowness of Mr. Cave’s apparatus, and there were no such men at 137 Redcliff Street. Except for William Thorne. And Thomas Cave. Was he in it too?

As he jumped back onto the top of the furnace Richard found the source of the hiss-the right-hand still was spraying a thin jet of fluid backward from a pinhole in its worn copper skin. As he crouched to plug it, Thorne walked in.

“Here! What are ye doing up there?” he demanded, face ugly.

“My job of work,” said Richard tranquilly. “A temporary one, I fear. I think ye’ll have to stand this pair down very soon.”

“Fucken shit! I keep telling old Tom to invest some of his profits in new stills, but he always has a reason not to.” Thorne stalked away, mollified, roaring for his acolytes, who had not been quick enough; the cat had come back sooner than anticipated.

When he returned to the Cooper’s Arms that evening Richard did not mention his discovery to Dick. Time enough when he knew more-knew, for instance, how many were involved in this huge excise fraud. Thorne, of course. Cave, possibly. And what about John Trevillian Ceely Trevillian? Why should a well-born idler like Ceely haunt a location far from the pastures where such ornamental ponies usually grazed?

When do they clear out the illicit liquor? Richard wondered. During the night, certainly, and probably on a Sunday night. The streets are deserted even of sailors and press gangs.

Getting out of the Cooper’s Arms on the next Sunday night was easy; he slept alone, Dick and Mag were snoring, and William Henry never roused, even in a thunderstorm. The moon was full and the sky cloudless-what good luck! As he reached the vicinity of 137 Redcliff Street, a lone bell was tolling midnight. He sought the dark shelter of a crane belonging to the pipe maker across the court and settled patiently to wait.

Two hours. They certainly cut it fine, he thought; two more hours would see the commencement of a leisurely dawn. And there were three of them: Thorne, Cave and Ceely Trevillian. Though it was difficult to recognize the last man; the mincing Bartholomew Baby had been replaced by a slim, decisively energetic man clad in black, with raggedly cropped short hair and boots on his feet.

Cave arrived on his elderly gelding, Thorne and Ceely drove up in a sledge drawn by a pair of massive horses, and the three of them proceeded to unload four dozen obviously empty hogshead casks from the geehoe. Cave unlocked a disused door into the back part of his distilling chamber and the barrels disappeared inside. A minute later Thorne was back, grunting as he rolled a full barrel; Cave bustled to the sledge and let down a ramp at its rear. It took Thorne and Trevillian combined to push each hogshead up the ramp, where they flipped it from its side onto one end with a deftness born of much practice.

Sixty minutes by Richard’s watch saw the job done; no doubt inside the building the empty hogsheads were in place beneath the illicit pipes-how often did they do this? Not every Sunday night or someone would notice, but, if Richard’s calculations were right, at least once in every three weeks.

Thomas Cave mounted his horse and rode off up Redcliff Street while the other two boarded the sledge, which headed on very smooth and silent runners eastward to the Temple Backs; Richard followed the sledge. At the river the casks were tipped onto their sides again and rolled down into a flat-bottomed barge tended by a man who was a stranger to Richard, though not to Thorne and Ceely. Finished, the three unharnessed one of the horses and tethered it to the barge; the stranger scrambled up onto its huge back and kicked it hard until it began to plod down the deplorable towpath in the direction of Bath, the floating cargo, with Ceely aboard, following behind. Once sure everything was going to plan, William Thorne drove off in the geehoe.