Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

She twinkled her fingers in the air. “It amuses me.”

“And the silk gowns? This-this virtuous room?”

“Mrs. Barton,” she said, tone oozing contempt, “is a stupid old cow of a bitch!”

“Do not use that word!” he snapped.

“Bitch! Bitch-bitch-bitch! There! I ’ave shocked you greatly, cher Richard.” She sat up and crossed her legs under her like a tailor. “I cheat Mrs. Barton, Richard. I cheat ’er blind. But she thinks she is the clever one, lodging me ’ere to keep ’er silly old ’usband away from me.” She lifted her lip. “As for ’er, she can parade around Clifton to all the big ’ouses and boast that she ’as a genuine Frrrrrench maid. Bah!”

Dressed, Richard eyed her ironically. “D’ye want to see more of me?” he asked.

“Oh yes, my Richard, very definitely.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow at the same hour. Mrs. Barton is not early out of ’er bed.”

“You cannot keep Willy on laudanum forever.”

“There is no need. I ’ave you now-why should Willy mind?”

“Quite. Until tomorrow, then.”

That day William Henry was, if not forgotten, buried under many layers of his father’s mind. Richard walked straight back to the Cooper’s Arms, up the stairs without saying a word to anyone, fell fully clothed on his bed and slept until dawn. Rumless.

“Your fish,”said Annemarie Latour to John Trevillian Ceely Trevillian, “is ’ooked.”

“I do wish you would abandon those Frenchified affectations,” Mr. Trevillian sighed. “Was it very awful, my poor darling?”

“Quite the opposite, cher Ceely. His clothes were clean. So was his person. No nits, no lice, no crabs.” She was emphasizing her aitches. “He washes.” A smile of pure cruelty curved her mouth. “His body is very beautiful. And he is very, very much a man. ”

The barb struck home to fester and spread its poison, but he was too clever to betray that. Instead he patted her on the bottom, gave her twenty golden guineas and dismissed her; Mr. Cave and Mr. Thorne were coming to call, and he had not seen them in some time. For one who lived with his doting mama on Park Street it was not advisable to be seen too often receiving low visitors.

“The best thing we can do,” said William Thorne when he and Cave arrived, “is to grab Insell and put him on a slaver as crew.”

“And have the suspicion of murder hanging about us like smoke around a foundry chimney?” asked Ceely. “Oh, no.”

“I will make sure he is listed as pressed and on the roster.”

“I want Richard Morgan done for too,” said Trevillian.

“It is not necessary!” wailed Thomas Cave. “Richard Morgan is well connected-the other is a nobody. Let Bill have Insell taken on a slaver, then let me go back to the Excise, please. I am not asking you to pay the fine, Ceely, but until it is paid the threat of trial hangs over all of us. We are being watched.”

“Look,” said Ceely Trevillian slowly and carefully, “I am too well-born to earn a living, and my late father, Devil take him, disinherited me. Knowing that I must live on my wits has sharpened them something brilliant. M’mother does what she can, including housing me and donating gold when m’brother is not looking, but I needed that excise money, and I am not pleased to be deprived of it. Nor will I be pleased to be deprived of either my freedom or my breathing and swallowing apparatus. Morgan and Insell have put a stop to my income, and I want to put a stop to them.” His face twisted. “Insell is a nothing, I agree. It is Morgan who will send us down. Besides, I need to ruin Richard Morgan.”

When Richardwoke, the first thing he did was go to look in William Henry’s cubicle. The bed was empty. Tears stung at his eyes, the first since William Henry had disappeared, but they did not fall. His sleep had been long enough to banish bodily aches, though his penis felt raw and he could feel her bites and scratches. A shocking word, bitch, but Annemarie Latour was a first-rate bitch.

The habits of the household at dawn went back past his very earliest memories. Dick descended to the kitchen and carried a kettle of hot water and a bucket of cold water up to Mag for her small tin bath. When Peg had been alive the two women had shared it, and after them the servant girl got it. While they washed upstairs, Dick and Richard washed downstairs.

Dick passed through to his bedroom with Mag’s kettle and bucket, cast a glance in Richard’s direction on his way out and ascertained that his son had finally come to. Leaving his slept-in clothes for the servant girl to deal with, Richard found more in his chest and ran down the stairs, naked, to join his father, who had already shaved and was standing in the small bath trickling water over himself with a tin dipper and slicking his wet skin with soap.

Dick gaped. “Christ! Where have you been?”

“With a woman,” said Richard, preparing to shave.

“About time too.” The soap was sloshed away with the dipper. “A whore, Richard?”

Richard grinned. “If she is, Father, then she is a very rare sort of a one. By that I mean that I have never seen her like.”

“A strong statement from a tavern man.” Dick stepped out of the oversized dish and rubbed himself vigorously with an old linen sheet while Richard stepped into his father’s used water.

“Finished?” came Mag’s voice from upstairs.

“Not yet!” Dick yelled, and dragged Richard, still drying himself, to the bullioned window and a shade more wan light. There he looked his son over grimly. “I hope ye’re not clapped or poxed.”

“I would bet I am not. The lady is particular.”

“What happened?”

“I met her at Insell’s place.”

“She’s Insell’s leavings?”

“Nay! She’d as soon cut her throat. Very high and mighty.” He frowned, shook his head. “Truth to tell, I know not why she fancied me. There is little enough between Insell and me.”

“Ye’re no more like Insell than a silk purse is a sow’s ear.”

“I am to see her again at eight o’clock this morning.”

Dick whistled. “’Tis hot, then?”

“Like a fire.” Richard finished tying his stock and combing his damp hair. “The thing is, Father, that I dislike her hugely, yet I cannot get enough of her. Ought I go? Or stay away forever?”

“Go, Richard, go! When it is a fire, the only way out is to walk through it to the other side.”

“And if it consumes me?”

“I will pray that it does not.”

At least, thought Richard at a quarter to eight, shutting the Cooper’s Arms door behind him, I have my father’s approval. I never dreamed he would understand. I wonder who was his fire?

He still had very little idea why he was going, whether it was as complex as sexual enslavement or as simple as sexual starvation. In Bristol “sex” and “sexual” were not words employed in the context of the act-too brutally explicit for a godfearing small city, not mealy-mouthed about many things. “Sex” stripped the act of love or morality. “Sex” made the act an animal event. In which case, sex and sex alone was why he walked to Jacob’s Well for more Annemarie.

But it was William Henry he thought about. Alive out there in someone else’s world, unable to get home. Which meant that he had been taken as a ship’s boy. It happened, especially to beautiful boys. Oh, dear God! Not my lad in that life! Please, dear God, let him be dead first! While I go to copulate with a French bitch who transfixes me the way I once saw a hooded snake transfix a rat at the Bristol Fair…

The fireburned more fiercely each time Richard met her, which was every day for the next week. But the pain of it and the pain of deserting William Henry, of imagining William Henry as a ship’s boy, forced him back to the rum; his days became a muddled blur of Annemarie, of his father’s worried face, of William Henry crying out from a great distance amid a vast sea, of sex and music and hooded snakes and rum, rum to find oblivion at the end of each hideous bout. He hated her, the French bitch, yet he could not get enough of her. Worse than that, he hated himself.