Colleen McCullough: Morgan’s Run

The news of a second pregnancy had thrilled both parents: a three-year gap was a worry. Now they would have that boy!

“It is a boy,” said Peg positively as her belly swelled. “I am carrying this one differently.”

The smallpox broke out. Time out of mind, every generation had lived with it; like the plague, its mortality rate had slowly waned, so that only the most severe epidemics killed many. The faces one saw in the streets often bore the disfiguring craters of pock marks-a shame, but at least the life had been spared. Dick Morgan’s face was slightly pock marked, but Mag and Peg had had the cowpox as girls, and never succumbed. Country superstition said that the cowpox meant no smallpox. So as soon as Richard had turned five, Mag took him to her father’s farm near Bedminster during a spate of the disease and made the little fellow try to milk cows until he came down with this benign, protective sort of pox.

Richard and Peg had fully intended to do the same with Mary, but no cowpox appeared in Bedminster. Not yet four, the child had suddenly burned with terrible fever, moaned and twisted her pain-racked body, cried in a constant frenzy for her dadda. When Cousin James-the-druggist came (the Morgans knew he was a better doctor than any in Bristol who called themselves doctors) he looked grave.

“If the fever comes down when the spots appear, she will live,” he said. “There are no medicaments can alter God’s will. Keep her warm and do not let the air get at her.”

Richard tried to help nurse her, sitting hour after hour beside the cot he had made and artfully fitted up with gimbals so that it swayed gently without the grind of cradle rockers. On the fourth day after the fever began the spots appeared, livid areolae with what looked like lead shot in their centers. Face, lower arms and hands, lower legs and feet. Vile, horrific. He talked to her and crooned to her, held her plucking hands while Peg and Mag changed her linens, washed her shrunken little buttocks as wrinkled and juiceless as an old woman’s. But the fever did not diminish, and eventually, as the pustules burst and cratered, she flickered out as softly and subtly as a candle.

Cousin James-of-the-clergy was overwhelmed with burials. But the Morgans had kinship rights, so despite the calls on his time he interred Mary Morgan, aged three, with all the solemnities the Church of England could provide. Heavy with exhaustion and near her time, Peg leaned on her aunt and mother-in-law while Richard stood, weeping desolately, quite alone; he would not permit anyone to go near him. His father, who had lost children-indeed, who had not?-was humiliated by this torrent of grief, this unseemly unmanning. Not that Richard cared how his father felt. He did not even know. His bubba Mary was dead and he, who would gladly have died in her place, was alive and in the world without her. God was not good. God was not kind or merciful. God was a monster more evil than the Devil, who at least made no pretense of virtue.

An excellentthing, Dick and Mag Morgan agreed, that Peg was about to birth another child. The only anodyne for Richard’s grief was a new baby to love.

“He might turn against it,” said Mag anxiously.

“Not Richard!” said Dick scornfully. “He is too soft.”

Dick was right, Mag wrong. For the second time Richard Morgan was enveloped in that ocean of love, though now he had some idea of its profundity. Knew the immensity of its depths, the power of its storms, the eternity of its reaches. With this child, he had vowed, he would learn to float, he would not expend his strength in fighting. A resolution which lasted no longer than the frozen moment in which he took in the sight of his son’s face, the placid minute hands, the pulse inside a brand-new being on this sad old earth. Blood of his blood, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh.

It was not in the province of a woman to name her babies. That task fell to Richard.

“Call him Richard,” said Dick. “It is tradition.”

“I will not. We have a Dick and a Richard already, do we now need a Dickon or a Rich?”

“I rather like Louis,” said Peg casually.

“Another papist name!” roared Dick. “And it’s Frog! ”

“I will call him William Henry,” said Richard.

“Bill, like his uncle,” said Dick, pleased.

“No, Father, not Bill. Not Will. Not Willy, not Billy, not even William. His name is William Henry, and so he will be known by everybody,” said Richard so firmly that the debate ended.

Truth to tell, this decision gratified the whole clan. Someone known to everybody as William Henry was bound to be a great man.

Richard gave voice to this verdict when he displayed his new son to Mr. James Thistlethwaite, who snorted.

“Aye, like Lord Clare,” he said. “Started out a schoolmaster, married three fat and ugly old widows of enormous fortune, was-er- lucky enough to be shriven of them in quick succession, became a Member of Parliament for Bristol, and so met the Prince of Wales. Plain Robert Nugent. Rrrrrrrrr olling in the soft, which he proceeded to lend liberally to Georgy-Porgy Pudden ’n’ Pie, our bloated Heir. No interest and no repayment of the principal until even the King could not ignore the debt. So plain Robert Nugent was apotheosized into Viscount Clare, and now has a Bristol street named after him. He will end an earl, as my London informants tell me that his soft is still going princeward at a great rate. You have to admit, my dear Richard, that the schoolmaster did well for himself.”

“Indeed he did,” said Richard, not at all offended. “Though I would rather,” he said after a pause, “that William Henry earned his peerage by becoming First Lord of the Admiralty. Generals are always noblemen because army officers have to buy their promotions, but admirals can scramble up with prize-money and the like.”

“Spoken like a true Bristolian! Ships are never far from any Bristolian’s thoughts. Though, Richard, ye have no experience of them beyond looking.” Mr. Thistlethwaite sipped his rum and waited with keen anticipation for the warm glow to commence inside him.

“Looking,” said Richard, his cheek against William Henry’s, “is quite close enough to ships for me.”

“D’ye never yearn for foreign parts? Not even London?”

“Nay. I was born in Bristol and I will die in Bristol. Bath and Bedminster are quite as far as I ever wish to go.” He held William Henry out and looked his son in the eye; for such a young babe, the gaze was astonishingly steady. “Eh, William Henry? Perhaps you will end in being the family’s traveler.”

Idle speculation. As far as Richard was concerned, simply having William Henry was enough.

The anxiety, however, was omnipresent, in Peg as well as Richard. Both of them fussed over the slightest deviation from William Henry’s habitual path-were his stools a little too runny?-was his brow too warm?-ought he not to be more forward for his age? None of this mattered a great deal during the first six months of William Henry’s life, but his grandparents fretted over what was going to happen as he grew into noticing, crawling, talking-and thinking! That doting pair were going to ruin the child! They listened avidly to anything Cousin James-the-druggist had to say on subjects few Bristolians-or other sorts of English people-worried their heads about. Like the state of the drains, the putridity of the Froom and Avon, the noxious vapors which hung over the city as ominously in winter as in summer. A remark about the Broad Street privy vault had Peg on her knees inside the closet beneath the stairs with rags and bucket, brush and oil of tar, scrubbing at the ancient stone seat and the floor, whitewashing ruthlessly. While Richard went down to the Council House and made such a nuisance of himself to various Corporation slugs that the honey-sledges actually arrived en masse to empty the privy vault, rinse it several times, and then tip the result of all this activity into the Froom at the Key Head right next door to the fish markets.