Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

“Because my papers say I am.”

“How can that be?”

“Because it is.”

She took him by the shoulders and shook him vigorously. “Oh, damn you, Richard, damn you! Why do you never tell me anything? What point is there in being so close?”

“I am not intentionally close, Lizzie.”

“Yes, you are! You never tell me a thing!”

“But you never ask,” he said, looking surprised.

She shook him again. “Then I am asking now! Tell me all about yourself, Richard Morgan. Tell me everything. I want to know how ye can be married yet not married, damn you!”

“Then I may as well tell the lot of you.”

They gathered around the table and heard a very edited story relating only to Annemarie Latour, Ceely Trevillian and a distillery. Of Peg, little Mary, William Henry and his other family he told them nothing because he could not bear to.

“Weeping Willy said more than that,” Lizzie stated sourly.

“It is all I am prepared to say.” Richard assumed a worried look and neatly changed the subject. “It sounds as if we are to be moved very soon. I pray that my cousin James gets here in time.”

By the 4th of January the number of men in the felons’ section of Gloucester Gaol had swollen. Four men came in from Bristol and two from Wiltshire. Two of the Bristol men were very young, but two were in their early thirties and had been close friends since childhood.

“Neddy and I got drunk one night in the Swan on Temple Street,” said William Connelly, slapping Edward Perrott companionably on the shoulder. “Not sure what happened, but the next thing we were in the Bristol Newgate and got seven years’ transportation to Africa at last February’s quarter sessions. Seems we stole clothes.”

“Ye look well for spending a year in that place. I was there for three months just before,” said Richard.

“Ye’re a Bristol man?”

“Aye, but tried here. My crime was committed in Clifton.”

William Connelly was obviously of Irish extraction; thick auburn hair, short nose and cheeky blue eyes. The more silent Edward Perrott had the bumpy big nose, prominent chin and mousy fairness of a true Englishman.

The two Wiltshire men, William Earl and John Cross, were at most twenty years old, and had already struck up a friendship with the two Bristol youngsters, Job Hollister and William Wilton. Joey Long was so simple that he gravitated naturally to this young group from the moment they clanked into the felons’ common-room, and-which Richard found strange at first-Isaac Rogers elected to join these five. A few hours saw Richard change his mind-no, not at all strange. Oozing glamour and seniority, the highwayman could retrieve some of the clout he had lost among his Gloucester fellows when he had funked at the prospect of hanging.

Then the Monmouth man arrived to make the twelfth for Woolwich and informed them that he was William Edmunds.

“Christ!” cried Bill Whiting. “There are twelve of us for Woolwich and five of us are fucken Williams! I lay claim to Bill, and that is that. Wilton from Bristol, ye remind me of Weeping Willy Insell, so ye’re Willy. Connelly from Bristol, ye’re Will. Earl from Wiltshire, ye’re Billy. But what the devil are we to do with the fifth? What did you do to get here, Edmunds?”

“Stole a heifer at Peterstone,” said Edmunds with a Welsh lilt.

Whiting roared with laughter and kissed the outraged Welshman full on his lips. “Another bugger, by God! I borrowed a sheep for the night-only wanted to fuck it. Never thought of a heifer!”

“Do not do that!” Edmunds scrubbed at his mouth vigorously. “You can fuck whatever ye like, but ye’ll not fuck me!”

“He is a Welshman and a thief,” said Richard, grinning. “We call him Taffy, of course.”

“Did ye get the gallows?” Bill Whiting asked Taffy.

“Twice over, Da.”

“For one heifer?”

“Nay. I got the second for escaping. But the Welsh ain’t too happy at the moment, would not have liked to see a Welshman hanged even in Monmouth, so they reprieved me again and got rid of me,” Taffy explained.

Richard found himself drawn to Taffy as much as he was to Bill Whiting and Will Connelly. He had Welsh moods like clouds chasing the sun in and out on a heath-purple hillside. But then, Richard’s own roots were Welsh.

Cousin James-the-druggist made it to Gloucester just in time on the 5th of January, loaded down with sacks and wooden boxes.

“The Excise Office paid over your five hundred pounds at the end of December,” he said, burrowing. “I have six new dripstones, five of them with their brass frames and catching dishes because I felt that you must keep the five friends around ye safe and well.”

“Why five friends, Cousin James?” Richard asked, intrigued.

“Jem Thistlethwaite said in his letter to me that the men on the Thames hulks are separated into groups of six who live and work together.” He did not go on to tell Richard any of the other things Jem had explained about the hulks; he could not bring himself to. “That is why there are five new boxes, all containing what yours does, save not in the same quantity. I brought your tool box too.”

Richard sat back on his heels and thought about that, then shook his head. “Nay, Cousin James, not my tools. I will need them for this Botany Bay, but there are enough rays of enlightenment dancing inside my head to feel very strongly that did I take them with me now, they would not survive to see Botany Bay. Keep them until ye know what ship I will be on, then send them to me.”

“Here are more books from the Reverend James. He has concentrated this time on books about the world, geography, voyages. Heavier, because most are on ordinary paper and leather bound. But he thinks they may help, and hopes that ye’ll be able to carry them and all your others to Botany Bay.”

After which Cousin James-the-druggist could find nothing to say about practical matters. He got to his feet. “Botany Bay is at the other end of the world, Richard. Ten thousand miles if ye could fly, more like sixteen thousand as a ship must sail. I fear that none of us will ever see you again, and that is a terrible grief. All for something you never meant. Oh dear, oh dear! Remember that you will be in my prayers every day for the rest of my life, and your father’s, and your mother’s, and the Reverend James’s. Surely so many good intentions cannot be lost upon God. Surely He will preserve ye. Oh dear, oh dear!”

Richard reached for him, held him close, kissed his cheeks. Then he pattered away, head bent, and did not look back.

But Richard’s eyes followed him down the path between the vegetable patches, through the castle gate. He turned a corner, and was gone. And I will pray for you, Cousin James, for I love you more than I love my father.

Lizzie Lock draped around his shoulders, he gathered his troops at the table in the felons’ common-room.

“It is not that I wish to lead,” he said to his five chosen companions-Bill Whiting, Will Connelly, Neddy Perrott, Jimmy Price and Taffy Edmunds. “I am seven-and-thirty, which makes me the oldest amongst us, but I am not the stuff makes leaders, and ye should all know that now. Each of us must look for strength and guidance within himself, as is fit and proper. Yet I do have some learning, and a source of information in political London as well as a very clever druggist cousin in Bristol.”

“I know him,” said Will Connelly, nodding. “James Morgan of Corn Street. Recognized him the moment he came in. Thought, phew! Yon Richard Morgan is well connected.”

“Aye, enough. First I have to tell ye that the men on the hulks are divided into groups of six who live and work together. An it pleases you, I would have the six of us form one such group before some hulk gaoler does it for us. Is that agreeable?”