Colleen McCullough: Morgan’s Run

When William Henry passed the six-months mark and began to change into a person, his grandparents discovered that he was the kind of child who cannot be ruined. Such was the sweetness of his nature and the humility of his tiny soul that he accepted all the attention gratefully, yet never complained if it were not given. He cried because he had a pain or some tavern fool had frightened him, though of Mr. Thistlethwaite (by far the most terrifying denizen of the Cooper’s Arms) he was not in the least afraid no matter how loudly he roared. His character inclined to thoughtful silences; though he would smile readily, he would not laugh, and never looked either sad or ill-tempered.

“I declare that he has the temperament of a monastery friar,” said Mr. Thistlethwaite. “Ye may have bred up a Carthlick yet.”

Five daysago a whisper had surfaced at the Cooper’s Arms: a few cases of the smallpox had appeared, but too widely dispersed to think of containment by quarantine, every city’s first-and last-desperate hope.

Peg’s eyes started from her head. “Oh, Richard, not again!”

“We will have William Henry inoculated” was Richard’s answer. After which he sent a message to Cousin James-the-druggist.

Who looked aghast when told what was required of him. “Jesus, Richard, no! Inoculation is for older folk! I have never heard of it for a babe barely out of his clouts! It would kill him! Far better to do one of two things-send him away to the farm, or keep him here in as much isolation as ye can. And pray, whichever course ye choose.”

“Inoculation, Cousin James. It must be inoculation.”

“Richard, I will not do it!” Cousin James-the-druggist turned to Dick, listening grimly. “Dick, say something! Do something! I beseech you!”

For once Richard’s father stood by him. “Jim, neither course would work. To get William Henry out of Bristol-no, hear me out!-to get William Henry out of Bristol would mean hiring a hackney, and who can tell what manner of person last sat in it? Or who might be on the ferry at Rownham Meads? And how can we isolate anybody in a tavern? This ain’t St. James’s on a Sunday, lively though that can be. All manner of folk come through my door. No, Jim, it must be inoculation.”

“Be it on your own heads, then!” cried Cousin James-the-druggist as he stumbled off, wringing his hands, to enquire of a doctor friend whereabouts he might find a victim of the smallpox who had reached rupture-of-the-pustules stage. Not so difficult a task; people were coming down with the disease everywhere. Mostly under the age of fifteen.

“Pray for me,” Cousin James-the-druggist said to his doctor friend as he laid his ordinary darning needle down across a running sore on the twelve-year-old girl’s face and turned it over and over to coat it with pus. Oh, poor soul! It had been such a pretty face, but it never would be again. “Pray for me,” he said as he rose to his feet and put the sopping needle on a bed of lint in a small tin case. “Pray that I am not about to do murder.”

He hastened immediately to the Cooper’s Arms, not a very long walk. And there, the partly naked William Henry on his knee, he took the darning needle from its case, placed its point against-against-oh, where ought he to do this murder? And such a public one, between the regulars sitting in their usual places, Mr. Thistlethwaite making a show of casually sucking his teeth, and the Morgans looming in a ring around him as if to prevent his fleeing should he take a notion to do so. Suddenly it was done; he pinched the flesh of William Henry’s arm just below the left shoulder, pushed the big needle in, then drew it out an inch away by its point.

William Henry did not flinch, did not cry. He turned his large and extraordinary eyes upon Cousin James’s sweating face and looked a question-why did you do that to me? It hurt!

Oh why, why did I? I have never seen such eyes in a head! Not animal’s eyes, but not human either. This is a strange child.

So he kissed William Henry all over his face, wiped away his own tears, put the needle back in its tin to burn the whole thing later in his hottest furnace, and handed William Henry to Richard.

“There, it is done. Now I am going to pray. Not for William Henry’s soul-what babe needs fear for stains on that? To pray for my own soul, that I have not done murder. Have you some vinegar and oil of tar? I would wash my hands.”

Mag produced a small jug of vinegar, a bottle of oil of tar, a pewter dish and a clean clout.

“Nothing will happen for three or four days,” he said as he rubbed away, “but then, if it takes, he will develop a fever. If it has taken to the proper degree, the fever will not be malign. And at some time the inoculation itself will fester, produce a pustule, and burst. All going well, ’twill be the only one. But I cannot say for sure, and I do not thank ye for this business.”

“You are the best man in Bristol, Cousin James!” cried Mr. Thistlethwaite jovially.

Cousin James-the-druggist paused in the doorway. “I am not your cousin, Jem Thistlethwaite-ye have no relations! Not even a mother,” he said in freezing tones, pushed his wig back onto his head properly, and vanished.

Mine Host shook with laughter. “That is telling ye, Jem!”

“Aye,” grinned Jem, unabashed. “Do not worry,” he said to Richard, “God would not dare offend Cousin James.”

Having walkedfor much longer than he had prayed, Richard arrived back at the Cooper’s Arms just in time to give a hand with supper. Barley broth made on beef shins tonight, with plump, bacony dumplings simmering in it, as well as the usual fare of bread, butter, cheese, cake and liquid refreshments.

The panic had died down and Broad Street was back to normal except that John/Samuel Adams and John Hancock still swung from the signpost of the American Coffee House. They would probably, Richard reflected, remain there until time and weather blew their stuffing all over the place and naught was left save limp rags.

Nodding to his father as he passed, Richard scrambled upstairs to the back half of the room at their top, which Dick had partitioned off in the customary way-a few planks from floor to near the ceiling, not snugly tenoned and joined like the wales of ships, but rather held together by an occasional strut and therefore full of cracks, some wide enough to put an eye to.

Richard and Peg’s back room held an excellent double bed with thick linen curtains drawn about it from rails connecting its four tall posts, several chests for clothing, a cupboard for shoes and boots, a mirror on one wall for Peg to prink in front of, a dozen hooks on the same wall, and William Henry’s gimbaled cot. There were no fifteen-shillings-a-yard wallpapers, no damask hangings, no carpets on the oak floor so old it had gone black two centuries ago, but it was quite as good a room as any one would see in any house of similar standing, namely of the middling classes.

Peg was by the cot, swinging it gently back and forth.

“How is he, my love?”

She looked up, smiling contentedly. “It has taken. He has a fever, but it is not burning him up. Cousin James-the-druggist came while you were walking, and seemed very relieved. He thinks William Henry will recover without developing the full pox.”

Because his left upper arm was sore, Richard assumed, William Henry lay sleeping on his right side with the offending limb drawn comfortably across his chest. Where the needle had passed through the flesh a great red welt was growing; his palm almost touching it, Richard could feel the heat in the thing.

“It is early!” he exclaimed.

“Cousin James says it often is after inoculation.”

Knees shaking from the sheer relief of learning that his son had survived his ordeal, Richard went to a hook on the wall and plucked his stout canvas apron from it. “I must help father. Thank God, thank God!” He was still thanking God as he bounded down the stairs, it having slipped his mind that until he saw William Henry’s pustule developing, he had quite given up on God.