Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

There were those among influential Bristolians who wanted peace at any price, including granting the American rebels whatever they demanded; there were those who deemed the rebels sorely wronged, yet who wanted the perpetuation of English imperium because they feared that if England abandoned a thousand miles of naked coast, the French would return with the Spanish hard behind them; and there were those whose outrage was colossal, who cursed the rebels for traitors fit only to be drawn and quartered after they were hanged, and who would not hear of the smallest concession’s being made. Naturally this last group of Bristol’s mighty had the most power at the Court of St. James, but all three groups cried woe in the drawing rooms of the best houses and huddled grimly over their port and turtle at the White Lion, the Bush Inn and the Plume of Feathers.

Beneath the thin crust of influential Bristolians lay the vast majority of citizens, who knew only that work was getting hard to find, that more and more ships sat permanently along the quays and the backs, and that now was not the time to strike for a raise of a penny a day. Since Parliament knew how to spend money but did not dole it out to the needy, care of the swelling numbers of jobless devolved upon the parishes-provided, that is, that they were genuine parishioners entered in the register. Each parish received £7 per annum per dwelling of the Corporation’s rents, and out of this came relief for the poor.

In one respect Bristol differed from all other English cities, for no reason easily explained; its upper crust tended toward an impressive degree of philanthropy, during life as well as in testamentary bequests. Perhaps one reason might have been that to have almshouses or poorhouses or hospitals or schools named after their endower lent their endower a second kind of immortality, for his name was never aristocratic. When it came to birth and lineage, Bristol’s upper crust was utterly mediocre. Lord Clare, who had been Robert Nugent the schoolmaster, was about as much of a nobleman as Bristol high society could produce. Bristol might was soundly vested in Mammon.

Thus 1776 arrived like the kind of brooding shadow seen only out of the corners of the eyes. By now, everybody had assumed, the King’s Navy and the King’s Army would have stamped out the last ember of revolution between New Hampshire and Georgia. But no news of this glorious event came, though those who could read-a large number in education- and charity-conscious Bristol-had taken to frequenting the staging inns to wait for the coach from London and the London flimsies and magazines.

The Cooper’s Arms was doing its share of drawing in the belt; and sad it was, too, to find with every passing week a new gap in the ranks of the regular patrons. Expenses kept time with shrinking custom, however; Mag cooked less, Peg carried home fewer loaves from Jenkins the baker, and Dick bought more vile cheap gin than rich aromatic Cave’s rum.

“I do not like to sound disloyal,” said Peg on a January day when the threat of snow found the Cooper’s Arms empty, “but surely some of our folk would find it easier to eat if they drank less.”

The look Dick gave Richard was wry, but he said nothing.

“My love,” said Richard, taking William Henry from his mother, “it is the way of the world, and we have managed to put a little aside because it is the way of the world. So hush, and do not think of disloyalty. Men and women are free to choose what they want to put in their stomachs. Some can bear the pain of doing without a daily half-pint of rum or gin, but some find the pain of doing without too hard to bear.” He shrugged, ruffled William Henry’s dark ringlets and smiled down into those amazing eyes, amber flecked with deep brown dots. “Pain is different for everybody, Peg.”

As Januarycrept onward, the tally of ships failed to reach expectations. From sympathy with the rebel cause, the feeling within the city was turning to increasingly bitter resentment. The Union Club at the Bush Inn, once engaged in inundating the King with petitions to cease taxing and trying to govern the colonies from afar, was stumbling into mortified silence; at the White Lion the Tories were roaring ever louder, inundating the King with formal avowals of allegiance and support, contributing to the cost of raising local regiments, and starting to ask questions about the two Whig Members of Parliament for Bristol, the Irishman Edmund Burke and the American Henry Cruger.

There, said the Steadfast Society, was Bristol, bleeding from almost a year of war already, with a Whig parliamentary team composed of a golden-tongued Irishman and a leaden-tongued American. Sentiments were changing, feelings were souring. Let all this business three thousand miles away get itself over and done with, let the chief business of the day be proper business! And damn the rebels!

On thenight of the 16th of January, while the tide was at its ebb, someone set fire to the Savannah La Mar, loading for Jamaica on the Broad Quay not far from Old Nick’s Entrance. She had been daubed with pitch, oil and turpentine, and luck alone had saved her; by the time the city’s two firemen had arrived with their forty-gallon water cart, several hundred shaken sailors and dock denizens had dealt with the blaze before serious damage had been done.

In the morning the port officials and bailiffs discovered that the Fame and the Hibernia, one to north and one to south of the Savannah La Mar, had also been soaked with incendiaries and set alight. For reasons no one could fathom, neither ship had so much as smoldered.

“Barratry in Bristol! The whole of the Quay could have gone up, and the backs, and then the city,” said Dick to Richard the moment he returned from the scene of this shipboard arson. “Low tide! Nothing to stop a good blaze leaping from ship to ship-Christ, Richard, it might have been as bad as London’s great fire!” And he shivered.

Nothing terrified people quite so effectively as fire. Not the worst the colliers of Kingswood could do could compare, for the angriest mob was a nothing alongside fire. Mobs were made of men and women with children tagging behind, whereas fire was the monstrous hand of God, the opening of the portals to Hell.

On the 18th of January, Cousin James-the-druggist, ashen-faced, ushered his weeping wife and those of his children still at home through Dick Morgan’s door.

“Will you look after Ann and the girls?” he asked, trembling. “I cannot persuade them that our house is safe.”

“Good God, Jim, what is it?”

“Fire.” He grasped at the counter to steady himself.

“Here,” said Richard, giving him a mug of best rum while Mag and Peg fluttered around the moaning Ann.

“Give her one too,” said Dick as Mr. James Thistlethwaite abandoned his manic quill to join them. “Now tell us, Jim.”

It took a full quarter-pint to calm Cousin James-the-druggist enough to speak. “In the middle of the night someone forced the door of my main warehouse-you know how strong it is, Dick, and how many chains and padlocks it has! He got at my turpentine, soaked a big box in a vat of it, and filled the box with tow soaked in more turpentine. Then he put the box against some casks of linseed oil, and lit it. The place was deserted, of course. No one saw him come, no one saw him go.”

“I do not understand!” cried Dick, quite as white as his first cousin. “We are right on the corner of Bell Lane, and I swear we have heard nothing, seen nothing- smelled nothing!”

“It would not burn,” said Cousin James-the-druggist in an odd voice. “I tell you, Dick, it would not burn! It should have burned! I found the box when I came to work. At first I thought the broken door meant someone after opiates or badly needed medicines, but the moment I got inside, I could smell the turpentine.” His grey-blue Morgan eyes shone with the light of the visionary. “It is a miracle!” he cried. “It is a miracle! God has been good, and I will give St. James’s a thousand pounds for its poorbox.”