Morgan's Run

  Walking swiftly now, Richard strode along Corn Street past John Weeks’s fabulous Bush Inn, headquarters of the Whig Union Club. From there he cut north up Small Street and emerged onto the Key at the Stone Bridge. The vista spread southward was extraordinary. It looked as if a very wide street had been filled with ships in skeletal rigging, just masts and yards and stays and shrouds above their beamy oaken bellies. Of the river Froom wherein they actually sat, nothing could be seen because of those ships in their multitudes, patiently waiting out the days of their twenty weeks’ turnaround.

  The tide had reached its ebb and was beginning to flood in again at a startling rate: the level of the water in both the Froom and the Avon rose thirty feet in around six and a half hours, then fell thirty. At the ebb the ships lay upon the foetid mud, which sloped steeply and tipped them sideways on their beams; at the flood, the ships rode afloat, as ships were built to do. Many a keel had hogged and buckled at the strain of lying sideways on Bristol mud.

  Richard’s mind, once over its instinctive reaction to that wide avenue of ships, returned to its rut.

  Lord God, hear my prayer! Keep my son safe. Do not take my son from meand from his mother. . . .

  He was not his father’s only son, though he was the elder; his brother, William, was a sawyer with his own business down along the St. Philip’s bank of the Avon near Cuckold’s Pill and the glasshouses, and he had three sisters all satisfactorily married to Free Men. There were nests of Morgans in several parts of the city, but the Morgans of Richard’s clan—perhaps emigrants from Wales in long ago times—had been resident for enough generations to have gained some standing; indeed, clan luminaries like Cousin James-the-druggist headed significant enterprises, belonged to the Merchant Venturers and the Corporation, gave hefty donations to the poorhouses, and hoped one day to be Mayor.

  Richard’s father was not a clan luminary. Nor was he a clan disgrace. After some elementary schooling he had served his time as an apprentice victualler, then, certificated and a Free Man who had paid his fine, he struggled toward the goal of keeping his own tavern. A socially acceptable marriage had been arranged for him; Margaret Biggs came from good farming stock near Bedminster and enjoyed the cachet of being able to read, though she could not write. The children, commencing with a girl, came along at intervals too frequent to render the grief of losing an occasional child truly unbearable. When Dick learned sufficient control to withdraw before ejaculating, the children ceased at two living sons, three living daughters. A good brood, small enough to make providing for them feasible. Dick wanted at least one fully literate son, and centered his hopes on Richard when it became apparent that William, two years younger, was no scholar.

  So when Richard turned seven he was enrolled at Colston’s School for Boys and donned the famous blue coat which informed Bristolians that his father was poor but respectable, staunchly Church of England. And over the course of the next five years literacy and numeracy were drummed into him. He learned to write a fair hand, do sums in his head, plod through Caesar’s Gallic War, Cicero’s speeches, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, stimulated by the acid sting of the cane and the caustic bite of the master’s comments. Since he was a good though not shining scholar and owned into the bargain a quiet attractiveness, he survived the late Mr. Colston’s philanthropic institution better than most, and got more out of it.

  At twelve, it was time to leave and espouse a trade or craft in keeping with his education. Much to the surprise of his relations, he went in a different direction than any Morgan thus far. Among his chief assets was a talent for things mechanical, for putting together the pieces of a puzzle; and allied to that was a patience truly remarkable in one so young. Of his own choice, he was apprenticed to Senhor Tomas Habitas the gunsmith.

  This decision secretly pleased his father, who liked the idea of the Morgans’ producing an artisan rather than a tradesman. Besides which, war was a part of life, and guns a part of war. A man who could make and mend them was unlikely to become cannon fodder on a battlefield.

  For Richard, the seven years of his apprenticeship were a joy when it came to the work and the learning, even if a trifle on the cheerless side when it came to physical comfort. Like all apprentices, he was not paid, lived in his master’s house, waited on him at his table, dined off the scraps, and slept on the floor. Luckily Senhor Tomas Habitas was a kind master and a superb gunsmith. Though he could make gorgeous dueling pistols and sporting guns, he was shrewd enough to realize that in order to prosper in those areas he must needs be a Manton, and a Manton he could not be outside of London. So he had settled for making the military musket known affectionately to every soldier and marine as “Brown Bess,” all 46 inches of her—be they wood of stock or steel of barrel—brown as a nut.

  At nineteen Richard was certificated and moved out of the Habitas household, though not out of the Habitas workshop. There he continued, a master craftsman now, to make Brown Bess. And he married, something he was not allowed to do while an apprentice. His wife was the child of his mother’s brother and therefore his own first cousin, but as the Church of England had no objection to that, he wed his bride in St. James’s church under the auspices of Cousin James-of-the-clergy. Though arranged, it had been a love match, and the couple had only fallen more deeply in love as the years rolled on. Not without some difficulties of nomenclature, for Richard Morgan, son of Richard Morgan and Margaret Biggs, had taken another Margaret Biggs to wife.

  While the Habitas gunsmithy had thrived that had not been so awkward, for the young pair lived in a two-roomed rented apartment on Temple Street across the Avon, just around the corner from the Habitas workshop and the Jewish synagogue.

  The marriage had taken place in 1767, three years after the Seven Years’ War against France had been concluded by an unpopular peace; heavily in debt despite victory, England had to increase her revenues by additional taxes and decrease the cost of her army and navy by massive retrenchments. Guns were no longer necessary. So one by one the Habitas artisans and apprentices disappeared until the establishment consisted of Richard and Senhor Tomas Habitas himself. Then finally, just after the birth of little Mary in 1770, Habitas was reluctantly obliged to let Richard go.

  “Come and work for me,” Dick Morgan had said cordially. “Guns may come and go, but rum is absolutely eternal.”

  It had answered very well, despite the problem with names. Richard’s mother had always been known as Mag and Richard’s wife as Peg, two diminutives for Margaret. The real trouble was that save for quirky Protestant Dissenters who christened their male progeny “Cranfield” or “Onesiphorus,” almost every male in England was John, William, Henry, Richard, James or Thomas, and almost every female was Ann, Catherine, Margaret, Elizabeth or Mary. One of the few customs which embraced every class from highest to lowest.

  Peg, deliciously cuddly and willing Peg, turned out not to conceive easily. Mary was her first pregnancy, nearly three years after she had married, and it was not for want of trying. Naturally both parents had hoped for a son, so it was a disappointment when they had to find a girl’s name. Richard’s fancy lighted upon Mary, not common in the clan and (as his father said frankly) a name with a papist taint to it. No matter. From the moment in which he took his newborn daughter into his arms and gazed down on her in awe, Richard Morgan discovered in himself an ocean of love as yet unexplored. Perhaps because of his patience, he had always liked and gotten on famously with children, but this had not prepared him for what he felt when he beheld little Mary. Blood of his blood, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh.

  Thus his new trade of victualler suited Richard far more than gun-smithing now that he had a child; a tavern was a family business, a place wherein he could constantly be with his daughter, see her with her mother, watch the miracle of Peg’s beautiful breast serve as a cushion for the babe’s head while the tiny mouth worked at getting milk. Nor did Peg stint her milk, terrified of the day when Mary would have to be weaned from the breast on to small beer. N
o water for a Bristol child, any more than for a London one! There was not much intoxicant in small beer, but it did have some. Those babes put to it too young, said Peg the farmer’s daughter (echoed by Mag), always grew up to be drunkards. Though not prone to espouse women’s ideas, Dick Morgan, veteran of forty years in the tavern business, heartily concurred. Little Mary was over two years old before Peg commenced to wean her.

  They had run the Bell then, Dick’s first tavern of his own. It was in Bell Lane and part of the tortuous complex of tenements, warehouses and underground chambers in control of Cousin James-the-druggist, who shared the south side of the narrow alley with the equally rambling premises of the American woolbrokering firm of Lewsley & Co. It must be added that Cousin James-the-druggist had a splendid shop for local retail on Corn Street; he made most of his money, however, in manufacturing and exporting drugs and chemical compounds from corrosive sublimate of mercury (used to treat syphilitic chancres) to laudanum and other opiates.

  When the license of the Cooper’s Arms around the corner on Broad Street had come up last year, Dick Morgan had leaped at it. A tavern on Broad Street! Why, even after paying the Corporation £21 a year in rent, the proprietor of a tavern on Broad Street could not help but see a profit of £100 a year!* It had answered well, as the Morgan family was not afraid of hard work, Dick Morgan never watered down his rum and gin, and the food available at dinner time (around noon) and supper time (around six) was excellent. Mag was a splendid cook of plain food, and all the petty regulations dating from the time of Good Queen Bess which hedged a Bristol tavern-keeper around—no bread to be baked on the premises, no animals killed to avoid buying from a butcher—were, thought Dick Morgan, actually benefits. If a man paid his bills on time, he could always get special terms from his wholesalers. Even when things were hard.

  * English money was divided into pounds, shillings and pence, with the guinea as an oddment. There were 21 shillings in a guinea, 20 shillings in a pound, and 12 pence in a shilling. A ha’penny was one half a penny, a farthing one quarter of a penny.

  I wish, God, said Richard to that invisible Being, that Thou wert not socruel. For Thy wrath so often seems to fall upon those who have not offendedThee. Preserve my son, I pray. . . .

  Around him on its heights and marshes the city of Bristol swam in a sea of gritty smoke, the spires of its many churches wellnigh hidden. The summer had been an unusually hot and dry one, and this August ending had seen no relief. The leaves of the elms and limes on College Green to the west and Queen Square to the south looked tired and faded, stripped of gloss and glitter. Chimneys gouted black plumes everywhere—the foundries in the Friers and Castle Green, the sugar houses around Lewin’s Mead, Fry’s chocolate works, the tall cones of the glasshouses and the squatter lime kilns. If the wind were not in the west, this atmospheric inferno received additional fugs from Kingswood, a place no Bristolian voluntarily went. The coal-fields and the massive metalworks upon them bred a half-savage people quick to anger and possessed of an abiding hatred for Bristol. No wonder, given the hideous fumes and wretched damps of Kingswood.

  He was moving now into real ship’s territory: Tombs’s dry dock, another dry dock, the reek of hot pitch, the unwaled ships abuilding looking like the rib cages of gargantuan animals. In Canon’s Marsh he took the rope walk through the marsh rather than the soggy footpath which meandered along the Avon’s bank, nodding to the ropemakers as they walked their third-of-a-mile inexorably twisting the hempen or linen strands, already twisted at least once, into whatever was the order of the day—cables, hawsers, lines. Their arms and shoulders were as corded as the rope they wound, their hands so hardened that all feeling had left them—how could they find pleasure in a woman’s skin?

  Past the single glasshouse at the foot of Back Lane, past a cluster of lime kilns, and so to the beginnings of Clifton. The stark bulk of Brandon Hill rose in the background, and before him in a steep tumble of wooded hills going down to the Avon was the place of which he dreamed. Clifton, where the air was clear and the dells and downs rippled shivers as the wind ruffled maidenhair and eyebright, heath in purple flower, marjoram and wild geraniums. The trees sparkled, ungrimed, and there were glimpses of the huge mansions which stood in their little parks high up—Manilla House, Goldney House, Cornwallis House, Clifton Hill House. . . .

  He wanted desperately to live in Clifton. Clifton folk were not consumptive, did not sicken of the flux or the malignant quinsy, the fever or the smallpox. That was as true of the humble folk in the cottages and rude shelters along the Hotwells road at the bottom of the hills as it was of the haughty folk who strolled outside the pillared majesty of their palaces aloft. Be he a sailor, a ropemaker, a shipwright’s journeyman or a lord of the manor, Clifton folk did not sicken and die untimely. Here one might keep one’s children.

  Mary, who used to be the light of his life. She had, they said, his grey-blue eyes and waving blackish hair, her mother’s nicely shaped nose, and the flawless tan skin both her parents owned. The best of both worlds, Richard used to say, laughing, the little creature cuddled to his chest with her eyes—his eyes—upturned to his face in adoration. Mary was her dadda’s girl, no doubt of it; she could not get enough of him, nor he of her. Two people glued together, was how the faintly disapproving Dick Morgan had put it. Though busy Peg had simply smiled and let it happen, never voicing to her beloved Richard her knowledge that he had usurped a part of the child’s affections due to her, the mother. After all, did it matter from whom the love came, provided there was love? Not every man was a good father, and most were too quick to administer a beating. Richard never lifted a hand.

  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, w
eeping 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 excellent thing, 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.