Morgan’s Run (29 page)

“Richard Morgan, I hereby sentence ye to seven years’ transportation to Africa. William Insell, ye may go free.” He banged his gavel to wake Sir George Nares up. “The court will come together again at ten of the clock tomorrow morning. God save the King.”

“God save the King,” everybody echoed dutifully.

The javelin man prodded the prisoners; Richard turned to descend into the dock well without bothering to look in Mr. John Trevillian Ceely Trevillian’s direction. Ceely had passed from his life as all things passed. The Ceelys did not matter.

And by the time he had plodded halfway back to Gloucester Gaol Richard found himself truly happy; he had just realized that very shortly he would be rid of Weeping Willy.

The sun
was nudging the western horizon when Richard and Willy—still weeping, presumably from joy—passed through the castle gate under escort by two gaolers. Here Richard was detained, Willy sent onward. Is this the beginning of the difference between a man awaiting trial and a convicted felon? His gaoler indicated the head gaoler’s house; Richard moved off as passively as he did everything under an official eye. After three months he knew all the gaolers, good, bad and indifferent, though he avoided striking up any sort of acquaintance with them and never called any by his name.

He was ushered into a comfortable-looking room furnished as a place for social congress. It contained three people: Mr. James Hyde the attorney and the Cousins James. Both the Cousins James were in tears and Mr. Hyde looked mournful. In fact, thought Richard as the door was closed behind him with his escort on its far side, they look worse than I feel. This has come as no surprise, I knew it would happen thus in my bones. Justice is blind, but not in the romantic sense they taught us at Colston’s. It is blind to individuals and human motives; its dispensers believe the obvious and are incapable of subtleties. All of that witness testimony from the Jacob’s Well people had its roots in gossip; Ceely merely entered the gossip chain and contributed the right mite. Robert Jones he paid—well, he paid all of them, but save for Jones he was able to disguise his payments as thoughtful gifts to folk who know him and his family and its servants. Oh, they understood! But on oath they could deny had anybody asked. Jones he bought outright. Or else Annemarie fed Jones the story of the plot. In which case she belonged to Ceely body and soul, was involved in the conspiracy from its beginning. If that is so, then she lay in wait for me and all of it was a fabulous lie. I have been convicted on the testimony of a witness who did not appear: Annemarie Latour. And the judge, having asked me where she was, did not follow through.

His silence after he entered the room enabled the Cousins James to mop their eyes and compose themselves. Mr. James Hyde took the time to examine Richard Morgan at closer quarters than the court room had allowed. A striking fellow, big and tall—a pity he had not worn a wig, it would have transformed him. The case had hinged upon whether the accused was a decent man insulted beyond bearing at finding his wife in bed with another man, or whether the accused had, so to speak, cashed in on the opportunity his wife’s infidelity had offered. Of course he knew from the Cousins James that the woman was not his client’s wife, but had not made capital of it because, were she known as a mere whore, the case would have been blacker. It was the unveiling of a plot had done for Richard Morgan; judges were notoriously prejudiced against accused felons who committed their crimes with cold-blooded forethought. And juries found as the judge instructed them to find.

Cousin James-the-druggist broke the long silence, handkerchief tucked away. “We have bought this room and all the time we want with you,” he said. “Richard, I am so sorry! It was a complete fabrication—every one of those people, however menial, was a part of Ceely’s circle.”

“What I want to know,” said Richard, sitting down, “is why Mr. Benjamin Fisher of the Excise did not appear for me as a character witness? Had he, things might have gone very differently.”

The Reverend James’s mouth compressed to a thin line. “He was too busy, he said, to make a journey of eighty miles. The truth is that he is busy concluding a deal with Thomas Cave, and cares not about the fate of his chief witness.”

“However,” said Mr. Hyde, who looked far less imposing out of his attorney’s gear, “ye may be sure, Mr. Morgan, that when I write your letter of appeal to Lord Sydney, the Secretary of State for Home Affairs, I will have a letter from Mr. Fisher attached. But not Benjamin. His brother John, the Commander.”

“Can I not appeal in a court?” Richard asked.

“No. Your appeal takes the form of a letter begging the King’s mercy. I will draft it as soon as I return to London.”

“Have some port, Richard,” said Cousin James-the-druggist.

“I have had naught to eat today, so I dare not.”

The door opened and a woman brought in a tray bearing bread, butter, grilled sausages, parsnips, cabbage and a tankard. She put it down without any expression on her face, bobbed a curtsey to the gentlemen, and departed.

“Eat, Richard. The head gaoler told me that supper has been served already in the gaol, so I asked for food.”

“Thank you, Cousin James, truly thank you,” said Richard with feeling, and dug in. But the first piece of sausage on his knife’s point was subjected to a long sniff before being gingerly tasted; satisfied, Richard chewed with gusto and carved off another slice. “Sausages,” he said, his mouth full, “are usually made from rotten meat when they are served to felons.”

His meal finished, Richard did sip at the glass of port, then grimaced. “It is so long since I have had sweet things that I seem to have lost my appetite for them. We get no butter with our bread, let alone jam.”

“Oh, Richard!” chorused the Cousins James.

“Do not feel sorry for me. My life is not over because I must spend the next seven years of it under some form or other of imprisonment,” said Richard, rising to his feet. “I am six-and-thirty and I will be six months short of four-and-forty when my sentence is done. The men of our family are long-lived, and I intend to keep my health and my strength. Those five hundred pounds from the Excise Office are mine no matter what happens, and I will write to the lackadaisical Mr. Benjamin Fisher directing that he pay them to you, Cousin James-the-druggist. Take what I have cost ye out of them, and use the rest to keep me supplied with dripstones, rags, clothes and shoes. With some to the Reverend James for books, including those he has already given me. I am not idle here, and my labor means that I am fed. But on Sundays I read. A blessing.”

“Remember, Richard, that we love you dearly,” said Cousin James-the-druggist, hugging and kissing him.

“And we pray for you,” said Cousin James-of-the-clergy.

Willy Insell
was the only prisoner acquitted at the assizes held in Gloucester during that March of 1785. Six were sentenced to be hanged: Maisie Harding for receiving stolen goods, Betty Mason for stealing fifteen guineas, Sam Day for stealing two pounds of weaving yarn, Bill Whiting for stealing a sheep, Isaac Rogers for highway robbery, and Joey Long for stealing a silver watch. The rest, some ten in all, were sentenced to seven years’ transportation to Africa, wherein His Britannic Majesty possessed no formal colony. Richard was well aware that had the Cousins James not testified as to his character, he too would have gotten the rope; though Bristol was far away, two of its leading citizens could not be quite ignored.

More importantly, how were they all going to fit into this tiny place? Within a week the answer was manifest: nine of the prisoners died of a malignant quinsy in the throat, as did the remaining children and ten debtors on the Bridewell side.

The situation in England’s prisons was absolutely desperate, which had not prevented the Gloucester judges from handing down their drastic sentences.

Between 1782 and 1784 three attempts had been made to deliver felons to America. The Swift was turned away on her first voyage, though some of her transportees escaped, assisted to do so by the Americans. On her second voyage in August of 1783 she took 143 prisoners on board and sailed from the Thames for Nova Scotia. But she got no farther than Sussex, where her human cargo mutinied and beached the ship near Rye. After which they scattered to the four winds. Only 39 were recaptured; of those, six were hanged and the rest sentenced to transportation to America for life. Just as if transportation to America were still an option, so slowly did the mills of government grind, not to mention the judicial mills.

In March of 1784 a third attempt to unload transportees in America was tried. This time the ship was the Mercury and the destination was Georgia (which, along with the other twelve newly united states, had already served stern notice to England that it would not, repeat,
would not
accept any transported felons). The Mercury took 179 men, women and children felons aboard and sailed from London. The mutiny occurred off the coast of Devon and the Mercury fetched up near Torbay. Some were still on board when recaptured, most had fled; 108 all told were apprehended, a few having ranged as far afield as Bristol. Though many of them were sentenced to hang, only two actually were. The political climate was shifting.

The Recovery in January of 1785 represented the last attempt of a disorganized nature to relieve gaol overcrowding; she took a cargo of felons to the equatorial wetlands of Africa and dumped them ashore without guards, supervision or much by way of necessities to survive. They died hideously, and the African experiment was never repeated. Clearly future transportees would have to be cared for in ways less provocative of public scandal. Between the prison reformers John Howard and Jeremy Bentham, the Quaker agitators against slavery and African expansion in general, and the two new names of Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce looming on the horizon, Mr. William Pitt the Younger’s fledgling government deemed it wise to provide no ammunition for social crusaders of any kind. Especially since Bentham and Wilberforce were important men in Whig Westminster. The extra taxes economic necessity had made unavoidable were odious enough. Mr. William Pitt the Younger owned one quality in common with a convicted felon named Richard Morgan: he intended to survive for many years to come. And in the meantime, Jeremy Bentham was allowed to tinker with the plans for the new Gloucester Gaol, while Lord Sydney of the Home Department was instructed to find somewhere—anywhere!—to dump England’s huge surplus of convicts.

In the
as yet unmodified Gloucester Gaol disease and proximity worked their wills.

Weeping Willy Insell, still weeping, was discharged, a free man, on the 5th of April. On the same day Mr. James Hyde the attorney forwarded the Humble Petition of Richard Morgan to Lord Sydney, together with a letter from Mr. John Fisher, Commander of the Bristol Excise Office. Lord Sydney’s indefatigable and highly efficient secretary, Mr. Evan Nepean, forwarded it on the 15th of April to the chambers of Sir James Eyre in Bedford Row; it would be up to him, the presiding judge in Morgan’s case, to review that case and advise Lord Sydney as to whether the King’s Mercy might or might not be extended to Richard Morgan. All very prompt, given that the trial had taken place on the 23rd of March. But there in Bedford Row the Humble Petition of Richard Morgan moldered; Mr. Baron Sir James Eyre was so busy that he had not the time to deal with any petitions, humble or otherwise.

In late
July a letter came from Mr. Jem Thistlethwaite, who had disappeared from his lodgings and the London scene at much the same date as William Henry had vanished. Richard took it from Old Mother Hubbard with a sinking sensation in his chest; he would now have to open up that wound and air it. From the time that he had entered the Bristol Newgate it had been buried beneath conscious thought. Though what he had not realized was that his blotting out of William Henry had generated his determination to survive, even spurred him to perform the rituals he had established for himself, the rituals of purification which set him apart from all his fellows and caused them to regard him as somewhere between untouchable and mad. Why survive? To get through these seven years in a fit state to resume his search for William Henry, buried deep in his mind.

“Richard, I have just received a letter from your father, and I am utterly overset by his awful news. Getting through the last few gallons of my pipe of rum apparently caused me to
think
I had written to inform you of my intended flight, but that letter was either not written or went astray. I have been absent abroad since June of last year—Italy beckoned, I went running into her glorious embrace. It is our combined luck that upon my return a bare week ago, I was able to engage my old lodgings again, and so your father’s pages reached me.

“I have always known that your life would not go as you thought it would—do you remember? You said, ‘I was born in Bristol and I will die in Bristol.’ Even as you said it, William Henry on your knee, I understood that it would not turn out so. I feared for you. And I, who am quite incapable of love, loved you then as I love you now. I just do not know the how or why, save that I see something in you that you do not realize is there.