Morgan’s Run (7 page)

“Let me go, Jem! Those pistols will go off!”

“Richard, Richard! I thought I’d not see ye again!”

“Not see me again? Why? Had I worked from dawn to dusk—and as you see, I am not—you would still have seen me in winter,” said Richard, detaching himself and holding out his arms to William Henry, who toddled into them. Then Peg came, smiling an apology with her eyes, to kiss him full upon the lips. Thus when Richard sat down at Jem Thistlethwaite’s table he felt as if his world had glued itself back together again; the chasm was not there.

When Dick handed him a tankard of beer he sipped at it, liking the slightly bitter taste but not desperate for it. The son of a temperate victualler, he too was temperate, drank only beer and then never enough to feel it. Which, had he realized, was why—apart from natural affection—Senhor Tomas Habitas prized him so. The work called for steady, skillful hands properly connected to a fresh, sharp mind, and it was rare to light upon a man who did not drink too much. Almost everybody drank too much. Mostly rum or gin. Threepence bought a half-pint of rum or, depending upon its quality, as much as a full pint of gin. Nor were there any laws on the books to punish excessive drinking, though there were laws to punish almost everything else. The Government made too much money from excise taxes to want to discourage drinking.

In Bristol more rum was made and consumed than gin; gin was what the poorest folk drank. Chief importer of sugar to the whole British Isles, Bristol quite naturally made itself the capital of Rum. As to strength, there was little difference between the two spirits, though rum was richer, lasted longer in the system and was more bearable the morning after.

Mr. Thistlethwaite drank rum of the best kind, and had settled upon the Cooper’s Arms as his home-away-from-home because Dick Morgan bought from the rum house of Mr. Thomas Cave in Redcliff; Cave’s rum was peerless.

So by the time that Richard walked in, Mr. Thistlethwaite was well away, more so than usual by three o’clock. He had missed Richard, as simple as that, and had assumed that from now on Richard would never be there before five and it came time for him to leave. That five was his inflexible rule represented a last instinct for self-preservation; he knew that were he to stay for one minute more, he would end lying permanently in the gutter which ran down the middle of Broad Street.

Delighted that Richard was still going to be a part of each tavern day, he righted himself unsteadily and prepared to take his leave. “Early, I know, but the sight of you, Richard, has quite overcome me,” he announced, weaving his way to the door. “Though I do not know why,” came the sound of his voice from Broad Street. “I really do not know why, for who are ye, save the son of my tavern-keeper? It is a mystery, a mystery.” His head, battered tricorn at a rakish angle, appeared around the jamb. “Is it possible that the eyes of a drunken man can plumb the future? Do I believe in premonitions? Hur hur hur! Call me Cassandra, for I swear I am a silly old woman. Ho ho ho, and off into the Beotian air go my Attic lungs!”

“Mad,” said Dick. “Mad as a March hare.”

The war
against the thirteen American colonies went on with, it seemed to the puzzled citizens of Bristol, so many English victories that news must come any day of American surrender. Yet that news never came. Admittedly the colonists had successfully invaded Boston and taken it off Sir William Howe, but Sir William had promptly removed himself to New York, apparently intending to divide and conquer by driving George Washington into New Jersey and placing himself squarely between the northern and southern colonies. His brother, Admiral Howe, had rolled up the fledgling American navy at Nassau and Narragansett Bay, so Britannia ruled the waves.

Until this time Pennsylvania’s colonial government had tried to steer a middle path and reconcile the two warring factions of loyalist and rebel; now, just as—to Bristol eyes, anyway—American defeat seemed inevitable, Pennsylvania repudiated its allegiance to the Crown and joined the rebels wholeheartedly! It made no sense, especially to Bristol’s Quakers, blood relatives.

In August of 1776 the news gazettes reported that the Continental Congress had accepted Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the mooted Declaration of Independence, and signed it into being without the consent of New York. President of the Congress, John Hancock was the first to sign, and with a flourish that his effigy, its emptied skin still dangling from the signpost of the American Coffee House, might well have envied. After General Washington’s ragged troops acclaimed the Declaration, New York ratified it. Independence was now unanimous, though New York around Manhattan remained loyalist. And the flag of the Continental Congress now consisted of thirteen stripes, red alternating with white.

Peace negotiations on Staten Island broke down after the colonists refused to rescind the Declaration of Independence, so Sir William Howe invaded New Jersey with his own English soldiers and 10,000 Hessian mercenaries the King had hired to stiffen his army. All fell before the English advance; Washington crossed the Delaware into Pennsylvania, then recrossed it in the teeth of a terrible winter to inflict a crushing defeat on the Hessians, wassailing at Trenton. After a second, smaller victory at Princeton, the rebel army retired into the Morristown hills and the reeling General Howe returned to Manhattan with his equally stunned second-in-command, Lord Cornwallis. Whose family owned Cornwallis House on Clifton Hill, and therefore was dear to every Bristol heart.

For Richard,
1776 had been a year of muskets and money; he had £400 in the Bristol Bank, and the twelve shillings per diem he donated to his father had enabled the Cooper’s Arms to keep its door open when many other taverns had closed theirs for good. Hardship gripped high, middling and low alike. Awful times.

The crime rate had soared beyond belief, and carried with it one peculiar symptom of this bitter, frustrating American war: convicts and the poor-without-a-parish were no longer being shipped to the thirteen colonies and sold there as indentured labor. Time honored and convenient, the practice had enabled the Government to implement the harshest punitive measures in Europe while simultaneously keeping its prison population down. For every Frenchman hanged, ten Englishmen were; for every German hanged, fifteen Englishmen were. An occasional woman was hanged. But the vast majority of those convicted of crimes of lesser degree than highway robbery, blatant murder or arson, were sold in job lots to contractors who hustled them aboard ships—many out of Bristol—transported them to some of the thirteen colonies, and there profitably resold them as white slaves. One difference between them and the black slaves lay in the fact that, theoretically at least, their bondage eventually came to an end. Often, however, it did not, particularly if the slaves were female. Moll Flanders had it good.

Transportation of white indentured labor was largely confined to some of the thirteen colonies because the plantation owners in the West Indies preferred negro labor. They believed that black people were used to the heat, worked better in it—and did not, when looked over, closely resemble the Master and Mistress. Now the transportation system had ground to a halt, but the English courts of quarter session and assizes did not in consequence cease to crack down hard on those accused of even the pettiest crime. English penal law was not designed to protect the rights of a few aristocrats; it was aimed at protecting the rights of all persons who had managed to acquire a modicum of wealth, no matter how small. Thus the prison populations swelled at an alarming rate, castles and old buildings were pressed into service as auxiliary places of detention, and the stream of convicted felons continued to pass in chains through gates both old and new.

At which point one Duncan Campbell, a London contractor and speculator of Scotch origins, conceived the idea of using old naval men o’ war put into ordinary—that is, retired from service—as prisons. He bought one such ship, Censor, moored her in the Thames at the Royal Arsenal, and filled her with 200 male convicts. A new law permitted convicted felons to be put to work on governmental business, and Censor’s felons were required to dredge the river’s reaches along this critical sea road as well as construct new docks—work no free man could be prevailed upon to do unless very well paid. Convict labor cost no more than food and lodging, both of which Mr. Duncan Campbell provided on Censor hulk. There were a few early mistakes; hammocks, Campbell discovered, were not beds suitable for felons, whose chains became badly tangled in their supports. So he switched to shelving for beds, and was able to increase Censor’s complement to 300 prisoners. His Britannic Majesty’s Government was mightily pleased, and happy to pay Campbell for his pains. Surplus felons could be stored on naval hulks until the war was over and wholesale transportation could begin again. What a relief!

To a tavern-keeper the explanation for petty crime was obvious; most of it occurred while its perpetrators were drunk. With the scarcity of jobs, rum or gin became increasingly precious to those who could perceive no ray of hope illuminating their lot. Silk garments, handkerchiefs and fripperies were the hallmark of more affluent folk. Men and women—even children—reduced to begging from the parish took out their rage and frustration in drinking as soon as a coin came their way, and then, drunk, pilfered silk garments, handkerchiefs, fripperies. Things they did not own, could not own. Things the better off prized. Things that—in London and Bristol, at least—might be sold to those who dealt in stolen goods for the price of another drink, another few hours of inebriated well-being. And when they were caught, off to the courts they shuffled to be sentenced to death—or to fourteen years—or, most frequently, to seven years. With the word “transportation” tacked on. Transportation to where? An unanswerable, therefore never asked, question.

As far
as Richard was concerned, 1777 ought simply to have been another year of muskets and money, but early in the New Year, while Washington and what troops he had left endured the ordeal of a frightful winter outside Morristown, the Morgans of the Cooper’s Arms received a shock. Mr. James Thistlethwaite abruptly announced his departure from Bristol.

Dick flopped onto a chair, something he did so rarely that his elbows were horny from leaning on the counter. “Leaving?” he asked feebly.
“Leaving?”

“Aye,” said Mr. Thistlethwaite aggressively, “leaving, damn ye!”

Peg and Mag began to cry; Richard shooed them upstairs with the bewildered William Henry to have their weep in private, then faced the apparently angry Mr. Thistlethwaite. “Jem, ye’re a fixture! Ye cannot leave!”

“I am not a fixture, and I am leaving!”

“Oh, sit down, man, sit down! And stop this prize-fighting posturing! We are not your adversaries,” said Richard. He looked stern. “Sit, Jem, and tell us why.”

“Ahah!” said Mr. Thistlethwaite, doing as bidden. “So you can come out of that timid shell. Does my going mean so much?”

“It is hideous,” said Richard. “Father, give me a beer and Jem some of Cave’s best.”

Dick got up and did as he was told.

“Now what’s amiss?” asked Richard.

“I am fed up, Richard, that is all. I have done my dash in Bristol. Who is there left to lampoon? Old Bishop Newton? I’d not do that to someone with wit enough to call Methodism a bastardized form of popery. And what else can I do to the Corporation? What more stinging quip is there than to say that Sir Abraham Isaac Elton is all jaw and no law, John Vernon is all law and no jaw, and Rowles Scudamore neither law nor jaw? I have exposed Daniel Harson for the Dissenting minister he once was, and John Powell for the medical man on a slaver he once was. No, I have shot my Bristol bolt, and I have a mind to seek greener pastures. So I am off to London.”

How to say tactfully that a shining light in Bristol might find itself obscured by the fog of a place twenty times larger than Bristol? “It is such a vast place,” Richard ventured.

“I have friends there,” Mr. Thistlethwaite countered.

“Ye’ll not change your mind?”

“I will not.”

“Then,” said Dick, reviving a little, “I drink to your good luck and good health, Jem.” He lifted his lip. “At least I will save the expense of quills and ink.”

“You will write to tell us how you are?” asked Richard somewhat later, by which time Mr. Thistlethwaite’s truculence had changed to maudlin self-pity.

“If you write to me.” The Bard of Bristol sniffled, wiped a tear away. “Oh, Richard, the world is a cruel place! And I have a mind to be cruel to it on a larger canvas than Bristol offers.”

Later that evening Richard sat William Henry on his lap and turned the child to face him. At two and a half, he was strongly knit and tall, and had, his father fancied, the face of a stern angel. It was those eyes, of course, so large and unique—truly unique, for no one could remember ever seeing their ale-and-pepper mix—but also the planes of his bones and the perfection of his skin. No matter where he went, people turned to look and marvel at his beauty, and this was not the judgment of a doting parent. By anybody’s standard, William Henry was a ravishing child.