Morgan’s Run (9 page)

“I wrote a brilliant—and very well received!—article upon the 5,500 Sons of Liberty taken prisoner when Sir Henry Clinton captured Charles Town. They have been impressed into our own navy! A nice touch, eh? My article revolved around a peculiar fact: that American officers do not dare to flog their soldiers or sailors! Imagine then what the Sons of Liberty think when the dear old English cat-with-nine-tails flays the hide from their backs and bottoms!

“I also wrote a defense of General Benedict Arnold’s defection, which I regard as a simple consequence of this plaguey slow war. I believe that he and his other turncoat colleagues have grown tired of enduring. The comforts of English commands and pensions must loom large for many American senior officers. Not to mention the attractions of English
professionalism.
It must surely be galling for a spanking-smart commander to see his ragged troops shoeless, hatless, mutinous from lack of pay
and
independent enough to tell him to fuck himself if they do not like his orders. No cat!

“I have laid down £100 at odds of ten-to-one that the rebels will win. Which means that eventually I will be £1,000 richer.

Eventually. Ye gods, Richard, how this wretched war drags on!

Parliament and the King are ruining England.”

But Richard’s mind was filled with a pain much closer to home than a war 3,000 miles away. Peg was turning in on herself.

She had her reasons: she would have no more children, William Henry was her sole hope, and Richard was not there all day to gentle her out of her moods and depressions.

Is it because as we grow older we are incapable of sustaining the vividness of our youthful dreams? Does life itself snuff them out? Is that what is happening to Peg? Is that what is happening to me? I used to have such wondrous dreams—the cottage in Clifton amid a garden full of flowers, a handsome pony to ride into Bristol and a trap to take my family up to Durdham Down for picnics, very pleasant congress with my neighbors of like estate, a dozen children and all the thrills and perils of watching them mature. As if I were naught save a witness to the magical purposes of God, warm in His hand, good to mine own, offending no one. Yet here am I turned two-and-thirty, and none of it has come to pass. I have a small fortune in the Bristol Bank, one chick in my nest, and I am doomed to live in my father’s house forever. I will never be my own man, for my wife, whom I love too dearly to hurt, is terrified of change. Terrified that she will lose her one chick. How to tell her that her terror is a temptation to God? Long ago I learned that trouble comes when one makes too much of a song and dance, that the best way to avoid trouble is to be quiet, draw no attention to oneself.

His love for William Henry had subtly changed as a result of Peg’s obsession with the child. What had been fear that their son would sicken or go wandering had turned to pity at their son’s plight. If he ran rather than walked, even inside the tavern, Peg would swoop upon him, ask him why he was running. When Dick took William Henry for his daily walk, Peg insisted on accompanying them, so the boy was doomed to walk hand-in-hand, never to run free. If he tried to stand on the very edge of the Key Head and count (he could count to 100) the number of ships in that amazing avenue, Peg snatched him away with a hard word for Dick’s carelessness. The greatest pity of it was that the child was not defiant, didn’t have that drive to assert his independence that most boys of six owned almost to excess.

“I have been talking to Senhor Habitas,” Richard said one long summer evening after the Cooper’s Arms had closed. “There is no fear that Tower Arms will cease to place orders with us for a good time to come, yet things have settled down into such regularity that we can spare attention for someone unskilled.” He drew a big breath and looked at Peg across the supper table. “From now on, I am going to take William Henry to work with me.”

He had intended to go on and explain that it was only for a little while, that the boy desperately needed the stimulus of new experiences and fresh faces, that he too owned that patience, that mechanical aptitude, that love for fitting together the pieces of a puzzle. But none of it was said.

Peg began to scream. “No, no, no!” came her thin shrieks, so terrifying that William Henry flinched, shivered, scrambled down from his chair and ran to hide his head in his father’s lap.

Dick clenched his fists and looked down at them, mouth set; Mag got up, plucked a pitcher of water off the counter and threw its contents in Peg’s face. She stopped screaming, began to howl.

“It was just an idea,” Richard said to his father.

“Not one of your better ones, Richard.”

“I thought—here, William Henry!” He put his arms around the boy and lifted him to sit on his lap, with a glare at Dick that forbade any comment; Dick thought his grandson too old to be cuddled by his father.

“It is all right, William Henry, it is all right.”

“Mama?” the child asked, skin bleached white, eyes enormous.

“Mama came over unwell, but she will be better soon. See? Grandmama knows what to do. I said something I ought not, that is all,” Richard ended, rubbing his son’s back and gazing at Dick with an awful desire to laugh. Not from amusement. From madness. “I cannot do anything right, Father,” he said. “I meant no harm.”

“I know,” said Dick, got up and went to pull the cat’s tail. “Here, have a real drop,” he said, handing Richard a mug. “I know ye don’t like rum, but sometimes strong medicine is the best.”

To his surprise, Richard discovered that the rum did him good, steadied his nerves and deadened his pain. “Father, what am I going to do?” he asked then.

“Not take William Henry to Habitas’s with ye, at any rate.”

“She is something worse than merely unwell, ain’t she?”

“I fear so, Richard. The worst of it is that it is not good for him to be so cosseted.”

“Who is ‘him’?” asked William Henry.

Both men looked at him, then at each other.

“ ‘Him,’ ” said Richard with decision, “is you, William Henry. Ye’re old enough to be told that your mama worries and fusses about you too much.”

“I know that, Dadda,” said William Henry. He climbed off Richard’s knee and went to stand beside his mother, pat her heaving shoulders. “Mama, you must not worry so. I am a big boy now.”

“But he is a little boy!” Peg wailed after Richard had taken her upstairs and put her on their bed. “Richard, how could you be so stupid? A babe in a gunsmithy!”

“Peg, we make guns, we do not use them,” said Richard patiently. “William Henry is old enough to be”—he searched frantically for a telling word—
“broadened.”

She rolled away from him. “That is ridiculous! How can anyone who calls a tavern ‘home’ be in need of broadening?”

“A tavern exposes a child to naught save folly,” said Richard, keeping the exasperation out of his voice. “Since his eyes could see, he has witnessed inebriation, self-pity, incautious comments, fisticuffs, profanity, lewd behavior and disgusting messes. You think that your presence makes it acceptable, that he cannot be harmed, but I too was a tavern-keeper’s child, and well do I remember what tavern life did to me. Frankly, I was glad to go to board at Colston’s, and gladder still not to serve my apprenticeship as a victualler. It would do William Henry the world of good to meet and have congress with sober men.”

“You will
not
take him to Habitas’s!” she spat.

“I can see that for myself, Peg, ye’ve no need to tell me. But this episode has shown me,” he said, sinking onto the bed and putting a hand on her shoulder, “that it is time to speak. You cannot keep William Henry wrapped in swaddling clothes for the rest of his childhood for no better reason than that he is our only child. Today has made me understand that it is high time our son was allowed a little more freedom. You must learn to let William Henry go now, for next year he will be at Colston’s School, and that I insist upon no matter what.”

“I cannot let him go!” she cried.

“You must. If you do not, Peg, then it is not your child who occupies your thoughts. It is you yourself.”

“I know, I know, I know!” she wept through her fingers, rocking. “But how can I stop? He is all I have—all I will ever have!”

“You have me.”

For a moment she did not answer. “Yes,” she said eventually, “I have you. But it is not the same, Richard, it is not the same. If anything were to happen to William Henry, I would die.”

Most of the light had gone; a grey little ray seeped through one of the cracks in the partition and rested like a cobweb on Richard Morgan’s face as he sat looking down on his wife. No, it is not the same, he thought. It is not the same.

Colston’s School
for Boys had enabled many of the sons of the better class of Bristol’s poor to become lettered. It was by no means the only such; every religious denomination except the Roman Catholics had charity schools, particularly the Church of England. Only two of them had distinctive uniforms for their charity pupils, however. Colston’s boys wore blue coats, the Red Maids wore red dresses. Both Church of England, though the Red Maids were not so lucky; they were taught to read but not to write, and most of their time was taken up with embroidering silk waistcoats and coats for the gentry, work for which their mistresses were paid but they were not. Literacy and numeracy were better spread among Bristol’s males than in any other English city, including London. Elsewhere they tended to be the mark of the wealthy.

Colston’s 100 charity boys were boarders, of course, a fate which had befallen Richard; due to school and apprenticeship, he had seen his parents only on Sundays and during vacations between the ages of seven and nineteen. Imagine Peg coping with
that!
Luckily Colston’s provided another mode of education; for a fat fee, the child of a prosperous man could attend between seven in the morning and two in the afternoon from Mondays to Saturdays as a day pupil. With generous holidays, of course; no schoolmaster wished more punishment upon himself than the Church of England and the late Mr. Colston’s will prescribed.

To William Henry, trotting along beside his grandfather (Mag had thrown a temper tantrum which had effectively prevented Peg’s coming too) on that first morning, more than a gate to school and learning was being thrown open; this was the first day of a whole new life, and he was dying of curiosity. Perhaps had he been let go with Richard to see what gun-smithing was like it might not have gripped him so urgently, but the prison walls his mother had erected around him remained unbreached, and he was very tired of them. A more passionate and impulsive child would have railed at them with evident frustration, but William Henry was as patient and as self-controlled as his father. His watchword was “wait.” And now, at last, the waiting was over.

Colston’s School for Boys looked no different from two dozen other piles which rejoiced in titles like school or poorhouse or hospital or workhouse; grimy and not very well kept up, the glass in its windows never cleaned, its plaster shabby and its timbers crooked. Damp pervaded it from foundations to Tudor chimneys, the interior had never been designed for instruction, and the smell of the Froom mere yards away was nauseating for any save a native Bristolian nose.

It had a gate and a yard and what seemed like a thousand boys, perhaps half of them wearing the famous blue coat. Like the other paying day pupils, William Henry was not required to wear it; some of the day pupils were the sons of aldermen or Merchant Venturers who had no wish to besmirch their offspring with the taint of charity.

A tall, spindling man in the black suit and starched white stock of a clergyman approached Dick and William Henry, smiling to reveal discolored, rotting teeth: a rum drinker.

“Reverend Prichard,” said Dick, bowing.

“Mister Morgan.” The dark eyes turned to William Henry and widened. “This is Richard’s son?”

“Yes, this is William Henry.”

“Then come, William Henry.” And the Reverend Prichard set off across the yard without a backward glance.

William Henry followed, also without a backward glance; he was too busy digesting the chaos a boys’ schoolyard was before discipline cracked down.

“It is fortunate for you,” said the day pupil master, “that your birthday should coincide with the commencement of your schooling, Master William Henry Morgan. You will start learning with A for apple and the two-times table. I see ye have your slate, good.”

“Yes, sir,” said William Henry, whose manners were excellent.

That was the last collected thing he was to say unbidden until dinner time in the refectory, nor were his thought processes in much better order. It was so confusing! There were so many rules, none of which seemed to make any sense. Standing. Sitting. Kneeling. Praying. Parroting words. How to answer a query, how not to answer a query. Who did what to whom. Whereabouts this was, versus that.