Morgan’s Run

PART ONE

From

August of 1775

until

October of 1784

“We are at war!” cried Mr. James Thiftlethwaite.

Every head save Richard Morgan’s lifted and turned toward the door, where a bulky figure stood brandishing a sheet of flimsy. For a moment a pin might have been heard dropping, then a confused babble of exclamations erupted at every table in the tavern except for Richard Morgan’s. Richard had paid the stirring announcement scant heed: what did war with the thirteen American colonies matter, compared to the fate of the child he held on his lap? Cousin James-the-druggist had inoculated the little fellow against the smallpox four days ago, and now Richard Morgan waited, agonized, to see if the inoculation would take.

“Come in, Jem, read it to us,” said Dick Morgan, Mine Host and Richard’s father, from behind his counter.

Though the noonday sun shone outside and light did diffuse through the bullioned panes of Crown glass in the windows of the Cooper’s Arms, the large room was dim. So Mr. James Thistlethwaite strolled over to the counter and the rays of an oil lamp, the butt of a horse pistol protruding from each greatcoat pocket. Spectacles perched upon the end of his nose, he started to read aloud, voice rising and falling in dramatic cadences.

Some of what he said did penetrate the fog of Richard Morgan’s worry-snatches, phrases only: “ ‘in open and avowed rebellion… the utmost endeavors to suppress such rebellion, and bring the traitors to justice… ’ ”

Feeling the contempt in his father’s gaze, Richard genuinely tried to concentrate. But surely the fever was beginning? Was it? If so, then the inoculation was definitely taking. And if it did take, would William Henry be one of those who suffered the full disease anyway? Died anyway? Dear God, no!

Mr. James Thistlethwaite was arriving at his peroration. “ ‘The die is now cast! The colonies must either submit or triumph!’ ” he thundered.

“What an odd way for the King to put it,” said Mine Host.

“Odd?”

“It sounds as if the King deems a colonial triumph possible.”

“Oh, I doubt that very much, Dick. His speech writer-some scurvy undersecretary to his bum boy Lord Bute, I hazard a guess-is fascinated with the balances of rhetoric-ah?” This last word was accompanied by a gesture, forefinger pointing to mouth.

Mine Host grinned and ran a measure of rum into a small pewter mug, then turned to chalk a slash on the slate fixed to his wall.

“Dick, Dick! My news merits one on the house!”

“No it does not. We would have heard sooner or later.” Mine Host leaned his elbows on his counter in the place where they had worn two slight depressions and stared at the armed and greatcoated Mr. Thistlethwaite-mad as a March hare! The summer’s day was sweltering. “Seriously, Jem, it is not exactly a bolt from the blue, but these are shocking tidings all the same.”

No other voice attempted to participate in their conversation; Dick Morgan stood well with his patrons, and Jem Thistlethwaite had long enjoyed a reputation as one of Bristol’s more eccentric intellectuals. The patrons were quite content to listen as they imbibed the tipple of their choice-rum, gin, beer, Bristol milk.

The two Morgan wives were there to move about, pick up the empties and return them to Dick for refilling-and more slashes on the slate. It was nearly dinner time; the smell of new bread Peg Morgan had just brought in from Jenkins the baker was stealing through the other odors natural to a tavern adjacent to the Bristol quays at low tide. Most of the mixture of men, women and children present would remain to avail themselves of that same new bread, a pat of butter, a hunk of Somerset cheese, a steaming pewter platter of beef and potatoes swimming in rich gravy.

His father was glaring at him. Miserably aware that Dick despised him for a milksop, Richard searched for something to say. “I suppose we hoped,” he said vaguely, “that none of the other colonies would stand by Massachusetts, having warned it that it was going too far. And did they truly think that the King would stoop to read their letter? Or, even if he had, yield to their demands? They are Englishmen! The King is their king too.”

“Nonsense, Richard!” said Mr. Thistlethwaite sharply. “This obsessive concern for your child is fast addling your thinking apparatus! The King and his sycophantic ministers are bent on plunging our sceptered isle into disaster! Eight thousand tons of Bristol shipping sent back unloaded from the thirteen colonies in less than a year! That serge manufactory in Redcliff gone out of business and the four hundred souls it employed thrown upon the parish! Not to mention that place near the Port Wall which makes painted canvas carpets for Carolina and Georgia! The pipe makers, the soap makers, the bottle makers, the sugar and rum makers-for God’s sake, man! Most of our trade is across the Western Ocean, and no mean part of that with the thirteen colonies! To go to war against the thirteen colonies is commercial suicide!”

“I see,” said Mine Host, picking up the sheet of flimsy to squint at it, “that Lord North has issued a-a ‘Proclamation for Suppressing Armed Rebellion.’ ”

“It is a war we cannot win,” said Mr. Thistlethwaite, holding out his empty mug to Mag Morgan, hovering.

Richard tried again. “Come now, Jem! We have beaten France after seven years of war-we are the greatest and bravest country in the world! The King of England does not lose his wars.”

“Because he fights them in close proximity to England, or against heathens, or against ignorant savages whose own rulers sell them. But the men of the thirteen colonies are, as ye rightly said, Englishmen. They are civilized and conversant with our ways. They are of our blood.” Mr. Thistlethwaite leaned back, sighed, wrinkled the nobly grog-blossomed contours of his bulbous nose. “They deem themselves held light, Richard. Put upon, spat upon, looked down upon. Englishmen, yes, yet never quite the bona fide article. And they are a very long way away, which is a nettle the King and his ministers have grasped in utter ignorance. You might say that our navy wins our wars-how long is it since we stood or fell by a land army outside our own isles? Yet how can we win a sea war against a foe who has no ships? We will have to fight on land. Thirteen different bits of land, scarcely interconnected. And against a foe not organized to conduct himself in proper military mode.”

“Ye’ve just shot down your own argument, Jem,” said Mine Host, smiling but not reaching for his chalk as he handed a fresh mug of rum to Mag. “Our armies are first rate. The colonists will not be able to stand against them.”

“I agree, I agree!” cried Jem, lifting his gratis rum in a toast to the landlord, who was rarely generous. “The colonists probably will never win a battle. But they do not need to win battles, Dick. All they need to do is to endure. For it is their land we will be fighting in, and it is not England.” His hand went to the left pocket of his greatcoat; out came the massive pistol, down it went on the table with a crash, while the tavern’s other occupants squealed and shrieked in terror-and Richard, his infant son on his lap, pushed its muzzle sideways so quickly that no one saw him move. The pistol, as everybody knew, was loaded. Oblivious to the consternation he had caused, Mr. Thistlethwaite burrowed into the depths of the pocket and produced some folded pieces of flimsy paper. These he examined one by one, his spectacles enlarging his pale blue and bloodshot eyes, his dark and curling hair escaping from the ribbon with which he had carelessly tied it back-no wigs or queues for Mr. James Thistlethwaite.

“Ah!” he exclaimed finally, flourishing a London news sheet. “Seven and a half months ago, ladies and gentlemen of the Cooper’s Arms, there was a great debate in the House of Lords, during which that grand old man, William Pitt the Earl of Chatham, gave what is said to be his greatest oration. In defense of the colonists. But it is not Chatham’s words thrill me,” continued Mr. Thistlethwaite, “it is the Duke of Richmond’s, and I quote: ‘You may spread fire and desolation, but that will not be government!’ How true, how very true! Now comes the bit I judge one of the great philosophical truths, though the Lords snored as he said it: ‘No people can ever be made to submit to a form of government they say they will not receive.’ ”

He stared about, nodding. “That is why I say that all the battles we will win can be of no use and can have little effect upon the outcome of the war. If the colonists endure, they must win.” His eyes twinkled as he folded the paper, shoved the quire or so back into his pocket, and jammed the horse pistol on top of them. “You know too much about guns, Richard, that is your trouble. The child was not endangered, nor any of the other folk here.” A rumble commenced in his throat and vibrated through his pursed lips. “I have lived in this stinking cesspool called Bristol for all of my life, and I have alleviated the monotony by making some of our festering Tory sores in government the object of my lampoons, from Quaker to Shaker to Kingmaker.” He waved his battered tricorn hat at his audience and closed his eyes. “If the colonists endure, they must win,” he repeated. “Anybody who lives in Bristol has made the acquaintance of a thousand colonists-they flit about the place like bats in the last light. The death of Empire, Dick! It is the first rattle in our English throats. I have come to know the colonists, and I say they will win.”

A strange and ominous sound began to percolate in from outside, a sound of many angry voices; the distorted shapes of passersby flickering unhurriedly across the windows suddenly became blurs moving at a run.

“Rioters!” Richard was getting to his feet even as he handed the child to his wife. “Peg, straight upstairs with William Henry! Mum, go with them.” He looked at Mr. Thistlethwaite. “Jem, do you intend to fire with one in either hand, or will you give me the second pistol?”

“Leave be, leave be!” Dick emerged from behind his counter to reveal himself a close physical counterpart to Richard, taller than most, muscular in build. “This end of Broad Street does not see rioters, even when the colliers came in from Kingswood and snatched old man Brickdale. Nor does it when the sailors go on the rampage. Whatever is going on, it is not a riot.” He crossed to the door. “However, I am of a mind to see what is afoot,” he said, and disappeared into the running throng. The occupants of the Cooper’s Arms followed him, including Richard and Jem Thistlethwaite, his horse pistols still snug in his greatcoat pockets.

People were boiling everywhere at street level, people leaned from every penthouse with necks craning; not a stone of the flagged road could be seen, nor a single slab of the new pedestrian pavement down either side of Broad Street. The three men pushed into the crush and moved with it toward the junction of Wine and Corn Streets-no, these were not rioters. These were affluent, extremely angry gentlemen who carried no women or children with them.

On the opposite side of Broad Street and somewhat closer to the hub of commerce around the Council House and the Exchange stood the White Lion Inn, headquarters of the Steadfast Society. This was the Tory club, source of much encouragement to His Britannic Majesty King George III, whose men they were to the death. The center of the disturbance was the American Coffee House next door, its sign the red-and-white flag of many stripes most American colonists used as a general banner when the flag of Connecticut or Virginia or some other colony was not appropriate.

“I believe,” said Dick Morgan, on fruitless tiptoe, “that we would do better to go back to the Cooper’s Arms and watch from the penthouse.”

So back they went, up the shaky crumbling stairs at the inner end of the counter and thus eventually to the casement windows which leaned perilously far out over Broad Street below. In the back room little William Henry was crying, his mother and grandmother bent over his cot cooing and clucking; the hubbub outside held no interest for Peg or Mag while William Henry displayed such terrible grief. Nor did the hubbub tempt Richard, joining the women.

“Richard, he will not perish in the next few minutes!” snapped Dick from the front room. “Come here and see, damn ye!”

Richard came, but reluctantly, to lean out the gaping window and gasp in amazement. “Yankeys, Father! Christ, what are they doing to the things?”

“Things” they certainly were: two rag effigies stuffed quite professionally with straw, tarred all over with pitch still smoking, and encrusted with feathers. Except for their heads, upon which sat the insignia of colonists-their abysmally unfashionable but very sensible hats, brim turned down all the way around so that the low round crown sat like the yolk blister in the middle of a fried egg.

“Holloa!” bellowed Jem Thistlethwaite, spying a well-known face belonging to a well-known, expensively suited body, the whole perched upon a geehoe sledge loaded with tall barrels. “Master Harford, what goes?”

“The Steadfast Society saith it hangeth John Hancock and John Adams!” the Quaker plutocrat called back.

“What, because General Gage refused to extend his pardon to them after Concord?”

“I know not, Master Thistlethwaite.” Clearly terrified that he too would be lampooned in some highly uncomplimentary way, Joseph Harford descended from his vantage point and melted into the crowd.

“Hypocrite!” said Mr. Thistlethwaite under his breath.

“Samuel Adams, not John Adams,” said Richard, his interest now fairly caught. “Surely it would be Samuel Adams?”

“If the richest merchants in Boston are whom the Steadfast Society mean to hang, then yes, it ought to be Samuel. But John writes and speaks more,” said Mr. Thistlethwaite.

In a nautically oriented city, the production of two ropes efficiently tied into hangman’s knots did not present a difficulty; two such magically appeared, and the stark, bristly, man-sized dolls were hoisted by their necks to the signpost of the American Coffee House, there to turn lazily and smolder sluggishly. Rage spent, the throng of Steadfast Society men vanished through the welcoming, Tory-blue doors of the White Lion Inn.

“Tory pricks!” said Mr. Thistlethwaite, descending the stairs with a nice mug of rum uppermost in his mind.

“Out, Jem!” said Mine Host, bolting the door until he could be sure the disturbance was definitely over.

Richard had not followed his father downstairs, though duty said he ought; his name was now joined to Dick’s in the official Corporation books. Richard Morgan, victualler, had paid the fine and become an accredited Free Man, a vote-empowered citizen of a city which was in itself a county distinct from Gloucestershire and Somersetshire surrounding it, a citizen of a city which was the second-largest in all of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Of the 50,000 souls jammed within its bounds, only some 7,000 were vote-empowered Free Men.

“Is it taking?” Richard asked his wife, and leaning over the cot; William Henry had quietened, seemed to doze uneasily.

“Yes, my love.” Peg’s soft brown eyes suddenly filled with tears, her lips trembling. “Now is the time to pray, Richard, that he does not suffer the full pox. Though he does not burn the way Mary did.” She gave her husband a gentle push. “Go for a good long walk. You may pray and walk. Go on! Please, Richard. If you stay, Father will growl.”

A peculiar lethargy had descended upon Broad Street as a result of the panic which seemed to wing citywide in minutes whenever riots threatened. Passing the American Coffee House, Richard stopped for a moment to contemplate the dangling effigies of John Hancock and John/Samuel Adams, his ears assailed by the fitful roars of laughter and spleen originating among the dining ranks of the Steadfast Society inside the White Lion. His lips curled in faint contempt; the Morgans were staunch Whigs whose votes had contributed to the success of Edmund Burke and Henry Cruger at the elections last year-what a circus they had been! And how miffed Lord Clare had been when he polled hardly a vote!

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. No 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! [1] 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.

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, weeping 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.

“No, Father, not Bill. Not Will. Not Willy, not Billy, not even William. His name is William Henry, and so he will be known by everybody,” said Richard so firmly that the debate ended.

Truth to tell, this decision gratified the whole clan. Someone known to everybody as William Henry was bound to be a great man.

Richard gave voice to this verdict when he displayed his new son to Mr. James Thistlethwaite, who snorted.

“Aye, like Lord Clare,” he said. “Started out a schoolmaster, married three fat and ugly old widows of enormous fortune, was-er-lucky enough to be shriven of them in quick succession, became a Member of Parliament for Bristol, and so met the Prince of Wales. Plain Robert Nugent. Rrrrrrrrrolling in the soft, which he proceeded to lend liberally to Georgy-Porgy Pudden ’n’ Pie, our bloated Heir. No interest and no repayment of the principal until even the King could not ignore the debt. So plain Robert Nugent was apotheosized into Viscount Clare, and now has a Bristol street named after him. He will end an earl, as my London informants tell me that his soft is still going princeward at a great rate. You have to admit, my dear Richard, that the schoolmaster did well for himself.”

“Indeed he did,” said Richard, not at all offended. “Though I would rather,” he said after a pause, “that William Henry earned his peerage by becoming First Lord of the Admiralty. Generals are always noblemen because army officers have to buy their promotions, but admirals can scramble up with prize-money and the like.”

“Spoken like a true Bristolian! Ships are never far from any Bristolian’s thoughts. Though, Richard, ye have no experience of them beyond looking.” Mr. Thistlethwaite sipped his rum and waited with keen anticipation for the warm glow to commence inside him.

“Looking,” said Richard, his cheek against William Henry’s, “is quite close enough to ships for me.”

“D’ye never yearn for foreign parts? Not even London?”

“Nay. I was born in Bristol and I will die in Bristol. Bath and Bedminster are quite as far as I ever wish to go.” He held William Henry out and looked his son in the eye; for such a young babe, the gaze was astonishingly steady. “Eh, William Henry? Perhaps you will end in being the family’s traveler.”

Idle speculation. As far as Richard was concerned, simply having William Henry was enough.

The anxiety, however, was omnipresent, in Peg as well as Richard. Both of them fussed over the slightest deviation from William Henry’s habitual path-were his stools a little too runny?-was his brow too warm?-ought he not to be more forward for his age? None of this mattered a great deal during the first six months of William Henry’s life, but his grandparents fretted over what was going to happen as he grew into noticing, crawling, talking-and thinking! That doting pair were going to ruin the child! They listened avidly to anything Cousin James-the-druggist had to say on subjects few Bristolians-or other sorts of English people-worried their heads about. Like the state of the drains, the putridity of the Froom and Avon, the noxious vapors which hung over the city as ominously in winter as in summer. A remark about the Broad Street privy vault had Peg on her knees inside the closet beneath the stairs with rags and bucket, brush and oil of tar, scrubbing at the ancient stone seat and the floor, whitewashing ruthlessly. While Richard went down to the Council House and made such a nuisance of himself to various Corporation slugs that the honey-sledges actually arrived en masse to empty the privy vault, rinse it several times, and then tip the result of all this activity into the Froom at the Key Head right next door to the fish markets.

When William Henry passed the six-months mark and began to change into a person, his grandparents discovered that he was the kind of child who cannot be ruined. Such was the sweetness of his nature and the humility of his tiny soul that he accepted all the attention gratefully, yet never complained if it were not given. He cried because he had a pain or some tavern fool had frightened him, though of Mr. Thistlethwaite (by far the most terrifying denizen of the Cooper’s Arms) he was not in the least afraid no matter how loudly he roared. His character inclined to thoughtful silences; though he would smile readily, he would not laugh, and never looked either sad or ill-tempered.

“I declare that he has the temperament of a monastery friar,” said Mr. Thistlethwaite. “Ye may have bred up a Carthlick yet.”

Five days ago a whisper had surfaced at the Cooper’s Arms: a few cases of the smallpox had appeared, but too widely dispersed to think of containment by quarantine, every city’s first-and last-desperate hope.

Peg’s eyes started from her head. “Oh, Richard, not again!”

“We will have William Henry inoculated” was Richard’s answer. After which he sent a message to Cousin James-the-druggist.

Who looked aghast when told what was required of him. “Jesus, Richard, no! Inoculation is for older folk! I have never heard of it for a babe barely out of his clouts! It would kill him! Far better to do one of two things-send him away to the farm, or keep him here in as much isolation as ye can. And pray, whichever course ye choose.”

“Inoculation, Cousin James. It must be inoculation.”

“Richard, I will not do it!” Cousin James-the-druggist turned to Dick, listening grimly. “Dick, say something! Do something! I beseech you!”

For once Richard’s father stood by him. “Jim, neither course would work. To get William Henry out of Bristol-no, hear me out!-to get William Henry out of Bristol would mean hiring a hackney, and who can tell what manner of person last sat in it? Or who might be on the ferry at Rownham Meads? And how can we isolate anybody in a tavern? This ain’t St. James’s on a Sunday, lively though that can be. All manner of folk come through my door. No, Jim, it must be inoculation.”

“Be it on your own heads, then!” cried Cousin James-the-druggist as he stumbled off, wringing his hands, to enquire of a doctor friend whereabouts he might find a victim of the smallpox who had reached rupture-of-the-pustules stage. Not so difficult a task; people were coming down with the disease everywhere. Mostly under the age of fifteen.

“Pray for me,” Cousin James-the-druggist said to his doctor friend as he laid his ordinary darning needle down across a running sore on the twelve-year-old girl’s face and turned it over and over to coat it with pus. Oh, poor soul! It had been such a pretty face, but it never would be again. “Pray for me,” he said as he rose to his feet and put the sopping needle on a bed of lint in a small tin case. “Pray that I am not about to do murder.”

He hastened immediately to the Cooper’s Arms, not a very long walk. And there, the partly naked William Henry on his knee, he took the darning needle from its case, placed its point against-against-oh, where ought he to do this murder? And such a public one, between the regulars sitting in their usual places, Mr. Thistlethwaite making a show of casually sucking his teeth, and the Morgans looming in a ring around him as if to prevent his fleeing should he take a notion to do so. Suddenly it was done; he pinched the flesh of William Henry’s arm just below the left shoulder, pushed the big needle in, then drew it out an inch away by its point.

William Henry did not flinch, did not cry. He turned his large and extraordinary eyes upon Cousin James’s sweating face and looked a question-why did you do that to me? It hurt!

Oh why, why did I? I have never seen such eyes in a head! Not animal’s eyes, but not human either. This is a strange child.

So he kissed William Henry all over his face, wiped away his own tears, put the needle back in its tin to burn the whole thing later in his hottest furnace, and handed William Henry to Richard.

“There, it is done. Now I am going to pray. Not for William Henry’s soul-what babe needs fear for stains on that? To pray for my own soul, that I have not done murder. Have you some vinegar and oil of tar? I would wash my hands.”

Mag produced a small jug of vinegar, a bottle of oil of tar, a pewter dish and a clean clout.

“Nothing will happen for three or four days,” he said as he rubbed away, “but then, if it takes, he will develop a fever. If it has taken to the proper degree, the fever will not be malign. And at some time the inoculation itself will fester, produce a pustule, and burst. All going well, ’twill be the only one. But I cannot say for sure, and I do not thank ye for this business.”

“You are the best man in Bristol, Cousin James!” cried Mr. Thistlethwaite jovially.

Cousin James-the-druggist paused in the doorway. “I am not your cousin, Jem Thistlethwaite-ye have no relations! Not even a mother,” he said in freezing tones, pushed his wig back onto his head properly, and vanished.

Mine Host shook with laughter. “That is telling ye, Jem!”

“Aye,” grinned Jem, unabashed. “Do not worry,” he said to Richard, “God would not dare offend Cousin James.”

Having walked for much longer than he had prayed, Richard arrived back at the Cooper’s Arms just in time to give a hand with supper. Barley broth made on beef shins tonight, with plump, bacony dumplings simmering in it, as well as the usual fare of bread, butter, cheese, cake and liquid refreshments.

The panic had died down and Broad Street was back to normal except that John/Samuel Adams and John Hancock still swung from the signpost of the American Coffee House. They would probably, Richard reflected, remain there until time and weather blew their stuffing all over the place and naught was left save limp rags.

Nodding to his father as he passed, Richard scrambled upstairs to the back half of the room at their top, which Dick had partitioned off in the customary way-a few planks from floor to near the ceiling, not snugly tenoned and joined like the wales of ships, but rather held together by an occasional strut and therefore full of cracks, some wide enough to put an eye to.

Richard and Peg’s back room held an excellent double bed with thick linen curtains drawn about it from rails connecting its four tall posts, several chests for clothing, a cupboard for shoes and boots, a mirror on one wall for Peg to prink in front of, a dozen hooks on the same wall, and William Henry’s gimbaled cot. There were no fifteen-shillings-a-yard wallpapers, no damask hangings, no carpets on the oak floor so old it had gone black two centuries ago, but it was quite as good a room as any one would see in any house of similar standing, namely of the middling classes.

Peg was by the cot, swinging it gently back and forth.

“How is he, my love?”

She looked up, smiling contentedly. “It has taken. He has a fever, but it is not burning him up. Cousin James-the-druggist came while you were walking, and seemed very relieved. He thinks William Henry will recover without developing the full pox.”

Because his left upper arm was sore, Richard assumed, William Henry lay sleeping on his right side with the offending limb drawn comfortably across his chest. Where the needle had passed through the flesh a great red welt was growing; his palm almost touching it, Richard could feel the heat in the thing.

“It is early!” he exclaimed.

“Cousin James says it often is after inoculation.”

Knees shaking from the sheer relief of learning that his son had survived his ordeal, Richard went to a hook on the wall and plucked his stout canvas apron from it. “I must help father. Thank God, thank God!” He was still thanking God as he bounded down the stairs, it having slipped his mind that until he saw William Henry’s pustule developing, he had quite given up on God.

For places like the Cooper’s Arms the relaxed atmosphere of long summer evenings brought benefits in its wake; the tavern’s regular clientele were respectable people who earned a better than subsistence living-tradesmen and artisans in the main, and accompanied by their wives and children. Between threepence and fourpence a head bought them plenty of palatable food and a big pitcher of small beer, and for those who preferred full beer, rum or gin or Bristol milk (a sherry much favored by the women), another sixpence would see them merry enough to tumble into bed and sleep the moment they got home, safe from footpads and the press gangs because that extended gloaming kept darkness at bay.

So Richard descended into a social club still golden-lit as much from the westering sun outside as from the oil lamps fixed to the exposed beams of walls and ceiling, black against the brilliant pallor of whitewashed plaster. The only portable lamp burned at Mine Host’s place behind his counter, at the far end of it from Ginger, the tavern’s most famous attraction.

Ginger was a large wooden cat Richard had carved after reading of the renowned Old Tom in London-a distinct improvement on the original, he prided himself. It stood diagonally across the boards with its nether regions closest to the drinkers, an orange-striped cat with jaws open in a wide smile and tail at a jaunty angle. When a customer wanted a measure of rum, he put a threepenny coin into its mouth and rested it upon the flexible tongue, which flopped down with an audible click. Then he held his mug beneath the two realistic testicles at its rear and pulled the tail; the cat promptly pissed exactly half a pint of rum.

Naturally the older children present were its greatest users; many a dad and mum were wheedled into drinking more than they ought for the sheer pleasure of putting a coin into Ginger’s mouth, pulling his tail, and watching him piss a stream of rum. If Richard had done no more for the Cooper’s Arms than that, he had vindicated his father’s generosity in taking him into the business.

As Richard crossed the sawdust-strewn floor with wooden bowls full of steaming broth distributed precariously up both arms, he exchanged conversation with everybody, his face lighting up as he told them of William Henry’s optimistic prognosis.

Mr. Thistlethwaite was not there. He came at eleven in the morning and stayed until five, sitting at “his” table under the window, which bore an inkwell and several quills (but he could buy his own paper, said Dick Morgan tersely), composing his lampoons. These were printed up by Sendall’s bookshop in Wine Street and sold there, though Mr. Thistlethwaite also had outlets on a few stalls in Pie Powder Court and Horse Fair, far enough from Sendall’s not to affect its market. They sold extremely well, for Mr. Thistlethwaite owned a rare ripeness of epithet and was apt into the bargain. His targets were usually Corporation officials from the Mayor through the Commander of Customs to the Sheriff, or religious entities addicted to pluralism, or those who presided over the courts. Though quite why he had it in for Henry Burgum the pewterer was a mystery-oh, Burgum was a dyed-in-the-wool villain, but what precisely had he done to Mr. James Thistlethwaite?

And so the supper hour wore down amid a general feeling of repletion and well-being, until promptly at eight o’clock by the old timepiece on the wall next to the slate, Dick Morgan rapped: “Settle up accounts, gentlemen!” After which, his tin cash box satisfyingly heavy, he shepherded the last toddler out the door and bolted it securely. The cash box went upstairs with him and was deposited beneath his own bed with a string tied from its handle to his big toe. Bristol had more than its share of thieves, some of them most artful. In the morning he transferred the mass of coins to a canvas bag and took it to the Bristol Bank in Small Street, a concern headed by, among others, a Harford, an Ames and a Deane. Though no matter which one of Bristol’s three banks a man patronized, it would be Quakers looking after his money.

William Henry was sleeping soundly on his right side; Richard lifted the cot closer to the bed, took off his apron, his voluminous white cotton shirt, his linen breeches, his shoes and thick white cotton stockings, and his flannel underdrawers. Then he donned the linen nightshirt Peg had draped across his pillow, untied the ribbon confining his long locks and fitted a nightcap securely over them. All this done, he slipped into bed with a sigh.

Two very different snores emanated through the gaps in the partition between this room and the front one where Dick and Mag slept, but not like the dead. Snores were the epitome of life. Dick produced a resonant rumble, whereas Mag wheezed and whistled. Smiling to himself, Richard rolled onto his side and found Peg, who snuggled up to him despite the warmth of the night and began to kiss his cheek. Very carefully Richard pleated up his nightshirt and hers, then fitted himself against her and cupped a hand around one high, firm breast.

“Oh, Peg, I do love you!” he whispered. “No man was ever gifted with a better wife.”

“Nor woman with a better husband, Richard.”

In complete agreement, they kissed down to the velvet of their tongues while she nudged her mound against his growing member and purred her pleasure.

“Perhaps,” he mumbled afterward, his eyes unwilling to stay open, “we have made a brother or sister for William Henry.” He had barely uttered the words before he was asleep.

Though as tired as he, Peg yanked at his nightshirt until it shielded his body from the bottom sheet, then adjusted her own with a dab of its tail to blot the moisture from her crotch. Oh, she thought, I wish Dad and Mum did not snore! Richard does not, and nor, he tells me, do I. Still, snores mean that they sleep and do not hear us. And thank you, dearest Lord, for being kind to my little boy. I know that he is so good You must want him to adorn Heaven, but he adorns this earth too, and he should have his chance. Yet why, dearest Lord, do I feel that I will have no other children?

For she did feel this, and it was a torment. Three years she had waited to fall the first time, then another three years before she fell the second time. Not that she had carried either child poorly, or been unduly sick, or suffered cramps and spasms. Just that somewhere inside her soul she sensed a womb leached of its fertility. The fault did not lie with Richard. Did she so much as look sideways at him with an invitation, he would have her, and never failed (save when a child was ill) to have her when they went to bed. Such a kind and considerate lover! Such a kind and considerate man. His own appetites and pleasures were less important to him than those of the folk who mattered to him. Especially hers and William Henry’s. And Mary’s. A tear fell into the down pillow and more followed, faster and faster. Why do our children have to go before us? It is not fair, it is not just. I am twoscore and five, Richard is twoscore and seven. Yet we have lost our firstborn, and I miss her so! Oh, how much I miss her!

Tomorrow, she thought drowsily, her spate of weeping ended, I will go to St. James’s burying ground and put flowers on her grave. Soon it will be winter, and of flowers there will be none.

Winter came, the ordinary Bristol gloom of fog, drizzle, a damp coldness which seeped into the bones; untroubled by the ice which often pocked the Thames and other rivers of eastern England, the tide in the Avon rose its thirty feet and fell its thirty feet as rhythmically and predictably as in summer.

News from the war in the thirteen colonies trickled in, far behind the events it chronicled. General Thomas Gage was no longer His Britannic Majesty’s Commander-in-Chief, Sir William Howe was, and it was being said that the rebellious Continental Congress was courting the French, the Spanish and the Dutch in search of allies and money. The King’s retaliation had been much as expected: at Christmastide the Parliament prohibited all trade with the thirteen colonies and declared them beyond the protection of the Crown. For Bristol, hideous news.

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 January crept 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 the night 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.”

Even Mr. Thistlethwaite was impressed. “That is enough to make me wish I wrote panegyrics, Cousin James, and could hymn ye in print.” He frowned. “But I smell something fishy in the city of Bristol, so I do. The Savannah La Mar, the Hibernia and the Fame all belong to Lewsley, which is an American firm. Lewsley is right next door to you in Bell Lane. Perhaps the arsonist broke down the wrong door. I would tell Lewsley if I were you-this is a plot by the Tories to drive American money out of Bristol.”

“Ye see Tories in everything, Jem,” said Richard, smiling.

“Tories are in everything dastardly, at any rate.” Mr. Thistlethwaite sat down at his table again, rolling his eyes at the clutch of hysterical women. “I do wish ye’d shoo them home, Dick. Leave Richard there with one of my horse pistols-here, take it, Richard! I can defend myself with one. But what I insist upon is silence. The muse has beckoned, and I have a new subject to write about.”

No one took any notice of this, but as the regular patrons started to drift in for a noon dinner and the flow of enquirers into what had happened at the Morgan drug warehouse steadily increased, Richard decided to do as Mr. Thistlethwaite had suggested. One of the horse pistols in his greatcoat pocket and a dozen paper shot cartridges in the other pocket, he escorted Ann Morgan and her two dismally plain daughters back to their very nice house in St. James’s Barton. There he sat himself in a chair in the hallway to repel invading arsonists.

Within the space of two days, Thursday to Saturday, all Bristol had spun into a helpless panic. The wardens and specially appointed constables actually put some effort into their exertions, the lamps were lit at five in the afternoon in those few places lucky enough to have street lighting, and the lampmen got busy with their ladders to refill the oil reservoirs, something they rarely did. People hurried home early and wished that the season were not winter and therefore redolent with the smell of wood smoke. Hardly anyone slept during that Saturday night.

On the 19th, a Sunday, all Bristol save for the Jews were in church to beg that God be merciful and bring this Hellhound to justice. Cousin James-of-the-clergy, an excellent preacher even when not on form, gave of his best in a manner some slightly startled members of the St. James’s congregation described as positively Jesuitical and others as alarmingly Methodical.

“For myself,” said Dick, to whom one such remark was addressed, “I care not whether the Reverend sounded Jesuitical or Methodical. If we are to sleep soundly in our beds, the arsonist must be kicking his heels at the end of a rope. Besides, the Reverend’s papa was a regular fire-and-brimstone preacher, do you not remember? He gave sermons in the open air to the colliers at Crew’s Hole.”

“The Steadfast Society blames it on the American colonists.”

“Hardly likely! The American colonists look more the victims,” said Dick, ending the subject.

In the small hours of Sunday going into Monday, Richard woke with a start from a restless sleep.

“Dadda, Dadda!” William Henry was saying loudly from his cot.

Out of bed in a trice, Richard lit a candle from the tinder box and bent over him, heart pounding, as the child sat bolt upright. “What is wrong, William Henry?” he whispered.

“Fire,” said William Henry clearly.

Only his obsession with his son’s health could have stoppered his nose-the room was full of smoke.

In an emergency he was neat and quick, preserved his presence of mind; Richard woke his father with a shout even as his hands worked at his clothes and pulled on his shoes. Ready, he did not wait for Dick, but ran down the stairs with his candle, grabbed two buckets, unbolted the tavern door and slid across the pavement, slippery in a little rain. Others were stirring as he ran around the corner into Bell Lane and there came to a halt, aghast. The warehouse complex of Lewsley & Co. was ablaze, flames licking through gaps in the slate roofs, the narrow and dirty confines of Bell Lane pulsing red. A noise of roar and huff filled his ears; the Spanish wool, the grain and casks of olive oil inside were soaking up the fire and the fire was feeding upon them as it had not fed upon tow and turpentine.

Men armed with buckets were coming from all directions and multiple lines of them strung themselves from the Froom at the Key Head to Lewsley & Co.’s warehouse. Though the tide was not all the way in, nor was it out; a fairly easy matter therefore to dip the buckets into the water and send them on their way. This frenzy of activity confined the fire to Lewsley & Co. and half a dozen ancient tenements; Cousin James-the-druggist’s complex right next door escaped without a mark. No one died-apparently the arsonist was more interested in destroying property than taking lives. So the occupants of the lost tenements had fled in time, their scant belongings clutched in their arms and their children wailing.

Filthy with soot, Richard went back to the Cooper’s Arms as soon as the Sheriff and his minions pronounced Bell Lane out of danger. Both his buckets had gone, only God knew where or to whom. His father and Cousin James-the-druggist were seated together at a table, both showing signs of wear and tear; they were a generation older, had tried to keep up, then gratefully turned their buckets over to younger men as they flocked in from more outlying districts to do their bit.

“There will be a great demand for buckets tomorrow, Richard,” said Dick, drawing his son a tankard of beer, “so I intend to be at the cooper’s as soon as dawn breaks to buy a dozen more. What a world we live in!”

“Dick,” said Cousin James-the-druggist with that same look of exaltation on his face, “for the second time within a day, God has spared me and mine! I feel-I feel as Paul must have done on the road to Damascus.”

“I do not see the comparison,” said Richard, drinking thirstily. “You have never persecuted the faithful, Cousin James.”

“No, Richard, but I have undergone a revelation. I will give every prisoner in the Bristol Newgate and the Bristol Bridewell a shilling as thanks to God.”

“Huh!” grunted Dick. “Do so, by all means, Jim, but be aware that they will spend it on booze in the prison taproom.”

Their speech had permeated to the upper floor; Mag and Peg came down the stairs well wrapped, Peg with William Henry in her arms, her eyes glowing.

“Oh, it is over and you are safe!”

Richard put his tankard down and crossed to take the child, who clung to him. “Father, it was William Henry who woke me. He said ‘fire’ as if he knew what it meant.”

Cousin James-the-druggist stared at William Henry thoughtfully. “He is pixilated. The fairies have claimed him.”

Peg gasped. “Cousin James, do not say such things! If the fairies own him, one day they will take him away!”

Strip that of its fanciful rustic superstition, Cousin James-the-druggist reflected, rising slowly and painfully to his feet, and it means that William Henry’s mother recognizes his strangeness. For the truth is that he ought never to have survived inoculation.

The arsonist did not stop with the destruction of Lewsley & Co. During the Monday after the fire, other torches similar to those which had set the American firm alight were found in a dozen other American-owned or American-affiliated warehouses and factories. On the Tuesday, Alderman Barnes’s sugar refining house went up in flames; its owner had strong American ties. But by now the whole of Bristol was hopping up and down in expectation of fire, so the conflagration was snuffed out before too much damage was done. Three days later, Alderman Barnes’s sugar house was torched again, and again saved.

Politically, both sides were striving to make capital out of the business; the Tories accused the Whigs and the Whigs accused the Tories. Edmund Burke put up £50 for information, the Merchant Venturers contributed £500, the King a further £1,000. As £1,550 represented more than most could earn in a lifetime, Bristol turned detective and soon winkled out a likely suspect-though, of course, nobody got the reward. A Scotchman known as Jack the Painter, he had lodged at various houses in the Pithay, a tumbledown street which crossed the Froom along St. James’s Backs; after the second attempt to burn down Alderman Barnes’s sugar house, he suddenly disappeared. Though no real evidence existed to link him physically to the fires, all of Bristol was convinced he was the arsonist. A hue and cry went up, fueled by London and provincial news gazettes clear across the country. From the Tyne to the Channel, no one wanted a fire maniac on the loose. The fugitive was apprehended in the act of robbing a nabob’s house in Liverpool, and upon the payment of £128 in expenses by the Corporation and the Merchant Venturers, he was extradited in chains to Bristol for interrogation. Where an unexpected obstacle reared its head: nobody could understand a word the Scotchman said apart from his name, James Aiten. So he was shipped to London on the theory that in such a vast metropolis there would be some who could understand the Scotch dialect. As indeed proved to be the case. James Aiten, alias Jack the Painter, confessed to all the Bristol fires-and to one in Portsmouth which had burned the Royal Navy rope house to the ground. This last crime was heinous in the extreme; ships could not function without miles upon miles of rope.

“What I fail to see,” said Dick Morgan to Jem Thistlethwaite, “is how Jack the Painter could have done both Bristol and Portsmouth. The rope house was set afire in December, when he was definitely living in the Pithay for all to see.”

Mr. Thistlethwaite shrugged. “He is a scapegoat, Dick, no more. It is necessary that England rest easy, and what better way to ensure that than to have a culprit? A Scotchman is ideal. I do not know about the Portsmouth fire, but the Bristol ones were set by the Tories, I would stake my life on it.”

“So you think there will be more fires?”

“Nay! The ruse has succeeded. American money has fled, Bristol is washed clean of it. The Tories can recline comfortably upon their laurels and let poor Jack the Painter bear the blame.”

Bear the blame he did. James Aiten, alias Jack the Painter, was tried at the Hampshire Assizes for the Royal Navy rope house fire, and convicted. After which he was conveyed to Portsmouth, where a special gallows had been built for the well-attended occasion. The drop was a full 67 feet, which meant that when Jack the Painter was kicked off a stool and launched into eternity, coming to the end of his tether chopped off his head neater than an axe could have. The head was then displayed on the Portsmouth battlements for all to see, and England rested easy.

Jack the Painter had assured his interrogators that he alone was responsible for all the fires.

“Not,” said Cousin James-the-druggist, “that I am satisfied by such an assurance. However, Easter has come and gone and there have been no more fires, so-who knoweth, as a Quaker might ask? All I know is that God spared me.”

Two days later Senhor Tomas Habitas the gunsmith walked into the Cooper’s Arms.

“Sir!” cried Richard, greeting him with a smile and a very warm handshake. “Sit down, sit down! A glass of Bristol milk?”

“Thank you, Richard.”

The tavern was empty apart from Mr. Thistlethwaite; prosperity was declining rapidly. So this unexpected visitor found himself the center of attention, a fact which seemed to please him.

A Portuguese Jew who had emigrated thirty years ago, Senhor Tomas Habitas was small, slender, olive-skinned and dark-eyed, with a long face, big nose and full mouth. About him hung a faint aura of aloofness, something he shared in common with the Quakers; a knowledge, perhaps, that he was too different ever to fit into the ordinary Bristol mold. The city had been good to him, as indeed it was to all Jews, who, unlike the papists, were permitted to worship God in their own fashion, had their burying ground in Jacob Street and two synagogues across the Avon in Temple parish; Jewishness was less of an impediment to social and economic success by far than Roman Catholicism. Mostly due to the fact that there were no Jewish (or Quaker) pretenders to His Britannic yet Germanic Majesty’s throne. Bonnie Prince Charlie and 1745 were still fresh in every mind, and Ireland not very distant.

“What brings you so far from home, sir?” asked Dick Morgan, presenting the guest with a large glass (made by the Jewish firm of Jacobs) of deep amber, very sweet sherry.

The narrow black eyes darted about the empty room, returning to Richard rather than to Dick. “Business is bad,” he said in a surprisingly deep voice, only lightly accented.

“Aye, sir,” said Richard, sitting down opposite the visitor.

“I am very sorry to see it.” Senhor Habitas paused. “I may be able to help.” He put his long, sensitive hands upon the table, and folded them. “We have this war with the American colonies to thank, I know. However, the war has brought increased business to some. And to me, very much so. Richard, I need you. Will you come back to work?”

While Richard was still opening his mouth to answer, Dick butted in. “On what terms, Senhor Habitas?” he asked, a little truculently. He knew his Richard-too soft to insist upon terms before he said yes.

The enigmatic eyes in the smooth face did not change. “On good terms, Mister Morgan,” he said. “Four shillings a musket.”

“Done!” said Dick instantly.

Only Mr. Thistlethwaite was looking at Richard, and in some pity. Did he never have a chance to decide his own destiny? The blue-grey eyes in Richard Morgan’s handsome face held neither anger nor dissatisfaction. Christ, he was patient! Patient with his father, with his wife, his mother, the patrons, Cousin James-the-druggist-the list really had no end. It seemed the only person for whom Richard would go to war was William Henry, and then it was a quiet business, steadfast rather than choleric. What does lie within you, Richard Morgan? Do you know yourself? If Dick were my father, I’d give him a bunch of fives that knocked him to the floor. Whereas you bear with his megrims and his fits and starts, his criticisms, even his too thinly veiled contempt for you. What is your philosophy? Where do you find your strength? Strength you have, I know it. But it is allied to-resignation? No, not quite that. You are a mystery to me, yet I like you better than any other man I know. And I fear for you. Why? Because I have a feeling that so much patience and forebearance will tempt God to try you.

Oblivious to Mr. Thistlethwaite’s concern for him, Richard returned to the Habitas workshop and settled to make Brown Bess for the soldiers fighting in the American war.

A gunsmith made a gun, but not its component parts. These came from various places: the steel barrel, forged into a tube by a hammer, from Birmingham, as did the steel parts of the flintlock; the walnut stock from any one of a dozen localities throughout England; and the brass or copper fittings from around Bristol.

“You will be pleased to know,” said Habitas when Richard reported on his first day, “that we have been commissioned to make the Short Land musket-a little lighter and easier to handle.”

At 42 inches, it was 4 inches shorter than the old Long Land still employed at the time of the Seven Years’ War, and a distinct improvement as far as an infantryman was concerned. Though its fire was quite as accurate, it weighed a half-pound lighter and was less unwieldy.

When Richard sat down at his bench on a high stool, everything he needed was distributed about him. The polished stocks with their long, half-moon barrel supports were turned in one piece, and stood in a frame to his left. To his right were the tanged barrels, each with pierced tenons on its under side. In receptacles on the bench were the various parts of the flintlock itself-springs, cocks, sears, frizzens, triggers, tumblers, screws, flints-and the brass bands, tubes, flanges and supports which bound the gun together. Between all these receptacles he spread out his tools, which were his own property and carried to and fro each day inside a hefty mahogany box bearing his name on a brass plate. There were dozens of files and screwdrivers; pincers, metal snips, tweezers, small hammers, a drill brace and assorted bits; and a collection of woodworking tools. Having been properly taught, he made his own emery papers out of canvas, sprinkling the abrasive black particles onto a base of very strong fish-glue, and used the same technique to fashion different sizes of emery sticks, some pointed, some rounded, some blunt and stubby. Filing parts down was at least fifty per cent of gunsmithing art, and so expert was Richard that his sawyer brother, William, would let no one else sharpen the teeth of his saws when it came time to set them anew.

What Richard had not realized until he picked up the first barrel to polish off the rust and then brown it with butter of antimony was how much he had missed practicing his craft. Six years! A long time. Yet his hands were sure, his mind enchanted at the prospect of assembling the pieces of a puzzle designed to kill men. A gunsmith’s reasoning processes, however, did not progress far enough to come to this ultimate conclusion; a gunsmith simply loved what he did and thought not at all about its destructive outcome.

The largest part of the work concerned the flintlock itself. The stock had to be carved delicately to fit it, then each spring and moving component had to be filed, adjusted, filed, adjusted, filed, adjusted, until finally mechanical harmony was achieved and it came time to put the flint in. Those in Norfolk and Suffolk who knapped the flints were craftsmen too, chipping away until the blocky chunk was faceted at its business end to precise specifications. Richard’s job was to line up the angle at which the flint struck the frizzen, a leafy-looking, inch-wide, L-shaped piece of steel whose base covered the powder pan. As the cock snapped forward and the flint struck, they forced the frizzen up and off the powder pan, at the same moment producing a shower of sparks. When the flint was properly positioned in the jaws of the cock, this shower of sparks was great enough to set off the powder in the pan; it flashed through a small touch hole into the breech of the barrel, and here in turn ignited the powder packed beneath the missile. In the case of Brown Bess, the missile was a lead ball.753 inches in diameter.

There was nothing Richard did not know about Brown Bess. He knew that she was useless at any range exceeding 100 yards, and of best use when the range was 40 yards or less. Which meant that opposing sides were very close before Brown Bess was fired, and that a good soldier would get in two shots at most before either engaging with bayonets or retreating. He knew that it was a very rare battle in which a man fired his Brown Bess more than ten times. He knew that her powder charge was a mere 70 grains-less than a fifth of an ounce-and he understood every aspect of gunpowder manufacture, for as a part of his apprenticeship he had spent time in the gunpowder works at Tower Harratz on the Avon in Temple Meads. He knew that there was a strong likelihood that only one in four of the Brown Besses he made would ever be fired in combat. He knew that her caliber was close enough (the ball was two sizes smaller than the smooth interior of the barrel) to French, Portuguese and Spanish caliber to enable cartridges from those three countries to be fired from her. And he knew that if one of her balls did strike a human target, the chances of survival were slim. If a man were chest- or gut-shot, his insides were a butchered shambles; if he were limb-shot, his bones were so fragmented that amputation was the only treatment.

It took him two hours to craft his first Brown Bess, but after that the rhythm came back, and by the end of the day he was making one musket an hour. For him, fabulous money at four shillings a gun, but for Senhor Habitas, far more. After deducting the costs of parts and Richard’s labor, Senhor Habitas made a profit of ten shillings a gun. There were cheaper gunsmithies, but a Habitas product fired. In the hands of a trained fusilier, no hang fires and no flashes in the pan. Senhor Habitas also made sure that he was present to watch his gunsmiths test fire the guns they made.

“I am not,” he said to Richard as they strolled through to the proving butt while there was still light enough to see, “putting on any apprentices. Just qualified gunsmiths, and preferably those I have schooled myself.” He looked suddenly very serious. “It will end, my beloved Richard, do not think otherwise. I give this war another three or four years, and I cannot see the French emerging from it in any state to fight us yet again. So we have work aplenty now, but it will cease, and I will have to let you go a second time. One reason why I am willing to pay you four shillings a gun. For I have never seen work as good as yours, and you are quick.”

Richard did not reply, which was so much his habit that Tomas Habitas had not expected a reply. Richard was a listener. He took in what was said to him with illuminating intelligence, yet would make no comment for the sake of talking. Information went aboard and straight into the cargo holds of his mind, there to stay until events required that he unload it. Perhaps, thought Habitas, that is why, even apart from his work, I am so fond of him. He is a truly peaceful man who minds his own business.

The ten Brown Besses that Richard had made were standing in a rack, fetched there by the ten-year-old lad whom Habitas employed as a menial. Richard picked up the first one, removed the ramrod from its pipes beneath the part of the stock supporting the barrel, and reached into a bin for a cartridge. The ball and powder lay inside a little bag of paper; Richard produced a mouthful of spit, sank his teeth hard into the base of the paper to rupture and moisten it, tipped the powder into the barrel, screwed up the paper and jammed it after the powder, then pushed the ball in. A deft thrust with the ramrod and the lot was snug in the breech at the bottom of the barrel. As he swung the musket up to his shoulder he rapped it smartly over the firing pan to clear powder out of the touch hole, and pulled the trigger. The cock, chunk of flint in its jaws, came down and struck the frizzen. Sparks, explosion and a huge puff of smoke seemed to happen all at once; a bottle forty yards away on a shelf in the range wall disintegrated.

“You have not lost your touch,” purred Senhor Habitas while the lad, barefoot, swept up the glass with a broom and put another dull brown, Bristol-made bottle up.

“Say that after I have fired all ten,” said Richard, grinning.

Nine behaved perfectly. The tenth needed a little more filing of the frizzen spring-not a major task, as it lay on the outside of the lock mechanism.

When Richard walked into the Cooper’s Arms he snatched William Henry from his high chair and held him tight, curbing his impulse to squeeze and hug until the child could scarcely breathe. William Henry, William Henry, how much I love you! Like life, like air, like the sun, like God in His Heaven! Then, leaning his cheek against his son’s curls, his eyes closed, he felt a fine convulsive trembling right through the little body. It was as invisible as a cat’s purr; he found it only by way of his fingertips. A vibrating anguish. Anguish? Why that word? His eyes snapped open, he held William Henry out at arm’s length and looked into his face. Secret, shut away.

“He did not seem to miss ye at all,” said Dick comfortably.

“He ate every scrap on his plate,” said Mag proudly.

“He was as happy as a lark in my company,” said Peg with a sly flash of triumph.

His knees began to buckle; Richard sank into a chair near the counter and cuddled his son close again. The fine tremor had gone. Oh, William Henry, what are you thinking? Did you decide that Dadda was never coming back? Until today Dadda has never been away from you for more than an hour or two, and did anybody remember to tell you that Dadda would be home at twilight? No, nobody did. Including me. And you did not cry, or refuse to eat, or display concern. But you thought I was never coming back. That I would not be here for you. “I will always be here for you,” he whispered against William Henry’s ear. “Always and always.”

“How did it go?” asked Peg, who could still, after eighteen months of watching Richard with William Henry, find herself amazed at her husband’s-weakness?-softness? It is not healthy, she thought. He needs our child to feed something in himself, something I have no idea of. Well, I love William Henry every bit as much as he does! And now is my chance to have my son for me.

“It went well,” said Richard, answering her question, then looked at Dick, his gaze a little remote. “I have earned two pounds today, Father. A pound for you and a pound for me.”

“No,” said Dick gruffly. “Ten shillings for me, thirty for you. That much will see me through even when the day brings no custom at all. Pay me two shillings more for your family’s board, and bank the other twenty-eight shillings for yourself. He means to pay ye every Saturday, I hope? None of this by-the-month business, or when he is paid for the goods?”

“Every Saturday, Father.”

That night when Richard turned to find Peg and carefully roll up her nightgown, she slapped his hands away nastily.

“No, Richard!” she whispered fiercely. “William Henry is not asleep yet, and he is old enough to understand!”

He lay in the darkness listening to the rumbles and wheezes from the front room, weary to the bone from an unaccustomed kind of labor, yet wide awake. Today had been the beginning of many new things. A job at work he loved, separation from a child he loved, separation from a wife he loved, the realization that he could hurt people he loved all unknowing. It should be so simple. Nothing drove him save love-he had to work to support his family, to make sure they did not want. Yet Peg had slapped his hands away for the first time since they had married, and William Henry had trembled a cat’s purr.

What can I do? How can I find a solution? Today I have unwittingly opened up a chasm, though for the best of reasons. I have never asked for much nor expected much. Just the presence of my family. In that is happiness. I belong to them, and they belong to me. Or so I thought. Does a chasm always open up when things change? How deep is it? How wide?

“Senhor Habitas,” he said as dawn broke on his second day of work, “how many muskets do ye expect me to make in a day?”

Not a blink; Tomas Habitas rarely blinked. “Why, Richard?”

“I do not want to stay from dawn to dusk, sir. It is not as it was in the old days. My family have need of me too.”

“That I understand,” said Senhor Habitas gently. “The dilemma is insoluble. One works to make money to ensure the comfort and well-being of one’s family, yet one’s family needs more than money, and a man cannot be in two places at the same instant of time. I am paying you per musket, Richard. That means as many or as few as ye care to make.” He shrugged, an alien gesture. “Yes, I would like fifteen or twenty in a day, but I am prepared to take one. It is your choice.”

“Ten in a day, sir?”

“Ten is perfectly satisfactory.”

So Richard walked home to the Cooper’s Arms in mid afternoon, his ten muskets completed and successfully tested. Senhor Habitas was pleased; he would see enough of William Henry and Peg as well as bank enough to make that house on Clifton Hill a reality. His son was walking; soon the allurements of Broad Street would beckon through the open tavern door and William Henry would go adventuring. Better by far that his footsteps led him along paths perfumed with flowers than paths redolent with the stench of the Froom at low tide.

But it was neither Peg nor William Henry who reached him first when he walked in; Mr. James Thistlethwaite leaped up from “his” table to envelop Richard in a massive hug.

“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.

“Mr. Thistlethwaite is going away,” Richard said to his son.

“Away?”

“Aye, to London. We will not see him again very often if at all, William Henry.”

The eyes did not fill with tears, but they changed in a way Richard had learned meant inward grief, secret and sensitive. “He does not like us anymore, Dadda?”

“He likes us very well. But he needs more room than he can find in Bristol, and that has nothing to do with us.”

Listening to them, Peg plucked at the bars of her own cage, a structure as hidden as whatever went on inside William Henry’s mind. After that one vindictive reaction against Richard’s right to touch her, she had disciplined herself into conjugal obedience, and if Richard noticed that her response to his lovemaking was more mechanical than of yore, he had not commented. It was not that she loved him any less; her emotional withdrawal was founded in her guilt. Her barrenness. Her womb was shriveled and empty, incapable of carrying more than her menses, and here she was married to a man who loved his children almost too much. Who needed a tribe of children so that he could not heap all his eggs into a basket named William Henry.

“My love,” she said to Richard as they lay in bed reassured by the snores from the front room and by the deep sound of William Henry’s sleeping respiration, “I fear that I will never conceive again.” There. It was out at last.

“Have you talked to Cousin James-the-druggist?”

“I do not need to, nor is it something he would know the answer to. It is the way God made me, I just know it.”

He blinked, swallowed. “Well, we have William Henry.”

“I know. And he is healthy, remarkably so. But, Richard”-she lifted herself up to sit-“it is on that head I wish to speak.”

Richard sat up too, linked his arms around his knees. “Then speak, Peg.”

“I do not want to move to Clifton.”

He leaned sideways, struck the tinder and lit their candle so that he could see her face. Round, softly pretty and strained with anxiety, its big brown eyes looking hunted. “But for the sake of our only child, Peg, we must move to Clifton!”

Her hands clenched, she suddenly resembled her son-whatever she felt, she would not find the right words to express. “It is for William Henry’s sake that I speak. I know that you have the money to buy a very nice cottage a little way up the hills, but I would be alone in it with William Henry and there would be no one to call on in an emergency.”

“We can afford a servant, Peg, I have told you that.”

“Yes, but a servant is not family. Here I have your parents to turn to-there are three of us to make sure that William Henry is all right, Richard.” She ground her good, hard-water-nourished teeth. “I am having nightmares. I see William Henry going down to the Avon and falling in because I was busy making bread and the servant busy fetching water from Jacob’s Well. I see it over and over again-over and over again!”

The flame glittered off a sudden rush of tears; Richard put the candle on the clothes chest beside the bed and pulled his wife into his arms. “Peg, Peg… These are dreams. I have them too, my love. But my nightmare is of William Henry crushed beneath the runners of a geehoe, or William Henry taken with the bloody flux, or William Henry falling down an open manhole. All things that cannot happen in Clifton. If it worries you so much, then we will have a nursemaid for him too.”

“Your nightmares are all different,” she wept, “but mine is ever the same. Just William Henry leaping into the Avon at the gorge, William Henry terrified of something I cannot see.”

He gentled her until she quietened and finally fell asleep in his arms. Then lay, the candle guttering, fighting his own grief. This was a family conspiracy, he knew it. His mother and father were getting at Peg, Mag because she adored William Henry and loved her niece like a daughter, Dick because-well, perhaps in his heart of hearts he had decided that once Richard was living in Clifton, those twelve shillings a day would cease; a man who is master of his own house has many additional expenses. All his instincts urged that he ignore these pressures and remove his wife and child to the clean air and verdant hills of Clifton, but what Dick Morgan deemed softness in Richard was in fact an ability to understand and commiserate with the actions of others, especially his family. If he insisted upon that cottage in Clifton-and he had found the right one, roomy, beautifully thatched, not too old, with a separate kitchen in its backyard to guard against fire and a garret for the servants-if he insisted upon that cottage in Clifton he knew now that Peg had made up her mind not to thrive in it. She had made up her mind to hate it. How odd, in a farmer’s daughter! Not for one moment had he dreamed that she would not espouse a more rural style of living as eagerly as he, a city man born and bred. His lips quivered, but in the privacy of the night marches Richard Morgan did not weep. He simply steeled himself to accept the fact that he would not be moving to Clifton.

Dear God on high, my wife thinks that William Henry will drown in the Avon were he to live in Clifton. Whereas I have a dread foreboding that it is Bristol will kill him. I pray Thee, I beg Thee to protect my son! Grant me this one child! His mother says that there will be no more, and I believe her.

“We will remain at the Cooper’s Arms,” he said to Peg as they rose just before dawn.

Her face lit up, she hugged him in an agony of relief. “Oh, thank you, Richard, thank you!”

The war in America continued to go well for England for some time, despite the fact that a few Tory elements in the Parliament felt strongly enough to secede from the Government as a protest against the King’s policies. Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne was told to clear out every rebel in northern New York and demonstrated his tactical prowess by taking Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, a stronghold the rebels had deemed invulnerable. But between the lake and the headwaters of the Hudson River lay a wilderness that Burgoyne traveled at the rate of a mile a day. He lost his luck; so did his diversionary contingent, defeated at Bennington. Horatio Gates had taken over as rebel commander, and had the brilliant Benedict Arnold with him. Twice brought to battle at Bemis Heights, Burgoyne plummeted to final defeat and surrender at Saratoga.

The news of Saratoga rocked all of England to its foundations. Surrender! Somehow Saratoga outweighed all of the victories so far, a mysterious and subtle consequence neither Lord North nor the King had considered. To ordinary Englishmen and Englishwomen, Saratoga said that England was losing the war, that the American rebels owned something the French, Spanish and Dutch did not.

Had Sir William Howe advanced up the Hudson to meet Burgoyne, things might have gone very differently, but Howe had decided to invade Pennsylvania instead. He beat George Washington at Brandywine, then succeeded in capturing Philadelphia and Germantown. The American Congress fled to Pennsylvanian York, which baffled the English in the field-and at home. A people simply did not abandon their capital to the enemy, they defended it to the death! What matter taking Philadelphia when it no longer held the rebel government? Something new was on the face of the earth.

Though Howe’s conquests in Pennsylvania occupied more or less the same time frame as Burgoyne’s campaigns in upper New York, in England they could not compete with defeat at Saratoga. From Saratoga onward, the Parliament started to wonder if England could win this war. The government of Lord North grew defensive, worried too about events in Ireland, blocked from direct trading across the seas and talking about enlisting volunteers to fight the French, allied to the Americans. Well, everybody in London saw through that! If the Irish intended to fight, they would be going to fight the English. Therefore the Irish would have to be conciliated, as the army was 3,000 miles away. Not an easy task with the Tories ruling the House.

In Bristol the economic depression kept on worsening. French and American privateers were sailing the seas and doing better than the English privateers; the Royal Navy was also on the far side of the Western Ocean. Always eager to mount privateers, many Bristol plutocrats contributed money toward transforming merchant vessels into heavily armed floating fortresses. English privateers had done extremely well during the Seven Years’ War against France, so nobody envisioned that this war would see different results.

“But,” said Richard to Mr. James Thistlethwaite in a letter he wrote during the last half of 1778, “our investors have lost disastrously. Bristol launched 21 privateers, but only the two slavers Tartar and Alexander have captured a prize-a French East Indiaman said to be worth £100,000. The shipping trade has declined so much that the Council says the port dues will not cover the Mayor’s salary.

“Highwaymen are everywhere. Even the White Ladies Inn on the Aust turnpike is now deemed too dangerous a journey for a Sunday outing, and Mr. and Mrs. Maurice Trevillian of that eminent Cornish family were held up and robbed in their carriage right outside their residence on Park Street! They lost a gold watch, some very expensive jewelry and a sum of money.

“In short, Jem, things are in a parlous state.”

Mr. Thistlethwaite answered Richard’s letter with remarkable promptitude. Some inimical little Bristol birds were whistling a merry tune, to the effect that Jem Thistlethwaite was not prospering in London. He had turned, they trilled, to hacking for certain publishers and even touting for stationers.

“Richard, how splendid to hear from you! I miss the sight of your comely face, but a letter conjures it up.

“The only difference between a pirate and a privateer is the Letter of Marque from H.M.’s Government, which takes a big share of the profits. What started as a local conflagration has become a world war. English outposts are under attack in nearly all corners of the globe-how can a globe have corners?-even some mighty remote ones.

“I am not surprised that it was two slavers captured the only prize. Especially Alexander and Tartar. Just the right size and weight. 120 men to man 16 guns. Perfect. Besides, slavers sail so well. Fast and maneuverable. And they may as well be doing something, with slaving wellnigh impossible for the duration.

“If Bristol is in dire straits, Liverpool is poised on the brink of a maelstrom. It is a town almost as large as Bristol, yet it has less than a quarter of Bristol’s charitable institutions. Thousands have been thrown on its parishes, which, lacking donations from philanthropists, cannot feed them. They are literally starving, and Lord Penrhyn and his Liverpudlian kind have never heard of the word ‘philanthropy.’ That is what happens in a town whose nabobs are all in the slaving business.

“Though it looks east, London’s million souls are suffering too, Richard. The East India Company is feeling a little pinch, and is very afraid of the French, who are doing quite well by their Yankey allies. The United States of America! A grand title for a loose confederacy of little colonies thrown together by urgent need-need which will pass. Then, I predict, each little colony will go its own way, and the United States of America will dissolve into an unattainable philosophical idea in the minds of a handful of brilliant, enlightened, extremely gifted men. The American colonists will win their war, I have never doubted it, but they will emerge as thirteen different states linked by nothing more solid than a treaty of mutual aid.

“A little whisper you will enjoy, I know. Mr. Henry Cruger, Member of Parliament for Bristol and an American, is rumored to be receiving a pension of at least £1,000 a year from the King for information about Yankey doings. Ironic, is it not? There is Bristol screaming that Cruger is a Yankey spy, when all the time he is spying for England.

“And I will conclude, my very dear Richard, by saying that London air is Beotian air too, not fit for my Attic lungs to respire. However, I am well, quite often too drunk-though the rum is not the equal of Thomas Cave’s.”

A concluding paragraph, thought Richard, putting the letter down, that said the Bristol birds were singing a true song. Poor Jem! Bristol had finite bounds; he had thought to find none in gargantuan London, a city amply provided with its own satirists and in no need of Bristolians.

So the letters with which he continued to inundate Richard contained news Richard had already heard, though he could not bring himself to say so in his replies.

“Oh, Jem!” he exclaimed at the end of 1780 as he read yet another Thistlethwaite missive. “Ye’ve lost your edge!”

“It is a topsy-turvy world, Richard. Sir Henry Clinton, our latest Commander-in-Chief, has abandoned Philadelphia in order to keep a firm hold on Manhattan and adjacent parts of New York. Which seems to me a little like a fox going to earth before the hounds have started baying. The French have formally recognized the United States of America and are making utter buffoons of themselves over Ambassador Benjamin Franklin’s moth-eaten fur hat. All of Europe is now so apprehensive that Catherine, Empress of All The Russias, has negotiated a league of armed neutrality between herself and Denmark, Sweden, Prussia, Austria and Sicily. The only thing these countries have in common is fear of the English and French.

“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.

His lessons took place in a vast room inhabited by the junior 100 of Colston’s pupils; several masters drifted from one group to another, or hectored one group without regard for the welfare of other groups. It was therefore of great advantage to William Henry Morgan that his grandfather, not busy enough in these hard times, had taught him to count, to know his ABC, and even to do a few simple sums. Otherwise he might have been overwhelmed.

Though the Reverend Prichard hovered, he did not take lessons. That duty for William Henry’s group rested with a Mr. Simpson, and it soon became apparent that Mr. Simpson had pronounced likes and dislikes when it came to his charges. Since he was willowy, sallow-skinned and looked to be in constant danger of vomiting, it was not surprising that he disliked the boys who snuffled with sickening gusto, or picked their noses, or displayed the sticky brown fingers which betrayed that they used them to wipe their dirty bottoms.

It was no torment for William Henry to do as he was told and-sit still!-don’t fidget!-don’t kick the bench!-don’t pick your nose!-don’t snuffle!-and don’t talk! Therefore Mr. Simpson appeared not to notice him beyond asking him his name and informing him that since there were already two Morgans at Colston’s, he would be known as “Morgan Tertius.” Another boy, asked the same question and giving a similar kind of reply, was foolish enough to protest that he did not want to be known as “Carter Minor.” Which earned him four vicious lashes with the cane, one for not saying “sir,” one for being presumptuous, and two for good luck.

The cane was a frightful instrument, one William Henry had no experience of whatsoever. In fact, he had lived for seven years without so much as being smacked. Therefore, he vowed, he would give no master at Colston’s any excuse for caning him. For by the time that eleven o’clock came and the entire school sat upon benches down either side of long tables in the refectory, William Henry had worked out who got the cane. The talkers, the nose pickers, the fidgeters, the snufflers, the dullards, the cheeky, and a small number of boys who could not seem to help getting up to mischief.

He did not care much for either of his closest companions in both classroom and refectory, but did like the look of the boy who sat next-but-one from him; cheerful, yet not quite perky enough to have gotten the cane. William Henry glanced at him and essayed a smile which caused one of the masters at the Head’s table to draw in a breath and stiffen.

The moment he received the smile, the boy somehow ejected the obstacle between them, who fell on the floor with a clatter and was hauled away by one ear to the Head’s table on a dais at the front of the enormous, echoing room.

“Monkton Minor,” said the newcomer, grinning to reveal a missing tooth. “Been here since February.”

“Morgan Tertius, started today,” whispered William Henry.

“It is allowed to talk quietly once Grace has been said. You must have a rich father, Morgan Tertius.”

William Henry eyed Monkton Minor’s blue coat and looked wistful. “I do not think so, Monkton Minor. Not terribly rich, anyway. He went here, and he wore the blue coat.”

“Oh.” Monkton Minor thought about that, then nodded. “Is your father still alive?”

“Yes. Is yours?”

“No. Nor is my mother. I am an orphan.” Monkton Minor leaned his head closer, his bright blue eyes sparkling. “What is your Christian name, Morgan Tertius?”

“I have two. William Henry. What is yours?”

“Johnny.” The look became conspiratorial. “I will call you William Henry and you will call me Johnny-but only if no one can hear us.”

“Is it a sin?” asked William Henry, who still catalogued wrongs in that light.

“No, just not good form. But I hate being a Minor!”

“And I a Tertius.” William Henry removed his gaze from his new friend and glanced guiltily toward the Head’s table on high, where the ejected benchmate was receiving what William Henry had already learned was a jawing-far worse than a few licks of the cane because it took so much longer and one had to stand absolutely still until it was over or else teeter on a stool for the rest of the day. Encountering the stare of a master beside Mr. Simpson, he blinked and looked away immediately, quite why he did not know. “Who is that, Johnny?”

“Next to the Head? Old Doom and Froom.” Mr. Prichard.

“No, one down. Next to the Simp.”

“Mr. Parfrey. He teaches Latin.”

“Does he have a nickname too?”

Monkton Minor managed to touch the tip of his snub nose with his pursed lips. “If he does, us juniors don’t know it. Latin is for the seniors.”

While the two boys discussed them, Mr. Parfrey and Mr. Simpson were busy discussing William Henry.

“I see, Ned, that ye have a Ganymede amongst your swine.”

Mr. Edward Simpson understood this without further elucidation. “Morgan Tertius? You should see his eyes!”

“I must make sure I do. But even viewed from afar, Ned, he is ravishing. Truly a Ganymede-ah, to be a Zeus!”

“As well then, George, that by the time he starts amo-ing and amas-ing, he will be two years older and probably as snotty as all the rest,” said Mr. Simpson, picking diffidently at his food, though a great deal more palatable than that served to the boys; disease ran in his family, notoriously short-lived.

Their casual exchange was not evidence of prurient intentions; it was merely a symptom of their unenviable lot. George Parfrey had longed to be a Zeus, but he might as easily and as fruitlessly have longed to be a Robert Nugent, now Earl Nugent. Schoolmasters were inevitably genteely impoverished. For Mr. Simpson and Mr. Parfrey, Colston’s represented a kind of zenith; they were paid £1 per week-but only when school was up-and had their board and lodging all year round as part of the job. As Colston’s ran to very good food (the Head was a famous Epicure) and its masters each had a roomlet to himself, there was very little reason to leave unless one were tapped for Eton, Harrow or Bristol Grammar School. Marriage made things more difficult, of course, and was out of the question until one either took Orders or received a hefty promotion; not that marriage was forbidden, rather that housing a wife and offspring in a roomlet was a daunting prospect. Besides which, Mr. Simpson and Mr. Parfrey were not tempted by the Other Sex. They preferred to make do with their own, and in particular with each other. The love, however, was purely on poor Ned Simpson’s side. George Parfrey owned himself completely.

“Perhaps we could go to the Hotwells after Church on Sunday?” Mr. Simpson asked hopefully. “The waters seem to do me good.”

“Provided you allow me the indulgence of my watercolors,” said Mr. Parfrey, still gazing at William Henry Morgan, who was growing more animated-and more beautiful-with every passing moment. He pulled a face. “I fail to understand how anyone can feel better after drinking the Avon’s leavings, but if you are happy to grant me a peaceful interlude by St. Vincent’s Rocks, then I will come.” A sigh emerged. “Oh, how much I would love to paint that divine child!”

Richard arrived to collect William Henry dry mouthed. What if he were greeted by a distraught little boy begging not to have to return to school tomorrow?

Needless fears. His eyes located his son careering headlong around the yard, laughing as he dodged the sallies of a blue-coated little fellow his own age, tow-headed and painfully thin.

“Dadda!” Up he scampered, his playmate close behind. “Dadda, this is Monkton Minor, but I call him Johnny when no one can hear us. He is a norphan.”

“How d’ye do, Monkton Minor?” asked Richard, his own days at Colston’s rushing back. He had been Morgan Minor, had graduated to Morgan Major after he turned eleven. And only his best friend had called him Richard. “I shall ask the Reverend Prichard if ye may come to dinner with us after Church next Sunday.”

He felt as if he shepherded a stranger, he reflected as he bore William Henry off; a William Henry who did not walk sedately at his side but skipped and hopped, hummed under his breath.

“I take it that you like school,” he said, smiling.

“It is splendid, Dadda! I can run and shout.”

The tears came; Richard blinked them away. “But not in the classroom, I trust.”

William Henry gave him a withering look. “Dadda, I am an angel in the classroom! I did not get the cane once. A lot of the boys got it a lot, and one boy fainted when he got thirty. Thirty is a walloping lot. But I worked out how not to get caned.”

“Did you? How?”

“I keep quiet and do my writing and my sums tidily.”

“Yes, William Henry, I know that technique well. Did the big boys make you cry when you were let out to play?”

“You mean when they lined all of us up in the privies?”

“They still do that, do they?”

“Well, they did to us. But I just wrote on the privy wall with the big piece of pooh Jones Major did on my hand-most of it missed-and then they left me alone. Johnny says it is the best way. They pick on the boys who howl and carry on.” He gave a particularly high skip. “I wiped my fingers on my coat. See?”

Mouth rigid, Richard eyed the brown smear across the skirt of William Henry’s brand-new, mushroom-colored coat and swallowed convulsively several times. Do not laugh, Richard, for Christ’s sake do not laugh! “If I were you,” he said when he was able, “I would not mention the pooh incident to Mama. Or show her where you wiped it off. I will ask Grandmama to clean the mark.”

So Richard ushered his son into the Cooper’s Arms with an air of triumph only his father noticed. Peg squealed and scooped the hitherto tractable William Henry into her arms to cover his face with kisses, and was pushed away.

“Mama, do not do that! I am a big boy now! Grandpapa, I had such a good time today! I ran ten times around the yard, I fell over and hurt my knee, I made a whole row of a’s on my slate, and Mr. Simpson says I am so advanced for my age that he is going to put me up into the next class. Except that that don’t make sense. He teaches the next class too, and in the same place. Mama, my knee is a badge! Do not fuss so!”

Richard filled in the rest of his afternoon by nailing up some planks to make William Henry his own cubicle at the far side of the bedroom; he slept in a bed these days anyway. The activity was as soothing as it was removed from the turmoil downstairs, from whence he could hear William Henry regaling every newcomer with a censored version of his day at school. Talk! He had not shut up-William Henry, who never said more than two words together!

For Peg, Richard felt an enormous pity tempered by the icy wind of his own common sense. William Henry had flown from the nest, and could never be confined again. But how much of what he had displayed in the stunning space of one small day had he harbored through the years? One day could not possibly have produced so many new thoughts, for all that it had endowed him with a new code of behavior. William Henry is not the saint I deemed him after all. William Henry, God bless him, is an ordinary little boy.

And so he tried to tell Peg, but without success. No matter how he attacked her, Peg refused to accept the fact that her son was alive and well and hugely enjoying a brand-new world. She sought refuge in tears and suffered such black depressions that Richard despaired, tired of her waterworks and having no idea of the depth of her guilt, her consciousness that she had failed in the only task a woman truly had: to give birth to children. His patience with her never diminished, but on the day that he caught her drinking a mug of rum it was sorely tried.

“This is no place for you,” he said kindly. “Let me buy that house in Clifton, Peg, please.”

“No, no, no!” she screamed.

“My love, we have been married for fourteen years and ye’ve been my friend as well as my wife, but this is too much. I do not know what ails your heart, but rum is no cure for it.”

“Leave me alone!”

“I cannot, Peg. Father is growing annoyed, but that is not the worst of it. William Henry is old enough to notice that his mama is behaving strangely. Please, try to be good for his sake.”

“William Henry does not care about me, why should I try for his sake?” she demanded.

“Oh, Peg, that is not true!”

Round and round in circles, that was how it seemed to be; not sweet reason nor Richard’s patience nor Dick’s irritation served to help placate whatever monsters chewed at her mind, though she did abandon the rum when William Henry asked her outright why she was falling-down drunk. The directness of his question appalled her.

“Though why I do not know,” said Dick to Richard later that day. “William Henry is a tavern-keeper’s child.”

Late in February of 1782, Mr. James Thistlethwaite sent Richard a letter by special courier.

“I write this on the night of the 27th, my dear friend, and I am the richer by £1,000. Paid by a draft on my hapless victim’s bank. It is official! Today the Parliament voted to discontinue offensive warfare against the thirteen colonies, and soon we will begin to withdraw our troops.

“I blame all of it on Franklin’s fur hat. The Frogs have proven themselves staunch allies, between Admiral de Grasse and General de Rochambeau-which goes to show that if a man captivates the French sense of fashion, anything is possible. George Washington and the Frogs ran rings around us at Yorktown, though I think what decided the Parliament was the fact that Lord Cornwallis surrendered. Yes, I realize that Clinton was having too good a time of it in New York to sail down and relieve Cornwallis, and I realize that it was the French navy enabled Washington and his land Frogs to force Yorktown, but that does not diminish the magnitude of surrender. Burgoyne all over again. London is shamed into heartbreak over it.

“Spread the news, Richard, for my courier will reach Bristol first, and do not neglect to say that your source is James Thistlethwaite, late of Cornwallis’s Bristol.

“Do I hear you ask what I am going to do with £1,000? Buy a pipe of rum from Mr. Thomas Cave’s distillery-and I do know that a pipe contains 105 gallons! I will also stroll down to the Green Canister in Half Moon Street, there to buy a gross of her finest cundums from Mrs. Phillips. These London whores are runny with the pox and the clap, but Mrs. Phillips has come up with the world’s most important invention since rum. I shall be able to poke my properly encundumed sugar stick with impunity.”

It was another year-March of 1783-before Senhor Tomas Habitas was obliged to let Richard go. The Bristol Bank held over £3,000 by then, scarcely a penny of it touched. Why should he spend it? Peg would not move to Clifton and his father (whom he had tried to talk into taking the Black Horse Inn on Clifton Hill) professed himself happy at the Cooper’s Arms. Not all those twelve shillings a day which Richard had paid him for over seven years had been used up, Dick explained ingenuously. He could afford to wait the hard times out right where he was, on Broad Street, in the thick of things.

Yes, the American war was over and in time a treaty would confirm that fact, but prosperity had not returned. Part of that was due to chaos in the Parliament, wherein Charles James Fox and Lord North screamed the roof down about the unwarranted concessions Lord Shelburne was making to the Americans. No one was worrying about mundanities like government. Short-lived administrations distinguished by wrangling and power plays wreaked havoc in Westminster; the truth was that no one, including the half-crazed King, knew what to do with a war debt of £232 million and falling revenues.

Food riots broke out among Bristol’s sailors, who were paid thirty shillings per month-provided that they were at sea. On shore, not a penny. The situation was so desperate that the Mayor managed to persuade ship owners to give their sailors fifteen shillings per month while on shore. In 1775 the number of ships paying the Mayor’s Dues had been 529: by 1783, that number had shrunk to 102. As most of these ships were Bristol based and lying idle along the quays and backs as well as downriver around Pill, several thousand sailors were a force to be reckoned with.

In Liverpool, 10,000 of the 40,000 inhabitants were depending upon the slender charitable resources of that city, and in Bristol the Poor Rates had soared 150 per cent. The Corporation and the Merchant Venturers had no choice other than to start selling off property. New and stringent ordinances were brought in to deal with the ever-increasing flow of rural poor into Bristol, there to throw themselves upon the parishes and eat at least. Some of those caught defrauding the parishes were publicly pilloried and whipped before being banished; yet the flood continued to pour in faster than an Avon tide.

“Did you see this, Dick?” asked Cousin James-the-druggist, calling in on his way home from his Corn Street shop. He waved a sheet of flimsy. “An advertisement from our felons in the Newgate, if you please! Announcing that they cannot afford to eat on their twopence a day-it is a disgrace, with bread at sixteen pence the quartern loaf.”

“A penny a day if they are still awaiting trial,” said Dick.

“I shall see Jenkins the baker and send them however much bread they need. And cheese and ox cheeks.”

Dick grinned slyly. “What, Jim, no shillingses tipped into their outstretched hands?”

Cousin James-the-druggist blushed. “Yes, ye were right, Dick. They did indeed drink it up.”

“They always will drink it up. To send them bread is sensible. Just make sure that your philanthropic cronies do likewise.”

“How is Richard now that he is not working? I never see him.”

“Well enough,” said Richard’s father curtly. “The reason he is invisible is up there on his bed.”

“Drunk?”

“Oh, no. She stopped that after William Henry asked her outright why she guzzled rum.” He shrugged. “When William Henry is not here, she lies on the bed and stares at nothing.”

“And when William Henry is here?”

“She behaves herself.” Mine Host hawked and spat copiously into his sawdust. “Women! They are very queer fish, Jim.”

A mental picture of his vaporish wife and their two bracket-faced spinster daughters swam before Cousin James-the-druggist’s eyes; he smiled wryly and nodded. “I have often wondered,” he said, “why the world should choose to liken a face to a bracket?”

Dick roared with laughter. “Thinking of your girls, Jim?”

“Girls no longer, alas. They are past their last prayers.” He got to his feet. “I am sorry to have missed Richard. I had thought to see him back here, as in the old days before Habitas.”

“The old days are gone, do I need to tell ye that? Look around you! The place is empty, and the quays boil with those poor sailor bastards. How virtuous are our genuine registered parish poor, and how indignant! They cast rocks at their wretched brethren in the pillory rather than pity them.” Dick pounded his fist on the table. “Why did we ever go to war three thousand miles away? Why did we not simply hand the colonists their precious liberty? Wish them well of something so ridiculous, then go back to sleep, or go fight France? The country is ruined, and all for the sake of an idea. Not our idea at that.”

“You have not answered me. If Richard has no job, where is he? And where is William Henry?”

“They walk together, Jim. Always to Clifton. They go-up Pipe Lane-down Frog Lane-across the Brandon Hill footpath to Clifton Hill-chase the cows and sheep in the Clifton Pound-then come back along the Avon, where they throw stones into the water and laugh a lot.”

“That is William Henry’s version, not Richard’s.”

“Richard tells me nothing,” said Dick sourly.

“You and he are different natured,” said Cousin James-the-druggist, going to the door. “That happens. What ye ought to be thanking God for, Dick, is that Richard and William Henry are like as two peas. It is”-he drew a breath-“quite beautiful.”

On the following Sunday after Church and a bracing sermon from Cousin James-of-the-clergy, Richard and William Henry walked to the Hotwells end of Clifton.

A decade or two ago Bristol’s own watering place had come near to rivaling Bath as a spa for high society; the guest houses of Dowry Place, Dowry Square and the Hotwells Road teemed with elegant visitors in expensive array, fabulously bewigged gentlemen in embroidered coats mincing along in high heels with bedizened ladies on their arms. There were balls and soirées, parties and routs, concerts and entertainments, even theater in the old Clifton playhouse on Wood Wells Lane. For a while an imitation Vauxhall Gardens had seen its share of masquerades, intrigues and scandals; novelists had situated their heroines at the Hotwells, and society doctors had extolled the medicinal properties of the waters.

And then the fabric of its fascination fell apart, too slowly to call disintegration, yet too quickly to call a rot from within. Fashion had made it: fashion unmade it. The elegant visitors moved back to Bath, or on to Cheltenham, and the Bristol Hotwells became mostly an export industry of bottled spa water.

Which suited Richard and William Henry very well, for it meant that a Sunday outing saw no more than a handful of other visitors on the horizon. Mag had packed them a cold dinner of broiled fowl, bread, butter, cheese and a few early apples her brother had sent from the farm at Bedminster; Richard carried it in a soldier’s pack athwart his shoulders, where it rested next to a flagon of small beer. They found a good spot beyond the square bulk of the Hotwells House, which stood on a rock shelf just above the high tide mark where the Avon Gorge terminated.

It truly was a beautiful place, for St. Vincent’s Rocks and the crags of the gorge were richly colored in reds, plums, pinks, rusts, greys and off-whites, the river was the hue of blued steel, and a wealth of trees conspired to hide even the chimneys of Mr. Codrington’s brass foundry.

“Can you swim, Dadda?” asked William Henry.

“No. Which is why we are sitting here, not right on the edge of the river,” said Richard.

William Henry eyed the spate thoughtfully; the tide was still flooding in, and the current curled and swirled visibly. “The water moves as if it were alive.”

“You might say it is. And it is hungry, never forget that. It would suck you down and eat you whole here, ye’d never see the surface again. So no high jinks anywhere near it, is that understood?”

“Yes, Dadda.”

Dinner eaten, the pair of them stretched out on the sward with their coats rolled up to serve as pillows; Richard closed his eyes.

“The Simp is gone,” said William Henry suddenly.

His father opened one eye and grinned. “Can you never be still and quiet?” he asked.

“Not often, and not now. The Simp is gone.”

The message sank in. “You mean that he does not teach you? Well, ye’ve just begun your third year at Colston’s, so that was to be expected.”

“No, Dadda, I mean that he is gone! Over the summer, while we were on holidays. Johnny says he was too sick to stay any longer. The Head asked the Bishop if he could go to one of the almshouses, but the Bishop said they were not for the sick, they were for the in-in-I do not know the word.”

“Indigent?”

“That is it, indigent! So they carried him in a sedan chair to St. Peter’s Hospital. Johnny says he cried dreadfully.”

“So would I, were I to be carried to St. Peter’s,” Richard said with feeling. “Poor fellow. Why wait until now to tell me?”

“I forgot,” said William Henry vaguely, rolled over twice, kicked his heels bruisingly against the grass, sighed deeply, flapped his hands, rolled over again, and began to pluck the detritus from around a promising stone.

“Time to go, my son. I recognize the signs,” said Richard, getting to his feet, stuffing their coats into the soldier’s pack and shouldering it. “Shall we hike up Granby Hill and look at Mr. Goldney’s grotto?”

“Oh yes please!” cried William Henry, scampering off.

They looked, reflected Mr. George Parfrey from his perch on a shrub-shrouded ledge above them, as if they had not a care in the world. And they probably did not have a care in the world. The boy was a paying pupil; though they were not ostentatiously dressed, Mr. Parfrey had taken due note of good fine cloth, the absence of frayed or darned hems, the shine on their silver-buckled shoes and a certain air of independence.

He knew everything about Morgan Tertius’s father, of course; Colston’s was a small place, its paying pupils dissected in the masters’ commonroom all the more minutely because in a starved existence there was so little else to talk about. A gunsmith in partnership with a Jew, and who had earned a small fortune out of the American war. Not often a boy as beautiful as the son appeared. Nor, when such a boy did appear, was he usually as unaffected and unspoiled as Morgan Tertius. However, the boy was not yet old enough to realize what capital he could make out of his beauty.

That had to be the father with him. They were too alike not to be closely related and the odds favored paternity. A sketchbook lay upon Parfrey’s knee, on its top page a drawing he had taken of the pair of them resting beside the Avon. A good drawing. George Parfrey himself was a handsome man, and when younger, his looks had effectively scotched any hope of a career as a drawing master in some rich man’s house, seeing to the limited education of the rich man’s daughters. For no rich man in his right mind would hire a handsome young man to peer over an heiress’s shoulder and catch her fancy.

Though his heart had not been touched, he was missing poor Ned Simpson more than he had counted upon; the others of their persuasion at Colston’s were paired too neatly to think of switching their affections. With Ned’s departure-he had died soon after going into St. Peter’s-no one needed him. Neither the Head, the Bishop nor the Reverend Mr. Prichard approved of Greek love, each of them having a suitable wife and other fish to fry. So the discreet liaisons which were conducted within the walls of Colston’s were fraught with a thousand tensions. Schoolmasters were a ha’penny a dozen, for who in choosing them cared a straw about whether they could teach or not? They were selected upon the recommendation of a board, a Church committee, an eminent cleric, an alderman, a Member of Parliament. None of whom would approve of homosexuality, no matter how discreet. Supply and demand. Sailors might drink themselves sodden, curse and brawl, ram every arse between Bristol and Wampoa, and still keep their reputations as good workmen intact; no ship owner bothered his head about booze, brawls or bums. The same could probably be said of lawyers or bookkeepers. Whereas schoolmasters were a ha’penny a dozen. No booze, no brawls, and-God forbid!-no bums. Especially in a charity school.

Mr. Parfrey had been thinking about moving on, but understood that his hopes were faint. His world was too small, too enclosed. Colston’s would see the end of his career, after which the Bishop might graciously consent to accommodating him in an almshouse. He was turned five-and-forty, and Colston’s was it.

So he put the sketchbook into his case and left the ledge above the Avon to its own devices, still thinking about Morgan Tertius and his father. Odd, that the father shared the son’s amazing good looks, yet did not have the power to turn heads.

Now that William Henry was back in school, Richard had the leisure to pursue both a friendship and an intriguing proposition. Cousin James-the-druggist had been at him to do something better by his £3,000 than leave it in a bank for Quakers to make more from than he did-invest it in the three-per-cents, or at least invest it! urged the businesslike member of the Morgan clan.

He had met Mr. Thomas Latimer when he and William Henry had called into the Habitas workshop. The seven years during which Senhor Habitas had made Brown Besses for Tower Arms had earned him enough to retire in style, but no one who loved his craft as much as Tomas Habitas did would voluntarily retire. Rather, he had advertised in Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal that he was now available to make sporting guns, and sufficient custom had arrived to keep him just pleasantly occupied.

As Habitas explained after the introductions were performed, Mr. Latimer was a craftsman of a different kind: he made pumps.

“Mostly hand pumps, but ships are converting to chain pumps, and I have an Admiralty contract for making the chains themselves,” he said cheerfully. “The hand pump or the pole pump were lucky to lift a ton of bilge water in a week, whereas the chain pump can lift a ton of bilge water in a literal minute. Not to mention that its basis is a simple wooden structure a ship’s carpenter can build. All he needs to complete it is the brass chain.”

This was news to Richard, who found himself liking Mr. Thomas Latimer enormously. Not anybody’s picture of an engineer, he was short, plump, and always smiling-no gloomy Vulcan’s brow or blacksmith’s sinews about Mr. Latimer!

“I have bought Wasborough’s brass foundry in Narrow Wine Street,” he explained, “I confess purely because it contains one of Wasborough’s three fire engines.”

Of course Richard knew what a fire engine was, but once his son was back in school and the hours between seven and two were entirely his to fritter away, he had the time to discover a great deal more about this fascinating device.

The fire engine had been invented by Newcomen early in the century; this was the model that pumped water out of the Kingswood mines and drove the water wheels in William Champion’s copper and brass works on the Avon adjacent to the coal. Then James Watt had invented the separate steam condenser, which improved the efficiency of Newcomen’s engine so much that Watt had been able to interest the Birmingham iron and steel magnate Matthew Bolton in his idea. Watt had gone into partnership with Bolton and the pair of them maintained a complete monopoly on the manufacture of fire engines through a series of court cases which effectively prevented anyone else’s trying to compete; no other inventor could manage to get around incorporating Watt’s heavily patented separate steam condenser into his design.

Then Matthew Wasborough, a man in his middle twenties, had met another Bristolian youth named Pickard. Wasborough had come up with a system of pulleys and a fly wheel, Pickard had invented the crank, and together these three new concepts converted the reciprocal motion of a fire engine into circular motion. Instead of the driving force moving up and down, it now turned round and round.

“Water-wheels rotate and can make machinery rotate,” said Mr. Latimer as he conducted the sweating Richard through a place filled with furnaces, hearths, lathes, presses, fumes and noise. “But that,” said Latimer, pointing, “can make machinery rotate all by itself.” Richard gazed at a puffing, chugging monstrosity which occupied pride of place amid a series of spinning lathes, all turning brass into useful objects for ships; iron and ships did not mix, thanks to the corrosive effects of salt water on iron.

“May we go outside?” Richard shouted, ears ringing.

“When Wasborough combined his pulleys and fly wheel with the Pickard crank, they virtually eliminated the water-wheel,” Latimer continued as soon as they emerged onto the bank of the Froom just downriver of the Weare where the washerwomen gathered to launder. “It is brilliant, for it means that a manufactory does not need to be sited on a river. If coal is cheap, as it is in Bristol, steam is better than water-provided the engine has circular motion.”

“Then why have I never heard of Wasborough and Pickard?”

“Because of James Watt, who sued them because their fire engine contained his patented separate steam condenser. Watt also accused Pickard of stealing his idea for a crank, which is utter nonsense. Watt’s solution to the problem of circular motion is rack-and-pinion-he calls it ‘sun and planet motion’-but it is devilish slow and complicated. The moment he saw the patent for Pickard’s crank, he knew it was the right answer, and could not bear being beaten.”

“I had no idea engineering was so cutthroat. What happened?”

“Oh, after a lot of heartaches like losing the contract for a Government flour mill in Deptford, Wasborough died of sheer despair-he was all of eight-and-twenty-and Pickard fled to Connecticut. But I have worked out how to get around Watt’s patented separate steam condenser, so I intend to produce the Wasborough-Pickard model before their patents run out and Watt can nip in to collar them.”

“It is hard to believe that the most brilliant man in the world is a villain,” said Richard.

“James Watt,” said Thomas Latimer, not smiling, “is a twisted, stringy little Scotch bastard of no mean ability but a great deal more conceit! If it exists, then Watt has to have invented it-to hear him, God is his apprentice and Heaven is a haggis. Pah!”

Richard eyed the sluggish Froom and noted its cargo of flotsam. Ideal for snarling the buckets of a water-wheel, he thought. “I do see the advantage of steam over water,” he said. “We simply cannot continue to conduct industries requiring water power in the midst of cities. Fire engines with circular motion are the way of the future, Mr. Latimer.”

“Call me Tom. Consider this, Richard! Wasborough dreamed of incorporating one of his fire engines into a ship, thus enabling it to steer a course as straight as an arrow without regard for seas, currents or tacking and standing to find a favorable wind. His steam device would rotate the blades of a modified water-wheel on either side of the ship, propelling it along. Wonderful!”

“Wonderful indeed, Tom.”

When he got home he repeated this sentiment to an audience consisting of his father and Cousin James-the-druggist.

“Latimer is looking for investors,” he said then, “and I am thinking of contributing my three thousand pounds to the venture.”

“Ye’ll lose your money,” said Dick grimly.

Cousin James-the-druggist did not agree. “News of Latimer’s intentions has created much interest, Richard, and the man’s credentials are excellent, even though he is a newcomer to Bristol. I am thinking of investing a thousand in it myself.”

“Then ye’re both fools,” said Dick, a stand from which he refused to budge.

Head bent over his books, William Henry was sitting at Mr. James Thistlethwaite’s old table doing his homework; he had gone from a slate to quill and paper, and had enough of Richard’s painstaking patience to enjoy producing copperplate script minus the smears and blots which were the bane of most boys’ lives.

I am going to make enough money, thought Richard, to educate William Henry right up to Oxford level. He will not go at twelve to some lawyer or druggist-or gunsmith!-to serve for seven years as an unpaid slave. I was lucky with Habitas, but how many young apprentices can say they have a good master? No, I do not want that fate for my only child. From Colston’s he must go to the Bristol Grammar School, and then to Oxford. Or Cambridge. He likes his schoolwork greatly, and I notice that, just as for me, it is no chore to him to have to read a book. He loves to learn.

Peg was there alongside Mag, both women busy putting the final touches to supper while Richard moved among the occupied tables collecting empties and delivering fulls. The atmosphere was much happier than of yore; Peg seemed to be on the mend at last. She could marshal an occasional smile, did not fuss over William Henry, and in bed she sometimes turned of her own volition to Richard to offer him a little love. Not the old sort of love, no. That was the stuff of dreams, and Richard’s dreams were busy dying. Only the young can conquer the mountains of the mind, thought Richard. At five-and-thirty years of age, I am no longer young. My son is nine, and I pass the dreams to him.

Along with a dozen other men, Richard signed his money over to Mr. Thomas Latimer for the express purpose of developing a new kind of fire engine; none of the investors, who included Cousin James-the-druggist, were given any interest in the brass foundry itself, devoted to manufacturing the flat, hook-linked chains for the Admiralty’s new bilge pumps.

“I am closing down for Christmas,” said Mr. Thomas Latimer to Richard (who was so fascinated that he visited Wasborough’s almost every day) on the eve of that foggy, mournfully grey season.

“Unusual” was Richard’s comment.

“Oh, the workmen will not be paid! It is just that I have noticed that nothing is done properly during Christmas. Too much rum. Though what the poor wretches have to celebrate I do not know,” sighed Latimer. “Times are no better, in spite of young William Pitt as Chancellor for the Exchequer.”

“How can times be better, Tom? The only way Pitt can pay for the American war is to raise existing taxes and think of new ones.” Richard grinned slyly. “Of course, ye could make a happier Yuletide for your workmen by paying them for the holidays.”

Mr. Latimer’s cheerfulness did not abate. “Could not do that! Did I, every employer in Bristol would blackball me.”

It was pleasant for Richard, however, to be able to spend more time at the Cooper’s Arms over Christmas, for William Henry had no school and the tavern was full of wassailers. Mag and Peg had made delicious puddings and pots of brandy sauce to go over them, a haunch of venison roasted on the spit, and Dick made his festive drink of hot, sweet, spiced wine. Richard produced presents: a second cat for Dick, tabby grey, to dispense gin; a green silk umbrella each for Mag and Peg; and for William Henry, a parcel of books, a ream of best writing papers, a splendid leather-covered cork ball, and no less than six pencles made of Cumberland graphite.

Dick was mighty pleased with his gin cat, but Mag and Peg were overwhelmed.

“Such an extravagance!” cried Mag, opening her umbrella to study the effect of lamplight through its thin, jade-colored fabric. “Oh, Peg, how fashionable we will be! Even Cousin Ann will be cast in the shade!” She pirouetted, then shut the umbrella in a hurry. “William Henry, do not dare to throw that ball in here!”

Of course the ball was the best present as far as William Henry was concerned, but the pencles were pretty good too. “Dadda, you will have to show me how to sharpen them, I want them to last as long as possible,” he said, beaming. “Oh, Mr. Parfrey will admire them! He does not have a pencle.”

Mr. Parfrey was top of the trees in William Henry’s estimation, everybody knew that by now; William Henry had been dinning his excellence in their ears ever since Latin classes had begun early in October. Clearly this was one schoolmaster who knew how to teach, for he had captured William Henry’s interest on his first day, and William Henry had not been the only one. Even Johnny Monkton voted Mr. Parfrey first rate.

“He may admire your pencles, but not take,” said Richard as he folded William Henry’s hand around a small parcel. “Here, this is a present for Johnny. A pity the Head insisted all boarders remain in school for Christmas Day, it would have been nice to have him here with us. Still, he shall have a present.”

“It is pencles,” said William Henry instantly.

“Aye, pencles.”

Peg seized the moment to enfold William Henry in a hug and press her lips to his wide, ivory brow. As if understanding that this was one gift he could give his mother, William Henry suffered her embrace, even kissed her back.

“Ain’t Dadda the best father?” he asked his mother.

“Yes,” said Peg, waiting in vain to be told that she was the best mother. A year ago her son’s indifference coupled with a remark like this would have generated a surge of hatred for Richard, but Peg had learned that hating Richard could not change a thing. Better then to get on with him, please him. Her son adored him so. What else could a woman expect? They were men together.

When the new year of 1784 dawned, Richard walked up to Narrow Wine Street to visit Mr. Latimer at Wasborough’s foundry.

What one saw from Narrow Wine Street was a barnlike structure built of limestone blocks so grimed from the smoke of its chimneys that they were black; along its façade were a number of very large, battered wooden doors, always thrown open to reveal the activity within as well as let out some of the heat and noise.

How odd! All the doors were closed. A long holiday indeed for Latimer’s poor workmen, not paid since before Christmas. As he walked down the length of the building Richard tried each door in turn: locked. The back way, then. He took advantage of a tiny alley to attain the Froom side of the building, and there found one open door. Silence greeted him as he entered; the furnaces were unlit, the hearths empty, and the quenched fire engine sat brooding among its idle lathes.

Emerging, he walked to the Froom, running full, and as grey and gelid as the sky.

“Richard, oh, Richard!”

He turned to see Cousin James-the-druggist come out of the alley, wringing his hands.

“Dick said you were here-Oh, Richard, it is terrible!”

Something in him already knew, but he asked anyway. “What is terrible, Cousin James?”

“Latimer! He is gone! Absconded with all our money!”

An oak mooring post probably as old as the English Romans stood at the edge of the river; Richard leaned against it and closed his eyes. “Then the man is an idiot. He will be caught.”

For answer, Cousin James-the-druggist began to weep.

“Cousin James, Cousin James, it is not the end of the world,” said Richard, putting an arm about his shoulders and leading him to a slab of foundry junk upon which they could sit. “Come now, do not cry so!”

“I must! It is my fault! If I had not encouraged you, your money would still be safe. I can afford to pay for my own stupidity, but-oh, Richard, it is not fair that you should lose your all!”

Not conscious of any pain beyond concern for this beloved man, Richard stared at the Froom without seeing it. This was not like losing little Mary, nor was it a millionth as important. The money was an external thing.

“I have a mind of my own, Cousin James, and you should know me better than to believe I can be led where I do not want to go. It is no one’s fault, least of all yours and least of all mine. Come, dry your eyes and tell me,” said Richard, proffering his nose rag.

Cousin James-the-druggist produced a proper handkerchief and mopped away, gradually calming.

“We will not see our money, Richard,” he said. “Latimer has taken it and fled to Connecticut, where he and Pickard intend to manufacture fire engines. Since the American war, Watt’s patents are worthless there.”

“Clever Mr. Latimer!” said Richard appreciatively. “Can we not take a lien on Wasborough’s foundry and get our money back by making chains for the Admiralty?”

“I am afraid not. Latimer does not own Wasborough’s. His father-in-law is a wealthy Gloucester cheesemaker, and bought it as a dowry for Latimer’s wife. Her papa also owns the house in Dove Street.”

“Then let us go home,” said Richard, “to the Cooper’s Arms. Ye can do with a mug of Cave’s rum, Cousin James.”

To give him credit, Dick said not one word, let alone “I told you so.” His eyes had gone from Richard’s calm face to Cousin James-the-druggist’s devastated one, and whatever he thought he kept to himself.

“There is really only one significant consequence,” Richard said to him later, “and that is that I no longer have the money to educate William Henry.”

“Are ye not angry?” Dick asked, frowning.

“No, Father. If losing my money is my share of trouble, then I am glad.

What if it had been losing Peg?” His breath caught. “Or losing William Henry?”

“Yes, I see. I do see.” Dick reached across the table and gripped his son’s arm strongly. “As for William Henry’s education, we will just have to pray that something comes along. He will be able to finish Colston’s, I have enough put by for that. So we have three years before we need fret.”

“And in the meantime, I must find a job. The Cooper’s Arms is not prosperous enough to support my family as well as yours.” Richard took Dick’s hand from his arm and lifted it to his cheek. “I thank you, Father, so very much.”

“Oh!” The exclamation served to cover Dick’s embarrassment at this unmanly display of affection. “I have just remembered! Old Tom Cave is in need of a man at his distillery. Someone who can solder, braze and weld. Go and see him, Richard. It may not be the answer to your prayers, but it will pay a pound a week and serve until something better comes along.”

Ownership of a rum distillery in Bristol was tantamount to having a license to coin money; no matter how hard the times were and how many souls were out of work, the consumption of rum never fell any more than did the price. Not only was rum Bristol’s favorite drink, it was also the drink loaded aboard every ship to make sure unhappy sailors did not mutiny. Provided they got their ration of rum, sailors would eat rotten sea biscuit and salt meat so old it shrank to nothing when boiled-and endure the rope’s end.

Mr. Cave’s premises were built like a fortress. They occupied most of one short block of Redcliff Street near the Redcliff Backs, from whence he collected his shipments of sugar from the West Indies and loaded his different sizes of casks into lighters the moment an order was paid for. His cellars were vast and impregnable, and like most Bristol cellars ran below the public land constituting a street. Bristol, in fact, was a hollow city mined so extensively that no heavy wheeled vehicle was allowed anywhere within it; all transport of goods was done by the sledges known as geehoes because their runners distributed the load more evenly over a much larger area than wheels did.

The stills were contained in a vast, virtually shapeless room on the ground floor, lit mostly from the reflected glare of the furnaces. The whole effect was of a copper forest of roundly buttressed tree trunks planted in a soil of fire bricks, the foliage strongly cooped oak casks shaped like apexamputated cones. It reeked of coal smoke, fermenting mash, molasses and head-spinning rum vapors, and Richard loathed it; inhaling the stench of rum day after day did not tempt him to change from a tankard of beer to a mug of Cave’s best.

Cave himself hardly ever appeared; the overseer, William Thorne, reigned supreme. As obsequious to Cave as he was cruel to his underlings, Thorne was of that kind who belonged, thought Richard, on a slaver like Alexander, back in the business. Thorne loved to flog an apprentice with a rope’s end, and took malicious delight in making life as miserable as possible for as many of Mr. Cave’s employees as he could. Though after a measuring look he left Richard severely alone, contenting himself with a series of curt instructions.

“And stay out of the back of the room,” Thorne ended. “There is naught there to concern ye, and I do not like prowlers. This is my ken, and I will thank ye to do as ye’re told.”

So Richard stayed out of the back part of the room, more for the sake of peace than because Thorne intimidated him. The stills themselves were copper, as were the pipes which twisted, kinked, looped and ran in many directions; the numerous valves, taps and braces were brass. It was therefore mandatory to have someone on hand who could detect weaknesses before they turned into leaks, and who could deal with those weaknesses while the stills continued to operate. They were paired and one pair was always shut down to permit major repairs to the metal; this was also Richard’s job. A job boring to the point of mindlessness, yet constant enough to require that he mind it and himself.

His first day acquainted him with the worst word in Thorne’s vocabulary: excise.

His Britannic Majesty’s Government had always taxed liquors imported from abroad; those were customs duties, and smuggling (very popular on the Cornish, Devon and Dorset coasts) was punishable by death and gibbetting. Then the Government had realized that there was even more money to be made by taxing spiritous liquors made inside England; those were excise duties. Gin and rum had to be made in licensed premises rigorously inspected by an Excise Man, for excise had to be paid on every drop of spirits a distillery squeezed out of its vats of fermented mash.

“All this,” said Richard at the end of his first week, “in order that ships can sail the seas free of mutiny, and folk on land forget their troubles. What a miracle is the mind of Man, that so much cleverness has been spent upon producing stupidity.”

“Richard,” said Dick, exasperated, “ye’re a Quaker at heart, I swear it. We make our living out of booze!”

“I know, Father, but I am free to think what I want, and I think that governments want us to drink so they can make money.”

“I wish Jem Thistlethwaite could hear ye!” Dick snapped.

“I know, I know, he would demolish my argument in a trice,” grinned Richard. “Calm yourself, Father! I am joking.”

“Peg, discipline this man of yours!” Dick said.

She turned with such a brilliant smile on her face that Richard drew a breath-oh, she was so much better! Was that all it took, permanent removal of the threat that she would be moved to Clifton? Now that continued residence at the Cooper’s Arms was assured because Richard had lost all his money, she was genuinely and happily secure.

She dropped the empty mug she was holding and, grunting, bent quickly to pick it up. A scream of such agony rent the air that the hair on every head in the tavern rose; Peg straightened, both hands to her head, then collapsed to the floor in a huddled heap. So many people crowded around that Dick had to shove most of them forcibly out of the way before he could kneel beside Richard, who had Peg’s head in his lap. Mag knelt on the other side with William Henry, who reached for his mother’s hand.

“It is no good, Richard. She is dead.”

“No! No, she cannot be!” Richard took her other hand and chafed it. “Peg! Peg, my love! Wake up! Peg, wake up!”

“Mama, Mama, wake up!” William Henry echoed, eyes too full of shock to produce tears. “Mama, wake up and I will hug and kiss you! Please, please wake up!”

But Peg lay so inanimate that no pinch or prick could rouse her.

“It was a stroke,” said Cousin James-the-druggist, summoned.

“Impossible!” cried Richard. “She ain’t old enough!”

“Young folk can have strokes, and they are always of this kind-a sudden scream of pain, then unconsciousness and death.”

“She cannot be dead,” said Richard stubbornly. How could Peg be dead? She was a part of him. “No, she cannot be dead.”

“Believe me, Richard, she is dead. All signs of life are gone. I have held a mirror to her mouth, and it has not clouded. I have put my wooden cone on her chest, and heard no heartbeat. She has lost her irises,” said Cousin James-the-druggist. “Accept God’s will, Richard. Let us take her upstairs and I will lay her out.”

That he did with Mag in attendance, washing her, dressing her in her Sunday gown of eyelet-embroidered pink cambric, rouging her lips and cheeks, curling her hair and piling it up in the latest fashion, fitting her Sunday-best high-heeled shoes on stockinged feet. Her hands were folded on her breast and her eyes had been closed from the very beginning; she looked peacefully asleep and barely twenty years old.

Richard sat beside her, William Henry alongside him so that he could not see his son’s face. Could he, it would break him, and that would not benefit either of them. The room was bright with lamps and candles which would not be allowed to go out until she was put into her coffin and carried in the funeral sledge to St. James’s for the burial service in two days’ time. This was, for want of a better description, a natural death. All the family from far and near would come to pay their respects, kiss the still kissable mouth, commiserate with the widower, then descend to the tavern and partake of refreshments. Nothing as eerie and outlandish as a wake would be held; in Protestant Bristol, death was coped with soberly and somberly.

Richard sat the long hours of day and night away, joined by various Morgans; for once no snores emanated through the flimsy partition. Just muffled sobs, murmurs of comfort, sighs. No one slept save William Henry, who cried himself into a restless slumber. The shock had been so sudden that Richard felt numbed, but beneath the layers of pain and grief slowly bubbling up he was horrified to find a core of bitter resentment: if you were going to die, Peg, why did you not do so before I invested my money? Then I could have taken William Henry to live in Clifton and been rid of the reek of rum. Been my own man.

On the second night and in the coldest marches of the small hours William Henry appeared barefoot in his nightshirt and came to sit with Richard. They had kept the room as cold as so many candles and lamps allowed, so the still figure on the bed looked as serene and beautiful as she had at the moment the laying out was finished. Richard rose and went to fetch a thick blanket and two pairs of stockings, draped the one about his son’s body and put the others on his feet.

“She looks so happy,” said William Henry, wiping at his tears.

“She was very happy at the instant she died,” Richard said, throat controlled, eyes dry. “She smiled, William Henry.”

“Then I must try to be happy for her, Dadda, must I not?”

“Yes, my son. There is nothing to fear in such an unexpected, happy death. Mama has gone to Heaven.”

“I miss her, Dadda!”

“So do I. That is natural. She has always been here. Now we have to get used to living without her, and that will be hard. But never forget that she looks happy. As if nothing nasty has touched her. Because nothing nasty has, William Henry.”

“And I still have you, Dadda.” The blanket-shrouded form edged close; William Henry put his curly head on his father’s arm and hiccoughed. “I still have you. I am not a norphan.”

In the morning Cousin James-of-the-clergy interred Margaret Morgan, born in 1750, dearly beloved wife of Richard Morgan and mother of William Henry, next to her daughter, Mary. As it was the end of January, there were no flowers, only evergreens. Richard did not weep, and William Henry seemed to have cried himself into acceptance. Only Mag sobbed, as much for her niece as for her daughter-in-law. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. That is life.

The death of his mother drew William Henry more tightly to his father, but his father was strapped with a job he worked at six days a week from dawn to dusk, which left only Sunday and a few snatched bedtime minutes for William Henry. The distillery was no gunsmithy, and Thomas Cave no Tomas Habitas. Special terms of employment were for William Thorne alone, who would disappear with impunity for sometimes hours on end, then return looking smug. Richard noticed that whenever Thorne did absent himself, Thomas Cave would be there waiting anxiously for his return-yet not in anger. Rather, in an eager apprehension. Puzzling. Had Richard been less preoccupied with his private worries and sadnesses, he would undoubtedly have seen more and come to some conclusions, but work was a solace only if he applied himself to it wholly.

The distillery saw an occasional visitor, the chief of whom was the Excise Man. William Thorne always showed the inspector around personally, and disapproved of observers.

The other frequent caller apparently had no business being in the distillery beyond friendship with Thorne; an odd relationship between two men who could surely have little in common. John Trevillian Ceely Trevillian was rich, foppish, and monumentally silly. His wigs were white as snow with starch powder and he tied them with naught save black velvet; his vacuous countenance was painted and patched; he wore embroidered velvet coats and lavish waistcoats; his heels were so high that he tittuped along with the aid of a clouded amber cane; and he exuded a perfume so strong it overpowered even the smell of rum.

Naturally Thorne performed no introductions on the occasion of Mr. Trevillian’s first visit after Richard started at Cave’s, but Ceely, as Thorne called him, paused in front of the new worker and eyed him in some appreciation. Apparently he enjoyed bare and sinewy forearms, thought Richard sourly when Mr. Trevillian, having looked his fill, tripped off in Thorne’s wake. He knew well enough who John Trevillian Ceely Trevillian was: the elder son of Mr. and Mrs. Maurice Trevillian of Park Street, the same wealthy couple who had been robbed by a highwayman outside their own front door. A Cornish family with large interests in Bristol commerce, and related by blood to a very ancient clan of London merchants named Ceely who had been prominent since the twelfth century. This Ceely, all of Bristol knew, was a bachelor of questionable sexual tastes, an idle and brainless fribble completely eclipsed by his younger brother.

Several further visits by Mr. Trevillian caused Richard to doubt Bristol’s judgment; that silly, whinnying, vapid manner of his concealed a brain both shrewd and intelligent. He knew a great deal about distilling, and a great deal about business. The ruse of idiocy was extremely effective: as Mr. Trevillian stood around the Exchange looking a simpleton, those in his vicinity did not bother to lower their voices when they talked of business deals in the making. And perhaps in consequence lost out to Mr. Trevillian.

To round the matter of Mr. Ceely Trevillian off, in April he appeared arm-in-arm with Mr. Thomas Cave. Ah! thought Richard. Ceely has a financial interest in this place-must have, to see old Tom Cave smarm and grovel so. Yet Ceely was not on the books, else Dick would have mentioned the fact; he was a sleeping partner who provided nothing beyond capital when it was needed, and thereby paid no taxes.

In himself, Richard was managing, though he chafed at the tiny amount of time he had to spend with William Henry. Sundays were infinitely precious. Occasionally Richard varied the route of their walk so that William Henry would get to know every part of Bristol, but their favorite destination remained Clifton, where the cottage Richard had almost bought mocked him. Of his own choice he might have gone elsewhere than Clifton, but William Henry adored the place.

“Mr. Parfrey told us a new one yesterday,” said William Henry, skipping along.

Stifling a sigh, Richard resigned himself to another paean about this paragon of a teacher who managed to turn boring old Latin into a game of puns and mnemonics; William Henry’s Latin was far more advanced than Richard’s had been at the same age.

“What?” he asked dutifully of his son.

“Caesar adsum iam forte-Caesar had some jam for tea.”

“And can you translate it?”

“ ‘As it so happened, and quite by chance, Caesar was at hand.’ ”

“Very good! He is a wit, your Mr. Parfrey.”

“Yes, he is very funny, Dadda. He makes us laugh so much that the Head and Mr. Prichard disapprove. I do not think they really like it that Mr. Parfrey never uses the cane either.”

“I am surprised Mr. Parfrey has survived at Colston’s,” said Richard dryly.

“We are all so good at our Latin,” William Henry explained. “We have to be! Otherwise we would get Mr. Parfrey into trouble with the Head. Oh, Dadda, I do like him! He smiles a lot.”

“In which case, William Henry, ye’re very lucky.”

At the end of May all the pieces of the puzzle at Cave’s distillery fell into place.

William Thorne had done one of his disappearing tricks and the acolytes who danced attendance on the stills had also disappeared, the latter rather in the manner of mice after cheese, twitching with apprehension but determined to consume the prize. In the case of Mr. Cave’s employees the prize was rum. Not the good rum which went into holding casks and would be blended by none save Mr. Cave himself, but the feint-ridden second distillate; no one would notice if a little were siphoned off the second receiver tub.

In no need of rum or company, Richard continued with his work. The huge room had so many corners, nooks and crannies that it was difficult to assign it a shape, and this was particularly true of its back regions, into which Richard was expressly forbidden entry. Nor would he have entered, had he not heard the unmistakable hiss of liquid escaping under pressure. A careful check of the rows of paired stills and their confusing network of pipes revealed nothing, but as he approached the last pair in the back row he became convinced that the noise was coming from somewhere behind. So he hauled himself up onto the uncomfortably warm bricks of the furnace and squeezed between the left and right still, ducking his head to avoid the receiver tubs.

It was then that he noticed some pipes which ought not to have been there, and stiffened. For a full minute he stood without moving and let his eyes accustom themselves to the gloom, then he looked upward and found a number of pipes hidden among festoons of spider-web and what might have passed at a casual glance for hempen lagging come adrift. Each of these pipes came off a receiver tub which held the final distillate, not at its bottom but well up its side-at a point, in fact, which would allow a runoff only if the tub were full to its tapping level. No valve was attached to each of these unwarranted pipes; once the contents of a tub reached the level of the pipe, the liquid ran off down it into the darkness at the back of the chamber.

There, hidden behind a false section of wall, were two rows of 50-gallon hogsheads. Lips pursed in a silent whistle, Richard calculated how much excise-free spirit was flowing off each and every day-no wonder that William Thorne always drained the final distillate from its receiver tub! Only a skilled distiller with experience elsewhere would have wondered at the slowness of Mr. Cave’s apparatus, and there were no such men at 137 Redcliff Street. Except for William Thorne. And Thomas Cave. Was he in it too?

As he jumped back onto the top of the furnace Richard found the source of the hiss-the right-hand still was spraying a thin jet of fluid backward from a pinhole in its worn copper skin. As he crouched to plug it, Thorne walked in.

“Here! What are ye doing up there?” he demanded, face ugly.

“My job of work,” said Richard tranquilly. “A temporary one, I fear. I think ye’ll have to stand this pair down very soon.”

“Fucken shit! I keep telling old Tom to invest some of his profits in new stills, but he always has a reason not to.” Thorne stalked away, mollified, roaring for his acolytes, who had not been quick enough; the cat had come back sooner than anticipated.

When he returned to the Cooper’s Arms that evening Richard did not mention his discovery to Dick. Time enough when he knew more-knew, for instance, how many were involved in this huge excise fraud. Thorne, of course. Cave, possibly. And what about John Trevillian Ceely Trevillian? Why should a well-born idler like Ceely haunt a location far from the pastures where such ornamental ponies usually grazed?

When do they clear out the illicit liquor? Richard wondered. During the night, certainly, and probably on a Sunday night. The streets are deserted even of sailors and press gangs.

Getting out of the Cooper’s Arms on the next Sunday night was easy; he slept alone, Dick and Mag were snoring, and William Henry never roused, even in a thunderstorm. The moon was full and the sky cloudless-what good luck! As he reached the vicinity of 137 Redcliff Street, a lone bell was tolling midnight. He sought the dark shelter of a crane belonging to the pipe maker across the court and settled patiently to wait.

Two hours. They certainly cut it fine, he thought; two more hours would see the commencement of a leisurely dawn. And there were three of them: Thorne, Cave and Ceely Trevillian. Though it was difficult to recognize the last man; the mincing Bartholomew Baby had been replaced by a slim, decisively energetic man clad in black, with raggedly cropped short hair and boots on his feet.

Cave arrived on his elderly gelding, Thorne and Ceely drove up in a sledge drawn by a pair of massive horses, and the three of them proceeded to unload four dozen obviously empty hogshead casks from the geehoe. Cave unlocked a disused door into the back part of his distilling chamber and the barrels disappeared inside. A minute later Thorne was back, grunting as he rolled a full barrel; Cave bustled to the sledge and let down a ramp at its rear. It took Thorne and Trevillian combined to push each hogshead up the ramp, where they flipped it from its side onto one end with a deftness born of much practice.

Sixty minutes by Richard’s watch saw the job done; no doubt inside the building the empty hogsheads were in place beneath the illicit pipes-how often did they do this? Not every Sunday night or someone would notice, but, if Richard’s calculations were right, at least once in every three weeks.

Thomas Cave mounted his horse and rode off up Redcliff Street while the other two boarded the sledge, which headed on very smooth and silent runners eastward to the Temple Backs; Richard followed the sledge. At the river the casks were tipped onto their sides again and rolled down into a flat-bottomed barge tended by a man who was a stranger to Richard, though not to Thorne and Ceely. Finished, the three unharnessed one of the horses and tethered it to the barge; the stranger scrambled up onto its huge back and kicked it hard until it began to plod down the deplorable towpath in the direction of Bath, the floating cargo, with Ceely aboard, following behind. Once sure everything was going to plan, William Thorne drove off in the geehoe.

I know it all, said Richard to himself. The rum goes to some place nearer Bath, where Ceely and the stranger either sell it or trans-ship it to Salisbury or Exeter, and a fat, excise-free profit is divided by four. I would be willing to bet, however, that it is Ceely Trevillian gets the biggest share.

What was he actually going to do? After turning it over in his mind all the way home, Richard decided that the time had come to tell his father.

Dick and Mag were up and about, William Henry still slumbering when Richard walked into the Cooper’s Arms. His parents cast each other a conspiratorial glance, having noticed on their way downstairs that Richard’s bed was empty. How to let a recent widower know that they did understand an occasional absence?

“Mum, go away,” said Richard without ceremony. “I have to speak to Father in private.”

Looking worldly, Dick prepared to listen to a tale of basic urges and some pretty female face seen in St. James’s yesterday morning, only to hear a tale of staggering villainy.

“What should I do, Father?”

A shrug, a wry look. “There is only one thing a decent man can do. Go at once-and in secret!-to the Collector of Excise at Excise House. His name is Benjamin Fisher.”

“Father! Your business-your friendship with Tom Cave-it would ruin everything for you!”

“Nonsense,” said Dick strongly. “There are other makers of good rum in Bristol, and I know ’em all. Stand on best terms with ’em too. Tom Cave is more a very old acquaintance than a friend, Richard. Ye’ve not seen him sup at my table, nor do I sup at his. Besides,” he grinned, “I always knew he was a sly boots. It is in his eyes, ain’t you noticed? Never gives ye a good frank stare.”

“Yes,” said Richard soberly, “I have noticed. Still, I feel sorrier for him than I do for Thorne. As for Ceely”-he made a gesture as if to push something horrible away-“the man is a turd. What an actor! The apparent nincompoop is a very clever man.”

“No work for you today,” said Dick, pushing Richard stairward. “Go and put on your best Sunday clothes, my new hat, and off to Excise House-and do not breathe a word to anyone, hear? There is no need to look so down in the mouth, either. If those beauties have tapped off half as much rum as ye think they have, then ye’ll get a hefty reward for your pains. Enough to see William Henry is educated to your heart’s content.”

It was that thought drove Richard, clad in his dark-hued Sunday clothes, Dick’s best hat on his head, to walk toward Queen Square. Excise House occupied the end of a block between the square and Princes Street (upon which desirable avenue Mr. Thomas Cave’s house was situated), and Richard soon discovered that the Excise Men of Excise House were slugs who used their desks to sleep off their hangovers, especially on a Monday. They were unorganized, uninterested, and preferred to be unoccupied. Thus it took Richard several hours to ascend the hierarchical ladder. Looking at each of the bored faces, Richard declined to say anything more than that he had discovered an excise fraud, and wanted to see the Collector himself. As distinct from the Commander, higher up still.

An interview he finally achieved at three o’clock in the afternoon, dinnerless and with his famous patience distinctly frayed.

“Ye have five minutes, Mr. Morgan,” said Mr. Benjamin Fisher from behind his desk.

No need to wonder if the Collector of Excise had ever been in the field himself; he peered at Richard through the small round lenses of a pair of spectacles which he did not need to peruse the neatly stacked documents on his desk. Short-sighted. His home had always been a desk. Which meant that he would not understand in the way any of his field officers would. On the other hand, Richard’s mind went on, that might mean that he does not accept bribes. For surely the men in the field do, else I would not be here.

Richard told his story in a few succinct words.

“How much rum d’ye estimate these persons draw off in a week?” Mr. Benjamin Fisher asked when Richard ended.

“If they pick up their hogsheads every three weeks, sir, about eight hundred gallons per week.”

That put a different complexion on it! Mr. Fisher straightened, put his quill down and pushed the piece of paper on which he had been taking notes to one side. On went the spectacles again; his eyes, two pale blue marbles swimming beneath layers of glass, goggled.

“Mr. Morgan, this is a huge fraud! Could ye be mistaken in your calculations?”

“Aye, sir, of course I could. But if they change the hogsheads every three weeks, then ’tis eight hundred gallons weekly. Yesterday was the first of June, and I can testify that the casks the three men brought into the distillery were completely empty, for one man could kick one cask around like a ball. Whereas the casks they took out were so full that it took two of them to roll one up an easy ramp. The Sunday I imagine they will use next is the twenty-second of June. If your men are hiding nearby from midnight on, ye’ll apprehend all three of them in the very act,” Richard said, betting that he was right.

“Thank you, Mr. Morgan. I suggest that ye return to work and conduct yourself as usually until further notified by this office. On behalf of His Majesty, I must convey the Excise Office’s sincere thanks for your diligence.”

Richard was going to the door when the Collector of Excise spoke again. “If the fraud is as large as you say, Mr. Morgan, there will be an eight-hundred-pound reward, five hundred pounds of which will go to you. After testifying at their trial, of course.”

He could not resist asking. “Who gets the other three hundred?”

“The men who arrest the culprits, Mr. Morgan.”

And that was that. Richard went home.

“You were right, Father,” he said to Dick. “If all turns out as I expect it will, then I will receive five-eighths of an eight-hundred-pound reward.”

Dick looked skeptical. “Three hundred pounds seem excessive for a dozen Excise Men to share for nothing more than the act of arrest.”

Which made Richard laugh. “Father! I had not thought ye so green! I imagine that the Excise Men who do the actual arresting will share fifty pounds of it. The other two hundred and fifty will undoubtedly find their way into Mr. Benjamin Fisher’s pockets.”

On Sunday the 22nd of June a dozen Excise Men chopped down the back door of the Cave distillery, charged into the deserted premises with staves at the ready, and there located four dozen full 50-gallon hogsheads of illicit rum connected to the stills by illicit pipes.

When Mr. Thomas Cave rode up on his horse at two on Monday morning and Mr. William Thorne and Mr. John Trevillian Ceely Trevillian drove up in their geehoe shortly thereafter, the gaping tatters of the door and the Excise seals on everything inside told an unmistakable tale.

“We were rumbled,” said Mr. Thorne, showing his teeth.

Cave shivered in terror. “Ceely, what do we do?”

“As the rum is gone, I suggest we go home,” said Ceely coolly.

“Why are they not here to arrest us?” Cave asked.

“Because they wanted no trouble, Tom. The amount of rum will have told them that there are some ruthless characters involved-it is a hanging offense. An Excise Man is not paid enough to risk a pistol ball in his guts.”

“Our sources should have informed us ahead of time!”

“That they should,” said Ceely grimly, “which leads me to think that this came from the very top and that foreign men were used.”

“Richard Morgan!” snarled Thorne, pounding one fist into the palm of his other hand. “The fucken bugger rumbled us!”

“Richard Morgan?” Trevillian frowned. “You mean that damned goodlooking fellow fixes the leaks?”

Thorne’s eyes dwelled on him in wonder; he lifted his lantern to inspect Ceely’s face closely. “Ye’re a mystery to me, Ceely,” he said slowly. “Is it women ye fancy, or men?”

“Who I fancy is not important, Bill. Go home and start putting a story together for the Collector of Excise. ’Tis you who’ll bear the blame.”

“What d’ye mean, me? We will all bear it!”

“Afraid not,” said Ceely Trevillian lightly, jumping up into the geehoe. “Did you not tell him, Tom?”

“Tell me what, Tom?”

But Mr. Cave could only shiver and shake his head.

“Tom made you the licensee,” said Ceely. “Some time ago, as a matter of fact. I thought it might be a good idea, and he saw my point at once. As for me-I have no connection whatsoever with Cave’s distillery.” He shook the reins to gee up the horses.

William Thorne stood leaden-footed, unable to move. “Where are you going?” he asked feebly.

Ceely’s teeth, very white, flashed in a laugh. “To the Temple Backs, of course, to alert our confederate.”

“Wait for me!”

“You,” said Mr. Ceely Trevillian, “can walk home, Bill.”

The sledge glided off, leaving Thorne to confront Cave.

“How could ye do this to me, Tom?”

Cave’s tongue came out to lick at his lips. “Ceely insisted,” he bleated. “I cannot stand against the man, Bill!”

“And you thought it an excellent idea. You would, you lily-livered old turd!” said Thorne bitterly.

“It is Ceely,” Thomas Cave insisted. “I’ll not leave ye unsupported, that is a promise. Whatever it takes to get you off will be done.” Panting with the effort, he managed to haul himself onto his horse; Thorne made no move to help him.

“I will hold you to that promise, Tom. But more important by far is the murder of Richard Morgan.”

“No!” Cave cried. “Whatever else you do, not that! Excise knows, you fool! Kill their informant and we will all hang!”

“If this comes to trial, I am certainly going to hang, so what matters it to me, eh?” He was shouting now. “Best make sure it never does come to trial, Tom! And that goes for Ceely too! If I go down, Richard Morgan will not be the only snitch! I will bring you and Ceely down with me-we will all go to the gallows! Hear me? All of us!”

Mr. Benjamin Fisher summoned Richard to Excise House early in the morning of the next day, the 23rd of June.

“I advise you not to return to work, Mr. Morgan,” said the Collector of Excise, two spots of color burning in his cheeks. “My fools of men raided Cave’s distillery during the day, so no one was apprehended. All they did was seize the liquor.”

Richard gaped. “Christ!”

“Well but fruitlessly said, sir. I echo your sentiment, but the damage is done. The only one Excise can prosecute is the licensee for having illicit rum on his premises.”

“Old Tom Cave? But he is not the principal villain!”

“Thomas Cave is not the licensee. That is William Thorne.”

Richard gaped again. “And what of Ceely Trevillian?”

Looking absolutely disgusted, Mr. Fisher squeezed his hands together and leaned forward. “Mr. Morgan, we have no case against anyone save William Thorne.” He put on his spectacles, grimacing. “Mr. Trevillian is extremely well connected, and general opinion around town is that he is an amiable, harmless simpleton. I will interview him for myself, but I must warn you that were it to come to court, it would be your word against his. I am very sorry, but unless new evidence comes to light Mr. Trevillian is unimpeachable. I am not even sure,” he ended, sighing, “that we have enough to hang William Thorne, though he will certainly go down for seven years’ transportation.”

“Why did your men not wait to catch them in the act?”

“Cowardice, sir. It is ever the way.” Mr. Fisher took his spectacles off and polished them vigorously, blinking away tears. “Though it is early, Mr. Thomas Cave is already waiting downstairs, I imagine to negotiate a settlement by offering to pay a very large fine. That is where the money lies, Mr. Morgan-I am not so blind that I cannot see that William Thorne is a red herring. Excise will get no recompense out of the licensee, whereas it may from the owner. That includes you. Your reward, I mean.”

As Richard left he encountered Thomas Cave in the foyer, but was wise enough to say nothing as he passed. No point in going to the distillery; he went back to the Cooper’s Arms.

“So I have no job and at least two of the three culprits are to escape justice,” he told Dick. “Oh, if only I had known!”

“It sounds as if Tom Cave will buy Thorne off,” said Dick, and cheered up. “Be thankful for one thing, Richard. No matter which way it goes, ye’ll get that five hundred pounds.”

That was true, but less of a comfort than Dick suspected. At least a part of Richard wanted to see Mr. John Trevillian Ceely Trevillian in the dock. Quite why he did not know, except that it lay in Ceely’s insultingly blatant look of appreciation on that first meeting. I am less than the dust to that conceited, whinnying fop, and I hate him. Yes, hate. For the first time in my life, I am filled with an emotion that held no personal significance for me until now; what used to be a word has become a fact.

He missed Peg in these trying times. The grief at her going had been great, but diminished by those last years of opposition, tears, drinking, wandering in the mind. Yet as the days went by and he searched Bristol for a job, that Peg was fading, to be replaced by the Peg he had married seventeen years ago. He needed to cuddle against her, to converse softly with her in the night, to seek the only kind of sexual solace he deemed truly satisfactory-one wherein love and friendship contributed at least as much as passion. There was no one left to talk to, for though his father was firmly on his side, Dick would always look down on him as too soft, a trifle spineless. And Mum was Mum-cook and scullery maid in one. In a few years William Henry would be his equal; then all he would lack was sexual solace. And that, Richard had resolved, would have to be put away until after William Henry was grown to full maturity. For he would not inflict a stepmother on this beloved only child, and whores were a kind of woman he could not stomach no matter how he ached for the simplest, most basic relief.

On Monday, which was the last day of June, Richard left at the crack of dawn-very early at this time of summer solstice-to walk the eight miles of hilly road between the Cooper’s Arms and Keynsham, a hamlet along the Avon made larger and much dirtier by folk like William Champion, brass maker. Champion had patented a secret process for refining zinc from calamine and old tailings, and it had come to Richard’s ears that he was looking for a good man to deal with zinc. Why not try? The worst that could happen was a refusal.

William Henry left for school at a quarter to seven as usual, grumbling because the Head had insisted that school be held on the last day of June when it fell on a Monday. His grandmother’s response was a good-natured cuff over the ear; William Henry took the hint and departed. Tomorrow was the commencement of two months of holiday, for the wearers of the blue coat as well as the paying pupils. Those who had homes and parents to go to would doff their blue coats and quit Colston’s until the beginning of September, while those like Johnny Monkton who had neither parents nor home would spend the summer at Colston’s under a somewhat relaxed code of discipline.

Dadda had explained why he could not keep William Henry company over the next two months, and William Henry understood completely. He was well aware that all of Dadda’s efforts were on his behalf, and that put a burden on his young shoulders that he did not even know was there. If he worked very hard over his books-and he did-it was to please Dadda, who valued an education more highly than any nine-year-old boy possibly could.

At the gates of Colston’s School he stopped, amazed; they were festooned with black ribbons! Mr. Hobson, a junior master, was waiting just inside them to put a hand on William Henry’s arm.

“Home again, lad,” he said, turning William Henry around.

“Home again, Mr. Hobson?”

“Aye. The Head passed away in his sleep during the night, so there is no school today. Your father will be notified about the funeral, Morgan Tertius. Now off you go.”

“May I see Monkton Minor, sir?”

“Not today. Goodbye,” said Mr. Hobson firmly, giving William Henry a little push between his shoulder blades.

At the Stone Bridge the child paused, frowning. What a bother! Dadda off to Keynsham, Grandpapa and Grandmama busy with the Monday chores-what was he going to do all day without Johnny?

This was the first time that life had presented William Henry with the opportunity to do exactly what he wanted without anybody’s knowing. The Cooper’s Arms thought him at Colston’s, yet Colston’s had sent him home. There to kick his heels to no purpose. Mind made up, William Henry galloped off the Stone Bridge, but not in the direction of home. In the direction of Clifton.

The steep, bluffy cone of Brandon Hill was his first stop; he scrambled all the way up to its top fancying himself a Roundhead soldier in Cromwell’s army besieging Bristol, and there stood to gaze across the lime kiln chimneys and marshlands, then to the ruins of the Royalist fort on St. Michael’s Hill. Game over, he leaped down from ledge to ledge until he reached the footpath and hopped, skipped and jumped to Jacob’s Well, which had once been the only convenient source of water for Clifton. There were houses around it now, none of them attractive to a small boy. So he gamboled on past St. Andrew’s church, turned somersaults on the springy turf of Clifton Green, and decided to walk to Manilla House, last in the row of mansions atop the hill.

“Holloa there, young spindle-shanks!” said a friendly voice outside the stable yard attached to Boyce’s Buildings.

“Holloa yourself, sir.”

“No school today?”

“The Head died,” William Henry explained briefly, and perched himself on the gate-post. “Who are you?”

“Name’s Richard the groom.”

“Richard is my dadda’s name too. I am William Henry.”

Out came a horny hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

For two hours he followed Richard the groom around, patting the few horses, peering into mostly empty stalls, helping draw buckets of water from the well and fetch hay, talking merrily. At the end of it Richard the groom gave him a tankard of small beer, a hunk of bread and some cheese; greatly refreshed, William Henry waved him a cheerful goodbye and continued on up the road.

Manilla House was as deserted as Freemantle House, Duncan House and Mortimer House-where to now?

He was still debating his alternatives when he heard the sound of horse’s hooves behind him, and turned to discover that the rider bore a very familiar and much-loved face. “Mr. Parfrey!” he called.

“Good lord!” said George Parfrey. “What are you doing here, Morgan Tertius?”

William Henry had the grace to blush. “Please, sir, I am on a walk,” he said lamely. “There is no school today, and Dadda has gone to Keynsham.”

“Ought you to be here, Morgan Tertius?”

“Please, sir, my name is William Henry.”

Mr. Parfrey frowned, then shrugged and held out his hand. “I see more than perhaps you know, William Henry. So be it. Hop up and come for a ride, then I will see you home.”

Ecstasy! In all his life he had never been upon a horse! Now here he was, sitting astride the saddle in front of Mr. Parfrey, so high off the ground that looking down made him feel quite dizzy. A whole new world, like being in the top of a tree that ran! How smooth and regular the motion! How wondrous to be on a new adventure with a friend almost as best as Dadda! William Henry succumbed to absolute bliss.

They cantered off up Durdham Down, scattering several flocks of sheep, laughing at anything and everything they chanced upon. And when William Henry let him get a word in edgeways, Mr. Parfrey revealed that he knew about lots of things besides Latin. They rode to the parapet of the Avon Gorge, where Mr. Parfrey pointed out the colors in the rock and told the eager little boy how iron tinted the grey and white of the limestone those richly ruddy pinks and plums; he pointed with his crop at the flowering plants in the summer grass and recited their names, then minutes later jokingly quizzed William Henry as to the identity of this one or that one.

Finally the bridle path atop the gorge led them down to the Hotwells House on its ledge jutting into the Avon.

“We may find some dinner here,” said Mr. Parfrey, letting the boy slide to the ground before dismounting. “Hungry?”

“Yes, sir!”

“If I am to call you William Henry away from the portals of Colston’s, I think you must call me Uncle George.”

There were very few people taking the waters in the pump room-a few consumptive, diabetic or gouty men, a very old lady and two crippled younger women. It had seen better days; the gilding had tarnished, the wallpaper was peeling, the drapes had frayed and accumulated visible layers of dirt, the spindling chairs needed new upholstery. But the sour lessee-who was still in the midst of a battle with Bristol over the rates he charged to drink the waters-provided dinner of a kind. To William Henry, accustomed to much better food at the Cooper’s Arms, it tasted of nectar and ambrosia simply because it was different-and because he shared it with such a magical companion. Who, when they were done, suggested a walk outside before they rode back to the city. The old lady and the crippled women cooed over William Henry as they left; he suffered their exclamations and pats with the same patience he used to give his dead mother, a side of him that fascinated George Parfrey.

For George Parfrey had found a magical companion too. It had been, in fact, a magical day, starting off with the news that the Head had expired during the night. The Reverend Prichard, his long dark face betraying none of the elation he felt inside (he hoped to be the new Head), was too preoccupied to take any notice of the masters once he had acquainted them with the situation. Apart from giving Harry Hobson the duty of turning the day pupils away as they arrived, he issued no orders whatsoever.

Very well, said Mr. Parfrey to himself, I hereby declare that today is a holiday. If I remain here, Prichard or one of the others will think of something for me to do. Whereas if no one sees my face, no one will remember my existence.

His one extravagance was a horse. Not to own-that was far beyond his slender means-but to hire on some Sundays from a stable near the gallows on St. Michael’s Hill. Mondays, he discovered when he arrived at the stable carrying his tray of watercolors and his sketchbook, offered him a wider choice of mount. The handsome black gelding he had hankered for was munching placidly on hay and no doubt expecting a day of rest after hectic Sunday excursions. Not to be. Ten minutes later Mr. Parfrey was in its saddle and trotting off across Kingsdown in the direction of the Aust road. A fine horseman, he gentled the black gelding out of its resentment and settled to enjoying his favorite pastime.

For a moment the old depression threatened to engulf him, but the day was too glorious not to be relished to its fullest, so he tucked his loneliness and apprehensions of a bitter old age into the back of his thoughts and concentrated upon the beauty around him. At which moment, hacking up Clifton Hill to Durdham Down, he saw Morgan Tertius ahead of him. Company! The little devil, he had decided to have a holiday from responsibilities too. Then why not be devils together? A question which carried the reassurance that he would be doing the boy a service by keeping him safe.

William Henry. The double name suited him, a nice conceit which age might perhaps confirm as a wise choice. All the masters had seen the potential in Morgan Tertius, though his beauty warped the judgment of some. As indeed it had Parfrey’s judgment, until exposure to Morgan Tertius in Latin class had shown him that the face merely reflected the beauty of the soul as a clouded mirror did the sun. What he had not seen until today was the naughty little boy, for in class William Henry was an angel. Because, the child had explained gravely as they cantered across Durdham Down, he did not want to get the cane and he did not want to be noticed.

How to tell him that he would always be noticed? Interesting that the father, so like him in the face, lacked the son’s vital spark. Richard Morgan would never turn heads, never stop the world spinning. Whereas William Henry Morgan did the first every day of his life, and might possibly manage to do the second one day. His conversation was typical of his age, though it did indicate a careful upbringing-until, that is, he got onto tavern doings and betrayed that there were few of the baser human passions he had not witnessed, from flashing knives to lust to manic furores. Yet none of it had tainted him; not the faintest whiff of corruption emanated from him.

So when they walked together out of the Hotwells House it seemed perfectly natural to turn their footsteps in the direction of the place where William Henry had picnicked with his father, and George Parfrey had watched them from above. Not a large spot, nor contiguous with the long stretch of the Avon bank on the Bristol side of the Hotwells House. A mere twenty feet of grassy verge between St. Vincent’s Rocks and another, lower outcrop. Inside a forest, it would have been a dell.

Though nine months had gone by since the day the two Morgans had picnicked there, the scene was curiously static; the Avon was at exactly the same level, flooding in toward its full, the grass was exactly the same shade of green, the cliffs reflected exactly the same intensity of light. Time out of mind. A chance to put one foot into the future and keep the other in the past. As if today were plucked from existence, time out of mind.

William Henry sat while George Parfrey produced his sketchbook and a piece of charcoal.

“May I watch you, Uncle George?”

“No, because I am taking your likeness. That means you must keep still and forget that I am looking at you. Count the daisies. When I am done, you may see yourself.”

So William Henry sat and George Parfrey looked.

At first the charcoal moved swiftly and surely, but as the minutes passed the strokes on the paper grew fewer, and finally ceased to be made. All Parfrey could do was look. Not only at so much beauty, but at the shape of his fate.

The timing is wrong-utterly wrong. I am fathoms deep in love with a complete innocent who is over thirty-five years my junior. By the time that I could awaken him to love, he would find nothing in me to love. Now that, Bill Shakespeare, is a tragedy worth the writing. When he is Hamlet, I will be Lear.

The hair ribbon had long fluttered away, so the dark mass of curls fell around the face with the same drama as dense coal smoke taken in a high wind. The skin was satin-peach-ivory-the thin blade of aquiline nose as patrician as the bones of the cheeks, and the mouth, full and sensuous, creased in its corners as if on the verge of a secret smile. But all that was as nothing compared to the eyes!

As if sensing Parfrey’s change in mood, William Henry looked up and directly at him, the enigmatic smile suddenly seeming to the dazzled Parfrey an invitation offered from some part of himself that William Henry did not know existed. The eyes filled with light and the dark flecks danced amid the gold because the sun, glancing off a water-slicked rock, was caught up in them too.

He could not help himself. It was done before a thought could flicker into his mind. George Parfrey crossed the distance between himself and his nemesis and kissed William Henry on the mouth. After that he had to hold the boy-could not bear to let him go-had to sample the skin of brow and cheek and neck with his lips-caress the small body which vibrated as a cat purred.

“Beautiful! Beautiful!” he was whispering. “Beautiful!”

The boy tore himself away frantically, leaped to his feet and hovered, eyes rolling in shock, uncertain which way to run. Terror was not yet a part of it; all of him was concentrated upon flight.

As his madness lifted Parfrey rose to stand with one hand outstretched, not understanding that he was blocking the route William Henry saw as his only avenue of escape.

“William Henry, I am so sorry! I did not mean to harm you, I would never harm you! I am so sorry!” Parfrey gasped, spreading his arms wide in an appeal for forgiveness.

Terror came. William Henry saw hands reaching for him, not the appeal, and turned to flee another way. There at his feet lay the Avon, the color of blued steel, coiling and twisting as it poured out of the gorge in a sinuous torrent. Mr. Parfrey was edging closer, his arms wanting to grab and imprison, a smile on his mouth that was no smile. The Cooper’s Arms had taught him what such smiles meant, for while Father and Grandfather were not looking other men had smiled so, whispered invitations. William Henry knew the smile was false, yet he mistook the reason for its falseness.

His head came up, he gazed into the sun blindly.

“Daddaaaaa!” he wailed, and jumped into the river.

The Avon in this place was not swimmable, nor could Parfrey swim. Even so, as he ran madly up and down the short piece of bank between the rocks looking for anything in that tide, he would have leaped into the water at the glimpse of a hand, an arm-anything! But nothing appeared. Not leaf, not twig, not branch, let alone William Henry. He had sunk like a stone, unresisting.

What had the child thought? What had he seen as he stood on the brink of the river? Why so much horror? Had he actually preferred the river? Did he know what he was doing when he jumped? Or was he incapable of reason? He had cried out for his dadda, that was all. And jumped. Not stumbled. Not fallen. Jumped.

At the end of half an hour Parfrey turned away. William Henry Morgan was not going to bob gasping to the surface. He was dead.

Dead, and I have killed him. I thought of self and self alone, I wanted an invitation and I deluded myself into believing he was giving me an invitation. But he was nine years old. Nine. I am cast out. I am anathema. I have murdered a child.

He found his horse, mounted it slackly and rode toward Bristol, oblivious to the interested regard of one old lady and two crippled women. How extraordinary! There went the man, but where was the dear little boy?

The horse he abandoned outside Colston’s gates and passed into the mourning institution without seeing a soul, though some saw him, and looked startled. In his cubicle he put the sketchbook on his table where he could see William Henry’s face from every corner, then took a small key from his fob and unlocked the wooden box which held those objects he did not want the likes of snooping Reverend Prichard to see. Inside among an untidy collection of memorabilia-a lock or two of hair, a polished agate stone, a tattered book, a painted miniature-lay another box. Inside it reposed a tiny gun and all the paraphernalia necessary to keep the gun in working order. A lady’s muff pistol.

Ready, he went to the table, sat upon the narrow chair, dipped his quill in the inkwell, automatically wiped its tip free of excess ink, and wrote across the bottom of the sketch.

“I have caused the death of William Henry Morgan.”

He signed his name and shot himself in the temple.

Consternation began at the Cooper’s Arms well before William Henry was due home from school at a quarter past two; news of the Head’s death had twinkled around the city at the speed of sunlight on water. The school was closed for the day, but William Henry had not come home. When Richard, tired and discouraged, walked through the door at three o’clock, he was greeted by two agitated grandparents and the news that his son was missing.

A crawling march of numbness paralyzed his mouth and jaw, but his physical exhaustion fled immediately. He tried to speak, open-close-open-close, and finally managed to mumble that he would start looking for William Henry.

“You go in the direction of Colston’s,” said Dick, untying his apron. “I will go toward Redcliff. Mag, shut up shop.”

Words were a little easier. “He will have gone to Clifton, Father. I will go across Brandon Hill, you go along the rope walk. We will meet at the Hotwells House.”

His heart was pounding at twice its normal speed, his mouth was so dry that he could find no spit to swallow, but Richard hurried as much as pausing to question everybody he saw allowed; by the time he reached the Brandon Hill footpath there were few to inquire of, but he stopped to knock on the doors of the apartment houses around Jacob’s Well-no, no one had seen an errant little boy.

At Boyce’s Buildings he had his first success; Richard the groom was still pottering around the stable yard.

“Aye, sir, I saw him early this morning-devilish fine young chap! Helped me hay and water the horses, and I gave him a bit to eat and drink. Then he went on up Clifton Hill, free as a bird.”

There was nothing in face or eyes to lead Richard to suspect that the man lied; Richard the groom was exactly what he purported to be, a friendly fellow who enjoyed the company of errant little boys without stopping to think that his first duty ought to have been a box on the ears and a boot up William Henry’s backside to push him in the direction of home.

With a muttered thank you, Richard toiled at an accelerated pace up Clifton Hill until he was high enough to see for miles. But the downs were deserted save for grazing sheep, and though he probed the eaves of every grove of trees, no William Henry emerged from their shelter.

At six o’clock he walked into the Hotwells House to find Dick already waiting there, and big with news.

“Richard, he was here for dinner! Came on horseback with a man in his forties-good-looking fellow, according to Mrs. Harris-an old lady who was here at the time. And they stood on very good terms. Laughed and joked as if they knew each other real well. They walked off toward St. Vincent’s Rocks. About an hour later, Mrs. Harris and two other women saw the man ride off alone, looking sick. William Henry was not with him.”

The lessee was hovering, very alarmed at developments. All he needed at this moment was a scandal, so he thrust a big glass of the Hotwells water into Richard’s hand free of charge and slunk off a little way to watch.

Without tasting its bitterness or smelling its odor of rotten eggs, Richard drained it at a gulp. His whole body was trembling, his clothes soaked with sweat; the eyes he turned to his father were horrified. “Come,” he said curtly, and walked out.

There was evidence that William Henry and his companion had been in the spot Richard knew from that previous visit; the grass was trampled and daisies had been picked, lay in a wilting heap. They called and called, but no one answered, then they climbed the rocks to inspect every crevice, ledge, hollow. No one was anywhere. The Avon, ebbing now, was shrinking backward into its gorge.

Dick made no attempt to persuade Richard to cease searching until twilight came, then he put a hand on his son’s arm and shook it gently. “Time to go back to the Cooper’s Arms,” he said. “In the morning we will mount a full party and look again.”

“Father, he is here, he did not leave here!” said Richard on a sobbing breath.

Do not mention the river! Do not put that thought into his poor head! “If he is here, we will find him in the morning. Now come home, Richard. Come home.”

They plodded toward Bristol, neither man vouchsafing a word-Richard in a fever of anguish, Dick cold to his marrow.

Though the door to the Cooper’s Arms bore a sign that it was closed, three men sat around the table near the counter, looking at their hands until the door opened. Cousin James-of-the-clergy, Cousin James-the-druggist, and the Reverend Mr. Prichard. Between them on the table was a sketchbook, face down.

“William Henry!” Richard cried. “Where is William Henry?”

“Sit down, Richard,” said Cousin James-the-druggist, who, as senior member of the clan, was always the one delegated to break bad news. Cousin James-of-the-clergy served as his assistant, ready to take over once the bad news had been given.

“Tell me!” said Richard through his teeth.

“William Henry’s Latin master is a man named George Parfrey,” said Cousin James-the-druggist in even tones, and managing to meet those half-crazed eyes. “This afternoon Parfrey shot himself. He left this.” He turned the sketchbook over.

The identity of the subject was unmistakable, even through the spatters of blood. “I have caused the death of William Henry Morgan.”

His knees gave. Richard fell upon them, his face whiter than the paper. “It cannot be,” he said. “It cannot be.”

“It must be, Richard. The man shot himself dead.” Cousin James-the-druggist crouched down beside Richard and smoothed his matted hair.

“He imagined it! Perhaps William Henry ran away.”

“I doubt that very much. Parfrey’s words indicate that he-he killed William Henry. If ye have not found the child, then he must have thrown William Henry into the Avon.”

“No, no, no!” Hands over his face, Richard rocked back and forth.

“What have you to say?” Dick asked Mr. Prichard aggressively.

Prichard wet his lips, turned grey. “We heard the shot and found Parfrey with his brains blown out. The drawing was near him. I went straight to the Reverend Morgan”-he indicated Cousin James-of-the-clergy-“and then we came here. I am-I do not know-words cannot say-oh, Mr. Morgan, if you knew my sorrow and regret! But Parfrey had been at Colston’s for ten years, he seemed a decent man, and his pupils thought him wonderful. What lies at the base of this is a mystery I cannot even begin to solve.”

Still on his knees, Richard heard as if in the far, far distance the voices rising and falling; Dick was recounting today’s expedition to Clifton, the events at the Hotwells House, the trodden grass and the plucked daisies in the little cove along the Avon.

“William Henry must have fallen into the river and drowned,” said Mr. Prichard. “We wondered at the way Parfrey phrased it-as if he witnessed the death, rather than committed murder.”

“Though he caused the death,” said Cousin James-of-the-clergy, in tones harder than a minister’s had any right to be. “May he rot!”

The voices continued to come and go, accompanied by the sobs of Mag in a corner, her apron thrown over her head, Hecuba mourning.

“He is not dead,” said Richard what seemed like hours later. “I know William Henry is not dead.”

“Tomorrow we will have half of Bristol looking, Richard, that I promise you,” said Cousin James-the-druggist. What he did not say was that most of the looking would be done along the banks of the Avon and the Froom, especially at low tide. Bodies did wash up-cats, dogs, horses, sheep and cows in the main, but occasionally some drowned man or woman or child would be found lying on the mud, one more piece of wreckage vomited up by the rivers.

They got Richard upstairs, put him on his bed and undressed him; he had worn holes in the bottom of his shoes, for he had walked almost thirty miles between dawn and dusk. But when Cousin James-the-druggist tried to make him swallow a dose of laudanum, he pushed the glass away.

No, William Henry was not dead. Would never have gone close enough to the river to drown. He had lectured his son on the subject, said that the Avon was hungry, and William Henry had listened, had understood the danger. Richard knew as well as Dick, the Cousins James and Mr. Prichard what must have transpired between boy and man: Parfrey had made amorous advances and William Henry had fled. But not in the direction of the river. An agile, clever little boy like William Henry? No, he would have scrambled up into the rocks and made his escape across country; even now he might be curled up asleep beneath some sheltering bank on Durdham Down, prepared to make the long walk home tomorrow. Terrified, but alive.

And so Richard comforted himself, talked himself away from the truth everybody else saw clearly, glad of one thing: that Peg had not lived to witness this. Truly God was good. He had taken Peg as if with a bolt of lightning, and closed her eyes before they could know despair.

Some thousands flocked with the Mayor’s consent to help search for William Henry. Every sailor on watch scanned the mud in his vicinity, sometimes leaped overboard to examine a huddled, greasy grey heap amid the four-legged carcasses and the refuse of 50,000 people. To no avail. Those who could afford horses rode as far afield as the Pill, Blaize Castle, Kingswood, and every village within miles of Clifton and Durdham Down; others prowled the river-banks turning over barrels, sloppy floats of turf, anything that might catch and conceal a body. But no one found William Henry.

“ ’Tis a week,” said Dick gruffly, “and there is no sign. The Mayor says we must give it up.”

“Yes, I understand, Father,” said Richard, “but I will never give it up. Never.”

“Accept it, please! Think what it is doing to your mother.”

“I cannot and will not accept it.”

Was this blind refusal to accept better than those oceans of tears he had shed when little Mary died? At least they had been an outlet. This was awful. More awful by far than Peg or little Mary.

“Did Richard lose all hope of finding William Henry,” said Cousin James-the-druggist over a mug of rum, “he would have nothing whatsoever to live for. His whole family is gone, Dick! At least this way he can hope. I have prayed and the Reverend James has prayed that there never is a body. Then Richard will survive.”

“This ain’t survival,” said Dick. “It is a living Hell.”

“For you and Mag, yes. For Richard, it is the prolongation of hope-and life. Do not badger him.”

Richard had not found a job either, but that did not carry the same urgency it would have were his father not in the tavern business. Ten years had gone by since Dick took up the license of the Cooper’s Arms, which had outlived most of the other less pretentious taverns in Bristol’s center. Though it could never expect the likes of the Steadfast Society or the Union Club to darken its door, and despite those dreadful years of depression, the Cooper’s Arms still had its customers. The moment an old regular got his job back or found a new one, he returned with his family to his old watering place. So the summer of 1784 saw the Cooper’s Arms in fairly good condition-not as full as it had been in 1774, but sufficiently so to keep Dick, Mag and Richard busy. Nor was it necessary to find school fees for William Henry.

Two months went by. In September, Colston’s opened its gates to paying pupils again-though not with Mr. Prichard as the new Head. The disappearance of William Henry Morgan and the suicide of George Parfrey, Latin master, had effectively ruined his chances to succeed to that august position. As the old Head was not there to bear the blame for this nightmare, the Reverend Mr. Prichard inherited its mantle-and its odium. Questions were being asked in the Bishop’s Palace by some very important Bristolians.

At about the same moment as Colston’s reopened, Richard had a letter from Mr. Benjamin Fisher, Collector of Excise, asking to see him at once.

“Ye may wonder,” said Mr. Fisher when Richard reported in, “why we have not yet arrested William Thorne. That we will do only as a last resort-so far we have concentrated our energies upon Mr. Thomas Cave in the hope that he will produce the sixteen hundred pounds’ fine necessary to settle the matter without prosecution. However,” he went on, beginning to smile in quiet satisfaction, “evidence has come to light which puts a different complexion on the case. Do sit down, Mr. Morgan.” He cleared his throat. “I heard about your little boy, and I am very sorry.”

“Thank you,” said Richard woodenly, seating himself.

“Do the names William Insell and Robert Jones mean anything to you, Mr. Morgan?”

“No, sir,” said Richard.

“A pity. Both of them worked at Cave’s distillery during your time there.”

“As still men?”

“Yes.”

Frowning, Richard tried to remember the eight or nine faces he had seen around the gloomy cavern, regretting now that he had held himself aloof from those workmen’s parties while Thorne was away. No, he had no idea which one was Insell, or Jones. “I am sorry, I simply do not remember them.”

“No matter. Insell came to me yesterday and confessed that he had been withholding information, it seems from fear of what Thorne might do to him. At about the time that you discovered the pipes and casks, Insell overheard a conversation between Thorne, Cave and Mr. Ceely Trevillian. They were talking about the illicit rum in plain terms. Though Insell had not suspected the swindle as he went about his work, this conversation made it clear that there was collusion among the three to defraud the Excise. So I intend to prosecute Cave and Trevillian as well as Thorne, and Excise will be able to get its money by garnishing Cave’s property.”

A small shaft of feeling penetrated Richard’s numbness; he sat back and looked contented. “That is excellent news, sir.”

“Do nothing, Mr. Morgan, until the case comes to trial. We will have to investigate matters some more before we move to arrest the three, but rest assured that it is going to happen.”

Two months ago the news would have sent him whooping back to the Cooper’s Arms; today it was merely of passing interest.

“I cannot remember Insell or Jones,” he said to his father, “but my evidence is corroborated.”

“That,” said Dick, pointing into a corner, “is William Insell. He came while ye were away and asked to see you.”

One look at Insell’s face jogged Richard’s memory. A fresh young fellow, good-natured and hardworking. Unfortunately he had been Thorne’s chief butt; twice he had felt Thorne’s rope’s end, and twice he had suffered the flogging without fighting back. Not unusual. To fight back meant losing one’s job, and in hard times jobs were too precious to lose. Richard would never have suffered so much as the threat of a flogging, but Richard had never been in a situation where the rope’s end was an alternative. Like William Henry, he had the knack of avoiding corporal punishment without needing to be obsequious; he was also a qualified craftsman, not a simple workman. Insell was a perfect victim, poor fellow. Not his own fault. Just the way he was made.

Richard carried two half-pints of rum to the corner table and sat down. This was indicative of a change in his behavior that no one had thought it wise to comment upon; Richard was drinking rum these days, and increasingly so.

“How d’ye do, Willy?” he asked, pushing one rum toward the pallid Mr. Insell.

“I had to come!” Insell gasped.

“What is it?” asked Richard, waiting for the burning fluid to start deadening his pain.

“Thorne! He has found out I went to the Excise.”

“I am not surprised, if ye blurt it out to everyone. Now calm yourself. Have some rum.”

Insell drank thirstily, gulped and half-retched on the power of Dick’s unwatered best stuff, and ceased to tremble. Finished with his own half-pint, Richard went to draw two more mugs.

“I have lost my job,” said Insell then.

“In which case, why d’ye need to fear Thorne?”

“The man is a murderer! He will find me and murder me!”

Privately Richard considered that Ceely Trevillian was more likely to do any murders necessary, but did not attempt to argue. “Where d’ye live, Willy?”

“In Clifton. At Jacob’s Well.”

“And what has Robert Jones to do with it?”

“I told him what I had overheard. Mr. Fisher of the Excise was interested in that, but he thinks I am far more important.”

“Rightly so. Does Thorne know you live at Jacob’s Well?”

“I do not think so.”

“Does Jones know?” Richard suddenly remembered Robert Jones, who was a crawler, smarmed up to Thorne. He was how Thorne knew, definitely.

“I never told him.”

“Then rest easy, Willy. If ye’ve nothing better to do, spend your days here. The Cooper’s Arms is one place Thorne will not look for you. But if you drink rum, ye’ll have to pay for it.”

Horrified, Insell pushed the second mug away. “Do I have to pay for this?” he asked.

“These are on my slate. Cheer up, Willy. In my experience, rogues are not very clever. Ye’ll be safe enough.”

The days were beginning to draw in a little, which limited the amount of time Richard had to search for William Henry. His first call was always the dell by the Avon, from which place he would clamber up the frowning cliffs, calling William Henry’s name; from the top of the gorge he would strike across Durdham Down, and so come eventually to Clifton Green. The walk home led him past William Insell’s lodging place, but he usually met Insell on the footpath across Brandon Hill, hurrying to beat the darkness, yet too afraid to leave the Cooper’s Arms until after sunset.

He had worn out two more pairs of shoes, but no one in the extended Morgan family attempted to remonstrate with him; the more Richard walked, the less time he had to drink rum. Brother William suddenly needed to have his saws set and sharpened more often (he pleaded a new West Indian timber), and that gave Richard some other place to walk than Clifton. Who knew? Perhaps the little fellow had gotten himself all the way to Cuckold’s Pill, so the journeys to William’s sawpits were not entirely wasted time. And he could not drink rum when he needed his eye to set a saw properly.

He had not wept, could not weep. The rum was a way to dull his pain, which was the pain of hope, hope that one day William Henry would walk through the door.

“I never thought to say this,” Richard said to Cousin James-the-druggist halfway through September, “but I am beginning to wish that I had found William Henry’s body. Then I could have no hope. As it is, I must assume William Henry is alive somewhere, and that in itself is torture-what sort of life must he be leading, not to come home?”

His cousin once removed eyed him sadly. Richard was thinner yet physically fitter-all that walking and climbing had honed down a body always in good trim until now it was probably capable of lifting anvils or withstanding the ravages of any disease. How old was he now that he had just had another birthday? Six-and-thirty. The Morgans tended to make old bones, and if Richard did not ruin his liver with rum, he looked as if he would live to be ninety. Yet what for? Oh, pray he put this awful business behind him, took another wife and begot another family!

“Two and one-half months, Cousin James! Not a sign of him! Perhaps”-he shuddered-“that abominable creature hid his body.”

“Dear fellow, put it behind you, please.”

“I cannot.”

William Insell did not arrive at the Cooper’s Arms the next day; glad of an excuse to walk out to Clifton earlier than usual, Richard put his hat on and went to the door.

“Off already?” asked Dick, surprised.

“Insell has not come, Father.”

Dick grunted. “That is no loss. I am very tired of him in his corner looking so woebegone that he puts the customers off.”

“I agree,” said Richard, managing a grin, “but his absence is a worry. I will see for myself why he ain’t here.”

The path across Brandon Hill was so familiar by now that he could have negotiated it blindfold; Richard was outside William Insell’s house within fifteen minutes of leaving home.

A girl sat hunched on the stoop. Hardly aware of her, Richard went to step around her. Her foot came out.

“Bon jour,” she said.

Startled, he looked down into the most bewitching female face he had ever seen. Big, saucily demure black eyes, long-lashed-a dimple in either rosy cheek-a pair of lush, unpainted red lips-a glowing skin-an uncoiffured mop of glossy black curls. Oh, she was pretty! And so clean-looking!

“How d’ye do?” he asked, removing his hat to bow.

“Very well, monsieur,” she said in French-accented English, “but I cannot say as much for poor Willy.”

“Insell, mistress?”

“Oui.” She got to her feet to reveal that her figure was as graciously endowed as her face, and fetchingly dressed in pink silk. Expensive. “Yes, Willy,” she added, pronouncing the name so adorably that Richard smiled.

She gasped. “Oh, monsieur! You are very ’andsome.”

Ordinarily shy with strangers, Richard found himself not shy with her at all, despite her forwardness. Conscious that he had reddened, he wanted to look away but found that he could not. She really was amazingly pretty, and the upper halves of two smooth, creamy breasts were even more beguiling than her expression.

“I am Richard Morgan,” he said.

“And I am Annemarie Latour, serving maid to Mrs. Barton. I live ’ere.” She chuckled. “Not with Willy, you understand!”

“He is sick, ye say?”

“Come and see for yourself.” She walked ahead of him up the narrow stairs, her dress kilted high enough to see two beautifully turned ankles below a foam of ruffled petticoats. “Willy! Willy! You ’ave a visitor!” she called as she reached the landing.

Richard entered Insell’s room to find him lying on his bed looking very bilious. “What is it, Willy?”

“Ate some bad oysters,” Insell groaned.

Annemarie had followed him in and was surveying Willy with interest but no pity. “ ’E would eat the oysters Mrs. Barton gave me. I told ’im that old thing would not give me fresh oysters. But Willy sniffed them and said they were good, so ’e ate them. Et voilà!” She pointed dramatically.

“Then serves ye right, William. Have ye seen a doctor? D’ye need anything?”

“Just rest,” moaned the sufferer. “I have cast up my accounts so many times that the doctor says there cannot be any more oysters left down there. I feel awful.”

“But ye’ll live, which is a good thing. Without you to confirm my testimony, Mr. Fisher of the Excise Office has no case. I will drop in tomorrow to see how you are.”

Richard descended the stairs conscious that Annemarie Latour was close enough behind him to smell the fresh scent of best Bristol soap. Not perfume. Soap. Lavender-scented soap. What was a girl like this doing living alone in a Clifton lodging house? Maids usually lived in. And no maid Richard had ever met wore silk. Mrs. Barton’s cast-offs, perhaps? If so, then Mrs. Barton, apostrophized by Annemarie as an “old thing,” must have an excellent figure.

“Bon jour, Monsieur Richard,” said Mistress Latour on the step. “I will see you tomorrow, non?”

“Yes,” said Richard, clapped his hat on his head and walked away up the hill toward Clifton Green.

His mind was battling to do two things at one and the same moment: William Henry had to be searched for, yet Annemarie Latour was there too, eating away like a worm. For so he saw her, instincts not awry just because his traitorous body was twitching and stirring. A lifetime around taverns had shown him on countless occasions that a man’s reason and good sense could fly out the window at the merest flick of a feminine skirt.

But why now, and why with this woman? Peg had been dead for nine months and by tradition he was still in mourning for her, ought not even to be thinking of his body’s needs. Nor was he a man who had ever dwelled upon his body’s needs. His wife had been his only lover, he had never seriously coveted any other woman.

It is neither the time nor the situation, he thought as he continued to wear out his fourth pair of shoes. It is simply her. Annemarie Latour. Whenever he had met her, in whatever situation he had met her, were Peg alive or dead, Richard divined that Annemarie Latour would have provoked this same bodily reaction in him. Thank God then that Peg was dead. The girl exuded some invisible lure, she was a siren whose chief pleasure was the act of seduction. And I am not Ulysses bound to the mast, nor are my ears stoppered with wax. I am an ordinary man of humblest origins. I do not love her, but Christ, I want her!

Then the guilt began. Peg was dead, he was still in mourning. William Henry had not been gone three months-these feelings were impious, disgusting, unnatural. He began to run, shrieking his son’s name to the indifferent winds of Clifton Hill. William Henry, William Henry, save me!

But he was back at Willy Insell’s door at eight the next morning, turning his hat around in his hands, looking in vain for Annemarie Latour. No one on the stoop, no one inside. Knocking gently, he pushed at the door to Insell’s room and discovered him asleep in the bed, his chest rising and falling regularly. He tiptoed out.

“Bon jour, Monsieur Richard.”

There she was! On the stairs leading to the garret.

“He is asleep,” said Richard lamely.

“I know. I gave him laudanum.”

She was wearing much less than yesterday, but perhaps she had just risen from her own bed: a pink lace robe, some kind of thin pink shift beneath it. Her hair, unpinned, cascaded in masses over her shoulders.

“I am sorry. Did I wake you?”

“No.” She put her finger to her lips. “Sssssh! Come up.”

Well, he was up already, just at the sight of her, but he followed her to the tiny eyrie where she lived and stood with his hat across his groin, gazing about like a bumpkin. Cousin Ann had much finer furniture, but Mistress Annemarie had much finer taste; the room was tidy, smelled of lavender rather than sweaty clothes, and was delicately fitted out in purest white.

“Richard? I may call you Richard?” she asked, plucking his hat away and staring round-eyed. “Oooooh, la la!” she exclaimed, and helped him out of his coat.

He was used to the decencies of nightclothes and darkness, but Annemarie believed in neither. When he tried to keep his shirt on she would not let him, pulled it over his head and left him standing defenseless, not a stitch on.

“You are very beautiful,” she said in a surprised tone, going all the way around him while the lace robe fell, then the pink silk shift. “I am very beautiful too, am I not?”

He could only nod, wordless. No need to worry what to do next; she was in complete control, and clearly preferred it that way. A less humble man might have balked at her mastery, but Richard knew himself a novice at this sort of activity, and had all a humble man’s pride. Let her take the initiative, then he could not be mortified by making a move she did not approve of, or might find laughable.

There were many beautiful ladies paraded around the better bits of Bristol, but voluminous skirts might hide spindled shanks or legs of mutton, and the breasts forced up by stays might sag to a suddenly spreading waist, a wobbling pudding of belly. Not so, Mistress Annemarie! She was, as she had complacently announced, very beautiful. Her breasts were as high and full as Peg’s had been, her waist smaller, her hips and thighs rounded, her legs slender yet well shaped, her belly flat, her black mound triumphantly, juicily plump.

She strolled around him again, then fitted her front to his back and rubbed herself against him with purrs and murmurs; he could feel the soft hair of her mound against his legs, jumped when she suddenly sank her manicured nails into his shoulders and pulled herself up until the hair was sliding voluptuously across his buttocks. Teeth clenched-for he feared that he would come right then and there-he forced himself to stand perfectly still while she inched around him, rubbing and cooing. Then she sank to her knees in front of him, threw her shoulders back so that her breasts reared up like red-capped, rounded pyramids, tossed her hair out of her face and grinned gleefully.

“I think,” she said in the back of her throat, “that I will play the silent flute.”

“Do that, madam,” he gasped, “and the tune will be drowned in a second!”

She cupped his balls in her hands and smirked. “No matter, cher Richard. There is many a tune in this ’andsome flute.”

The sensation was-sensational. Eyes closed, every fiber of him concentrated upon drawing this astonishing pleasure out for as long as his flesh could bear, Richard tried to store up as many different nuances of the experience as he could. Then, defeated, let himself come in dazzling colors, jerks and black velvet, his hands clutching her hair as she gulped and swallowed him down.

But she had been right; no sooner was the convulsion over than the tyrant at the base of his belly was up and wanting more.

“Now it is my turn,” she said, stalked as if she still wore high heels to the bed, and sprawled upon it, swollen crimson lips sparkling in the depths of her mound. “First the tongue in a la-la-la, then the flute in a march, and then-the tarantelle! Bang, bang, bang with the stick upon the drum!”

That was what she wanted, and that was what she got. All pretense at thought had long since gone; if madam demanded a full performance, then let it be a symphony.

“Ye’re a musical wench,” he said several hours later, utterly spent. “Nay, do not bother trying. The flute is tweetled out.”

“You are full of surprises, my dear,” she said, still purring.

“And you. Though I doubt ye learned such a varied repertoire on the likes of my poor single drumstick. It must have taken-flutes-clarinets-oboes-bassoons even.”

“Somewhere, cher Richard, you ’ave picked up an education.”

“Five years at Colston’s is a sort of an education, I suppose. But most of it I learned in making guns.”

“Guns?”

“Aye, from a Portuguese gentleman of Jewish persuasion. My master gunsmith,” said Richard, so exhausted that speaking was an effort, but realizing that she liked to chat after concerts. “He played the violin, his wife the harpsichord, and his three daughters harp, cello and-flute. I lived in their house for seven years, and used to sing because they liked my voice. My blood is probably Welsh, and the Welsh are much addicted to singing.”

“You also ’ave a sense of humor,” she said, hair brushing his face. “Very refreshing in a Bristolian. Is the humor Welsh too?”

He got off the bed and into his underdrawers, then sat on its edge to pull on his stockings. “What I cannot understand is why ye’re a lady’s maid, Annemarie. Ye should be some nabob’s mistress.”

She twinkled her fingers in the air. “It amuses me.”

“And the silk gowns? This-this virtuous room?”

“Mrs. Barton,” she said, tone oozing contempt, “is a stupid old cow of a bitch!”

“Do not use that word!” he snapped.

“Bitch! Bitch-bitch-bitch! There! I ’ave shocked you greatly, cher Richard.” She sat up and crossed her legs under her like a tailor. “I cheat Mrs. Barton, Richard. I cheat ’er blind. But she thinks she is the clever one, lodging me ’ere to keep ’er silly old ’usband away from me.” She lifted her lip. “As for ’er, she can parade around Clifton to all the big ’ouses and boast that she ’as a genuine Frrrrrench maid. Bah!”

Dressed, Richard eyed her ironically. “D’ye want to see more of me?” he asked.

“Oh yes, my Richard, very definitely.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow at the same hour. Mrs. Barton is not early out of ’er bed.”

“You cannot keep Willy on laudanum forever.”

“There is no need. I ’ave you now-why should Willy mind?”

“Quite. Until tomorrow, then.”

That day William Henry was, if not forgotten, buried under many layers of his father’s mind. Richard walked straight back to the Cooper’s Arms, up the stairs without saying a word to anyone, fell fully clothed on his bed and slept until dawn. Rumless.

“Your fish,” said Annemarie Latour to John Trevillian Ceely Trevillian, “is ’ooked.”

“I do wish you would abandon those Frenchified affectations,” Mr. Trevillian sighed. “Was it very awful, my poor darling?”

“Quite the opposite, cher Ceely. His clothes were clean. So was his person. No nits, no lice, no crabs.” She was emphasizing her aitches. “He washes.” A smile of pure cruelty curved her mouth. “His body is very beautiful. And he is very, very much a man.”

The barb struck home to fester and spread its poison, but he was too clever to betray that. Instead he patted her on the bottom, gave her twenty golden guineas and dismissed her; Mr. Cave and Mr. Thorne were coming to call, and he had not seen them in some time. For one who lived with his doting mama on Park Street it was not advisable to be seen too often receiving low visitors.

“The best thing we can do,” said William Thorne when he and Cave arrived, “is to grab Insell and put him on a slaver as crew.”

“And have the suspicion of murder hanging about us like smoke around a foundry chimney?” asked Ceely. “Oh, no.”

“I will make sure he is listed as pressed and on the roster.”

“I want Richard Morgan done for too,” said Trevillian.

“It is not necessary!” wailed Thomas Cave. “Richard Morgan is well connected-the other is a nobody. Let Bill have Insell taken on a slaver, then let me go back to the Excise, please. I am not asking you to pay the fine, Ceely, but until it is paid the threat of trial hangs over all of us. We are being watched.”

“Look,” said Ceely Trevillian slowly and carefully, “I am too well-born to earn a living, and my late father, Devil take him, disinherited me. Knowing that I must live on my wits has sharpened them something brilliant. M’mother does what she can, including housing me and donating gold when m’brother is not looking, but I needed that excise money, and I am not pleased to be deprived of it. Nor will I be pleased to be deprived of either my freedom or my breathing and swallowing apparatus. Morgan and Insell have put a stop to my income, and I want to put a stop to them.” His face twisted. “Insell is a nothing, I agree. It is Morgan who will send us down. Besides, I need to ruin Richard Morgan.”

When Richard woke, the first thing he did was go to look in William Henry’s cubicle. The bed was empty. Tears stung at his eyes, the first since William Henry had disappeared, but they did not fall. His sleep had been long enough to banish bodily aches, though his penis felt raw and he could feel her bites and scratches. A shocking word, bitch, but Annemarie Latour was a first-rate bitch.

The habits of the household at dawn went back past his very earliest memories. Dick descended to the kitchen and carried a kettle of hot water and a bucket of cold water up to Mag for her small tin bath. When Peg had been alive the two women had shared it, and after them the servant girl got it. While they washed upstairs, Dick and Richard washed downstairs.

Dick passed through to his bedroom with Mag’s kettle and bucket, cast a glance in Richard’s direction on his way out and ascertained that his son had finally come to. Leaving his slept-in clothes for the servant girl to deal with, Richard found more in his chest and ran down the stairs, naked, to join his father, who had already shaved and was standing in the small bath trickling water over himself with a tin dipper and slicking his wet skin with soap.

Dick gaped. “Christ! Where have you been?”

“With a woman,” said Richard, preparing to shave.

“About time too.” The soap was sloshed away with the dipper. “A whore, Richard?”

Richard grinned. “If she is, Father, then she is a very rare sort of a one. By that I mean that I have never seen her like.”

“A strong statement from a tavern man.” Dick stepped out of the oversized dish and rubbed himself vigorously with an old linen sheet while Richard stepped into his father’s used water.

“Finished?” came Mag’s voice from upstairs.

“Not yet!” Dick yelled, and dragged Richard, still drying himself, to the bullioned window and a shade more wan light. There he looked his son over grimly. “I hope ye’re not clapped or poxed.”

“I would bet I am not. The lady is particular.”

“What happened?”

“I met her at Insell’s place.”

“She’s Insell’s leavings?”

“Nay! She’d as soon cut her throat. Very high and mighty.” He frowned, shook his head. “Truth to tell, I know not why she fancied me. There is little enough between Insell and me.”

“Ye’re no more like Insell than a silk purse is a sow’s ear.”

“I am to see her again at eight o’clock this morning.”

Dick whistled. “’Tis hot, then?”

“Like a fire.” Richard finished tying his stock and combing his damp hair. “The thing is, Father, that I dislike her hugely, yet I cannot get enough of her. Ought I go? Or stay away forever?”

“Go, Richard, go! When it is a fire, the only way out is to walk through it to the other side.”

“And if it consumes me?”

“I will pray that it does not.”

At least, thought Richard at a quarter to eight, shutting the Cooper’s Arms door behind him, I have my father’s approval. I never dreamed he would understand. I wonder who was his fire?

He still had very little idea why he was going, whether it was as complex as sexual enslavement or as simple as sexual starvation. In Bristol “sex” and “sexual” were not words employed in the context of the act-too brutally explicit for a godfearing small city, not mealy-mouthed about many things. “Sex” stripped the act of love or morality. “Sex” made the act an animal event. In which case, sex and sex alone was why he walked to Jacob’s Well for more Annemarie.

But it was William Henry he thought about. Alive out there in someone else’s world, unable to get home. Which meant that he had been taken as a ship’s boy. It happened, especially to beautiful boys. Oh, dear God! Not my lad in that life! Please, dear God, let him be dead first! While I go to copulate with a French bitch who transfixes me the way I once saw a hooded snake transfix a rat at the Bristol Fair…

The fire burned more fiercely each time Richard met her, which was every day for the next week. But the pain of it and the pain of deserting William Henry, of imagining William Henry as a ship’s boy, forced him back to the rum; his days became a muddled blur of Annemarie, of his father’s worried face, of William Henry crying out from a great distance amid a vast sea, of sex and music and hooded snakes and rum, rum to find oblivion at the end of each hideous bout. He hated her, the French bitch, yet he could not get enough of her. Worse than that, he hated himself.

Then out of the blue she sent a note with Willy Insell that she could not see him for some time-but she gave no reason. Dazed at the affair, Insell could provide no reason either, save that the knocker was off her garret door and he fancied she was staying with Mrs. Barton. I cannot deal with losing both of them, Richard thought as he wandered in search of either of them. What I feel for her is base metal, heavy and dull and dark as lead, so how can I mourn at losing her? The fire still consumes me.

Giving up the search, he spent his days inside the Cooper’s Arms drinking rum, talking to nobody, the quill and paper he had taken to write to Mr. James Thistlethwaite lying dry and blank.

“Jim, please tell me what to do,” Dick begged of Cousin James-the-druggist.

“I am an apothecary, not a doctor of the soul, and it is poor Richard’s soul is sick. No, I do not blame it on the woman. She is merely a symptom of his disease, which has been coming on ever since William Henry drowned.”

“D’ye really think he drowned?”

Cousin James-the-druggist nodded emphatically. “I have not the slightest doubt.” He sighed. “At first I thought it was better for Richard to cherish hope, but when he took to rum I changed my mind. His soul needs a doctor, and rum is no cure.”

“Except,” Dick objected, “that the Reverend James is such a-a fizzing sort of minister. ’Tis you has good sense and can see all sides, not the other James. Imagine trying to tell him about this French whore-he would be off with his prayer book in one hand and a Roman crucifix in the other to do battle with one of Satan’s imps! For so he would regard her. Whereas I think she is just a meddler, and very attracted to Richard. Why can he never see that women fancy him? They do, Jim! You must have seen it for yourself.”

As both his bracket-faced spinster daughters had been in love with their cousin Richard for years, Cousin James-the-druggist had no hesitation in nodding emphatically a second time.

By the 27th of September Richard was soaked to the core in rum; when he received a note from Annemarie Latour saying that she was back in residence and dying to see him, he floundered from his chair and was off at a run.

“Richard! Oh, how marvelous to see you! Mon cher, mon cher!” She drew him inside, covering his face with kisses, took his hat and coat from him, purred and murmured and cooed.

“Why?” he asked, hanging back, determined this once to be his own man. “Why have I not seen you for a week?”

“Because Mrs. Barton has been ill and I have been with her-Willy should have told you. I asked him to tell you.”

“So far you have not dropped a single aitch,” he said.

“Because I have been with Mrs. Barton, ’oo-who-hates it when I speak the bad English. I have had to nurse ’er-her,” said Annemarie, looking injured.

Richard slumped onto the bed, feeling the rum. “Oh, what the hell does it matter, girl? I have missed ye and I am glad to be back. Kiss me.”

So they played at sex with lips, tongues, hands, wetness and fire, the sodden ecstasies of utter shamelessness. Hour upon hour, he upon her, she upon him, upside down, right way up, she fertile of imagination, he consumed to go in whichever direction she pointed.

“You are astonishing,” she said at the end of it.

His eyes were closing, but he summoned up a huge effort and kept them open. “In what way?”

“You stink of rum, yet you can still fuck-that is a good word-like a boy of nineteen.”

“You would know, my dear.” He grinned and did close his eyes. “It takes more than a few pints of rum to knock the stuffing out of me,” he said. “I have lasted a great deal longer than John Adams and John Hancock.”

“What?”

He vouchsafed no answer; Annemarie lay back against the soft pile of pillows and gazed at the ceiling, wondering how she was going to feel when this was over. When Ceely had persuaded her-assisted by several rouleaux of golden guineas-to seduce Richard Morgan, she had stifled a sigh, taken the money and reconciled herself to however many weeks of boredom. The trouble was that she had not been bored. For one thing, Richard was a gentleman. Which was more than she could say for that two-faced, double-gaited monster Ceely, who by profession called himself a gentleman yet would not have recognized one on the street.

What she had not counted upon was the victim’s attractiveness (to herself, however, she called it beauty). On the surface, a drab and genteel ordinary man of Bristol with no pretensions to fashion and no ability to turn heads. Then when first he smiled at her he seemed to whip a veil from his face, was suddenly strikingly handsome. And beneath the clothes of the time, designed to make all men look paunchy, round shouldered and sway backed, lay the physique of an ancient Greek statue. He hides, she thought, groping after the English adage, his light under a bushel. It is there only for those with the eyes to see. What a pity that he has never valued himself enough to stand forth. A superb lover. Oh yes, superb!

How then might she feel when all this was over? Not long now, depending upon how malleable Richard was-Ceely wanted it done soon, and the rum would be a great help. Her own part, she suspected, was a minor one, and she would never know the outcome. But playing that part meant goodbye to Ceely and to England. Her looks were still at their peak, she could pass for twenty even though she was thirty; between what Ceely would pay her shortly and what he had already paid her over the course of four years, she would be able to quit this country of dirty pigs and go home to her beloved Gironde, there to live like a lady.

For an hour she dozed; then she leaned over and shook Richard awake. “Richard! Richard! I ’ave an idea!”

His head felt swollen and his mouth was parched; Richard got off the bed and went to the white pitcher in which Annemarie kept small beer. A good beaker of that and he felt a little better, though he knew it would be several days before he cleared the rum from his system. If he stopped drinking it. But did he want to?

“What?” he asked, sitting on the bed, head in his hands.

“Why do we not set up house together? Mrs. Hale downstairs is moving out and the rent for two floors is only half a crown a week-we could move our bedroom down so there are not as many steps, and put Willy up here or in the cellar. His rent would be a help-he pays a shilling. Oh, it would be so nice to ’ave a proper establishment-do say yes, Richard, please!”

“I have not got a job, my dear,” he said through his hands.

“But I ’ave-have-with Mrs. Barton, and you will soon get one too,” she said comfortably. “Please, Richard! What if some horrible man moves in? How would I protect myself?”

He took his hands away from his face and looked at her.

“I could say we were married, that would make it respectable.”

“Married?”

“Just to satisfy the neighbors, cher Richard. Please!”

It was difficult to think, and the small beer was making him feel a little sick; Richard grasped the proposition and turned it over in his befuddled mind, wondering if this might not be the best way. He was outwearing his welcome at the Cooper’s Arms-or else the Cooper’s Arms was outwearing him. “Very well,” he said.

She jigged up and down on the bed, beaming. “Tomorrow! Willy is helping Mrs. Hale move today, then he can help me. Tomorrow!”

The news that Richard was leaving stunned his parents, who looked at each other and resolved to say nothing against it. His consumption of rum between coming home and going to bed was greater than ever-if he transferred himself to Clifton he would have to pay for at least a part of what he drank.

“For I cannot deny my own son what he has here,” said Dick.

“You are right, it is too readily available,” Mag agreed.

So Dick lent him the handcart in which they fetched sawdust and provisions, watched a grim-faced Richard load two chests upon it. “What about your tools?”

“Keep them,” said Richard tersely. “I doubt I will need those kind of tools in Clifton.”

The house in which Mistress Latour and Willy Insell lodged was the middle one of three conjoined premises on Clifton Green Lane not far from Jacob’s Well. That the edifice had once been a single dwelling was patent in the narrowness of the stairs and the rough partitions which divided it into three separate sections, thereby increasing the rents. The boards did reach the ceilings, but were typically slipshod-full of gaping cracks and thin enough to hear a woman’s voice shrilling next door. Annemarie’s garret rose alone like a single eyebrow and had afforded a great deal more privacy, Richard now discovered as he surveyed her fine bed in its new location one floor down.

“Our lovemaking will be rather more public,” he said dryly.

A Gallic shrug. “All the world makes love, cher Richard.” Suddenly she gasped and reached into her reticule. “I forgot! I ’ave a letter for you.”

He took the folded sheet and stared at the seal curiously; not anyone’s he knew. But the front was clearly addressed-by the copperplate hand of a scrivener-to Mr. Richard Morgan.

“Sir,” said the letter, “your name has been drawn to my attention through the kind services of Mrs. Herbert Barton. I believe that you are a gunsmith. If this be true, and you are able to furnish good references and perhaps demonstrate your skills in my own presence, then I may have employment for you. Kindly present yourself at nine of the clock to my establishment at 10, Westgate Buildings, Bath, on the 30th of September.”

It was signed, in a shaky, unschooled hand, “Horatio Midder.” Who on earth was Horatio Midder? He had thought he knew the name of every gunsmith between Reading and Weymouth, but Mr. Midder was new to him.

“What is it? Who is it from?” Annemarie was asking, trying to peer over his shoulder.

“From a gunsmith in Bath named Horatio Midder. Offering me a job,” said Richard, blinking. “He wants to see me on the thirtieth at nine in the morning, which means I will have to leave tomorrow.”

“Oh, it is the friend of Mrs. Barton’s!” caroled Annemarie, clapping her hands in joy. She hung her head until her long black lashes cast shadows on her cheeks. “I mentioned you to her, cher Richard. You do not mind?”

“If it means a job,” said Richard, picking her up and tossing her into the air, “I would not care did ye mention my name to Old Nick himself!”

“It is too bad,” she pouted, “that you will have to go away tomorrow. I have told everybody in these ’ouses-houses-that we are married and you have moved in, and we have many invitations to visit.” The pout grew poutier. “Perhaps you will have to stay in Bath on Friday night too-I will not see you until Saturday.”

“Never mind, if it means a job of work,” said Richard, taking one of his chests to a spot where he thought Annemarie would not want to put anything of her own. “I am still sorry that ye moved the bed downstairs,” he hinted. “Since Willy has elected to live in the cellar, there was no need.”

“What does it matter, Richard, if you get a job in Bath?” she asked with inarguable logic. “We will be moving again anyway.”

“True.”

“Is it not nice to have a room for my desk?” she asked. “I love to write letters, and it was so cramped upstairs.”

He walked to the room behind the bedroom and looked at the desk, very solitary. “We will have to buy furniture to keep it company. How odd! In all my life I have not needed to furnish a place, even when Peg and I lived on Temple Street.”

“Peg?”

“My wife. She is dead,” said Richard curtly, suddenly needing a drink. “I shall go for a walk while you write letters.”

But she followed him downstairs, where the living room and the kitchen lay, the one containing four wooden chairs, a table and a sideboard, the other a counter and crude fireplace. Could Annemarie cook? Would Annemarie have the time to cook, if she spent her afternoons and evenings with the late-rising Mrs. Barton?

On the doorstep she stood on tiptoe and kissed him.

“Egad!” cried an affected voice. “Mr. Morgan, is it not?”

Richard broke the kiss with a jerk and slewed around to see Mr. John Trevillian Ceely Trevillian posing not three feet away in all the glory of cyclamen velvet embroidered in black and white. The hair on the back of his head rose, but, aware of Annemarie, he could not do what he longed to do-turn his rump on Ceely Trevillian and stride away down the lane.

“Mr. Trevillian, as I live and breathe,” he said.

“Is this the wife I have been hearing about?” the fop fluted, pursing his painted lips in admiration. “Do introduce me!”

For a long moment Richard stood silent, striving to keep his face expressionless as his rum-clouded mind raced through all the possible consequences of this unhappy, inopportune encounter. To one side of and behind Mr. Trevillian stood a small group of men and women he had not so far met, but assumed from their indoor dress that they lived in one or the other of the boarded-off sections on either side of Annemarie’s apartment. What should he do? How should he answer? “Do introduce me!” Ceely had said.

Like almost every other Englishman, Richard knew very little about the law, but he did know that once he spoke of a woman as his wife, in effect she became his wife at Common Law. When Annemarie had proposed that she tell her friends and neighbors of a marriage between herself and Richard, he had retained, even in his hungover state, sufficient sense to resolve that she could prattle on about marrying him as much as she wanted, but he would make sure he never confirmed her talk.

Now here he stood, confronted by his inimicus Ceely Trevillian in the midst of Annemarie’s neighbors, neatly impaled on the horns of a dilemma: if his introduction implied that she was his wife, then as long as he cohabited with her, she was his Common Law wife; if he publicly disavowed her, she acquired the status of a whore in the eyes of her neighbors and the persecution would start.

He gave a mental shrug. So be it. His wife she would have to be until-or if-he ceased to cohabit with her. Though he loathed her tasteless musical analogies quite as much as he loathed himself for being caught in her sexual toils, he could not turn her from a respectable maidservant into a trollop. Of their two lives, hers was the one that revolved around Jacob’s Well and its denizens.

“Annemarie,” he said curtly. Then: “What are you doing here?”

“My dear fellow, visiting my hairdresser-Mr. Joice, y’know.” Ceely indicated a simpering man at his elbow. “Lives next door, which is how I learned ye’re married and come to live here.” Out came a lace handkerchief; he passed it delicately across his brow. “’Tis a warm day for the end of September, is it not?”

“Oh, sir, please to come in,” said Annemarie, curtseying in a flurry of petticoats. “A rest in the cool of our living room will soon make you feel better.” She ushered the unwelcome visitor in and sat him on one of the chairs, then fanned his brow with the edge of her apron. “Richard, my dear, do we ’ave anything to offer the gentleman?” she asked dulcetly, obviously impressed with so much style.

“Until I fetch beer and rum from the Black Horse, naught,” said Richard ungraciously.

“Then I will find you a pitcher for beer and one for small beer,” she said, and bustled with many twitchings of her skirts into the kitchen, making sure that Ceely got an eyeful of ankle.

“I owe you no thanks, Morgan,” said Ceely as soon as they were alone. “That tale you fabricated about me has led to several very unpleasant interviews with the Commander of Excise. I do not know what I did to offend you while you tinkered with Mr. Cave’s apparatus, but it was certainly not sufficient to deserve the tissue of lies you told the Collector.”

“No lies,” said Richard levelly. “I saw ye at work by the light of a full moon on a cloudless night, and heard your name.” He smiled. “And because ye were injudicious enough to converse frankly with Mr. Cave and Mr. Thorne while another listened, you will be exposed as the villain you are, Mr. Ceely Trevillian.”

Annemarie came in, an empty white pitcher in each hand. “Is beer acceptable, sir?” she asked the visitor.

“At this hour of day, quite,” said Mr. Trevillian.

A pitcher in either hand, Richard went off to the Black Horse under Brandon Hill while Annemarie settled in another chair to talk to the awesomely grand gentleman.

When he returned he discovered that his trip had been for nothing; Mr. Trevillian was standing on the stoop, busy kissing Annemarie’s hand.

“I ’ope we see you again, m’sieur,” she said, dimpling demurely.

“Oh, I can promise you that!” he cried in his falsetto voice. “Do not forget that my hairdresser lives right next door.”

Annemarie gasped. “Mrs. Barton! I will be late!”

Mr. Trevillian offered his arm. “As I know the lady well, Madame Morgan, pray permit me to escort you to her house.”

And off they went, heads together, he mouthing pretty nothings, she giggling. Richard watched them turn at the corner of a nearby lane of half-finished houses, emitted an angry growl and went to get his father’s handcart. It had to be returned. The silly French bitch! Simpering and groveling to the likes of Ceely Trevillian just because he wore cyclamen velvet some poor workhouse child had been forced to embroider without seeing a farthing’s recompense.

The daily coach to Bath left the Lamb Inn at noon and made the trip in four hours for a price of four shillings an inside seat or two shillings on the box. Though he had saved scrupulously during the six months he had worked for Mr. Thomas Cave, there was very little money left; the trip to Bath would cost him a minimum of ten shillings he could ill afford. He had come to no arrangement with Annemarie over domestic expenses, and yesterday’s two meals had been taken at the Black Horse, a more costly business than the Cooper’s Arms; she had not offered to pay the shot, nor apparently disapproved of the amount of rum he drank. Her tipple was port.

Thus Richard set off to walk clear to the other side of Bristol in time to secure a two-shilling seat on the box; this necessitated sitting on top of the coach exposed to the elements, but the day did not promise rain.

Posting inns were busy places, endowed with large interior courtyards in which grooms and horses trailing harness walked to and fro restlessly, ostlers ran in all directions, and servants bearing trays of refreshments tendered them to the prospective passengers. Finding the team of six horses not hitched to his vehicle yet, Richard paid two shillings for a seat on the box and went to lounge against a wall until Bath was announced ready for boarding.

He was still lounging there when William Insell ran through the gates and paused to look about, chest heaving.

“Willy!”

Insell came hurrying over. “Oh, thank God, thank God!” he gasped. “I feared ye might have left.”

“What is it? Annemarie? Is she ill?”

“Not ill, no,” said Insell, pale eyes goggling. “Worse!”

“Worse?” Richard grasped his arm. “Is she dead?”

“No, no! She has made an assignation with Ceely Trevillian!”

Why did that not surprise him? “Go on.”

“He came to see the hairdresser fellow next door-or so he said, but the next moment he was aknocking on our door, and I had not got up the stairs from the cellar when Annemarie opened it.” He wiped the sweat from his brow and looked at Richard pleadingly. “I am so thirsty! I ran all the way.”

Richard disbursed a penny for a tankard of small beer for Insell, who drained it at a gulp. “There! Better!”

“Tell me, Willy. My coach will be called at any moment.”

“They made no secret of it-it was just as if they had clear forgotten I was in the house. She asked him if he wanted to do business with her, and he said yes. But then she did one of her flouncing acts-said the time were not right, you might come back. Six o’clock this evening, she said, and he could stay the night. So he went next door to Joice the hairdresser-I could hear him neighing through the wall. Then I waited until Annemarie went upstairs, and ran to find you.” His anxious face fixed its hang-dog eyes on Richard, begging for approval.

“Bath! Bath!” someone was shouting.

What to do? Damn it, he needed this job! And yet the man in him was outraged that Annemarie could prefer Ceely Trevillian to himself-Ceely Trevillian, of all men! The slur was insupportable. He straightened. “No job in Bath,” he said ruefully. “Come, we will go to my father’s and wait there. At six o’clock, Mistress Latour and Mr. Ceely Trevillian are in for a nasty surprise. It may be that he will never see the inside of a court for excise fraud, but he will remember what happens this evening, and so I swear it.”

How, wondered Dick, sensing terrible trouble brewing but not able to find out what kind of trouble, can I demand the truth from a thirty-six-year-old man, son though he is? What is going on, and why will he not tell me? That cringing creature Insell sits fawning at his feet-oh, there is no harm in him, but a good friend for Richard he is definitely not. Richard, Richard, steady on the rum!

At a little before six, just as Mag was about to serve supper to a pleasantly full tavern, Richard and Insell got up. Amazing how well he stood the rum, thought Dick as Richard walked an arrow-straight line to the door with Insell weaving behind him. My son is horribly drunk, trouble’s in the wind, and he has shut me out.

Twilight still infused the sky with a subtle afterglow because the weather was fine; Richard walked so swiftly that Willy Insell was hard put to keep up with him, the rage in him growing with every step he took.

The front door was unlocked; Richard slipped inside. “Stay down here until I call you,” he whispered to Willy, then ground his teeth. “With Ceely! Ceely! The bitch!” He started up the stairs, fists clenched.

To find the scene inside the bedroom one straight out of a classical farce. His lusty inamorata lay on the bed with legs akimbo, Ceely on top of her clad in his lace-trimmed shirt. They were heaving up and down in the traditional motion, Annemarie giving vent to small moans of pleasure, Ceely emitting grunts.

Richard had thought himself prepared for it, but the anger which invaded him drove reason from his brain. In one wall was a fireplace, beside it a scuttle of coal and a hammer for breaking down the larger chunks. Before the pair on the bed could blink, he had crossed the room, picked up the hammer and faced them.

“Willy, come up!” Richard roared. “No, do not move! I want my witness to see ye exactly as ye are.”

Insell walked in and stood gaping at Annemarie’s breasts.

“Are you prepared to testify, Mr. Insell, that ye’ve seen my wife in bed doing business with Mr. Ceely Trevillian?”

“Aye!” gulped Mr. Insell, trembling.

Annemarie had told Trevillian that Richard was drinking very heavily, but he had not imagined in any of his rehearsals for this moment what the sight of a very big man in a black rage would do to him; the cool and collected excise defrauder felt the blood drain from his face. Christ! Morgan meant murder!

“Damned bitch!” Richard shouted, turning his head to glare at Annemarie, quite as frightened as Trevillian. Shivering, she eeled up the bed and tried to retreat into the wall. “You bitch! You whore! And to think that I acknowledged ye as my wife to save your reputation! I did not deem ye a whore, madam, but I was mistaken!” His furious gaze went from her to the window-sill, whereon sat Trevillian’s watch, purse and fob. “Where is your candle, madam?” he asked, snarling. “Whores advertise for custom by putting a candle in the window, but I see no candle!” He reeled, staggered, sat heavily on the side of the bed and put the hammer to Trevillian’s forehead. “As for you, Ceely, ’twas you forced me to call this slut my wife, so you can take the consequences! I’ll have you up in court on charges of wife-stealing!”

Trevillian tried to slither away; Richard took his shoulder in an agonizing grip and tapped the hammer very gently against his sweating brow. “No, Ceely, do not move. Otherwise your blood will be all over this pretty white counterpane.”

“What are you going to do?” whispered Annemarie, sounding very afraid. “Richard, you are drunk! I beg you, not murder!” Her voice rose shrilly. “Put the hammer down, Richard! Put the hammer down! Not murder! Put it down!”

Richard obeyed with a spitting sound of contempt, though the hammer remained much closer to his hand than to Trevillian’s.

Think, Ceely Trevillian, think! He is murderous but not by nature a murderer-work on him, calm him, get this thing going in the direction it was intended to go!

Richard lifted the hammer amid Annemarie’s shrieks of terror and used its head to flick Trevillian’s shirt up around his belly. Then he looked at Annemarie in feigned amazement. “Is that what ye wanted? My, ye must be desperate for gold!” He didn’t know which one of the guilty pair he hated more-Annemarie for selling her favors or Ceely Trevillian for putting him in this cuckold’s situation by forcing him to indicate that she was a wife; so he hurtled, rum-impelled, down the only path he could see would make both of them pay. At least on this memorable evening and for however long after it that his rage endured. Not as far as a court, no. Not as far as a profit, no. But if he died for it, he would make them fear him and fear the consequences.

His hand shot out too quickly to see, took Trevillian by the throat and lifted him bodily to kneel in the middle of the bed. “I have here a witness that ye stole my wife, sir. I intend to prosecute ye for”-he hesitated, plucked a figure out of nowhere-“a thousand pounds in damages. I am a respectable artisan and I do not relish the role of a cuckold, especially when my cuckolder is a turd like you, Ceely Trevillian. Ye were willing to pay for my wife’s services-well, the fee has just gone up.”

Think, Ceely, think! It is going where I thought I would have to lead it without his aid. He is talking more, acting with less violence. The rum is slowing him down at last.

Trevillian wet his lips and found the words he had rehearsed. “Morgan, I acknowledge that ye have the right to take measures at law, and I admit that ye’d get some damages. But let us not air this matter in a court, please! My mama and brother-! And think of your wife, of her public reputation! Were her name to be bandied about in a court, she would be jobless and cast out.”

Yes, the rage was dying; Morgan looked suddenly confused, ill, at a loss. Trevillian babbled on. “I admit my guilt freely, but let me settle this out of court-here and now, Morgan, here and now! Ye would not get a thousand pounds, but ye might get five hundred. Let me give you my note of hand for five hundred pounds, Morgan, please! Then we can call the matter settled.”

Thrown off balance by this cow-hearted surrender, Richard sat on the edge of the bed wondering what to do now. He had envisioned Trevillian fighting back, resisting, daring him to do his worst-why had he envisioned that? Because of memories of the slim, crisp excise defrauder stripped in the moonlight of his fancy clothes and fancy manners? But that, he realized now, was a Trevillian in complete control of a situation. The man had no genuine sinew, he was a fraud in every way.

“ ’Tis a fair offer, Richard,” said Willy Insell timidly.

“Very well,” Richard said, and got off the bed. “Dress yourself, Ceely, ye look ridiculous.”

Having scrambled any old how into his plush jade green outfit embroidered in peacock blue, Trevillian followed Richard into the back room and sat down at Annemarie’s desk. Hopeful that he would see a share in Richard’s windfall, Willy Insell followed; what Willy did not realize was that Richard had no intention of cashing any note of hand. All Richard wanted was to make the fellow sweat over the next few days at the prospect of losing £500.

The note of hand for £500 was made payable to Richard Morgan of Clifton, and signed “Jno. Trevillian.”

Richard studied it, tore it up. “Again, Ceely,” he said. “Sign it with all your wretched names, not half of them.”

At the top of the stairs the temptation was too much; Richard applied the toe of his shoe to Trevillian’s meager buttocks and sent him pitching down with a roll and a somersault, the noise of his body when it struck the flimsy board partition echoing like thunder. By the time he reached the tiny square of hall, Trevillian was yelling at the top of his lungs. No cool excise defrauder now! He tugged at the door and fell into the lane, weeping and howling, there to be succored by all the neighbors.

Richard shot the bolt and went up the stairs to Annemarie, but without Willy Insell, who scuttled down into his cellar.

She had not moved. Her eyes followed Richard as he crossed to the bed and picked up the hammer again.

“I ought to kill you,” he said tiredly.

She shrugged. “But you will not, Richard. It is not in you, even with the rum.” A smile tugged at her mouth. “Ah, but Ceely believed for a moment that you would. A surprise for that one, so confident, so full of himself, so fond of complicated schemes.”

He might have fastened upon this remark as betraying a more intimate knowledge of Ceely Trevillian than a chance encounter in a bed, but someone was pounding on the front door. “Now what?” he asked, and went downstairs. “Yes?” he called.

“Mr. Trevillian wants his watch back,” said a man’s voice.

“Tell Mr. Trevillian that he can have his watch back after I have had satisfaction!” Richard roared through the bolted door. “He wants his watch back,” he said as he re-entered the bedroom.

The watch was still lying on the window-sill, though the fob and purse had gone.

“Give it back,” said Annemarie suddenly. “Throw it out the window to him, please.”

“I’m damned if I will! He can have it back, but when I am good and ready.” He picked it up and examined it. “What a conceit! Steel. All the go, top of the trees, very dapper.” The watch went into his greatcoat pocket alongside the note of hand.

“I am out of here,” he said, feeling very sick.

She was off the bed in an instant, throwing on a dress, shoving her bare feet into shoes. “Richard, wait! Willy, Willy, come and help me!” she called.

Willy appeared as they reached the bottom of the stairs, face dismayed. “Here, Richard, what are ye going to do? Leave be!”

“If it is Ceely ye’re worried about, there is no need,” said Richard, stepping into the lane and inhaling fresh air deeply. “He ain’t here now. The performance stopped two minutes ago.”

He set off toward Brandon Hill, Annemarie on one side of him and Willy on the other, three vague outlines in the pitch darkness of a place not lit by any lamps.

“Richard, what will happen to me if you go?” Annemarie asked.

“I care not, madam. I did ye the honor of allowing Ceely to think ye were my wife, but I’d not have the likes of you to wife, and that is the truth. What will change for ye? Ye’re still in employment, and Ceely and I between us have seen to it that your reputation is pure.” He grinned mirthlessly. “Pure? Madam, ye’re a black-hearted whore.”

“What about me?” Willy asked, thinking of £500.

“I will be at the Cooper’s Arms. With the Excise case still coming up, we have to stick to each other.”

“Let us see ye over the hill,” Willy offered.

“No. Take madam back to her house. It is not safe.”

Thus they parted in the night, one man and the woman returning to Clifton Green Lane, the other man striding off along the Brandon Hill footpath, heedless of its dangers. Mrs. Mary Meredith stopped outside her front door, glad she had arrived, but wondering at the fearlessness of the walker, whose companions had left him. They had been talking in low voices and had seemed on excellent terms, but who they were she had no idea. Their faces were invisible on this late September evening.

Too empty to be sick, Richard stumbled home feeling the rum far more than he had in the heat of that confrontation. What a business! And what was he going to say to his father?

“But at least I can say that the fire is out,” he ended a letter to Mr. James Thistlethwaite the next day, which was the last day of September, 1784. “I do not know what came over me, Jem, save that the fellow I met inside myself I do not like-bitter, vengeful and cruel. Not only that, but I find myself in possession of the two articles I want least in the world-a steel watch and a note of hand for £500. The first I will return as soon as I can bear to set eyes upon Ceely Trevillian’s face and the second I will never present to his bank for payment. When I return the watch I will tear it up under his nose. And I curse the rum.

“Father sent a man over to Clifton for my stuff, so I have not set eyes on Annemarie, nor will I ever again. False from hair of head to hair of-I will not say it. What a fool I have been! And at six-and-thirty years of age. My father says I should have gone through an experience like Annemarie at one-and-twenty. The older the fool, the bigger the fool, is how he put it with his usual grace. Still, he is an excellent man.

“The business has made me understand much about myself I had no inkling of. What shames me is that I have betrayed my little son-thought not a scrap about him or his fate from the time I met Annemarie until today, when I woke to find her spell no longer upon me. Maybe a man has to have one fling of a sexual sort. But how have I offended God, that He should choose this time of loss and grief to try me in such a horrible way?

“Please write, Jem. I can understand that it might be very difficult to write in the aftermath of our news about William Henry, but we would all like to hear from you, and worry at your silence. Besides, I need your words of wisdom. In fact, I am in dire need of them.”

But if Mr. James Thistlethwaite intended to reply, his letter had not reached the Cooper’s Arms by the 8th of October, when two sober-looking men in drab brown suits walked into the tavern.

“Richard Morgan?” asked the one in the lead.

“Aye,” said Richard, emerging from behind the counter.

The man came close enough to him to put his right hand on Richard’s left shoulder. “Richard Morgan, I hereby arrest ye in the name of His Majesty George Rex on charges laid by Mr. John Trevillian Ceely Trevillian.”

“William Insell?” he asked then.

“Oh! Oh!” squeaked Willy, cowering in his corner.

Again the hand on the shoulder. “William Insell, I hereby arrest ye in the name of His Majesty George Rex on charges laid by Mr. John Trevillian Ceely Trevillian. Come with us, please, and do not try to make trouble. There are six more of us outside the door.”

Richard held out his hand to his father, standing thunderstruck, and opened his mouth to speak before he realized that he had no idea what to say.

The bailiff dug him sharply between the shoulder blades with the same hand he had lain upon Richard’s shoulder. “Not a word, Morgan, not a word.” He stared around the silent tavern. “If ye want Morgan and Insell, ye’ll find them in the Bristol Newgate.”