Morgan’s Run

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.