Morgan’s Run

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