Morgan's Run

“What is his name?”

“I have no idea. Flippety O’Flappety, it may as well be. I call him Paddy, and give him a good lunch of bread and vegetables at the sawpit. Cold meat too. A man ca

Suddenly Kitty laughed and clapped her hands. “Oh, Richard, do stop talking about your sawpits! Stephen has big news.”

Richard stared. “Do you? Tell us!”

“King summoned me this morning and informed me that I am to be the official pilot for Norfolk Island. I think he and Major Ross must have had a talk about the number of longboats, cutters and jollyboats which have been wrecked coming across the reef against orders and signals not to attempt to land. Or even defying advice not to return to their ships from the beach. So from now on I and I alone have the ordering of it, no matter what any ship’s master might have to say on the subject. My word is law—and that includes a ship in the roads—when she may bear in, or go to Cascade, or Ball Bay. I am pilot! Had I been pilot when Sirius was here, she would never have gone on the reef.”

“Stephen, that is truly splendid!” cried Kitty, eyes shining.

Richard wrung his hand. “That is not all, is it?”

“There is more, I admit.” He looked lit from within, a fine man not many years past thirty with a whole new world spread before him. “I am in the Royal Navy with a temporary rank of midshipman, but as soon as Commander King can get permission from His Excellency I am to be commissioned a lieutenant—for rank, probably to some ship permanently in Portsmouth harbor. I will be staying here, however, so do not panic. When a genuine lieutenancy comes up, then I am afraid I will have to go. Not an immediate prospect. Meanwhile I am pilot, shortly ye’ll have to address me as Lieutenant Donovan, and in my spare time I have been placed in charge of men clearing forest on Mount George, so I am out of that wretched stone quarry.”

“This calls for a small celebration,” said Richard, rising to dig behind a bookshelf. Out came a bottle. “’Tis my own rum—Morgan’s special blend. Major Ross gave me a good supply of it when he left, but I have not tasted it. So you and I will see what the local rum is like after it has aged a while in a cask with some decent Bristol spirits to help it along.”

“Here is to you, Richard.” Stephen lifted his mug and sipped, expecting to flinch or at least grimace. Surprise spread over his face, he took a full mouth of it. “Richard, not bad at all!” The mug was tipped in Kitty’s direction. “And here is to Kitty and the baby, whose godfather I demand to be. May she be a girl and may ye call her Kate.”

“Why Kate?” asked Kitty.

“Because in this part of the world ’tis better to be a shrew than a mouse.” Stephen gri

“What if it is a boy?” the little mother enquired.

Richard answered. “My first boy will be William Henry, and he will always be called all of it. William Henry.”

“William Henry. . . . I like it,” said Kitty, pleased.

Head bent over his mug, Stephen concealed a sigh. So she did not know. Would she ever know? Richard, tell her! Admit her as an equal, I beg you!

“I have news too, Lieutenant—and may ye be an Admiral of the Blue one day,” Richard a

The twenty gold coins were slipped into Stephen’s palm; he raised his brows, then put them into the pockets of his canvas jacket. When Kitty was told that she could look, she found them laughing, for what reason she did not know.

1792 came in dry, though there had been the usual rain around Christmas, luckily just after reaping had ended. Kitty grew heavier, but she was not one of those women who looked as if they might burst; she carried small and could keep busy without too much extra effort.

“You know, Richard, it truly ought to be you having this poor baby!” she said to him, exasperated. “You fuss and cluck so!”

“I do think that ye ought to go into Arthur’s Vale and stay with Olivia Lucas,” he said anxiously. “Morgan’s Run is isolated.”

“I am not going to stay with Olivia Lucas!”

“What if the baby comes earlier than ye expect?”

“Richard, I have had a long talk with Olivia—I know all about it! Believe me, I will have plenty of time to let Joey know and let you know and let Olivia know. This is a first baby. They do not come in a hurry,” she said firmly.

“You are sure?”

“Truly,” she said in the voice of a dying martyr, walked to a chair lithely, sat down without making a difficulty of it, and looked at him very seriously. “I have some questions to ask you, Richard, and I insist upon some answers,” she said.

An air of authority surrounded her; fascinated, Richard could not take his eyes off her. “Then ask,” he said, sitting down where his face was on full display to her. “Go ahead, ask.”

“Richard, shortly I am to have your child, but I know next to nothing about your life. What little I know is thanks to Lizzie Lock. What she told me amounts to a pinpoint, and I think I am entitled to know more than Lizzie Lock. Tell me about the daughter who would be my age now.”

“Her name was Mary, and she is buried next to her mother in the burying ground of St. James’s, Bristol. She died of the smallpox when she was three. One reason why I would rather my children grew up here. The worst we have to worry about is dysentery.”

“Did you have other children?”

“A son, William Henry. He drowned.”

Her face crumpled. “Oh, Richard!”

“Do not grieve, Kitty. It was all a very long time ago, and in a different country. My children will not grow up with the same sort of risks.”

“There are risks here, and drowning is the most common one.”

“Believe me, the way my son drowned could not happen here. His was a death happens in cities, not on small islands where we all know each other. There are bad folk here and we do not mix with them, but when a school is organized, we parents will know a great deal more about the schoolmasters than Bristol parents do. William Henry died because of a schoolmaster.” Head to one side, he looked at her quizzically. “Any more questions?”

“How did your Bristol wife die?”

“Of an apoplexy, luckily before William Henry went. She did not suffer at all.”

“Oh, Richard!”

“There is no need to be sad, my love. You are why it happened, I am sure of it. In that I was not meant to know the joy of a real family in Bristol, where I never knew the joy of living in my own house. All I ask from you is that ye keep a small corner of your heart for me as the father of your children. That and the children will be enough.”

Her mouth parted, she almost said that he had more than a small corner of her heart, but she closed it with the words unspoken. To say them would be a promise, a commitment that she was not sure she would be able to honor. She liked him enormously, and, liking him, did not think it decent to imply that he was more than he truly was. No music in her heart, no wings on her soul. Did he give her those, it might be different. Did he give her those, she would be able to call him “my love.”