Morgan's Run

“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 fu

“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 ma

In no need of rum or company, Richard continued with his work. The huge room had so many corners, nooks and cra

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 ru

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.