Morgan's Run

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 Brita

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 I

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 pe

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 i

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 I

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 Sava

In the morning the port officials and bailiffs discovered that the Fame and the Hibernia, one to north and one to south of the Sava

“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 A

“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 A