Free Morgan’s Run by Colleen McCullough Page A

damn ye!”
    Peg and Mag began to cry; Richard shooed them upstairs with the bewildered William Henry to have their weep in private, then faced the apparently angry Mr. Thistlethwaite. “Jem, ye’re a fixture! Ye cannot leave!”
    “I am not a fixture, and I am leaving!”
    “Oh, sit down, man, sit down! And stop this prize-fighting posturing! We are not your adversaries,” said Richard. He looked stern. “Sit, Jem, and tell us why.”
    “Ahah!” said Mr. Thistlethwaite, doing as bidden. “So you can come out of that timid shell. Does my going mean so much?”
    “It is hideous,” said Richard. “Father, give me a beer and Jem some of Cave’s best.”
    Dick got up and did as he was told.
    “Now what’s amiss?” asked Richard.
    “I am fed up, Richard, that is all. I have done my dash in Bristol. Who is there left to lampoon? Old Bishop Newton? I’d not do that to someone with wit enough to call Methodism a bastardized form of popery. And what else can I do to the Corporation? What more stinging quip is there than to say that Sir Abraham Isaac Elton is all jaw and no law, John Vernon is all law and no jaw, and Rowles Scudamore neither law nor jaw? I have exposed Daniel Harson for the Dissenting minister he once was, and John Powell for the medical man on a slaver he once was. No, I have shot my Bristol bolt, and I have a mind to seek greener pastures. So I am off to London.”
    How to say tactfully that a shining light in Bristol might find itself obscured by the fog of a place twenty times larger than Bristol? “It is such a vast place,” Richard ventured.
    “I have friends there,” Mr. Thistlethwaite countered.
    “Ye’ll not change your mind?”
    “I will not.”
    “Then,” said Dick, reviving a little, “I drink to your good luck and good health, Jem.” He lifted his lip. “At least I will save the expense of quills and ink.”
    “You will write to tell us how you are?” asked Richard somewhat later, by which time Mr. Thistlethwaite’s truculence had changed to maudlin self-pity.
    “If you write to me.” The Bard of Bristol sniffled, wiped a tear away. “Oh, Richard, the world is a cruel place! And I have a mind to be cruel to it on a larger canvas than Bristol offers.”
    Later that evening Richard sat William Henry on his lap and turned the child to face him. At two and a half, he was strongly knit and tall, and had, his father fancied, the face of a stern angel. It was those eyes, of course, so large and unique—truly unique, for no one could remember ever seeing their ale-and-pepper mix—but also the planes of his bones and the perfection of his skin. No matter where he went, people turned to look and marvel at his beauty, and this was not the judgment of a doting parent. By anybody’s standard, William Henry was a ravishing child.
    “Mr. Thistlethwaite is going away,” Richard said to his son.
    “Away?”
    “Aye, to London. We will not see him again very often if at all, William Henry.”
    The eyes did not fill with tears, but they changed in a way Richard had learned meant inward grief, secret and sensitive. “He does not like us anymore, Dadda?”
    “He likes us very well. But he needs more room than he can find in Bristol, and that has nothing to do with us.”
    Listening to them, Peg plucked at the bars of her own cage, a structure as hidden as whatever went on inside William Henry’s mind. After that one vindictive reaction against Richard’s right to touch her, she had disciplined herself into conjugal obedience, and if Richard noticed that her response to his lovemaking was more mechanical than of yore, he had not commented. It was not that she loved him any less; her emotional withdrawal was founded in her guilt. Her barrenness. Her womb was shriveled and empty, incapable of carrying more than her menses, and here she was married to a man who loved his children almost too much. Who needed a tribe of children so that he could not heap all his eggs into a basket named