Free Morgan’s Run by Colleen McCullough Page B

William Henry.
    “My love,” she said to Richard as they lay in bed reassured by the snores from the front room and by the deep sound of William Henry’s sleeping respiration, “I fear that I will never conceive again.” There. It was out at last.
    “Have you talked to Cousin James-the-druggist?”
    “I do not need to, nor is it something he would know the answer to. It is the way God made me, I just know it.”
    He blinked, swallowed. “Well, we have William Henry.”
    “I know. And he is healthy, remarkably so. But, Richard”—she lifted herself up to sit—“it is on that head I wish to speak.”
    Richard sat up too, linked his arms around his knees. “Then speak, Peg.”
    “I do not want to move to Clifton.”
    He leaned sideways, struck the tinder and lit their candle so that he could see her face. Round, softly pretty and strained with anxiety, its big brown eyes looking hunted. “But for the sake of our only child, Peg, we must move to Clifton!”
    Her hands clenched, she suddenly resembled her son—whatever she felt, she would not find the right words to express. “It is for William Henry’s sake that I speak. I know that you have the money to buy a very nice cottage a little way up the hills, but I would be alone in it with William Henry and there would be no one to call on in an emergency.”
    “We can afford a servant, Peg, I have told you that.”
    “Yes, but a servant is not
family.
Here I have your parents to turn to—there are three of us to make sure that William Henry is all right, Richard.” She ground her good, hard-water-nourished teeth. “I am having nightmares. I see William Henry going down to the Avon and falling in because I was busy making bread and the servant busy fetching water from Jacob’s Well. I see it over and over again—over and over again!”
    The flame glittered off a sudden rush of tears; Richard put the candle on the clothes chest beside the bed and pulled his wife into his arms. “Peg, Peg. . . . These are dreams. I have them too, my love. But my nightmare is of William Henry crushed beneath the runners of a geehoe, or William Henry taken with the bloody flux, or William Henry falling down an open manhole. All things that cannot happen in Clifton. If it worries you so much, then we will have a nursemaid for him too.”
    “Your nightmares are all different,” she wept, “but mine is ever the same. Just William Henry leaping into the Avon at the gorge, William Henry terrified of something I cannot see.”
    He gentled her until she quietened and finally fell asleep in his arms. Then lay, the candle guttering, fighting his own grief. This was a family conspiracy, he knew it. His mother and father were getting at Peg, Mag because she adored William Henry and loved her niece like a daughter, Dick because—well, perhaps in his heart of hearts he had decided that once Richard was living in Clifton, those twelve shillings a day would cease; a man who is master of his own house has many additional expenses. All his instincts urged that he ignore these pressures and remove his wife and child to the clean air and verdant hills of Clifton, but what Dick Morgan deemed softness in Richard was in fact an ability to understand and commiserate with the actions of others, especially his family. If he insisted upon that cottage in Clifton—and he had found the right one, roomy, beautifully thatched, not too old, with a separate kitchen in its backyard to guard against fire and a garret for the servants—if he insisted upon that cottage in Clifton he knew now that Peg had made up her mind not to thrive in it. She had made up her mind to hate it. How odd, in a farmer’s daughter! Not for one moment had he dreamed that she would not espouse a more rural style of living as eagerly as he, a city man born and bred. His lips quivered, but in the privacy of the night marches Richard Morgan did not weep. He simply steeled himself to accept the fact that he would not be moving to