Morgan's Run Read online

  “Can I not appeal in a court?” Richard asked.

  “No. Your appeal takes the form of a letter begging the King’s mercy. I will draft it as soon as I return to London.”

  “Have some port, Richard,” said Cousin James-the-druggist.

  “I have had naught to eat today, so I dare not.”

  The door opened and a woman brought in a tray bearing bread, butter, grilled sausages, parsnips, cabbage and a tankard. She put it down without any expression on her face, bobbed a curtsey to the gentlemen, and departed.

  “Eat, Richard. The head gaoler told me that supper has been served already in the gaol, so I asked for food.”

  “Thank you, Cousin James, truly thank you,” said Richard with feeling, and dug in. But the first piece of sausage on his knife’s point was subjected to a long sniff before being gingerly tasted; satisfied, Richard chewed with gusto and carved off another slice. “Sausages,” he said, his mouth full, “are usually made from rotten meat when they are served to felons.”

  His meal finished, Richard did sip at the glass of port, then grimaced. “It is so long since I have had sweet things that I seem to have lost my appetite for them. We get no butter with our bread, let alone jam.”

  “Oh, Richard!” chorused the Cousins James.

  “Do not feel sorry for me. My life is not over because I must spend the next seven years of it under some form or other of imprisonment,” said Richard, rising to his feet. “I am six-and-thirty and I will be six months short of four-and-forty when my sentence is done. The men of our family are long-lived, and I intend to keep my health and my strength. Those five hundred pounds from the Excise Office are mine no matter what happens, and I will write to the lackadaisical Mr. Benjamin Fisher directing that he pay them to you, Cousin James-the-druggist. Take what I have cost ye out of them, and use the rest to keep me supplied with dripstones, rags, clothes and shoes. With some to the Reverend James for books, including those he has already given me. I am not idle here, and my labor means that I am fed. But on Sundays I read. A blessing.”

  “Remember, Richard, that we love you dearly,” said Cousin James-the-druggist, hugging and kissing him.

  “And we pray for you,” said Cousin James-of-the-clergy.

  Willy Insell was the only prisoner acquitted at the assizes held in Gloucester during that March of 1785. Six were sentenced to be hanged: Maisie Harding for receiving stolen goods, Betty Mason for stealing fifteen guineas, Sam Day for stealing two pounds of weaving yarn, Bill Whiting for stealing a sheep, Isaac Rogers for highway robbery, and Joey Long for stealing a silver watch. The rest, some ten in all, were sentenced to seven years’ transportation to Africa, wherein His Britannic Majesty possessed no formal colony. Richard was well aware that had the Cousins James not testified as to his character, he too would have gotten the rope; though Bristol was far away, two of its leading citizens could not be quite ignored.

  More importantly, how were they all going to fit into this tiny place? Within a week the answer was manifest: nine of the prisoners died of a malignant quinsy in the throat, as did the remaining children and ten debtors on the Bridewell side.

  The situation in England’s prisons was absolutely desperate, which had not prevented the Gloucester judges from handing down their drastic sentences.

  Between 1782 and 1784 three attempts had been made to deliver felons to America. The Swift was turned away on her first voyage, though some of her transportees escaped, assisted to do so by the Americans. On her second voyage in August of 1783 she took 143 prisoners on board and sailed from the Thames for Nova Scotia. But she got no farther than Sussex, where her human cargo mutinied and beached the ship near Rye. After which they scattered to the four winds. Only 39 were recaptured; of those, six were hanged and the rest sentenced to transportation to America for life. Just as if transportation to America were still an option, so slowly did the mills of government grind, not to mention the judicial mills.

  In March of 1784 a third attempt to unload transportees in America was tried. This time the ship was the Mercury and the destination was Georgia (which, along with the other twelve newly united states, had already served stern notice to England that it would not, repeat, would not accept any transported felons). The Mercury took 179 men, women and children felons aboard and sailed from London. The mutiny occurred off the coast of Devon and the Mercury fetched up near Torbay. Some were still on board when recaptured, most had fled; 108 all told were apprehended, a few having ranged as far afield as Bristol. Though many of them were sentenced to hang, only two actually were. The political climate was shifting.

  The Recovery in January of 1785 represented the last attempt of a disorganized nature to relieve gaol overcrowding; she took a cargo of felons to the equatorial wetlands of Africa and dumped them ashore without guards, supervision or much by way of necessities to survive. They died hideously, and the African experiment was never repeated. Clearly future transportees would have to be cared for in ways less provocative of public scandal. Between the prison reformers John Howard and Jeremy Bentham, the Quaker agitators against slavery and African expansion in general, and the two new names of Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce looming on the horizon, Mr. William Pitt the Younger’s fledgling government deemed it wise to provide no ammunition for social crusaders of any kind. Especially since Bentham and Wilberforce were important men in Whig Westminster. The extra taxes economic necessity had made unavoidable were odious enough. Mr. William Pitt the Younger owned one quality in common with a convicted felon named Richard Morgan: he intended to survive for many years to come. And in the meantime, Jeremy Bentham was allowed to tinker with the plans for the new Gloucester Gaol, while Lord Sydney of the Home Department was instructed to find somewhere—anywhere!—to dump England’s huge surplus of convicts.

  In the as yet unmodified Gloucester Gaol disease and proximity worked their wills.

  Weeping Willy Insell, still weeping, was discharged, a free man, on the 5th of April. On the same day Mr. James Hyde the attorney forwarded the Humble Petition of Richard Morgan to Lord Sydney, together with a letter from Mr. John Fisher, Commander of the Bristol Excise Office. Lord Sydney’s indefatigable and highly efficient secretary, Mr. Evan Nepean, forwarded it on the 15th of April to the chambers of Sir James Eyre in Bedford Row; it would be up to him, the presiding judge in Morgan’s case, to review that case and advise Lord Sydney as to whether the King’s Mercy might or might not be extended to Richard Morgan. All very prompt, given that the trial had taken place on the 23rd of March. But there in Bedford Row the Humble Petition of Richard Morgan moldered; Mr. Baron Sir James Eyre was so busy that he had not the time to deal with any petitions, humble or otherwise.

  In late July a letter came from Mr. Jem Thistlethwaite, who had disappeared from his lodgings and the London scene at much the same date as William Henry had vanished. Richard took it from Old Mother Hubbard with a sinking sensation in his chest; he would now have to open up that wound and air it. From the time that he had entered the Bristol Newgate it had been buried beneath conscious thought. Though what he had not realized was that his blotting out of William Henry had generated his determination to survive, even spurred him to perform the rituals he had established for himself, the rituals of purification which set him apart from all his fellows and caused them to regard him as somewhere between untouchable and mad. Why survive? To get through these seven years in a fit state to resume his search for William Henry, buried deep in his mind.

  “Richard, I have just received a letter from your father, and I am utterly overset by his awful news. Getting through the last few gallons of my pipe of rum apparently caused me to think I had written to inform you of my intended flight, but that letter was either not written or went astray. I have been absent abroad since June of last year—Italy beckoned, I went running into her glorious embrace. It is our combined luck that upon my return a bare week ago, I was able to engage my old lodgings again, and so your father’s pages reached me.

&
nbsp; “I have always known that your life would not go as you thought it would—do you remember? You said, ‘I was born in Bristol and I will die in Bristol.’ Even as you said it, William Henry on your knee, I understood that it would not turn out so. I feared for you. And I, who am quite incapable of love, loved you then as I love you now. I just do not know the how or why, save that I see something in you that you do not realize is there.

  “Of William Henry I will say no more than that you will never find him. He was not meant for this earth, but wherever he is, Richard, he is happy and at peace. The truly good have no business here, for they have nothing to learn. And even atheists like me can believe that sometimes these things happen because, did they not, the future would hold worse. Be glad for William Henry.”

  Richard put the letter down blindly, unable to see for the tears he had never been able to shed for William Henry. The other prisoners in the felons’ common-room, including Lizzie Lock, made no attempt to approach him as he sat on his box and wept. How strange that it should be Jem Thistlethwaite who broke down the dam and let the torrent of grief flow free at last. But he was not right. William Henry would come back one day, he was not gone from this world forever.

  He took up the letter again at dinner time the following day, having spoken to no one, and no one having spoken to him.

  “I have carved a little niche for myself among the new breed of Whigs the presence of a young leader like Pitt has permitted.

  Oligarchy, though it must ever rule in the Lords, has quit the Commons. Men of ideas abound, and Pitt, could he only find the money, would indulge them all.

  “Getting to you yourself, the prospect of transportation is nonexistent. The African experiment was such a disaster that no one at Westminster has the courage—or the stupidity, miraculously enough—to revive it in any form. India has been suggested, and discarded the way a man would divest himself of a shirt made of snakes. Our outposts there are perilous and circumscribed. Though these are not the reasons behind the decision. They are firmly based in the opposition of the East India Company, which wants no felons jeopardizing its activities in Bengal and Cathay. The West Indies want none but negroes for indenture or slavery, and the English grip on places like Nova Scotia and Newfoundland does not allow transportation. The French hover. As do the Spanish in the south.

  “So it would seem that you will serve out your time in Gloucester. Rest assured, however, that as soon as I hear anything, I will pass it on to you. Dick says that you have organized yourself with what Cousin James-the-druggist calls a ‘cool kind of passion.’ ”

  His answer had to wait until Sunday, when he took possession of the end of the table Old Mother Hubbard had installed in the felons’ common-room just before the assizes and not removed after them, on the theory that it gave some felons an extra storey to perch upon when the place was overcrowded. As if it knew times of undercrowding.

  A rash of visitors had broken out, envoys of a friend of Mr. Pitt’s named Jeremy Bentham, at present touring Russia with the intention of writing a legal code for the Empress Catherine, but also the author of a treatise on the virtues and vices of setting felons to hard labor on public works, and exponent of a new kind of prison-in-the-round. His envoys popped in and out of the gaol inspecting it minutely and shaking their heads gloomily, gazing at the extensions its inmates were erecting and muttering about its all having to be pulled down again. Square! Why did the minds of men think square when round had no corners?

  “I would rather be in Italy than in Gloucester Gaol, Jem, of that I can assure you.

  “Of Ceely Trevillian and the affair at the distillery I can say no more than that I had the misfortune to run up against a man of birth and brain with no better outlet for his talents than intrigue, conspiracy and manipulation. He belongs on the stage, where he would have out-acted Kemp, Mrs. Siddons and Garrick combined. My only consolation is that when Cave and Thorne have arrived at a settlement with the Excise Office, I will be able to pay my debts and ensure that the Cousins James are not out of pocket when they buy me more things. I am never without a new book, though reading some of them is painful, as Clifton and the Hotwells keep cropping up. Two places I would rather not be reminded of, even by an Evelina or a Humphry Clinker. Not so much because of William Henry or Ceely as because of Annemarie Latour, with whom I sinned grievously. I can see the exasperation at my prudishness on your ugly face from here, but you were not there, nor could you have loved the man I became with her. Pleasure meant too much. Can you understand that? And if you cannot, how can I make you? I was a bull, a stallion. I rutted, I did not make love. And I loathed the object of my animality, who was an animal too.

  “In Gloucester Gaol we are all in together, men and women—and children. Though it is a place of more fucking than suckling. The babies usually die, poor little creatures. And their poor mothers, who constantly carry and bear for nothing. At first the presence of the women appalled me, but as time has gone on I have come to realize that they make Gloucester Gaol endurable. Without them, we would be a collection of men brutalized beyond recognition.

  “My own woman is Lizzie Lock, who has been here since the beginning of 1783 for stealing hats. When she sees one she fancies, she pinches it. Ours is a platonic friendship, we neither make love nor rut. I protect her from other men and she protects my box of belongings whilst I am laboring. Jem, if solvency permits it, would you find a grand hat for Lizzie? Red, or red and black, preferably with feathers. It would cast her into ecstasies.

  “I must go. Even my elevated status in here does not guarantee tenure of so much table for a whole Sunday afternoon. That is the oddest part about it, Jem. For some reason (possibly that I am deemed mad) I notice that I am, for want of a better word, respected. Write to me sometimes, please.”

  * * *

  Cousin James-the-druggist came to see Richard in August, loaded with a new dripstone, more rags and clothes, medicines, books.

  “But keep your present dripstone going, Richard, for I see no evidence that it is tainting. The more spare stones ye have, the better, and I have brought ye a good stout sack for surplus items. The Gloucester water is purer by far than any Bristol can produce, even from the Bishop’s feather off Jacob’s Well.” He was very ill at ease, talking for the sake of talking, and finding it very hard to meet Richard’s eyes.

  “There was no real reason to make this journey in such hot weather, Cousin James,” said Richard gently. “Tell me the bad news.”

  “We have finally heard from Mr. Hyde in Chancery Lane. Sir James Eyre got around to your petition for the King’s Mercy on the ninth of last month, or at least that is the date on his letter to Lord Sydney. He denied ye mercy, Richard, and most emphatically. There is no doubt in his mind that ye conspired with that woman to rob Ceely Trevillian. Even though she was never found.”

  “The damning witness who was not there,” said Richard under his breath. “Not there, but believed.”

  “So that is it, my poor dear fellow. We have exhausted all our avenues. Your reward is safe, however. It cannot be garnished because it is not related to the crime for which ye were convicted. I know ye’ve a few guineas, but when next I come I will bring ye a new box with a hollow long side to it—tops and bottoms are more likely to be examined than sides, I am told. It will contain gold coins packed in lint so that, no matter how hard the box is shaken or rapped, they will make no noise. The lint also sounds solid.”

  Richard took both his hands and held them strongly. “I know I keep saying it, but I cannot thank you enough, Cousin James. What would I have become without you?”

  “A bloody sight dirtier, Richard my love,” said Lizzie Lock after Cousin James-the-druggist had gone. “ ’Tis the apothecary gives ye your drips, soaps, oil of tar and all the rest of your popish ceremonials. Ye remind me of a priest saying Mass.”

  “Aye, he is a fussy bugger,” said Bill Whiting, smiling. “It ain’t necessary, Richard my love—look at the rest of us.”

  “Talki
ng of buggery, Bill, I saw you sneaking around my sheep the other day,” said Betty Mason, who kept a flock for Old Mother Hubbard. “Leave them alone.”

  “What chance do I have to bugger anybody except Jimmy and Richard my love? And they will not be in it. I hear, by the by, that all our lugging of rocks is to go for naught—Old Mother Hubbard says there is talk of a new style for the new prison.”

  “I hear that too,” said Richard, sopping up the last of his soup with a piece of stale bread.

  Jimmy Price sighed. “We are like whosit thingummabob who kept on having to roll the boulder up the hill but it always came down again. Christ, it would be nice to work for some purpose.” He glanced across to where Ike Rogers was hunched at the far end of the table the old brigade defended against all presumptuous comers. “Ike, ye have to eat. Otherwise Richard my love will have your soup too, the hungry bugger. I ain’t noticed the other five gallows birds off their food, nor worried much either. Eat, Ike, eat! Ye will not hang, I swear it.”

  Ike vouchsafed no reply; the blustering bully was no more. Highwaymen were considered the aristocrats of criminals, but Ike could not seem to come to terms with his fate or adopt the die-hard attitude of the other five in similar case.

  Richard went to sit on the bench beside him and put an arm about his shoulders. “Eat, Ike,” he said cheerfully.

  “I am not hungry.”

  “Jimmy is right. Ye will not go to the gallows. It is over two years since anybody hanged at Gloucester, though many have been sentenced to it. Old Mother Hubbard needs us to work to get his thirty pence a week for each of us. If we do not work, he gets but fourteen pence.”