Morgan's Run Read online

  Food riots broke out among Bristol’s sailors, who were paid thirty shillings per month—provided that they were at sea. On shore, not a penny. The situation was so desperate that the Mayor managed to persuade ship owners to give their sailors fifteen shillings per month while on shore. In 1775 the number of ships paying the Mayor’s Dues had been 529: by 1783, that number had shrunk to 102. As most of these ships were Bristol based and lying idle along the quays and backs as well as downriver around Pill, several thousand sailors were a force to be reckoned with.

  In Liverpool, 10,000 of the 40,000 inhabitants were depending upon the slender charitable resources of that city, and in Bristol the Poor Rates had soared 150 per cent. The Corporation and the Merchant Venturers had no choice other than to start selling off property. New and stringent ordinances were brought in to deal with the ever-increasing flow of rural poor into Bristol, there to throw themselves upon the parishes and eat at least. Some of those caught defrauding the parishes were publicly pilloried and whipped before being banished; yet the flood continued to pour in faster than an Avon tide.

  “Did you see this, Dick?” asked Cousin James-the-druggist, calling in on his way home from his Corn Street shop. He waved a sheet of flimsy. “An advertisement from our felons in the Newgate, if you please! Announcing that they cannot afford to eat on their twopence a day—it is a disgrace, with bread at sixteen pence the quartern loaf.”

  “A penny a day if they are still awaiting trial,” said Dick.

  “I shall see Jenkins the baker and send them however much bread they need. And cheese and ox cheeks.”

  Dick grinned slyly. “What, Jim, no shillingses tipped into their outstretched hands?”

  Cousin James-the-druggist blushed. “Yes, ye were right, Dick. They did indeed drink it up.”

  “They always will drink it up. To send them bread is sensible. Just make sure that your philanthropic cronies do likewise.”

  “How is Richard now that he is not working? I never see him.”

  “Well enough,” said Richard’s father curtly. “The reason he is invisible is up there on his bed.”

  “Drunk?”

  “Oh, no. She stopped that after William Henry asked her outright why she guzzled rum.” He shrugged. “When William Henry is not here, she lies on the bed and stares at nothing.”

  “And when William Henry is here?”

  “She behaves herself.” Mine Host hawked and spat copiously into his sawdust. “Women! They are very queer fish, Jim.”

  A mental picture of his vaporish wife and their two bracket-faced spinster daughters swam before Cousin James-the-druggist’s eyes; he smiled wryly and nodded. “I have often wondered,” he said, “why the world should choose to liken a face to a bracket?”

  Dick roared with laughter. “Thinking of your girls, Jim?”

  “Girls no longer, alas. They are past their last prayers.” He got to his feet. “I am sorry to have missed Richard. I had thought to see him back here, as in the old days before Habitas.”

  “The old days are gone, do I need to tell ye that? Look around you! The place is empty, and the quays boil with those poor sailor bastards. How virtuous are our genuine registered parish poor, and how indignant! They cast rocks at their wretched brethren in the pillory rather than pity them.” Dick pounded his fist on the table. “Why did we ever go to war three thousand miles away? Why did we not simply hand the colonists their precious liberty? Wish them well of something so ridiculous, then go back to sleep, or go fight France? The country is ruined, and all for the sake of an idea. Not our idea at that.”

  “You have not answered me. If Richard has no job, where is he? And where is William Henry?”

  “They walk together, Jim. Always to Clifton. They go—up Pipe Lane—down Frog Lane—across the Brandon Hill footpath to Clifton Hill—chase the cows and sheep in the Clifton Pound—then come back along the Avon, where they throw stones into the water and laugh a lot.”

  “That is William Henry’s version, not Richard’s.”

  “Richard tells me nothing,” said Dick sourly.

  “You and he are different natured,” said Cousin James-the-druggist, going to the door. “That happens. What ye ought to be thanking God for, Dick, is that Richard and William Henry are like as two peas. It is”—he drew a breath—“quite beautiful.”

  On the following Sunday after Church and a bracing sermon from Cousin James-of-the-clergy, Richard and William Henry walked to the Hotwells end of Clifton.

  A decade or two ago Bristol’s own watering place had come near to rivaling Bath as a spa for high society; the guest houses of Dowry Place, Dowry Square and the Hotwells Road teemed with elegant visitors in expensive array, fabulously bewigged gentlemen in embroidered coats mincing along in high heels with bedizened ladies on their arms. There were balls and soirées, parties and routs, concerts and entertainments, even theater in the old Clifton playhouse on Wood Wells Lane. For a while an imitation Vauxhall Gardens had seen its share of masquerades, intrigues and scandals; novelists had situated their heroines at the Hotwells, and society doctors had extolled the medicinal properties of the waters.

  And then the fabric of its fascination fell apart, too slowly to call disintegration, yet too quickly to call a rot from within. Fashion had made it: fashion unmade it. The elegant visitors moved back to Bath, or on to Cheltenham, and the Bristol Hotwells became mostly an export industry of bottled spa water.

  Which suited Richard and William Henry very well, for it meant that a Sunday outing saw no more than a handful of other visitors on the horizon. Mag had packed them a cold dinner of broiled fowl, bread, butter, cheese and a few early apples her brother had sent from the farm at Bedminster; Richard carried it in a soldier’s pack athwart his shoulders, where it rested next to a flagon of small beer. They found a good spot beyond the square bulk of the Hotwells House, which stood on a rock shelf just above the high tide mark where the Avon Gorge terminated.

  It truly was a beautiful place, for St. Vincent’s Rocks and the crags of the gorge were richly colored in reds, plums, pinks, rusts, greys and off-whites, the river was the hue of blued steel, and a wealth of trees conspired to hide even the chimneys of Mr. Codrington’s brass foundry.

  “Can you swim, Dadda?” asked William Henry.

  “No. Which is why we are sitting here, not right on the edge of the river,” said Richard.

  William Henry eyed the spate thoughtfully; the tide was still flooding in, and the current curled and swirled visibly. “The water moves as if it were alive.”

  “You might say it is. And it is hungry, never forget that. It would suck you down and eat you whole here, ye’d never see the surface again. So no high jinks anywhere near it, is that understood?”

  “Yes, Dadda.”

  Dinner eaten, the pair of them stretched out on the sward with their coats rolled up to serve as pillows; Richard closed his eyes.

  “The Simp is gone,” said William Henry suddenly.

  His father opened one eye and grinned. “Can you never be still and quiet?” he asked.

  “Not often, and not now. The Simp is gone.”

  The message sank in. “You mean that he does not teach you? Well, ye’ve just begun your third year at Colston’s, so that was to be expected.”

  “No, Dadda, I mean that he is gone! Over the summer, while we were on holidays. Johnny says he was too sick to stay any longer. The Head asked the Bishop if he could go to one of the almshouses, but the Bishop said they were not for the sick, they were for the in—in—I do not know the word.”

  “Indigent?”

  “That is it, indigent! So they carried him in a sedan chair to St. Peter’s Hospital. Johnny says he cried dreadfully.”

  “So would I, were I to be carried to St. Peter’s,” Richard said with feeling. “Poor fellow. Why wait until now to tell me?”

  “I forgot,” said William Henry vaguely, rolled over twice, kicked his heels bruisingly against the grass, sighed deeply, flapped his hands, roll
ed over again, and began to pluck the detritus from around a promising stone.

  “Time to go, my son. I recognize the signs,” said Richard, getting to his feet, stuffing their coats into the soldier’s pack and shouldering it. “Shall we hike up Granby Hill and look at Mr. Goldney’s grotto?”

  “Oh yes please!” cried William Henry, scampering off.

  They looked, reflected Mr. George Parfrey from his perch on a shrub-shrouded ledge above them, as if they had not a care in the world. And they probably did not have a care in the world. The boy was a paying pupil; though they were not ostentatiously dressed, Mr. Parfrey had taken due note of good fine cloth, the absence of frayed or darned hems, the shine on their silver-buckled shoes and a certain air of independence.

  He knew everything about Morgan Tertius’s father, of course; Colston’s was a small place, its paying pupils dissected in the masters’ commonroom all the more minutely because in a starved existence there was so little else to talk about. A gunsmith in partnership with a Jew, and who had earned a small fortune out of the American war. Not often a boy as beautiful as the son appeared. Nor, when such a boy did appear, was he usually as unaffected and unspoiled as Morgan Tertius. However, the boy was not yet old enough to realize what capital he could make out of his beauty.

  That had to be the father with him. They were too alike not to be closely related and the odds favored paternity. A sketchbook lay upon Parfrey’s knee, on its top page a drawing he had taken of the pair of them resting beside the Avon. A good drawing. George Parfrey himself was a handsome man, and when younger, his looks had effectively scotched any hope of a career as a drawing master in some rich man’s house, seeing to the limited education of the rich man’s daughters. For no rich man in his right mind would hire a handsome young man to peer over an heiress’s shoulder and catch her fancy.

  Though his heart had not been touched, he was missing poor Ned Simpson more than he had counted upon; the others of their persuasion at Colston’s were paired too neatly to think of switching their affections. With Ned’s departure—he had died soon after going into St. Peter’s—no one needed him. Neither the Head, the Bishop nor the Reverend Mr. Prichard approved of Greek love, each of them having a suitable wife and other fish to fry. So the discreet liaisons which were conducted within the walls of Colston’s were fraught with a thousand tensions. Schoolmasters were a ha’penny a dozen, for who in choosing them cared a straw about whether they could teach or not? They were selected upon the recommendation of a board, a Church committee, an eminent cleric, an alderman, a Member of Parliament. None of whom would approve of homosexuality, no matter how discreet. Supply and demand. Sailors might drink themselves sodden, curse and brawl, ram every arse between Bristol and Wampoa, and still keep their reputations as good workmen intact; no ship owner bothered his head about booze, brawls or bums. The same could probably be said of lawyers or bookkeepers. Whereas schoolmasters were a ha’penny a dozen. No booze, no brawls, and—God forbid!—no bums. Especially in a charity school.

  Mr. Parfrey had been thinking about moving on, but understood that his hopes were faint. His world was too small, too enclosed. Colston’s would see the end of his career, after which the Bishop might graciously consent to accommodating him in an almshouse. He was turned five-and-forty, and Colston’s was it.

  So he put the sketchbook into his case and left the ledge above the Avon to its own devices, still thinking about Morgan Tertius and his father. Odd, that the father shared the son’s amazing good looks, yet did not have the power to turn heads.

  Now that William Henry was back in school, Richard had the leisure to pursue both a friendship and an intriguing proposition. Cousin James-the-druggist had been at him to do something better by his £3,000 than leave it in a bank for Quakers to make more from than he did—invest it in the three-per-cents, or at least invest it! urged the businesslike member of the Morgan clan.

  He had met Mr. Thomas Latimer when he and William Henry had called into the Habitas workshop. The seven years during which Senhor Habitas had made Brown Besses for Tower Arms had earned him enough to retire in style, but no one who loved his craft as much as Tomas Habitas did would voluntarily retire. Rather, he had advertised in Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal that he was now available to make sporting guns, and sufficient custom had arrived to keep him just pleasantly occupied.

  As Habitas explained after the introductions were performed, Mr. Latimer was a craftsman of a different kind: he made pumps.

  “Mostly hand pumps, but ships are converting to chain pumps, and I have an Admiralty contract for making the chains themselves,” he said cheerfully. “The hand pump or the pole pump were lucky to lift a ton of bilge water in a week, whereas the chain pump can lift a ton of bilge water in a literal minute. Not to mention that its basis is a simple wooden structure a ship’s carpenter can build. All he needs to complete it is the brass chain.”

  This was news to Richard, who found himself liking Mr. Thomas Latimer enormously. Not anybody’s picture of an engineer, he was short, plump, and always smiling—no gloomy Vulcan’s brow or blacksmith’s sinews about Mr. Latimer!

  “I have bought Wasborough’s brass foundry in Narrow Wine Street,” he explained, “I confess purely because it contains one of Wasborough’s three fire engines.”

  Of course Richard knew what a fire engine was, but once his son was back in school and the hours between seven and two were entirely his to fritter away, he had the time to discover a great deal more about this fascinating device.

  The fire engine had been invented by Newcomen early in the century; this was the model that pumped water out of the Kingswood mines and drove the water wheels in William Champion’s copper and brass works on the Avon adjacent to the coal. Then James Watt had invented the separate steam condenser, which improved the efficiency of Newcomen’s engine so much that Watt had been able to interest the Birmingham iron and steel magnate Matthew Bolton in his idea. Watt had gone into partnership with Bolton and the pair of them maintained a complete monopoly on the manufacture of fire engines through a series of court cases which effectively prevented anyone else’s trying to compete; no other inventor could manage to get around incorporating Watt’s heavily patented separate steam condenser into his design.

  Then Matthew Wasborough, a man in his middle twenties, had met another Bristolian youth named Pickard. Wasborough had come up with a system of pulleys and a fly wheel, Pickard had invented the crank, and together these three new concepts converted the reciprocal motion of a fire engine into circular motion. Instead of the driving force moving up and down, it now turned round and round.

  “Water-wheels rotate and can make machinery rotate,” said Mr. Latimer as he conducted the sweating Richard through a place filled with furnaces, hearths, lathes, presses, fumes and noise. “But that,” said Latimer, pointing, “can make machinery rotate all by itself.” Richard gazed at a puffing, chugging monstrosity which occupied pride of place amid a series of spinning lathes, all turning brass into useful objects for ships; iron and ships did not mix, thanks to the corrosive effects of salt water on iron.

  “May we go outside?” Richard shouted, ears ringing.

  “When Wasborough combined his pulleys and fly wheel with the Pickard crank, they virtually eliminated the water-wheel,” Latimer continued as soon as they emerged onto the bank of the Froom just downriver of the Weare where the washerwomen gathered to launder. “It is brilliant, for it means that a manufactory does not need to be sited on a river. If coal is cheap, as it is in Bristol, steam is better than water—provided the engine has circular motion.”

  “Then why have I never heard of Wasborough and Pickard?”

  “Because of James Watt, who sued them because their fire engine contained his patented separate steam condenser. Watt also accused Pickard of stealing his idea for a crank, which is utter nonsense. Watt’s solution to the problem of circular motion is rack-and-pinion—he calls it ‘sun and planet motion’—but it is devilish slow and compli
cated. The moment he saw the patent for Pickard’s crank, he knew it was the right answer, and could not bear being beaten.”

  “I had no idea engineering was so cutthroat. What happened?”

  “Oh, after a lot of heartaches like losing the contract for a Government flour mill in Deptford, Wasborough died of sheer despair—he was all of eight-and-twenty—and Pickard fled to Connecticut. But I have worked out how to get around Watt’s patented separate steam condenser, so I intend to produce the Wasborough-Pickard model before their patents run out and Watt can nip in to collar them.”

  “It is hard to believe that the most brilliant man in the world is a villain,” said Richard.

  “James Watt,” said Thomas Latimer, not smiling, “is a twisted, stringy little Scotch bastard of no mean ability but a great deal more conceit! If it exists, then Watt has to have invented it—to hear him, God is his apprentice and Heaven is a haggis. Pah!”

  Richard eyed the sluggish Froom and noted its cargo of flotsam. Ideal for snarling the buckets of a water-wheel, he thought. “I do see the advantage of steam over water,” he said. “We simply cannot continue to conduct industries requiring water power in the midst of cities. Fire engines with circular motion are the way of the future, Mr. Latimer.”

  “Call me Tom. Consider this, Richard! Wasborough dreamed of incorporating one of his fire engines into a ship, thus enabling it to steer a course as straight as an arrow without regard for seas, currents or tacking and standing to find a favorable wind. His steam device would rotate the blades of a modified water-wheel on either side of the ship, propelling it along. Wonderful!”

  “Wonderful indeed, Tom.”

  When he got home he repeated this sentiment to an audience consisting of his father and Cousin James-the-druggist.

  “Latimer is looking for investors,” he said then, “and I am thinking of contributing my three thousand pounds to the venture.”