Morgan's Run

by Colleen McCullough

  On the second night and in the coldest marches of the small hours William Henry appeared barefoot in his nightshirt and came to sit with Richard. They had kept the room as cold as so many candles and lamps allowed, so the still figure on the bed looked as serene and beautiful as she had at the moment the laying out was finished. Richard rose and went to fetch a thick blanket and two pairs of stockings, draped the one about his son’s body and put the others on his feet.

  “She looks so happy,” said William Henry, wiping at his tears.

  “She was very happy at the instant she died,” Richard said, throat controlled, eyes dry. “She smiled, William Henry.”

  “Then I must try to be happy for her, Dadda, must I not?”

  “Yes, my son. There is nothing to fear in such an unexpected, happy death. Mama has gone to Heaven.”

  “I miss her, Dadda!”

  “So do I. That is natural. She has always been here. Now we have to get used to living without her, and that will be hard. But never forget that she looks happy. As if nothing nasty has touched her. Because nothing nasty has, William Henry.”

  “And I still have you, Dadda.” The blanket-shrouded form edged close; William Henry put his curly head on his father’s arm and hiccoughed. “I still have you. I am not a norphan.”

  In the morning Cousin James-of-the-clergy interred Margaret Morgan, born in 1750, dearly beloved wife of Richard Morgan and mother of William Henry, next to her daughter, Mary. As it was the end of January, there were no flowers, only evergreens. Richard did not weep, and William Henry seemed to have cried himself into acceptance. Only Mag sobbed, as much for her niece as for her daughter-in-law. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. That is life.

  The death of his mother drew William Henry more tightly to his father, but his father was strapped with a job he worked at six days a week from dawn to dusk, which left only Sunday and a few snatched bedtime minutes for William Henry. The distillery was no gunsmithy, and Thomas Cave no Tomas Habitas. Special terms of employment were for William Thorne alone, who would disappear with impunity for sometimes hours on end, then return looking smug. Richard noticed that whenever Thorne did absent himself, Thomas Cave would be there waiting anxiously for his return—yet not in anger. Rather, in an eager apprehension. Puzzling. Had Richard been less preoccupied with his private worries and sadnesses, he would undoubtedly have seen more and come to some conclusions, but work was a solace only if he applied himself to it wholly.

  The distillery saw an occasional visitor, the chief of whom was the Excise Man. William Thorne always showed the inspector around personally, and disapproved of observers.

  The other frequent caller apparently had no business being in the distillery beyond friendship with Thorne; an odd relationship between two men who could surely have little in common. John Trevillian Ceely Trevillian was rich, foppish, and monumentally silly. His wigs were white as snow with starch powder and he tied them with naught save black velvet; his vacuous countenance was painted and patched; he wore embroidered velvet coats and lavish waistcoats; his heels were so high that he tittuped along with the aid of a clouded amber cane; and he exuded a perfume so strong it overpowered even the smell of rum.

  Naturally Thorne performed no introductions on the occasion of Mr. Trevillian’s first visit after Richard started at Cave’s, but Ceely, as Thorne called him, paused in front of the new worker and eyed him in some appreciation. Apparently he enjoyed bare and sinewy forearms, thought Richard sourly when Mr. Trevillian, having looked his fill, tripped off in Thorne’s wake. He knew well enough who John Trevillian Ceely Trevillian was: the elder son of Mr. and Mrs. Maurice Trevillian of Park Street, the same wealthy couple who had been robbed by a highwayman outside their own front door. A Cornish family with large interests in Bristol commerce, and related by blood to a very ancient clan of London merchants named Ceely who had been prominent since the twelfth century. This Ceely, all of Bristol knew, was a bachelor of questionable sexual tastes, an idle and brainless fribble completely eclipsed by his younger brother.

  Several further visits by Mr. Trevillian caused Richard to doubt Bristol’s judgment; that silly, whinnying, vapid manner of his concealed a brain both shrewd and intelligent. He knew a great deal about distilling, and a great deal about business. The ruse of idiocy was extremely effective: as Mr. Trevillian stood around the Exchange looking a simpleton, those in his vicinity did not bother to lower their voices when they talked of business deals in the making. And perhaps in consequence lost out to Mr. Trevillian.

  To round the matter of Mr. Ceely Trevillian off, in April he appeared arm-in-arm with Mr. Thomas Cave. Ah! thought Richard. Ceely has a financial interest in this place—must have, to see old Tom Cave smarm and grovel so. Yet Ceely was not on the books, else Dick would have mentioned the fact; he was a sleeping partner who provided nothing beyond capital when it was needed, and thereby paid no taxes.

  In himself, Richard was managing, though he chafed at the tiny amount of time he had to spend with William Henry. Sundays were infinitely precious. Occasionally Richard varied the route of their walk so that William Henry would get to know every part of Bristol, but their favorite destination remained Clifton, where the cottage Richard had almost bought mocked him. Of his own choice he might have gone elsewhere than Clifton, but William Henry adored the place.

  “Mr. Parfrey told us a new one yesterday,” said William Henry, skipping along.

  Stifling a sigh, Richard resigned himself to another paean about this paragon of a teacher who managed to turn boring old Latin into a game of puns and mnemonics; William Henry’s Latin was far more advanced than Richard’s had been at the same age.

  “What?” he asked dutifully of his son.

  “Caesar adsum iam forte—Caesar had some jam for tea.”

  “And can you translate it?”

  “ ‘As it so happened, and quite by chance, Caesar was at hand.’ ”

  “Very good! He is a wit, your Mr. Parfrey.”

  “Yes, he is very funny, Dadda. He makes us laugh so much that the Head and Mr. Prichard disapprove. I do not think they really like it that Mr. Parfrey never uses the cane either.”

  “I am surprised Mr. Parfrey has survived at Colston’s,” said Richard dryly.

  “We are all so good at our Latin,” William Henry explained. “We have to be! Otherwise we would get Mr. Parfrey into trouble with the Head. Oh, Dadda, I do like him! He smiles a lot.”

  “In which case, William Henry, ye’re very lucky.”

  At the end of May all the pieces of the puzzle at Cave’s distillery fell into place.

  William Thorne had done one of his disappearing tricks and the acolytes who danced attendance on the stills had also disappeared, the latter rather in the manner of mice after cheese, twitching with apprehension but determined to consume the prize. In the case of Mr. Cave’s employees the prize was rum. Not the good rum which went into holding casks and would be blended by none save Mr. Cave himself, but the feint-ridden second distillate; no one would notice if a little were siphoned off the second receiver tub.

  In no need of rum or company, Richard continued with his work. The huge room had so many corners, nooks and crannies that it was difficult to assign it a shape, and this was particularly true of its back regions, into which Richard was expressly forbidden entry. Nor would he have entered, had he not heard the unmistakable hiss of liquid escaping under pressure. A careful check of the rows of paired stills and their confusing network of pipes revealed nothing, but as he approached the last pair in the back row he became convinced that the noise was coming from somewhere behind. So he hauled himself up onto the uncomfortably warm bricks of the furnace and squeezed between the left and right still, ducking his head to avoid the receiver tubs.

  It was then that he noticed some pipes which ought not to have been there, and stiffened. For a full minute he stood without moving and let his eyes accustom themselves to the gloom, then he looked upward and found a number of pipes hidden among f
estoons of spider-web and what might have passed at a casual glance for hempen lagging come adrift. Each of these pipes came off a receiver tub which held the final distillate, not at its bottom but well up its side—at a point, in fact, which would allow a runoff only if the tub were full to its tapping level. No valve was attached to each of these unwarranted pipes; once the contents of a tub reached the level of the pipe, the liquid ran off down it into the darkness at the back of the chamber.

  There, hidden behind a false section of wall, were two rows of 50-gallon hogsheads. Lips pursed in a silent whistle, Richard calculated how much excise-free spirit was flowing off each and every day—no wonder that William Thorne always drained the final distillate from its receiver tub! Only a skilled distiller with experience elsewhere would have wondered at the slowness of Mr. Cave’s apparatus, and there were no such men at 137 Redcliff Street. Except for William Thorne. And Thomas Cave. Was he in it too?

  As he jumped back onto the top of the furnace Richard found the source of the hiss—the right-hand still was spraying a thin jet of fluid backward from a pinhole in its worn copper skin. As he crouched to plug it, Thorne walked in.

  “Here! What are ye doing up there?” he demanded, face ugly.

  “My job of work,” said Richard tranquilly. “A temporary one, I fear. I think ye’ll have to stand this pair down very soon.”

  “Fucken shit! I keep telling old Tom to invest some of his profits in new stills, but he always has a reason not to.” Thorne stalked away, mollified, roaring for his acolytes, who had not been quick enough; the cat had come back sooner than anticipated.

  When he returned to the Cooper’s Arms that evening Richard did not mention his discovery to Dick. Time enough when he knew more—knew, for instance, how many were involved in this huge excise fraud. Thorne, of course. Cave, possibly. And what about John Trevillian Ceely Trevillian? Why should a well-born idler like Ceely haunt a location far from the pastures where such ornamental ponies usually grazed?

  When do they clear out the illicit liquor? Richard wondered. During the night, certainly, and probably on a Sunday night. The streets are deserted even of sailors and press gangs.

  Getting out of the Cooper’s Arms on the next Sunday night was easy; he slept alone, Dick and Mag were snoring, and William Henry never roused, even in a thunderstorm. The moon was full and the sky cloudless—what good luck! As he reached the vicinity of 137 Redcliff Street, a lone bell was tolling midnight. He sought the dark shelter of a crane belonging to the pipe maker across the court and settled patiently to wait.

  Two hours. They certainly cut it fine, he thought; two more hours would see the commencement of a leisurely dawn. And there were three of them: Thorne, Cave and Ceely Trevillian. Though it was difficult to recognize the last man; the mincing Bartholomew Baby had been replaced by a slim, decisively energetic man clad in black, with raggedly cropped short hair and boots on his feet.

  Cave arrived on his elderly gelding, Thorne and Ceely drove up in a sledge drawn by a pair of massive horses, and the three of them proceeded to unload four dozen obviously empty hogshead casks from the geehoe. Cave unlocked a disused door into the back part of his distilling chamber and the barrels disappeared inside. A minute later Thorne was back, grunting as he rolled a full barrel; Cave bustled to the sledge and let down a ramp at its rear. It took Thorne and Trevillian combined to push each hogshead up the ramp, where they flipped it from its side onto one end with a deftness born of much practice.

  Sixty minutes by Richard’s watch saw the job done; no doubt inside the building the empty hogsheads were in place beneath the illicit pipes—how often did they do this? Not every Sunday night or someone would notice, but, if Richard’s calculations were right, at least once in every three weeks.

  Thomas Cave mounted his horse and rode off up Redcliff Street while the other two boarded the sledge, which headed on very smooth and silent runners eastward to the Temple Backs; Richard followed the sledge. At the river the casks were tipped onto their sides again and rolled down into a flat-bottomed barge tended by a man who was a stranger to Richard, though not to Thorne and Ceely. Finished, the three unharnessed one of the horses and tethered it to the barge; the stranger scrambled up onto its huge back and kicked it hard until it began to plod down the deplorable towpath in the direction of Bath, the floating cargo, with Ceely aboard, following behind. Once sure everything was going to plan, William Thorne drove off in the geehoe.

  I know it all, said Richard to himself. The rum goes to some place nearer Bath, where Ceely and the stranger either sell it or trans-ship it to Salisbury or Exeter, and a fat, excise-free profit is divided by four. I would be willing to bet, however, that it is Ceely Trevillian gets the biggest share.

  What was he actually going to do? After turning it over in his mind all the way home, Richard decided that the time had come to tell his father.

  Dick and Mag were up and about, William Henry still slumbering when Richard walked into the Cooper’s Arms. His parents cast each other a conspiratorial glance, having noticed on their way downstairs that Richard’s bed was empty. How to let a recent widower know that they did understand an occasional absence?

  “Mum, go away,” said Richard without ceremony. “I have to speak to Father in private.”

  Looking worldly, Dick prepared to listen to a tale of basic urges and some pretty female face seen in St. James’s yesterday morning, only to hear a tale of staggering villainy.

  “What should I do, Father?”

  A shrug, a wry look. “There is only one thing a decent man can do. Go at once—and in secret!—to the Collector of Excise at Excise House. His name is Benjamin Fisher.”

  “Father! Your business—your friendship with Tom Cave—it would ruin everything for you!”

  “Nonsense,” said Dick strongly. “There are other makers of good rum in Bristol, and I know ’em all. Stand on best terms with ’em too. Tom Cave is more a very old acquaintance than a friend, Richard. Ye’ve not seen him sup at my table, nor do I sup at his. Besides,” he grinned, “I always knew he was a sly boots. It is in his eyes, ain’t you noticed? Never gives ye a good frank stare.”

  “Yes,” said Richard soberly, “I have noticed. Still, I feel sorrier for him than I do for Thorne. As for Ceely”—he made a gesture as if to push something horrible away—“the man is a turd. What an actor! The apparent nincompoop is a very clever man.”

  “No work for you today,” said Dick, pushing Richard stairward. “Go and put on your best Sunday clothes, my new hat, and off to Excise House—and do not breathe a word to anyone, hear? There is no need to look so down in the mouth, either. If those beauties have tapped off half as much rum as ye think they have, then ye’ll get a hefty reward for your pains. Enough to see William Henry is educated to your heart’s content.”

  It was that thought drove Richard, clad in his dark-hued Sunday clothes, Dick’s best hat on his head, to walk toward Queen Square. Excise House occupied the end of a block between the square and Princes Street (upon which desirable avenue Mr. Thomas Cave’s house was situated), and Richard soon discovered that the Excise Men of Excise House were slugs who used their desks to sleep off their hangovers, especially on a Monday. They were unorganized, uninterested, and preferred to be unoccupied. Thus it took Richard several hours to ascend the hierarchical ladder. Looking at each of the bored faces, Richard declined to say anything more than that he had discovered an excise fraud, and wanted to see the Collector himself. As distinct from the Commander, higher up still.

  An interview he finally achieved at three o’clock in the afternoon, dinnerless and with his famous patience distinctly frayed.

  “Ye have five minutes, Mr. Morgan,” said Mr. Benjamin Fisher from behind his desk.

  No need to wonder if the Collector of Excise had ever been in the field himself; he peered at Richard through the small round lenses of a pair of spectacles which he did not need to peruse the neatly stacked documents on his desk. Short-sighted. His home had always been a
desk. Which meant that he would not understand in the way any of his field officers would. On the other hand, Richard’s mind went on, that might mean that he does not accept bribes. For surely the men in the field do, else I would not be here.

  Richard told his story in a few succinct words.

  “How much rum d’ye estimate these persons draw off in a week?” Mr. Benjamin Fisher asked when Richard ended.

  “If they pick up their hogsheads every three weeks, sir, about eight hundred gallons per week.”

  That put a different complexion on it! Mr. Fisher straightened, put his quill down and pushed the piece of paper on which he had been taking notes to one side. On went the spectacles again; his eyes, two pale blue marbles swimming beneath layers of glass, goggled.

  “Mr. Morgan, this is a huge fraud! Could ye be mistaken in your calculations?”

  “Aye, sir, of course I could. But if they change the hogsheads every three weeks, then ’tis eight hundred gallons weekly. Yesterday was the first of June, and I can testify that the casks the three men brought into the distillery were completely empty, for one man could kick one cask around like a ball. Whereas the casks they took out were so full that it took two of them to roll one up an easy ramp. The Sunday I imagine they will use next is the twenty-second of June. If your men are hiding nearby from midnight on, ye’ll apprehend all three of them in the very act,” Richard said, betting that he was right.

  “Thank you, Mr. Morgan. I suggest that ye return to work and conduct yourself as usually until further notified by this office. On behalf of His Majesty, I must convey the Excise Office’s sincere thanks for your diligence.”