Morgan's Run

by Colleen McCullough

  What the two days’ grace meant to Richard was a chance to make his stay in Gloucester Gaol more comfortable.

  Cousin James-of-the-clergy brought him a new greatcoat. “As you see, your cousin Elizabeth”—who was his wife—“has sewn a thick lining of wool into your coat, Richard, and given ye two sorts of gloves. The leather ones have no fingertips, the knitted ones do. And I have packed the pockets of the greatcoat.”

  No wonder it was so heavy. Both pockets contained books.

  “I ordered them from London through Sendall’s,” Cousin James-of-the-clergy explained, “on the thinnest paper, and I tried not to visit you with too much religion. Just a Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.” He paused. “Bunyan is a Baptist, if that can be called a religion, but I think that Pilgrim’s Progress is a great book, so I put it in. And Milton.”

  There were also a volume of Shakespeare’s tragedies, one of his comedies, and John Donne’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives.

  Richard took the Reverend James’s hand and held it to his cheek, eyes closed. Seven books, none very big, so thin was the paper, so flexible the cloth binding. “Between the coat, the gloves, the Bible, Bunyan, Shakespeare and Plutarch, ye’ve managed to care for my body, my soul and my mind. I cannot thank you enough.”

  Cousin James-the-druggist concentrated on Richard’s health. “A new stone for your drip apparatus, though do not change it until ye have to—it is just as well the stone is not much heavier than pumice, eh? Oil of tar and some new, very hard-wearing soap—ye go through soap too fast, Richard, too fast! Some of my special asphalt ointment—’twill heal anything from an ulcer to psoriasis. Ink and paper—I have wired the cork down so the bottle cannot leak. And do look at these, Richard!” he burbled, as always delighted out of a slough of despond by some new device. “They are called ‘nibs’ because they perform the same function as the tip of a trimmed quill, and they slide into the steel end of this wooden handle. I imported them from Italy, though they were made in Araby—geese are few and far between in Araby, it seems. Another razor, just in case. A big tin of malt for when ye do not get fruit or green vegetables—it prevents the scurvy. And rags, rags, rags. Between my wife and your mother, the drapers are out of sheets. A roll of lint and some styptic. And a bottle of my patented tonic, to which I have added a drachm of gold so that ye do not break out in boils. If ye get boils or carbuncles after ye’ve no tonic left, chew some lead shot for a few days. What is not padded with rags is padded with clothes.” Busy packing the chest, he frowned. “I fear ye’ll have to stuff some of it into your greatcoat pockets, Richard.”

  “They are already full,” said Richard firmly. “The Reverend James brought me books, and I cannot leave them behind. If my mind fails, Cousin James, physical well-being is irrelevant. All that has kept me sane these past three months has been the chance to read. The worst horror of a prison is the idleness. The utter lack of anything to do. In Bunyan’s day—yes, I have Pilgrim’s Progress—a man could perform useful work and even sell what he made to support his wife and children, as Bunyan did for twelve long years. In here, the gaolers do not even like us to walk. Without books I would truly have gone mad. So I must keep them.”

  “I understand.”

  After much packing, unpacking and rearranging, the entire treasure trove was squeezed into the box. Only after Willy sat on its lid could its two stout locks be snapped shut; the key, on a thong, went around Richard’s neck. When he lifted the chest, he estimated that it weighed at least fifty pounds.

  There was a box for Willy too, smaller and much lighter.

  “The words have not been invented to tell ye of my gratitude,” Richard said, his eyes alive with the purest love.

  “And I thank you,” said Willy, moved to tears despite Richard.

  They parted then, to meet in Gloucester at the Lent assizes.

  * * *

  At dawn on the 6th of January, Richard and Willy picked up their boxes and shuffled through the barred gate into the passageway, where Walter waited with another individual, a stranger armed with a cudgel. They were thrust into the ironing room; for a fleeting moment Richard thought that they were to be divested of their irons for the journey, and breathed a sigh of relief. The box was heavy enough without the weight of fetters. But no. The sorry-looking fellow who ran this chamber of horrors took a two-inch-wide band of iron and locked it around Richard’s waist. His wrists were fitted with manacles, their two-foot chains attached to the lock at the front of his belly. After which the chain between his ankles was removed and replaced with two chains, one going from his left ankle to the lock on the belt, the other from his right ankle to the lock on the belt. He could walk with a normal stride, but never with sufficient agility to escape. Four lengths of chain met at the lock above his navel.

  Somehow he managed to pick up his chest, and found with an odd surge of pleasure that the wrist chains formed a cradle for it, distributing the load between his arms and his trunk.

  “Hold your box so, Willy,” he said to his shadow, “and it will bear better.”

  “Hold your tongue!” barked Walter.

  The piercing air outside felt and smelled like a distillation of Heaven. Nostrils and eyes dilated, Richard set out in front of their escort, who so far had not spoken a word. A Bristol bailiff?

  How wondrous to be rid of that stinking dungeon! Gloucester, he knew, was a small town, therefore its gaol was bound to be more tolerable than the Bristol Newgate. Crime in rural areas was not unknown, but all the gazettes said that it was far greater in big cities. He could also comfort himself with the knowledge that he had more time in prison behind him than before him: the Gloucester Lent assizes were to be held in the latter part of March.

  Oh, the air! Threatening snow, said the lowering black sky, but the only cold parts of him were his ears, unprotected now by hair. His hat shielded his scalp, but its upturned three-cornered brim could do nothing for his ears. Who cared? Eyes shining, he strode out down Narrow Wine Street, his chains jingling.

  Though the hour was very early, Bristol was an early-rising sort of place; people were expected to be at work shortly after dawn, there to spend eight hours in winter, ten hours in spring and autumn, and twelve hours in summer. So as the three men walked, the two felons in front, there were plenty of people to see them. Faces would contort in terror, figures would plunge precipitously to the far side of the street—no one wanted to brush by a felon.

  Wasborough’s brass foundry doors were wide open, its interior an inferno of flame and roar. The Royal Navy was getting the flat, hook-linked brass chains for its new bilge pumps, obviously; he had never walked up to see since losing his money.

  “Dolphin Street,” said the bailiff curtly as they reached its corner. Not in the direction of the Cooper’s Arms, then, but north across the Froom. Well, that made sense. The Gloucester Turnpike ran north.

  Which led to a new thought: who was paying for all this? He and Willy were being extradited from one county to another, and the importing county was the one had to pay. Were he and Willy so significant to Gloucestershire, then, that it was willing to disburse several pounds on forty miles of travel and the cost of their bailiff escort? Or was it Ceely paying? Yes, of course it was Ceely paying. With pleasure, Richard imagined.

  From Dolphin Street it was left into Broadmead and the wagon yard of Michael Henshaw, who operated freight wagons to Gloucester, Monmouth and Wales, Oxford, Birmingham, and even Liverpool. There they were shoved into an alcove full of horse dung and allowed to put their boxes down, Willy gasping in distress.

  At least, thought Richard, three months of inertia have not stripped me of all my strength. Poor Willy is not strong, is all. But three months more will see me reduced to Willy’s plight unless Gloucester Gaol offers me the opportunity to work and feeds me enough to work on. But if I do work, who will guard my box, keep thieving hands out of it? I will not lose things like my oil of tar and dripstone, but my rags and clothes will vanish in a second and someone mi
ght find the hollow compartment holding my golden guineas. My books might go! For certainly I am not the only prisoner in England who reads books.

  The huge wagon Willy and Richard climbed into was provided with a canvas cover stretched taut across iron half-hoops; they would be protected from the worst of the elements, including what looked like a coming snow-storm bound to be more severe away from the heat of Bristol’s chimneys. A team of eight big horses were harnessed to the wagon, and looked fit to struggle through the mud and mire of the Gloucester Turnpike. The interior was jammed with so many barrels and crates that there was nowhere to put their feet, and the wagoneer began to insist that their boxes stay behind.

  “They has their property, man, that is the Law,” said the bailiff in a tone brooking no argument. He climbed into the wagon to unlock the chains between their ankles and waists, fastening them instead to the half-hoops supporting the canvas shroud. The best they could do was dispose themselves among the cargo with legs stretched out. The bailiff jumped down, and for a moment Richard wondered if he was leaving them here. The wagon jerked into motion; the bailiff’s back was ranged alongside the wagoneer’s on the driver’s seat, over which an adequate shelter was rigged.

  “Willy, stir yourself,” said Richard to his doleful companion, clearly dying to burst into tears. “Help me shift my box to rest against this sack, then I will do the same for you. We will have something to lean against. And do not cry! Cry, and ye’re dead.”

  The pace was tormentingly slow on that completely plastic, unpaved road, and from time to time the wagon bogged to its axles in mud. Richard and Willy would be unchained and unloaded and set to digging and pushing—as was, Richard noted with amusement, the indignant bailiff. The snow was coming down hard, but the temperature was not low enough to freeze the surface. By the end of the first day, unfed and unwatered save by mouthfuls of snow, they had covered eight of the forty miles.

  Which pleased the wagoneer, disembarking in front of the Stars and Plough in Almondsbury.

  “I owe ye a bed and blankets,” he said to the prisoners with a great deal more good humor than he had displayed in Bristol. “ ’Twere your efforts got us out of the muck half a dozen times. And as for you, Tom, ye deserve a quart of ale—’tis good here, the landlord makes his own brew.”

  He and Tom the bailiff disappeared, leaving Richard and Willy inside the wagon wondering what happened now. Then Tom the bailiff came to unlock the chains binding them to the hoops, cudgel at the ready, and conducted them to a stone barn wherein lay straw. He found a beam with several iron staples in it close to the floor, and locked them to that. After which he vanished.

  “I am so hungry!” whimpered Willy.

  “Ye may pray, Willy, but do not cry.”

  The barn smelled clean and the straw was dry, a better nest than any which had come Richard’s way for three months, he thought, burrowing around. In the midst of this, the landlord and a hefty yokel walked in, the landlord bearing a tray upon which reposed two tankards, bread, butter, and two big bowls of steaming soup. The yokel went to an empty stall and reappeared with horse blankets.

  “John says ye helped the wagon considerable,” said Mine Host, putting down his tray where they could reach it and then stepping backward quickly. “Have ye money to pay more than the penny each the bailiff will for ye? Otherwise I am out of pocket and must charge John’s firm, since he says ye’ve earned laborer’s wages.”

  “How much?” Richard asked.

  “Threepence each, including the quarts of ale.”

  Richard produced a sixpence from his waistcoat pocket.

  Three pence got them bread and small beer at dawn, then it was back into the wagon for a second day of eight miles, broken by much digging, pushing and heaving. A blissful night’s rest amid straw and blankets combined with the nourishing hot food had worked wonders for Richard’s frame, ache though it did from his exertions. Even Willy was more cheerful, put more heart into the work. It had ceased to snow and snapped colder, though never cold enough to freeze the ground; eight miles in one day were as many as they could go, a progress which perfectly satisfied John the wagoneer—and probably enabled him to put up each night at his regular stop.

  Thus Richard expected to be deposited at Gloucester Gaol on the evening of the fifth day. The wagon, however, ceased to roll when it reached the Harvest Moon on Gloucester’s outskirts.

  “I am not of a mind to put ye into that foul place in the dark,” John the wagoneer explained. “Ye have paid your way like gentlemen, and I feel sorry for ye, very. This will be your last night of decent rest and decent food for only God can say how long. ’Tis hard to think of ye as felons, so good luck, both of ye.”

  At dawn the next day the wagon crossed the Severn River on the drawbridge and entered the town of Gloucester through its west gate. In many ways it was still medieval, had retained most of its walls, ditches, drawbridges and cloisters, half-timbered houses. His view of the town was limited to what he could see through the uncovered back of the wagon, but that was sufficient to tell him that Gloucester was a minnow to Bristol’s whale.

  The wagon drew up to a gate in a heavy, ancient wall; Richard and Willy were unloaded and conducted, together with Tom the bailiff, into a large open space which seemed given over to the cultivation of plants only spring would name. In front of them was Gloucester Castle, which was also Gloucester Gaol. A place of frowning stone turrets, towers and barred windows, yet more of a ruin than a fortress last defended in the time of Oliver Cromwell. They did not enter it, but went instead to a fairly large stone house set against the outer wall and ditch surrounding the castle. Here lived the head gaoler.

  The real reason they had been escorted from Bristol, Richard decided here, lay more in the fact that the Bristol Newgate wanted its irons back than cared about escaping prisoners. They were divested of every piece of iron they wore, Tom the bailiff gathering them to himself like a woman her new baby. As soon as all were accounted and signed for, he strolled off with his cargo in a sack to catch the cheap coach home. Leaving Richard and Willy to be put into fresh sets of the familiar locked fetters with a two-foot length of chain between. This deed done, a gaoler—they never saw the head gaoler himself—hustled them, carrying their precious boxes, to the castle.

  What little of it was still habitable was such a crush of prisoners that sitting down with the legs stretched out was quite impossible. If these wretches sat, it was with knees drawn up beneath their chins. The chamber was exactly twelve feet square and contained around thirty men and ten women. The gaoler who had escorted them bawled an incomprehensible order and everybody who had managed to find enough space to sit got to their feet. They then filed outside, Richard and a weeping Willy in their midst, still carrying their boxes, and came to a halt in a freezing yard where twenty more men and women already stood.

  It was Sunday, and the complement of Gloucester Gaol were to receive God’s message from the Reverend Mr. Evans, a gentleman so old that his reedy voice drifted into the winds eddying around the roughly rectangular space and rendered his words of repentance, hope and piety—if such they were—unintelligible. Luckily he considered that a ten-minute service and another twenty minutes spent sermonizing constituted adequate labor for the £40 per annum he was paid as prison chaplain, especially because he also had to do this on Wednesdays and Fridays.

  After, they were herded back to the felons’ common-room, far smaller than that for debtors, of whom there were only half as many.

  “It ain’t as bad as this Monday to Saturday,” said a voice as Richard put his box down by shoving someone else out of the way, and sat on it. “What a lovely man ye are!”

  She squatted at his feet, elbowing those on either side of her roughly, a thin and stringy creature of about thirty years, clad in much-mended but reasonably clean clothes—black skirt, red petticoat, red blouse, black jerkin and an oddly cheeky black hat which sat with its wide brim to one side and bore a goose feather dyed scarlet.

  �
��Is there no chapel where the parson can make his sermon heard?” Richard asked with a slight smile; there was something very likable about her, and talking to her meant he did not have to listen to Weeping Willy.

  “Oh, aye, but it ain’t big enough for all of us. We are real full at the moment—need a decent dose of gaol fever to cut the numbers back. Name is Lizzie Lock.” And she thrust out a hand.

  He shook it. “Richard Morgan. This is Willy Insell, who is the bane of my life as well as my shadow.”

  “How de do, Willy?”

  Willy’s answer was a fresh spate of tears.

  “He is a water fountain,” said Richard tiredly, “and one day I am going to strangle him.” He gazed about. “Why are there women in with the men?”

  “No separate gaol, Richard my love. No separate gaol for the debtors either, which is why we got a mention in John Howard’s report on England’s Bridewells about five year ago. And that is why we are abuilding of a new gaol. And that is why we ain’t so crowded Monday to Saturday, when the men are abuilding,” she said, rattling it off.

  He picked one fact out of this. “Who is John Howard?”

  “Fellow wrote this report on the Bridewells, I already told ye that,” said Lizzie Lock. “Do not ask me more for I do not know no more. Would not know that except it set Gloucester by the ears—the Bishop and his grand College and the beadles. So they got a Act of Parliament to build a new gaol. Supposed to be finished in another three years, but I will not be here to see it.”

  “Expecting to be released?” asked Richard, whose smile was growing. He liked her, though he was not attracted to her in the slightest; just that her beady black eyes had not given up on life.

  “Lord bless ye, no!” she said with great good cheer. “I went down for the sus. per coll. two year ago.”