Morgan’s Run Read Online Free Page B

Morgan’s Run
Book: Morgan’s Run Read Online Free
Author: Colleen McCullough
Tags: Fiction
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that the debate ended.
    Truth to tell, this decision gratified the whole clan. Someone known to everybody as William Henry was bound to be a great man.
    Richard gave voice to this verdict when he displayed his new son to Mr. James Thistlethwaite, who snorted.
    “Aye, like Lord Clare,” he said. “Started out a schoolmaster, married three fat and ugly old widows of enormous fortune, was—er—
lucky
enough to be shriven of them in quick succession, became a Member of Parliament for Bristol, and so met the Prince of Wales. Plain Robert Nugent.
Rrrrrrrrr
olling in the soft, which he proceeded to lend liberally to Georgy-Porgy Pudden ’n’ Pie, our bloated Heir. No interest and no repayment of the principal until even the King could not ignore the debt. So plain Robert Nugent was apotheosized into Viscount Clare, and now has a Bristol street named after him. He will end an earl, as my London informants tell me that his soft is still going princeward at a great rate. You have to admit, my dear Richard, that the schoolmaster did well for himself.”
    “Indeed he did,” said Richard, not at all offended. “Though I would rather,” he said after a pause, “that William Henry earned his peerage by becoming First Lord of the Admiralty. Generals are always noblemen because army officers have to buy their promotions, but admirals can scramble up with prize-money and the like.”
    “Spoken like a true Bristolian! Ships are never far from any Bristolian’s thoughts. Though, Richard, ye have no experience of them beyond looking.” Mr. Thistlethwaite sipped his rum and waited with keen anticipation for the warm glow to commence inside him.
    “Looking,” said Richard, his cheek against William Henry’s, “is quite close enough to ships for me.”
    “D’ye never yearn for foreign parts? Not even London?”
    “Nay. I was born in Bristol and I will die in Bristol. Bath and Bedminster are quite as far as I ever wish to go.” He held William Henry out and looked his son in the eye; for such a young babe, the gaze was astonishingly steady. “Eh, William Henry? Perhaps you will end in being the family’s traveler.”
    Idle speculation. As far as Richard was concerned, simply having William Henry was enough.
    The anxiety, however, was omnipresent, in Peg as well as Richard. Both of them fussed over the slightest deviation from William Henry’s habitual path—were his stools a little too runny?—was his brow too warm?—ought he not to be more forward for his age? None of this mattered a great deal during the first six months of William Henry’s life, but his grandparents fretted over what was going to happen as he grew into noticing, crawling, talking—and thinking! That doting pair were going to ruin the child! They listened avidly to anything Cousin James-the-druggist had to say on subjects few Bristolians—or other sorts of English people—worried their heads about. Like the state of the drains, the putridity of the Froom and Avon, the noxious vapors which hung over the city as ominously in winter as in summer. A remark about the Broad Street privy vault had Peg on her knees inside the closet beneath the stairs with rags and bucket, brush and oil of tar, scrubbing at the ancient stone seat and the floor, whitewashing ruthlessly. While Richard went down to the Council House and made such a nuisance of himself to various Corporation slugs that the honey-sledges actually arrived en masse to empty the privy vault, rinse it several times, and then tip the result of all this activity into the Froom at the Key Head right next door to the fish markets.
    When William Henry passed the six-months mark and began to change into a person, his grandparents discovered that he was the kind of child who cannot be ruined. Such was the sweetness of his nature and the humility of his tiny soul that he accepted all the attention gratefully, yet never complained if it were not given. He cried because he had a pain or some tavern fool had

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