Tomorrow, she thought drowsily, her spate of weeping ended, I will go to St. James’s burying ground and put flowers on her grave. Soon it will be winter, and of flowers there will be none.
Winter came, the ordinary Bristol gloom of fog, drizzle, a damp coldness which seeped into the bones; untroubled by the ice which often pocked the Thames and other rivers of eastern England, the tide in the Avon rose its thirty feet and fell its thirty feet as rhythmically and predictably as in summer.
News from the war in the thirteen colonies trickled in, far behind the events it chronicled. General Thomas Gage was no longer His Britannic Majesty’s Commander-in-Chief, Sir William Howe was, and it was being said that the rebellious Continental Congress was courting the French, the Spanish and the Dutch in search of allies and money. The King’s retaliation had been much as expected: at Christmastide the Parliament prohibited all trade with the thirteen colonies and declared them beyond the protection of the Crown. For Bristol, hideous news.
There were those among influential Bristolians who wanted peace at any price, including granting the American rebels whatever they demanded; there were those who deemed the rebels sorely wronged, yet who wanted the perpetuation of English imperium because they feared that if England abandoned a thousand miles of naked coast, the French would return with the Spanish hard behind them; and there were those whose outrage was colossal, who cursed the rebels for traitors fit only to be drawn and quartered after they were hanged, and who would not hear of the smallest concession’s being made. Naturally this last group of Bristol’s mighty had the most power at the Court of St. James, but all three groups cried woe in the drawing rooms of the best houses and huddled grimly over their port and turtle at the White Lion, the Bush Inn and the Plume of Feathers.
Beneath the thin crust of influential Bristolians lay the vast majority of citizens, who knew only that work was getting hard to find, that more and more ships sat permanently along the quays and the backs, and that now was not the time to strike for a raise of a penny a day. Since Parliament knew how to spend money but did not dole it out to the needy, care of the swelling numbers of jobless devolved upon the parishes—provided, that is, that they were genuine parishioners entered in the register. Each parish received £7 per annum per dwelling of the Corporation’s rents, and out of this came relief for the poor.
In one respect Bristol differed from all other English cities, for no reason easily explained; its upper crust tended toward an impressive degree of philanthropy, during life as well as in testamentary bequests. Perhaps one reason might have been that to have almshouses or poorhouses or hospitals or schools named after their endower lent their endower a second kind of immortality, for his name was never aristocratic. When it came to birth and lineage, Bristol’s upper crust was utterly mediocre. Lord Clare, who had been Robert Nugent the schoolmaster, was about as much of a nobleman as Bristol high society could produce. Bristol might was soundly vested in Mammon.
Thus 1776 arrived like the kind of brooding shadow seen only out of the corners of the eyes. By now, everybody had assumed, the King’s Navy and the King’s Army would have stamped out the last ember of revolution between New Hampshire and Georgia. But no news of this glorious event came, though those who could read—a large number in education- and charity-conscious Bristol—had taken to frequenting the staging inns to wait for the coach from London and the London flimsies and magazines.
The Cooper’s Arms was doing its share of drawing in the belt; and sad it was, too, to find with every passing week a new gap in the ranks of the regular patrons. Expenses kept time with shrinking custom, however; Mag cooked less, Peg carried home fewer loaves from Jenkins the baker, and Dick bought more vile cheap gin than rich aromatic Cave’s rum.
“I do not like to sound disloyal,” said Peg on a January day when the threat of snow found the Cooper’s Arms empty, “but surely some of our folk would find it easier to eat if they drank less.”
The look Dick gave Richard was wry, but he said nothing.
“My love,” said Richard, taking William Henry from his mother, “it is the way of the world, and we have managed to put a little aside because it is the way of the world. So hush, and do not think of disloyalty. Men and women are free to choose what they want to put in their stomachs. Some can bear the pain of doing without a daily half-pint of rum or gin, but some find the pain of doing without too hard to bear.” He shrugged, ruffled William Henry’s dark ringlets and smiled down into those amazing eyes, amber flecked with deep brown dots. “Pain is different for everybody, Peg.”
As January crept onward, the tally of ships failed to reach expectations. From sympathy with the rebel cause, the feeling within the city was turning to increasingly bitter resentment. The Union Club at the Bush Inn, once engaged in inundating the King with petitions to cease taxing and trying to govern the colonies from afar, was stumbling into mortified silence; at the White Lion the Tories were roaring ever louder, inundating the King with formal avowals of allegiance and support, contributing to the cost of raising local regiments, and starting to ask questions about the two Whig Members of Parliament for Bristol, the Irishman Edmund Burke and the American Henry Cruger.
There, said the Steadfast Society, was Bristol, bleeding from almost a year of war already, with a Whig parliamentary team composed of a golden-tongued Irishman and a leaden-tongued American. Sentiments were changing, feelings were souring. Let all this business three thousand miles away get itself over and done with, let the chief business of the day be proper business! And damn the rebels!
On the night of the 16th of January, while the tide was at its ebb, someone set fire to the Savannah La Mar, loading for Jamaica on the Broad Quay not far from Old Nick’s Entrance. She had been daubed with pitch, oil and turpentine, and luck alone had saved her; by the time the city’s two firemen had arrived with their forty-gallon water cart, several hundred shaken sailors and dock denizens had dealt with the blaze before serious damage had been done.
In the morning the port officials and bailiffs discovered that the Fame and the Hibernia, one to north and one to south of the Savannah La Mar, had also been soaked with incendiaries and set alight. For reasons no one could fathom, neither ship had so much as smoldered.
“Barratry in Bristol! The whole of the Quay could have gone up, and the backs, and then the city,” said Dick to Richard the moment he returned from the scene of this shipboard arson. “Low tide! Nothing to stop a good blaze leaping from ship to ship—Christ, Richard, it might have been as bad as London’s great fire!” And he shivered.
Nothing terrified people quite so effectively as fire. Not the worst the colliers of Kingswood could do could compare, for the angriest mob was a nothing alongside fire. Mobs were made of men and women with children tagging behind, whereas fire was the monstrous hand of God, the opening of the portals to Hell.
On the 18th of January, Cousin James-the-druggist, ashen-faced, ushered his weeping wife and those of his children still at home through Dick Morgan’s door.
“Will you look after Ann and the girls?” he asked, trembling. “I cannot persuade them that our house is safe.”
“Good God, Jim, what is it?”
“Fire.” He grasped at the counter to steady himself.
“Here,” said Richard, giving him a mug of best rum while Mag and Peg fluttered around the moaning Ann.
“Give her one too,” said Dick as Mr. James Thistlethwaite abandoned his manic quill to join them. “Now tell us, Jim.”
It took a full quarter-pint to calm Cousin James-the-druggist enough to speak. “In the middle of the night someone forced the door of my main warehouse—you know how strong it is, Dick, and how many chains and padlocks it has! He got at my turpentine, soaked a big box in a vat of it, and filled the box with tow soaked in more turpentine. Then he put the box against some casks of linseed oil, and lit it. The place was deserted, of course. No one saw him come, no one saw him go.”
“I do not understand!” cried Dick, qui
te as white as his first cousin. “We are right on the corner of Bell Lane, and I swear we have heard nothing, seen nothing—smelled nothing!”
“It would not burn,” said Cousin James-the-druggist in an odd voice. “I tell you, Dick, it would not burn! It should have burned! I found the box when I came to work. At first I thought the broken door meant someone after opiates or badly needed medicines, but the moment I got inside, I could smell the turpentine.” His grey-blue Morgan eyes shone with the light of the visionary. “It is a miracle!” he cried. “It is a miracle! God has been good, and I will give St. James’s a thousand pounds for its poorbox.”
Even Mr. Thistlethwaite was impressed. “That is enough to make me wish I wrote panegyrics, Cousin James, and could hymn ye in print.” He frowned. “But I smell something fishy in the city of Bristol, so I do. The Savannah La Mar, the Hibernia and the Fame all belong to Lewsley, which is an American firm. Lewsley is right next door to you in Bell Lane. Perhaps the arsonist broke down the wrong door. I would tell Lewsley if I were you—this is a plot by the Tories to drive American money out of Bristol.”
“Ye see Tories in everything, Jem,” said Richard, smiling.
“Tories are in everything dastardly, at any rate.” Mr. Thistlethwaite sat down at his table again, rolling his eyes at the clutch of hysterical women. “I do wish ye’d shoo them home, Dick. Leave Richard there with one of my horse pistols—here, take it, Richard! I can defend myself with one. But what I insist upon is silence. The muse has beckoned, and I have a new subject to write about.”
No one took any notice of this, but as the regular patrons started to drift in for a noon dinner and the flow of enquirers into what had happened at the Morgan drug warehouse steadily increased, Richard decided to do as Mr. Thistlethwaite had suggested. One of the horse pistols in his greatcoat pocket and a dozen paper shot cartridges in the other pocket, he escorted Ann Morgan and her two dismally plain daughters back to their very nice house in St. James’s Barton. There he sat himself in a chair in the hallway to repel invading arsonists.
Within the space of two days, Thursday to Saturday, all Bristol had spun into a helpless panic. The wardens and specially appointed constables actually put some effort into their exertions, the lamps were lit at five in the afternoon in those few places lucky enough to have street lighting, and the lampmen got busy with their ladders to refill the oil reservoirs, something they rarely did. People hurried home early and wished that the season were not winter and therefore redolent with the smell of wood smoke. Hardly anyone slept during that Saturday night.
On the 19th, a Sunday, all Bristol save for the Jews were in church to beg that God be merciful and bring this Hellhound to justice. Cousin James-of-the-clergy, an excellent preacher even when not on form, gave of his best in a manner some slightly startled members of the St. James’s congregation described as positively Jesuitical and others as alarmingly Methodical.
“For myself,” said Dick, to whom one such remark was addressed, “I care not whether the Reverend sounded Jesuitical or Methodical. If we are to sleep soundly in our beds, the arsonist must be kicking his heels at the end of a rope. Besides, the Reverend’s papa was a regular fire-and-brimstone preacher, do you not remember? He gave sermons in the open air to the colliers at Crew’s Hole.”
“The Steadfast Society blames it on the American colonists.”
“Hardly likely! The American colonists look more the victims,” said Dick, ending the subject.
In the small hours of Sunday going into Monday, Richard woke with a start from a restless sleep.
“Dadda, Dadda!” William Henry was saying loudly from his cot.
Out of bed in a trice, Richard lit a candle from the tinder box and bent over him, heart pounding, as the child sat bolt upright. “What is wrong, William Henry?” he whispered.
“Fire,” said William Henry clearly.
Only his obsession with his son’s health could have stoppered his nose—the room was full of smoke.
In an emergency he was neat and quick, preserved his presence of mind; Richard woke his father with a shout even as his hands worked at his clothes and pulled on his shoes. Ready, he did not wait for Dick, but ran down the stairs with his candle, grabbed two buckets, unbolted the tavern door and slid across the pavement, slippery in a little rain. Others were stirring as he ran around the corner into Bell Lane and there came to a halt, aghast. The warehouse complex of Lewsley & Co. was ablaze, flames licking through gaps in the slate roofs, the narrow and dirty confines of Bell Lane pulsing red. A noise of roar and huff filled his ears; the Spanish wool, the grain and casks of olive oil inside were soaking up the fire and the fire was feeding upon them as it had not fed upon tow and turpentine.
Men armed with buckets were coming from all directions and multiple lines of them strung themselves from the Froom at the Key Head to Lewsley & Co.’s warehouse. Though the tide was not all the way in, nor was it out; a fairly easy matter therefore to dip the buckets into the water and send them on their way. This frenzy of activity confined the fire to Lewsley & Co. and half a dozen ancient tenements; Cousin James-the-druggist’s complex right next door escaped without a mark. No one died—apparently the arsonist was more interested in destroying property than taking lives. So the occupants of the lost tenements had fled in time, their scant belongings clutched in their arms and their children wailing.
Filthy with soot, Richard went back to the Cooper’s Arms as soon as the Sheriff and his minions pronounced Bell Lane out of danger. Both his buckets had gone, only God knew where or to whom. His father and Cousin James-the-druggist were seated together at a table, both showing signs of wear and tear; they were a generation older, had tried to keep up, then gratefully turned their buckets over to younger men as they flocked in from more outlying districts to do their bit.
“There will be a great demand for buckets tomorrow, Richard,” said Dick, drawing his son a tankard of beer, “so I intend to be at the cooper’s as soon as dawn breaks to buy a dozen more. What a world we live in!”
“Dick,” said Cousin James-the-druggist with that same look of exaltation on his face, “for the second time within a day, God has spared me and mine! I feel—I feel as Paul must have done on the road to Damascus.”
“I do not see the comparison,” said Richard, drinking thirstily. “You have never persecuted the faithful, Cousin James.”
“No, Richard, but I have undergone a revelation. I will give every prisoner in the Bristol Newgate and the Bristol Bridewell a shilling as thanks to God.”
“Huh!” grunted Dick. “Do so, by all means, Jim, but be aware that they will spend it on booze in the prison taproom.”
Their speech had permeated to the upper floor; Mag and Peg came down the stairs well wrapped, Peg with William Henry in her arms, her eyes glowing.
“Oh, it is over and you are safe!”
Richard put his tankard down and crossed to take the child, who clung to him. “Father, it was William Henry who woke me. He said ‘fire’ as if he knew what it meant.”
Cousin James-the-druggist stared at William Henry thoughtfully. “He is pixilated. The fairies have claimed him.”
Peg gasped. “Cousin James, do not say such things! If the fairies own him, one day they will take him away!”
Strip that of its fanciful rustic superstition, Cousin James-the-druggist reflected, rising slowly and painfully to his feet, and it means that William Henry’s mother recognizes his strangeness. For the truth is that he ought never to have survived inoculation.
* * *
The arsonist did not stop with the destruction of Lewsley & Co. During the Monday after the fire, other torches similar to those which had set the American firm alight were found in a dozen other American-owned or American-affiliated warehouses and factories. On the Tuesday, Alderman Barnes’s sugar refining house went up in flames; its owner had strong American ties. But by now the whole of Bristol was hopping up and down in expectation of fire, so the conflagration was snuffed out before
too much damage was done. Three days later, Alderman Barnes’s sugar house was torched again, and again saved.
Politically, both sides were striving to make capital out of the business; the Tories accused the Whigs and the Whigs accused the Tories. Edmund Burke put up £50 for information, the Merchant Venturers contributed £500, the King a further £1,000. As £1,550 represented more than most could earn in a lifetime, Bristol turned detective and soon winkled out a likely suspect—though, of course, nobody got the reward. A Scotchman known as Jack the Painter, he had lodged at various houses in the Pithay, a tumbledown street which crossed the Froom along St. James’s Backs; after the second attempt to burn down Alderman Barnes’s sugar house, he suddenly disappeared. Though no real evidence existed to link him physically to the fires, all of Bristol was convinced he was the arsonist. A hue and cry went up, fueled by London and provincial news gazettes clear across the country. From the Tyne to the Channel, no one wanted a fire maniac on the loose. The fugitive was apprehended in the act of robbing a nabob’s house in Liverpool, and upon the payment of £128 in expenses by the Corporation and the Merchant Venturers, he was extradited in chains to Bristol for interrogation. Where an unexpected obstacle reared its head: nobody could understand a word the Scotchman said apart from his name, James Aiten. So he was shipped to London on the theory that in such a vast metropolis there would be some who could understand the Scotch dialect. As indeed proved to be the case. James Aiten, alias Jack the Painter, confessed to all the Bristol fires—and to one in Portsmouth which had burned the Royal Navy rope house to the ground. This last crime was heinous in the extreme; ships could not function without miles upon miles of rope.
“What I fail to see,” said Dick Morgan to Jem Thistlethwaite, “is how Jack the Painter could have done both Bristol and Portsmouth. The rope house was set afire in December, when he was definitely living in the Pithay for all to see.”