Read Online Morgan’s Run by Colleen McCullough - Free Book Online

God in His Heaven! Then, leaning his cheek against his son’s curls, his eyes closed, he felt a fine convulsive trembling right through the little body. It was as invisible as a cat’s purr; he found it only by way of his fingertips. A vibrating anguish.
Anguish?
Why that word? His eyes snapped open, he held William Henry out at arm’s length and looked into his face. Secret, shut away.
    “He did not seem to miss ye at all,” said Dick comfortably.
    “He ate every scrap on his plate,” said Mag proudly.
    “He was as happy as a lark in my company,” said Peg with a sly flash of triumph.
    His knees began to buckle; Richard sank into a chair near the counter and cuddled his son close again. The fine tremor had gone. Oh, William Henry, what are you thinking? Did you decide that Dadda was never coming back? Until today Dadda has never been away from you for more than an hour or two, and did anybody remember to tell you that Dadda would be home at twilight? No, nobody did. Including me. And you did not cry, or refuse to eat, or display concern. But you thought I was never coming back. That I would not be here for you. “I will always be here for you,” he whispered against William Henry’s ear. “Always and always.”
    “How did it go?” asked Peg, who could still, after eighteen months of watching Richard with William Henry, find herself amazed at her husband’s—weakness?—softness? It is not healthy, she thought. He needs our child to feed something in himself, something I have no idea of. Well, I love William Henry every bit as much as he does! And now is my chance to have my son for
me.
    “It went well,” said Richard, answering her question, then looked at Dick, his gaze a little remote. “I have earned two pounds today, Father. A pound for you and a pound for me.”
    “No,” said Dick gruffly. “Ten shillings for me, thirty for you. That much will see me through even when the day brings no custom at all. Pay me two shillings more for your family’s board, and bank the other twenty-eight shillings for yourself. He means to pay ye every Saturday, I hope? None of this by-the-month business, or when he is paid for the goods?”
    “Every Saturday, Father.”
    That night when Richard turned to find Peg and carefully roll up her nightgown, she slapped his hands away nastily.
    “No, Richard!” she whispered fiercely. “William Henry is not asleep yet, and he is old enough to understand!”
    He lay in the darkness listening to the rumbles and wheezes from the front room, weary to the bone from an unaccustomed kind of labor, yet wide awake. Today had been the beginning of many new things. A job at work he loved, separation from a child he loved, separation from a wife he loved, the realization that he could hurt people he loved all unknowing. It should be so simple. Nothing drove him save love—he had to work to support his family, to make sure they did not want. Yet Peg had slapped his hands away for the first time since they had married, and William Henry had trembled a cat’s purr.
    What can I do? How can I find a solution? Today I have unwittingly opened up a chasm, though for the best of reasons. I have never asked for much nor expected much. Just the presence of my family. In that is happiness. I belong to them, and they belong to me. Or so I thought. Does a chasm always open up when things change? How deep is it? How wide?

    “Senhor Habitas,” he said as dawn broke on his second day of work, “how many muskets do ye expect me to make in a day?”
    Not a blink; Tomas Habitas rarely blinked. “Why, Richard?”
    “I do not want to stay from dawn to dusk, sir. It is not as it was in the old days. My family have need of me too.”
    “That I understand,” said Senhor Habitas gently. “The dilemma is insoluble. One works to make money to ensure the comfort and well-being of one’s family, yet one’s family needs more than money, and a man cannot be in two places at the same instant of time. I