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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