Excerpt from Morgan's Run by Colleen McCullough, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Be it on your own heads, then!" cried Cousin James-the-druggist as he stumbled off, wringing his hands, to enquire of a doctor friend whereabouts he might find a victim of the smallpox who had reached rupture-of-the-pustules stage. Not so difficult a task; people were coming down with the disease everywhere. Mostly under the age of fifteen.

"Pray for me," Cousin James-the-druggist said to his doctor friend as he laid his ordinary darning needle down across a running sore on the twelve-year-old girl's face and turned it over and over to coat it with pus. Oh, poor soul! It had been such a pretty face, but it never would be again. "Pray for me," he said as he rose to his feet and put the sopping needle on a bed of lint in a small tin case. "Pray that I am not about to do murder."

He hastened immediately to the Cooper's Arms, not a very long walk. And there, the partly naked William Henry on his knee, he took the darning needle from its case, placed its point against -- against -- oh, where ought he to do this murder? And such a public one, between the regulars sitting in their usual places, Mr. Thistlethwaite making a show of casually sucking his teeth, and the Morgans looming in a ring around him as if to prevent his fleeing should he take a notion to do so. Suddenly it was done; he pinched the flesh of William Henry's arm just below the left shoulder, pushed the big needle in, then drew it out an inch away by its point.

William Henry did not flinch, did not cry. He turned his large and extraordinary eyes upon Cousin James's sweating face and looked a question -- why did you do that to me? It hurt!

Oh why, why did I? I have never seen such eyes in a head! Not animal's eyes, but not human either. This is a strange child.

So he kissed William Henry all over his face, wiped away his own tears, put the needle back in its tin to burn the whole thing later in his hottest furnace, and handed William Henry to Richard.

"There, it is done. Now I am going to pray. Not for William Henry's soul -- what babe needs fear for stains on that? To pray for my own soul, that I have not done murder. Have you some vinegar and oil of tar? I would wash my hands."

Mag produced a small jug of vinegar, a bottle of oil of tar, a pewter dish and a clean clout.

"Nothing will happen for three or four days," he said as he rubbed away, "but then, if it takes, he will develop a fever. If it has taken to the proper degree, the fever will not be malign. And at some time the inoculation itself will fester, produce a pustule, and burst. All going well, 'twill be the only one. But I cannot say for sure, and I do not thank ye for this business."

"You are the best man in Bristol, Cousin James!" cried Mr. Thistlethwaite jovially.

Cousin James-the-druggist paused in the doorway. "I am not your cousin, Jem Thistlethwaite -- ye have no relations! Not even a mother," he said in freezing tones, pushed his wig back onto his head properly, and vanished.

Mine Host shook with laughter. "That is telling ye, Jem!"

"Aye," grinned Jem, unabashed. "Do not worry," he said to Richard, "God would not dare offend Cousin James."


Having walked for much longer than he had prayed, Richard arrived back at the Cooper's Arms just in time to give a hand with supper. Barley broth made on beef shins tonight, with plump, bacony dumplings simmering in it, as well as the usual fare of bread, butter, cheese, cake and liquid refreshments.

The panic had died down and Broad Street was back to normal except that John/Samuel Adams and John Hancock still swung from the signpost of the American Coffee House. They would probably, Richard reflected, remain there until time and weather blew their stuffing all over the place and naught was left save limp rags.

Nodding to his father as he passed, Richard scrambled upstairs to the back half of the room at their top, which Dick had partitioned off in the customary way -- a few planks from floor to near the ceiling, not snugly tenoned and joined like the wales of ships, but rather held together by an occasional strut and therefore full of cracks, some wide enough to put an eye to.

Excerpted from Morgan's Run, copyright (c)2000 Colleen McCullough. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.