“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.