He smiled as he thought about Laura Hawthorne. She had nursed him back to health. If it hadn’t been for her, he felt sure he would have never made it out of that alleyway. She had kept him in her room, bandaged him, and made sure that he got back to the ship. He still had no idea what had happened to him. It was all a hazy dream. He thought he had been drugged. That pig-faced bartender must have put laudanum in his drink. He had heard that this was how some men were shanghaied off the docks in London. He wondered if that was why he’d been drugged, but that didn’t explain why they dumped him in the alleyway. He had so little memory of what had happened. From the bloody gash on his head, he knew that he had been bludgeoned with some kind of blunt object. The bruises and swelling on his rib cage and face implied that he had been kicked and then presumably dragged out into the street. What he did remember was a man with fleshy eyelids. He was leaning over him, a man whose name might have been Bill.
His mind shifted back to Laura. She was somewhat of a mystery to him. He wasn’t sure how she found him there in that alleyway, or why she took the trouble to care for him. He knew very little about her except that her mother had died when she was twelve years old. Her father had taken to drink shortly afterward, abandoning the family. She and her older sister had been left without a home. Her sister had married a tavern keeper and she had taken the maid’s job at a boarding house as her best option. She was a good-looking woman with high cheekbones and piercing green eyes. Morgan found her physically attractive, but he was not emotionally attached. It was certainly not love. Their relationship could best be described as a sailor’s romance, born of necessity and nurtured more by practicality than love. Many of the other sailors had similar loosely defined ties with women in London.
Morgan and Laura would sometimes spend an afternoon together walking along the Thames as far as the London and Southwark Bridges. She was always full of questions about his family and his home. She wanted to know all about why he went to sea, and why he chose to sail with the London Line. He told her about his brother Abraham and his quest to find out what had happened to him. She always seemed interested and wanted to hear more. He revealed to her the puzzling information he had received from John Taylor, and how he was looking for one English sailor in particular, named William Blackwood. She’d said she would ask around the taverns and the boarding houses to see if any of the girls had heard of Blackwood or a ship called the Charon.
Morgan was thinking about this as he stood by the helm looking into the darkness, puffing on his cigar. A sudden gust of wind caused him to reach for one of the windward stays to keep his balance. Sea spray splashed his face and his thoughts abruptly shifted to his own career. The last two years had brought so much change in his life. He remembered when he first got the news that he was to be promoted. It was in the summer of 1827. They’d just arrived off Sandy Hook. The captain had given the order to square the yards. One of those fast newspaper schooners had come alongside, the reporter shouting the startling headline that slavery had been legally abolished in New York on July 4, Independence Day. That same afternoon, Captain Champlin gave him the good news that he would be promoting him to second mate. He was turning the Hudson over to his brother, Christopher, and Morgan would be serving as one of his new ship’s officers. It had all happened so quickly.
He thought back to Henry Champlin’s last words to him as he stepped off the Hudson in New York.
“I suppose you wonder why I decided to promote you, Morgan.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I can tell you that Mr. Griswold thought you were too young. So did my brother.”
“Yes, sir,” Morgan replied glumly as he watched Champlin fold his arms over his chest.
“But I told them I’d observed that you had a watchful eye and a keen desire to know the reason why of anything, two important and desirable traits out on the open Atlantic highway. You were a good sailor man, I told them, with a ready smile no matter the weather, and if we didn’t promote you soon we might lose you to another line.”
Champlin paused to take in a deep breath, then straightened his back and adopted an air of frigid dignity. He looked around to make sure that no one was listening, and then began speaking in a more serious tone of voice.
“But that’s not why I wanted you as a ship’s officer, Morgan. No, the real reason I wanted to promote you is over the years I saw some rare leadership skills in you, most particularly in the way you handled Jack Brown. You showed me then that you were a sailor at your best when the weather was at its worst.”