BERNARD CORNWELL
The Starbuck Chronicles
Rebel

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 1993

Map © John Gilkes 2013

Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007497966

Ebook Edition © September 2013 ISBN: 9780007339471

Version: 2017-05-08

REBEL

is for Alex and Kathy de Jonge,

who introduced me to the Old Dominion

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Two

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Three

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Historical Note

About the Author

Also by Bernard Cornwell

About the Publisher

PART ONE

ONE

THE YOUNG MAN was trapped at the top end of Shockoe Slip where a crowd had gathered in Cary Street. The young man had smelt the trouble in the air and had tried to avoid it by ducking into an alleyway behind Kerr’s Tobacco Warehouse, but a chained guard dog had lunged at him and so driven him back to the steep cobbled slip where the crowd had engulfed him.

‘You going somewhere, mister?’ a man accosted him.

The young man nodded, but said nothing. He was young, tall and lean, with long black hair and a clean-shaven face of flat planes and harsh angles, though at present his handsome looks were soured by sleeplessness. His skin was sallow, accentuating his eyes, which were the same gray as the fog-wrapped sea around Nantucket, where his ancestors had lived. In one hand he was carrying a stack of books tied with hemp rope, while in his other was a carpetbag with a broken handle. His clothes were of good quality, but frayed and dirty like those of a man well down on his luck. He betrayed no apprehension of the crowd, but instead seemed resigned to their hostility as just another cross he had to bear.

‘You heard the news, mister?’ The crowd’s spokesman was a bald man in a filthy apron that stank of a tannery.

Again the young man nodded. He had no need to ask what news, for there was only one event that could have sparked this excitement in Richmond’s streets. Fort Sumter had fallen, and the news, hopes and fears of civil war were whipping across the American states.

‘So where are you from?’ the bald man demanded, seizing the young man’s sleeve as though to force an answer.

‘Take your hands off me!’ The tall young man had a temper.

‘I asked you civil,’ the bald man said, but nevertheless let go of the younger man’s sleeve.

The young man tried to turn away, but the crowd pressed around him too thickly and he was forced back across the street toward the Columbian Hotel where an older man dressed in respectable though disheveled clothes had been tied to the cast-iron palings that protected the hotel’s lower windows. The young man was still not the crowd’s prisoner, but neither was he free unless he could somehow satisfy their curiosity.

‘You got papers?’ another man shouted in his ear.

‘Lost your voice, son?’ The breath of his questioners was fetid with whiskey and tobacco. The young man made another effort to push against his persecutors, but there were too many of them and he was unable to prevent them from trapping him against a hitching post on the hotel’s sidewalk. It was mid-morning on a warm spring day. The sky was cloudless, though the dark smoke from the Tredegar Iron Works and the Gallegoe Mills and the Asa Snyder Stove Factory and the tobacco factories and Talbott’s Foundry and the City Gas Works all combined to make a rank veil that haloed the sun. A Negro teamster, driving an empty wagon up from the wharves of Samson and Pae’s Foundry, watched expressionless from atop his wagon’s box. The crowd had stopped the carter from turning his horses out of Shockoe Slip, but the man was too wise to make any protest.

‘Where are you from, boy?’ The bald tanner thrust his face close to the young man’s. ‘What’s your name?’

‘None of your business.’ The tone was defiant.

‘So we’ll find out!’ The bald man seized the bundle of books and tried to pull them away. For a moment there was a fruitless tug of war, then the frayed rope holding the books parted and the volumes spilt across the cobbles. The bald man laughed at the accident and the young man hit him. It was a good hard blow and it caught the bald man off his balance so that he rocked backward and almost fell.

Someone cheered the young man, admiring his spirit. There were about two hundred people in the crowd with some fifty more onlookers who half hung back from the proceedings and half encouraged them. The crowd itself was mischievous rather than ugly, like children given an unexpected vacation from school. Most of them were in working clothes, betraying that they had used the news of Fort Sumter’s fall as an excuse to leave their benches and lathes and presses. They wanted some excitement, and errant Northerners caught in the city’s streets would be this day’s best providers of that excitement.

The bald man rubbed his face. He had lost dignity in front of his friends and wanted revenge. ‘I asked you a question, boy.’

‘And I said it was not your business.’ The young man was trying to pick up his books, though two or three had already been snatched away. The prisoner already tied to the hotel’s window bars watched in silence.

‘So where are you from, boy?’ a tall man asked, but in a conciliatory voice, as though he was offering the young man a chance to make a dignified escape.

‘Faulconer Court House.’ The young man heard and accepted the note of conciliation. He guessed that other strangers had been accosted by this mob, then questioned and released, and that if he kept his head then he too might be spared whatever fate awaited the middle-aged man already secured to the railings.

‘Faulconer Court House?’ the tall man asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Your name?’

‘Baskerville.’ He had just read the name on a fascia board of a shop across the street; ‘Bacon and Baskerville,’ the board read, and the young man snatched the name in relief. ‘Nathaniel Baskerville.’ He embellished the lie with his real Christian name.

‘You don’t sound like a Virginian, Baskerville,’ the tall man said.

‘Only by adoption.’ His vocabulary, like the books he had been carrying, betrayed that the young man was educated.

‘So what do you do in Faulconer County, boy?’ another man asked.

‘I work for Washington Faulconer.’ Again the young man spoke defiantly, hoping the name would serve as a talisman for his protection.

‘Best let him go, Don!’ a man called.

‘Let him be!’ a woman intervened. She did not care that the boy was claiming the protection of one of Virginia’s wealthiest landowners; rather she was touched by the misery in his eyes as well as by the unmistakable fact that the crowd’s captive was very good-looking. Women had always been quick to notice Nathaniel, though he himself was too inexperienced to realize their interest.

‘You’re a Yankee, boy, aren’t you?’ the taller man challenged.

‘Not any longer.’

‘So how long have you been in Faulconer County?’ That was the tanner again.

‘Long enough.’ The lie was already losing its cohesion. Nathaniel had never visited Faulconer County, though he had met the county’s richest inhabitant, Washington Faulconer, whose son was his closest friend.

‘So what town lies halfway between here and Faulconer Court House?’ the tanner, still wanting revenge, demanded of him.

‘Answer him!’ the tall man snapped.

Nathaniel was silent, betraying his ignorance.

‘He’s a spy!’ a woman whooped.

‘Bastard!’ The tanner moved in fast, trying to kick Nathaniel, but the young man saw the kick coming and stepped to one side. He slapped a fist at the bald man, clipping an ear, then drove his other hand at the man’s ribs. It was like hitting a hog carcass for all the good it did. Then a dozen hands were mauling and hitting Nathaniel; a fist smacked into his eye and another bloodied his nose to hurl him back hard against the hotel’s wall. His carpetbag was stolen, his books were finally gone, and now a man tore open his coat and ripped his pocket book free. Nathaniel tried to stop that theft, but he was overwhelmed and helpless. His nose was bleeding and his eye swelling. The Negro teamster watched expressionless and did not even betray any reaction when a dozen men commandeered his wagon and insisted he jump down from the box. The men clambered aboard the vehicle and shouted they were going to Franklin Street where a gang was mending the road. The crowd parted to let the wagon turn while the carter, unregarded, edged his way to the crowd’s fringe before running free.

Nathaniel had been thrust against the window bars. His hands were jerked down hard across the bar’s spiked tops and tied with rope to the iron cage. He watched as one of his books was kicked into the gutter, its spine broken and its pages fluttering free. The crowd tore apart his carpetbag, but found little of value except a razor and two more books.

‘Where are you from?’ The middle-aged man who was Nathaniel’s fellow prisoner must have been a very dignified figure before the jeering crowd had dragged him to the railings. He was a portly man, balding, and wearing an expensive broadcloth coat.

‘I come from Boston.’ Nathaniel tried to ignore a drunken woman who pranced mockingly in front of him, brandishing her bottle. ‘And you, sir?’

‘Philadelphia. I only planned to be here for a few hours. I left my traps at the railroad depot and thought I’d look around the city. I have an interest in church architecture, you see, and wanted to see St. Paul’s Episcopal.’ The man shook his head sorrowfully, then flinched as he looked at Nathaniel again. ‘Is your nose broken?’

‘I don’t think so.’ The blood from his nostrils was salty on Nathaniel’s lips.

‘You’ll have a rare black eye, son. But I enjoyed seeing you fight. Might I ask your profession?’

‘I’m a student, sir. At Yale College. Or I was.’

‘My name is Doctor Morley Burroughs. I’m a dentist.’

‘Starbuck, Nathaniel Starbuck.’ Nathaniel Starbuck saw no need to hide his name from his fellow captive.

‘Starbuck!’ The dentist repeated the name in a tone that implied recognition. ‘Are you related?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I pray they don’t discover it,’ the dentist said grimly.

‘What are they going to do to us?’ Starbuck could not believe he was in real danger. He was in the plumb center of an American town in broad daylight! There were constables nearby, magistrates, churches, schools! This was America, not Mexico or Cathay.

The dentist pulled at his bonds, relaxed, pulled again. ‘From what they’re saying about road menders, son, my guess is tar and feathers, but if they find out you’re a Starbuck?’ The dentist sounded half-hopeful, as though the crowd’s animosity might be entirely diverted onto Starbuck, thus leaving him unscathed.

The drunken woman’s bottle smashed on the roadway. Two other women were dividing Starbuck’s grimy shirts between them while a small bespectacled man was leafing through the papers in Starbuck’s pocket book. There had been little money there, just four dollars, but Starbuck did not fear the loss of his money. Instead he feared the discovery of his name, which was written on a dozen letters in the pocket book. The small man had found one of the letters, which he now opened, read, turned over, then read again. There was nothing private in the letter, it merely confirmed the time of a train on the Penn Central Road, but Starbuck’s name was written in block letters on the letter’s cover and the small man had spotted it. He looked up at Starbuck, then back to the letter, then up at Starbuck yet again. ‘Is your name Starbuck?’ he asked loudly.

Starbuck said nothing.

The crowd smelled excitement and turned back to the prisoners. A bearded man, red-faced, burly and even taller than Starbuck, took up the interrogation. ‘Is your name Starbuck?’

Starbuck looked around, but there was no help in sight. The constables were leaving this mob well alone, and though some respectable-looking people were watching from the high windows of the houses on the far side of Cary Street, none was moving to stop the persecution. A few women looked sympathetically at Starbuck, but they were powerless to help. There was a minister in a frock coat and Geneva bands hovering at the crowd’s edge, but the street was too fired with whiskey and political passion for a man of God to achieve any good, and so the minister was contenting himself with making small ineffective cries of protest that were easily drowned by the raucous celebrants.

‘You’re being asked a question, boy!’ The red-faced man had taken hold of Starbuck’s tie and was twisting it so that the double loop around Starbuck’s throat tightened horribly. ‘Is your name Starbuck?’ He shouted the question, spraying Starbuck’s face with spittle laced with drink and tobacco.

‘Yes.’ There was no point in denying it. The letter was addressed to him, and a score of other pieces of paper in his luggage bore the name, just as his shirts had the fatal name sewn into their neckbands.

‘And are you any relation?’ The man’s face was broken-veined. He had milky eyes and no front teeth. A dribble of tobacco juice ran down his chin and into his brown beard. He tightened the grip on Starbuck’s neck. ‘Any relation, cuffee?’

Again it could not be denied. There was a letter from Starbuck’s father in the pocket book and the letter must be found soon, and so Starbuck did not wait for the revelation, but just nodded assent. ‘I’m his son.’

The man let go of Starbuck’s tie and yelped like a stage red Indian. ‘It’s Starbuck’s son!’ He screamed his victory to the mob. ‘We got ourselves Starbuck’s son!’

‘Oh, Christ in his holy heaven,’ the dentist muttered, ‘but you are in trouble.’

And Starbuck was in trouble, for there were few names more calculated to incense a Southern mob. Abraham Lincoln’s name would have done it well enough, and John Brown’s and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s would have sufficed to inflame a crowd, but lacking those luminaries the name of the Reverend Elial Joseph Starbuck was next best calculated to ignite a blaze of Southern rage.

For the Reverend Elial Starbuck was a famous enemy of Southern aspirations. He had devoted his life to the extirpation of slavery, and his sermons, like his editorials, ruthlessly savaged the South’s slavocracy: mocking its pretensions, flaying its morals, and scorning its arguments. The Reverend Elial’s eloquence in the cause of Negro liberty had made his name famous, not just in America, but wherever Christian men read their journals and prayed to their God, and now, on a day when the news of Fort Sumter’s capture had so inspired the South, a mob in Richmond, Virginia, had taken hold of one of the Reverend Elial Starbuck’s sons.

In truth Nathaniel Starbuck detested his father. He wanted nothing more to do with his father ever again, but the crowd could not know that, nor would they have believed Starbuck if he had told them. This crowd’s mood had turned dark as they demanded revenge on the Reverend Elial Starbuck. They were screaming for that revenge, baying for it. The crowd was also growing as people in the city heard the news about Fort Sumter’s fall and came to join the commotion that celebrated Southern liberty and triumph.

‘String him up!’ a man called.

‘He’s a spy!’

‘Nigger lover!’ A hunk of horse dung sailed toward the prisoners, missing Starbuck, but hitting the dentist on the shoulder.

‘Why couldn’t you have stayed in Boston?’ the dentist complained.

The crowd surged toward the prisoners, then checked, uncertain exactly what they wanted of their captives. A handful of ringleaders had emerged from the crowd’s anonymity, and those ringleaders now shouted for the crowd to be patient. The commandeered wagon had gone to fetch the road menders’ tar, the crowd was assured, and in the meantime a sack of feathers had been fetched from a mattress factory in nearby Virginia Street. ‘We’re going to teach you gennelmen a lesson!’ the big bearded man crowed to the two prisoners. ‘You Yankees think you’re better than us southrons, isn’t that what you think?’ He took a handful of the feathers and scattered them in the dentist’s face. ‘All high and mighty, are you?’

‘I am a mere dentist, sir, who has been practicing my trade in Petersburg.’ Burroughs tried to plead his case with dignity.

‘He’s a dentist!’ the big man shouted delightedly.

‘Pull his teeth out!’

Another cheer announced the return of the borrowed wagon, which now bore on its bed a great black steaming vat of tar. The wagon clattered to a halt close to the two prisoners, and the stench of its tar even overwhelmed the smell of tobacco, which permeated the whole city.

‘Starbuck’s whelp first!’ someone shouted, but it seemed the ceremonies were to be conducted in the order of capture, or else the ringleaders wanted to save the best till last, for Morley Burroughs, the Philadelphia dentist, was the first to be cut free of the bars and dragged toward the wagon. He struggled, but he was no match for the sinewy men who pulled him onto the wagon bed that would now serve as a makeshift stage.

‘Your turn next, Yankee.’ The small bespectacled man who had first discovered Starbuck’s identity had come to stand beside the Bostoner. ‘So what are you doing here?’

The man’s tone had almost been friendly, so Starbuck, thinking he might have found an ally, answered him with the truth. ‘I escorted a lady here.’

‘A lady now! What kind of lady?’ the small man asked. A whore, Starbuck thought bitterly, a cheat, a liar and a bitch, but God, how he had fallen in love with her, and how he had worshiped her, and how he had let her twist him about her little finger and thus ruin his life so that now he was bereft, impoverished and homeless in Richmond. ‘I asked you a question,’ the man insisted.

‘A lady from Louisiana,’ Starbuck answered mildly, ‘who wanted to be escorted from the North.’

‘You’d better pray she comes and saves you quick!’ the bespectacled man laughed, ‘before Sam Pearce gets his hands on you.’

Sam Pearce was evidently the red-faced bearded man who had become the master of ceremonies and who now supervised the stripping away of the dentist’s coat, vest, trousers, shoes, shirt and undershirt, leaving Morley Burroughs humiliated in the sunlight and wearing only his socks and a pair of long drawers, which had been left to him in deference to the modesty of the watching ladies. Sam Pearce now dipped a long-handled ladle into the vat and brought it up dripping with hot treacly tar. The crowd cheered. ‘Give it him, Sam!’

‘Give it him good!’

‘Teach the Yankee a lesson, Sam!’

Pearce plunged the ladle back in the vat and gave the tar a slow stir before lifting the ladle out with its deep bowl heaped high with the smoking, black, treacly substance. The dentist tried to pull away, but two men dragged him toward the vat and bent him over its steaming mouth so that his plump, white, naked back was exposed to the grinning Pearce, who moved the glistening, hot mass of tar over his victim.

The expectant crowd fell silent. The tar hesitated, then flowed off the ladle to strike the back of the dentist‘s balding head. The dentist screamed as the hot thick tar scalded him. He jerked away, but was pulled back, and the crowd, its tension released by his scream, cheered.

Starbuck watched, smelling the thick rank stench of the viscous tar that oozed past the dentist’s ears onto his fat white shoulders. It steamed in the warm spring air. The dentist was crying, whether at the ignominy or for the pain it was impossible to tell, but the crowd didn’t care; all they knew was that a Northerner was suffering, and that gave them pleasure.

Pearce scooped another heavy lump of tar from the vat. The crowd screamed for it to be poured on, the dentist’s knees buckled and Starbuck shivered.

‘You next, boy.’ The tanner had moved to stand beside Starbuck. ‘You next.’ He suddenly swung his fist, burying it in Starbuck’s belly to drive the air explosively out of his lungs and making the young man jerk forward against his bonds. The tanner laughed. ‘You’ll suffer, cuffee, you’ll suffer.’

The dentist screamed again. A second man had leaped onto the wagon to help Pearce apply the tar. The new man used a short-handled spade to heave a mass of thick black tar out of the vat. ‘Save some for Starbuck!’ the tanner shouted.

‘There’s plenty more here, boys!’ The new tormentor slathered his spadeful of tar onto the dentist’s back. The dentist twitched and howled, then was dragged up from his knees as yet more tar was poured down his chest so that it dripped off his belly onto his clean white drawers. Trickles of the viscous substance were dribbling down the sides of his head, down his face and down his back and thighs. His mouth was open and distorted, as though he was crying, but no sound came from him now. The crowd was ribald at the sight of him. One woman was doubled over, helpless with mirth.

‘Where are the feathers?’ another woman called.

‘Make him a chicken, Sam!’

More tar was poured on till the whole of the dentist’s upper body was smothered in the gleaming black substance. His captors had released him, but he was too stricken to try and escape now. Besides, his stockinged feet were stuck in puddles of tar, and all he could do for himself was to try and paw the filthy mess away from his eyes and mouth while his tormentors finished their work. A woman filled her apron with feathers and climbed up to the wagon’s bed where, to huge cheers, the feathers were sprinkled over the humiliated dentist. He stood there, black-draped, feathered, steaming, mouth agape, pathetic, and around him the mob howled and jeered and hooted. Some Negroes on the far sidewalk were convulsed in laughter, while even the minister who had been so pathetically protesting the scene was finding it hard not to smile at the ridiculous spectacle. Sam Pearce, the chief ringleader, released one last handful of feathers to stick in the congealing, cooling tar then stepped back and flourished a proud hand toward the dentist. The crowd cheered again.

‘Make him cluck, Sam! Make him cluck like a hen!’

The dentist was prodded with the short-handled spade until he produced a pathetic imitation of a chicken’s cluck.

‘Louder! Louder!’

Doctor Burroughs was prodded again, and this time he managed to make the miserable noise loud enough for the crowd’s satisfaction. Laughter echoed from the houses and sounded clear down to the river where the barges jostled at the quays.

‘Bring on the spy, Sam!’

‘Give it him good!’

‘Show us Starbuck’s bastard!’

Men seized Starbuck, released his bonds and hurried him toward the wagon. The tanner helped them, still striking and kicking at the helpless Starbuck, spitting his hatred and taunting him, anticipating the humiliation of Elial Starbuck’s whelp. Pearce had crammed the dentist’s top hat onto its owner’s grotesque, tar-thick, feathered head. The dentist was shaking, sobbing silently.

Starbuck was pushed hard against the wagon’s wheel. Hands reached down from above, grabbed his collar and heaved up. Men pushed at him, his knee cracked hard against the wagon side, then he was sprawling on the wagon bed, where his hand was smeared by a warm patch of spilt tar. Sam Pearce hauled Starbuck upright and displayed his bloody face to the crowd. ‘Here he is! Starbuck’s bastard!’

‘Fillet him, Sam!’

‘Push him in, Sam!’

Pearce rammed Starbuck’s head over the vat, holding his face just inches from the stinking liquid. The vat had been stolen from its coals, but it was big enough and full enough to have retained almost all its heat. Starbuck tried to flinch away as a bubble slowly erupted just beneath his bleeding nose. The tar plopped tiredly back, then Pearce jerked him back upright. ‘Let’s have your clothes off, cuffee.’

Hands pulled at Starbuck’s coat, tearing off its sleeves and ripping it clean off his back. ‘Strip him naked, Sam!’ a woman screamed excitedly.

‘Give his pa something to preach about!’ A man was jumping up and down beside the wagon. A child stood by the man, hand at her mouth, eyes bright, staring. The dentist, unremarked now, had sat on the wagon’s box, where he pathetically and uselessly tried to scrape the hot tar off his scorched skin.

Sam Pearce gave the vat a stir. The tanner was spitting again and again at Starbuck while a gray-haired man fumbled at Starbuck’s waist, loosing the buttons of his pants. ‘Don’t you dare piss on me, boy, or I’ll leave you nothing to piss with.’ He pulled the trousers down to Starbuck’s knees, provoking a shrill scream of approval from the crowd.

And a gunshot sounded too.

The gunshot cracked the still air of the street junction to startle a score of flapping birds up from the roofs of the warehouses that edged the Shockoe Slip. The crowd turned. Pearce moved to tear at Starbuck’s shirt, but a second gunshot sounded hugely loud, echoing off the far houses and causing the crowd to go very still. ‘Touch the boy again,’ a confident, lazy voice spoke, ‘and you’re a dead man.’

‘He’s a spy!’ Pearce tried to brazen out the moment.

‘He’s my guest.’ The speaker was mounted on a tall black horse and was wearing a slouch hat, a long gray coat and high boots. He was carrying a long-barreled revolver, which he now pushed into a holster on his saddle. It was a marvelously insouciant gesture, suggesting he had nothing to fear from this mob. The man’s face was shadowed by the hat’s brim, but clearly he had been recognized, and as he spurred the horse forward the crowd silently parted to give him passage. A second horseman followed, leading a riderless horse.

The first horseman reined in beside the wagon. He tilted his hat upward with the tip of a riding crop then stared with incredulity at Starbuck. ‘It’s Nate Starbuck! Yes?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Starbuck was shivering.

‘You remember me, Nate? We met in New Haven last year?’

‘Of course I remember you, sir.’ Starbuck was shaking, but with relief rather than fear. His rescuer was Washington Faulconer, father of Starbuck’s best friend and the man whose name Starbuck had earlier invoked to save himself from this mob’s wrath.

‘You seem to be getting a wrong impression of Virginian hospitality,’ Washington Faulconer said softly. ‘Shame on you!’ These last words were spoken to the crowd. ‘We’re not at war with strangers in our city! What are you? Savages?’

‘He’s a spy!’ The tanner tried to restore the crowd’s supremacy.

Washington Faulconer turned scornfully on the man. ‘And you’re a black-assed fool! You’re behaving like Yankees, all of you! Northerners might want a mobocracy for a government, but not us! Who is this man?’ He pointed with his riding crop at the dentist.

The dentist could not speak, so Starbuck, released from the grip of his enemies and with his trousers safely restored to his waist, answered for his fellow victim. ‘His name is Burroughs, sir. He’s a dentist passing through town.’

Washington Faulconer glanced about until he saw two men he recognized. ‘Bring Mister Burroughs to my house. We shall do our best to make reparations to him.’ Then, that remonstrance delivered to the shamed crowd, he looked back to Starbuck and introduced his companion, who was a dark-haired man a few years older than Starbuck. ‘This is Ethan Ridley.’ Ridley was leading the riderless horse, which he now urged alongside the wagon bed. ‘Mount up, Nate!’ Washington Faulconer urged Starbuck.

‘Yes, sir.’ Starbuck stooped for his coat, realized that it was torn beyond repair, so straightened up empty-handed. He glanced at Sam Pearce, who gave a tiny shrug as though to suggest there were no hard feelings, but there were, and Starbuck, who had never known how to control his temper, stepped fast toward the big man and hit him. Sam Pearce twisted away, but not soon enough, and Starbuck’s blow landed on his ear. Pearce stumbled, put a hand out to save himself but only succeeded in plunging the hand deep into the tar vat. He screamed, jerked himself free, but his balance was gone, and he flailed hopelessly as he tripped off the wagon’s outer end to fall with skull-cracking force onto the road. Starbuck’s hand was hurting, stung by the wild and clumsy blow, but the crowd, with the unpredictability of an impassioned mob, suddenly started laughing and cheering him.

‘Come on, Nate!’ Washington Faulconer was grinning at Pearce’s downfall.

Starbuck stepped off the wagon directly onto the horse’s back. He fumbled with his feet for the stirrups, took the reins, and kicked back with his tar-stained shoes. He guessed he had lost his books and clothes, but the loss was hardly important. The books were exegetical texts left over from his studies at the Yale Theological Seminary and at best he might have sold them for a dollar fifty. The clothes were of even less value, and so he abandoned his belongings, instead following his rescuers out of the crowd and up Pearl Street. Starbuck was still shaking, and still hardly daring to believe he had escaped the crowd’s torment. ‘How did you know I was there, sir?’ he asked Washington Faulconer.

‘I didn’t realize it was you, Nate, I just heard that some young fellow claiming to know me was about to be strung up for the crime of being a Yankee, so I thought we should take a look. It was a teamster who told me, a Negro fellow. He heard you say my name and he knew my house, so he came and told my steward. Who told me, of course.’

‘I owe you an extraordinary debt, sir.’

‘You certainly owe the Negro fellow a debt. Or rather you don’t, because I thanked him for you with a silver dollar.’ Washington Faulconer turned and looked at his bedraggled companion. ‘Does that nose hurt?’

‘No more than a usual bloody nose, sir.’

‘Might I ask just what you’re doing here, Nate? Virginia doesn’t seem the healthiest place for a Massachusetts man to be running loose.’

‘I was looking for you, sir. I was planning to walk to Faulconer Court House.’

‘All seventy miles, Nate!’ Washington Faulconer laughed. ‘Didn’t Adam tell you we keep a town house? My father was a state senator, so he liked to keep a place in Richmond to hang his hat. But why on earth were you looking for me? Or was it Adam you wanted? He’s up North, I’m afraid. He’s trying to avert war, but I think it’s a little late for that. Lincoln doesn’t want peace, so I fear we’ll have to oblige him with war.’ Faulconer offered this mix of questions and answers in a cheerful voice. He was an impressive-looking man of middle years and medium height, with a straight back and wide square shoulders. He had short fair hair, a thick square-cut beard, a face that seemed to radiate frankness and kindness, and blue eyes that were crinkled in an expression of amused benignity. To Starbuck he seemed just like his son, Adam, whom Starbuck had met at Yale and whom Starbuck always thought of as the decentest man he had ever met. ‘But why are you here, Nate?’ Faulconer asked his original question again.

‘It’s a long story, sir.’ Starbuck rarely rode a horse and did it badly. He slouched in the saddle and jolted from side to side, making a horrid contrast to his two elegant companions, who rode their horses with careless mastery.

‘I like long stories,’ Washington Faulconer said happily, ‘but save it for when you’re cleaned up. Here we are.’ He gestured with his riding crop at a lavish four-storied stone-faced house, evidently the place where his father had hung his hat. ‘No ladies staying here this week, so we can be free and easy. Ethan will get you some clothes. Show him to Adam’s room, will you, Ethan?’

Negro servants ran from the house’s stable yard to take the horses and suddenly, after weeks of uncertainty and danger and humiliation, Starbuck felt himself being surrounded by security and comfort and safety. He could almost have wept for the relief of it. America was collapsing in chaos, riot was loose on its streets, but Starbuck was safe.

‘You’re looking a deal more human, Nate!’ Washington Faulconer greeted Starbuck in his study, ‘and those clothes more or less fit. Are you feeling better?’

‘Much better. Thank you, sir.’

‘Bath hot enough?’

‘Perfect, sir.’

‘That eye looks sore. Maybe a poultice before you sleep? We had to call a doctor for your Philadelphia friend. They’re trying to unpeel the poor fellow in the stable yard. While my problem is whether to buy one thousand rifles at twelve bucks each.’

‘Why shouldn’t we?’ Ethan Ridley, who had settled Starbuck into Adam’s room then arranged for his bath and a change of clothes, was now perched on a sofa at the window of Washington Faulconer’s study, where he was toying with a long-barreled revolver that he occasionally sighted at pedestrians in the street below.

‘Because I don’t want to take the first available guns, Ethan,’ Washington Faulconer said. ‘Something better may come along in a month or two.’

‘There’s not much better than the Mississippi rifle.’ Ridley silently picked off the driver of a scarlet barouche. ‘And the price won’t go down, sir. With respect, it won’t go down. Prices never do.’

‘I guess that’s true.’ Faulconer paused, but still seemed reluctant to make a decision.

A clock ticked heavily in a corner of the room. A wagon axle squealed in the street. Ridley lit a long thin cigar and sucked hungrily on its smoke. A brass tray beside him was littered with ash and cigar butts. He drew on the cigar again, making its tip glow fierce, then glanced at Starbuck. ‘Will the North fight?’ he demanded, evidently expecting that a Yankee like Starbuck must have the answer pat.

But Starbuck had no idea what the North intended to do in the aftermath of Fort Sumter’s fall. In these last weeks Nathaniel Starbuck had been much too distracted to think about politics, and now, faced with the question that was energizing the whole South country, he did not know what to respond.

‘In one sense it doesn’t matter if they fight or not,’ Washington Faulconer spoke before Starbuck could offer any answer. ‘If we don’t seem prepared to fight, Ethan, then the North will certainly invade. But if we stand firm, why, then they may back down.’

‘Then buy the guns, sir,’ Ridley urged, reinforcing his encouragement by pulling the trigger of his empty revolver. He was a lean tall man, elegant in black riding boots, black breeches and a black coat that was smeared with traces of cigar ash. He had long dark hair oiled sleek against his skull and a beard trimmed to a rakish point. In Adam’s bedroom, while Starbuck had tidied and cleaned himself, Ridley had paced up and down the room, telling Starbuck how he was planning to marry Washington Faulconer’s daughter, Anna, and how the prospect of war had delayed their wedding plans. Ridley had talked of the possible war as an irritation rather than a calamity, and his slow, attractive Southern accent had only made the confidence in his voice all the more convincing.

‘There goes twelve thousand dollars!’ Washington Faulconer now said, evidently putting his signature to a money draft as he spoke. ‘Buy the guns for me, Ethan, and well done.’ Starbuck wondered why Washington Faulconer was buying so many rifles, but he did not need to wonder that Faulconer could afford the weapons, for he knew his friend’s father to be one of the richest men in Virginia, indeed in all the precariously United States. Faulconer could boast that the most recent survey done of his family’s land in Faulconer County had been accomplished by a raw young surveyor named George Washington, and since that day not one acre had been lost to the family and a good many had been added. Among the new acres was the land on which Faulconer’s Richmond town house stood—one of the grandest houses on Clay Street that had, at its rear, a wide stable yard with a carriage house and quarters for a dozen grooms and stalls for thirty horses. The house boasted a ballroom, a music room, and what was commonly regarded as Richmond’s finest staircase, a magnificent circling stair that swept around and up a gilded well hung with family portraits, the oldest of which had been brought from England in the seventeenth century. The books in Washington Faulconer’s study had the family’s coat of arms tooled in gold into their leather covers, while the desks, chairs and tables had all been made by Europe’s finest craftsmen because, for a man as wealthy as Washington Faulconer, only the very best would do. Flowers stood on every table, not just for decoration, but in an attempt to overwhelm the smell of the city’s tobacco factories.

‘Now, Nate,’ Washington Faulconer said heartily when he had decided to buy the twelve-dollar guns, ‘you promised us a story. There’s coffee there, or something stronger? Do you drink? You do? But not with your father’s blessing, I’m sure. Your father can hardly approve of ardent spirits, or does he? Is the Reverend Elial a prohibitionist as well as an abolitionist? He is! What a ferocious man he must be, to be sure. Sit down.’ Washington Faulconer was full of energy and happy to conduct a conversation with himself as he stood up, pulled a chair for Starbuck away from the wall, poured Starbuck coffee, then sat back at his desk. ‘So come! Tell me! Aren’t you supposed to be at the seminary?’

‘Yes, sir, I am.’ Starbuck felt inhibited suddenly, ashamed of his story and of his pathetic condition. ‘It’s a very long tale,’ he protested to Washington Faulconer.

‘The longer the better. So come along, tell!’

So Starbuck had no choice but to tell his pathetic story of obsession, love and crime; a shameful tale of how Mademoiselle Dominique Demarest of New Orleans had persuaded Nathaniel Starbuck of Yale that life had more to offer than lectures in didactic theology, sacred literature or the sermonizing arts.

‘A bad woman!’ Washington Faulconer said with happy relish when Starbuck first mentioned her. ‘Every tale should have a bad woman.’

Starbuck had first glimpsed Mademoiselle Dominique Demarest in the Lyceum Hall at New Haven where Major Ferdinand Trabell’s touring company was presenting the Only True and Authorized Stage Version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Complete with Real Bloodhounds. Trabell’s had been the third such traveling Tom company to visit New Haven that winter, and each had claimed to be presenting the only true and authorized dramatic version of the great work, but Major Trabell’s production had been the first that Starbuck dared attend. There had been impassioned debate in the seminary about the propriety of attending a thespian performance, even one dedicated to moral instruction and the abolition of slavery, but Starbuck had wanted to go because of the bloodhounds mentioned on the playbill. There had been no bloodhounds in Mrs. Beecher Stowe’s fine work, but Starbuck suspected the animals might make a dramatic addition to the story, and so he had visited the Lyceum where, awestruck, he had watched as a veritable angel who was playing the part of the fugitive slave Eliza had tripped lightly across the make-believe ice floes pursued by a pair of lethargic and dribbling dogs that might or might not have been bloodhounds.

Not that Starbuck cared about the dogs’ pedigree, but only about the angel, who had a long face, sad eyes, shadowed cheeks, a wide mouth, hair black as night, and a gentle voice. He had fallen in love instantly, furiously and, so far as he could tell, eternally. He had gone to the Lyceum the next night, and the next, and the next, which was also New Haven’s final performance of the great epic, and on the following day he had offered to help Major Trabell strike and crate the scenery, and the major, who had recently been abandoned by his only son and was therefore in need of a replacement to play the parts of Augustine St. Clair and Simon Legree, and recognizing Starbuck’s good looks and commanding presence, had offered him four dollars a week, full board, and Major Trabell’s own tutelage in the thespian arts. Not even those enticements could have persuaded Starbuck to abandon his seminary education, except that Mademoiselle Dominique Demarest had added her entreaties to those of her employer, and so, on a whim, and for his adoration of Dominique, Starbuck had become a traveling player.

‘You upped stakes and went? Just like that?’ Washington Faulconer asked with obvious amusement, even admiration.

‘Yes, sir.’ Though Starbuck had not confessed the full extent of his humiliating surrender to Dominique. He had admitted attending the theater night after night, but he had not described how he had lingered in the streets wanting a glimpse of his angel, or how he had written her name again and again in his notebooks, nor how he had tried to capture in pencil the delicacy of her long, misleadingly ethereal face, nor how he had yearned to repair the spiritual damage done to Dominique by her appalling history.

That history had been published in the New Haven newspaper that had noticed the Tom company’s performance, which notice revealed that although Mademoiselle Demarest appeared to be as white as any other respectable lady, she was in truth a nineteen-year-old octoroon who had been the slave of a savage New Orleans gentleman whose behavior rivaled that of Simon Legree. Delicacy forbade the newspaper from publishing any details of his behavior, except to say that Dominique’s owner had threatened the virtue of his fair property and thus forced Dominique, in an escape that rivaled the drama of Eliza’s fictional flight, to flee northward for liberty and the safeguard of her virtue. Starbuck tried to imagine his lovely Dominique running desperately through the Louisiana night pursued by yelping fiends, howling dogs and a slavering owner.

‘Like hell I escaped! I was never a slave, never!’ Dominique told Starbuck next day when they were riding the cars for Hartford, where the show would play for six nights in the Touro Hall. ‘I ain’t got nigger blood, not one drop. But the notion sells tickets, so it does, and tickets is money, and that’s why Trabell tells the newspapers I’m part nigger.’

‘You mean it’s a lie?’ Starbuck was horrified.

‘Of course it’s a lie!’ Dominique was indignant. ‘I told you, it just sells tickets, and tickets is money.’ She said the only truths in the fable were that she was nineteen and had been raised in New Orleans, but in a white family that she claimed was of irreproachable French ancestry. Her father possessed money, though she was vague about the exact process whereby the daughter of a wealthy Louisiana merchant came to be performing the part of Eliza in Major Ferdinand Trabell’s touring Tom company. ‘Not that Trabell’s a real major,’ Dominique confided to Starbuck, ‘but he pretends to have fought in Mexico. He says he got his limp there off a bayonet, but I reckon he more likely got stabbed by a whore in Philadelphia.’ She laughed. She was two years younger than Starbuck but seemed immeasurably older and far more experienced. She also seemed to like Starbuck, who returned her liking with a blind adoration and did not care that she was not an escaped slave. ‘How much is he paying you?’ Dominique asked Starbuck.

‘Four dollars a week.’

She laughed scornfully. ‘Robbing you!’

For the next two months Starbuck happily learned the acting trade as he worshiped at the shrine of Miss Demarest’s virtue. He enjoyed being on stage, and the fact that he was the son of the Reverend Elial Starbuck, the famous abolitionist, served to swell both Trabell’s audiences and receipts. It also brought Nathaniel’s new profession to the attention of his father who, in a terrifying fury, sent Starbuck’s elder brother, James, to bring the sinner to repentance.

James’s mission had failed miserably, and two weeks later Dominique, who had so far not permitted Starbuck any liberty beyond the holding of her hand, at last promised him the reward of his heart’s whole desire if he would just help her steal that week’s takings from Major Trabell. ‘He owes me money,’ Dominique said, and she explained that her father had written to say he was waiting for her in Richmond, Virginia, and she knew Major Trabell would not pay her any of the six months’ wages he owed and so she needed Starbuck’s help in purloining what was, by rights, already hers. For the reward she was offering, Starbuck would have helped Dominique steal the moon, but he settled for the eight hundred and sixty-four dollars he found in Major Trabell’s portmanteau, which he stole while, in the next-door room, the major took a hip bath with a young lady who was hoping for a career upon the stage and had therefore offered herself to the major’s professional inspection and judgment.

Starbuck and Dominique fled that same night, reaching Richmond just two days later. Dominique’s father was supposed to have been waiting at the Spotswood House Hotel on Main Street, but instead it was a tall young man, scarce a year older than Starbuck himself, who waited in the hotel’s parlor and who laughed with joy when Dominique appeared. The young man was Major Trabell’s son, Jefferson, who was estranged from his father, and who now dismissed Starbuck with a patronizing ten dollars. ‘Make yourself scarce, boy,’ he had said, ‘before you’re strung up for crow bait. Northerners ain’t popular in these parts right now.’ Jefferson Trabell wore buckskin breeches, top boots, a satin vest and a scarlet coat. He had dark knowing eyes and narrow side-whiskers which, like his long black hair, were oiled smooth as jet. His tie was secured with a large pearl pin and his holstered revolver had a polished silver handgrip. It was that revolver rather than the tall young man’s dandyish air that persuaded Starbuck there was little point in trying to claim his promised reward from Mademoiselle Dominique Demarest.

‘You mean she just dropped you?’ Washington Faulconer asked in disbelief.

‘Yes, sir.’ The shameful memory convulsed Starbuck with misery.

‘Without even giving you a ride?’ Ethan Ridley laid down the empty revolver as he asked the question and, though the query earned him a reproving glance from Washington Faulconer, it was also clear the older man wanted to know the answer. Starbuck offered no reply, but he had no need to. Dominique had made him into a fool, and his foolishness was obvious.

‘Poor Nate!’ Washington Faulconer was amused. ‘What are you going to do now? Go home? Your father won’t be too happy! And what of Major Trabell? He’ll be wanting to nail your gizzards to his barn door, won’t he? That and get his money back! Is he a Southerner?’

‘A Pennsylvanian, sir. But his son pretends to be a Southerner.’

‘So where is the son? Still at the Spotswood?’

‘No, sir.’ Starbuck had spent the night in a boarding house in Canal Street and, in the morning, still seething with indignation, he had gone to the Spotswood House Hotel to confront Dominique and her lover, but instead a clerk had told him that Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson Trabell had just left for the Richmond and Danville Railroad Depot. Starbuck had followed them, only to discover that the birds were flown and that their train was already steaming south out of the depot, its locomotive pumping a bitter smoke into the spring air that was so briskly filled with the news of Fort Sumter’s capitulation.

‘Oh, it’s a rare tale, Nate! A rare tale!’ Washington Faulconer laughed. ‘But you shouldn’t feel so bad. You ain’t the first young fellow to be fooled by a petticoat, and you won’t be the last, and I’ve no doubt Major Trabell’s a scoundrel as deep as they come.’ He lit a cigar, then tossed the spent match into a spittoon. ‘So what are we going to do with you?’ The lightness with which he asked the question seemed to imply that whatever answer Starbuck desired could be easily supplied. ‘Do you want to go back to Yale?’

‘No, sir.’ Starbuck spoke miserably.

‘No?’

Starbuck spread his hands. ‘I’m not sure I should be at the seminary, sir. I’m not even sure I should have been there in the first place.’ He stared down at his scarred, grazed knuckles, and bit his lip as he considered his answer. ‘I can’t become a minister now, sir, not now that I’m a thief.’ And worse than a thief, Starbuck thought. He was remembering the fourth chapter of first Timothy where St. Paul had prophesied how in the latter times some men would depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils, and Starbuck knew he had fulfilled that prophecy, and the realization imbued his voice with a terrible anguish. ‘I’m simply not worthy of the ministry, sir.’

‘Worthy?’ Washington Faulconer exclaimed. ‘Worthy! My God, Nate, if you could see the plug-uglies who shove themselves into our pulpits you wouldn’t say that! My God, we’ve got a fellow in Rosskill Church who preaches blind drunk most Sunday mornings. Ain’t that so, Ethan?’

‘Poor old fool toppled into a grave last year,’ Ridley added with amusement. ‘He was supposed to be burying someone and damn near buried himself instead.’

‘So I wouldn’t worry about being worthy,’ Faulconer said scornfully. ‘But I suppose Yale won’t be too happy to have you back, Nate, not if you walked out on them for some chickabiddy trollop? And I suppose you’re a wanted man too, eh? A thief no less!’ Faulconer evidently found this notion hugely entertaining. ‘Go back North and they’ll clap you in jail, is that it?’

‘I fear so, sir.’

Washington Faulconer hooted with amusement. ‘By God, Nate, but you are stuck in the tar patch. Both feet, both hands, ass, crop and privates! And what will your sacred father do if you go home? Give you a whipping before he turns you over to the constables?’

‘Like as not, sir, yes.’

‘So the Reverend Elial’s a whipper, is he? Likes to thrash?’

‘Yes, sir, he does.’

‘I can’t allow that.’ Washington Faulconer stood and walked to a window overlooking the street. A magnolia was in bloom in his narrow front garden, filling the window bay with its sweet scent. ‘I never was a believer in a thrashing. My father didn’t beat me and I’ve never beaten my children. Fact is, Nate, I’ve never laid a hand on any child or servant, only on my enemies.’ He spoke sententiously, as though he was accustomed to defending his strange behavior, as in truth he was, for, not ten years before, Washington Faulconer had made himself famous for freeing all his slaves. For a brief time the Northern newspapers had hailed Faulconer as a precursor of Southern enlightenment, a reputation that had made him bitterly unpopular in his native Virginia, but his neighbors’ animosity had died away when Faulconer had refused to encourage other Southerners to follow his example. He claimed the decision had been purely personal. Now, the furor long in his past, Faulconer smiled at Starbuck. ‘Just what are we going to do with you, Nate?’

‘You’ve done enough, sir,’ Starbuck said, though in reality he was hoping that far more might yet be done. ‘What I must do, sir, is find work. I have to repay Major Trabell.’

Faulconer smiled at Starbuck’s earnestness. ‘The only work around here, Nate, is common soldiering, and I don’t think that’s a trade to pay off debts in a hurry. No, I think you’d better raise your sights a little higher.’ Faulconer was taking an obvious enjoyment in solving Starbuck’s problem. He smiled, then gestured about the lavishly appointed room. ‘Maybe you’d consider staying here, Nate? With me? I’m in need of someone who can be my private secretary and do some purchasing as well.’

‘Sir!’ Ethan Ridley sat bolt upright on the sofa, his irate tone betraying that the job being offered to Starbuck was one Ridley considered his own.

‘Oh come, Ethan! You detest clerking for me! You can’t even spell!’ Faulconer chided his future son-in-law gently. ‘Besides, with the guns purchased, your main job’s done. At least for the moment.’ He sat thinking for a few seconds, then clicked his fingers. ‘I know, Ethan, go back to Faulconer County and start some proper recruiting. Beat the drum for me. If we don’t raise the county, someone else will, and I don’t want Faulconer County men fighting for other Virginia regiments. Besides, don’t you want to be with Anna?’

‘Of course I do, sir.’ Though Ridley, offered this chance to be close to his betrothed, seemed somewhat less than enthusiastic.

Washington Faulconer turned back to Starbuck. ‘I’m raising a regiment, Nate, a legion. The Faulconer Legion. I’d hoped it wouldn’t be necessary, I’d hoped common sense would prevail, but it seems the North wants a fight and, by God, we’ll have to give them one if they insist. Would it offend your loyalties to help me?’

‘No, sir.’ That seemed an entirely inadequate response, so Starbuck imbued his voice with more enthusiasm. ‘I’d be proud to help you, sir.’

‘We’ve made a beginning,’ Faulconer said modestly. ‘Ethan has been buying equipment and we’ve found our guns now, as you heard, but the paperwork is already overwhelming. Do you think you can handle some correspondence for me?’

Could Starbuck handle correspondence? Nathaniel Starbuck would have done all Washington Faulconer’s correspondence from that moment until the seas ran dry. Nathaniel Starbuck would do whatever this marvelous, kind, decent and carelessly generous man wanted him to do. ‘Of course I can help, sir. It would be a privilege.’

‘But, sir!’ Ethan Ridley tried one last patriotic protest. ‘You can’t trust military affairs to a Northerner.’

‘Nonsense, Ethan! Nate’s stateless! He’s an outlaw! He can’t go home, not unless he goes to jail, so he’ll just have to stay here. I’m making him an honorary Virginian.’ Faulconer bestowed a bow on Starbuck in recognition of this elevated status. ‘So welcome to the southland, Nate.’

Ethan Ridley looked astonished at his future father-in-law’s quixotic kindness, but Nathaniel Starbuck did not care. He had fallen on his feet, his luck had turned clean round, and he was safe in the land of his father’s enemies. Starbuck had come South.

TWO

STARBUCK’S FIRST DAYS in Richmond were spent accompanying Ethan Ridley to warehouses that held the stores and supplies that would equip the Faulconer Legion. Ridley had arranged for the purchase of the equipment and now, before he left to begin the major recruiting effort in Faulconer County, he made certain Starbuck was able to take over his responsibilities. ‘Not that you need bother with the finances, Reverend,’ Ridley told Starbuck, using the half-mocking and half-teasing nickname he had adopted for the Northerner, ‘I’ll just let you arrange the transport.’ Starbuck would then be left to kick his heels in big echoing warehouses or in dusty counting houses while Ridley talked business in the private inner office before emerging to toss another instruction Starbuck’s way. ‘Mister Williams will have six crates ready for collection next week. By Thursday, Johnny?’

‘Ready by Thursday, Mister Ridley.’ The Williams warehouse was selling the Faulconer Legion a thousand pairs of boots, while other merchants were selling the regiment rifles, uniforms, percussion caps, buttons, bayonets, powder, cartridges, revolvers, tents, skillets, haversacks, canteens, tin mugs, hemp line, webbing belts: all the mundane necessities of military paraphernalia, and all of it coming from private warehouses because Washington Faulconer refused to deal with the Virginian government. ‘You have to understand. Reverend,’ Ridley told Starbuck, ‘that Faulconer ain’t fond of the new governor, and the new governor ain’t fond of Faulconer. Faulconer thinks the governor will let him pay for the Legion, then steal it away from him, so we ain’t allowed to have anything to do with the state government. We’re not to encourage them, see? So we can’t buy goods out of the state armories, which makes life kind of difficult.’ Though plainly Ethan Ridley had overcome many of the difficulties, for Starbuck’s notebook was filling impressively with lists of crates, boxes, barrels and sacks that needed to be collected and delivered to the town of Faulconer Court House. ‘Money,’ Ridley told him, ‘that’s the key, Reverend. There’s a thousand fellows trying to buy equipment, and there’s a shortage of everything, so you need deep pockets. Let’s go get a drink.’

Ethan Ridley took a perverse delight in introducing Starbuck to the city’s taverns, especially the dark, rancid drinking houses that were hidden among the mills and lodging houses on the northern bank of the James River. ‘This ain’t like your father’s church, is it, Reverend?’ Ridley would ask of some rat-infested, rotting hovel, and Starbuck would agree that the liquor den was indeed a far cry from his ordered, Boston upbringing where cleanliness had been a mark of God’s favor and abstinence a surety of his salvation.

Ridley evidently wanted to savor the pleasure of shocking the Reverend Elial Starbuck’s son, yet even the filthiest of Richmond’s taverns held a romance for Starbuck solely because it was such a long way from his father’s Calvinist joylessness. It was not that Boston lacked drinking houses as poverty stricken and hopeless as any in Richmond, but Starbuck had never been inside Boston’s drinking dens and thus he took a strange satisfaction out of Ridley’s midday excursions into Richmond’s malodorous alleyways. The adventures seemed proof that he really had escaped his family’s cold, disapproving grasp, but Starbuck’s evident enjoyment of the expeditions only made Ridley try yet harder to shock him. ‘If I abandoned you in this place, Reverend,’ Ridley threatened Starbuck in one seamen’s tavern that stank from the sewage dripping into the river from a rusting pipe not ten feet from the stillroom, ‘you’d have your throat cut inside five minutes.’

‘Because I’m a Northerner?’

‘Because you’re wearing shoes.’

‘I’d be all right,’ Starbuck boasted. He had no weapons, and the dozen men in the tavern looked capable of slitting a congregation of respectable throats with scarce a twinge of conscience, but Starbuck would not let himself show any fear in front of Ethan Ridley. ‘Leave me here if you want.’

‘You wouldn’t dare stay here on your own,’ Ridley said.

‘Go on. See if I mind.’ Starbuck turned to the serving hatch and snapped his fingers. ‘One more glass here. Just one!’ That was pure bravado, for Starbuck hardly drank any alcohol. He would sip at a whiskey, but Ridley always finished the glass. The terror of sin haunted Starbuck, indeed it was that terror which gave the tavern excursions their piquancy, and liquor was one of the greater sins whose temptations Starbuck half-flirted with and half-resisted.

Ridley laughed at Starbuck’s defiance. ‘You’ve got balls, Starbuck, I’ll say that.’

‘So leave me here.’

‘Faulconer won’t forgive me if I get you killed. You’re his new pet puppy, Reverend.’

‘Pet puppy?’ Starbuck bridled at the words.

‘Don’t take offense, Reverend.’ Ridley stamped on the butt of a smoked cigar and immediately lit another. He was a man of impatient appetites. ‘Faulconer’s a lonely man, and lonely men like having pet puppies. That’s why he’s so keen on secession.’

‘Because he’s lonely?’ Starbuck did not understand.

Ridley shook his head. He was lounging with his back against the counter, staring through a cracked dirty window to where a two-masted ship creaked against a crumbling river quay. ‘Faulconer supports the rebellion because he thinks it’ll make him popular with his father’s old friends. He’ll prove himself a more fervent Southerner than any of them, because in a way he ain’t a Southerner at all, you know what I mean?’

‘No.’

Ridley grimaced, as though unwilling to explain himself, but then tried anyway. ‘He owns land, Reverend, but he don’t use it. He doesn’t farm it, he doesn’t plant it, he doesn’t even graze it. He just owns it and stares at it. He doesn’t have niggers, at least not as slaves. His money comes out of railroads and paper, and the paper comes out of New York or London. He’s probably more at home in Europe than here in Richmond, but that don’t stop wanting him to belong here. He wants to be a Southerner, but he ain’t.’ Ridley blew a plume of cigar smoke across the room, then turned his dark, sardonic gaze on Starbuck. ‘I’ll give you a piece of advice.’

‘Please.’

‘Keep agreeing with him,’ Ridley said very seriously. ‘Family can disagree with Washington, which is why he don’t spend too much time with family, but private secretaries like you and me ain’t allowed any disagreements. Our job is to admire him. You understand me?’

‘He’s admirable anyway,’ Starbuck said loyally.

‘I guess we’re all admirable,’ Ridley said with amusement, ‘so long as we can find a pedestal high enough to stand on. Washington’s pedestal is his money, Reverend.’

‘And yours too?’ Starbuck asked belligerently.

‘Not mine, Reverend. My father lost all the family money. My pedestal, Reverend, is horses. I’m the best damned horseman you’ll find this side of the Atlantic. Or any side for that matter.’ Ridley grinned at his own lack of modesty, then tossed back his glass of whiskey. ‘Let’s go and see if those bastards at Boyle and Gamble have found the field glasses they promised me last week.’

In the evenings Ridley would disappear to his half-brother’s rooms in Grace Street, leaving Starbuck to walk back to Washington Faulconer’s house through streets that were swarming with strange-looking creatures come from the deeper, farther reaches of the South. There were thin-shanked, gaunt-faced men from Alabama, long-haired leather-skinned horse riders from Texas and bearded homespun volunteers from Mississippi, all of them armed like buccaneers and ready to drink themselves into fits of instant fury. Whores and liquor salesmen made small fortunes, city rents doubled and doubled again, and still the railroads brought fresh volunteers to Richmond. They had come, one and all, to protect the new Confederacy from the Yankees, though at first it looked as if the new Confederacy would be better advised to protect itself from its own defenders, but then, obedient to the insistent commands of the state’s newly appointed military commander, all the ragtag volunteers were swept away to the city’s Central Fair Grounds where cadets from the Virginia Military Institute were brought to teach them basic drill.

That new commander of the Virginian militia, Major-General Robert Lee, also insisted on paying a courtesy call on Washington Faulconer. Faulconer suspected that the proposed visit was a ploy by Virginia’s new governor to take control of the Legion, yet, despite his misgivings, Faulconer could scarcely refuse to receive a man who came from a Virginia family as old and prominent as his own. Ethan Ridley had left Richmond the day before Lee’s visit, and so Starbuck was ordered to be present at the meeting. ‘I want you to make notes of what’s said,’ Faulconer warned him darkly. ‘Letcher’s not the kind of man to let a patriot raise a regiment. You mark my words, Nate, he’ll have sent Lee to take the Legion away from me.’

Starbuck sat at one side of the study, a notebook open on his knees, though in the event nothing of any great importance was discussed. The middle-aged Lee, who was dressed in civilian clothes and attended by one young captain in the uniform of the state militia, first exchanged civilities with Faulconer, then formally, almost apologetically, explained that Governor Letcher had appointed him to command the state’s military forces and his first duty was to recruit, equip and train those forces, in which connection he understood that Mister Faulconer was raising a regiment in Faulconer County?

‘A legion,’ Faulconer corrected him.

‘Ah yes, indeed, a legion.’ Lee seemed quite flummoxed by the word.

‘And not one stand of its arms, not one cannon, not one cavalry saddle, not one buttonhook or one canteen, indeed not one item of its equipment, Lee, will be a charge upon the state,’ Faulconer said proudly. ‘I am paying for it, down to the last bootlace.’

‘An expensive undertaking, Faulconer, I’m sure.’ Lee frowned, as though puzzled by Faulconer’s generosity. The general had a great reputation, and folk in Richmond had taken immense comfort from the fact that he had returned to his native state rather than accept the command of Abraham Lincoln’s Northern armies, but Starbuck, watching the quiet, neat, gray-bearded man, could see little evidence of the general’s supposed genius. Lee seemed reticent to the point of timidity and was entirely dwarfed by Washington Faulconer’s energy and enthusiasm. ‘You mention cannon and cavalry,’ Lee said, speaking very diffidently, ‘does that mean your regiment, your Legion I should say, will consist of all arms?’

‘All arms?’ Washington Faulconer was unfamiliar with the phrase.

‘The Legion will not consist of infantry alone?’ Lee explained courteously.

‘Indeed. Indeed. I wish to bring the Confederacy a fully trained, fully equipped, wholly useful unit.’ Faulconer paused to consider the wisdom of his next words, but then decided a little bombast would not be misplaced. ‘I fancy the Legion will be akin to Bonaparte’s elite troops. An imperial guard for the Confederacy.’

‘Ah, indeed.’ It was hard to tell whether Lee was impressed or aghast at the vision. He paused for a few seconds, then calmly remarked that he looked forward to the day when such a Legion would be fully assimilated into the state’s forces. That was precisely what Faulconer feared most—a naked grab by Governor John Letcher to take command of his Legion and thus reduce it to yet another mediocre component in the state militia. Faulconer’s vision was much grander than the governor’s lukewarm ambitions, and, in defense of that vision, he made no response to Lee’s words. The general frowned. ‘You do understand, Mister Faulconer, that we must have order and arrangement?’

‘Discipline, you mean?’

‘The very word. We must use discipline.’

Washington Faulconer ceded the point graciously, then inquired of Lee whether the state would like to assume the cost of outfitting and equipping the Faulconer Legion? He let that dangerous question dangle for a few seconds, then smiled. ‘As I made clear to you, Lee, my ambition is to provide the Confederacy with a finished article, a trained Legion, but if the state is to intervene’—he meant interfere, but was too tactful to use the word—‘then I think it only right that the state should take over the necessary funding and, indeed, reimburse me for the monies already expressed. My secretary, Mister Starbuck, can give you a full accounting.’

Lee received the threat without changing his placid, somewhat anxious expression. He glanced at Starbuck, seemed curious about the young man’s fading black eye, but made no comment. Instead he looked back to Washington Faulconer. ‘But you do intend to place the Legion under the proper authority?’

‘When it is trained, indeed.’ Faulconer chuckled. ‘I am hardly proposing to wage a private war on the United States.’

Lee did not smile at the small jest, instead he seemed rather downcast, but it seemed triumphantly clear to Starbuck that Washington Faulconer had won his victory over Governor Letcher’s representative and that the Faulconer Legion would not be assimilated into the new regiments being hurriedly raised across the state. ‘Your recruitment goes well?’ Lee asked.

‘I have one of my best officers supervising the process. We’re only levying recruits in the county, not outside.’ That was not wholly true, but Faulconer felt the state would respect his proprietorial rights inside Faulconer County, whereas if he too openly recruited outside the county the state might complain that he was poaching.

Lee seemed happy enough with the reassurance. ‘And the training?’ he asked. ‘It will be in competent hands?’

‘Extremely competent,’ Faulconer said enthusiastically, but without adding any of the detail Lee clearly wanted to hear. In Faulconer’s absence the Legion’s training would be supervised by the Legion’s second in command, Major Alexander Pelham, who was a neighbor of Faulconer’s and a veteran of the War of 1812. Pelham was now in his seventies, but Faulconer claimed he was as able and vigorous as a man half his age. Pelham was also the only officer connected to the Legion who had ever experienced warfare, though as Ethan Ridley had cattily remarked to Starbuck, that experience had been confined to a single day’s action, and that single action had been the defeat at Bladensburg.

Lee’s visit ended with an inconsequential exchange of views on how the war should be prosecuted. Faulconer vigorously pressed the necessity of capturing the city of Washington, while Lee talked of the urgent need to secure Virginia’s defenses, and afterward, with mutual assurances of goodwill, the two men parted. Washington Faulconer waited until the general had gone down the famous curved staircase, then exploded at Starbuck. ‘What chance do we have when fools like that are put in command? Dear God, Nate, but we need younger men, energetic men, hard-driving men, not washed-out, cautious buffoons!’ He paced the room vigorously, impotent to express the full measure of his frustration. ‘I knew the governor would try to kidnap the Legion! But he’ll need to send someone with sharper claws than that!’ He gestured scornfully toward the door through which Lee had left.

‘The newspapers say he’s the most admired soldier in America.’ Starbuck could not resist the observation.

‘Admired for what? Keeping his pants clean in Mexico? If there’s going to be war, Nate, it will not be a romp against an ill-armed pack of Mexicans! You heard him, Nate! “The paramount importance of keeping the Northern forces from attacking Richmond.”’ Faulconer gave a rather good imitation of the softspoken Lee, then savaged him with criticism. ‘Defending Richmond isn’t paramount! What’s paramount is winning the war. It means hitting them hard and soon. It means attack, attack, attack!’ He glanced at a side table where maps of the western part of Virginia lay beside a timetable of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Despite his denial of planning to wage a private war on the North, Washington Faulconer was plotting an attack on the rail line that fed supplies and recruits from the western states to the city of Washington. His ideas for the raid were still forming, but he was imagining a small, fast force of mounted soldiers who would burn down trestles, derail locomotives and tear up track. ‘I hope the fool didn’t see those maps,’ he said in sudden worry.

‘I covered them with maps of Europe before General Lee arrived, sir,’ Starbuck said.

‘You’re a brisk one, Nate! Well done! Thank God I’ve got young men like you, and none of Lee’s dullards from West Point. Is that why we’re supposed to admire him? Because he was a good superintendent of West Point? And what does that make him? It makes him a schoolmaster!’ Faulconer’s scorn was palpable. ‘I know schoolmasters, Nate. My brother-in-law’s a schoolmaster and the man isn’t fit to be a cookhouse corporal, but he still insists I should make him an officer in the Legion. Never! Pecker is a fool! A cretin! A lunkhead! A heathen! A he-biddy. That’s what my brother-in-law is, Nate, a he-biddy!’

Something in Washington Faulconer’s energetic tirade triggered Starbuck’s memory of the amusing stories Adam liked to tell about his eccentric schoolmaster uncle. ‘He was Adam’s tutor, sir, yes?’

‘He tutored both Adam and Anna. Now he runs the country school, and Miriam wants me to make him a major.’ Miriam was Washington Faulconer’s wife, a woman who remained secluded in the country and suffered from a debilitating variety of mysterious maladies. ‘Make Pecker a major!’ Faulconer hooted with derisive laughter at the very idea. ‘My God, you wouldn’t put the pathetic fool in charge of a henhouse, let alone a regiment of fighting men! He’s a poor relation, Nate. That’s what Pecker is. A poor relation. Ah well, to work!’

There was plenty of work. The house was besieged by callers, some wanting monetary help to develop a secret weapon they swore would bring instant victory to the South, others seeking an officer’s appointment with the Legion. A good number of the latter were professional European soldiers on half pay from their own armies, but all such petitioners were told that the Faulconer Legion would elect only local men to be its company officers and that Faulconer’s appointed aides would all be Virginians too. ‘Except for you, Nate,’ Washington Faulconer told Starbuck, ‘that’s if you’d like to serve me?’

‘I’d be honored, sir.’ And Starbuck felt a warm rush of gratitude for the kindness and trust that Faulconer was showing him.

‘You won’t find it hard to fight against your own kind, Nate?’ Faulconer asked solicitously.

‘I feel more at home here, sir.’

‘And so you should. The South is the real America, Nate, not the North.’

Not ten minutes later Starbuck had to refuse an appointment to a scarred Austrian cavalry officer who claimed to have fought in a half-dozen hard battles in Northern Italy. The man, hearing that only Virginians would be allowed to command in the Legion, sarcastically inquired how he could reach Washington. ‘Because if no one will have me here, then by God I shall fight for the North!’

The beginning of May brought the news that Northern warships had begun a blockade of the Confederate coast. Jefferson Davis, the new president of the Provisional Government of the Confederate States of America, retaliated by signing a declaration of war against the United States, though the State of Virginia seemed in two minds about waging that war. State troops were withdrawn from Alexandria, a town just across the Potomac River from Washington, an act that Washington Faulconer scathingly condemned as typical of Letcher’s caviling timidity. ‘You know what the governor wants?’ he asked Nate.

‘To take the Legion from you, sir?’

‘He wants the North to invade Virginia, because that’ll ease him off the political fence without tearing his britches. He’s never been fervent for secession. He’s a trimmer, Nate, that’s his trouble, a trimmer.’ Yet the very next day brought news that Letcher, far from waiting supine while the North restored the Union, had ordered Virginian troops to occupy the town of Harper’s Ferry fifty miles upstream of Washington. The North had abandoned the town without a fight, leaving behind tons of gun-making equipment in the Federal arsenal. Richmond celebrated the news, though Washington Faulconer seemed rueful. He had cherished his idea of an attack on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad whose track crossed the Potomac at Harper’s Ferry, but now, with the town and its bridge safe in Southern hands, there no longer seemed any need to raid the line farther west. The news of the river town’s occupation also promoted a flurry of speculation that the Confederacy was about to make a preemptive attack across the Potomac, and Faulconer, fearing that his rapidly growing Legion might be denied its proper place in such a victorious invasion, decided his place was at Faulconer Court House, where he could hasten the Legion’s training. ‘I’ll bring you out to Faulconer County as soon as I can,’ Faulconer promised Starbuck as he mounted his horse for the seventy-mile ride to his country estate. ‘Write to Adam for me, will you?’

‘I will, sir, of course.’

‘Tell him to come home.’ Faulconer raised a gloved hand in farewell, then released his tall black horse to the road. ‘Tell him to come home!’ he shouted as he went.

Starbuck dutifully wrote, addressing his letter to the church in Chicago that forwarded Adam’s mail. Adam, just like Starbuck, had abandoned his studies at Yale, but where Starbuck had done it for an obsession with a girl, Adam had gone to Chicago to join the Christian Peace Commission which, by prayer, tracts and witness had been trying to bring the two parts of America back into peaceful amity.

No answer came from Chicago, yet every post brought Starbuck new and urgent demands from Washington Faulconer. ‘How long will it take Shaffer’s to make officers’ uniforms?’ ‘Do we have a determination of officers’ insignia? This is important, Nate! Inquire at Mitchell and Tylers,’ ‘Visit Boyle and Gambles and ask about saber patterns,’ ‘In my bureau, third drawer down, is a revolver made by Le Mat, send it back with Nelson.’ Nelson was one of the two Negro servants who carried the letters between Richmond and Faulconer Court House. ‘The Colonel’s mighty anxious to collect his uniforms,’ Nelson confided to Starbuck. ‘The Colonel’ was Washington Faulconer, who had begun signing his letters ‘Colonel Faulconer,’ and Starbuck took good care to address Faulconer with the self-bestowed rank. The Colonel had ordered notepaper printed with the legend ‘The Faulconer Legion, Campaign Headquarters, Colonel Washington Faulconer, State of Virginia, Commanding,’ and Starbuck used the proof sheet to write the Colonel the happy news that his new uniforms were expected to be ready by Friday and promising he would have them sent out to Faulconer County immediately.

On that Friday morning Starbuck was sitting down to bring his account books up-to-date when the door to the music room banged open and a tall stranger glowered angrily from the threshold. He was a tall thin man, all bony elbows, long shanks and protruding knees. He looked to be in early middle age, had a black beard streaked with gray, a sharp nose, slanted cheekbones and tousled black hair, and was wearing a threadbare black suit over scuffed brown work boots; altogether a scarecrow figure whose sudden appearance had made Starbuck jump.

‘You must be Starbuck, ah-ha?’

‘I am, sir.’

‘I heard your father preach once.’ The curious man bustled into the room, looking for somewhere to drop his bag and umbrella and walking stick and coat and hat and book bag, and, finding no place suitable, clung to them. ‘He was impassioned, yes, but he tortured his logic. Does he always?’

‘I’m not sure what you mean. You, sir, are?’

‘It was in Cincinatti. At the old Presbyterian Hall, the one on Fourth Avenue, or was it Fifth? It was in ’56, anyway, or maybe it was ’55? The hall has since burned down, but is no loss to the architecture of what is left of the Republic. Not a fine building in my opinion. Of course none of the fools in the audience noted your father’s logic. They just wanted to cheer his every word. Down with the slavocracy! Up with our sable brethren! Hallelujah! Evil in our midst! Slur on a great nation! Bah!’

Starbuck, even though he disliked his father, felt pressed to defend him. ‘You made your opposition known to my father, sir? Or do you just start quarrels with his son?’

‘Quarrels? Opposition? I hold no opposition to your father’s views! I agree with them, each and every one. Slavery, Starbuck, is a menace to our society. I simply disagree with your father’s contemptible logic! It is not enough to pray for an end to the peculiar institution, we have to propose practical arrangements for its abolition. Are the slaveholders to be recompensed for their pecuniary loss? And if so, by whom? By the Federal government? By a sale of bonds? And what of the Negroes themselves? Are we to repatriate them to Africa? Settle them in South America? Or are we to breed the darkness out of them by forcible miscegenation, a process, I might say, which has been well begun by our slave owners. Your father made no mention of these matters, but merely had recourse to indignation and prayer, as if prayer has ever settled anything!’

‘You do not believe in prayer, sir?’

‘Believe in prayer!’ The thin man was scandalized by the very thought of such a belief. ‘If prayer solved anything there’d be no unhappiness in this world, would there? All the moaning women would be smiling! There would be no more disease, no more hunger, no more appalling children picking their snot-filled nostrils in our schoolrooms, no more sniveling infants brought for my admiration. Why should I admire their mewling, puking, whimpering, filthy-faced offspring? I do not like children! I have been telling Washington Faulconer that simple fact for fourteen years now! Fourteen years! Yet my brother-in-law seems incapable of understanding the simplest sentence of plain-spoken English and insists I run his schoolroom. Yet I do not like children, I have never liked children and I hope that I never shall like children. Is that so very hard to understand?’ The man still clung to his awkward burdens, even as he waited for Starbuck’s response.

Starbuck suddenly understood who this bad-tempered disorganized man was. This was the he-biddy, the poor relation, Faulconer’s brother-in-law. ‘You’re Mister Thaddeus Bird,’ he said.

‘Of course I’m Thaddeus Bird!’ Bird seemed angry that his identity needed confirmation. He glared bright-eyed and bristling at Starbuck. ‘Have you heard a word I said?’

‘You were telling me you do not like children.’

‘Filthy little beasts. In the North, mark you, you raise children differently. There you are not afraid to discipline them. Or beat them, indeed! But here, in the South, we need differentiate our children from our slaves and so we beat the latter and destroy the former with kindness.’

‘Mister Faulconer beats neither, I believe?’

Bird froze, staring at Starbuck as though the younger man had just uttered an extraordinary profanity. ‘My brother-in-law, I perceive, has been advertising his good qualities to you. His good qualities, Starbuck, are dollars. He buys affection, adulation and admiration. Without money he would be as empty as a Tuesday night pulpit. Besides he does not need to beat his servants or children because my sister can beat enough for twenty.’

Starbuck was offended by this ungrateful attack on his patron. ‘Mister Faulconer freed his slaves, did he not?’

‘He freed twenty house slaves, six garden boys and his stable people. He never had field hands because he never needed them. The Faulconer fortune is not based on cotton or tobacco, but upon inheritance, railroads and investment, so it was a painless gesture, Starbuck, and principally done, I suspect, to spite my sister. It is, perhaps, the one good deed Faulconer ever did, and I refer to the exercise of spitefulness rather than to the act of manumission.’ Bird, failing to find anywhere to put down his belongings, simply opened his arms and let them all drop untidily onto the music room’s parquet floor. ‘Faulconer wants you to deliver the uniforms.’

Starbuck was taken aback, but then realized the subject had abruptly been changed to the Colonel’s new finery. ‘He wants me to take them to Faulconer Court House?’

‘Of course he does!’ Bird almost screamed at Starbuck. ‘Must I state the obvious? If I say that Faulconer wishes you to deliver his uniforms, must I first define uniforms? And afterward identify Washington Faulconer? Or the Colonel, as we must all now learn to call him? Good God, Starbuck, and you were at Yale?’

‘At the seminary.’

‘Ah! That explains all. A mind that can credit the bleatings of theology professors can hardly be expected to understand plain English.’ Thaddeus Bird evidently found this insult amusing, for he began to laugh and, at the same time, to jerk his head backward and forward in a motion so like a woodpecker that it was instantly obvious how his nickname had arisen. Yet if Starbuck himself had been asked to christen this thin, angular and unpleasant man with a nickname it would not have been Pecker, but Spider, for there was something about Thaddeus Bird that irresistibly reminded Starbuck of a long-legged, hairy, unpredictable and malevolent spider. ‘The Colonel has sent me to run some errands in Richmond, while you are to go to Faulconer Court House,’ Pecker Bird went on, but in a plump, mocking voice such as he might use to a small and not very clever child. ‘Stop me if your Yale-educated mind finds any of these instructions difficult to understand. You will go to Faulconer Court House where the Colonel’—Bird paused to make a mocking salute—‘wishes for your company, but only if the tailors have finished making his uniforms. You are to be the official conveyor of those uniforms, and of his daughter’s manifold petticoats. Your responsibilities are profound.’

‘Petticoats?’ Starbuck asked.

‘Women’s undergarments,’ Bird said maliciously, then sat at Washington Faulconer’s grand piano where he played a swift and remarkably impressive arpeggio before settling into the tune of ‘John Brown’s Body’ to which, without regard to either scansion or tune, he chanted conversationally. ‘Why does Anna want so many petticoats? Especially as my niece already possesses more petticoats than a reasonable man might have thought necessary for a woman’s comfort, but reason and young ladies have never kept close company. But why does she want Ridley? I cannot answer that question either.’ He stopped playing, frowning. ‘Though he is a remarkably talented artist.’

‘Ethan Ridley?’ Starbuck, trying to follow the tortuous changes in Bird’s conversation, asked in surprise.

‘Remarkably talented,’ Bird confirmed rather wistfully, as though he envied Ridley’s skill, ‘but lazy, of course. Natural talent going to waste, Starbuck. Just wasted! He won’t work at his talent. He prefers to marry money rather than make it.’ He accentuated this judgment by playing a gloomy minor chord, then frowned. ‘He is a slave of nature,’ he said, looking expectantly at Starbuck.

‘And a son of hell?’ The second half of the Shakespearean insult slipped gratifyingly into Starbuck’s mind.

‘So you have read something other than your sacred texts.’ Bird seemed disappointed, but then recovered his malevolence as he lowered his voice into a confiding hiss, saying, ‘But I shall tell you, Starbuck, that the slave of nature will marry the Colonel’s daughter! Why does that family contract such marriages? God knows, and he is not saying, though at present, mark my words, young Ridley is in bad odor with the Colonel. He has failed to recruit Truslow! Ah-ha!’ Bird crashed a demonic and celebratory discord on the piano. ‘No Truslow! Ridley had better look to his laurels, had he not? The Colonel is not best pleased.’

‘Who is Truslow?’ Starbuck asked somewhat despairingly.

‘Truslow!’ Bird said portentously, then paused to play a foreboding couplet of bass notes. ‘Truslow, Starbuck, is our county’s murderer! Our outlaw! Our hardscrabble demon from the hills! Our beast, our creature of darkness, our fiend!’ Bird cackled at this fine catalog of mischief, then twisted on the piano bench to face Starbuck. ‘Thomas Truslow is a rogue, and my brother-in-law the Colonel, who lacks common sense, wishes to recruit Truslow into the Legion because, he says, Truslow served as a soldier in Mexico. And so Truslow did, but the real reason, mark my words well, Starbuck, is that my brother-in-law believes that by recruiting him he can harness Truslow’s reputation to the greater glory of his ridiculous Legion. In brief, Starbuck, the great Washington Faulconer desires the murderer’s approval. The world is a strange place indeed. Shall we now go and buy petticoats?’

‘You say Truslow’s a murderer?’

‘I did indeed. He stole another man’s wife, and killed the man thus to obtain her. He then volunteered for the Mexican War to escape the constables, but after the war he took up where he left off. Truslow’s not a man to ignore his talents, you understand? He killed a man who insulted his wife, and cut the throat of another who tried to steal his horse, which is a rare jest, believe me, because Truslow must be the biggest horse thief this side of the Mississippi.’ Bird took a thin and very dark cigar from one of his shabby pockets. He paused to bite the tip off the cigar, then spat the shred of tobacco across the room in the vague direction of a porcelain spittoon. ‘And he hates Yankees. Detests them! If he meets you in the Legion, Starbuck, he’ll probably hone his murdering talents still further!’ Bird lit the cigar, puffed smoke and cackled amusement, his head nodding back and forth. ‘Have I satisfied your curiosity, Starbuck? Have we gossiped sufficiently? Good, then we shall go and see if the Colonel’s uniforms are truly ready and then we shall buy Anna her petticoats. To war, Starbuck, to war!’

Thaddeus Bird first strode across town to Boyle and Gambles’s huge warehouse where he placed an order for ammunition. ‘Minié bullets. The nascent Legion is firing them faster than the factories can make them. We need more, and still more. You can provide minié bullets?’

‘Indeed we can, Mister Bird.’

‘I am not Mister Bird!’ Bird announced grandly, ‘but Major Bird of the Faulconer Legion.’ He clicked his heels together and offered the elderly salesman a bow.

Starbuck gaped at Bird. Major Bird? This ludicrous man whom Washington Faulconer had declared would never be commissioned? A man, Faulconer claimed, not fit to be a cookhouse corporal? A man, if Starbuck remembered rightly, who would be commissioned only over Faulconer’s dead body? And Bird was to be made a major while professional European soldiers, veterans of real wars, were being turned down for mere lieutenancies?

‘And we need still more percussion caps’—Bird was oblivious of Starbuck’s astonishment—‘thousands of the little devils. Send them to the Faulconer Legion Encampment at Faulconer Court House in Faulconer County.’ He signed the order with a flourish, Major Thaddeus Caractacus Evillard Bird. ‘Grandparents,’ he curtly explained the grandiose names to Starbuck, ‘two Welsh, two French, all dead, let us go.’ He led the way out of the warehouse and downhill toward Exchange Alley.

Starbuck matched strides with the long-pacing Bird and broached the difficult subject. ‘Allow me to congratulate you on your commission, Major Bird?’

‘So your ears work, do they? That’s good news, Starbuck. A young man should possess all his faculties before age, liquor and stupidity erase them. Yes, indeed. My sister bestirred herself from her sickbed to prevail upon the Colonel to commission me a major in his Legion. I do not know upon what precise authority Colonel Brigadier General Captain Lieutenant Admiral the Lord High Executioner Faulconer makes such an appointment, but perhaps we do not need authority in these rebellious days. We are, after all, Robinson Crusoes marooned upon an authority-less island, and we must therefore fashion what we can out of what we find there, and my brother-in-law has discovered within himself the power to make me a major, so that is what I am.’

‘You desired such an appointment?’ Starbuck asked very politely, because he could not really imagine this extraordinary man wanting to be a soldier.

‘Desired?’ Pecker Bird came to an abrupt stop on the pavement, thus forcing a lady to make an exaggerated swerve about the obstacle he had so suddenly created. ‘Desired? That is a pertinent question, Starbuck, such as one might have expected from a Boston youth. Desired?’ Bird tangled his beard in his fingers as he thought of his answer. ‘My sister desired it, that is certain, for she is stupid enough to believe that military rank is an automatic conferrer of respectability, which quality she feels I lack, but did I desire the appointment? Yes I did. I must confess I did, and why, you ask? Because firstly, Starbuck, wars are customarily conducted by fools and it thus behooves me to offer myself as an antidote to that sad reality.’ The schoolmaster offered this appalling immodesty in all apparent sincerity and in a voice that had attracted the amused attention of several pedestrians. ‘And secondly it will take me away from the schoolroom. Do you know how I despise children? How I dislike them? How their very voices make me wish to scream in protest! Their mischief is cruel, their presence demeaning and their conversation tedious. Those are my chief reasons.’ Suddenly, and as abruptly as he had stopped his forward progress, Major Thaddeus Caractacus Evillard Bird began striding downhill again with his long ragged pace.

‘There were arguments against accepting the appointment,’ Bird continued when Starbuck had caught up with him. ‘First, the necessary close association with my brother-in-law, but upon balance that is preferable to the company of children, and second, the expressed wish of my dear intended, who fears that I might fall upon the field of battle. That would be tragic, Starbuck, tragic!’ Bird stressed the enormity of the tragedy by gesturing violently with his right hand, almost sending a passing gentleman’s hat flying. ‘But my darling Priscilla understands that at this time a man must not be seen laggard in his patriotic duty and so she has consented, albeit with sweet reservations, to my going for a soldier.’

‘You’re engaged to be married, sir?’

‘You find that circumstance extraordinary, perhaps?’ Bird demanded vehemently.

‘I find it cause to offer you still further congratulations, sir.’

‘Your tact exceeds your truthfulness,’ Bird cackled, then swerved into the doorway of Shaffer’s, the tailors, where Colonel Faulconer’s three identical bespoke uniforms were indeed ready as promised, as was the much cheaper outfit that Faulconer had ordered for Starbuck. Pecker Bird insisted on examining the Colonel’s uniform, then ordered one exactly like it for himself, except, he allowed, his coat’s collar should only have a major’s single star and not the three gold stars that decorated the Colonel’s collar wings. ‘Put the uniform upon my brother-in-law’s account,’ Bird said grandly as two tailors measured his awkward, bony frame. He insisted upon every possible accoutrement for the uniform, every tassel and plume and braided decoration imaginable. ‘I shall go into battle gaudy,’ Bird said, then turned as the spring-mounted bell on the shop’s door rang to announce the entrance of a new customer. ‘Delaney!’ Bird delightedly greeted a short, portly man who, with an owlish face, peered about myopically to discover the source of the enthusiastic greeting.

‘Bird? Is that you? They have uncaged you? Bird! It is you!’ The two men, one so lanky and unkempt, the other so smooth and round and neat, greeted each other with unfeigned delight. It was immediately clear that though they had not met for many months, they were resuming a conversation full of rich insults aimed at their mutual acquaintances, the best of whom were dismissed as mere nincompoops while the worst were utter fools. Starbuck, forgotten, stood fingering the parcels containing the Colonel’s three uniforms until Thaddeus Bird, suddenly remembering him, beckoned him forward.

‘You must meet Belvedere Delaney, Starbuck. Mister Delaney is Ethan’s half-brother, but you should not allow that unhappy circumstance to prejudice your judgment.’

‘Starbuck,’ Delaney said, offering a half bow. He was at least twelve inches shorter than the tall Starbuck and a good deal more elegant. Delaney’s black coat, breeches and top hat were of silk, his top boots gleamed, while his puff-bosomed shirt was a dazzling white and his tie pinned with a gold-mounted pearl. He had a round myopic face that was sly and humorous. ‘You are thinking,’ he accused Starbuck, ‘that I do not resemble dear Ethan. You were wondering, were you not, how a swan and a buzzard could be hatched from the same egg?’

‘I was wondering no such thing, sir,’ Starbuck lied.

‘Call me Delaney. We must be friends. Ethan tells me you were at Yale?’

Starbuck wondered what else Ethan had divulged. ‘I was at the seminary, yes.’

‘I shall not hold that against you, so long as you do not mind that I am a lawyer. Not, I hasten to say, a successful one, because I like to think of the law as my amusement rather than as my profession, by which I mean that I do a little probate work when it is plainly unavoidable.’ Delaney was being deliberately modest, for his flourishing practice was being nurtured by an acute political sensibility and an almost Jesuitical discretion. Belvedere Delaney did not believe in airing his clients’ dirty linen in open court and thus did his subtle work in the quiet back rooms of the Capitol Building, or in the city’s dining clubs or in the elegant drawing rooms of the big houses on Grace Street and Clay Street. He was privy to the secrets of half Virginia’s lawmakers and was reckoned to be a rising power in the Virginian capital. He told Starbuck that he had met Thaddeus Bird at the University of Virginia and that the two men had been friends ever since. ‘You shall both come and have dinner with me,’ Delaney insisted.

‘On the contrary,’ Bird said, ‘you shall have dinner with me.’

‘My dear Bird!’ Delaney pretended horror. ‘I cannot afford to eat on a country schoolmaster’s salary! The horrors of secession have stirred my appetites, and my delicate constitution requires only the richest of foods and the finest of wines. No, no! You shall eat with me, as will you, Mister Starbuck, for I am determined to hear all your father’s secret faults. Does he drink? Does he consort with evil women in the vestry? Reassure me on these matters, I beg you.’

‘You shall dine with me,’ Bird insisted, ‘and you will have the finest wine in the Spotswood’s cellars because, my dear Bird, it is not I who shall pay, but Washington Faulconer.’ ‘We are to eat on Faulconer’s account?’ Delaney asked in delight.

‘We are indeed,’ Bird answered with relish.

‘Then my business with Shaffer’s will wait for the morrow. Lead me to the trough! Lead on, dear Bird, lead on! Let us make gluttons of ourselves, let us redefine greed, let us consume comestibles as they have never been consumed before, let us wallow in the wines of France, and let us gossip. Above all, let us have gossip.’

‘I’m supposed to be buying petticoats,’ Starbuck demurred.

‘I suspect you look better in trousers,’ Delaney said sternly, ‘and besides, petticoats, like duty, can wait till the morrow. Pleasure summons us, Starbuck, pleasure summons us, let us surrender to its call.

THREE

SEVEN SPRINGS, Washington Faulconer’s house in Faulconer County, was everything Starbuck dreamed it would be, everything Adam had ever told him it would be, and everything Starbuck thought he might ever want a house to be. It was, he decided from the very first moment he saw it on that Sunday morning in late May, just perfect.

Seven Springs was a sprawling white building just two stories high except where a white clock tower surmounted a stable gate and where a rickety cupola, steepled with a weather-vane, graced the main roof. Starbuck had expected something altogether more pretentious, something with high pillars and elegant pilasters, with arching porticoes and frowning pediments, but instead the big house seemed more like a lavish farmhouse that over the years had absent-mindedly spread and multiplied and reproduced itself until it was a tangle of steep roofs, shadowed reentrants and creeper-hung walls. The heart of the house was made of thick fieldstone, the outer wings were timber, while the black-shuttered and iron-balconied windows were shaded by tall trees under which were set white painted benches, long-roped swings, and broad tables. Smaller trees were brilliant with red and white blossom that fell to make drifts of color on the well-scythed lawn. The house and its garden cradled a marvelous promise of warm domesticity and unassuming comforts.

Starbuck, greeted by a Negro servant in the front hall, had first been relieved of the paper-wrapped bundles containing Washington Faulconer’s new uniforms, then a second servant took the carpetbag containing Starbuck’s own uniform, and afterward a turbanned maid came for the two heavy bundles of petticoats that had hung so awkwardly from Starbuck’s saddle bow.

He waited. A longcase clock, its painted face orbiting with moons, stars and comets, ticked heavily in a corner of the tiled hallway. The walls were papered in a floral pattern on which hung gold-framed portraits of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Washington Faulconer. The portrait of Faulconer depicted him mounted on his magnificent black horse, Saratoga, and gesturing toward what Starbuck took to be the estate surrounding Seven Springs. The hallway grate held the ashes of a fire, suggesting that the nights were still cold in this upland county. Fresh flowers stood in a crystal vase on the table where two newspapers lay folded, their headlines celebrating North Carolina’s formal secession to the Confederate cause. The house smelt of starch, lye soap and apples. Starbuck fidgeted as he waited. He did not quite know what was expected of him. Colonel Faulconer had insisted that Starbuck bring the three newly made uniforms directly to Faulconer Court House, but whether he was to be a guest in the house or was expected to find a berth with the encamped Legion, Starbuck still did not know, and the uncertainty made him nervous.

A flurry of feet on the stairs made him turn. A young woman, fair-haired, dressed in white, and excited, came running down the final flight, then checked on the bottom stair with her hand resting on the white-painted newel post. She solemnly inspected Starbuck. ‘You’re Nate Starbuck?’ she finally asked.

‘Indeed, ma’am.’ He offered her a small, awkward bow.

‘Don’t “ma’am” me, I’m Anna.’ She stepped down onto the hall floor. She was small, scarce more than five feet tall, with a pale, waiflike face that was so anxiously wan that Starbuck, if he had not known her to be one of Virginia’s wealthiest daughters, might have thought her an orphan.

Anna’s face was familiar to Starbuck from the portrait that hung in the Richmond town house, but however accurately the picture had caught her narrow head and diffident smile, the painter had somehow missed the essence of the girl, and that essence, Starbuck decided, was oddly pitiable. Anna, despite her prettiness, looked childishly nervous, almost terrified, as if she expected the world to mock her and cuff her and discard her as worthless. That look of extraordinary timidity was not helped by the hint of a strabismus in her left eye, though the squint, if it existed at all, was very slight. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come,’ she said, ‘because I was looking for an excuse not to attend church, and now I can talk to you.’

‘You received the petticoats?’ Starbuck asked.

‘Petticoats?’ Anna paused, frowning, as if the word were unfamiliar to her.

‘I brought you the petticoats you wanted,’ Starbuck explained, feeling as though he was speaking to a rather stupid child.

Anna shook her head. ‘The petticoats were for father, Mister Starbuck, not me, though why he should want them, I don’t know. Maybe he thinks the supply will be constricted by war? Mother says we must stock up on medicines because of the war. She’s ordered a hundredweight of camphor, and the Lord knows how much niter paper and hartshorn too. Is the sun very hot?’

‘No.’

‘I cannot go into too fierce a sunlight, you see, in case I burn. But you say it isn’t fierce?’ She asked the question very earnestly.

‘It isn’t, no.’

‘Then shall we go for a walk? Would you like that?’ She crossed the hall and slipped a hand under Starbuck’s arm and tugged him toward the wide front door. The impetuous gesture was strangely intimate for such a timid girl, yet Starbuck suspected it was a pathetic appeal for companionship. ‘I’ve been so wanting to meet you,’ Anna said. ‘Weren’t you supposed to come here yesterday?’

‘The uniforms were a day late,’ Starbuck lied. In truth his dinner with Thaddeus Bird and the beguiling Belvedere Delaney had stretched from the early afternoon to late supper-time, and so the petticoats had not been bought till late Saturday morning, but it hardly seemed politic to admit to such dalliance.

‘Well, you’re here now,’ Anna said as she drew Starbuck into the sunlight, ‘and I’m so glad. Adam has talked so much about you.’

‘He often spoke of you,’ Starbuck said gallantly and untruthfully, for in fact Adam had rarely spoken of his sister, and never with great fondness.

‘You surprise me. Adam usually spends so much time examining his own conscience that he scarcely notices the existence of other people.’ Anna, thus revealing a more astringent mind than Starbuck had expected, nevertheless blushed, as if apologizing for her apparently harsh judgment. ‘My brother is a Faulconer to the core,’ she explained. ‘He is not very practical.’

‘Your father is practical, surely?’

‘He’s a dreamer,’ Anna said, ‘a romantic. He believes that all fine things will come true if we just have enough hope.’

‘And surely this house was not built by mere hopes?’ Starbuck waved toward the generous facade of Seven Springs.

‘You like the house?’ Anna sounded surprised. ‘Mother and I are trying to persuade Father to pull it down and build something altogether grander. Something Italian, perhaps, with columns and a dome? I would like to have a pillared temple on a hill in the garden. Something surrounded by flowers, and very grand.’

‘I think the house is lovely as it is,’ Starbuck said.

Anna made a face to show her disapproval of Starbuck’s taste. ‘Our great-great-grandfather Adam built it, or most of it. He was very practical, but then his son married a French lady and the family blood became ethereal. That’s what mother says. And she’s not strong either, so her blood didn’t help.’

‘Adam doesn’t seem ethereal.’

‘Oh, he is,’ Anna said, then she smiled up at Starbuck. ‘I do so like Northern voices. They sound so much cleverer than our country accents. Would you permit me to paint you? I’m not so good a painter as Ethan, but I work harder at it. You can sit beside the Faulconer River and look melancholy, like an exile beside the waters of Babylon.’

‘You’d like me to hang my harp upon the willows?’ Starbuck jested clumsily.

Anna withdrew her arm and clapped her hands with delight. ‘You will be marvelous company. Everyone else is so dull. Adam is being pious in the North, father is besotted with soldiering, and mother spends all day wrapped in ice.’

‘In ice?’

‘Wenham ice, from your home state of Massachusetts. I suppose, if there’s war, there’ll be no more Wenham ice and we shall have to suffer the local product. But Doctor Danson says the ice might cure mother’s neuralgia. The ice cure comes from Europe, so it must be good.’ Starbuck had never heard of neuralgia, and did not want to inquire into its nature in case it should prove to be one of the vague and indescribable feminine diseases that so often prostrated his mother and elder sister, but Anna volunteered that the affliction was a very modern one and was constituted by what she described as ‘facial headaches.’ Starbuck murmured his sympathy. ‘But father thinks she makes it up to annoy him,’ Anna continued in her timid and attenuated voice.

‘I’m sure that can’t be true,’ Starbuck said.

‘I think it might,’ Anna said in a very sad voice. ‘I sometimes wonder if men and women always irritate each other?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘This isn’t a very cheerful conversation, is it?’ Anna asked rather despairingly and in a tone that suggested all her conversations became similarly bogged down in melancholy. She seemed to sink further into despair with every second, and Starbuck was remembering Belvedere Delaney’s malicious tales of how intensely his half-brother disliked this girl, but how badly Ridley needed her dowry. Starbuck hoped those tales were nothing more than malicious gossip, for it would be a cruel world, he thought, that could victimize a girl as fey and tremulous as Anna Faulconer. ‘Did Father really say the petticoats were for me?’ she suddenly asked.

‘Your uncle said as much.’

‘Oh, Pecker,’ Anna said, as if that explained everything.

‘It seemed a very strange request,’ Starbuck said gallantly.

‘So much is strange these days,’ Anna said hopelessly, ‘and I daren’t ask Father for an explanation. He isn’t happy, you see.’

‘No?’

‘It’s poor Ethan’s fault. He couldn’t find Truslow, you see, and Father has set his heart on recruiting Truslow. Have you heard about Truslow?’

‘Your uncle told me about him, yes. He made Truslow sound rather fearful.’

‘But he is fearful. He’s frightful!’ Anna stopped to look up into Starbuck’s face. ‘Shall I confide in you?’

Starbuck wondered what new horror story he was about to hear of the dreaded Truslow. ‘I should be honored by your confidence, Miss Faulconer,’ he said very formally.

‘Call me Anna, please. I want to be friends. And I tell you, secretly, of course, that I don’t believe poor Ethan went anywhere near Truslow’s lair. I think Ethan is much too frightened of Truslow. Everyone’s frightened of Truslow, even Father, though he says he isn’t.’ Anna’s soft voice was very portentous. ‘Ethan says he went up there, but I don’t know if that’s true.’

‘I’m sure it is.’

‘I’m not.’ She put her arm back into Starbuck’s elbow and walked on. ‘Maybe you should ride up to find Truslow, Mister Starbuck?’

‘Me?’ Starbuck asked in horror.

A sudden animation came into Anna’s voice. ‘Think of it as a quest. All my father’s young knights must ride into the mountains and dare to challenge the monster, and whoever brings him back will prove himself the best, the noblest and the most gallant knight of all. What do you think of that idea, Mister Starbuck? Would you like to ride on a quest?’

‘I think it sounds terrifying.’

‘Father would appreciate it if you went, I’m sure,’ Anna said, but when Starbuck made no reply she just sighed and pulled him toward the side of the house. ‘I want to show you my three dogs! You’re to say that they’re the prettiest pets in all the world, and after that we shall fetch the painting basket and we’ll go to the river and you can hang that shabby hat on the willows. Except we don’t have willows, at least I don’t think we have. I’m not good at trees.’

But there was to be no meeting with the three dogs, nor any painting expedition, for the front door of Seven Springs suddenly opened and Colonel Faulconer stepped into the sunlight.

Anna gasped with admiration. Her father was dressed in one of his new uniforms and looked simply grand. He looked, indeed, as though he had been born to wear this uniform and to lead free men across green fields to victory. His gray frock coat was thickly brocaded with gilt and yellow lace that had been folded and woven to make a broad hem to the coat’s edges, while the sleeves were richly embroidered with intricately looped braid that climbed from the broad cuffs to above the elbows. A pair of yellow kidskin gloves was tucked into his shiny black belt, beneath which a tasseled red silk sash shimmered. His top boots gleamed, his saber’s scabbard was polished to mirror brightness and the yellow plume on his cocked hat stirred in the small warm wind. Washington Faulconer was quite plainly delighted with himself as he moved to watch his reflection in one of the tall windows. ‘Well, Anna?’ he asked.

‘It’s wonderful, Father!’ Anna said with as much animation as Starbuck suspected her capable. Two black servants had come from the house and nodded their agreement.

‘I expected the uniforms yesterday, Nate.’ Faulconer half-asked and half-accused Starbuck with the statement.

‘Shaffer’s was a day late, sir’—the lie came smoothly—‘but they were most apologetic.’

‘I forgive them, considering the excellency of their tailoring.’ Washington Faulconer could hardly take his eyes from his reflection in the window glass. The gray uniform was set off with golden spurs, gilded spur chains and golden scabbard links. He had a revolver in a soft leather pouch, the weapon’s butt looped to the belt with another golden chain. Braids of white and yellow ribbons decorated the outer seams of his breeches while his jacket’s epaulettes were cushioned in yellow and hung with gold links. He drew the ivory-hilted saber, startling the morning with the harsh scrape of the steel on the scabbard’s throat. The sun’s light slashed back from the curved and brilliantly polished blade. ‘It’s French,’ he told Starbuck, ‘a gift from Lafayette to my grandfather. Now it will be carried in a new crusade for liberty.’

‘It’s truly impressive, sir,’ Starbuck said.

‘So long as a man needs to dress in uniform to fight, then these rags are surely as good as any,’ the Colonel said with mock modesty, then slashed the saber in the empty air. ‘You’re not feeling exhausted after your journey, Nate?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then unhand my daughter and we’ll find you some work.’ But Anna would not let Starbuck go. ‘Work, Father? But it’s Sunday.’

‘And you should have gone to church, my dear.’

‘It’s too hot. Besides, Nate has agreed to be painted and surely you won’t deny me that small pleasure?’

‘I shall indeed, my dear. Nate is a whole day late in arriving and there’s work to be done. Now why don’t you go and read to your mother?’

‘Because she’s sitting in the dark enduring Doctor Danson’s ice cure.’

‘Danson’s an idiot.’

‘But he’s the only medically qualified idiot we possess,’ Anna said, once more showing a glimpse of vivacity that her demeanor otherwise hid. ‘Are you really taking Nate away, Father?’

‘I truly am, my dear.’

Anna let go of Starbuck’s elbow and gave him a shy smile of farewell. ‘She’s bored,’ the Colonel said when he and Starbuck were back in the house. ‘She can chatter all day, mostly about nothing.’ He shook his head disapprovingly as he led Starbuck down a corridor hung with bridles and reins, snaffles and bits, cruppers and martingales. ‘No trouble finding a bed last night?’

‘No, sir.’ Starbuck had put up at a tavern in Scottsville where no one had been curious about his Northern accent or had demanded to see the pass that Colonel Faulconer had provided him.

‘No news of Adam, I suppose?’ the Colonel asked wistfully.

‘I’m afraid not, sir. I did write, though.’

‘Ah well. The Northern mails must be delayed. It’s a miracle they’re still coming at all. Come’—he pushed open the door of his study—‘I need to find a gun for you.’

The study was a wonderfully wide room built at the house’s western extremity. It had creeper-framed windows on three of its four walls and a deep fireplace on the fourth. The heavy ceiling beams were hung with ancient flintlocks, bayonets and muskets, the walls with battle prints, and the mantel stacked with brass-hilted pistols and swords with snake-skin handles. A black labrador thumped its tail in welcome as Faulconer entered, but was evidently too old and infirm to climb to its feet. Faulconer stooped and ruffled the dog’s ears. ‘Good boy. This is Joshua, Nate. Used to be the best gun dog this side of the Atlantic. Ethan’s father bred him. Poor old fellow.’ Starbuck was not sure whether it was the dog or Ethan’s father who had earned the comment, but the Colonel’s next words suggested it was not Joshua being pitied. ‘Bad thing, drink,’ the Colonel said as he pulled open a bureau’s wide drawer that proved to be filled with handguns. ‘Ethan’s father drank away the family land. His mother died of the milksick when he was born, and there’s a half-brother who scooped up all the mother’s money. He’s a lawyer in Richmond now.’

‘I met him,’ Starbuck said.

Washington Faulconer turned and frowned at Starbuck. ‘You met Delaney?’

‘Mister Bird introduced me to him in Shaffer’s.’ Starbuck had no intention of revealing how the introduction had led to ten hours of the Spotswood House Hotel’s finest food and drink, all of it placed on the Faulconer account, or how he had woken on Saturday morning with a searing headache, a dry mouth, a churning belly and a dim memory of swearing eternal friendship with the entertaining and mischievous Belvedere Delaney.

‘A bad fellow, Delaney.’ The Colonel seemed disappointed in Starbuck. ‘Too clever for his own good.’

‘It was a very brief meeting, sir.’

‘Much too clever. I know lawyers who’d like to have a rope, a tall tree and Mister Delaney all attached to each other. He got all the mother’s money and poor Ethan didn’t get a thin dime out of the estate. Not fair, Nate, not fair at all. If Delaney had an ounce of decency he’d look after Ethan.’

‘He mentioned that Ethan is a very fine artist?’ Starbuck said, hoping the compliment about his future son-in-law might restore the Colonel’s good humor.

‘So Ethan is, but that won’t bring home the bacon, will it? A fellow might as well play the piano prettily, like Pecker does. I’ll tell you what Ethan is, Nate. He’s one of the finest hunters I’ve ever seen and probably the best horseman in the country. And he’s a damned fine farmer. He’s managed what’s left of his father’s land these last five years, and I doubt anyone else could have done half as well.’ The Colonel paid Ridley this generous compliment, then drew out a long-barreled revolver and tentatively spun its chambers before deciding it was not the right gun. ‘Ethan’s got solid worth, Nate, and he’ll make a good soldier, a fine soldier, though I confess he didn’t make the best recruiting officer.’ Faulconer turned to offer Starbuck a shrewd look. ‘Did you hear about Truslow?’

‘Anna mentioned him, sir. And Mister Bird did, too.’

‘I want Truslow, Nate. I need him. If Truslow comes he’ll bring fifty hard men out of the hills. Good men, natural fighters. Rogues, of course, every last one of them, but if Truslow tells them to knuckle under, they will. And if he doesn’t join up? Half the men in the county will fear to leave their livestock unguarded, so you see why I need him.’

Starbuck sensed what was coming and felt his confidence plummet. Truslow was the Yankee hater, the murderer, the demon of the hardscrabble hills.

The Colonel spun the cylinder of another revolver. ‘Ethan says Truslow’s away thieving horses and won’t be home for days, maybe weeks, but I have a feeling Truslow just avoided Ethan. He saw him coming and knew what he wanted, so ducked out of sight. I need someone Truslow doesn’t know. Someone who can talk to the fellow and discover his price. Every man has his price, Nate, especially a blackguard like Truslow.’ He put the revolver back and picked out another still more lethal-looking gun. ‘So how would you feel about going, Nate? I’m not pretending it’s an easy task because Truslow isn’t the easiest of men, and if you tell me you don’t want to do it, then I’ll say no more. But otherwise?’ The Colonel left the invitation dangling.

And Starbuck, presented with the choice, suddenly found that he did want to go. He wanted to prove that he could bring the monster down from his lair. ‘I’d be happy to go, sir.’

‘Truly?’ The Colonel sounded mildly surprised.

‘Yes, truly.’

‘Good for you, Nate.’ Faulconer snapped back the cock of the lethal-looking revolver, pulled the trigger, then decided that gun was not right either. ‘You’ll need a gun, of course. Most of the rogues in the mountains don’t like Yankees. You’ve got your pass, of course, but it’s a rare creature who can read up there. I’d tell you to wear the uniform, except folk like Truslow associate uniforms with excise men or tax collectors, so you’re much safer in ordinary clothes. You’ll just have to bluff your way if you’re challenged, and if that doesn’t work, shoot one of them.’ He chuckled, and Starbuck shuddered at the errand that now faced him. Not six months before he had been a student at Yale Theological College, immersed in an intricate study of the Pauline doctrine of atonement, and now he was supposed to shoot his way through a countryside of illiterate Yankee haters in search of the district’s most feared horse thief and murderer? Faulconer must have sensed his premonition, for he grinned. ‘Don’t worry, he won’t kill you, not unless you try and take his daughter or, worse, his horse.’

‘I’m glad to hear that, sir,’ Starbuck said dryly.

‘I’ll write you a letter for the brute, though God only knows if he can read. I’ll explain you’re an honorary southron, and I’ll make him an offer. Say fifty dollars as a signing bounty? Don’t offer him anything more, and for God’s sake don’t encourage him into thinking I want him to be an officer. Truslow will make a good sergeant, but you’d hardly want him at your supper table. His wife’s dead, so she won’t be a problem, but he’s got a daughter who might be a nuisance. Tell him I’ll find her a position in Richmond if he wants her placed. She’s probably a filthy piece of work, but no doubt she can sew or tend store.’ Faulconer had laid a walnut box on his desk, which he now turned round so that the lid’s catch faced Starbuck. ‘I don’t think this is for you, Nate, but take a look at her. She’s very pretty.’

Starbuck raised the walnut lid to reveal a beautiful ivory-handled revolver that lay in a specially shaped compartment lined with blue velvet. Other velvet-lined compartments held the gun’s silver-rimmed powder horn, bullet mold and crimper. The gold-lettered label inside the lid read ‘R. Adams, Patentee of the Revolver, 79 King William Street, London EC.’ ‘I bought her in England two years ago.’ The Colonel lifted the gun and caressed its barrel. ‘She’s a lovely thing, isn’t she?’

‘Yes, sir, she is.’ And the gun did indeed seem beautiful in the soft morning light that filtered past the long white drapes. The shape of the weapon was marvelously matched to function, a marriage of engineering and design so perfectly achieved that for a few seconds Starbuck even forgot exactly what the gun’s function was.

‘Very beautiful,’ Washington Faulconer said reverently. ‘I’ll take her to the Baltimore and Ohio in a couple of weeks.’ ‘The Baltimore …’ Starbuck began, then stopped as he realized he had not misheard. So the Colonel still wanted to lead his raid on the railroad? ‘But I thought our troops at Harper’s Ferry had blocked the line, sir.’

‘So they have, Nate, but I’ve discovered the cars are still running as far as Cumberland, then they move their supplies on by road and canal.’ Faulconer put the beautiful Adams revolver away. ‘And it still seems to me that the Confederacy is being too quiescent, too fearful. We need to attack, Nate, not sit around waiting for the North to strike at us. We need to set the South alight with a victory! We need to show the North that we’re men, not craven mudsills. We need a quick, absolute victory that will be written across every newspaper in America! Something to put our name in the history books! A victory to begin the Legion’s history.’ He smiled. ‘How does that sound?’

‘It sounds marvelous, sir.’

‘And you’ll come with us, Nate, I promise. Bring me Truslow, then you and I will ride to the rails and break a few heads. But you need a gun first, so how about this beast?’ The Colonel offered Nate a clumsy, long-barreled, ugly revolver with an old-fashioned hook-curved hilt, an awkward swan-necked hammer and two triggers. The Colonel explained that the lower ring trigger revolved the cylinder and cocked the hammer, while the upper lever fired the charge. ‘She’s a brute to fire,’ Faulconer admitted, ‘until you learn the knack of releasing the lower trigger before you pull the upper one. But she’s a robust thing. She can take a knock or two and still go on killing. She’s heavy and that makes her difficult to aim, but you’ll get used to her. And she’ll scare the wits out of anyone you point her at.’ The pistol was an American-made Savage, three and a half pounds in weight and over a foot in length. The lovely Adams, with its blue sheened barrel and soft white handle, was smaller and lighter, and fired the same size bullet, yet it was not nearly as frightening as the Savage.

The Colonel put the Adams back into his drawer, then turned and pocketed the key. ‘Now, let’s see, it’s midday. I’ll find you a fresh horse, give you that letter and some food, then you can be on your way. It isn’t a long ride. You should be there by six o’clock, maybe earlier. I’ll write you that letter, then send you Truslow hunting. Let’s be to work, Nate!’

The Colonel accompanied Starbuck for the first part of his journey, ever encouraging him to sit his horse better. ‘Heels down, Nate! Heels down! Back straight!’ The Colonel took amusement from Starbuck’s riding, which was admittedly atrocious, while the Colonel himself was a superb horseman. He was riding his favorite stallion and, in his new uniform and mounted on the glossy horse, he looked marvelously impressive as he led Starbuck through the town of Faulconer Court House, past the water mill and the livery stable, the inn and the courthouse, the Baptist and the Episcopal churches, past Greeley’s Tavern and the smithy, the bank and the town gaol. A girl in a faded bonnet smiled at the Colonel from the school house porch. The Colonel waved to her, but did not stop to talk. ‘Priscilla Bowen,’ he told Nate, who had no idea how he was supposed to remember the flood of names that was being unleashed on him. ‘She’s a pretty enough thing if you like them plump, but only nineteen, and the silly girl intends to marry Pecker. My God, but she could do better than him! I told her so too. I didn’t mince my words either, but it hasn’t done a blind bit of good. Pecker’s double her age, double! I mean it’s one thing to bed them, Nate, but you don’t have to marry them! Have I offended you?’

‘No, sir.’

‘I keep forgetting your strict beliefs.’ The Colonel laughed happily. They had passed through the town, which had struck Starbuck as a contented, comfortable community and much larger than he had expected. The Legion itself was encamped to the west of the town, while Faulconer’s house was to the north. ‘Doctor Danson reckoned that the sound of military activity would be bad for Miriam,’ Faulconer explained. ‘She’s delicate, you understand.’

‘So Anna was telling me, sir.’

‘I was thinking of sending her to Germany once Anna’s safely married. They say the doctors there are marvelous.’

‘So I’ve heard, sir.’

‘Anna could accompany her. She’s delicate too, you know. Danson says she needs iron. God knows what he means. But they can both go if the war’s done by fall. Here we are, Nate!’ The Colonel gestured toward a meadow where four rows of tents sloped down toward a stream. This was the Legion’s encampment, crowned by the three-banded, seven-starred flag of the new Confederacy. Thick woods rose on the stream’s far bank, the town lay behind, and the whole encampment somehow had the jaunty appearance of a traveling circus. A baseball diamond had already been worn into the flattest part of the meadow, while the officers had made a steeplechase course along the bank of the stream. Girls from the town were perched along a steep bank that formed the meadow’s eastern boundary, while the presence of carriages parked alongside the road showed how the gentry from the nearby countryside were making the encampment into the object of an excursion. There was no great air of purpose about the men who lounged or played or strolled around the campground, which indolence, as Starbuck well knew, resulted from Colonel Faulconer’s military philosophy, which declared that too much drill simply dulled a good man’s appetite for battle. Now, in sight of his good Southerners, the Colonel became markedly more cheerful. ‘We just need two or three hundred more men, Nate, and the Legion will be unbeatable. Bringing me Truslow will be a good beginning.’

‘I’ll do my best, sir,’ Starbuck said, and wondered why he had ever agreed to face the demon Truslow. His apprehensions were sharpened because Ethan Ridley, mounted on a spirited chestnut horse, had suddenly appeared at the encampment’s main entrance. Starbuck remembered Anna Faulconer’s confident assertion that Ridley had not even dared face Truslow, and that only made him all the more nervous. Ridley was in uniform, though his gray woolen tunic looked very drab beside the Colonel’s brand-new finery.

‘So what do you think of Shaffer’s tailoring, Ethan?’ the Colonel demanded of his future son-in-law.

‘You look superb, sir,’ Ridley responded dutifully, then nodded a greeting to Starbuck, whose mare edged to the side of the road and lowered her head to crop at the grass while Washington Faulconer and Ridley talked. The Colonel was saying how he had discovered two cannon that might be bought, and was wondering if Ridley would mind going to Richmond to make the purchase and to ferret out some ammunition. The Richmond visit would mean that Ridley could not ride on the raid against the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and the Colonel was apologizing for denying his future son-in-law the enjoyment of that expedition, but Ridley seemed not to mind. In fact his dark, neatly bearded face even looked cheerful at the thought of returning to Richmond.

‘In the meantime Nate’s off to look for Truslow.’ The Colonel brought Starbuck back into the conversation.

Ridley’s expression changed instantly to wariness. ‘You’re wasting your time, Reverend. The man’s off stealing horses.’

‘Maybe he just avoided you, Ethan?’ Faulconer suggested.

‘Maybe,’ Ridley sounded grudging, ‘but I’ll still wager that Starbuck’s wasting his time. Truslow can’t stand Yankees. He blames a Yankee for his wife’s death. He’ll tear you limb from limb, Starbuck.’

Faulconer, evidently affected by Ridley’s pessimism, frowned at Starbuck. ‘It’s your choice, Nate.’

‘Of course I’ll go, sir.’

Ridley scowled. ‘You’re wasting your time, Reverend,’ he said again, with just a hint of too much force.

‘Twenty bucks says I’m not,’ Starbuck heard himself saying, and immediately regretted the challenge as a stupid display of bravado. It was worse than stupid, he thought, but a sin too. Starbuck had been taught that all wagering was sinful in the sight of God, yet he did not know how to withdraw the impulsive offer.

Nor was he sure that he wanted to withdraw because Ridley had hesitated, and that hesitation seemed to confirm Anna’s suspicion that her fiancé might indeed have evaded looking for the fearful Truslow.

‘Sounds a fair offer to me,’ the Colonel intervened happily.

Ridley stared at Starbuck, and the younger man thought he detected a hint of fear in Ridley’s gaze. Was he frightened that Starbuck would reveal his lie? Or just frightened of losing twenty dollars? ‘He’ll kill you, Reverend.’

‘Twenty dollars says I’ll have him here before the month’s end,’ Starbuck said.

‘By the week’s end,’ Ridley challenged, seeing a way out of the wager.

‘Fifty bucks?’ Starbuck recklessly raised the wager.

Washington Faulconer laughed. Fifty dollars was nothing to him, but it was a fortune to penniless young men like Ridley and Starbuck. Fifty dollars was a month’s wages to a good man, the price of a decent carriage horse, the cost of a fine revolver. Fifty dollars turned Anna’s quixotic quest into a harsh ordeal. Ethan Ridley hesitated, then seemed to feel he demeaned himself by that hesitation and so held out a gloved hand. ‘You’ve got till Saturday, Reverend, not a moment more.’

‘Done,’ Starbuck said, and shook Ridley’s hand.

‘Fifty bucks!’ Faulconer exclaimed with delight when Ridley had ridden away. ‘I do hope you’re feeling lucky, Nate.’

‘I’ll do my best, sir.’

‘Don’t let Truslow bully you. Stand up to him, you hear me?’

‘I will, sir.’

‘Good luck, Nate. And heels down! Heels down!’

Starbuck rode west toward the blue-shadowed mountains. It was a lovely day under an almost cloudless sky. Starbuck’s fresh horse, a strong mare named Pocahontas, trotted tirelessly along the grass verge of the dirt road, which climbed steadily away from the small town, past orchards and fenced meadows, going into a hilly country of small farms, lush grass and quick streams. These Virginia foothills were not good for tobacco, less good still for the famous Southern staples of indigo, rice and cotton, but they grew good walnuts and fine apples, and sustained fat cattle and plentiful corn. The farms, though small, looked finely kept. There were big barns and plump meadows and fat herds of cows whose bells sounded pleasantly languorous in the midday warmth. As the road climbed higher the farms became smaller until some were little more than corn patches hacked out of the encroaching woods. Farm dogs slept beside the road, waking to snap at the horse’s heels as Starbuck rode by.

Starbuck became more apprehensive as he rode higher into the hills. He had the insouciance and cockiness of youth, believing himself capable of any deed he set his mind to achieve, but as the sun declined he began to perceive Thomas Truslow as a great barrier that defined his whole future. Cross the barrier and life would be simple again, fail it and he would never again look in a mirror and feel respect for himself. He tried to steel himself against whatever hard reception Truslow might have for him, if indeed Truslow was in the hills at all, then he tried to imagine the triumph of success if the grim Truslow came meekly down to join the Legion’s ranks. He thought of Faulconer’s pleasure and of Ridley’s chagrin, and then he wondered how he was ever to pay the wager if he lost. Starbuck had no money and, though the Colonel had offered to pay him wages of twenty-six dollars a month, Starbuck had yet to see a cent of it.

By midafternoon the dirt road had narrowed to a rough track that ran alongside a tumbling, white whipped river that foamed at rocks, coursed between boulders and worried at fallen trees. The woods were full of bright red blossom, the hills steep, the views spectacular. Starbuck passed two deserted cabins, and once he was startled by the crash of hooves and turned, fumbling for the loaded revolver, only to see a white-tailed deer galloping away through the trees. He had begun to enjoy the landscape, and that enjoyment made him wonder whether his destiny belonged in the wild new western lands where Americans struggled to claw a new country from the grip of heathen savages. My God, he thought, but he should never have agreed to study for the ministry! At night the guilt of that abandoned career often assailed him, but here, in the daylight, with a gun at his side and an adventure ahead, Starbuck felt ready to meet the devil himself, and suddenly the words rebel and treason did not seem so bad to him after all. He told himself he wanted to be a rebel. He wanted to taste the forbidden fruits against which his father preached. He wanted to be an intimate of sin, he wanted to saunter through the valley of the shadow of death because that was the way of a young man’s dreams.

He reached a ruined sawmill where a track led south. The track was steep, forcing Starbuck off Pocahontas’s back. Faulconer had told him there was another, easier road, but this steep path was the more direct and would bring him onto Truslow’s land. The day had become hot, and sweat was prickling at Starbuck’s skin. Birds screamed from among the new pale leaves.

By late afternoon he reached the ridge line, where he remounted to stare down into the red-blossomed valley where Truslow lived. It was a place, the Colonel said, where fugitives and scoundrels had taken refuge over the years, a lawless place where sinewy men and their tough wives hacked a living from a thin soil, but a soil happily free of government. It was a high, hanging valley famous for horse thieves, where animals stolen from the rich Virginia lowlands were corralled before being taken north and west for resale. This was a nameless place where Starbuck had to confront the demon of the hardscrabble hills whose approval was so important to the lofty Washington Faulconer. He turned and looked behind, seeing the great spread of green country stretching toward the hazed horizon, then he looked back to the west, where a few trickles of smoke showed where homesteads were concealed among the secretive trees.

He urged Pocahontas down the vague path that led between the trees. Starbuck wondered what kind of trees they were. He was a city boy and did not know a redbud from an elm or a live oak from a dogwood. He could not slaughter a pig or hunt a deer or even milk a cow. In this countryside of competent people he felt like a fool, a man of no talent and too much education. He wondered whether a city childhood unfitted a man for warfare, and whether the country people with their familiarity with death and their knowledge of landscape made natural soldiers. Then, as so often, Starbuck swung from his romantic ideals of war to a sudden feeling of horror at the impending conflict. How could there be a war in this good land? These were the United States of America, the culmination of man’s striving for a perfect government and a godly society, and the only enemies ever seen in this happy land had been the British and the Indians, and both of those enemies, thanks to God’s providence and American fortitude, had been defeated.

No, he thought, but these threats of war could not be real. They were mere excitements, politics turned sour, a spring fever that would be cooled by fall. Americans might fight against the godless savages of the untamed wilderness, and were happy to slaughter the hirelings of some treacherous foreign king, but they would surely never turn on one another! Sense would prevail, a compromise would be reached, God would surely reach out his hand to protect his chosen country and its good people. Though maybe, Starbuck guiltily hoped, there would be time for one adventure first—one sunlit raid of bright flags and shining sabers and drumming hoofbeats and broken trains and burning trestles.

‘Go one pace more, boy, and I’ll blow your goddamned brains to kingdom come,’ the hidden voice spoke suddenly.

‘Oh, Christ!’ Starbuck was so astonished that he could not check the blasphemous imprecation, but he did retain just enough sense to haul in the reins, and the mare, well schooled, stopped.

‘Or maybe I’ll blow your brains out anyhows.’ The voice was as deep and harsh as a rat-tailed file scraping on rusted iron, and Starbuck, even though he had still not seen the speaker, suspected he has found his murderer. He had discovered Truslow.

FOUR

THE REVEREND ELIAL STARBUCK leaned forward in his pulpit and gripped his lectern so hard that his knuckles whitened. Some of his congregation, sitting close to the great man, thought the lectern must surely break. The Reverend’s eyes were closed and his long, bony, white-bearded face contorted with passion as he sought the exact word that would inflame his listeners and fill the church with a vengeful righteousness.

The tall building was silent. Every pew was taken and every bench in the gallery full. The church was foursquare, undecorated, plain, as simple and functional a building as the gospel that was preached from its white-painted pulpit. There was a black-robed choir, a new-fangled harmonium, and high clear-glass windows. Gas lamps provided lighting, and a big black pot-bellied stove offered a grudging warmth in winter, though that small comfort would not be needed for many months now. It was hot inside the church; not so hot as it would be in high summer when the atmosphere would be stifling, but this spring Sunday was warm enough for the worshipers to be fanning their faces, but as the Reverend Elial’s dramatic silence stretched so, one by one, the paper fans were stilled until it seemed as if every person inside the church’s high bare interior was as motionless as a statue.

They waited, hardly daring to breathe. The Reverend Elial, white-haired, white-bearded, fierce-eyed, gaunt, held his silence as he savored the word in his mind. He had found the right word, he decided, a good word, a word in due season, a word from his text, and so he drew in a long breath and raised a slow hand until it seemed as though every heart in the whole high building had paused in its beating.

‘Vomit!’ the Reverend Elial screamed, and a child in the gallery cried aloud with fear of the word’s explosive power. Some women gasped.

The Reverend Elial Starbuck smashed his right fist onto the pulpit’s rail, struck it so hard that the sound echoed through the church like a gunshot. At the end of a sermon the edges of his hands were often dark with bruises, while the power of his preaching broke the spines of at least a half-dozen Bibles each year. ‘The slavocracy has no more right to call itself Christian than a dog can call itself a horse! Or an ape a man! Or a man an angel! Sin and perdition! Sin and perdition! The slavocracy is diseased with sin, polluted with perdition!’ The sermon had reached the point where it no longer needed to make sense, because now the logic of its exposition could give way to a series of emotional reminders that would hammer the message deep into the listeners’ hearts and fortify them against one more week of worldly temptations. The Reverend Elial had been preaching for one and a quarter hours, and he would preach for at least another half hour more, but for the next ten minutes he wanted to lash the congregation into a frenzy of indignation.

The slavocracy, he told them, was doomed for the deepest pits of hell, to be cast down into the lake of burning sulfur where they would suffer the torments of indescribable pain for the length of all eternity. The Reverend Elial Starbuck had cut his preaching teeth on descriptions of hell and he offered a five-minute reprise of that place’s horrors, so filling his church with revulsion that some of the weaker brethren in the congregation seemed near to fainting. There was a section in the gallery where freed Southern slaves sat, all of them sponsored in some way by the church, and the freedmen echoed the reverend’s words, counterpointing and embroidering them so that the church seemed charged and filled with the Spirit.

And still the Reverend Elial racked the emotion higher and yet higher. He told his listeners how the slavocracy had been offered the hand of Northern friendship, and he flung out his own bruised hand as if to illustrate the sheer goodness of the offer. ‘It was offered freely! It was offered justly! It was offered righteously! It was offered lovingly!’ His hand stretched farther and farther out toward the congregation as he detailed the generosity of the Northern states. ‘And what did they do with our offer? What did they do? What did they do?’ The last repetition of the question had come in a high scream that locked the congregation into immobility. The Reverend Elial glared round the church, from the rich pews at the front to the poor benches at the back of the galleries, then down to his own family’s pew, where his eldest son, James, sat in his new stiff blue uniform. ‘What did they do?’ The Reverend Elial sawed the air as he answered his question. ‘They returned to their folly! “For as a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.”’ That had been the Reverend Elial Starbuck’s text, taken from the eleventh verse of the twenty-sixth chapter of the Book of Proverbs. He shook his head sadly, drew his hand back, and repeated the awful word in a tone of resignation and puzzlement. ‘Vomit, vomit, vomit.’

The slavocracy, he said, was mired in its own vomit. They wallowed in it. They reveled in it. A Christian, the Reverend Elial Starbuck declared, had only one choice in these sad days. A Christian must armor himself with the shield of faith, weapon himself with the weapons of righteousness, and then march south to scour the land free of the Southern dogs that supped of their own vomit. And the members of the slavocracy are dogs, he emphasized to his listeners, and they must be whipped like dogs, scourged like dogs and made to whimper like dogs.

‘Hallelujah!’ a voice called from the gallery, while in the Starbuck pew, hard beneath the pulpit, James Starbuck felt a pulse of pious satisfaction that he would be going forth to do the Lord’s work in his country’s army, then he felt a balancing spurt of fear that perhaps the slavocracy would not take its whipping quite as meekly as a frightened dog. James Elial MacPhail Starbuck was twenty-five, yet his thinning black hair and perpetual expression of pained worry made him look ten years older. He was able to console himself for his balding scalp by the bushy thickness of his fine deep beard that well matched his corpulent, tall frame. In looks he took more after his mother’s side of the family than his father’s, though in his assiduity to business he was every bit Elial’s son for, even though he was only four years out of Harvard’s Dane Law School, James was already spoken of as a coming man in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and that fine reputation, added to his famous father’s entreaties, had earned him a place on the staff of General Irvin McDowell. This sermon would thus be the last James would hear from his father for many a week for, in the morning, he would take the cars for Washington to assume those new duties.

‘The South must be made to whimper like dogs supping their own vomit!’ The Reverend Elial began the summation which, in turn, would lead to the sermon’s fiery and emotive conclusion, but one worshiper did not wait for those closing pyrotechnics. Beneath the gallery at the very back of the church a box pew door clicked open and a young man slipped out. He tiptoed the few paces to the rear door, then edged through into the vestibule. The few people who noticed his going assumed he was feeling unwell, though in truth Adam Faulconer was not feeling physically sick, but heartsick. He paused on the street steps of the church and took a deep breath while behind him the voice of the preacher rose and fell, muffled now by the granite walls of the tall church.

Adam looked astonishingly like his father. He had the same broad shoulders, stocky build and resolute face, with the same fair hair, blue eyes, and square-cut beard. It was a dependable, trustworthy face, though at this moment it was also a very troubled face.

Adam had come to Boston after receiving a letter from his father that had described Starbuck’s arrival in Richmond. Washington Faulconer had sketched an outline of Nate’s troubles, then continued: ‘For your sake I shall offer him shelter and every kindness, and I assume he will stay here as long as he needs to, and I further assume that need might be for ever, but I surmise it is only the fear of his family that keeps him in Virginia. Perhaps, if you can spare the time from your endeavors,’ and Adam had smelt the rancor in his father’s choice of that word, ‘you might inform Nate’s family that their son is penitent, humiliated and dependent on charity, and so gain for him a token of their forgiveness?’

Adam had wanted to visit Boston. He knew the city was the most influential in the North, a place of learning and piety where he hoped to find men who could offer some hope of peace, but he had also hoped to discover some peace for Nate Starbuck to which end he had gone to the Reverend Elial Starbuck’s house, but the Reverend, apprised of Adam’s business, had refused to receive him. Now Adam had listened to his friend’s father preach and he suspected there was as little hope for America as there was for Nate. As the venom had poured from the pulpit Adam had understood that so long as such hatred went unassuaged there could be no compromise. The Christian Peace Commission had become irrelevant, for the churches of America could no more bring peace than a candle flame could melt the Wenham Lake in midwinter. America, Adam’s blessed land, must go to war. It made no sense to Adam, for he did not understand how decent men could ever think that war could adjudicate matters better than reason and goodwill, but dimly and reluctantly, Adam was beginning to understand that goodwill and reason were not the mainsprings of mankind, but instead that passion, love and hate were the squalid fuels that drove history blindly onward.

Adam walked the plump ordered streets of residential Boston, beneath the new-leafed trees and beside the tall clean houses that were so gaily decorated with patriotic flags and bunting. Even the carriages waiting to take the worshipers back to their comfortable homes sported American flags. Adam loved that flag, and could be made misty-eyed by all it stood for, yet now he recognized in its bright stars and broad stripes a tribal emblem being flaunted in hate, and he knew that everything he had worked for was about to be melted in the crucible. There was going to be war.

Thomas Truslow was a short, dark-haired stump of a man; a flint-faced, bitter-eyed creature whose skin was grimy with dirt and whose clothes were shiny with grease. His black hair was long and tangled like the thick beard that jutted pugnaciously from his dark-tanned face. His boots were thick-soled cowhide brogans, he wore a wide-brimmed hat, filthy Kentucky jeans and a homespun shirt with sleeves torn short enough to show the corded muscles of his upper arms. There was a heart tattooed on his right forearm with the odd word Emly written beneath it, and it took Starbuck a few seconds to realize that it was probably a misspelling of Emily.

‘Lost your way, boy?’ This unprepossessing creature now challenged Starbuck. Truslow was carrying an antique flintlock musket that had a depressingly blackened muzzle pointing unwaveringly at Starbuck’s head.

‘I’m looking for Mister Thomas Truslow,’ Starbuck said.

‘I’m Truslow.’ The gun muzzle did not waver, nor did the oddly light eyes. When all was said and done, Starbuck decided, it was those eyes that seared him most. You could clean up this brute, trim his beard, scrub his face and dress him in a churchgoing suit, and still those wild eyes would radiate the chilling message that Thomas Truslow had nothing to lose.

‘I’ve brought you a letter from Washington Faulconer.’

‘Faulconer!’ The name was expressed as a joyless burst of laughter. ‘Wants me for a soldier, is that it?’

‘He does, Mister Truslow, yes.’ Starbuck was making an effort to keep his voice neutral and not betray the fear engendered by those eyes and by the threat of violence that came off Truslow as thick as the smoke from a green bonfire. It seemed that at any second a trembling mechanism could give way in the dark brain behind those pale eyes to unleash a pulverizing bout of destructiveness. It was a menace that seemed horribly close to madness, and very far from the reasoned world of Yale and Boston and Washington Faulconer’s gracious house.

‘Took his time in sending for me, didn’t he?’ Truslow asked suspiciously.

‘He’s been in Richmond. But he did send someone called Ethan Ridley to see you last week.’

The mention of Ridley’s name made Truslow strike like a starving snake. He reached up with his left hand, grabbed Starbuck’s coat, and pulled down so that Starbuck was leaning precariously out of his saddle. He could smell the rank tobacco on Truslow’s breath, and see the scraps of food caught in the wiry, black bristles of his beard. The mad eyes glared into Starbuck’s face. ‘Ridley was here?’

‘I understand he visited you, yes.’ Starbuck was struggling to be courteous and even dignified, though he was remembering how his father had once tried to preach to some half-drunken immigrant longshoremen working on the quays of Boston Harbor and how even the impressive Reverend Elial had struggled to maintain his composure in the face of their maniacal coarseness. Breeding and education, Starbuck reflected, were poor things with which to confront raw nature. ‘He says you were not here.’

Truslow abruptly let go of Starbuck’s coat, at the same time making a growling noise that was half-threat and half-puzzlement. ‘I wasn’t here,’ he said, but distantly, as if trying to make sense of some new and important information, ‘but no one told me how he was here either. Come on, boy.’

Starbuck pulled his coat straight and surreptitiously loosened the big Savage revolver in its holster. ‘As I said, Mister Truslow, I have a letter for you from Colonel Faulconer …’

‘Colonel is he, now?’ Truslow laughed. He had stumped ahead of Starbuck, forcing the Northerner to follow him into a wide clearing that was evidently the Truslow homestead. Bedraggled vegetables grew in long rows, there was a small orchard, its trees a glory of white blossom, while the house itself was a one-story log cabin surmounted by a stout stone chimney from which a wisp of smoke trickled. The cabin was ramshackle and surrounded by untidy stacks of timber, broken carts, sawhorses and barrels. A brindled dog, seeing Starbuck, lunged furiously at the end of its chain, scattering a flock of terrified chickens that had been scratching in the dirt. ‘Get off your horse, boy,’ Truslow snapped at Starbuck.

‘I don’t want to detain you, Mister Truslow. I have Mister Faulconer’s letter here.’ Starbuck reached inside his coat.

‘I said get off that damned horse!’ Truslow snapped the command so fiercely that even the dog, which had seemed wilder than its own master, suddenly whimpered itself into silence and skulked back to the shade of the broken porch. ‘I’ve got work for you, boy,’ Truslow added.

‘Work?’ Starbuck slid out of the saddle, wondering just what kind of hell he had come to.

Truslow snatched the horse’s reins and tied them to a post. ‘I was expecting Roper,’ he said in impenetrable explanation, ‘but till he comes, you’ll have to do. Over there, boy.’ He pointed at a deep pit which lay just beyond one of the piles of broken carts. It was a saw pit, maybe eight feet deep and straddled by a tree trunk in which a massive great double-handed ripsaw was embedded.

‘Jump down, boy! You’ll be bottom man,’ Truslow snapped.

‘Mister Truslow!’ Starbuck tried to stem the madness with an appeal to reason.

‘Jump, boy!’ That tone of voice would have made the devil snap to attention, and Starbuck did take an involuntary step toward the pit’s edge, but then his innate stubbornness took command.

‘I’m not here to work.’

Truslow grinned. ‘You’ve got a gun, boy, you’d better be prepared to use it.’

‘I’m here to give you this letter.’ Starbuck took the envelope from an inside pocket.

‘You could kill a buffalo with that pistol, boy. You want to use it on me? Or you want to work for me?’

‘I want you to read this letter …’

‘Work or fight, boy.’ Truslow stepped closer to Starbuck. ‘I don’t give a sack of shit which one you want, but I ain’t waiting all day for you to make up your mind on it either.’

There was a time for fighting, Starbuck thought, and a time for deciding he would be bottom man in a saw pit. He jumped, landing in a slurry of mud, sawdust and woodchips.

‘Take your coat off, boy, and that hog pistol with it.’

‘Mister Truslow!’ Starbuck made one last effort to retain a shred of control over this encounter. ‘Would you just read this letter?’

‘Listen, boy, your letter’s just words, and words never filled a belly yet. Your fancy Colonel is asking me for a favor, and you’ll have to work to earn him his answer. You understand me? If Washington Faulconer himself had come I’d have him down that pit, so leave off your whining, get off your coat, take hold of that handle, and give me some work.’

So Starbuck left off his whining, took off his coat, took hold of the handle and gave him some work.

It seemed to Starbuck that he was mired in a pit beneath a cackling and vengeful demon. The great pit saw, singing through the trunk, was repeatedly rammed down at him in a shower of sawdust and chips that stung Starbuck’s eyes and clogged his mouth and nostrils, yet each time he took a hand off the saw to try and cuff his face, Truslow would bellow a reproof. ‘What’s the matter, boy? Gone soft on me? Work!’

The pit was straddled by a pinewood trunk that, judging by its size, had to be older than the Republic. Truslow had grudgingly informed Starbuck that he was cutting the trunk into planks which he had promised to deliver for a new floor being laid at the general store at Hankey’s Ford. ‘This and two other trunks should manage it,’ Truslow announced before they were even halfway through the first cut, by which time Starbuck’s muscles were already aching like fire and his hands were smarting.

‘Pull, boy, pull!’ Truslow shouted. ‘I can’t keep the cut straight if you’re lollygagging!’ The saw blade was nine feet long and supposed to be powered equally by the top and bottom men, though Thomas Truslow, perched on top of the trunk in his nailed boots, was doing by far the greater amount of work. Starbuck tried to keep up. He gathered that his role was to pull down hard, for it was the downstroke that provided most of the cutting force, and if he tried to push up too hard he risked buckling the saw, so it was better to let Truslow yank the great steel blade up from the pit, but though that upward motion gave Starbuck a half second of blessed relief, it immediately led to the crucial, brutal downstroke. Sweat was pouring off Starbuck.

He could have stopped. He could have refused to work one more moment and instead have just let go of the great wooden handle and shouted up at this foul man that Colonel Faulconer was unaccountably offering him a fifty-dollar bonus to sign up as a soldier, but he sensed that Truslow was testing him, and suddenly he resented the Southern attitude that assumed he was a feeble New Englander, too educated to be of any real use and too soft to be trusted with real men’s work. He had been fooled by Dominique, condemned as pious by Ethan Ridley and now he was being ridiculed by this filthy, tobacco-stained, bearded fiend, and Starbuck’s anger made him whip the saw down again and again and again so that the great blade rang through the slashing wood grain like a church bell.

‘Now you’re getting it!’ Truslow grunted.

‘And damn you, damn you too,’ Starbuck said, though under his panting breath. It felt extraordinarily daring to use the swear words, even under his breath for, though the devil above him could not hear the cursing, heaven’s recording angel could, and Starbuck knew he had just added another sin to the great list of sins marked to his account. And swearing was among the bad sins, almost as bad as thieving. Starbuck had been brought up to hate blaspheming and to despise the givers of oaths, and even the profane weeks he had spent with Major Trabell’s foul-mouthed Tom company had not quelled his unhappy conscience about cursing, but somehow he needed to defy God as well as Truslow at this moment, and so he went on spitting the word out to give himself strength.

‘Hold it!’ Truslow suddenly shouted, and Starbuck had an instant fear that his muttered imprecations had been heard, but instead the halt had merely been called so that the work could be adjusted. The saw had cut to within a few inches of the pit’s side, so now the trunk had to be moved. ‘Catch hold, boy!’ Truslow tossed down a stout branch that ended in a crutch. ‘Ram that under the far end and heave when I tell you.’

Starbuck heaved, moving the great trunk inch by painful inch until it was in its new position. Then there was a further respite as Truslow hammered wedges into the sawn cut.

‘So what’s Faulconer offering me?’ Truslow asked.

‘Fifty dollars.’ Starbuck spoke from the pit and wondered how Truslow had guessed that anything was being offered. ‘You’d like me to read you the letter?’

‘You suggesting I can’t read, boy?’

‘Let me give you the letter.’

‘Fifty, eh? He thinks he can buy me, does he? Faulconer thinks he can buy whatever he wants, whether it’s a horse, a man or a whore. But in the end he tires of whatever he buys, and you and me’ll be no different.’

‘He isn’t buying me,’ Starbuck said, and had that lie treated with a silent derision by Truslow. ‘Colonel Faulconer’s a good man,’ Starbuck insisted.

‘You know why he freed his niggers?’ Truslow asked.

Pecker Bird had told Starbuck that the manumission had been intended to spite Faulconer’s wife, but Starbuck neither believed the story nor would he repeat it. ‘Because it was the right thing to do,’ he said defiantly.

‘So it might have been,’ Truslow allowed, ‘but it was for another woman he did it. Roper will tell you the tale. She was some dollygob church girl from Philadelphia come to tell us southrons how to run our lives, and Faulconer let her stroll all over him. He reckoned he had to free his niggers before she’d ever lie with him, so he did but she didn’t anyway.’ Truslow laughed at this evidence of a fool befuddled. ‘She made a mock of him in front of all Virginia, and that’s why he’s making this Legion of his, to get his pride back. He thinks he’ll be a warrior hero for Virginia. Now, take hold, boy.’

Starbuck felt he had to protect his hero. ‘He’s a good man!’

‘He can afford to be good. His wealth’s bigger than his wits, now take hold, boy. Or are you afraid of hard work, is that it? I tell you boy, work should be hard. No bread tastes good that comes easy. So take hold. Roper will be here soon enough. He gave his word, and Roper don’t break his word. But you’ll have to do till he comes.’ Starbuck took hold, tensed, pulled, and the hellish rhythm began again. He dared not think of the blisters being raised on his hands, nor of the burning muscles of his back, arms and legs. He just concentrated blindly on the downstroke, dragging the pit saw’s teeth through the yellow wood and closing his eyes against the constant sifting of sawdust. In Boston, he thought, they had great steam-driven circular saws that could rip a dozen trunks into planks in the same time it took to make just one cut with this ripping saw, so why in God’s name were men still using saw pits?

They paused again as Truslow hammered more wedges into the cut trunk. ‘So what’s this war about, boy?’

‘States’ rights’ was all Starbuck could say.

‘What in hell’s name does that mean?’

‘It means, Mister Truslow, that America disagrees on how America should be governed.’

‘You could fill a bushel the way you talk, boy, but it don’t add up to a pot of turnips. I thought we had a Constitution to tell us how to govern ourselves?’

‘The Constitution has evidently failed us, Mister Truslow.’

‘You mean we ain’t fighting to keep our niggers?’

‘Oh, dear God,’ Starbuck sighed gently. He had once solemnly promised his father that he would never allow that word to be spoken in his presence, yet ever since he had met Dominique Demarest he had ignored the promise. Starbuck felt all his goodness, all his honor in the sight of God, slipping away like sand trickling through fingers.

‘Well, boy? Are we fighting for our niggers or aren’t we?’

Starbuck was leaning weakly on the dirt wall of the pit. He stirred himself to answer. ‘A faction of the North would dearly like to abolish slavery, yes. Others merely wish to stop it spreading westward, but the majority simply believe that the slave states should not dictate policy to the rest of America.’

‘What do the Yankees care about niggers? They ain’t got none.’

‘It is a matter of morality, Mister Truslow,’ Starbuck said, trying to wipe the sweat-matted sawdust out of his eyes with his sawdust-matted sleeve.

‘Does the Constitution say anything worth a piece of beaver shit about morality?’ Truslow asked in a tone of genuine inquiry.

‘No, sir. No, sir, it does not.’

‘I always reckon when a man speaks about morals he don’t know nothing about what he’s saying. Unless he’s a preacher. So what do you think we should do with the niggers, boy?’ Truslow asked.

‘I think, sir’—Starbuck wished to hell he was anywhere but in this mud and sawdust pit answering this foulmouth’s questions—‘I think, sir,’ he said again as he tried desperately to think of anything that might make sense, ‘I think that every man, of whatever color, has an equal right before God and before man to an equal measure of dignity and happiness.’ Starbuck decided he sounded just like his elder brother, James, who could make any proposition sound pompous and lifeless. His father would have trumpeted the rights of the Negroes in a voice fit to rouse echoes from the angels, but Starbuck could not raise the energy for that kind of defiance.

‘You like the niggers, is that the size of it?’

‘I think they are fellow creatures, Mister Truslow.’

‘Hogs are fellow creatures, but it don’t stop me killing ’em come berry time. Do you approve of slavery, boy?’

‘No, Mister Truslow.’

‘Why not, boy?’ The grating, mocking voice sounded from the brilliant sky above.

Starbuck tried to remember his father’s arguments, not just the easy one that no man had the right to own another, but the more complex ones, such as how slavery enslaved the owner as much as it enslaved the possessed, and how it demeaned the slaveholder, and how it denied God’s dignity to men who were the ebony image of God, and how it stultified the slavocracy’s economy by driving white artisans north and west, but somehow none of the complex, persuasive answers would come and he settled for a simple condemnation instead. ‘Because it’s wrong.’

‘You sound like a woman, boy.’ Truslow laughed. ‘So Faulconer thinks I should fight for his slave-holding friends, but no one in these hills can afford to feed and water a nigger, so why should I fight for them that can?’

‘I don’t know, sir, I really don’t know.’ Starbuck was too tired to argue.

‘So I’m supposed to fight for fifty bucks, is that it?’ Truslow’s voice was scathing. ‘Take hold, boy.’

‘Oh, God.’ The blisters on Starbuck’s hands had broken into raw patches of torn skin that were oozing blood and pus, but he had no choice but to seize the pit saw’s handle and drag it down. The pain of the first stroke made him whimper aloud, but the shame of the sound made him grip hard through the agony and to tear the steel teeth angrily through the wood.

‘That’s it, boy! You’re learning!’

Starbuck felt as if he were dying, as if his whole body had become a shank of pain that bent and pulled, bent and pulled, and he shamelessly allowed his weight to sag onto the handles during each upstroke so that Truslow caught and helped his tiredness for a brief instant before he let his weight drag the saw down once again. The saw handle was soggy with blood, the breath was rasping in his throat, his legs could barely hold him upright and still the toothed steel plunged up and down, up and down, up and mercilessly down.

‘You ain’t gettin’ tired now, boy, are you?’

‘No.’

‘Hardly started, we are. You go and look at Pastor Mitchell’s church in Nellysford, boy, and you’ll see a wide heart-pine floor that me and my pa whipsawed in a single day. Pull on, boy, pull on!’

Starbuck had never known work like it. Sometimes, in the winter, he went to his Uncle Matthew’s home in Lowell and they would saw ice from the frozen lake to fill the family ice house, but those excursions had been playful occasions, interspersed with snowball fights or bouts of wild skating along the lake banks beneath the icicle-hung trees. This plank sawing was relentless, cruel, remorseless, yet he dared not give up for he felt that his whole being, his future, his character, indeed his very soul were being weighed in the furious balance of Thomas Truslow’s scorn.

‘Hold there, boy, time for another wedge.’

Starbuck let go of the pit saw’s handle, staggered, tripped and half fell against the pit’s wall. His hands were too painful to uncurl. His breath hurt. He had been half aware that a second man had come to the saw pit and had been chatting to Truslow these last few painful minutes, but he did not want to look up and see whoever else was witnessing this humiliation.

‘You ever see anything to match it, Roper?’ Truslow’s voice was mocking.

Starbuck still did not look up.

‘This is Roper, boy,’ Truslow said. ‘Say your greeting.’

‘Good day, Mister Roper,’ Starbuck managed to say.

‘He calls you mister!’ Truslow found that amusing. ‘He thinks you niggers are his fellow creatures, Roper. Says you’ve got the same equal rights before God as he has. You reckon that’s how God sees it, Roper?’

Roper paused to inspect the exhausted Starbuck. ‘I reckon God would want me in his bosom long before he ever took that,’ Roper finally answered, and Starbuck looked unwillingly upward to see that Roper was a tall black man who was clearly amused by Starbuck’s predicament. ‘He don’t look good for nothing, does he now?’ Roper said.

‘He ain’t a bad worker,’ Truslow, astonishingly, came to Starbuck’s defense, and Starbuck, hearing it, felt as though he had never in all his life received a compliment half so valuable. Truslow, the compliment delivered, jumped down into the pit. ‘Now I’ll show you how it’s done, boy.’ Truslow took hold of the pit saw’s handle, nodded up at Roper, and suddenly the great blade of steel blurred as the two men went into an instant and much practiced rhythm. ‘This is how you do it!’ Truslow shouted over the saw’s ringing noise to the dazed Starbuck. ‘Let the steel do the work! You don’t fight it, you let it slice the wood for you. Roper and me could cut half the forests in America without catching breath.’ Truslow was using one hand only, and standing to one side of the work so that the flood of dust and chips did not stream onto his face. ‘So what brings you here, boy?’

‘I told you, a letter from—’

‘I mean what’s a Yankee doing in Virginia. You are a Yankee, aren’t you?’

Starbuck, remembering Washington Faulconer’s assertion of how much this man hated Yankees, decided to brazen it out. ‘And proud of it, yes.’

Truslow jetted a stream of tobacco juice into a corner of the pit. ‘So what are you doing here?’

Starbuck decided this was not the time to talk of Mademoiselle Demarest, nor of the Tom company, so offered an abbreviated and less anguished version of his story. ‘I’ve fallen out with my family and taken shelter with Mister Faulconer.’

‘Why him?’

‘I am a close friend of Adam Faulconer.’

‘Are you now?’ Truslow actually seemed to approve. ‘Where is Adam?’

‘The last we heard he was in Chicago.’

‘Doing what?’

‘He works with the Christian Peace Commission. They hold prayer meetings and distribute tracts.’

Truslow laughed. ‘Tracts and prayers won’t help, because America don’t want peace, boy. You Yankees want to tell us how to live our lives, just like the British did last century, but we ain’t any better listeners now than we were then. Nor is it their business. Who owns the house uses the best broom, boy. I’ll tell you what the North wants, boy.’ Truslow, while talking, was whipping the saw up and down in his slicing, tireless rhythm. ‘The North wants to give us more government, that’s what they want. It’s these Prussians, that’s what I reckon. They keep telling the Yankees how to make better government, and you Yankees is fool enough to listen, but I tell you it’s too late now.’

‘Too late?’

‘You can’t mend a broken egg, boy. America’s in two pieces, and the North will sell herself to the Prussians and we’ll mess through as we are.’

Starbuck was far too tired to care about the extraordinary theories that Truslow had about Prussia. ‘And the war?’

‘We just have to win it. See the Yankees off. I don’t want to tell them how to live, so long as they don’t tell me.’

‘So you’ll fight?’ Starbuck asked, sensing some hope for the success of his errand.

‘Of course I’ll fight. But not for fifty dollars.’ Truslow paused as Roper hammered a wedge into the new cut.

Starbuck, whose breath was slowly coming back, frowned. ‘I’m not empowered to offer more, Mister Truslow.’

‘I don’t want more. I’ll fight because I want to fight, and if I weren’t wanting to fight then fifty times fifty dollars wouldn’t buy me, though Faulconer would never understood that.’ Truslow paused to spit a stream of viscous tobacco juice. ‘His father now, he knew that a fed hound never hunts, but Washington? He’s a milksop, and he always pays to get what he wants, but I ain’t for sale. I’ll fight to keep America the way she is, boy, because the way she is makes her the best goddamned country in the whole goddamned world, and if that means killing a passel of you chicken-shit Northerners to keep her that way, then so be it. Are you ready, Roper?’

The saw slashed down again, leaving Starbuck to wonder why Washington Faulconer had been willing to pay so dearly for Truslow’s enlistment. Was it just because this man could bring other hard men from the mountains? In which case, Starbuck thought, it would be money well spent, for a regiment of hardscrabble demons like Truslow would surely be invincible.

‘So what are you trained to be, boy?’ Truslow kept sawing as he asked the question.

Starbuck was tempted to lie, but he had neither the energy nor the will to sustain a fiction. ‘A preacher,’ he answered wearily.

The sawing abruptly stopped, causing Roper to protest as his rhythm was broken. Truslow ignored the protest. ‘You’re a preacher?’

‘I was training to be a minister.’ Starbuck offered a more exact definition.

‘A man of God?’

‘I hope so, yes. Indeed I do.’ Except he knew he was not worthy and the knowledge of his backsliding was bitter.

Truslow stared incredulously at Starbuck and then, astonishingly, he wiped his hands down his filthy clothes as though trying to smarten himself up for his visitor. ‘I’ve got work for you,’ he announced grimly.

Starbuck glanced at the wicked-toothed saw. ‘But …’

‘Preacher’s work,’ Truslow said curtly. ‘Roper! Ladder.’

Roper dropped a homemade ladder into the pit and Starbuck, flinching from the pain in his hands, let himself be chivied up its crude rungs.

‘Did you bring your book?’ Truslow demanded as he followed Starbuck up the ladder.

‘Book?’

‘All preachers have books. Never mind, there’s one in the house. Roper! You want to ride down to the Decker house? Tell Sally and Robert to come here fast. Take the man’s horse. What’s your name, mister?’

‘Starbuck. Nathaniel Starbuck.’

The name evidently meant nothing to Truslow. ‘Take Mister Starbuck’s mare,’ he called to Roper, ‘and tell Sally I won’t take no for an answer!’ All these instructions had been hurled over Truslow’s shoulders as he hurried to his log house. The dog scurried aside as its master stalked past, then lay staring malevolently at Starbuck, growling deep in its throat.

‘You don’t mind if I take the horse?’ Roper asked. ‘Not to worry. I know her. I used to work for Mister Faulconer. I know this mare, Pocahontas, isn’t she?’

Starbuck waved a feeble hand in assent. ‘Who is Sally?’

‘Truslow’s daughter.’ Roper chuckled as he untied the mare’s bridle and adjusted the saddle. ‘She’s a wild one, but you know what they say of women. They’re the devil’s nets, and young Sally will snare a few souls before she’s through. She don’t live here now. When her mother was dying she took herself off to Missus Decker, who can’t abide Truslow.’ Roper seemed amused by the human tangle. He swung himself into Pocahontas’s saddle. ‘I’ll be off, Mister Truslow!’ he called toward the cabin.

‘Go on, Roper! Go!’ Truslow emerged from the house carrying an enormous Bible that had lost its back cover and had a broken spine. ‘Hold it, mister.’ He thrust the dilapidated Bible at Starbuck, then bent over a water butt and scooped handfuls of rainwater over his scalp. He tried to pat the matted filthy hair into some semblance of order, then crammed his greasy hat back into place before beckoning to Starbuck. ‘Come on, mister.’

Starbuck followed Truslow across the clearing. Flies buzzed in the warm evening air. Starbuck, cradling the Bible in his forearms to spare his skinned palms, tried to explain the misunderstanding to Thomas Truslow. ‘I’m not an ordained minister, Mister Truslow.’

‘What’s ordained mean?’ Truslow had stopped at the edge of the clearing and was unbuttoning his filthy jeans. He stared at Starbuck, evidently expecting an answer, then began to urinate. ‘It keeps the deer off the crop,’ he explained. ‘So what’s ordained mean?’

‘It means that I have not been called by a congregation to be their pastor.’

‘But you’ve got the book learning?’

‘Yes, most of it.’

‘And you could be ordained?’

Starbuck was immediately assailed with guilt about Mademoiselle Dominique Demarest. ‘I’m not sure I want to be, anymore.’

‘But you could be?’ Truslow insisted.

‘I suppose so, yes.’

‘Then you’re good enough for me. Come on.’ He buttoned his trousers and beckoned Starbuck under the trees to where, in a tended patch of grass and beneath a tree that was brilliant with red blossom, a single grave lay. The grave marker was a broad piece of wood, rammed into the earth and marked with the one word Emly. The grave did not look old, for its blossom-littered earth ridge was still sparse with grass. ‘She was my wife,’ Truslow said in a surprisingly meek and almost shy voice.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Died Christmas Day.’ Truslow blinked, and suddenly Starbuck felt a wave of sorrow come from the small, urgent man, a wave every bit as forceful and overwhelming as Truslow’s more habitual emanation of violence. Truslow seemed unable to speak, as though there were not words to express what he felt. ‘Emily was a good wife,’ he finally said, ‘and I was a good husband to her. She made me that. A good woman can do that to a man. She can make a man good.’

‘Was she sick?’ Starbuck asked uneasily.

Truslow nodded. He had taken off his greasy hat, which he now held awkwardly in his strong hands. ‘Congestion of the brain. It weren’t an easy death.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Starbuck said inadequately.

‘There was a man might have saved her. A Yankee.’ Truslow spoke the last word with a sour hatred that made Starbuck shiver. ‘He was a fancy doctor from up North. He was visiting relatives in the valley last Thanksgiving.’ He jerked his head westward, indicating the Shenandoah Valley beyond the intervening mountains. ‘Doctor Danson told me of him, said he could work miracles, so I rode over and begged him to come up and see my Emily. She couldn’t be moved, see. I went on bended knee.’ Truslow fell silent, remembering the humiliation, then shook his head. ‘The man refused to move. Said there was nothing he could do, but the truth was he didn’t want to stir off his fat ass and mount a horse in that rain. They ran me off the property.’

Starbuck had never heard of anyone being cured of congestion of the brain and suspected the Yankee doctor had known all along that anything he tried would be a waste of time, but how was anyone to persuade a man like Thomas Truslow of that truth?

‘She died on Christmas Day,’ Truslow went on softly. ‘The snow was thick up here then, like a blanket. Just me and her, the girl had run off, damn her skin.’

‘Sally?’

‘Hell, yes.’ Truslow was standing to attention now with his hands crossed awkwardly over his breast, almost as if he was imitating the death stance of his beloved Emily. ‘Emily and me weren’t married proper,’ he confessed to Starbuck. ‘She ran off with me the year before I went to be a soldier. I was just sixteen, she weren’t a day older, but she was already married. We were wrong, and we both knew it, but it was like we couldn’t help ourselves.’ There were tears in his eyes, and Starbuck suddenly felt glad to know that this tough man had once behaved as stupidly and foolishly as Starbuck had himself just behaved. ‘I loved her,’ Truslow went on, ‘and that’s the truth of it, though Pastor Mitchell wouldn’t wed us because he said we were sinners.’

‘I’m sure he should have made no such judgment,’ Starbuck said gravely.

‘I reckon he should. It was his job to judge us. What else is a preacher for except to teach us conduct? I ain’t complaining, but God gave us his punishment, Mister Starbuck. Only one of our children lived, and she broke our hearts, and now Emily’s dead and I’m left alone. God is not mocked, Mister Starbuck.’

Suddenly, unexpectedly, Starbuck felt an immense surge of sympathy for this awkward, hard, difficult man who stood so clumsily beside the grave he must have dug himself. Or perhaps Roper had helped him, or one of the other fugitive men who lived in this high valley out of sight of the magistrates and the taxmen who infested the plains. At Christmastime, too, and Starbuck imagined them carrying the limp body out into the snow and hacking down into the cold ground.

‘We weren’t married proper, and she were never buried proper, not with a man of God to see her home, and that’s what I want you to do for her. You’re to say the right words, Mister Starbuck. Say them for Emily, because if you say the right words then God will take her in.’

‘I’m sure he will.’ Starbuck felt entirely inadequate to the moment.

‘So say them.’ There was no violence in Thomas Truslow now, just a terrible vulnerability.

There was silence in the small glade. The evening shadows stretched long. Oh dear God, Starbuck thought, but I am not worthy, not nearly worthy. God will not listen to me, a sinner, yet are we not all sinners? And the truth, surely, was that God had already heard Thomas Truslow’s prayer, for Truslow’s anguish was more eloquent than any litany that Starbuck’s education could provide. Yet Thomas Truslow needed the comfort of ritual, of old words lovingly said, and Starbuck gripped the book tight, closed his eyes and raised his face toward the dusk-shadowed blossoms, but suddenly he felt a fool and an imposter and no words would come. He opened his mouth, but he could not speak.

‘That’s right,’ Truslow said, ‘take your time.’

Starbuck tried to think of a passage of scripture that would give him a start. His throat was dry. He opened his eyes and suddenly a verse came to him. ‘Man that is born of a woman,’ he began, but his voice was scratchy and uncertain so he began again, ‘man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.’

‘Amen,’ Thomas Truslow said, ‘amen to that.’

‘He cometh forth like a flower …’

‘She was, she was, praise God, she was.’

‘And is cut down.’

‘The Lord took her, the Lord took her.’ Truslow, his eyes closed, rocked back and forth as he tried to summon all his intensity.

‘He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.’

‘God help us sinners,’ Truslow said, ‘God help us.’

Starbuck was suddenly dumb. He had quoted the first two verses of the fourteenth chapter of Job, and suddenly he was remembering the fourth verse, which asked who can bring a clean thing from an unclean? Then gave its hard answer, no one. And surely Truslow’s unsanctified household had been unclean?

‘Pray, mister, pray,’ Truslow pleaded.

‘Oh Lord God’—Starbuck clenched his eyes against the sun’s dying light—‘remember Emily who was thy servant, thy handmaid, and who was snatched from this world into thy greater glory.’

‘She was, she was!’ Truslow almost wailed the confirmation.

‘Remember Emily Truslow—’ Starbuck went on lamely.

‘Mallory,’ Truslow interrupted, ‘that was her proper name, Emily Marjory Mallory. And shouldn’t we kneel?’ He snatched off his hat and dropped onto the soft loamy soil.

Starbuck also dropped to his knees. ‘Oh, Lord,’ he began again, and for a moment he was speechless, but then, from nowhere it seemed, the words began to flow. He felt Truslow’s grief fill him, and in turn he tried to lay that grief upon the Lord. Truslow moaned as he listened to the prayer, while Starbuck raised his face to the green leaves as though he could project his words on strong hard wings out beyond the trees, out beyond the darkening sky, out beyond the first pale stars, out to where God reigned in all his terrible brooding majesty. The prayer was good, and Starbuck felt its power and wondered why he could not pray for himself as he prayed for this unknown woman. ‘Oh God,’ he finished, and there were tears on his face as his prayer came to an end, ‘oh dear God, hear our prayer, hear us, hear us.’

And then there was silence again, except for the wind in the leaves and the sound of the birds and from somewhere in the valley a lone dog’s barking. Starbuck opened his eyes to see that Truslow’s dirty face was streaked with tears, yet the small man looked oddly happy. He was leaning forward to hold his stubby, strong fingers into the dirt of the grave as if, by thus holding the earth above his Emily’s corpse, he could talk with her.

‘I’ll be going to war, Emily,’ he said, without any embarrassment at so addressing his dead woman in Starbuck’s presence. ‘Faulconer’s a fool, and I won’t be going for his sake, but we’ve got kin in his ranks, and I’ll go for them. Your brother’s joined this so-called Legion, and cousin Tom is there, and you’d want me to look after them both, girl, so I will. And Sally’s going to be just dandy. She’s got her man now and she’s going to be looked after, and you can just wait for me, my darling, and I’ll be with you in God’s time. This is Mister Starbuck who prayed for you. He did it well, didn’t he?’ Truslow was weeping, but now he pulled his fingers free of the soil and wiped them against his jeans before cuffing at his cheeks. ‘You pray well,’ he said to Starbuck.

‘I think perhaps your prayer was heard without me,’ Starbuck said modestly.

‘A man can never be sure enough, though, can he? And God will soon be deafened with prayers. War does that, so I’m glad we put our word in before the battles start drowning his ears with words. Emily will have enjoyed hearing you pray. She always did like a good prayer. Now I want you to pray over Sally.’

Oh God, Starbuck thought, but this was going too far! ‘You want me to do what, Mister Truslow?’

‘Pray over Sally. She’s been a disappointment to us.’ Truslow climbed to his feet and pulled his wide-brimmed hat over his hair. He stared at the grave as he went on with his tale. ‘She’s not like her mother, nor like me. I don’t know what bad wind brought her to us, but she came and I promised Emily as how I’d look after her, and I will. She’s bare fifteen now and going to have a child, you see.’

‘Oh.’ Starbuck did not know what else to say. Fifteen! That was the same age as his younger sister, Martha, and Starbuck still thought of Martha as a child. At fifteen, Starbuck thought, he had not even known where babies came from, assuming they were issued by the authorities in some secret, fuss-laden ceremony involving women, the church and doctors.

‘She says it’s young Decker’s babe, and maybe it is. And maybe it isn’t. You tell me Ridley was here last week? That worries me. He’s been sniffing round my Sally like she was on heat and him a dog. I was down the valley last week on business, so who knows where she was?’

Starbuck’s first impulse was to declare that Ridley was engaged to Anna Faulconer, so could not be responsible for Sally Truslow’s pregnancy, but some impulse told him that such a naive protest would be met with a bitter scorn and so, not knowing what else to say, he sensibly said nothing.

‘She’s not like her mother,’ Truslow spoke on, more to himself than to Starbuck. ‘There’s a wildness in her, see? Maybe it’s mine, but it weren’t Emily’s. But she says it’s Robert Decker’s babe, so let it be so. And he believes her and says he’ll marry her, so let that be so too.’ Truslow stooped and plucked a weed from the grave. ‘That’s where Sally is now,’ he explained to Starbuck, ‘with the Deckers. She said she couldn’t abide me, but it was her mother’s pain and dying she couldn’t abide. Now she’s pregnant, so she needs to be married with a home of her own, not living on charity. I promised Emily I’d look after Sally, so that’s what I’m doing. I’ll give Sally and her boy this homestead, and they can raise the child here. They won’t want me. Sally and me have never seen eye to eye, so she and young Decker can take this place and be proper together. And that’s what I want you to do, Mister Starbuck. I want you to marry them proper. They’re on their way here now.’

‘But I can’t marry them!’ Starbuck protested.

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