The Starbuck Chronicles: The Complete 4-Book Collection

‘We’re not looking for a house,’ Ridley corrected her, ‘but a set of rooms. My brother knows some that are for rent.’

‘Rooms.’ She was suspicious.

‘Large rooms. Tall ceilings, carpets.’ Ridley waved his hands to suggest opulence. ‘A place you can keep your own niggers.’

‘I can have a nigger?’ she asked excitedly.

‘Two.’ Ridley embroidered his promise. ‘You can have a maid and a cook. Then, of course, when the baby comes, you can have a nurse.’

‘I want a carriage, too. A carriage like that.’ She gestured through the window at a four-wheeled carriage that had an elegant shell body slung on leather springs and a black canvas hood folded back to reveal an interior of scarlet buttoned leather. The carriage was drawn by four matching bays. A Negro coachman sat on the box while another black, either slave or servant, handed a woman up into the open coach.

‘That’s a barouche,’ Ridley told her.

‘Barouche.’ Sally tried the word and liked it.

A tall, rather cadaverous man followed the woman into the barouche. ‘And that,’ Ridley told Sally, ‘is our president.’

‘The skinny one!’ She leaned forward to stare at Jefferson Davis who, his top hat in his hand, was standing in the carriage to finish a conversation with two men who stood on the hotel steps. His business finished, President Davis sat opposite his wife and crammed the glossy hat on his head. ‘Is that really Jeff Davis?’ Sally asked.

‘It is. He’s staying in the hotel while they find him a house.’

‘I never thought I’d see a president,’ Sally said, and watched wide-eyed as the barouche turned in the courtyard before clattering under the arch into Main Street. Sally smiled at Ridley. ‘You’re trying real hard to be nice, aren’t you?’ she said, as though Ridley had personally arranged for the president of the Provisional Government of the Confederate States of America to parade for Sally’s benefit.

‘I’m trying real hard,’ he said, and reached across the table to take hold of her left hand. He drew it toward him and kissed her fingers. ‘I’m going to go on trying real hard,’ he said, ‘so that you’ll always be happy.’

‘And the baby.’ Sally was beginning to feel motherly.

‘And our baby,’ Ridley said, though the words very nearly stuck in his craw, but he managed to smile, then took the new gold ring out of his pocket, shook it free of its small wash-leather bag and placed it on her ring finger. ‘You should have a wedding ring,’ he explained. Sally had started to wear the antique silver ring on her right hand, and her left was consequently bare.

Sally examined the effect of the small gold ring on her finger, then laughed. ‘Does this mean we’re married?’

‘It means you should look respectable for a landlord,’ he said, then took her right hand in his and tugged the silver ring over her knuckle.

‘Careful!’ Sally tried to pull her hand away, but Ridley kept firm hold.

‘I’m going to have it cleaned,’ he said. He placed the silver ring in the wash-leather bag. ‘I’ll take good care of it,’ he promised, though in truth he had decided that the antique ring would make a good keepsake to remember Sally by. ‘Now come!’ He glanced at the big clock above the carving table. ‘We have to meet my brother.’

They walked through the spring sunshine and folks thought what a fine couple they made; a handsome Southern officer and his beautiful, graceful girl who, flushed with wine, laughed beside her man. Sally even danced a few steps as she imagined what happiness these next months would bring. She would be a respectable lady, with her own slaves and living in luxury. When Sally had been small her mother would sometimes talk about the fine houses of the wealthy and how they had candles in every room and feather mattresses on every bed and ate off golden plates and never knew what the cold was. Their water did not come from a stream that froze in winter, their beds had no lice and their hands were never chipped and sore like Sally’s. Now Sally would live just like that. ‘Robert said I’d be happy if I just stopped dreaming,’ she confided in her lover, ‘and if he could see me now!’

‘Did you tell him you were coming here?’ Ridley asked.

‘Of course not! I’m not wanting to see him ever again. Not till I’m a great lady and then I’ll let him open my carriage door and he won’t even know who I am.’ She laughed at that fine revenge on her previous poverty. ‘Is that your brother’s coach?’

They had come to the corner of Cary Street and Twenty-fourth. It was a grim quarter of town, close to the York River Railroad that lay between the cobbled street and the rocky riverbank. Ridley had explained to Sally that his brother did business in this part of town, which is why they needed to walk through its streets. Now, on the point of ridding himself of the girl, he felt a pang of remorse. Her company this afternoon had been light and easy, her laughter unforced, and the glances of other men in the streets had been flatteringly jealous. Then Ridley thought of her ambition that was so unrealistic and of the threat she represented, and so he hardened his heart to the inevitable. ‘That’s the carriage,’ he said, guessing that the big, ugly, close-curtained coach was indeed Delaney’s vehicle, though there was no sign of Delaney himself. Instead there was a massive Negro on the box and two gaunt sway-backed horses in the dilapidated harness.

The Negro looked down at Ridley. ‘You Mister Ridley, Massa?’

‘Yes.’ Ridley felt Sally’s hands clutch fearfully at his arm.

The Negro knocked twice on the coach roof and the curtained door opened to reveal a thin, middle-aged white man with a gap-toothed grin, dirty hair and a walleye. ‘Mister Ridley. And you must be Miss Truslow?’

‘Yes.’ Sally was nervous.

‘Welcome, ma’am. Welcome.’ The ugly creature leaped down from the carriage to offer Sally a deep bow. ‘My name is Tillotson, ma’am, Joseph Tillotson, and I am your servant, ma’am, your most obedient servant.’ He looked up at her from his bowed position, blinked in astonishment at her beauty and seemed to leer in anticipation as he swept his hand in an elaborate gesture inviting her into the coach’s interior. ‘Be so pleased, dear lady, as to step inside the coach and I shall wave my wand and turn it into a golden carriage fit for a princess as lovely as you.’ He snuffled with laughter at his own wit.

‘This ain’t your brother, Ethan.’ Sally was suspicious and apprehensive.

‘We’re going to meet him, ma’am, indeed we are,’ Tillotson said and offered her his grotesque welcoming bow again.

‘You’re coming, Ethan?’ Sally still clung to her lover’s arm.

‘Of course I am,’ Ridley reassured Sally, then persuaded her to walk toward the coach as Tillotson folded down a set of steps covered in threadbare carpet.

‘Give me your parasol, ma’am, and allow me.’ Tillotson took Sally’s parasol, then handed her up into the dark, musty interior. The coach’s windows were covered by leather-blinds that had been unrolled from their spindles and nailed to the bottom sill. Ridley stepped toward the coach, uncertain what to do next, but Tillotson pushed him unceremoniously away, folded up the carriage steps then leapt nimbly into the coach’s dark interior. ‘Got her, Tommy!’ he shouted to the driver. ‘Go on!’ He tossed the brand-new parasol into the gutter and slammed the door.

‘Ethan!’ Sally’s voice called in pathetic protest as the big coach lurched forward. Then she called again, but louder. ‘Ethan!’

There was the sound of a slap, a scream, then silence. The Negro coachman cracked his whip, the carriage’s iron-rimmed wheels screeched on the cobbles as the heavy vehicle slewed around the corner, and thus Ridley was rid of his succuba. He felt remorse, for her voice had been so pathetic in that last desperate cry, but he knew there had been no other alternative. Indeed, he told himself, the whole wretched business had been Sally’s own fault, for she had made herself into a nuisance, good for one thing only, but now she was gone and he told himself he was well shot of her.

He still held Sally’s heavy bag. He pulled it open to find there was no gun inside, just the one hundred silver dollars he had originally paid to bribe her into silence. Each coin had been separately wrapped in a torn sheet of blue sugar paper, as if each was peculiarly special, and for a moment Ridley’s heart was touched by that childish tribute, but then he realized that Sally had probably wrapped the coins to stop them chinking and thus attracting predatory attention. Whatever, the coins were now his again, which only seemed right. He tucked the bag under his arm, pulled on his gloves, tipped his uniform hat over his eyes, tugged his saber to a jaunty angle, and sauntered slowly home.

‘It seems’—Anna reached across the table for a bread roll that she broke into two, then dipped one half in gravy as a titbit for her noisy spaniels—‘that Truslow has a daughter, and the daughter got herself pregnant, so he married her off to some poor boy and now the daughter’s run away and the boy’s in the Legion, and Truslow is angry.’

‘Damned angry,’ her father said in high amusement. ‘Hit the boy.’

‘Poor Truslow,’ Adam said.

‘Poor boy.’ Anna dropped another morsel of bread among her yapping, scrapping dogs. ‘Truslow broke his cheekbone, isn’t that right, Papa?’

‘Broke it badly,’ Faulconer confirmed. The Colonel had managed to repair the ravages imposed on him by the abortive cavalry raid. He had bathed, trimmed his beard and donned uniform so that he once again looked like a dashing soldier. ‘The boy’s called Robert Decker,’ the Colonel went on, ‘the son of Tom Decker, you remember him, Adam? Wretched man. He’s dead now, it seems, and good riddance.’

‘I remember Sally Truslow,’ Adam said idly. ‘A sullen thing, but real pretty.’

‘Did you see the girl when you were up at Truslow’s place, Nate?’ Faulconer asked. The Colonel was trying very hard to be pleasant toward Starbuck to show that the morose disregard of the last few days was over and forgotten.

‘I don’t remember noticing her, sir.’

‘You would have noticed her,’ Adam said. ‘She’s kind of noticeable.’

‘Well, she’s bolted,’ Faulconer said, ‘and Decker doesn’t know where she’s run to, and Truslow’s mad at him. Seems he gave the happy couple his patch of land and they’ve just left it in Roper’s care. You remember Roper, Adam? He’s living up there now. Man’s a rogue, but he knew how to manage horses.’

‘I don’t suppose they were ever properly married.’ Anna found the plight of the unhappy couple far more interesting than the fate of a freed slave.

‘I doubt it very much,’ her father agreed. ‘It would have been one quick jump over the broomstick, if they were even that formal.’

Starbuck stared down at his plate. Dinner had been a dish of boiled bacon, dried corn pie and fried potatoes. Washington Faulconer, his two children and Starbuck had been the only diners, and Truslow’s attack on Robert Decker the only topic of conversation. ‘Where can the poor girl have gone?’ Adam asked.

‘Richmond,’ his father said instantly. ‘All the bad girls go to Richmond. She’ll find herself work,’ he said, glancing at Anna and making a rueful face, ‘of a kind.’

Anna blushed, while Starbuck was thinking that Ethan Ridley was also in Richmond. ‘What happens to Truslow?’ he asked instead.

‘Nothing. He’s already full of remorse. I put him in the guard tent and threatened him with ten kinds of hell.’ In fact Major Pelham had arrested Truslow and done all the threatening, but Faulconer did not think the distinction important. The Colonel lit a cigar. ‘Now Truslow’s insisting that Decker join his company and I suppose I’d better let him. It seems the boy’s got relatives in the company. Can’t you keep those dogs quiet, Anna?’

‘No, Father.’ She dropped another scrap of gravy-soaked bread into the noisy free-for-all. ‘And speaking of jumping over broomsticks,’ she said, ‘you all missed Pecker’s wedding.’

‘That was a very proper wedding, surely?’ her brother said sternly.

‘Of course it was. Moss officiated very damply and Priscilla looked almost pretty.’ Anna smiled. ‘Uncle Pecker glowered at us all, it poured with rain and Mother sent six bottles of wine as a present.’

‘Our best wine,’ Washington Faulconer said stonily.

‘How would Mother have known?’ Anna asked innocently.

‘She knew,’ Faulconer said.

‘And the schoolchildren sang a very feeble song,’ Anna went on. ‘When I get married, Father, I do not want the Tompkinson twins singing for me. Is that very ungrateful?’

‘You’ll get married in St. Paul’s, Richmond,’ her father said, ‘with the Reverend Peterkin officiating.’

‘In September,’ Anna insisted. ‘I’ve talked with Mama, and she agrees. But only if we have your blessing, Papa, of course.’

‘September?’ Washington Faulconer shrugged, as though he did not much mind when the wedding took place. ‘Why not?’

‘Why September?’ Adam asked.

‘Because the war will be over by then,’ Anna declared, ‘and if we leave it later then there’ll be bad weather for the Atlantic crossing, and Mother says we need to be in Paris by October at the latest. We’ll have a winter in Paris, then go to the German spas in the spring. Mama says you might like to come, Adam?’

‘Me?’ Adam seemed surprised at the invitation.

‘To keep Ethan company while Mama and I take the waters. And to be Mama’s escort, of course.’

‘You can go in uniform, Adam.’ Washington Faulconer clearly did not resent being left out of the family expedition. ‘Your mother would like that. Full-dress uniform with saber, sash and medals, eh? Show the Europeans how a Southern soldier looks?’

‘Me?’ Adam asked again, this time of his father.

‘Yes, you, Adam.’ Faulconer tossed his napkin onto the table. ‘And talking of uniforms, you’ll find one in your room. Put it on, then come to the study and we’ll fit you out with a saber. You too, Nate. Every officer should carry a blade.’

Adam paused and for a second or two Starbuck feared that this was the moment when his friend would make his pacifist stand. Starbuck tensed for the confrontation, but then, with a decisive nod that suggested he had made his choice only after a great effort of will, Adam pushed back his chair. ‘To work,’ he said quietly, almost to himself, ‘to work.’

The work proved to be a glorious early summer of drumbeats and drill, of exercises across pastureland and of comradeship in tented encampments. They were hot days of laughter, weariness, sore muscles, tanned skin, high hopes and powder-stained faces. The Legion practiced musketry until the men’s shoulders were bruised from the impact of the guns and their faces smeared black by the explosion of the percussion caps and their lips powder-stained from biting open the paper-wrapped cartridges. They learned to fix bayonets, to form a firing line and to make a square to fend off cavalry. They began to feel like soldiers.

They learned to sleep through discomfort and discovered the long loping march rhythm that would see a man through endless, sun-racked days on heat-baked roads. On Sundays they formed a hollow square for a service of prayer and hymns. Their favorite was ‘Fight the Good Fight,’ while in the evenings, when men were feeling maudlin for their families, they loved to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ very slowly so that the sweet tune lingered in the hot evening air. On other nights of the week groups of men formed Bible classes or prayer meetings, while some played cards or drank the liquor that was sold illegally by peddlers come from Charlottesville or Richmond. Once, when Major Pelham caught such a peddler, he broke the man’s entire stock of stone-bottled mountain whiskey, though the Colonel was less inclined to take the hard line. ‘Let them have their good time,’ Faulconer liked to say.

Adam feared that his father was trying too hard to be popular, yet in fairness the lenience was all a part of Washington Faulconer’s theory of soldiering. ‘These men aren’t European peasants,’ the Colonel explained, ‘and they certainly ain’t Northern factory drudges. These are good Americans! Good Southerners! They’ve got fire in their bellies and liberty in their hearts and if we force them into hours of drill and yet more drill and still more drill we’ll simply dull them into witless fools. I want them eager! I want them to go into battle like horses fresh off a spring pasture, not like nags coming off winter hay. I want them full of spirit, élan, the French call it, and it’s going to win us this war!’

‘Not without drill, it won’t,’ Major Pelham would answer gloomily. He was allowed to give four hours of drill a day and not a minute more. ‘I’ll warrant Robert Lee is drilling his men in Richmond,’ Pelham would insist, ‘and McDowell his in Washington!’

‘I warrant they are too, and so they should, just to keep the rogues out of mischief. But our rogues are better quality. They’re going to make the best soldiers in America! In the world!’ And when the Colonel was in this sublime mood neither Pelham nor all the military experts in Christendom could have changed his mind.

So Sergeant Truslow simply ignored the Colonel and made his company do the extra drill anyway. At first, when Truslow had come down from his high home in the hills, the Colonel had imagined employing him as one of the fifty cavalrymen who would be the Legion’s outriders and scouts, but somehow, after the raid, the Colonel felt less willing to have Truslow so close to headquarters, and so he had let Truslow become company sergeant to Company K, one of the two skirmishing companies, but even from there, on the outer flank of the Legion, Truslow’s influence was baleful. Soldiering, he said, was about winning battles, not about holding prayer meetings or hymn singing, and he immediately insisted that Company K triple the amount of time it spent in drill. He had the company out of bed two hours before dawn and, by the time the other companies were just beginning to light their breakfast fires, Company K was already tired. Captain Roswell Jennings, K Company’s commanding officer who had secured his election with lavish quantities of homemade whiskey, was happy so long as Truslow did not demand his presence at the extra sessions.

The other companies, seeing the extra snap and pride in Company K, had begun to lengthen their own time on the parade ground. Major Pelham was delighted, the Colonel held his peace, while Sergeant Major Proctor, who had been Washington Faulconer’s bailiff, deviled through his drill books to find new and more complicated maneuvers for the rapidly improving Legion to practice. Soon even old Benjamin Ridley, Ethan’s father, who had been a militia officer in his younger days, but who was now so fat and ill that he could scarcely walk, grudgingly admitted that the Legion was at last beginning to look like real soldiers.

Ethan Ridley had returned from Richmond with caissons, limbers and ammunition for the two artillery pieces. The Legion was now fully equipped. Each man had a double-breasted gray jacket with two rows of brass buttons, a pair of ankle-high boots, gray trousers and a round cap with a crown and visor stiffened with pasteboard. He carried a knapsack for his spare clothes and personal belongings, a haversack for his food, a canteen for water, a tin cup, a cap box on his belt to hold the percussion caps that fired his rifle, and a cartridge box for the ammunition. His weapons were one walnut-stocked 1841 Model Rifle, a sword-handled bayonet and whatever personal weapons he chose to carry. Nearly all the men carried bowie knives, which they were certain would prove lethal in the hand-to-hand combat they confidently expected. Some men had revolvers, and indeed, as the June days lengthened and the rumors of impending battle intensified, more and more parents provided their soldier sons with revolvers in the belief that the weapon would be a lifesaver in battle.

‘What you need,’ Truslow told his men, ‘is one rifle, one mug, one haversack, and damn all else.’ He carried a bowie knife, but only for scavenging and cutting brush. Everything else, he told them, was just weight.

The men ignored Truslow, trusting instead in the Colonel’s largesse. Each man was issued an oilcloth groundsheet in which he rolled two gray blankets. Washington Faulconer’s only economy was a refusal to buy the Legion any greatcoats. The war, he declared, could not possibly last into the cold weather, and he was not spending his money to provide the men of Faulconer County with churchgoing coats, but only to make a great name for themselves in the history of Southern independence. He did provide each man with a sewing kit, towels and a clothes brush, while Doctor Billy Danson insisted that every Legionnaire also carry a roll of cotton strips for bandages.

Major Thaddeus Bird, who had always been fond of long walks and was the only one of Faulconer’s officers who resolutely refused to ride a horse, contended that Truslow was right and that the men had been provided with altogether too much equipment. ‘A man can’t march cumbered like a mule,’ he contended. The schoolmaster was ever ready to express such military opinions, which were just as readily ignored by the Colonel, though as the summer passed a group of younger men found themselves drawn more and more to Bird’s company. They would meet in his yard of an evening, sitting on the broken church bench or on stools fetched from the schoolhousc. Starbuck and Adam went frequently, as did Bird’s deputy, Lieutenant Davies, and a half dozen other officers and sergeants.

The men would bring their own food and drink. Priscilla would sometimes have prepared a salad or a plate of biscuits, but the real business of the evenings was either to make music or else to raid Bird’s jumbled pile of books for passages to read aloud. Then they would argue into the darkness, setting the world to rights as Adam and Starbuck used to do when they were at Yale, though these new evenings of discussion were laced with news and rumors of the war. In western Virginia, where the Colonel’s raid had been so damply disappointing, the Confederacy suffered new defeats. The worst was at Philippi where Northern forces won a humiliatingly easy victory that the Northern newspapers dubbed the ‘Philippi Races.’ Thomas Jackson, fearing to be cut off in Harper’s Ferry, abandoned the river town, and that event made it seem to the young officers in Faulconer Court House that the North was invincible, but then, a week later, came reports of a skirmish on the seaboard of Virginia where Northern troops had sallied inland from a coastal fortress only to be bloodily repulsed in the fields around Bethel Church.

Not all the news was true. There were rumors of victories that never happened and peace talks that never occurred. One day it was announced that the European powers had recognized the Confederacy and that the North was consequently suing for peace, but that turned out to be false even though the Reverend Moss had sworn on a stack of Bibles that it was the gospel truth. Bird was amused by the summer’s alarms. ‘It’s just a game,’ he said, ‘just a game.’

‘War is hardly a game, Uncle,’ Adam chided.

‘Of course it’s a game, and the Legion is your father’s toy and a very expensive one too. Which is why I hope we never get used in battle because then the toy will be broken and your father will be inconsolable.’

‘Do you really hope that, Thaddeus?’ his wife asked. She liked to sit in the garden till dark, but then, because she had taken over sole responsibility for the school, she would go to bed and leave the men to argue by candlelight.

‘Of course I hope that,’ Bird said. ‘No one in his right mind wants a battle.’

‘Nate does,’ Adam said teasingly.

‘I said “in his right mind,”’ Bird pounced. ‘I am careful to be precise with my words, perhaps because I never went to Yale. Do you really want to see battle, Starbuck?’

Starbuck half-smiled. ‘I want to see the elephant.’

‘Unnecessarily large, gray, curiously wrinkled and with burdensome droppings,’ Bird remarked.

‘Thaddeus!’ Priscilla laughed.

‘I hope there’s peace,’ Starbuck amended his wish, ‘but I am half-curious to see a battle.’

‘Here!’ Bird tossed a book across to Starbuck. ‘There’s an account of Waterloo in there, I think it begins on page sixty-eight. Read that, Starbuck, and you’ll be cured of your desire to see elephants.’

‘You’re not curious, Thaddeus?’ his wife charged him. She was sewing a flag together, one of the many banners that would be used to decorate the town on the Fourth of July, which was now just two days away and was to be marked by a great gala at Seven Springs. There would be a feast, a parade, fireworks and dancing, and everyone in town was expected to contribute something to the celebration.

‘I’m a little curious, of course.’ Bird paused to light one of the thin, malodorous cigars that he favored. ‘I have a curiosity about all the extremes of human existence because I am tempted to believe that truth is best manifested in such extremes, whether it be in the excesses of religion, violence, affection or greed. Battle is merely a symptom of one of those excesses.’

‘I would much rather that you applied yourself to the study of excessive affection,’ Priscilla said mildly, and the young men laughed. They were all fond of Priscilla and touched by the evident tenderness that she and Bird felt for each other.

The talk drifted on. The yard, which was supposed to supply the schoolmaster with vegetables, had become overgrown with black-eyed Susans and daisies, though Priscilla had made space for some herbs that were pungent in the evening warmth. The back of the yard was bounded by two apple trees and a broken fence beyond which was a meadow and a long view across the wooded foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a lovely peaceful place.

‘Are you taking a servant, Starbuck?’ Lieutenant Davies asked. ‘Because if so I have to put his name in the servants’ book.’

Starbuck had been daydreaming. ‘A servant?’

‘The Colonel, in his wisdom,’ Bird explained, ‘has decreed that officers may provide themselves with a servant, but only, mark this, if the man is black. No white servants allowed!’

‘I can’t afford a servant,’ Starbuck said. ‘White or black.’

‘I was rather hoping to make Joe Sparrow my servant,’ Bird said wistfully, ‘though unless he blacks his face now, I can’t.’

‘Why Sparrow?’ Adam asked. ‘So you could whistle at each other?’

‘Very amusing,’ Bird was entirely unamused. ‘I promised Blanche I would keep him safe, that is why, but the Lord only knows how I’m supposed to do that.’

‘Poor Runt,’ Adam said. Joe Sparrow, a thin and scholarly sixteen-year-old, was universally known as Runt. He had won a scholarship to the University of Virginia where he was supposed to begin his studies in the fall, but he had broken his mother’s heart by joining the Legion. He had been one of the recruits shamed into volunteering by receiving a petticoat. His mother, Blanche, had pleaded with Washington Faulconer to excuse her boy, but Faulconer had been adamant that every young man had a duty to serve. Joe, like many of the men, was a three-month volunteer, and the Colonel had assured Blanche Sparrow that her son would have served his stint by the time his first semester began.

‘The Colonel really should have excused him,’ Bird said. ‘This war shouldn’t be fought by bookish boys, but by men like Truslow.’

‘Because he’s expendable?’ one of the sergeants asked.

‘Because he understands violence,’ Bird said, ‘which we all have to learn to understand if we are to be good soldiers.’ Priscilla peered at her stitches in the fading light. ‘I wonder what happened to Truslow’s daughter?’

‘Did she ever talk with you, Starbuck?’ Bird asked.

‘With me?’ Starbuck sounded surprised.

‘It was just that she asked for you,’ Bird explained. ‘On the night that she came here.’

‘I thought you didn’t know her?’ Adam said idly.

‘I don’t. I met her at Truslow’s cabin, but not to notice.’ Starbuck was glad that the dusk hid his blush. ‘No, she didn’t speak to me.’

‘She asked for you and for Ridley, but of course neither of you was here.’ Bird checked suddenly, as though aware that he had been indiscreet. ‘Not that it matters. Did you bring your flute, Sergeant Howes? I was thinking we might attempt the Mozart?’

Starbuck listened to the music, but he could find no joy in it. In these last weeks he felt he had come to an understanding of himself, or at least he had found an equilibrium as his moods had ceased to oscillate between black despair and dizzy hope. Instead he had taken pleasure in the long days of work and exercise, yet now the reminder of Sally Truslow had utterly destroyed his peace. And she had asked for him! And that revelation, so casually made, added new and bone-dry fuel to Starbuck’s dreams. She wanted his help, and he had not been here, so had she gone to Ridley? To that goddamned son of a supercilious bitch Ridley?

Next morning Starbuck confronted Ridley. They had hardly spoken in the last few weeks, not out of distaste, but simply because they kept separate friends. Ridley was leader of a small group of hard-riding, hard-drinking young officers who thought of themselves as rakes and daredevils and who despised the men who gathered in Pecker Bird’s garden to talk away the long evenings. Ridley, when Starbuck found him, was stretched full-length in his tent, recovering, he said, from a night in Greeley’s Tavern. One of his cronies, a lieutenant called Moxey, was sitting on the other bed with his head in his hands, groaning. Ridley similarly groaned when he saw Starbuck. ‘It’s the Reverend! Have you come to convert me? I’m beyond conversion.’