The Starbuck Chronicles: The Complete 4-Book Collection

Sergeant Thomas Truslow had been playing bluff with a group of his cronies, but now stirred himself to watch as the horses thumped past on their first circuit of the steeplechase course. ‘I’ve got money on the boy,’ he confided in Starbuck. ‘Billy Arkwright, on the black.’ He pointed toward a skinny boy riding a small black horse. The boy, who looked scarce a day over twelve, was trailing a field of officers and farmers whose horses seemed to sail over the big fences before they turned out to the country for the second time around. Ridley was comfortably in front, his chestnut jumping surely and scarcely winded after the first circuit, while Billy Arkwright’s horse seemed too delicate to keep up, let alone survive the long second time around.

‘You look as if you’ve lost your money,’ Starbuck said happily.

‘What you know about horses, boy, I could write in the dust with one bladderful of weak piss.’ Truslow was amused. ‘So who would you put your money on?’

‘Ridley?’

‘He’s a good horseman, but Billy’ll beat him.’ Truslow watched as the horsemen disappeared into the country, then shot Starbuck a suspicious look. ‘I hear you were asking Ridley about Sally.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘The whole goddamn Legion knows, because Ridley’s been telling them. You think he knows where she is?’

‘He says not.’

‘Then I’d be obliged if you let sleeping bitches lie,’ Truslow said grimly. ‘The girl’s gone, and that’s all there is to it. I’m shot of her. I gave her a chance. I gave her land, a roof, beasts, a man, but nothing of mine was ever good enough for Sally. She’ll be in Richmond now, making her living, and I daresay it’ll be a good living until she crawls back here scabbed with the pox.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Starbuck said, because he could think of nothing else to say. He was just glad that Truslow had not asked why he had confronted Ridley.

‘There’s no harm done,’ Truslow said, ‘except that the damned girl took my Emily’s ring. I should have kept it. If I don’t die with that ring in my pocket, Starbuck, then I won’t find my Emily again.’

‘I’m sure that’s not true.’

‘I’m sure of it.’ Truslow stubbornly stuck to his superstition, then nodded to the left. ‘There, what did I tell you?’ Billy Arkwright was three lengths ahead of Ethan Ridley, whose mare was now lathered with sweat. Ridley was slashing with his whip at the mare’s laboring flanks, but Arkwright’s small-boned black was comfortably ahead and stretching its lead. Truslow laughed. ‘Ridley can kick the belly out of that horse, but she won’t go no faster. There ain’t another step in her. Go on, Billy-boy! Go on, boy!’ Truslow, his money won, turned away even before the race finished.

Arkwright won by five lengths, going away, and after him a weary stream of muddied men and horses galloped home. Billy Arkwright received his purse of fifty dollars, though what he really wanted was to be allowed to join the Legion. ‘I can ride and shoot. What more do you want, Colonel?’

‘You’ll have to wait for another war, Billy, I’m sorry.’

After the steeplechase there were four ganderpulls. The birds were hung on a high beam, their necks were greased, and one by one the young people ran and leaped. Some missed entirely, others caught hold of a neck but were defeated by the butter, which made the geese necks slippery, while some were struck by a gander’s sharp beak and went off sucking blood, but eventually the birds died and their heads were ripped free. The crowd cheered as the blood-drenched winners walked away with their plump prizes.

The dancing began at nightfall. Two hours later, when it was fully dark, the fireworks crackled and blazed above the Seven Springs estate. Starbuck had drunk a lot of wine and felt mildly tipsy. After the fireworks the dancing began again with an officers’ cotillion. Starbuck did not dance, but instead found himself a quiet shadow under a tall tree and watched the dancers circle beneath the moth-haunted paper lanterns. The women wore white dresses garlanded with red and blue ribbons in honor of the day’s festival while the men were in gray uniform and their sword scabbards swung as they turned to the music’s lilt.

‘You’re not dancing,’ a quiet voice said.

Starbuck turned to see Anna Faulconer. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Can I lead you into the dance?’ She held out a hand. Behind her the windows of Seven Springs were lit with celebratory candles. The house looked very beautiful, almost magical. ‘I had to escort Mother to bed,’ Anna explained, ‘so I missed the entrance.’

‘No, thank you.’ Starbuck ignored her outstretched hand, which invited him into the cotillion.

‘How very ungallant of you!’ Anna said in hurt reproof.

‘It is not a lack of gallantry,’ Starbuck explained, ‘but an inability to dance.’

‘You can’t dance? People don’t dance in Boston?’

‘People do, yes, but not my family.’

Anna nodded her comprehension. ‘I can’t imagine your father leading a dance. Adam says he’s very fierce.’

‘He is, yes.’

‘Poor Nate,’ Anna said. She watched Ethan Ridley put his hand into the fingers of a tall lithe beauty, and a look of puzzled sadness showed briefly on her face. ‘Mother was unkind to you,’ she said to Starbuck, though she still watched Ridley.

‘I am sure she did not mean to be.’

‘Are you?’ Anna asked pointedly, then shrugged. ‘She thinks you are luring Adam away,’ Anna explained.

‘To war?’

‘Yes.’ Anna at last looked away from Ridley and stared up into Starbuck’s face. ‘She wants him to stay here. But he can’t, can he? He can’t stay safe at home while other young men go to face the North.’

‘No, he can’t.’

‘But Mother doesn’t see that. She just thinks that if he stays at home he can’t possibly die. But I can see how a man couldn’t live with that.’ She looked up at Starbuck, her eyes glossed by the lantern light, which oddly accentuated her small squint. ‘So you have never danced?’ she asked. ‘Truly?’

‘I’ve never danced,’ Starbuck admitted, ‘not one step.’ ‘Perhaps I could teach you to dance?’

‘That would be kind.’

‘We could start now?’ Anna offered.

‘I think not, thank you.’

The cotillion ended, the officers bowed, the ladies curtseyed and then the couples scattered across the lawn. Captain Ethan Ridley offered his hand to the tall girl, then walked her to the tables where he courteously bowed her to her seat. Then, after a brief word with a man who looked like the girl’s father, he turned and searched the lantern-lit lawns until he saw Anna. He crossed the lawn, ignored Starbuck, and offered his fiancée an arm. ‘I thought we might go for supper?’ Ridley suggested. He was far from drunk, but neither was he entirely sober.

But Anna was not ready to go. ‘Do you know, Ethan, that Starbuck can’t dance?’ She asked not out of any mischief, but simply for something to say.

Ridley glanced at Starbuck. ‘That doesn’t surprise me. Yankees aren’t much good for anything. Except preaching, maybe.’ Ridley laughed. ‘And marrying. I hear he’s good at marrying people.’

‘Marrying people?’ Anna asked, and as she spoke Ridley seemed to understand that his tongue had run away with him. Not that he had any chance to retract or amend the statement, for Starbuck had lunged past Anna to seize hold of Ridley’s crossbelt. Anna screamed as Starbuck yanked Ridley hard toward him.

A score of men turned toward the scream, but Starbuck was oblivious of their interest. ‘What did you say, you son of a bitch?’ he demanded of Ridley.

Ridley’s face had gone pale. ‘Let go of me, you ape.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said let go of me!’ Ridley’s voice was loud. He fumbled at his belt where a revolver was holstered.

Adam ran toward the two men. ‘Nate!’ He took Starbuck’s hand and gently pried it free. ‘Go, Ethan,’ Adam said and slapped Ridley’s hand away from the revolver. Ridley lingered, evidently wanting to prolong the confrontation, but Adam snapped his command more sharply. The altercation had been swift, but dramatic enough to send a frisson of interest through the big crowd around the dancing lawn.

Ridley stepped back. ‘You want to fight that duel, Reverend?’

‘Go!’ Adam showed a surprising authority. ‘Too much drink altogether,’ he added in a voice loud enough to satisfy the curiosity of the spectators. ‘Now go!’ he said again to Ridley, and watched as the tall man strode away with Anna on his arm. ‘Now what was that about?’ Adam demanded of Starbuck.

‘Nothing,’ Starbuck said. Washington Faulconer was frowning from the far side of the lawn, but Starbuck did not care. He had found himself an enemy and was astonished by the pure hardness of the hate he felt. ‘Nothing at all,’ he nevertheless insisted to Adam.

Adam refused to accept the denial. ‘Tell me!’

‘Nothing. I tell you, nothing.’ Except that Ridley evidently knew that Starbuck had performed a travesty of a marriage service for Decker and Sally. That service had stayed a secret. No one in the Legion knew. Truslow had never talked of what had happened that night, nor had either Decker or Starbuck, yet Ridley knew of it, and only one person could have told him, and that person was Sally. Which meant that Ridley had lied when he swore he had not seen Sally since her marriage. Starbuck turned on Adam. ‘Will you do something for me?’

‘You know I will.’

‘Persuade your father to send me to Richmond. I don’t care how, but just find a job for me there and make him send me.’

‘I’ll try. But tell me why, please.’

Starbuck walked a few paces in silence. He remembered feeling something like this during the painful nights when he had waited outside the Lyceum Hall in New Haven, desperate for Dominique to appear. ‘Suppose,’ he finally said to Adam, ‘that someone had asked for your help and you had promised to give it, and then you found reason to believe that person was in trouble. What would you do?’

‘I’d help, of course,’ Adam said.

‘So find me a way of reaching Richmond.’ It was madness, of course, and Starbuck knew it. The girl meant nothing to him, he meant nothing to her, yet once again, just as he had in New Haven, he was ready to throw his whole life on a chance. He knew it was a sin to pursue Sally as he did, but knowing he toyed with sin made it no easier to resist. Nor did he want to resist. He would pursue Sally whatever the danger, because, so long as there was a sliver of a chance, even a chance no bigger than a firefly’s glow in the eternal night, he would take the risk. He would take it even if it meant destroying himself in the pursuit of it. That much, at least, he knew about himself, and he rationalized the stupidity by thinking that if America was set on destruction then why should Starbuck not indulge in the same joyous act? Starbuck looked at his friend. ‘You’re not going to understand this,’ he said.

‘Try me, please?’ Adam asked earnestly.

‘It is the pure joy of self-destruction.’

Adam frowned, then shook his head. ‘You’re right. I don’t understand. Explain, please.’

But Starbuck just laughed.

In the event a trip to Richmond was easily arranged, though Starbuck was forced to wait for ten long days until Washington Faulconer found his reason to make a journey to the state capital.

The reason was glory, or rather the threat that the Legion would be denied its proper part in the glorious victory that would seal Confederate independence. Rumors, which seemed confirmed by newspaper reports, spoke of imminent battle. A Confederate army was gathering in the northern part of Virginia to face the Federal army assembled in Washington. Whether the Southern concentration of forces was meant as a preparation for an attack on Washington or whether it was gathering to defend against an expected Yankee invasion, no one knew, but one thing was certain: the Faulconer Legion had not been summoned to the gathering of the host.

‘They want all the glory for themselves,’ Washington Faulconer complained, and declared that the infernal jackanapes in Richmond were doing everything possible to thwart the Legion’s ambitions. Pecker Bird remarked privately that Faulconer had been so successful in keeping his regiment free of the state’s intervention that he could hardly now complain if the state kept their fighting free of Washington Faulconer’s interference, yet even Bird wondered whether the Legion was to be deliberately kept out of the war for, by the middle of July, there was still no summons from the army and Faulconer, knowing that the time had come to humble himself before the hated state authorities, declared he would go to Richmond himself and there offer the Legion to the Confederacy’s service. He would take his son with him.

‘You don’t mind if Nate comes, do you?’ Adam asked.

‘Nate?’ Faulconer had frowned. ‘Wouldn’t Ethan be more useful to us?’

‘I would be grateful if you took Nate, Father.’

‘Whatever.’ Faulconer found it hard to resist any of Adam’s requests. ‘Of course.’

Richmond seemed strangely empty to Starbuck. There were still plenty of uniformed men in the city, but they were mostly staff officers or commissary troops, for most of the fighting men had been sent northward to the rail junction at Manassas where Pierre Beauregard, a professional soldier from Louisiana and the hero of Fort Sumter’s bloodless fall, was gathering the Army of Northern Virginia. Another smaller Confederate force, the Army of the Shenandoah, was assembling under General Joseph Johnston, who had taken over the command of the rebel forces in the Shenandoah Valley, but Faulconer was eager that the Legion should join Beauregard, for Beauregard’s Army of Northern Virginia was closer to Washington and thus, in Faulconer’s opinion, more likely to see action.

‘Is that indeed what he believes?’ Belvedere Delaney asked. The attorney had been delighted when a nervous Starbuck, presuming upon his one brief meeting with the attorney, called at Delaney’s Grace Street rooms on the evening of his arrival in Richmond. Delaney insisted he stay for supper. ‘Write a note to Faulconer. Say you’ve met an old friend from Boston. Say he’s enticed you to a Bible class at the First Baptist Church. That’s an entirely believable excuse and one that no one will ever want to explore. My man will deliver the note. Come inside, come inside.’ Delaney was in the uniform of a Confederate captain. ‘Take no notice of it. I am supposed to be a legal officer in the War Department, but truly I wear it only to stop the bloodthirsty ladies inquiring when I intend to lay down my life for Dixie. Now come inside, please.’

Starbuck allowed himself to be persuaded upstairs into the comfortable parlor where Delaney apologized for the supper. ‘It will only be mutton, I fear, but my man does it with a delicate vinegar sauce that you will enjoy. I must confess that my greatest disappointment in New England was the cooking. Is it because you have no slaves and thus must depend on wives for your victuals? I doubt I ate one decent meal all the time I was in the North. And in Boston! Dear Lord above, but a diet of cabbage, beans and potatoes is scarcely a diet at all. You are distracted, Starbuck.’

‘I am, sir, yes.’

‘Don’t “sir” me, for God’s sake. I thought we were friends. Is it the prospect of battle that distracts you? I watched some troops throw away their dice and packs of playing cards last week! They said they wanted to meet their Maker in a state of grace. An Englishman once said that the prospcct of being hanged next morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully, but I’m not sure it would make me throw away my playing cards.’ He brought Starbuck paper, ink and a pen. ‘Write your note. Will you drink some wine as we wait for supper? I hope so. Claim to be immersed in Bible study.’ Starbuck eschewed the wilder part of Delaney’s fancy, merely explaining to Washington Faulconer that he had met an old friend and would therefore not be at Clay Street for supper.

The note was sent and Starbuck stayed to share Delaney’s supper, though he proved a poor companion for the plump, sly attorney. The night was hot and very little breeze came past the gauze sheets that were stretched across the open windows to keep the insects at bay, and even Delaney seemed too listless to eat, though he did keep up a lively if one-sided conversation. He asked for news of Thaddeus Bird and was delighted to hear that the schoolmaster was a constant irritation to Washington Faulconer. ‘I should have dearly liked to have been at Thaddeus’s wedding, but alas, duty called. Is he happy?’

‘He seems very happy.’ Starbuck was almost too nervous to make conversation, but he tried hard. ‘They both seem happy.’

‘Pecker is an uxorious man, which makes her a lucky girl. And of course Washington Faulconer opposed the marriage, which suggests it might be a good match for Pecker. So tell me what you think of Washington Faulconer? I want to hear your most salacious opinions, Starbuck. I want you to sing for your supper with some intriguing gossip.’

Starbuck eschewed the gossip, instead offering a conventional and admiring opinion of Faulconer, which left Delaney entirely unconvinced. ‘I don’t know the man well, of course, but he always strikes me as empty. Quite hollow. And he so desperately wants to be admired. Which is why he freed his slaves.’

‘Which is admirable, surely?’

‘Oh to be sure’—Delaney was deprecating—‘except that the proximate cause of the manumission was some interfering woman from the North who was far too pious to reward Faulconer with her charms, and the poor fellow has spent the ten years since trying to persuade his fellow Virginian landowners that he isn’t some dangerous radical. In truth he’s just a little rich boy not quite grown up, and I’m not at all sure there’s anything under that glossy exterior except a superfluity of money.’

‘He’s been good to me.’

‘And he’ll go on being good to you so long as you admire him. But after that?’ Delaney picked up a silver fruit knife, and mimicked the action of slitting his throat. ‘Dear sweet God, but this night is hot,’ he leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms wide. ‘I did some business in Charleston last summer and took supper at a house where every place at table was provided with a slave whose job was to fan our brows. That sort of behavior is a bit overripe for Richmond, more’s the pity.’ He chattered on, talking of his travels in South Carolina and Georgia while Starbuck picked at the mutton, drank too much wine, tried a little of the apple pie, and finally pushed his plate away.

‘A cigarette?’ Delaney suggested. ‘Or a cigar? Or do you still refuse to smoke? You’re quite wrong in that refusal. Tobacco is a great emollient. Our Heavenly Father, I think, must have intended everything on earth to be of specific use to mankind and so he gave us wine to excite us, brandy to inflame us and tobacco to calm us. Here.’ Delaney had crossed to his silver humidor, cut the stem of a cigar and handed it to Starbuck. ‘Light it, then tell me what ails thee.’ Delaney knew that something extraordinary must have driven Starbuck to this desperate visit. The boy looked almost feverish.

Starbuck allowed himself to be persuaded to take the cigar, as much as anything else by the promise that tobacco was a soothing agent. His eyes stung from the smoke, he half-choked on the bitter taste, but he persisted. To have done less would have been to show himself less than a grown man and, on this night when he knew he was behaving like a half-grown youth, he needed the trappings of adulthood. ‘Do you think,’ he asked as an elliptic introduction to the delicate matter that had brought him to Delaney’s door, ‘that the devil also put some things on earth? To snare us?’

Delaney lit a cigarette, then smiled knowingly. ‘So who is she?’

Starbuck said nothing. He felt such a fool, but some irresistible compulsion had driven him to this foolishness, just as it had compelled him to destroy a career for the sake of Dominique Demarest. Washington Faulconer had told him that such destructive obsessions were a disease of young men, but if so it was a disease that Starbuck could neither cure nor alleviate, and now it was driving him to make a fool of himself before this clever lawyer, who waited so patiently for his answer. Starbuck still paused, but at last, knowing that procrastination would serve no longer, he admitted his quest. ‘Her name is Sally Truslow.’

Delaney offered the faintest, most private of smiles. ‘Do go on.’

Starbuck was actually trembling. The rest of America was poised at the edge of battle, waiting for that terrible moment when a schism would be ripped into a gulf of blood, but all he could do was quiver for a girl he had met but for one lame evening. ‘I thought she might have come here. To these rooms,’ he said lamely.

Delaney blew a long plume of smoke that rippled the candles on the polished dining table. ‘I smell something of my brother here. Tell me all.’

Starbuck told all, and the telling seemed pathetic to him, as pathetic as that far-off day when he had confessed his foolishness to Washington Faulconer. Now he limpingly talked of a promise made in a dusky night, of an obsession he could not properly describe and could not justify and could not really account for, except to say that life would be nothing unless he could find Sally.

‘And you thought she might be here?’ Delaney asked with friendly mockery.

‘I know she was given this address,’ Starbuck said pointedly.

‘And so you came to me,’ Delaney said, ‘which was wise. So what do you want of me?’

Starbuck looked across the table. To his surprise he had smoked the cigar down to an inch-long stub, which he now abandoned with the mangled remains of his pie. ‘I want to know if you can tell me how to find her,’ he said, and he thought how futile this quest was, and how demeaning. Somehow, before he arrived in this elegant room, Starbuck had believed that his search for Sally was a practical dream, but now, faced with confessing his obsession to this man who was a virtual stranger, Starbuck felt utterly foolish. He also sensed the hopelessness of searching for one lost girl in a town of forty thousand people. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I should never have come here.’

‘I seem to remember telling you to seek my help,’ Delaney reminded him, ‘though admittedly we were both quite drunk at the time. I’m glad you came.’

Starbuck stared at his benefactor. ‘You can help me?’

‘Of course I can help you,’ Belvedere Delaney said very calmly. ‘In fact I know exactly where your Sally is.’

Starbuck felt the elation of success and the terror of confronting that success to discover it was a sham. He felt as if he were at the very edge of a chasm and he did not know whether it was to heaven or to hell that he would leap. ‘So she’s alive?’ he asked.

‘Come to me tomorrow evening,’ Delaney said in oblique answer, then held up a hand to check any further questions. ‘Come here at five. But—’ He said the last word warningly.

‘Yes?’

Delaney pointed his cigarette across the table. ‘You will owe me a debt for this, Starbuck.’

Starbuck shivered despite the warmth. A soul was sold, he suspected, but for what coin? But nor did he really care because tomorrow night he would find Sally. Perhaps it was the wine, or the heady tobacco fumes, or else the thought of all his dreams coming to a resolution, but he did not care. ‘I understand,’ he said carefully, understanding nothing.

Delaney smiled and broke the spell. ‘Some brandy? And another cigar, I think.’ It would be amusing, Delaney thought, to corrupt the Reverend Elial Starbuck’s son. Besides, if Delaney was honest, he rather liked Nathaniel Starbuck. The boy was naive, but there was steel inside him and he had quick wits even if those wits were presently obliterated by desire. Starbuck, in short, might be useful one day, and if that usefulness was ever needed Delaney would be able to call in the debt that he was forging this night out of a young man’s obsession and desperation.

For Delaney was now an agent of the North. A man had come to his chambers, posing as a client, and there produced a copy of Delaney’s letter offering to spy for the North. The copy had been burned, and the sight of the burning paper had sent a shiver of nerves through Delaney’s soul. From now on he knew himself to be a marked man, liable to the death penalty, yet still the rewards of that loyalty to the North were worth the risk.

And the risk, he knew, could be very short-lived. Delaney did not believe the rebellion could last even to the end of July. The North’s new army would roll majestically across the pathetic rebel forces gathered in Northern Virginia, secession would collapse and the Southern politicians would then whimper that they had never meant to preach rebellion anyway. And what would become of the little people betrayed by those politicians? Starbuck, Delaney supposed, would be sent back to his ghastly hellhound of a father and that would be the end of the boy’s one adventure. So let him have a last, exotic moment to remember his whole dull life through and if, perchance, the rebellion did last a few months more, why, Starbuck would be an ally whether he wanted to be or not. ‘Tomorrow night, then,’ Delaney said mischievously, then raised his brandy glass, ‘at five.’

Starbuck spent the next day in a torment of apprehension. He dared not tell Washington Faulconer what irked him, he dared not even tell Adam, but instead he kept a feverish silence as he accompanied father and son to the Mechanics Hall in Franklin Street where Robert Lee had his offices. Lee had now been promoted from head of Virginia’s forces to be the Confederate president’s chief military adviser, yet he still retained much of his state work and was, Faulconer was told, gone from the capital to inspect some fortifications that guarded the mouth of the James River. A harassed clerk, sweating in the outer office, said that the general was expected back that afternoon, or maybe next day, and no, it was not possible to make any appointment. All petitioners must wait. At least a score of men were already waiting on the landing or on the wide stairs. Washington Faulconer bristled at being lumped as a petitioner, but somehow kept his patience as the clock ticked and the clouds gathered dark over Richmond.

At a quarter to five Starbuck asked if he might leave. Faulconer turned angrily on his aide, as though about to refuse permission, but Starbuck blurted out an excuse of not feeling well. ‘My stomach, sir.’

‘Go,’ Faulconer said irritably, ‘go.’ He waited until Starbuck had gone down the stairs, then turned on Adam. ‘What the hell is the matter with him? It isn’t his stomach, that’s for sure.’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘A woman? That’s what it looks like. He’s met an old friend? Who? And why doesn’t he introduce us? It’s a whore, I tell you, a whore.’

‘Nate doesn’t have the money,’ Adam said stiffly.

‘I wouldn’t be so certain.’ Washington Faulconer walked to the window at the end of the landing and stared gloomily into the street where a tobacco wagon had lost a wheel and a crowd of Negroes had gathered round to offer the teamster advice.

‘Why wouldn’t you be certain, Father?’ Adam asked.

Faulconer brooded for a moment, then turned on his son. ‘You remember the raid? You know why Nate disobeyed my orders? So that Truslow could steal from the passengers in the cars. Good Lord, Adam, that’s not warfare! That’s brigandry, pure and simple, and your friend condoned it. He risked the success of all we had achieved to become a thief.’

‘Nate isn’t a thief!’ Adam protested vigorously.

‘And I trusted him with matters here in Richmond,’ Washington Faulconer said, ‘and how am I to know if his accounting was fair?’

‘Father!’ Adam said angrily. ‘Nate is not a thief.’

‘And what did he do to that Tom company fellow?’

‘That was …’ Adam began, but then did not know how to continue, for it was certain that his friend had indeed stolen Major Trabell’s money. ‘No, Father.’ Adam persisted in his stubborn denial, though a lot more weakly.

‘I just wish I could share your certainty.’ Faulconer looked gloomily down at the landing floor that was stained with dried tobacco juice that had missed the spittoons. ‘I’m not even sure any longer that Nate belongs here in the South,’ Faulconer said heavily, then looked up as a clatter of boots and a murmur of voices sounded in the downstairs hall.

Robert Lee had arrived at last, and Starbuck’s character could be momentarily forgotten so that the Legion could be offered for battle.

George, Belvedere Delaney’s house slave, had conducted Starbuck as far as the front door of the house in Marshall Street where he had been greeted by a middle-aged woman of stern looks and apparent respectability. ‘My name is Richardson,’ she had told Starbuck, ‘and Mister Delaney has given me his full instructions. This way, sir, if you would.’

It was a whorehouse. That much an astonished Starbuck realized as he was escorted through the hallway and past an open parlor door beyond which a group of girls sat dressed in laced bodices and white underskirts. Some smiled at him, others did not even look up from their hands of cards, but Starbuck faltered as he understood what trade was carried on in this comfortable, even luxurious house with its dark rugs, papered walls and gilt-framed landscapes. This was one of the dens of iniquity against which his father preached the awful threat of everlasting torture, a place of hellish horrors and unbridled sins, where a varnished hall stand with brass hooks, an umbrella tray and a beveled mirror held three officers’ hats, a silk top hat and a cane. ‘You may stay as long as you like, young man,’ Mrs. Richardson said, pausing beside the hall stand to pass on Delaney’s instructions, ‘and there will be no charge. Please be careful of the loose stair rod.’