The Starbuck Chronicles: The Complete 4-Book Collection

‘I’m told that in war nothing ever goes to plan,’ Starbuck said happily, ‘and that if it does, you’re probably being whipped. We have to get used to chaos, and learn to make the best of it.’

‘Father’s not good at that,’ Adam confessed.

‘Then it’s a good job he’s got me.’ Starbuck smiled benignly at Ethan Ridley, who had ridden in with the approaching Legion. Starbuck had decided he would be very pleasant to Ridley from now until the end of Ridley’s life. Ridley ignored him.

The Colonel had originally supposed that the Legion would be entrained in comfort by ten that morning, yet it was not till five in the evening that the single train limped slowly north. There was enough room for the infantrymen, three days’ supply of food and all the Legion’s ammunition, but precious little else. The officers’ horses and servants were put into the two gondola cars. The Colonel would travel in the caboose, which had arrived with the locomotive, while the men were given the boxcars. The Colonel, mindful of his duties as a director of the line, gave strict orders that the cars were to arrive at Manassas Junction undamaged, but no sooner had he spoken than Sergeant Truslow found an axe and smashed a hole in the side of a boxcar. ‘A man needs light and air,’ he growled at the Colonel, then swung the axe again. The Colonel turned away and pretended not to notice the orgy of destruction as the Legion began its enthusiastic ventilation of the wooden boxes.

There was no room on the train for the Legion’s cavalry, which had to be left behind, along with the two six-pounder guns, their caissons and limbers, the cast-iron camp stoves and all the wagons. The Legion’s tents were slung into the boxcars at the last moment and Bandmaster Little took his instruments, claiming they were medical supplies. The Legion’s colors were almost left behind in the confusion, but Adam saw the twin leather flag cases abandoned on a gun caisson and stowed them in the caboose. The depot was chaotic as women and children sought to say goodbye to their men, and as the men, exhausting the water in their canteens, tried to fill the small round bottles from the outflow of the depot’s stilt-legged water tank. Faulconer was shouting last-minute instructions for the cavalry, artillery and wagon train, which would now travel North by road. He reckoned they should take three days to make the journey while the train, even with its damaged axle boxes, should make it in one. ‘We’ll see you in Manassas,’ the Colonel told Lieutenant Davies, who was to be in charge of the convoy, ‘or maybe in Washington!’

Anna Faulconer, driving her small cart, had arrived from Faulconer Court House and insisted on handing out small Confederate flags that she and the servants at Seven Springs had embroidered. Her father, impatient at the delay, ordered the engineer to sound the whistle to summon the men back to the boxcars, but the sound of the shrieking steam frightened some of the horses in the gondola cars and one Negro servant had his leg broken when Captain Hinton’s mare kicked back. The servant was carried off the train and, in the delay, two men from E Company decided they did not want to fight and deserted, but three other men insisted on being allowed to join the Legion there and then and so climbed aboard.

Finally, at five o’clock, the train began its journey. It could go no faster than ten miles an hour because of the broken axle boxes and so it limped North, its wheels clanking across the rail joints and its bell clanging a mournful sound over the water meadows and green fields. The Colonel was still furious at the day’s delays, but the men were in high spirits and sang cheerfully as their slow train chugged away from the hills, its smoke drifting among trees. They left the convoy of wagons, guns and cavalry behind and steamed slowly into the night.

The train journey took almost two days. The crowded cars spent twelve hours waiting at the Gordonsville Junction, another three at Warrenton, and endless other minutes waiting while the tender was fueled with cordwood or its water tank charged, but at last, on a hot Saturday afternoon, they reached Manassas Junction where the Army of Northern Virginia had its headquarters. No one in Manassas knew the Legion was coming or what to do with them, but finally a staff officer led the Legion north and east from the small town along a country road that wound through small steep hills. There were other troops camped in meadows, and artillery pieces parked in farm gates, and the sight of those other troops gave the Legion an apprehensive feeling that they had joined some massive undertaking that none of them truly understood. Till now they had been the Faulconer Legion, safe in Faulconer Court House and led by Colonel Faulconer, but the train had abruptly brought them to a strange place where they were lost in an incomprehensible and uncontrollable process.

It was almost dark when the staff Captain pointed to a farmhouse that lay to the right of the road on a wide, bare plateau. ‘The farm’s still occupied,’ he told Faulconer, ‘but those pastures look empty, so make yourselves at home.’

‘I need to see Beauregard.’ Faulconer sounded irritable, made so by the evening’s uncertainty. He wanted to know where exactly he was, and the staff officer did not know, and he wanted to know precisely what was expected of his Legion, but the staff officer could not tell him that either. There were no maps, no orders, no sense of direction at all. ‘I should see Beauregard tonight,’ Faulconer insisted.

‘I guess the general will be real pleased to see you, Colonel,’ the staff officer said tactfully, ‘but I reckon you’d best still wait for morning now. Say at six o’clock?’

‘Are we expecting action?’ Faulconer asked pompously.

‘Sometime tomorrow, I guess.’ The staff officer’s cigar glowed briefly. ‘The Yankees are up that a way,’ he gestured vaguely eastward with his lit cigar, ‘and I guess we’ll be crossing the river to give them a howdy, but the general won’t be giving his orders till morning. I’ll tell you how to find him, and you be there at six, Colonel. That’ll give you boys time to have yourselves a prayer service first.’

‘A prayer service?’ Faulconer’s tone suggested the staff officer was touched in the head.

‘Tomorrow’s the Lord’s Day, Colonel,’ the captain said reproachfully, and so it would be, for the next day would be Sunday, July 21, 1861.

And America would be broken by battle.

By two o’clock on Sunday morning the air was already stiflingly hot and breathlessly calm. The sun would not rise for another two and a half hours yet, and the sky was still star bright, cloudless and brilliant. Most of the men, even though they had lugged their tents the long five miles from the rail junction to the farm, slept in the open air. Starbuck woke to see the heavens like a brilliant scatter of cold white light, more beautiful than anything found on earth.

‘Time to get up,’ Adam said beside him.

Men were waking all around the hilltop. They were coughing and cursing, their voices made loud by nervousness. Somewhere in the dark valley a set of harness chains jangled and a horse whinnied, and a trumpet called reveille from a far encampment, its sound echoing back from a distant dark slope. A cockerel crowed from the farmhouse on the hill where dim lights showed behind curtained windows. Dogs barked and the cooks banged skillets and kettles.

‘“The armorers”’—Starbuck still lay on his back, staring up at the sharp-edged stars—‘“accomplishing the knights, with busy hammers closing rivets up, give dreadful note of preparation.”’

Adam would normally have taken pleasure in capping the quotation, but he was in a silent, subdued mood and so said nothing. All along the Legion’s lines the smoky fires were being coddled into life to throw a garish light on shirt-sleeved men, stands of rifles and the white conical tents. The thickening smoke shimmered the stars.

Starbuck still gazed upward. ‘“The cripple tardy-gaited night,”’ he quoted again, ‘“who like a foul witch doth limp so tediously away.”’ He was delivering the quotations to disguise his nervousness. Today, he was thinking, I shall see the elephant.

Adam said nothing. He felt that he had come to the brink of a terrible chaos, like the abyss across which Satan had flown in Paradise Lost, and that was exactly what this war meant for America, Adam thought sadly—the loss of innocence, the loss of sweet perfection. He had joined the Legion to please his father, now he might have to pay the price of that compromise.

‘Coffee, Massa?’ Nelson, Faulconer’s servant, brought two tin mugs of coffee from the fire he had tended all night behind the Colonel’s tent.

‘You’re a great and good man, Nelson.’ Starbuck sat up and readied for the coffee.

Sergeant Truslow was shouting at Company K, where someone had complained that there was no bucket with which to fetch water and Truslow was bellowing at the man to stop complaining and go steal a damned bucket.

‘You don’t seem nervous.’ Adam sipped the coffee, then grimaced at its harsh taste.

‘Of course I’m nervous,’ Starbuck said. In fact the apprehension was writhing in his belly like snakes boiling in a pit. ‘But I have an idea that I might be a good soldier.’ Was that true, he wondered, or was he just saying it because he wanted it to be true? Or because he had boasted of it to Sally? And was that all it had been? A boast to impress a girl?

‘I shouldn’t even be here,’ Adam said.

‘Nonsense,’ Starbuck said briskly. ‘Survive one day, Adam, just one day, then help make peace.’

A few minutes past three o’clock two horsemen appeared in the regiment’s lines. One man was carrying a lantern with which he had lit his way across the hilltop. ‘Who are you?’ the second man shouted.

‘The Faulconer Legion!’ Adam called back the answer.

‘The Faulconer Legion? Jesus wept! We’ve got a Legion on our goddamned side now? The damned Yankees might as well give up.’ The speaker was a short balding man with intense, button-black eyes that scowled from an unwashed face above a dirty black mustache and a ragged spade beard. He slid out of his saddle and paced into the firelight to reveal skeletally thin legs bowed like razor clam shells that looked entirely inadequate to support the weight of his big belly and broad, muscled torso. ‘So who’s in command here?’ the strange man demanded.

‘My father,’ Adam said, ‘Colonel Faulconer.’ He gestured at his father’s tent.

‘Faulconer!’ The stranger turned toward the tent. He was wearing a shabby Confederate uniform and was clutching a brown felt hat so battered and filthy that it might have been spurned by a sharecropper.

‘Here!’ The Colonel’s tent was lit within by lanterns that cast grotesque shadows every time he moved in front of their flames. ‘Who is it?’

‘Evans. Colonel Nathan Evans.’ Evans did not wait for an invitation but pushed through Faulconer’s tent flap. ‘I heard troops arrived here last night and I thought I’d say howdy. I’ve got half a brigade up by the stone bridge and if the bastard Yankees decide to use the Warrenton Pike then you and I are all that stands between Abe Lincoln and the whores in New Orleans. Is that coffee, Faulconer, or whiskey?’

‘Coffee.’ Faulconer’s voice was distant, suggesting he did not like Evans’s brusque familiarity.

‘I’ve my own whiskey, but I’ll have a coffee first and thank you kindly, Colonel.’ Starbuck watched as Evans’s shadow drank the Colonel’s coffee. ‘What I want you to do, Faulconer,’ Evans demanded when the coffee was drained, ‘is move your boys down to the road, then on up to a wooden bridge here.’ He had evidently opened a map that he spread on Faulconer’s bed. ‘There’s a deal of timber around the bridge and I guess if you keep your boys hidden then the sons of bitch Yankees won’t know you’re there. Of course we may all end up being about as much use as a pair of balls on a shad-bellied priest, but on the other hand we may not.’

Evans’s staff officer lit a cigar and gave Adam and Starbuck a desultory glance. Thaddeus Bird, Ethan Ridley and at least a score of other men were openly listening to the conversation inside the tent.

‘I don’t understand,’ Faulconer said.

‘It ain’t difficult.’ Evans paused and there was a scratching sound as he struck a match to light a cigar. ‘Yankees are over the stream. They want to keep advancing on Manassas Junction. Capture that and they’ve cut us from the valley army. Beauregard’s facing them, but he ain’t the kind to wait to get hit, so he plans to attack on their left, our right.’ Evans was demonstrating the moves on his map. ‘So Beauregard’s got most of our army out on the right. Way over eastward, two miles away at least, and if he can get his pants buttoned before noon he’ll probably attack later today. He’ll hook round the back of the bastards and kill as many as he can. Which is dandy, Faulconer, but suppose the sons of bitches decide to attack us first? And suppose they ain’t as dumb as Northerners usually are and instead of marching straight into our faces suppose they try to hook around our left? We’re the only troops to stop them. In fact there’s nothing between us and Mexico, Faulconer, so what if the pox-ridden bastards do decide to have a go at this flank?’ Evans chuckled. ‘That’s why I’m right glad you’re here, Colonel.’

‘Are you saying I’m attached to your brigade?’ Faulconer asked.

‘I ain’t got orders for you, if that’s what you mean, but why the hell else were you sent here?’

‘I have an appointment with General Beauregard at six in the morning to discover just that,’ Faulconer said.

There was a pause as Evans evidently uncapped a flask, pulled at it, then screwed the cap back into place. ‘Colonel,’ he finally said, ‘why in hell’s name were you put out here? This is the left flank. We’re the last sons of bitches that anyone thought to position. We’re here, Colonel, in case the goddamned Yankees attack up the Warrenton Pike.’

‘I have not yet received my orders,’ Faulconer insisted.

‘So what are you waiting for? A choir of goddamned angels? For Christ’s sake, Faulconer, we need men on this flank of the army!’ Nathan Evans’s temper had plainly snapped, but he made an effort to explain matters calmly again. ‘Beauregard plans to push north on our right, so what if the shit-faced Yankees decided to push south on theirs? What am I supposed to do? Hurl kisses at them? Ask them to delay the war while you fetch your damned orders?’

‘I shall fetch those orders from Beauregard,’ Faulconer said stubbornly, ‘and no one else.’

‘Then while you’re fetching your goddamned orders why don’t you move your goddamned Legion to the wooden bridge? Then if you’re needed you can march to the stone bridge over the Run and give my boys a hand.’

‘I shall not move,’ Faulconer insisted, ‘until I receive proper orders.’

‘Oh, dear God,’ Adam murmured for his father’s obduracy.

The argument went on two minutes more, but neither man would shift. Faulconer’s wealth had not accustomed him to taking orders, and least of all from diminutive, ill-smelling, bow-legged, coarse-tongued brutes like Nathan Evans, who, abandoning his attempts to snare the Legion into his brigade, stormed out of the tent and hauled himself into his saddle. ‘Come on, Meadows,’ he snarled at his aide, and the two men galloped off into the darkness.

‘Adam!’ Faulconer shouted. ‘Pecker!’

‘Ah, the second in command is summoned by the great leader,’ Bird said caustically, then followed Adam into the tent.

‘Did you hear that?’ Faulconer demanded.

‘Yes, Father.’

‘So you understand, both of you, that whatever that man may order, you ignore. I shall bring you orders from Beauregard.’

‘Yes, Father,’ Adam said again.

Major Bird was not so obliging. ‘Are you ordering me to disobey a direct command from a superior officer?’

‘I am saying that Nathan Evans is a lunkhead addicted to stone-jug whiskey,’ the Colonel said, ‘and I did not spend a damned fortune on a fine regiment just to see it thrown away in his drink-sodden hands.’

‘So I do disobey his orders?’ Major Bird persisted.

‘It means you obey my orders, and no one else’s,’ the Colonel said. ‘Damn it, if the battle’s on the right then that’s where we should be, not stuck on the left with the dregs of the army. I want the Legion on parade in one hour. Tents struck, fighting order.’

The Legion paraded at half past four by which time the hilltop was bathed in a ghostly twilight and the farther hills were dark shapes receding ever more obscurely until, at last, there was nothing but an opaque darkness in which dimly mysterious points of red light suggested far-off camp fires. There was just enough gray half-light to see that the nearer countryside was littered with carts and wagons, giving the scene an odd resemblance to a camp meeting site on the morning after the preaching had ended, except that among these wagons were the satanic shapes of limbers, portable forges and cannon. The smoke of the dying camp fires clung in the hollows like mist beneath the last fading stars. Somewhere a band was playing ‘Home, Sweet Home’ and a man in B Company tunelessly sang the words until a sergeant told him to be silent.

The Legion waited. Their heavy packs, blankets and groundsheets had been piled with the tents at the rear of the band so that the men would simply carry their weapons, haversacks and canteens into battle. Around them, mostly unseen, an army took up its positions. Pickets gazed across the stream, gunners sipped coffee beside their monstrous guns, cavalrymen watered horses in the dozen streams that laced the pastureland, and surgeons’ assistants tore up lint for bandages or sharpened flesh knives and bone saws. A few officers galloped importantly across the fields, vanishing into the farther darknesses on their mysterious errands.

Starbuck sat on Pocahontas just behind the Legion’s color party and wondered if he was dreaming. Was there really to be a battle? The short-tempered Evans had hinted as much and everyone seemed to expect one, yet there was no sign of any enemy. He half-wanted the expectations to be true, and was half-terrified that they would come true. Intellectually he knew that battle was chaotic, cruel and bitter, yet he could not rid himself of the belief that it would turn out to be glorious, plumed and oddly calm. In books, stern-faced men waited to see the whites of their enemies’ eyes, then fired and won great victories. Horses pranced and flags whipped in a smokeless wind beneath which the decorous dead lay sleeping and the pain-free dying spoke lovingly of their country and of their mothers. Men died as simply as Major Pelham had died. Oh sweet Jesus, Starbuck prayed as a sudden burst of terror whipsawed through his thoughts, but don’t let me die. I regret all my sins, every one of them, even Sally, and I will never sin again if you will just let me live.

He shivered even though he was sweating under his thick woolen uniform coat and trousers. Somewhere to his left a man shouted an order, but the sound was small and faraway, like a voice heard from a sickbed in a distant room. The sun had still not risen, though the eastern horizon was now suffused with a rosy brilliance and it was light enough for Colonel Faulconer to make a slow inspection of his Legion’s ranks. He reminded the men of the homes they had left in Faulconer County, and of their wives, sweethearts and children. He reassured them that the war was not of the South’s making, but of the North’s choosing. ‘We just wanted to be left alone, is that so terrible an ambition?’ he asked. Not that the men needed the Colonel’s reassurance, but Faulconer knew that a commanding officer was expected to rouse the spirits of his men on the morning of battle, and so he encouraged his Legion that their cause was just and that men fighting for a just cause need not fear defeat.

Adam had been supervising the piling of the Legion’s baggage, but now rode back to Starbuck’s side. Adam’s horse was one of the best beasts from the Faulconer stud—a tall, bay stallion, glossily beautiful, a disdainful aristocrat among beasts just as the Faulconers were lords among common men. Adam nodded toward the small house with its dimly glowing windows that stood silhouetted on the hill’s flat top. ‘They sent a servant to ask us whether it would be safe to stay there.’

‘What did you say?’

‘How could I say anything? I don’t know what will happen today. But do you know who lives there?’

‘How on earth would I know that?’

‘The widow of the Constitution’s surgeon. Isn’t that something? Surgeon Henry, he was called.’ Adam’s voice sounded very stilted, as though it was taking all his self-discipline to contain his emotions. He had put on a soldier’s coat for his father’s sake, and worn a captain’s three metal bars on his collar because to do so was simpler than wearing a martyr’s sackcloth, but today he would pay the real price of that compromise, and the thought of it was making him sick to his stomach. He fanned his face with his wide-brimmed hat, then glanced to the east where the cloudless sky looked like a sheet of beaten silver touched with a shimmer of lurid gold. ‘Can you imagine how hot it will be by midday?’ Adam asked.

Starbuck smiled. ‘“As they gather silver, and brass, and iron, and lead, and tin, into the midst of the furnace, to blow the fire upon it, to melt it; so will I gather you in mine anger and in my fury, and I will leave you there, and melt you.”’ He imagined himself writhing in a blast of furnace heat, a sinner burning for his iniquities. ‘Ezekiel,’ he explained to Adam, whose expression betrayed that he had not placed the text.

‘It isn’t a very cheering text for a Sunday morning,’ Adam said, then shuddered uncontrollably as he imagined what this day might bring. ‘Do you really feel you might make a good soldier?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’ He had failed at everything else, Starbuck thought bitterly.

‘At least you look like a soldier.’ Adam spoke with a touch of envy.

‘How does a soldier look?’ Starbuck asked, amused.

‘Like someone in a Walter Scott novel,’ Adam answered quickly, ‘Ivanhoe, maybe?’

Starbuck laughed. ‘My grandmother MacPhail always told me I had the face of a preacher. Like my father.’ And Sally had said he had her father’s eyes.

Adam put his hat back on. ‘I suppose your father will be preaching damnation on all slaveholders this morning?’ He was simply wanting to make conversation, any conversation, just noise to divert his thoughts from the horrors of war.

‘Perdition and hell fire will indeed be summoned to support the Northern cause,’ Starbuck agreed, and he was suddenly assailed by a vision of his comfortable Boston home where his younger brothers and sisters would just be waking up and readying themselves for early morning family prayers. Would they remember to pray for him this morning? His elder sister would not. At nineteen Ellen Marjory Starbuck already had the pinched opinions of crabbed middle age. She was betrothed to a Congregational minister from New Hampshire, a man of infinite spite and calculated unkindness and, instead of recommending Nathaniel to God’s protection, Ellen would doubtless be praying for her older brother James, who, Starbuck supposed, would be in uniform, though for the life of him he could not imagine stuffy, punctilious James in battle. James would be a good headquarters man in Washington or Boston—making fussy lists and enforcing detailed regulations.

The younger children would pray for Nathaniel, though perforce their entreaties would necessarily be silent lest they provoked the wrath of the Reverend Elial. There was sixteen-year-old Frederick George, who had been born with a withered left arm, fifteen-year-old Martha Abigail, who most resembled Nathaniel in looks and character, and last of all was twelve-year-old Samuel Washington Starbuck, who wanted to be a whaling captain. Five other children had died in infancy.

‘What are you thinking?’ Adam asked abruptly, out of nervousness.

‘I was thinking of family history,’ Starbuck said, ‘and how congestive it is.’

‘Congestive?’

‘Limiting. Mine, anyway.’ And Sally’s, he thought. Maybe even Ridley’s too, though Starbuck did not want to indulge in pity for the man he would kill. Or would he? He glanced across at Ethan Ridley, who sat motionless in the dawn. It was one thing to contemplate a killing, Starbuck decided, but quite another to perform the deed.

A flurry of far musket shots rattled the last shadows of receding dark. ‘Oh, God.’ Adam spoke the words as a prayer for his country. He stared eastward, though not so much as a leaf moved in the far wooded hollows where, at last, the creeping light was showing vivid green among the dying grays. Somewhere in those hills and woods an enemy waited, though whether the firing was the first flicker of battle or merely a false alarm, no one could tell.

Another bout of terror rippled through Starbuck. He was frightened of dying, but he was far more terrified of displaying his fear. If he had to die he would prefer it to be a romantic death with Sally beside him. He tried to recall the sweetness of that thunder-laden night when she had lain in his arms and, like children, they had watched the lightning scratch the sky. How could one night change a man so much? Dear God, Starbuck thought, but that one night was like being born again, and that was as wicked a heresy as any he could dream of, but there was no other description that so exactly fitted what he had felt. He had been dragged from doubt into certainty, from misery into gladness, from despair to glory. It was that magical conversion, which his father preached and for which he had so often prayed, and which at last he had experienced, except it was the devil’s conversion that had swamped his soul with calmness, and not the Savior’s grace that had changed him.

‘Are you listening, Nate?’ Adam had evidently spoken, but to no avail. ‘There’s Father. He’s beckoning us.’

‘Of course.’ Starbuck followed Adam to the Legion’s right flank beyond Company A where Colonel Faulconer had finished his inspection. ‘Before I go and find Beauregard,’ Faulconer spoke awkwardly, as though he was unsure of himself, ‘I thought I’d make a reconnaissance that way.’ He pointed northward, out beyond the army’s left flank. The Colonel’s voice sounded like that of a man trying to convince himself that he was a real soldier on a real battlefield. ‘Would you like to come? I need to satisfy myself that Evans is wrong. No point in staying here if there’s no Yankees out in these woods. Do you feel like a gallop, Nate?’

Starbuck reflected that the Colonel must be in a better mood than he appeared if he called him Nate instead of the colder Starbuck. ‘I’d like that, sir.’

‘Come on, then. You too, Adam.’

The father and son led Starbuck down the hill to where a tree-shaded stone house stood beside a crossroads. Two artillery pieces were creaking and jangling eastward along the turnpike, dragged by tired horses. The Colonel galloped between the two guns, then swerved onto the road that led north from the crossroads. The road climbed a long hill between shadowed pastureland, rising to a wooded crest where the Colonel reined in.

Faulconer unholstered and extended a leather-bound telescope, which he trained north toward a far hill crowned by a simple wooden church. Nothing disturbed the fleeting shadows of darkness on that far hill, nor indeed anywhere else in the gentle landscape. A white-painted farm lay in the distance and leafy woods all around, but no soldiers disturbed the pastoral scene. The Colonel stared long and hard at the distant church on its hill, then collapsed the telescope’s short tubes. ‘According to that lunkhead Evans’s map, that’s Sudley Church. There are some fords beneath there, and no Yankees in sight. Except for you, Nate.’

Starbuck took the last words as a pleasantry. ‘I’m an honorary Virginian, sir. Remember?’

‘Not any longer, Nate,’ Faulconer said heavily. ‘This isn’t a reconnaissance, Nate. The Yankees will never come this far north. I brought you here instead to say goodbye.’

Starbuck gazed at the Colonel, wondering if this was some kind of elaborate jest. It seemed not. ‘Goodbye, sir?’ He managed to stammer the iteration.

‘This isn’t your quarrel, Nate, and Virginia isn’t your country.’

‘But, sir …’

‘So I’m sending you home.’ The Colonel overrode Starbuck’s feeble objection with a firm kindness, just as he might speak to a useless puppy which, despite its potential for amusement, he was about to put down with a single shot to the skull.

‘I have no home.’ Starbuck had meant the words to be defiant, but somehow they came out as a pathetic bleat.

‘Indeed you do, Nate. I wrote to your father six weeks ago and he has been good enough to reply to me. His letter was delivered under a flag of truce last week. Here it is.’ The Colonel took a folded paper from a pouch at his waist and held it out to Starbuck.

Starbuck did not move.

‘Take it, Nate,’ Adam urged his friend.

‘Did you know about this?’ Starbuck turned fiercely on Adam, fearing his friend’s betrayal.

‘I told Adam this morning,’ the Colonel said, intervening. ‘But this is my doing, not Adam’s.’

‘But you don’t understand, sir!’ Starbuck appealed to the Colonel.

‘But I do, Nate! I do!’ Colonel Faulconer smiled condescendingly. ‘You’re an impetuous young man, and there’s nothing amiss with that. I was impulsive, but I can’t allow youthful impetuosity to lead you into rebellion. It won’t do, upon my soul it will not. A man should not fight against his own country because of a youthful mistake. So I have determined your fate.’ The Colonel spoke very firmly, and once again pushed the letter toward Starbuck who, this time, felt obliged to grasp it. ‘Your brother James is with McDowell’s army,’ the Colonel continued, ‘and he’s enclosed a laissez-passer that will see you safe through the Northern lines. Once past the pickets you should seek out your brother. I fear you’ll have to give me your sword and pistol, but I’ll let you keep Pocahontas. And the saddle! And that’s an expensive saddle, Nate.’ He added the last words as a kind of enticement that might reconcile Starbuck to his unexpected fate.