The Starbuck Chronicles: The Complete 4-Book Collection

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.

‘If you can send my Emily’s soul to heaven, you can marry my daughter to Robert Decker.’

Starbuck wondered how in God’s name he was to correct Thomas Truslow’s egregious misunderstanding of both theology and the civil powers. ‘If she is to be married,’ he insisted, ‘then she must go before a magistrate and—’

‘God bears a bigger clout than a magistrate.’ Truslow turned and walked away from the grave. ‘Sally will be married by a man of God, and that’s more important than being wed by some buzzard of a lawyer who just wants his fee.’

‘But I’m not ordained!’

‘Don’t start that excuse again. You’ll do for me. I’ve heard you, Mister Starbuck, and if God don’t listen to your words then he won’t listen to any man’s. And if my Sally is to be married, then I want her to be properly married by God’s law. I don’t want her roaming again. She’s been wild, but it’s time she was settled down. So you pray over her.’

Starbuck was not at all sure that prayer could stop a girl roaming, but he did not like to say as much to Thomas Truslow. ‘Why don’t you take her down to the valley? There must be proper ministers there who’ll marry them?’

‘The ministers in the valley, mister’—Truslow had turned to stab a finger hard into Starbuck’s chest to emphasize his words—‘were too high and goddamned mighty to bury my Emily, so believe me, mister, they are too high and goddamned mighty to wed my daughter to her boy. And are you now trying to tell me that you’re also too good for the likes of us?’ His finger rammed one last time into Starbuck’s chest, then stayed there.

‘I think it would be a privilege to perform the service for your daughter, sir,’ Starbuck said hurriedly.

Sally Truslow and her boy came just after dark. Roper brought them, leading Sally on the horse. She dismounted in front of her father’s porch where a lantern-shielded candle burned. She kept her face low, not daring to look up into her father’s face. She wore a black bonnet and a blue dress. She was slim-waisted, not yet showing her pregnancy.

Beside her was a young man with a round and innocent face. He was clean-shaven, indeed he looked as if he could not grow a beard if he tried. He might have been sixteen, but Starbuck guessed he was younger. Robert Decker had sandy coarse hair, trusting blue eyes, and a quick smile, which he struggled to subdue as he nodded a cautious greeting to his future father-in-law. ‘Mister Truslow,’ he said warily.

‘Robert Decker,’ Truslow said, ‘you’re to meet Nathaniel Starbuck. He’s a man of God and he’s agreed to marry you and Sally.’

Robert Decker, fidgeting with his round hat that he held in front of him with both hands, nodded cheerfully at Starbuck. ‘Right pleased to make your acquaintance, mister.’

‘Look up, Sally!’ Truslow growled.

‘I ain’t sure I want to be married.’ She whined the protest.

‘You’ll do as you’re told to do,’ her father growled.

‘I want to be church married!’ the girl insisted. ‘Like Laura Taylor was, by a proper preacherman!’ Starbuck hardly heard what she said, or even cared what she said, because instead he was gazing at Sally Truslow and wondering why God ordained these mysteries. Why was some country girl, whelped off an adulteress to a hard-bitten man, born to make the very sun seem dim? For Sally Truslow was beautiful. Her eyes were blue as the sky over the Nantucket sea, her face sweet as honey, her lips as full and inviting as a man’s dreams could want. Her hair was a dark brown, streaked with lighter veins and rich in the lantern’s light. ‘A marriage should be proper,’ she complained, ‘not like jumping over a broomstick.’ Leaping a broomstick was the deep country way of wedlock, or the slave’s way of signifying a marriage.

‘You planning on raising the child on your own, Sally,’ Truslow demanded, ‘without marrying?’

‘You can’t do that, Sally,’ Robert Decker said with a pathetic anxiety. ‘You need a man to work for you, to look after you.’

‘Maybe there won’t be any child,’ she said petulantly.

Truslow’s hand moved like lightning, slashing hard and open across his daughter’s cheek. The sound of the blow was like a whip cracking. ‘You kill that baby,’ he threatened, ‘and I’ll take a leather to your skin that will leave your bones like bed slats. You hear me?’

‘I won’t do nothing.’ She was crying, cringing from the vicious blow. Her face had reddened from the slap, but there was still a cunning belligerence in her eyes.

‘You know what I do to a cow that won’t carry its young?’ Truslow shouted at her. ‘I slaughter ’em. You think anyone would care if I put another aborting bitch under the dirt?’

‘I ain’t going to do nothing! I told you! I’ll be a good girl!’

‘She will, Mister Truslow,’ Robert Decker said. ‘She won’t do anything.’

Roper, impassive, stood behind the couple as Truslow stared hard into Robert Decker’s eyes. ‘Why do you want to marry her, Robert?’

‘I’m real fond of her, Mister Truslow.’ He was embarrassed to make the admission, but grinned and looked sideways at Sally. ‘And it’s my baby. I just know it is.’

‘I’m going to have you married proper,’ Truslow looked back to his daughter, ‘by Mister Starbuck, who knows how to talk to God, and if you break your vows, Sally, then God will whip your hide till it bleeds dry. God won’t be mocked, girl. You offend him and you’ll end up like your mother, dead before your time and food to worms.’

‘I’ll be a good girl,’ Sally whined, and she looked straight at Starbuck for the first time, and Starbuck’s breath checked in his throat as he stared back. Once, when Starbuck had been a small child, his Uncle Matthew had taken him to Faneuil Hall to see a demonstration of the electrical force, and Starbuck had held hands in a ring of onlookers as the lecturer fed a current through their linked bodies. He felt then something of what he experienced now, a tingling thrill that momentarily made the rest of the world seem unimportant. Then, as soon as he recognized the excitement, he felt a kind of desperation. This feeling was sin. It was the devil’s work. Surely he must be soul sick? For surely no ordinary, decent man would be so entranced by every girl who had a pretty face? Then, jealously, he wondered whether Thomas Truslow’s suspicions were right and that Ethan Ridley had been this girl’s sweetheart, and Starbuck felt a stab of corrosive jealousy as sharp as a blade, then a fierce anger that Ridley could deceive Washington and Anna Faulconer. ‘Are you a proper preacherman?’ Sally cuffed her nose and asked Starbuck.

‘I wouldn’t ask him to wed you otherwise,’ her father insisted.

‘I was asking him myself,’ she said defiantly, keeping her eyes on Starbuck, and he knew she had seen clean into his soul. She was seeing his lust and his weakness, his sinfulness and his fear. Starbuck’s father had often warned him against the powers of women, and Starbuck had thought he had met those powers at their most devilish in Mademoiselle Dominique Demarest, but Dominique had possessed nothing to compare with this girl’s intensity. ‘And if a girl can’t ask a preacherman who’s marrying her just what kind of a preacherman he is,’ Sally insisted, ‘then what can she ask?’ Her voice was low, like her father’s, but where his generated fear, hers suggested something infinitely more dangerous. ‘So are you a proper preacherman, mister?’ she demanded of Starbuck again.

‘Yes.’ Starbuck told the lie for the sake of Thomas Truslow, and because he dared not let the truth enslave him to this girl.

‘I guess we’re all ready, then,’ Sally said defiantly. She did not want to be married, but neither did she want to appear browbeaten. ‘You got a ring for us, Pa?’

The question appeared casual, but Starbuck was immediately aware that it carried a heavy freight of emotion. Truslow stared defiantly at his daughter, the mark of his hand still across her cheek, but she matched his defiance. Robert Decker looked from daughter to father, then back to the daughter, and had the sense to keep his mouth shut.

‘The ring’s special,’ Truslow said.

‘You holding it for another woman, is that it?’ Sally sneered the question, and for a second Starbuck thought Truslow would hit her again, but instead he pushed a hand into a pocket of his coat and brought out a small leather bag. He untied the drawstrings and took out a scrap of blue cloth, which he unwrapped to reveal a ring. It glinted in the darkness, a ring of silver, etched with some design that Starbuck could not decipher.

‘This was your mother’s ring,’ Truslow said.

‘And ma always said it should be mine,’ Sally insisted.

‘I should have buried it with her.’ Truslow gazed down at the ring, which was clearly a relic of great power for him, but then, impulsively, as though he knew he would regret the decision, he shoved the ring toward Starbuck. ‘Say the words,’ Truslow snapped.

Roper snatched off his hat while young Decker composed his face into a serious expression. Sally licked her lips and smiled at Starbuck, who looked down at the silver ring laying on the ragged Bible. He saw the ring was engraved with words, but, in the dim light, he could not make them out. My God, he thought, but just what words was he to find for this travesty of a marriage act? This was a worse ordeal than the saw pit.

‘Speak up, mister,’ Truslow growled.

‘God has ordained marriage,’ Starbuck heard himself saying as he desperately tried to remember the marriage services he had attended in Boston, ‘to be an instrument of his love, and an institution in which we can bring our children into this world to be his servants. The commandments of marriage are simple, that you love one another.’ He had been looking at Robert Decker as he spoke, and the young man nodded eagerly, as though Starbuck needed the reassurance, and Starbuck felt a terrible sob of pity for this honest fool who was being yoked to a temptress, then he glanced at Sally. ‘And that you are faithful to each other until death do you part.’