Rebel

  Everyone in the room held their breath. A fly buzzed round Adam’s face, but a second assistant waved a towel to drive it away.

  “If you must,” the photographer told Adam, “you can breathe out, but very slowly. Take care not to move your right hand.”

  It seemed an age, but at last Adam could relax as the glass plate was reshrouded in its wooden box and rushed off to the wagon for development. Starbuck was then positioned in the frame, his skull painfully inserted in the metal jaws and he too was caparisoned with saber and pistol, and instructed to hold his breath as the wet glass plate was exposed inside the big wooden camera.

  Adam immediately began to make faces over the photographer’s shoulder. He grimaced, squinted, blew out his cheeks and waggled his fingers in his ears until, to his delight, Starbuck began laughing.

  “No, no, no!” The photographer was distraught and slammed a cover over the plate. “It may not have been exposed long enough,” he complained, “you will look like a ghost,” but Starbuck rather liked that spectral thought and had no need of a carte de visite, let alone a keepsake, and so he wandered off through the crowd, eating on a hunk of bread and pork while Adam went to ready his horse for the steeplechase. Ethan Ridley was expected to win the race, which carried a generous fifty-dollar purse.

  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 enquiring 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 disappo
intment 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 prospect 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.”