Starbuck crossed the room, cut the cigar, lit it, then took one for himself. “How did you find me?” Sally asked.
“I went to Ethan Ridley’s brother.”
“That Delaney? He’s a strange one,” Sally said. “I like him, I think I like him, but he’s not like Ethan. I tell you, if I see Ethan again, I swear I’ll kill the son of a bitch. I don’t care if they hang me, Nate, I’ll kill him. Mrs. Richardson swears that he won’t be allowed to see me if he comes here, but I hope he does. I hope that son of a bitch comes in here and I’ll stick him like a hog on a slab, so I will.” She sucked on the cigar, making its tip glow a brilliant red.
“What happened?” Starbuck asked.
She shrugged, sat in a chair by the window and told how she had come to Richmond to find Ethan Ridley. For three or four days he had seemed friendly, even kind to her, but then he had told her they were going in a carriage to look at some rooms he planned to rent for her. Except there were no rooms, only two men who had carried her off to a cellar in the eastern end of the city and there they had beaten her, raped her and beaten her again until she had learned to be obedient. “I lost the baby,” she said bleakly, “but they wanted that, I reckon. I mean I wasn’t any good to them pregnant, not here.” She waved around the room, hinting at her new trade. “And of course, he arranged it.”
“Ridley?”
Sally nodded. “He had it all arranged. He wanted rid of me, see? So he had two men take me. One was a nigger, I mean a black, and the other used to be a slave trader, see, so they knew how to break people like my pa used to break horses.” She shrugged and turned toward the window. “I guess I needed breaking, too.”
“You can’t say that!” Starbuck was appalled.
“Oh, honey!” Sally smiled at him. “How the hell am I to get what I want in this world? You give me that answer? I ain’t born to money, I ain’t educated for money, all I got is what men want.” She drew on the cigar, then took a glass of wine from Starbuck. “A lot of the girls here started that way. I mean they have to be broken in. It ain’t nice, and I don’t care if I never see those two men again, but I’m here now, and I’m mended.”
“They scarred you?”
“Hell, yes.” She touched her left cheek. “Ain’t too bad, though, is it? They did other things. Like if I wouldn’t open my mouth? They had this machine they use on slaves who won’t speak. It goes round your head and has a piece of iron here.” She demonstrated by jabbing the cigar toward her lips, then shrugged. “That could hurt. But all I had to do was learn to be good and they stopped using it.”
Starbuck was filled with inchoate indignation. “Who were the two men?”
“Just men, Nate. It don’t matter.” Sally made a dismissive gesture, as though she did not really blame them for what had happened. “Then after a month Mister Delaney came to the house and he said he was real shocked at what was happening to me, and he said it was all Ethan’s fault, and Mrs. Richardson came as well, and they took me away and made a real fuss of me and brought me here, and Mrs. Richardson said I didn’t really have much of a choice any longer. I could stay here and make money or they’d put me back on the street. So here I am.”
“You could go home, surely?” Starbuck suggested.
“No!” Sally was vehement. “I don’t want to be at home, Nate! Father always wanted me to be a boy. He reckons everyone should be happy with a log house, two hunting dogs, an axe and a long rifle, but that ain’t my dream.”
“Do you want to go away?” Starbuck asked her. “With me?”
She smiled pityingly at him. “How are we going to do that, honey?”
“I don’t know. Just leave here. Walk north.” He gestured toward the darkening sky that was filled with a new hard rain, and even as he made the suggestion he knew it was hopeless.
Sally laughed at the very thought of walking away from Mrs. Richardson’s house. “I’ve got what I want here!”
“But…”
“I’ve got what I want,” she insisted. “Listen, people ain’t no different to horses. Some are special, some are workers. Mrs. Richardson says I can be special. She don’t waste me on every customer, only the special ones. And she says I can leave here if a man wants me and can pay for me proper. I mean I can leave anyway, but where am I going to go? Look at me! I’ve got dresses and wine and cigars and money. And I won’t do this forever. You see the carriages go by with the rich folks? Half those women started like me, Nate!” She spoke very earnestly, then laughed when she saw his unhappiness. “Now listen. Take off that sword, sit down proper, and tell me about the Legion. Make me real happy and tell me Ethan has shot himself. You know that son of a bitch took my ma’s ring? The silver ring?”
“I’ll get it back for you.”
“No!” She shook her head. “Ma wouldn’t want that ring in this place, but you can get it for Pa.” She thought for a second, then smiled wanly. “He loved my ma, you know, he really did.”
“I know. I saw him at her grave.”
“Course you did.” She took a crystallized cherry and bit it in half, then tucked her legs up onto the chair. “So why did you call yourself a preacherman? I often wondered about that.”
So Starbuck told her about Boston and the Reverend Elial Starbuck and the big dark brooding house on Walnut Street that always seemed filled with the dangerous silences of parental anger and the smell of wax and wood oil and Bibles and coal smoke. Darkness fell over Richmond, but neither Starbuck nor Sally moved to light a candle, instead they talked of childhood and of broken dreams and how love always seemed to trickle through the fingers when you thought you had a grasp of it.
“It was when Ma died that everything went wrong for me,” Sally said, then she gave a long sigh and turned in the darkness to look at Starbuck. “So you reckon you’ll stay here? In the South?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“Why?”
“To be near you?” He said it easily, like a friend, and she laughed to hear it. Starbuck leaned forward, his elbows propped on his long legs and wondered about the real truth of his answer. “I don’t know what I shall do,” he said softly. “I know I’m not going to be a preacher now, and I don’t really know what else I can be. I could be a schoolteacher, I guess, but I’m not really sure I want to do that. I’m no good at business, at least I don’t think I am, and I don’t have the money to become a lawyer.” He paused, drawing on his third cigar of the evening. Delaney had been right, it was soothing.
“So what are you going to sell, honey?” Sally asked ironically. “I’ve been taught real good what I have to sell, so what about you? No one looks after us for nothing, Nate. I learned that. My ma might have done that for me, but she’s dead, and my pa…” She shook her head. “All he wanted was for me to be a cook and a hog slaughterer and a fowl keeper and a farmer’s woman. But that ain’t me. And if you ain’t a lawyer or a preacherman or a teacher, then what in hell’s name are you going to be?”
“That.” He gestured at the discarded saber that was propped in its cheap scabbard against the windowsill. “I’m going to be a soldier. I’m going to be a very good soldier.” It was strange, he thought, but he had never said this before, not even to himself, but suddenly it all made such sense. “I’m going to be famous, Sally. I’m going to ride through this war like a, like a…” He paused, seeking the right word, then suddenly a bout of thunder cracked overhead, shaking the very house, and at the same instant a bolt of lightning sizzled through the Richmond sky like white fire blazing. “Like that!” Starbuck said, “just like that.”
Sally smiled. Her teeth looked very white in the darkness, and her hair, when the sheet lightning blanched the night, reflected like dark gold. “You won’t get rich being a soldier, Nate.”
“No, I guess I won’t at that.”
“And I’m expensive, honey.” She was only half teasing him.
“I’ll find the money somehow.”
She stirred in the dark, stubbing out her cigar and stretchi
ng her slender arms. “They’ve given you tonight. I don’t know why, but I guess Mister Delaney likes you, right?”
“I think he does, yes.” Starbuck’s heart was thumping in his chest. He thought how very naive he had been about Delaney, then how much he owed Delaney, and then how little he knew about Delaney. How blind he had been, he thought, how trusting. “Does Delaney own this place?” he asked.
“He has a bit of it, I don’t know how much. But he’s given you tonight, honey, all night, right till breakfast, and after that?”
“I said I’ll find the money.” Starbuck’s voice was choked and he was trembling.
“I can tell you how to earn it forever. For as long as you and I still want it.” Sally spoke soft in the darkness and the rain drummed on the street and on the roof.
“How?” It was a miracle Starbuck could speak at all, and even so the word came out like a croak. “How?” He said it again.
“Kill Ethan for me.”
“Kill Ethan,” Starbuck said as though he had not heard her correctly, and as though he had not spent these last days persuading himself that Ethan was his enemy and fantasizing a young man’s dreams of how he would destroy his enemy. “Kill him?” he asked in dread.
“Kill that son of a bitch for me. Just kill him for me.” Sally paused. “It ain’t that I mind being here, Nate, in fact it’s probably the best place for me, but I hate that son of a bitch for telling me lies, and I hate that he thinks he got away with telling me lies, and I want that son of a bitch dead and I want the last thing he hears on this earth to be my name so he don’t ever forget why he’s gone to hell. Will you do that for me?”
Dear God, Starbuck thought, but how many sins were here brought into one foul bundle? How many entries would the Recording Angel be making in the Lamb’s Book of Life? What hope of redemption was there for a man who would contemplate murder, let alone commit it? How wide the gates of hell gaped, how searing the flames would be, how agonizing the lake of fire, and how long would all eternity stretch if he did not stand now, fetch his sword, and walk out from this den of iniquity into the cleansing rain. Dear God, he prayed, but this is a terrible thing, and if you will just save me now then I will never sin again, not ever.
He looked into Sally’s eyes, her lovely eyes. “Of course I’ll kill him for you,” he heard himself saying.
“You want to eat first, honey? Or later?”
Like a slash of lightning, white across the sky, he would be marvelous.
PART THREE
ORDERS CAME FROM RICHMOND THAT DIRECTED THE LEGION TO the rail junction at Manassas where the rails of the Orange and Alexandria met the Manassas Gap line. The orders did not arrive till three days after Washington Faulconer had returned from Richmond, and even then the permission seemed grudging. The order was addressed to the commanding officer of the Faulconer County Regiment, as though the Richmond authorities did not want to dignify Washington Faulconer’s achievement in raising the Legion, but at least they were allowing the Legion to join General Beauregard’s Army of Northern Virginia as Faulconer had requested. General Lee had enclosed a curt note regretting that it was not in his power to attach the “Faulconer County Regiment” to any one particular corps in Beauregard’s army, indeed he took care to note that, because the regiment’s availability had been made known to the authorities at such short notice and because the regiment had undertaken no brigade training of any kind, he doubted whether it could be used for anything other than detached duties. Washington Faulconer rather liked the sound of such duties until Major Pelham dryly noted that detached duties usually meant serving as baggage guards, railroad sentries or prisoner of war escorts.
If Lee’s note was calculated to pique Washington Faulconer, it succeeded, though the Colonel declared it was no more than he expected from the mudsills in Richmond. General Beauregard, Faulconer was certain, would prove more welcoming. Faulconer’s greatest concern was to reach Manassas before the war ended. Northern troops had crossed the Potomac in force and were said to be slowly advancing toward the Confederate Army, and rumor in Richmond claimed that Beauregard planned to unleash a massive encircling move that would crush the northern invaders. The rumors added that if such a defeat did not persuade the United States to sue for peace, then Beauregard would cross the Potomac and capture Washington. Colonel Faulconer dreamed of riding his black charger, Saratoga, up the steps of the unfinished Capitol Building and in the fulfillment of that dream he was willing to swallow the worst of Richmond’s insults, and thus the day after the arrival of the churlish order the Legion was woken two hours before dawn with orders to strike the tent lines and load the baggage wagons. The Colonel anticipated a swift march to the rail depot at Rosskill, yet somehow everything took much longer than anyone expected. No one seemed entirely certain how to disassemble the eleven giant cast-iron camp stoves that Faulconer had bought, nor had anyone thought to order the Legion’s ammunition to be fetched out of its dry storage at Seven Springs.
News of the move also provoked the mothers, sweethearts and wives of the soldiers to bring one last gift to the encampment. Men who were already laden down with haversacks, weapons, knapsacks, blankets and cartridge boxes were given woolen scarves, coats, capes, revolvers, bowie knives, jars of preserves, sacks of coffee, biscuits and buffalo robes, and all the time the hot sun rose still higher and the camp stoves were still not disassembled, and one of the wagon horses cast a shoe, and Washington Faulconer fumed, Pecker Bird cackled at the confusion and Major Pelham had a heart attack.
“Oh, good Christ!” It was Little, the bandmaster, who had been complaining to Pelham that there was not enough wagon space for his instruments when suddenly the elderly officer made an odd clicking noise in his throat, gasped one huge, despairing breath inward, then toppled from his saddle. Men dropped whatever they were doing to gather round the thin motionless body. Washington Faulconer spurred toward the gawking spectators and waved them back with his riding crop. “Back to your duties! Back! Where the hell’s Doctor Danson? Danson!”
Danson arrived and stooped over the still form of Pelham, then declared him dead. “Out like a candle!” Danson struggled to his feet, putting his trumpet-stethoscope back into a pocket. “Damned good way to go, Faulconer.”
“Not today, it isn’t. Damn you! Back to work!” He pointed his riding crop at a staring soldier. “Go on, away with you! Who the hell’s going to tell Pelham’s sister?”
“Not me,” Danson said.
“Goddamn it! Why couldn’t he have died in battle?” Faulconer turned the horse. “Adam! Duty for you!”
“I’m supposed to be going to the Rosskill depot, sir.”
“Ethan can go.”
“He’s fetching the ammunition.”
“Damn Rosskill! I want you to go to Miss Pelham. My best regards to her, you know what to say. Take her some flowers. Better still, fetch Moss on your way. If a preacher isn’t any good with the bereaved, then what the hell use is he?”
“You want me to go to Rosskill afterward?”
“Send Starbuck. You tell him what to do.” Starbuck had not been in the Colonel’s best books since the night in Richmond when he had stayed out till well past breakfast and had then refused to say where he had been. “Not that you need to be told what he’s been doing,” the Colonel had grumbled to his son that morning, “because it stands out a mile, but he might have the decency to tell us who she is.”
Now Nate was ordered to ride to the Rosskill depot of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad and tell the depot manager to prepare for the Legion’s arrival. Faulconer, who was a director of the railroad, had already sent a letter that, in anticipation of the orders from Richmond, had required two trains to be prepared for the Legion’s journey, but someone now had to ride to the depot and order the engineers to fire up their boxes and so raise steam. One train would consist of the railroad director’s car, which was reserved for Faulconer and his aides, and sufficient second-class passenger cars to carry the Legion’s nine hundred a
nd thirty-two men, while the second train would consist of boxcars for supplies and horses, and open wagons for the Legion’s wagons, cannons, limbers and caissons. Adam handed Starbuck a copy of his father’s letter and a copy of the written orders that had been dispatched to the depot manager at dawn. “Roswell Jenkins’s company is supposed to be there by eleven, though God knows if they’ll be ready by then. They’re going to make ramps.”
“Ramps?”
“To get the horses into the wagons,” Adam explained. “Wish me luck. Miss Pelham is not the easiest of women. Dear God.”
Starbuck wished his friend good luck, then saddled Pocahontas and trotted her out of the chaotic encampment, through the town and down the Rosskill road. The town, which held the nearest railroad depot to Faulconer County, was twice the size of Faulconer Court House and had been built where the foothills finally gave way to the wide plain that stretched to the distant sea. It was an easy downhill ride. The day was hot and the cows in the meadows were either standing under shade trees or else up to their bellies in the deep cool streams. The roadside was bright with flowers, the trees heavy with leaf, and Starbuck was happy.
He had a letter to Sally in his saddlebag. She had wanted him to send her letters and he had promised to write as often as he could. This first letter told of the last days of training and of how the Colonel had given him the mare, Pocahontas. He had kept the letter simple, the words short and the letters big and round. He had told Sally how he loved her, and he guessed that was true, but it was a strange kind of love, more like a friendship than the destructive passion he had felt for Dominique. Starbuck was still jealous of the men Sally would lie with, as any man surely should be jealous, but Sally would have none of his jealousy. She needed his friendship as he needed hers, for they had come together in the thunder-riven night like two lonely children needing comfort, and afterward, lying happily in the bed where they had smoked cigars and listened to the dawn rain, they had agreed to write, or rather Starbuck had agreed to write and Sally had promised she would try to read his letters and one day she would even try to write back so long as Starbuck promised on his honor not to laugh at her efforts.