Kitabı oku: «The Starbuck Chronicles: The Complete 4-Book Collection», sayfa 12

SEVEN

THE FRIENDS MET, reined in, both spoke at once, checked, laughed, spoke again, but were each too full of news and the pleasure of reunion to make much sense of the other. ‘You look weary.’ Adam at last managed to edge in an intelligible remark.

‘I am.’

‘I must meet Father. Then we’ll talk.’ Adam spurred on toward Washington Faulconer who, the failure of his raid apparently forgotten, was beaming with happiness at his son’s return.

‘How did you get back?’ Faulconer called as his son galloped toward him.

‘They wouldn’t let me over the Long Bridge at Washington, so I went upriver and paid a ferryman near Leesburg.’

‘When did you get home?’

‘Just yesterday.’ Adam reined in to receive his father’s greeting. It was plain to everyone that Washington Faulconer’s happiness was entirely restored. His son had come home, and the uncertainties of Adam’s loyalty were thus resolved. The Colonel’s pleasure expanded to include and even to seek forgiveness from Starbuck. ‘I’ve been distracted, Nate. You must forgive me,’ he said quietly to Nate when Adam had gone on to greet Murphy, Hinton and Truslow.

Starbuck, too embarrassed by the older man’s apology, said nothing.

‘You’ll join us for dinner at Seven Springs, Nate?’ Faulconer had mistaken Starbuck’s silence for pique. ‘I’d take it hard if you refused.’

‘Of course, sir.’ Starbuck paused, then bit an unfair bullet. ‘And I’m sorry if I let you down, sir.’

‘You didn’t, you didn’t, you didn’t.’ Faulconer thus hurriedly brushed away Starbuck’s apology. ‘I’ve been distracted, Nate. Nothing else. I put too many hopes in that raid, and didn’t foresee the weather. That was all it was, Nate, the weather. Adam, come!’ Adam had spent much of his morning meeting his old friends in the Legion, but his father now insisted on showing his son around the whole encampment one more time, and Adam good-humoredly expressed his admiration of the tent lines and the horse lines, and of the cook house, the wagon park and the meeting tent.

There were now six hundred and seventy-eight volunteers in the camp, almost all of them from within a half day’s ride of Faulconer Court House. They had been divided into ten companies, which had then elected their own officers though, as Faulconer cheerfully admitted, a deal of bribery had been needed to make sure that the best men won. ‘I think I used four barrels of best mountain whiskey,’ Faulconer confided in his son, ‘to make sure that Miller and Patterson weren’t elected.’ Each company had selected a captain and two lieutenants, while some had a second lieutenant as well. Washington Faulconer had appointed his own headquarters staff with the elderly Major Pelham as his second in command and the egregious Major Bird as his over-promoted clerk. ‘I tried to rid us of Pecker, but your mother absolutely insisted,’ the Colonel confided in Adam. ‘Have you seen your mother?’

‘This morning, sir, yes.’

‘And is she well?’

‘She says not.’

‘She usually improves when I go away,’ the Colonel said in a dryly amused voice. ‘And these are the headquarter tents.’ Unlike the bell-shaped tents of the infantry companies the four headquarter tents were large wall-sided ridge tents, each equipped with a groundsheet, camp beds, folding stools, washing bowl, jug and a collapsible camp table which folded into a canvas bag. ‘That’s mine.’ Faulconer gestured at the cleanest tent. ‘Major Pelham’s is next to me. I’ll put Ethan and Pecker over there, and you and Nate can share the fourth tent. I guess that will please you?’ Adam and Ridley had both been appointed as captains, while Starbuck was the lowest of the low, a second lieutenant, and together the three young men formed what the Colonel called his corps of aides. Their job, he told Adam, was to be his messengers, as well as to serve as his eyes and ears on the battlefield. He made it all sound very ominous.

The Legion consisted of more than just the headquarters staff and ten companies of infantry. There was a band, a medical unit, a color party, a force of fifty cavalrymen who would be led by a captain and serve as the Legion’s scouts, and the battery of two bronze six-pounder cannon, both twenty years old and with smoothbore barrels that Faulconer had purchased from Bowers Foundry in Richmond where the guns had gone to be melted down and so made into newer weapons. He proudly showed the pair of guns to his son. ‘Aren’t they marvelous?’

The guns were certainly smart. Their bronze barrels had been buffed to a sun-reflecting dazzle, the wheel spokes and rims were newly varnished, while the guns’ accoutrements, the chains and buckets and rammers and wormscrews, had all been variously polished or painted, yet there was something oddly unsettling about the two weapons. They looked too grim for this summer morning, too full of the menace of death.

‘They’re not the last word in guns.’ Faulconer took his son’s silence for an unspoken criticism. ‘They’re hardly Parrotts, and not even rifled, but I fancy we can strew a few Yankee corpses across the field with these beauties. Ain’t that so, Pelham?’

‘If we can find some ammunition for them, Colonel.’ Major Pelham, who was accompanying the Colonel on this inspection tour, sounded very dubious.

‘We’ll find ammunition!’ Now that his son had returned from the North, the Colonel’s ebullient optimism was wholly restored. ’Ethan will find us ammunition.’

‘He’s sent none yet,’ Pelham answered gloomily. Major Alexander Pelham was a tall, thin, white-haired man whom Starbuck, in the days before the raiding party had ridden north and west, had discovered to be almost perpetually morose. Pelham now waited till the Colonel and his son had ridden out of earshot then cocked a rheumy eye at Starbuck. ‘The best thing that can happen, Lieutenant Starbuck, is that we never find the ammunition for these cannon. The barrels will probably crack apart if we do. Artillery isn’t for amateurs.’ He sniffed. ‘So the raid went badly?’

‘It was disappointing, sir.’

‘Aye, so I heard from Murphy.’ Major Pelham shook his head, as though he had known all along that such adventurousness would be doomed. He was dressed in his old United States uniform that he had last worn in the War of 1812—a faded blue tunic with washed-out braid, buttons bereft of their gilt and crossbelts made of leather as cracked as sun-dried mud. His saber was a huge, black-scabbarded hook of a blade. He winced as the band, which had been practicing in the shade of the Legion’s meeting tent, started playing ‘My Mary-Anne.’ ‘They’ve been playing that all week,’ he grumbled. ‘Mary-Anne, Mary-Anne, Mary-Anne. Maybe we can drive the Yankees off with bad music?’

‘I like the tune.’

‘Not when you’ve heard it fifty times, you won’t. They should be playing marching tunes. Good solid marches, that’s what we need. But how much drill are we doing now? Four hours a day? It should be twelve, but the Colonel won’t permit it. You can rest on it that the Yankees won’t be playing baseball like us.’ Pelham paused to spit tobacco juice. He had an almost mystical belief in the necessity of endless drill and was supported in that creed by all the old soldiers in the Legion, and opposed by the Colonel, who still feared that too much close-order drill would dull his volunteers’ enthusiasm. ‘Wait till you’ve seen the elephant,’ Pelham said, ‘then you’ll know why you should be drilling.’

Starbuck felt his customary response to the idea of seeing the elephant. First there was a pulse of pure fear, as palpable as a chill of liquid pumped from the heart, then there was a surge of excitement that seemed to come from the head rather than the heart, as though sheer resolution could overcome the terror and thus create a vigorous ecstasy from battle. Then came the unnerving knowledge that nothing could be understood, neither the terror nor the ecstasy, until the mystery of battle had been experienced. Starbuck’s impatience to understand that mystery was mixed with a desire to delay the confrontation, and his eagerness with a fervent wish that battle would never happen. It was all very confusing.

Adam, released from his father’s company, turned his horse back toward Starbuck. ‘We’ll go down the river and have a swim.’

‘A swim?’ Starbuck feared this activity might be a new enthusiasm in Adam’s life.

‘Swimming is good for you!’ Adam’s eagerness confirmed Starbuck’s fear. ‘I’ve been talking with a doctor who claims that soaking in water prolongs life!’

‘Nonsense!’

‘I’ll race you!’ Adam kicked back his heels and galloped away.

Starbuck followed more slowly on his already tired mare as Adam led him around the town on paths he had known since childhood and that led eventually to a stretch of parkland which Starbuck assumed was part of the Seven Springs estate. By the time Starbuck reached the river Adam was already undressing. The water was limpid, tree-edged and bright in the spring sunshine. ‘What doctor?’ Starbuck challenged his friend.

‘He’s called Wesselhoeft. I went to see him in Vermont, on mother’s behalf, of course. He recommends a diet of brown bread and milk, and frequent immersions in what he calls a sitz-bad.’

‘A sitting bath?’

‘Sitz-bad please, my dear Nate. It works better in German, all cures do. I told Mother about Doctor Wesselhoeft and she promises me she’ll try each of his specifics. Are you coming in?’ Adam did not wait for an answer, but instead leaped naked into the river. He came up shouting, evidently in reaction to the water’s temperature. ‘It doesn’t really warm up until July!’ he explained.

‘Maybe I’ll just watch you.’

‘Don’t be absurd, Nate. I thought you New Englanders were hardy?’

‘Not foolhardy,’ Starbuck quipped, and thought how good it was to be back with Adam. They had been apart for months, yet the very first moment they were back together it seemed as if no time had passed at all.

‘Come on in, you coward,’ Adam called.

‘Dear God.’ Starbuck leaped into the cleansing coldness, and came up shouting just as Adam had done. ‘It’s freezing!’

‘But good for you! Wesselhoeft recommends a cold bath every morning.’

‘Does Vermont not provide asylums for the insane?’

‘Probably,’ Adam laughed, ‘but Wesselhoeft is very sane and very successful.’

‘I’d rather die young than be this cold every day.’ Starbuck scrambled up the bank and lay on the grass under the warm sun.

Adam joined him. ‘So what happened on the raid?’

Starbuck told him, though leaving out the details of Washington Faulconer’s moroseness on the return ride. Instead he made the foray into something comical, a chapter of errors in which no one was hurt and no one offended. He finished by saying he did not think the war would get any more serious than the raid had been. ‘No one wants a real war, Adam. This is America!’

Adam shrugged. ‘The North isn’t going to release us, Nate. The Union’s too important to them.’ He paused. ‘And to me.’

Starbuck did not reply. Across the river a herd of cows grazed, and in the silence the sound of their teeth tearing at the grass was surprisingly loud. Their cowbells were plangent, matching Adam’s suddenly ominous mood. ‘Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand volunteers,’ he said.

‘I heard.’

‘And the Northern papers say that three times that many will be ready by June.’

‘You’re frightened of numbers?’ Starbuck asked unfairly.

‘No. I’m frightened of what the numbers mean, Nate. I’m frightened of seeing America struck down into barbarism. I’m frightened of seeing fools ride yelling into battle just for the joy of it. I’m frightened of seeing our classmen become the Gadarene swine of the nineteenth century.’ Adam squinted across the river to where the distant hills were bright with blossoms and new leaf. ‘Life is so good!’ he said after a while, though with a sad intensity.

‘People fight to make it better,’ Starbuck said.

Adam laughed. ‘Don’t be absurd, Nate.’

‘Why else do they fight?’ Starbuck bridled.

Adam spread his hands, as if to suggest there could be a thousand answers, and none of them significant. ‘Men fight because they’re too proud and too stupid to admit they’re wrong,’ he finally said. ‘I don’t care what it takes, Nate, but we’ve got to sit down, call a convention, talk the whole thing out! It doesn’t matter if it takes a year, two years, five years! Talk must be better than war. And what’s Europe going to think of us? For years we’ve been saying that America is the noblest, best experiment of history, and now we’re going to tear it apart! For what? For states’ rights? To keep slavery?’

‘Your father doesn’t see it as you do,’ Starbuck said.

‘You know Father,’ Adam said fondly. ‘He’s always seen life as a game. Mother says he’s never really grown up.’

‘And you grew up before your time?’ Starbuck suggested.

Adam shrugged. ‘I can’t take matters lightly. I wish I could, but I can’t. And I can’t take tragedy easily, at least not this tragedy.’ He waved toward the cows, evidently intending those innocent and motionless beasts to stand for the spectacle of America rushing headlong into warfare. ‘But what about you?’ He turned to Starbuck. ‘I hear you’ve been in trouble.’

‘Who told you?’ Starbuck was instantly embarrassed. He stared up at the clouds, unable to meet his friend’s gaze.

‘My father wrote to me, of course. He wanted me to go to Boston and plead with your father.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t.’

‘But I did. Except your father wouldn’t receive me. I heard him preach though. He was formidable.’

‘He usually is,’ Starbuck said, though inwardly he was wondering why Washington Faulconer could possibly want Adam to plead with the Reverend Elial. Was Faulconer wanting to be rid of him?

Adam plucked a blade of grass and shredded it between his square, capable fingers. ‘Why did you do it?’

Starbuck, who had been lying on his back, suddenly felt ashamed of his nakedness and so rolled onto his belly and stared down at the clover and grass. ‘Dominique? Lust, I suppose.’

Adam frowned, as if the concept was unknown to him. ‘Lust?’

‘I wish I could describe it. Except that it’s overwhelming. One moment everything is normal, like a ship in a calm sea, then suddenly this enormous wind comes from nowhere, this enormous, exciting, howling wind and you can’t help it, but just sail madly off with it.’ He stopped, dissatisfied with his imagery. ‘It’s the sirens’ song, Adam. I know it’s wrong, but you can’t help it.’ Starbuck suddenly thought of Sally Truslow and the memory of her beauty hurt so much that he flinched.

Adam took the flinch as evidence of remorse. ‘You have to pay back the man Trabell, don’t you?’

‘Oh, yes. Of course I do.’ That necessity weighed heavily on Starbuck’s conscience, at least when he allowed himself to remember the theft of Major Trabell’s money. Until a few hours ago, when he had still been planning his return North, he had convinced himself that he wanted nothing more than to repay Trabell, but now, with Adam home, Starbuck wanted nothing more than to stay in Virginia. ‘I wish I knew how,’ he said vaguely.

‘I think you should go home,’ Adam suggested firmly, ‘and put things straight with your family.’

Starbuck had spent the last two days thinking precisely the same thing, though now he demurred from that sensible plan. ‘You don’t know my father.’

‘How can a man be scared of his own father, yet contemplate going into battle without fear?’

Starbuck smiled quickly to acknowledge the point, then shook his head. ‘I don’t want to go home.’

‘Must we always do what we want? There is duty and obligation.’

‘Maybe things didn’t go wrong when I met Dominique,’ Starbuck said, striking obliquely away from his friend’s stern words. ‘Maybe they went wrong when I first went to Yale. Or when I agreed to be baptized. I’ve never felt like a Christian, Adam. I should never have let Father baptize me. I should never have let him send me to seminary. I’ve been living a lie.’ He thought of his prayers at a dead woman’s grave, and blushed. ‘I don’t think I’ve even been converted. I’m not a true Christian at all.’

‘Of course you are!’ Adam was shocked at his friend’s apostasy.

‘No,’ Starbuck insisted. ‘I wish I was. I’ve seen other men converted. I’ve seen the happiness in them, and the power of the Holy Spirit in them, but I’ve never really experienced the same thing. I’ve wanted to, I’ve always wanted to.’ He paused. He could think of no one else to whom he could speak like this, only Adam. Good honest Adam who was like Faithful to John Bunyan’s Christian. ‘My God, Adam,’ Starbuck went on, ‘but I’ve prayed for conversion! I’ve begged for it! But I’ve never known it. I think, maybe, that if I was saved, if I was born again, I’d have the strength to resist lust, but I don’t and I don’t know how to find that strength.’ It was an honest, pathetic admission. He had been raised to believe that nothing in his whole life, not even his life itself, was as important as the necessity for conversion. Conversion, Starbuck had been taught, was the moment of being born again into Christ, that miraculous instant in which a man allowed Jesus Christ into his heart as his Lord and Savior, and if a man did allow that marvelous ingress to happen, then nothing would ever be the same again because all of life and all of subsequent eternity would be transmuted into a golden existence. Without salvation life was nothing but sin and hell and disappointment; with it there was joy, love and heaven everlasting.

Except Starbuck had never found that moment of mystical conversion. He had never experienced the joy. He had pretended to, because such a pretense was the only way to satisfy his father’s insistence on salvation, yet all his life had been a lie since that moment of pretense. ‘There’s something worse,’ he confessed to Adam now. ‘I’m beginning to suspect that real salvation, real happiness, doesn’t lie in the experience of conversion at all, but in abandoning the whole concept. Maybe I’ll only be happy if I can reject the whole paraphernalia?’

‘My God,’ Adam said, horrified at the very idea of such Godlessness. He thought for a few seconds. ‘I don’t think,’ he went on slowly, ‘that conversion depends on an outside influence. You can’t expect a magical change, Nate. True conversion comes from an inner determination.’

‘You mean Christ has nothing to do with it?’

‘Of course he does, yes, but he’s powerless unless you invite him in. You have to unleash his power.’

‘I can’t!’ The protest was almost a wail, the cry of a young man desperate to be released from the travails of religious struggle, a struggle that pitted Christ and his salvation against the temptation of Sally Truslow and Dominique and of all the other forbidden and wonderful delights that seemed to tear Starbuck’s soul in two.

‘You should begin by going home,’ Adam said. ‘It’s your duty.’

‘I’m not going home,’ Starbuck said, utterly ignoring his recent decision to do just that. ‘I won’t find God at home, Adam. I need to be on my own.’ That was not true. Starbuck, now that his friend had returned to Faulconer Court House, wanted to stay in Virginia because the summer which had looked so threatening under Washington Faulconer’s disapproval was suddenly promising to be golden again. ‘And why are you here?’ Starbuck turned the questioning on his friend. ‘For duty?’

‘I suppose so.’ Adam was uncomfortable with the question. ‘I suppose we all look for home when things seem bad. And they are bad, Nate. The North is going to invade.’

Starbuck grinned. ‘So we fight them off, Adam, and that will be the end of it. One battle! One short, sweet battle. One victory, and then peace. You’ll get your convention then, you’ll get everything you want probably, but you have to fight one battle first.’

Adam smiled. It seemed to him that his friend Nate existed only for sensation. Not for thought, which Adam liked to think was his own touchstone. Adam believed that the truth of everything, from slavery to salvation, could be adduced by reason, while Starbuck, he realized, was swayed solely by emotion. In some ways, Adam thought with a surprise, Starbuck resembled his father, the Colonel. ‘I’m not going to fight,’ Adam said after a long pause. ‘I won’t fight.’

It was Starbuck’s turn to be shocked. ‘Does your father know that?’

Adam shook his head, but said nothing. It seemed that he too was wary of a father’s disapproval.

‘So why did you come home?’ Starbuck asked.

Adam was quiet for a long while. ‘I think,’ he said at last, ‘because I knew that nothing I could say would help any longer. No one was listening to reason, only to passion. The people I thought wanted peace turned out to want victory more. Fort Sumter changed them, you see. It didn’t matter that no one had died there, the bombardment proved to them that the slave states would never yield to reason, and then they demanded that I add my voice to their demands, and those demands weren’t for moderation anymore, but for the destruction of all this.’ He gestured at the Faulconer domain, at the sweet fields and heavy trees. ‘They wanted me to attack Father and his friends, and I refused to do it. So I came home instead.’

‘But you won’t fight?’

‘I don’t think so.’

Starbuck frowned. ‘You’re braver than me, Adam, my God you are.’

‘Am I? I wouldn’t have dared run away with a, with a’— Adam paused, unable to find a word delicate enough to describe the very indelicate Dominique—‘I wouldn’t have dared risk my whole life for a whim!’ He made it sound admirable instead of shameful.

‘It was nothing but stupidity,’ Starbuck confessed.

‘And you’d never do it again?’ Adam asked with a smile, and Starbuck thought of Sally Truslow, and said nothing. Adam plucked a blade of grass and twisted it about his finger. ‘So what do you think I should do?’

So Adam’s mind was not made up after all? Starbuck smiled. ‘I’ll tell you exactly what to do. Just go along with your father. Play at soldiers, enjoy the encampment, have a marvelous summer. Peace will come, Adam, maybe after one battle, but peace will come, and it will be soon. Why ruin your father’s happiness? What do you gain by doing that?’

‘Honesty?’ Adam suggested. ‘I have to live with myself, Nate.’

Adam found living with himself difficult, as Nate well knew. Adam was a stern and demanding young man, especially of himself. He might forgive weakness in others, but not in his own character. ‘So why did you come back?’ Starbuck went on the attack. ‘Just to raise your father’s hopes before disappointing him? My God, Adam, you talk about my duty to my father, what’s yours? To preach to him? To break his heart? Why are you here? Because you expect your tenants and neighbors to fight, but think you can sit the battle out because you’ve got scruples? My God, Adam, you’d have done better to stay in the North.’

Adam paused a long time before responding. ‘I’m here because I’m weak.’

‘Weak!’ That was the last quality Starbuck would have ascribed to his friend.

‘Because you’re right; I can’t disappoint Father. Because I know what he wants, and it doesn’t seem such a great deal to give him.’ Adam shook his head. ‘He’s such a generous man, and he’s so often disappointed in people. I really would like to make him happy.’

‘Then for God’s sake put on the uniform, play soldiers and pray for peace. Besides,’ Starbuck said, deliberately lightening the mood, ‘I can’t bear the thought of a summer without your company. Can you imagine just me and Ethan as your father’s aides?’

‘You don’t like Ethan?’ Adam had detected the distaste in Starbuck’s voice and seemed surprised by it.

‘He seems not to like me. I took fifty bucks off him in a bet and he hasn’t forgiven me for it.’

‘He’s touchy about money,’ Adam agreed. ‘In fact I sometimes wonder if that’s why he wants to marry Anna, but that’s a very unworthy suspicion, isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’

‘Of course it is.’

Starbuck remembered Belvedere Delaney voicing the same suspicion, but did not mention it. ‘Why does Anna want to marry Ethan?’ he asked instead.

‘She just wants to escape,’ Adam said. ‘Can you imagine life in Seven Springs? She sees marriage as her ticket to freedom.’ Adam suddenly leaped to his feet and scrambled to pull on his trousers, his haste occasioned by the approach of a small dog cart that was being driven by Anna herself. ‘She’s here!’ Adam warned Starbuck who, like his friend, hurriedly tugged on his pants and shirt and was just pulling on his stockings as Anna reined in. Her cart was escorted by three yapping spaniels that now leaped excitedly at Adam and Starbuck.

Anna, sheltered from the sun by a wide, lace-fringed parasol, stared reproachfully at her brother. ‘You’re late for dinner, Adam.’

‘My Lord, is that the time?’ Adam fumbled for his watch among his rumpled clothes. One of the spaniels leaped up and down at him while the other two lapped noisily from the river.

‘It doesn’t really matter that you’re late,’ Anna said, ‘because there’s been some trouble at the camp.’

‘What trouble?’ Starbuck asked.

‘Truslow discovered his son-in-law had joined the Legion while he was away. So he hit him!’ Anna seemed very shocked at the violence.

‘He hit Decker?’

‘Is that his name?’ Anna asked.

‘What happened to Decker’s wife?’ Starbuck asked a little too urgently.

‘I’ll tell you at dinner,’ Anna said. ‘Now why don’t you finish dressing, Mister Starbuck, then tie your tired horse to the back of the cart and ride home with me. You can hold the parasol and tell me all about the raid. I want to hear everything.’

Ethan Ridley took Sally Truslow to Muggeridge’s Drapery and Millinery in Exchange Alley where he bought her a parasol in printed calico to match her pale green linen cambric dress. She was also wearing a fringed paisley shawl, yarn stockings, a wide-brimmed hat trimmed with silk lilies, white ankle-length boots and white lace gloves. She carried a small beaded handbag and, in rude contrast, her old canvas bag.

‘Let me hold the bag for you,’ Ridley said. Sally wanted to try on a linen hat with a stiffened brim and a muslin veil.

‘Take care of it.’ Sally gave him the bag reluctantly.

‘Of course.’ The canvas bag was heavy, and Ridley wondered if she did have a gun in there. Ridley himself had a gun at his hip as part of his uniform. He was in the yellow trimmed gray of the Faulconer Legion, with a saber at his left hip and the revolver on his right side.

Sally turned around in front of the cheval mirror, admiring the hat. ‘It’s real nice,’ she said.

‘You look lovely,’ Ridley said, though in truth he had found her company ever more grating in these last few days. She had no education, no subtlety and no wit. What she had was the face of an angel, the body of a whore, and his bastard in her belly. She also had a desperation to escape the narrow world of her father’s cramped homestead, but Ridley was too concerned for his own future to comprehend Sally’s plight. He did not see her as attempting to escape from an unbearable past, but as an extortioner trying to gouge a parasitical future. He did not see the fear in her, only the determination to take what she wanted. He despised her. At night, impassioned, he wanted nothing more than to be with her, but by day, exposed to her crude ideas and lacerating voice, he wanted only to be rid of her. And today he would be rid of her, but first it was necessary to lull her into complacency.

He took her to Lascelles Jewelry store on Eighth Street where he listened to the owner’s splenetic complaints about the proposal to lay a railroad line directly outside his shop window. The line, which would run down the center of the steep street, was intended to connect the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac rails with the Richmond and Petersburg line so that military supplies could be carried across the city without the need to unload one set of rail wagons into horse-drawn carts. ‘But have they considered the effect upon trade, Captain Ridley? Have they? No! And who will buy fine jewelry with locomotives smoking outside? It’s preposterous!’

Ridley bought Sally a filigree necklace that was flashy enough to please her and cheap enough not to offend his parsimony. He also bought a narrow gold ring, scarce more than a curtain band, which he pushed into his uniform pocket. The purchases, with the parasol and linen hat, cost him fourteen dollars, and the brisket of beef that he bought as dinner in the Spotswood House cost another dollar thirty. He was lulling Sally’s apprehensions, and the price was worth it if she went quietly to whatever fate awaited her. He gave her wine to drink with the meal, and brandy afterward. She wanted a cigar and was quite unworried that no other lady in the dining room chose to smoke. ‘I’ve always liked a cigar. My ma used a pipe, but I like a cigar.’ She smoked contentedly, oblivious of the amused stare of the other diners. ‘This is real nice.’ She had taken to luxury like a starved cat to a creamery.

‘You should get used to this sort of place,’ Ridley said. He lolled in his chair, an elegantly booted leg propped on the cold radiator that stood beneath the window and looked onto the hotel’s courtyard. His scabbarded saber hung from its slings on the radiator’s purge valve. ‘I am going to make you a lady,’ he lied to her. ‘I am going to teach you how a lady speaks, how a lady behaves, how a lady eats, how a lady dances, how a lady reads, how a lady dresses. I am going to make you into a great lady.’

She smiled. To be a great lady was Sally’s dream. She imagined herself in silks and lace, ruling a parlor like the one in Belvedere Delaney’s house, no, an even bigger parlor, a vast parlor, a parlor with cliffs for walls and a vaulted heaven for a ceiling and golden furniture and hot water all day long. ‘Are we really looking for a house this afternoon?’ she asked wistfully. ‘I’m real tired of Mrs. Cobbold.’ Mrs. Cobbold owned the boarding house in Monroe Street and was suspicious of Ridley’s relationship with Sally.