Rebel

‘On the contrary,’ Bird said, ‘you shall have dinner with me.’

‘My dear Bird!’ Delaney pretended horror. ‘I cannot afford to eat on a country schoolmaster’s salary! The horrors of secession have stirred my appetites, and my delicate constitution requires only the richest of foods and the finest of wines. No, no! You shall eat with me, as will you, Mister Starbuck, for I am determined to hear all your father’s secret faults. Does he drink? Does he consort with evil women in the vestry? Reassure me on these matters, I beg you.’

‘You shall dine with me,’ Bird insisted, ‘and you will have the finest wine in the Spotswood’s cellars because, my dear Bird, it is not I who shall pay, but Washington Faulconer.’ ‘We are to eat on Faulconer’s account?’ Delaney asked in delight.

‘We are indeed,’ Bird answered with relish.

‘Then my business with Shaffer’s will wait for the morrow. Lead me to the trough! Lead on, dear Bird, lead on! Let us make gluttons of ourselves, let us redefine greed, let us consume comestibles as they have never been consumed before, let us wallow in the wines of France, and let us gossip. Above all, let us have gossip.’

‘I’m supposed to be buying petticoats,’ Starbuck demurred.

‘I suspect you look better in trousers,’ Delaney said sternly, ‘and besides, petticoats, like duty, can wait till the morrow. Pleasure summons us, Starbuck, pleasure summons us, let us surrender to its call.

THREE

SEVEN SPRINGS, Washington Faulconer’s house in Faulconer County, was everything Starbuck dreamed it would be, everything Adam had ever told him it would be, and everything Starbuck thought he might ever want a house to be. It was, he decided from the very first moment he saw it on that Sunday morning in late May, just perfect.

Seven Springs was a sprawling white building just two stories high except where a white clock tower surmounted a stable gate and where a rickety cupola, steepled with a weather-vane, graced the main roof. Starbuck had expected something altogether more pretentious, something with high pillars and elegant pilasters, with arching porticoes and frowning pediments, but instead the big house seemed more like a lavish farmhouse that over the years had absent-mindedly spread and multiplied and reproduced itself until it was a tangle of steep roofs, shadowed reentrants and creeper-hung walls. The heart of the house was made of thick fieldstone, the outer wings were timber, while the black-shuttered and iron-balconied windows were shaded by tall trees under which were set white painted benches, long-roped swings, and broad tables. Smaller trees were brilliant with red and white blossom that fell to make drifts of color on the well-scythed lawn. The house and its garden cradled a marvelous promise of warm domesticity and unassuming comforts.

Starbuck, greeted by a Negro servant in the front hall, had first been relieved of the paper-wrapped bundles containing Washington Faulconer’s new uniforms, then a second servant took the carpetbag containing Starbuck’s own uniform, and afterward a turbanned maid came for the two heavy bundles of petticoats that had hung so awkwardly from Starbuck’s saddle bow.

He waited. A longcase clock, its painted face orbiting with moons, stars and comets, ticked heavily in a corner of the tiled hallway. The walls were papered in a floral pattern on which hung gold-framed portraits of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Washington Faulconer. The portrait of Faulconer depicted him mounted on his magnificent black horse, Saratoga, and gesturing toward what Starbuck took to be the estate surrounding Seven Springs. The hallway grate held the ashes of a fire, suggesting that the nights were still cold in this upland county. Fresh flowers stood in a crystal vase on the table where two newspapers lay folded, their headlines celebrating North Carolina’s formal secession to the Confederate cause. The house smelt of starch, lye soap and apples. Starbuck fidgeted as he waited. He did not quite know what was expected of him. Colonel Faulconer had insisted that Starbuck bring the three newly made uniforms directly to Faulconer Court House, but whether he was to be a guest in the house or was expected to find a berth with the encamped Legion, Starbuck still did not know, and the uncertainty made him nervous.

A flurry of feet on the stairs made him turn. A young woman, fair-haired, dressed in white, and excited, came running down the final flight, then checked on the bottom stair with her hand resting on the white-painted newel post. She solemnly inspected Starbuck. ‘You’re Nate Starbuck?’ she finally asked.

‘Indeed, ma’am.’ He offered her a small, awkward bow.

‘Don’t “ma’am” me, I’m Anna.’ She stepped down onto the hall floor. She was small, scarce more than five feet tall, with a pale, waiflike face that was so anxiously wan that Starbuck, if he had not known her to be one of Virginia’s wealthiest daughters, might have thought her an orphan.

Anna’s face was familiar to Starbuck from the portrait that hung in the Richmond town house, but however accurately the picture had caught her narrow head and diffident smile, the painter had somehow missed the essence of the girl, and that essence, Starbuck decided, was oddly pitiable. Anna, despite her prettiness, looked childishly nervous, almost terrified, as if she expected the world to mock her and cuff her and discard her as worthless. That look of extraordinary timidity was not helped by the hint of a strabismus in her left eye, though the squint, if it existed at all, was very slight. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come,’ she said, ‘because I was looking for an excuse not to attend church, and now I can talk to you.’

‘You received the petticoats?’ Starbuck asked.

‘Petticoats?’ Anna paused, frowning, as if the word were unfamiliar to her.

‘I brought you the petticoats you wanted,’ Starbuck explained, feeling as though he was speaking to a rather stupid child.

Anna shook her head. ‘The petticoats were for father, Mister Starbuck, not me, though why he should want them, I don’t know. Maybe he thinks the supply will be constricted by war? Mother says we must stock up on medicines because of the war. She’s ordered a hundredweight of camphor, and the Lord knows how much niter paper and hartshorn too. Is the sun very hot?’

‘No.’

‘I cannot go into too fierce a sunlight, you see, in case I burn. But you say it isn’t fierce?’ She asked the question very earnestly.

‘It isn’t, no.’

‘Then shall we go for a walk? Would you like that?’ She crossed the hall and slipped a hand under Starbuck’s arm and tugged him toward the wide front door. The impetuous gesture was strangely intimate for such a timid girl, yet Starbuck suspected it was a pathetic appeal for companionship. ‘I’ve been so wanting to meet you,’ Anna said. ‘Weren’t you supposed to come here yesterday?’

‘The uniforms were a day late,’ Starbuck lied. In truth his dinner with Thaddeus Bird and the beguiling Belvedere Delaney had stretched from the early afternoon to late supper-time, and so the petticoats had not been bought till late Saturday morning, but it hardly seemed politic to admit to such dalliance.

‘Well, you’re here now,’ Anna said as she drew Starbuck into the sunlight, ‘and I’m so glad. Adam has talked so much about you.’

‘He often spoke of you,’ Starbuck said gallantly and untruthfully, for in fact Adam had rarely spoken of his sister, and never with great fondness.

‘You surprise me. Adam usually spends so much time examining his own conscience that he scarcely notices the existence of other people.’ Anna, thus revealing a more astringent mind than Starbuck had expected, nevertheless blushed, as if apologizing for her apparently harsh judgment. ‘My brother is a Faulconer to the core,’ she explained. ‘He is not very practical.’

‘Your father is practical, surely?’

‘He’s a dreamer,’ Anna said, ‘a romantic. He believes that all fine things will come true if we just have enough hope.’

‘And surely this house was not built by mere hopes?’ Starbuck waved toward the generous facade of Seven Springs.

‘You like the house?’ Anna sounded surprised. ‘Mother and I are trying to persuade Father to pull it down and build something altogether grander. Something Italian, perhaps, with columns and a dome? I would like to have a pillared temple on a hill in the garden. Something surrounded by flowers, and very grand.’

‘I think the house is lovely as it is,’ Starbuck said.

Anna made a face to show her disapproval of Starbuck’s taste. ‘Our great-great-grandfather Adam built it, or most of it. He was very practical, but then his son married a French lady and the family blood became ethereal. That’s what mother says. And she’s not strong either, so her blood didn’t help.’

‘Adam doesn’t seem ethereal.’

‘Oh, he is,’ Anna said, then she smiled up at Starbuck. ‘I do so like Northern voices. They sound so much cleverer than our country accents. Would you permit me to paint you? I’m not so good a painter as Ethan, but I work harder at it. You can sit beside the Faulconer River and look melancholy, like an exile beside the waters of Babylon.’

‘You’d like me to hang my harp upon the willows?’ Starbuck jested clumsily.

Anna withdrew her arm and clapped her hands with delight. ‘You will be marvelous company. Everyone else is so dull. Adam is being pious in the North, father is besotted with soldiering, and mother spends all day wrapped in ice.’

‘In ice?’

‘Wenham ice, from your home state of Massachusetts. I suppose, if there’s war, there’ll be no more Wenham ice and we shall have to suffer the local product. But Doctor Danson says the ice might cure mother’s neuralgia. The ice cure comes from Europe, so it must be good.’ Starbuck had never heard of neuralgia, and did not want to inquire into its nature in case it should prove to be one of the vague and indescribable feminine diseases that so often prostrated his mother and elder sister, but Anna volunteered that the affliction was a very modern one and was constituted by what she described as ‘facial headaches.’ Starbuck murmured his sympathy. ‘But father thinks she makes it up to annoy him,’ Anna continued in her timid and attenuated voice.

‘I’m sure that can’t be true,’ Starbuck said.

‘I think it might,’ Anna said in a very sad voice. ‘I sometimes wonder if men and women always irritate each other?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘This isn’t a very cheerful conversation, is it?’ Anna asked rather despairingly and in a tone that suggested all her conversations became similarly bogged down in melancholy. She seemed to sink further into despair with every second, and Starbuck was remembering Belvedere Delaney’s malicious tales of how intensely his half-brother disliked this girl, but how badly Ridley needed her dowry. Starbuck hoped those tales were nothing more than malicious gossip, for it would be a cruel world, he thought, that could victimize a girl as fey and tremulous as Anna Faulconer. ‘Did Father really say the petticoats were for me?’ she suddenly asked.

‘Your uncle said as much.’

‘Oh, Pecker,’ Anna said, as if that explained everything.

‘It seemed a very strange request,’ Starbuck said gallantly.

‘So much is strange these days,’ Anna said hopelessly, ‘and I daren’t ask Father for an explanation. He isn’t happy, you see.’

‘No?’

‘It’s poor Ethan’s fault. He couldn’t find Truslow, you see, and Father has set his heart on recruiting Truslow. Have you heard about Truslow?’

‘Your uncle told me about him, yes. He made Truslow sound rather fearful.’

‘But he is fearful. He’s frightful!’ Anna stopped to look up into Starbuck’s face. ‘Shall I confide in you?’

Starbuck wondered what new horror story he was about to hear of the dreaded Truslow. ‘I should be honored by your confidence, Miss Faulconer,’ he said very formally.

‘Call me Anna, please. I want to be friends. And I tell you, secretly, of course, that I don’t believe poor Ethan went anywhere near Truslow’s lair. I think Ethan is much too frightened of Truslow. Everyone’s frightened of Truslow, even Father, though he says he isn’t.’ Anna’s soft voice was very portentous. ‘Ethan says he went up there, but I don’t know if that’s true.’

‘I’m sure it is.’

‘I’m not.’ She put her arm back into Starbuck’s elbow and walked on. ‘Maybe you should ride up to find Truslow, Mister Starbuck?’

‘Me?’ Starbuck asked in horror.

A sudden animation came into Anna’s voice. ‘Think of it as a quest. All my father’s young knights must ride into the mountains and dare to challenge the monster, and whoever brings him back will prove himself the best, the noblest and the most gallant knight of all. What do you think of that idea, Mister Starbuck? Would you like to ride on a quest?’

‘I think it sounds terrifying.’

‘Father would appreciate it if you went, I’m sure,’ Anna said, but when Starbuck made no reply she just sighed and pulled him toward the side of the house. ‘I want to show you my three dogs! You’re to say that they’re the prettiest pets in all the world, and after that we shall fetch the painting basket and we’ll go to the river and you can hang that shabby hat on the willows. Except we don’t have willows, at least I don’t think we have. I’m not good at trees.’

But there was to be no meeting with the three dogs, nor any painting expedition, for the front door of Seven Springs suddenly opened and Colonel Faulconer stepped into the sunlight.

Anna gasped with admiration. Her father was dressed in one of his new uniforms and looked simply grand. He looked, indeed, as though he had been born to wear this uniform and to lead free men across green fields to victory. His gray frock coat was thickly brocaded with gilt and yellow lace that had been folded and woven to make a broad hem to the coat’s edges, while the sleeves were richly embroidered with intricately looped braid that climbed from the broad cuffs to above the elbows. A pair of yellow kidskin gloves was tucked into his shiny black belt, beneath which a tasseled red silk sash shimmered. His top boots gleamed, his saber’s scabbard was polished to mirror brightness and the yellow plume on his cocked hat stirred in the small warm wind. Washington Faulconer was quite plainly delighted with himself as he moved to watch his reflection in one of the tall windows. ‘Well, Anna?’ he asked.

‘It’s wonderful, Father!’ Anna said with as much animation as Starbuck suspected her capable. Two black servants had come from the house and nodded their agreement.

‘I expected the uniforms yesterday, Nate.’ Faulconer half-asked and half-accused Starbuck with the statement.

‘Shaffer’s was a day late, sir’—the lie came smoothly—‘but they were most apologetic.’

‘I forgive them, considering the excellency of their tailoring.’ Washington Faulconer could hardly take his eyes from his reflection in the window glass. The gray uniform was set off with golden spurs, gilded spur chains and golden scabbard links. He had a revolver in a soft leather pouch, the weapon’s butt looped to the belt with another golden chain. Braids of white and yellow ribbons decorated the outer seams of his breeches while his jacket’s epaulettes were cushioned in yellow and hung with gold links. He drew the ivory-hilted saber, startling the morning with the harsh scrape of the steel on the scabbard’s throat. The sun’s light slashed back from the curved and brilliantly polished blade. ‘It’s French,’ he told Starbuck, ‘a gift from Lafayette to my grandfather. Now it will be carried in a new crusade for liberty.’

‘It’s truly impressive, sir,’ Starbuck said.

‘So long as a man needs to dress in uniform to fight, then these rags are surely as good as any,’ the Colonel said with mock modesty, then slashed the saber in the empty air. ‘You’re not feeling exhausted after your journey, Nate?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then unhand my daughter and we’ll find you some work.’ But Anna would not let Starbuck go. ‘Work, Father? But it’s Sunday.’

‘And you should have gone to church, my dear.’

‘It’s too hot. Besides, Nate has agreed to be painted and surely you won’t deny me that small pleasure?’

‘I shall indeed, my dear. Nate is a whole day late in arriving and there’s work to be done. Now why don’t you go and read to your mother?’

‘Because she’s sitting in the dark enduring Doctor Danson’s ice cure.’

‘Danson’s an idiot.’

‘But he’s the only medically qualified idiot we possess,’ Anna said, once more showing a glimpse of vivacity that her demeanor otherwise hid. ‘Are you really taking Nate away, Father?’

‘I truly am, my dear.’

Anna let go of Starbuck’s elbow and gave him a shy smile of farewell. ‘She’s bored,’ the Colonel said when he and Starbuck were back in the house. ‘She can chatter all day, mostly about nothing.’ He shook his head disapprovingly as he led Starbuck down a corridor hung with bridles and reins, snaffles and bits, cruppers and martingales. ‘No trouble finding a bed last night?’

‘No, sir.’ Starbuck had put up at a tavern in Scottsville where no one had been curious about his Northern accent or had demanded to see the pass that Colonel Faulconer had provided him.

‘No news of Adam, I suppose?’ the Colonel asked wistfully.

‘I’m afraid not, sir. I did write, though.’

‘Ah well. The Northern mails must be delayed. It’s a miracle they’re still coming at all. Come’—he pushed open the door of his study—‘I need to find a gun for you.’

The study was a wonderfully wide room built at the house’s western extremity. It had creeper-framed windows on three of its four walls and a deep fireplace on the fourth. The heavy ceiling beams were hung with ancient flintlocks, bayonets and muskets, the walls with battle prints, and the mantel stacked with brass-hilted pistols and swords with snake-skin handles. A black labrador thumped its tail in welcome as Faulconer entered, but was evidently too old and infirm to climb to its feet. Faulconer stooped and ruffled the dog’s ears. ‘Good boy. This is Joshua, Nate. Used to be the best gun dog this side of the Atlantic. Ethan’s father bred him. Poor old fellow.’ Starbuck was not sure whether it was the dog or Ethan’s father who had earned the comment, but the Colonel’s next words suggested it was not Joshua being pitied. ‘Bad thing, drink,’ the Colonel said as he pulled open a bureau’s wide drawer that proved to be filled with handguns. ‘Ethan’s father drank away the family land. His mother died of the milksick when he was born, and there’s a half-brother who scooped up all the mother’s money. He’s a lawyer in Richmond now.’

‘I met him,’ Starbuck said.

Washington Faulconer turned and frowned at Starbuck. ‘You met Delaney?’

‘Mister Bird introduced me to him in Shaffer’s.’ Starbuck had no intention of revealing how the introduction had led to ten hours of the Spotswood House Hotel’s finest food and drink, all of it placed on the Faulconer account, or how he had woken on Saturday morning with a searing headache, a dry mouth, a churning belly and a dim memory of swearing eternal friendship with the entertaining and mischievous Belvedere Delaney.

‘A bad fellow, Delaney.’ The Colonel seemed disappointed in Starbuck. ‘Too clever for his own good.’

‘It was a very brief meeting, sir.’

‘Much too clever. I know lawyers who’d like to have a rope, a tall tree and Mister Delaney all attached to each other. He got all the mother’s money and poor Ethan didn’t get a thin dime out of the estate. Not fair, Nate, not fair at all. If Delaney had an ounce of decency he’d look after Ethan.’

‘He mentioned that Ethan is a very fine artist?’ Starbuck said, hoping the compliment about his future son-in-law might restore the Colonel’s good humor.

‘So Ethan is, but that won’t bring home the bacon, will it? A fellow might as well play the piano prettily, like Pecker does. I’ll tell you what Ethan is, Nate. He’s one of the finest hunters I’ve ever seen and probably the best horseman in the country. And he’s a damned fine farmer. He’s managed what’s left of his father’s land these last five years, and I doubt anyone else could have done half as well.’ The Colonel paid Ridley this generous compliment, then drew out a long-barreled revolver and tentatively spun its chambers before deciding it was not the right gun. ‘Ethan’s got solid worth, Nate, and he’ll make a good soldier, a fine soldier, though I confess he didn’t make the best recruiting officer.’ Faulconer turned to offer Starbuck a shrewd look. ‘Did you hear about Truslow?’

‘Anna mentioned him, sir. And Mister Bird did, too.’

‘I want Truslow, Nate. I need him. If Truslow comes he’ll bring fifty hard men out of the hills. Good men, natural fighters. Rogues, of course, every last one of them, but if Truslow tells them to knuckle under, they will. And if he doesn’t join up? Half the men in the county will fear to leave their livestock unguarded, so you see why I need him.’

Starbuck sensed what was coming and felt his confidence plummet. Truslow was the Yankee hater, the murderer, the demon of the hardscrabble hills.

The Colonel spun the cylinder of another revolver. ‘Ethan says Truslow’s away thieving horses and won’t be home for days, maybe weeks, but I have a feeling Truslow just avoided Ethan. He saw him coming and knew what he wanted, so ducked out of sight. I need someone Truslow doesn’t know. Someone who can talk to the fellow and discover his price. Every man has his price, Nate, especially a blackguard like Truslow.’ He put the revolver back and picked out another still more lethal-looking gun. ‘So how would you feel about going, Nate? I’m not pretending it’s an easy task because Truslow isn’t the easiest of men, and if you tell me you don’t want to do it, then I’ll say no more. But otherwise?’ The Colonel left the invitation dangling.

And Starbuck, presented with the choice, suddenly found that he did want to go. He wanted to prove that he could bring the monster down from his lair. ‘I’d be happy to go, sir.’

‘Truly?’ The Colonel sounded mildly surprised.

‘Yes, truly.’

‘Good for you, Nate.’ Faulconer snapped back the cock of the lethal-looking revolver, pulled the trigger, then decided that gun was not right either. ‘You’ll need a gun, of course. Most of the rogues in the mountains don’t like Yankees. You’ve got your pass, of course, but it’s a rare creature who can read up there. I’d tell you to wear the uniform, except folk like Truslow associate uniforms with excise men or tax collectors, so you’re much safer in ordinary clothes. You’ll just have to bluff your way if you’re challenged, and if that doesn’t work, shoot one of them.’ He chuckled, and Starbuck shuddered at the errand that now faced him. Not six months before he had been a student at Yale Theological College, immersed in an intricate study of the Pauline doctrine of atonement, and now he was supposed to shoot his way through a countryside of illiterate Yankee haters in search of the district’s most feared horse thief and murderer? Faulconer must have sensed his premonition, for he grinned. ‘Don’t worry, he won’t kill you, not unless you try and take his daughter or, worse, his horse.’

‘I’m glad to hear that, sir,’ Starbuck said dryly.

‘I’ll write you a letter for the brute, though God only knows if he can read. I’ll explain you’re an honorary southron, and I’ll make him an offer. Say fifty dollars as a signing bounty? Don’t offer him anything more, and for God’s sake don’t encourage him into thinking I want him to be an officer. Truslow will make a good sergeant, but you’d hardly want him at your supper table. His wife’s dead, so she won’t be a problem, but he’s got a daughter who might be a nuisance. Tell him I’ll find her a position in Richmond if he wants her placed. She’s probably a filthy piece of work, but no doubt she can sew or tend store.’ Faulconer had laid a walnut box on his desk, which he now turned round so that the lid’s catch faced Starbuck. ‘I don’t think this is for you, Nate, but take a look at her. She’s very pretty.’