“Now, Nate!” Washington Faulconer said heartily when he had decided to buy the twelve-dollar guns, “you promised us a story. There’s coffee there, or something stronger? Do you drink? You do? But not with your father’s blessing, I’m sure. Your father can hardly approve of ardent spirits, or does he? Is the Reverend Elial a prohibitionist as well as an abolitionist? He is! What a ferocious man he must be, to be sure. Sit down.” Washington Faulconer was full of energy and happy to conduct a conversation with himself as he stood up, pulled a chair for Starbuck away from the wall, poured Starbuck coffee, then sat back at his desk. “So come! Tell me! Aren’t you supposed to be at the seminary?”
“Yes, sir, I am.” Starbuck felt inhibited suddenly, ashamed of his story and of his pathetic condition. “It’s a very long tale,” he protested to Washington Faulconer.
“The longer the better. So come along, tell!”
So Starbuck had no choice but to tell his pathetic story of obsession, love and crime; a shameful tale of how Mademoiselle Dominique Demarest of New Orleans had persuaded Nathaniel Starbuck of Yale that life had more to offer than lectures in didactic theology, sacred literature or the sermonizing arts.
“A bad woman!” Washington Faulconer said with happy relish when Starbuck first mentioned her. “Every tale should have a bad woman.”
Starbuck had first glimpsed Mademoiselle Dominique Demarest in the Lyceum Hall at New Haven where Major Ferdinand Trabell’s touring company was presenting the Only True and Authorized Stage Version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Complete with Real Bloodhounds. Trabell’s had been the third such traveling Tom company to visit New Haven that winter, and each had claimed to be presenting the only true and authorized dramatic version of the great work, but Major Trabell’s production had been the first that Starbuck dared attend. There had been impassioned debate in the seminary about the propriety of attending a thespian performance, even one dedicated to moral instruction and the abolition of slavery, but Starbuck had wanted to go because of the bloodhounds mentioned on the playbill. There had been no bloodhounds in Mrs. Beecher Stowe’s fine work, but Starbuck suspected the animals might make a dramatic addition to the story, and so he had visited the Lyceum where, awestruck, he had watched as a veritable angel who was playing the part of the fugitive slave Eliza had tripped lightly across the make-believe ice floes pursued by a pair of lethargic and dribbling dogs that might or might not have been bloodhounds.
Not that Starbuck cared about the dogs’ pedigree, but only about the angel, who had a long face, sad eyes, shadowed cheeks, a wide mouth, hair black as night, and a gentle voice. He had fallen in love instantly, furiously and, so far as he could tell, eternally. He had gone to the Lyceum the next night, and the next, and the next, which was also New Haven’s final performance of the great epic, and on the following day he had offered to help Major Trabell strike and crate the scenery, and the major, who had recently been abandoned by his only son and was therefore in need of a replacement to play the parts of Augustine St. Clair and Simon Legree, and recognizing Starbuck’s good looks and commanding presence, had offered him four dollars a week, full board, and Major Trabell’s own tutelage in the thespian arts. Not even those enticements could have persuaded Starbuck to abandon his seminary education, except that Mademoiselle Dominique Demarest had added her entreaties to those of her employer, and so, on a whim, and for his adoration of Dominique, Starbuck had become a traveling player.
“You upped stakes and went? Just like that?” Washington Faulconer asked with obvious amusement, even admiration.
“Yes, sir.” Though Starbuck had not confessed the full extent of his humiliating surrender to Dominique. He had admitted attending the theater night after night, but he had not described how he had lingered in the streets wanting a glimpse of his angel, or how he had written her name again and again in his notebooks, nor how he had tried to capture in pencil the delicacy of her long, misleadingly ethereal face, nor how he had yearned to repair the spiritual damage done to Dominique by her appalling history.
That history had been published in the New Haven newspaper that had noticed the Tom company’s performance, which notice revealed that although Mademoiselle Demarest appeared to be as white as any other respectable lady, she was in truth a nineteen-year-old octoroon who had been the slave of a savage New Orleans gentleman whose behavior rivaled that of Simon Legree. Delicacy forbade the newspaper from publishing any details of his behavior, except to say that Dominique’s owner had threatened the virtue of his fair property and thus forced Dominique, in an escape that rivaled the drama of Eliza’s fictional flight, to flee northward for liberty and the safeguard of her virtue. Starbuck tried to imagine his lovely Dominique running desperately through the Louisiana night pursued by yelping fiends, howling dogs and a slavering owner.
“Like hell I escaped! I was never a slave, never!” Dominique told Starbuck next day when they were riding the cars for Hartford, where the show would play for six nights in the Touro Hall. “I ain’t got nigger blood, not one drop. But the notion sells tickets, so it does, and tickets is money, and that’s why Trabell tells the newspapers I’m part nigger.”
“You mean it’s a lie?” Starbuck was horrified.
“Of course it’s a lie!” Dominique was indignant. “I told you, it just sells tickets, and tickets is money.” She said the only truths in the fable were that she was nineteen and had been raised in New Orleans, but in a white family that she claimed was of irreproachable French ancestry. Her father possessed money, though she was vague about the exact process whereby the daughter of a wealthy Louisiana merchant came to be performing the part of Eliza in Major Ferdinand Trabell’s touring Tom company. “Not that Trabell’s a real major,” Dominique confided to Starbuck, “but he pretends to have fought in Mexico. He says he got his limp there off a bayonet, but I reckon he more likely got stabbed by a whore in Philadelphia.” She laughed. She was two years younger than Starbuck but seemed immeasurably older and far more experienced. She also seemed to like Starbuck, who returned her liking with a blind adoration and did not care that she was not an escaped slave. “How much is he paying you?” Dominique asked Starbuck.
“Four dollars a week.”
She laughed scornfully. “Robbing you!”
For the next two months Starbuck happily learned the acting trade as he worshiped at the shrine of Miss Demarest’s. virtue. He enjoyed being onstage, and the fact that he was the son of the Reverend Elial Starbuck, the famous abolitionist, served to swell both Trabell’s audiences and receipts. It also brought Nathaniel’s new profession to the attention of his father who, in a terrifying fury, sent Starbuck’s elder brother, James, to bring the sinner to repentance.
James’s mission had failed miserably, and two weeks later Dominique, who had so far not permitted Starbuck any liberty beyond the holding of her hand, at last promised him the reward of his heart’s whole desire if he would just help her steal that week’s takings from Major Trabell. “He owes me money,” Dominique said, and she explained that her father had written to say he was waiting for her in Richmond, Virginia, and she knew Major Trabell would not pay her any of the six months’ wages he owed and so she needed Starbuck’s help in purloining what was, by rights, already hers. For the reward she was offering, Starbuck would have helped Dominique steal the moon, but he settled for the eight hundred and sixty-four dollars he found in Major Trabell’s portmanteau, which he stole while, in the next-door room, the major took a hip bath with a young lady who was hoping for a career upon the stage and had therefore offered herself to the major’s professional inspection and judgment.
Starbuck and Dominique fled that same night, reaching Richmond just two days later. Dominique’s father was supposed to have been waiting at the Spotswood House Hotel on Main Street, but instead it was a tall young man, scarce a year older than Starbuck himself, who waited in the hotel’s parlor and who laughed with joy when Dominique appeared. The young man was Major Trabell’s son, Jefferson, who was estranged f
rom his father, and who now dismissed Starbuck with a patronizing ten dollars. “Make yourself scarce, boy,” he had said, “before you’re strung up for crow bait. Northerners ain’t popular in these parts right now.” Jefferson Trabell wore buckskin breeches, top boots, a satin vest and a scarlet coat. He had dark knowing eyes and narrow side-whiskers which, like his long black hair, were oiled smooth as jet. His tie was secured with a large pearl pin and his holstered revolver had a polished silver handgrip. It was that revolver rather than the tall young man’s dandyish air that persuaded Starbuck there was little point in trying to claim his promised reward from Mademoiselle Dominique Demarest.
“You mean she just dropped you?” Washington Faulconer asked in disbelief.
“Yes, sir.” The shameful memory convulsed Starbuck with misery.
“Without even giving you a ride?” Ethan Ridley laid down the empty revolver as he asked the question and, though the query earned him a reproving glance from Washington Faulconer, it was also clear the older man wanted to know the answer. Starbuck offered no reply, but he had no need to. Dominique had made him into a fool, and his foolishness was obvious.
“Poor Nate!” Washington Faulconer was amused. “What are you going to do now? Go home? Your father won’t be too happy! And what of Major Trabell? He’ll be wanting to nail your gizzards to his barn door, won’t he? That and get his money back! Is he a southerner?”
“A Pennsylvanian, sir. But his son pretends to be a southerner.”
“So where is the son? Still at the Spotswood?”
“No, sir.” Starbuck had spent the night in a boardinghouse in Canal Street and, in the morning, still seething with indignation, he had gone to the Spotswood House Hotel to confront Dominique and her lover, but instead a clerk had told him that Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson Trabell had just left for the Richmond and Danville Railroad Depot. Starbuck had followed them, only to discover that the birds were flown and that their train was already steaming south out of the depot, its locomotive pumping a bitter smoke into the spring air that was so briskly filled with the news of Fort Sumter’s capitulation.
“Oh, it’s a rare tale, Nate! A rare tale!” Washington Faulconer laughed. “But you shouldn’t feel so bad. You ain’t the first young fellow to be fooled by a petticoat, and you won’t be the last, and I’ve no doubt Major Trabell’s a scoundrel as deep as they come.” He lit a cigar, then tossed the spent match into a spittoon. “So what are we going to do with you?” The lightness with which he asked the question seemed to imply that whatever answer Starbuck desired could be easily supplied. “Do you want to go back to Yale?”
“No, sir.” Starbuck spoke miserably.
“No?”
Starbuck spread his hands. “I’m not sure I should be at the seminary, sir. I’m not even sure I should have been there in the first place.” He stared down at his scarred, grazed knuckles, and bit his lip as he considered his answer. “I can’t become a minister now, sir, not now that I’m a thief.” And worse than a thief, Starbuck thought. He was remembering the fourth chapter of first Timothy where St. Paul had prophesied how in the latter times some men would depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils, and Starbuck knew he had fulfilled that prophecy, and the realization imbued his voice with a terrible anguish. “I’m simply not worthy of the ministry, sir.”
“Worthy?” Washington Faulconer exclaimed. “Worthy! My God, Nate, if you could see the plug-uglies who shove themselves into our pulpits you wouldn’t say that! My God, we’ve got a fellow in Rosskill Church who preaches blind drunk most Sunday mornings. Ain’t that so, Ethan?”
“Poor old fool toppled into a grave last year,” Ridley added with amusement. “He was supposed to be burying someone and damn near buried himself instead.”
“So I wouldn’t worry about being worthy,” Faulconer said scornfully. “But I suppose Yale won’t be too happy to have you back, Nate, not if you walked out on them for some chickabiddy trollop? And I suppose you’re a wanted man too, eh? A thief no less!” Faulconer evidently found this notion hugely entertaining. “Go back north and they’ll clap you in jail, is that it?”
“I fear so, sir.”
Washington Faulconer hooted with amusement. “By God, Nate, but you are stuck in the tar patch. Both feet, both hands, ass, crop and privates! And what will your sacred father do if you go home? Give you a whipping before he turns you over to the constables?”
“Like as not, sir, yes.”
“So the Reverend Elial’s a whipper, is he? Likes to thrash?”
“Yes, sir, he does.”
“I can’t allow that.” Washington Faulconer stood and walked to a window overlooking the street. A magnolia was in bloom in his narrow front garden, filling the window bay with its sweet scent. “I never was a believer in a thrashing. My father didn’t beat me and I’ve never beaten my children. Fact is, Nate, I’ve never laid a hand on any child or servant, only on my enemies.” He spoke sententiously, as though he was accustomed to defending his strange behavior, as in truth he was, for, not ten years before, Washington Faulconer had made himself famous for freeing all his slaves. For a brief time the northern newspapers had hailed Faulconer as a precursor of southern enlightenment, a reputation that had made him bitterly unpopular in his native Virginia, but his neighbors’ animosity had died away when Faulconer had refused to encourage other southerners to follow his example. He claimed the decision had been purely personal. Now, the furor long in his past, Faulconer smiled at Starbuck. “Just what are we going to do with you, Nate?”
“You’ve done enough, sir,” Starbuck said, though in reality he was hoping that far more might yet be done. “What I must do, sir, is find work. I have to repay Major Trabell.”
Faulconer smiled at Starbuck’s earnestness. “The only work around here, Nate, is common soldiering, and I don’t think that’s a trade to pay off debts in a hurry. No, I think you’d better raise your sights a little higher.” Faulconer was taking an obvious enjoyment in solving Starbuck’s problem. He smiled, then gestured about the lavishly appointed room. “Maybe you’d consider staying here, Nate? With me? I’m in need of someone who can be my private secretary and do some purchasing as well.”
“Sir!” Ethan Ridley sat bolt upright on the sofa, his irate tone betraying that the job being offered to Starbuck was one Ridley considered his own.
“Oh come, Ethan! You detest clerking for me! You can’t even spell!” Faulconer chided his future son-in-law gently. “Besides, with the guns purchased, your main job’s done. At least for the moment.” He sat thinking for a few seconds, then clicked his fingers. “I know, Ethan, go back to Faulconer County and start some proper recruiting. Beat the drum for me. If we don’t raise the county, someone else will, and I don’t want Faulconer County men fighting for other Virginia regiments. Besides, don’t you want to be with Anna?”
“Of course I do, sir.” Though Ridley, offered this chance to be close to his betrothed, seemed somewhat less than enthusiastic.
Washington Faulconer turned back to Starbuck. “I’m raising a regiment, Nate, a legion. The Faulconer Legion. I’d hoped it wouldn’t be necessary, I’d hoped common sense would prevail, but it seems the North wants a fight and, by God, we’ll have to give them one if they insist. Would it offend your loyalties to help me?”
“No, sir.” That seemed an entirely inadequate response, so Starbuck imbued his voice with more enthusiasm. “I’d be proud to help you, sir.”
“We’ve made a beginning,” Faulconer said modestly. “Ethan has been buying equipment and we’ve found our guns now, as you heard, but the paperwork is already overwhelming. Do you think you can handle some correspondence for me?”
Could Starbuck handle correspondence? Nathaniel Starbuck would have done all Washington Faulconer’s correspondence from that moment until the seas ran dry. Nathaniel Starbuck would do whatever this marvelous, kind, decent and carelessly generous man wanted him to do. “Of course I can help, sir. It would be a priv
ilege.”
“But, sir!” Ethan Ridley tried one last patriotic protest. “You can’t trust military affairs to a northerner.”
“Nonsense, Ethan! Nate’s stateless! He’s an outlaw! He can’t go home, not unless he goes to jail, so he’ll just have to stay here. I’m making him an honorary Virginian.” Faulconer bestowed a bow on Starbuck in recognition of this elevated status. “So welcome to the southland, Nate.”
Ethan Ridley looked astonished at his future father-in-law’s quixotic kindness, but Nathaniel Starbuck did not care. He had fallen on his feet, his luck had turned clean round, and he was safe in the land of his father’s enemies. Starbuck had come south.
STARBUCK’S FIRST DAYS IN RICHMOND WERE SPENT ACCOMPANYING Ethan Ridley to warehouses that held the stores and supplies that would equip the Faulconer Legion. Ridley had arranged for the purchase of the equipment and now, before he left to begin the major recruiting effort in Faulconer County, he made certain Starbuck was able to take over his responsibilities. “Not that you need bother with the finances, Reverend,” Ridley told Starbuck, using the half-mocking and half-teasing nickname he had adopted for the northerner, “I’ll just let you arrange the transport.” Starbuck would then be left to kick his heels in big echoing warehouses or in dusty counting houses while Ridley talked business in the private inner office before emerging to toss another instruction Starbuck’s way. “Mister Williams will have six crates ready for collection next week. By Thursday, Johnny?”
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