Rebel

by Bernard Cornwell

  Starbuck eschewed the gossip, instead offering a conventional and admiring opinion of Faulconer, which left Delaney entirely unconvinced. “I don’t know the man well, of course, but he always strikes me as empty. Quite hollow. And he so desperately wants to be admired. Which is why he freed his slaves.”

  “Which is admirable, surely?”

  “Oh to be sure”—Delaney was deprecating—“except that the proximate cause of the manumission was some interfering woman from the North who was far too pious to reward Faulconer with her charms, and the poor fellow has spent the ten years since trying to persuade his fellow Virginian landowners that he isn’t some dangerous radical. In truth he’s just a little rich boy not quite grown up, and I’m not at all sure there’s anything under that glossy exterior except a superfluity of money.”

  “He’s been good to me.”

  “And he’ll go on being good to you so long as you admire him. But after that?” Delaney picked up a silver fruit knife, and mimicked the action of slitting his throat. “Dear sweet God, but this night is hot.” He leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms wide. “I did some business in Charleston last summer and took supper at a house where every place at table was provided with a slave whose job was to fan our brows. That sort of behavior is a bit overripe for Richmond, more’s the pity.” He chattered on, talking of his travels in South Carolina and Georgia while Starbuck picked at the mutton, drank too much wine, tried a little of the apple pie, and finally pushed his plate away.

  “A cigarette?” Delaney suggested. “Or a cigar? Or do you still refuse to smoke? You’re quite wrong in that refusal. Tobacco is a great emollient. Our Heavenly Father, I think, must have intended everything on earth to be of specific use to mankind and so he gave us wine to excite us, brandy to inflame us and tobacco to calm us. Here.” Delaney had crossed to his silver humidor, cut the stem of a cigar and handed it to Starbuck. “Light it, then tell me what ails thee.” Delaney knew that something extraordinary must have driven Starbuck to this desperate visit. The boy looked almost feverish.

  Starbuck allowed himself to be persuaded to take the cigar, as much as anything else by the promise that tobacco was a soothing agent. His eyes stung from the smoke, he half-choked on the bitter taste, but he persisted. To have done less would have been to show himself less than a grown man and, on this night when he knew he was behaving like a half-grown youth, he needed the trappings of adulthood. “Do you think,” he asked as an elliptic introduction to the delicate matter that had brought him to Delaney’s door, “that the devil also put some things on earth? To snare us?”

  Delaney lit a cigarette, then smiled knowingly. “So who is she?”

  Starbuck said nothing. He felt such a fool, but some irresistible compulsion had driven him to this foolishness, just as it had compelled him to destroy a career for the sake of Dominique Demarest. Washington Faulconer had told him that such destructive obsessions were a disease of young men, but if so it was a disease that Starbuck could neither cure nor alleviate, and now it was driving him to make a fool of himself before this clever lawyer, who waited so patiently for his answer. Starbuck still paused, but at last, knowing that procrastination would serve no longer, he admitted his quest. “Her name is Sally Truslow.”

  Delaney offered the faintest, most private of smiles. “Do go on.”

  Starbuck was actually trembling. The rest of America was poised at the edge of battle, waiting for that terrible moment when a schism would be ripped into a gulf of blood, but all he could do was quiver for a girl he had met but for one lame evening. “I thought she might have come here. To these rooms,” he said lamely.

  Delaney blew a long plume of smoke that rippled the candles on the polished dining table. “I smell something of my brother here. Tell me all.”

  Starbuck told all, and the telling seemed pathetic to him, as pathetic as that far off day when he had confessed his foolishness to Washington Faulconer. Now he limpingly talked of a promise made in a dusky night, of an obsession he could not properly describe and could not justify and could not really account for, except to say that life would be nothing unless he could find Sally.

  “And you thought she might be here?” Delaney asked with friendly mockery.

  “I know she was given this address,” Starbuck said pointedly.

  “And so you came to me,” Delaney said, “which was wise. So what do you want of me?”

  Starbuck looked across the table. To his surprise he had smoked the cigar down to an inch-long stub, which he now abandoned with the mangled remains of his pie. “I want to know if you can tell me how to find her,” he said, and he thought how futile this quest was, and how demeaning. Somehow, before he arrived in this elegant room, Starbuck had believed that his search for Sally was a practical dream, but now, faced with confessing his obsession to this man who was a virtual stranger, Starbuck felt utterly foolish. He also sensed the hopelessness of searching for one lost girl in a town of forty thousand people. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I should never have come here.”

  “I seem to remember telling you to seek my help,” Delaney reminded him, “though admittedly we were both quite drunk at the time. I’m glad you came.”

  Starbuck stared at his benefactor. “You can help me?”

  “Of course I can help you,” Belvedere Delaney said very calmly. “In fact I know exactly where your Sally is.”

  Starbuck felt the elation of success and the terror of confronting that success to discover it was a sham. He felt as if he were at the very edge of a chasm and he did not know whether it was to heaven or to hell that he would leap. “So she’s alive?” he asked.

  “Come to me tomorrow evening,” Delaney said in oblique answer, then held up a hand to check any further questions. “Come here at five. But—” He said the last word warningly.

  “Yes?”

  Delaney pointed his cigarette across the table. “You will owe me a debt for this, Starbuck.”

  Starbuck shivered despite the warmth. A soul was sold, he suspected, but for what coin? But nor did he really care because tomorrow night he would find Sally. Perhaps it was the wine, or the heady tobacco fumes, or else the thought of all his dreams coming to a resolution, but he did not care. “I understand,” he said carefully, understanding nothing.

  Delaney smiled and broke the spell. “Some brandy? And another cigar, I think.” It would be amusing, Delaney thought, to corrupt the Reverend Elial Starbuck’s son. Besides, if Delaney was honest, he rather liked Nathaniel Starbuck. The boy was naive, but there was steel inside him and he had quick wits even if those wits were presently obliterated by desire. Starbuck, in short, might be useful one day, and if that usefulness was ever needed Delaney would be able to call in the debt that he was forging this night out of a young man’s obsession and desperation.

  For Delaney was now an agent of the North. A man had come to his chambers, posing as a client, and there produced a copy of Delaney’s letter offering to spy for the North. The copy had been burned, and the sight of the burning paper had sent a shiver of nerves through Delaney’s soul. From now on he knew himself to be a marked man, liable to the death penalty, yet still the rewards of that loyalty to the North were worth the risk.

  And the risk, he knew, could be very short-lived. Delaney did not believe the rebellion could last even to the end of July. The North’s new army would roll majestically across the pathetic rebel forces gathered in northern Virginia, secession would collapse and the southern politicians would then whimper that they had never meant to preach rebellion anyway. And what would become of the little people betrayed by those politicians? Starbuck, Delaney supposed, would be sent back to his ghastly hellhound of a father and that would be the end of the boy’s one adventure. So let him have a last, exotic moment to remember his whole dull life through and if, perchance, the rebellion did last a few months more, why, Starbuck would be an ally whether he wanted to be or not. “Tomorrow night, then,” Delaney said mischievously, then raised his brand
y glass, “at five.”

  Starbuck spent the next day in a torment of apprehension. He dared not tell Washington Faulconer what irked him, he dared not even tell Adam, but instead he kept a feverish silence as he accompanied father and son to the Mechanics Hall in Franklin Street where Robert Lee had his offices. Lee had now been promoted from head of Virginia’s forces to be the Confederate president’s chief military adviser, yet he still retained much of his state work and was, Faulconer was told, gone from the capital to inspect some fortifications that guarded the mouth of the James River. A harassed clerk, sweating in the outer office, said that the general was expected back that afternoon, or maybe next day, and no, it was not possible to make any appointment. All petitioners must wait. At least a score of men were already waiting on the landing or on the wide stairs. Washington Faulconer bristled at being lumped as a petitioner, but somehow kept his patience as the clock ticked and the clouds gathered dark over Richmond.

  At a quarter to five Starbuck asked if he might leave. Faulconer turned angrily on his aide, as though about to refuse permission, but Starbuck blurted out an excuse of not feeling well. “My stomach, sir.”

  “Go,” Faulconer said irritably, “go.” He waited until Starbuck had gone down the stairs, then turned on Adam. “What the hell is the matter with him? It isn’t his stomach, that’s for sure.”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “A woman? That’s what it looks like. He’s met an old friend? Who? And why doesn’t he introduce us? It’s a whore, I tell you, a whore.”

  “Nate doesn’t have the money,” Adam said stiffly.

  “I wouldn’t be so certain.” Washington Faulconer walked to the window at the end of the landing and stared gloomily into the street where a tobacco wagon had lost a wheel and a crowd of Negroes had gathered round to offer the teamster advice.

  “Why wouldn’t you be certain, Father?” Adam asked.

  Faulconer brooded for a moment, then turned on his son. “You remember the raid? You know why Nate disobeyed my orders? So that Truslow could steal from the passengers in the cars. Good Lord, Adam, that’s not warfare! That’s brigandry, pure and simple, and your friend condoned it. He risked the success of all we had achieved to become a thief.”

  “Nate isn’t a thief!” Adam protested vigorously.

  “And I trusted him with matters here in Richmond,” Washington Faulconer said, “and how am I to know if his accounting was fair?”

  “Father!” Adam said angrily. “Nate is not a thief.”

  “And what did he do to that Tom company fellow?”

  “That was…,” Adam began, but then did not know how to continue, for it was certain that his friend had indeed stolen Major Trabell’s money. “No, Father.” Adam persisted in his stubborn denial, though a lot more weakly.

  “I just wish I could share your certainty.” Faulconer looked gloomily down at the landing floor that was stained with dried tobacco juice that had missed the spittoons. “I’m not even sure any longer that Nate belongs here in the South,” Faulconer said heavily, then looked up as a clatter of boots and a murmur of voices sounded in the downstairs hall.

  Robert Lee had arrived at last, and Starbuck’s character could be momentarily forgotten so that the Legion could be offered for battle.

  George, Belvedere Delaney’s house slave, had conducted Starbuck as far as the front door of the house in Marshall Street where he had been greeted by a middle-aged woman of stern looks and apparent respectability. “My name is Richardson,” she had told Starbuck, “and Mister Delaney has given me his full instructions. This way, sir, if you would.”

  It was a whorehouse. That much an astonished Starbuck realized as he was escorted through the hallway and past an open parlor door beyond which a group of girls sat dressed in laced bodices and white underskirts. Some smiled at him, others did not even look up from their hands of cards, but Starbuck faltered as he understood what trade was carried on in this comfortable, even luxurious house with its dark rugs, papered walls and gilt-framed landscapes. This was one of the dens of iniquity against which his father preached the awful threat of everlasting torture, a place of hellish horrors and unbridled sins, where a varnished hall stand with brass hooks, an umbrella tray and a beveled mirror held three officers’ hats, a silk top hat and a cane. “You may stay as long as you like, young man,” Mrs. Richardson said, pausing beside the hall stand to pass on Delaney’s instructions, “and there will be no charge. Please be careful of the loose stair rod.”

  Mrs. Richardson led Starbuck up a stairway that was papered in flock and lit by a fringed oil lamp that hung on a long brass chain suspended from the stairwell’s high ceiling. Starbuck was in uniform and his scabbarded saber clattered awkwardly against the banisters. A curtained arch waited at the top of the stairs and beyond it the light was even dimmer, though not so dim that Starbuck could not see the framed prints on the wall. The pictures showed naked couples and at first he did not believe what he saw, then he looked again and blushed for what he did indeed see. A stern part of his conscience instructed him to turn back now. For all of his life Starbuck had struggled between sin and righteousness and he knew, better than any man, that the wages of sin were death, yet if all the choirs of heaven and all the preachers of earth had bellowed that message into his ears Starbuck could not have turned back at that moment.

  He followed the black-dressed Mrs. Richardson down the long passage. A Negro maid carrying a cloth-covered bowl on a tray came the other way and stood aside to let Mrs. Richardson pass, then grinned cheekily at Starbuck. Some voices laughed in a nearby room, while from another a man’s voice gasped excitedly. Starbuck felt light-headed, almost as if he was going to faint as he followed Mrs. Richardson around a corner and down a short flight of steps. They turned yet another corner, climbed a second short stair and then at last Mrs. Richardson brought out her ring of keys, selected one and pushed it into the door’s lock. She paused, then turned the key to push open the door. “Go in, Mister Starbuck.”

  Starbuck went nervously into the room. The door closed behind him, the key turned in the lock, and there was Sally. Alive. Sitting in a chair with a book in her lap and looking even more beautiful than he had remembered her. For weeks he had tried to conjure that face in his dreams, but now, faced with the reality of her beauty again, he realized how inadequate those conjurations had been. He was overwhelmed by her.

  They stared at each other. Starbuck did not know what to say. His saber scabbard scraped dully against the door. Sally was wearing a dark blue robe and her hair was gathered in heavy loops on top of her head and tied with pale blue ribbons. There was a fresh scar on her cheek, which did not make her any less beautiful, but oddly made her more fascinating. The scar was a white streak that slashed off her left cheekbone toward her ear. She stared at him, seemingly as surprised as he was nervous, then she closed the small book and put it on the table beside her. “It’s the preacherman!” She sounded pleased to see him.

  “Sally?” Starbuck’s voice was uncertain. He was as nervous as a child.

  “I’m Victoria now. Like the queen?” Sally laughed. “They gave me a new name, see? So I’m Victoria.” She paused. “But you can call me Sally.”

  “They lock you in?”

  “That’s just to keep the customers out. Sometimes the men run wild, at least, the soldiers do. But I ain’t a prisoner. I got a key, see?” She pulled a key out of her robe pocket. “And I mustn’t say ain’t. Mrs. Richardson doesn’t like it. She says I mustn’t say ain’t and I mustn’t say nigger neither. It ain’t nice, see? And she’s teaching me to read as well.” She showed her book to Starbuck. It was a McGuffey’s Reading Primer, the very first in the series and a book that Starbuck had disposed of when he was three years old. “I’m getting real good,” Sally said enthusiastically.

  Starbuck wanted to weep for her. He did not really know why. She looked well, she even sounded happy, yet there was something pathetic about this place that made him hate the whole world. �
�I was worried about you,” he said lamely.

  “That’s nice.” She gave him a half smile, then shrugged. “But I’m doing fine, real fine. Except I’ll bet that piece of shit Ethan Ridley didn’t worry about me?”

  “I don’t think he does, no.”

  “I’ll see him in hell.” Sally sounded bitter. A rumble of thunder sounded above the city, followed a moment later by the heavy sound of rain falling. The new drops twitched the tight-stretched gauze insect curtains that were pinned across the two open windows. It was dusk and summer lightning flickered pale across the western sky. “We’ve got wine,” Sally said, reverting to cheerfulness, “and some cold chicken, see? And bread. And these are sugar fruits, see? And nuts. Mrs. Richardson said I was getting a special visitor and the girls brought all this up here. They can look after us real well, see?” She stood and crossed to one of the open windows, staring past the gauze at the ashen sheets of lightning that flickered in the gathering darkness. The summer air was heavy and sultry, suffused with Richmond’s tobacco smell that filled Sally’s large room which, to Starbuck’s innocent eye, looked distressingly ordinary, rather like a well-furnished hotel bedroom. It had a small coal grate in a black metal fireplace, a brass fender, flowered wallpaper and framed mountain landscapes on its walls. There were two chairs, two tables and a scatter of rugs and the ubiquitous spittoons on the polished wood floor. There was also a wide bed with a carved hardwood headpiece and a heap of white pillows. Starbuck tried hard not to look at the bed while Sally still gazed through the gauze at the western horizon where the lightning stuttered. “I sometimes look over there and I think of home.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  She laughed. “I like it here, preacherman.”

  “Nate, call me Nate.”

  She turned from the window. “I always wanted to be a fine lady, see? I wanted everything nice. My ma used to tell me about a real nice house she once went to. She said it had candles and pictures and soft rugs and I always wanted that. I hated living up there. Up at four in the morning and hauling water and always so cold in winter. And your hands were always sore. Bleeding even.” She paused and held up her hands, which now were white and soft, then she took a cigar from a jar on the table where the food had been placed. “You want a smoke, Nate?”