Читать книгу Rebel - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 11

THE REVEREND ELIAL STARBUCK leaned forward in his pulpit and gripped his lectern so hard that his knuckles whitened. Some of his congregation, sitting close to the great man, thought the lectern must surely break. The Reverend’s eyes were closed and his long, bony, white-bearded face contorted with passion as he sought the exact word that would inflame his listeners and fill the church with a vengeful righteousness.

The tall building was silent. Every pew was taken and every bench in the gallery full. The church was foursquare, undecorated, plain, as simple and functional a building as the gospel that was preached from its white-painted pulpit. There was a black-robed choir, a new-fangled harmonium, and high clear-glass windows. Gas lamps provided lighting, and a big black pot-bellied stove offered a grudging warmth in winter, though that small comfort would not be needed for many months now. It was hot inside the church; not so hot as it would be in high summer when the atmosphere would be stifling, but this spring Sunday was warm enough for the worshipers to be fanning their faces, but as the Reverend Elial’s dramatic silence stretched so, one by one, the paper fans were stilled until it seemed as if every person inside the church’s high bare interior was as motionless as a statue.

They waited, hardly daring to breathe. The Reverend Elial, white-haired, white-bearded, fierce-eyed, gaunt, held his silence as he savored the word in his mind. He had found the right word, he decided, a good word, a word in due season, a word from his text, and so he drew in a long breath and raised a slow hand until it seemed as though every heart in the whole high building had paused in its beating.

‘Vomit!’ the Reverend Elial screamed, and a child in the gallery cried aloud with fear of the word’s explosive power. Some women gasped.

The Reverend Elial Starbuck smashed his right fist onto the pulpit’s rail, struck it so hard that the sound echoed through the church like a gunshot. At the end of a sermon the edges of his hands were often dark with bruises, while the power of his preaching broke the spines of at least a half-dozen Bibles each year. ‘The slavocracy has no more right to call itself Christian than a dog can call itself a horse! Or an ape a man! Or a man an angel! Sin and perdition! Sin and perdition! The slavocracy is diseased with sin, polluted with perdition!’ The sermon had reached the point where it no longer needed to make sense, because now the logic of its exposition could give way to a series of emotional reminders that would hammer the message deep into the listeners’ hearts and fortify them against one more week of worldly temptations. The Reverend Elial had been preaching for one and a quarter hours, and he would preach for at least another half hour more, but for the next ten minutes he wanted to lash the congregation into a frenzy of indignation.

The slavocracy, he told them, was doomed for the deepest pits of hell, to be cast down into the lake of burning sulfur where they would suffer the torments of indescribable pain for the length of all eternity. The Reverend Elial Starbuck had cut his preaching teeth on descriptions of hell and he offered a five-minute reprise of that place’s horrors, so filling his church with revulsion that some of the weaker brethren in the congregation seemed near to fainting. There was a section in the gallery where freed Southern slaves sat, all of them sponsored in some way by the church, and the freedmen echoed the reverend’s words, counterpointing and embroidering them so that the church seemed charged and filled with the Spirit.

And still the Reverend Elial racked the emotion higher and yet higher. He told his listeners how the slavocracy had been offered the hand of Northern friendship, and he flung out his own bruised hand as if to illustrate the sheer goodness of the offer. ‘It was offered freely! It was offered justly! It was offered righteously! It was offered lovingly!’ His hand stretched farther and farther out toward the congregation as he detailed the generosity of the Northern states. ‘And what did they do with our offer? What did they do? What did they do?’ The last repetition of the question had come in a high scream that locked the congregation into immobility. The Reverend Elial glared round the church, from the rich pews at the front to the poor benches at the back of the galleries, then down to his own family’s pew, where his eldest son, James, sat in his new stiff blue uniform. ‘What did they do?’ The Reverend Elial sawed the air as he answered his question. ‘They returned to their folly! “For as a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.”’ That had been the Reverend Elial Starbuck’s text, taken from the eleventh verse of the twenty-sixth chapter of the Book of Proverbs. He shook his head sadly, drew his hand back, and repeated the awful word in a tone of resignation and puzzlement. ‘Vomit, vomit, vomit.’

The slavocracy, he said, was mired in its own vomit. They wallowed in it. They reveled in it. A Christian, the Reverend Elial Starbuck declared, had only one choice in these sad days. A Christian must armor himself with the shield of faith, weapon himself with the weapons of righteousness, and then march south to scour the land free of the Southern dogs that supped of their own vomit. And the members of the slavocracy are dogs, he emphasized to his listeners, and they must be whipped like dogs, scourged like dogs and made to whimper like dogs.

‘Hallelujah!’ a voice called from the gallery, while in the Starbuck pew, hard beneath the pulpit, James Starbuck felt a pulse of pious satisfaction that he would be going forth to do the Lord’s work in his country’s army, then he felt a balancing spurt of fear that perhaps the slavocracy would not take its whipping quite as meekly as a frightened dog. James Elial MacPhail Starbuck was twenty-five, yet his thinning black hair and perpetual expression of pained worry made him look ten years older. He was able to console himself for his balding scalp by the bushy thickness of his fine deep beard that well matched his corpulent, tall frame. In looks he took more after his mother’s side of the family than his father’s, though in his assiduity to business he was every bit Elial’s son for, even though he was only four years out of Harvard’s Dane Law School, James was already spoken of as a coming man in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and that fine reputation, added to his famous father’s entreaties, had earned him a place on the staff of General Irvin McDowell. This sermon would thus be the last James would hear from his father for many a week for, in the morning, he would take the cars for Washington to assume those new duties.

‘The South must be made to whimper like dogs supping their own vomit!’ The Reverend Elial began the summation which, in turn, would lead to the sermon’s fiery and emotive conclusion, but one worshiper did not wait for those closing pyrotechnics. Beneath the gallery at the very back of the church a box pew door clicked open and a young man slipped out. He tiptoed the few paces to the rear door, then edged through into the vestibule. The few people who noticed his going assumed he was feeling unwell, though in truth Adam Faulconer was not feeling physically sick, but heartsick. He paused on the street steps of the church and took a deep breath while behind him the voice of the preacher rose and fell, muffled now by the granite walls of the tall church.

Adam looked astonishingly like his father. He had the same broad shoulders, stocky build and resolute face, with the same fair hair, blue eyes, and square-cut beard. It was a dependable, trustworthy face, though at this moment it was also a very troubled face.

Adam had come to Boston after receiving a letter from his father that had described Starbuck’s arrival in Richmond. Washington Faulconer had sketched an outline of Nate’s troubles, then continued: ‘For your sake I shall offer him shelter and every kindness, and I assume he will stay here as long as he needs to, and I further assume that need might be for ever, but I surmise it is only the fear of his family that keeps him in Virginia. Perhaps, if you can spare the time from your endeavors,’ and Adam had smelt the rancor in his father’s choice of that word, ‘you might inform Nate’s family that their son is penitent, humiliated and dependent on charity, and so gain for him a token of their forgiveness?’

Adam had wanted to visit Boston. He knew the city was the most influential in the North, a place of learning and piety where he hoped to find men who could offer some hope of peace, but he had also hoped to discover some peace for Nate Starbuck to which end he had gone to the Reverend Elial Starbuck’s house, but the Reverend, apprised of Adam’s business, had refused to receive him. Now Adam had listened to his friend’s father preach and he suspected there was as little hope for America as there was for Nate. As the venom had poured from the pulpit Adam had understood that so long as such hatred went unassuaged there could be no compromise. The Christian Peace Commission had become irrelevant, for the churches of America could no more bring peace than a candle flame could melt the Wenham Lake in midwinter. America, Adam’s blessed land, must go to war. It made no sense to Adam, for he did not understand how decent men could ever think that war could adjudicate matters better than reason and goodwill, but dimly and reluctantly, Adam was beginning to understand that goodwill and reason were not the mainsprings of mankind, but instead that passion, love and hate were the squalid fuels that drove history blindly onward.

Adam walked the plump ordered streets of residential Boston, beneath the new-leafed trees and beside the tall clean houses that were so gaily decorated with patriotic flags and bunting. Even the carriages waiting to take the worshipers back to their comfortable homes sported American flags. Adam loved that flag, and could be made misty-eyed by all it stood for, yet now he recognized in its bright stars and broad stripes a tribal emblem being flaunted in hate, and he knew that everything he had worked for was about to be melted in the crucible. There was going to be war.

Thomas Truslow was a short, dark-haired stump of a man; a flint-faced, bitter-eyed creature whose skin was grimy with dirt and whose clothes were shiny with grease. His black hair was long and tangled like the thick beard that jutted pugnaciously from his dark-tanned face. His boots were thick-soled cowhide brogans, he wore a wide-brimmed hat, filthy Kentucky jeans and a homespun shirt with sleeves torn short enough to show the corded muscles of his upper arms. There was a heart tattooed on his right forearm with the odd word Emly written beneath it, and it took Starbuck a few seconds to realize that it was probably a misspelling of Emily.

‘Lost your way, boy?’ This unprepossessing creature now challenged Starbuck. Truslow was carrying an antique flintlock musket that had a depressingly blackened muzzle pointing unwaveringly at Starbuck’s head.

‘I’m looking for Mister Thomas Truslow,’ Starbuck said.

‘I’m Truslow.’ The gun muzzle did not waver, nor did the oddly light eyes. When all was said and done, Starbuck decided, it was those eyes that seared him most. You could clean up this brute, trim his beard, scrub his face and dress him in a churchgoing suit, and still those wild eyes would radiate the chilling message that Thomas Truslow had nothing to lose.

‘I’ve brought you a letter from Washington Faulconer.’

‘Faulconer!’ The name was expressed as a joyless burst of laughter. ‘Wants me for a soldier, is that it?’

‘He does, Mister Truslow, yes.’ Starbuck was making an effort to keep his voice neutral and not betray the fear engendered by those eyes and by the threat of violence that came off Truslow as thick as the smoke from a green bonfire. It seemed that at any second a trembling mechanism could give way in the dark brain behind those pale eyes to unleash a pulverizing bout of destructiveness. It was a menace that seemed horribly close to madness, and very far from the reasoned world of Yale and Boston and Washington Faulconer’s gracious house.

‘Took his time in sending for me, didn’t he?’ Truslow asked suspiciously.

‘He’s been in Richmond. But he did send someone called Ethan Ridley to see you last week.’

The mention of Ridley’s name made Truslow strike like a starving snake. He reached up with his left hand, grabbed Starbuck’s coat, and pulled down so that Starbuck was leaning precariously out of his saddle. He could smell the rank tobacco on Truslow’s breath, and see the scraps of food caught in the wiry, black bristles of his beard. The mad eyes glared into Starbuck’s face. ‘Ridley was here?’

‘I understand he visited you, yes.’ Starbuck was struggling to be courteous and even dignified, though he was remembering how his father had once tried to preach to some half-drunken immigrant longshoremen working on the quays of Boston Harbor and how even the impressive Reverend Elial had struggled to maintain his composure in the face of their maniacal coarseness. Breeding and education, Starbuck reflected, were poor things with which to confront raw nature. ‘He says you were not here.’

Truslow abruptly let go of Starbuck’s coat, at the same time making a growling noise that was half-threat and half-puzzlement. ‘I wasn’t here,’ he said, but distantly, as if trying to make sense of some new and important information, ‘but no one told me how he was here either. Come on, boy.’

Starbuck pulled his coat straight and surreptitiously loosened the big Savage revolver in its holster. ‘As I said, Mister Truslow, I have a letter for you from Colonel Faulconer …’

‘Colonel is he, now?’ Truslow laughed. He had stumped ahead of Starbuck, forcing the Northerner to follow him into a wide clearing that was evidently the Truslow homestead. Bedraggled vegetables grew in long rows, there was a small orchard, its trees a glory of white blossom, while the house itself was a one-story log cabin surmounted by a stout stone chimney from which a wisp of smoke trickled. The cabin was ramshackle and surrounded by untidy stacks of timber, broken carts, sawhorses and barrels. A brindled dog, seeing Starbuck, lunged furiously at the end of its chain, scattering a flock of terrified chickens that had been scratching in the dirt. ‘Get off your horse, boy,’ Truslow snapped at Starbuck.

‘I don’t want to detain you, Mister Truslow. I have Mister Faulconer’s letter here.’ Starbuck reached inside his coat.

‘I said get off that damned horse!’ Truslow snapped the command so fiercely that even the dog, which had seemed wilder than its own master, suddenly whimpered itself into silence and skulked back to the shade of the broken porch. ‘I’ve got work for you, boy,’ Truslow added.

‘Work?’ Starbuck slid out of the saddle, wondering just what kind of hell he had come to.

Truslow snatched the horse’s reins and tied them to a post. ‘I was expecting Roper,’ he said in impenetrable explanation, ‘but till he comes, you’ll have to do. Over there, boy.’ He pointed at a deep pit which lay just beyond one of the piles of broken carts. It was a saw pit, maybe eight feet deep and straddled by a tree trunk in which a massive great double-handed ripsaw was embedded.

‘Jump down, boy! You’ll be bottom man,’ Truslow snapped.

‘Mister Truslow!’ Starbuck tried to stem the madness with an appeal to reason.

‘Jump, boy!’ That tone of voice would have made the devil snap to attention, and Starbuck did take an involuntary step toward the pit’s edge, but then his innate stubbornness took command.

‘I’m not here to work.’

Truslow grinned. ‘You’ve got a gun, boy, you’d better be prepared to use it.’

‘I’m here to give you this letter.’ Starbuck took the envelope from an inside pocket.

‘You could kill a buffalo with that pistol, boy. You want to use it on me? Or you want to work for me?’

‘I want you to read this letter …’

‘Work or fight, boy.’ Truslow stepped closer to Starbuck. ‘I don’t give a sack of shit which one you want, but I ain’t waiting all day for you to make up your mind on it either.’

There was a time for fighting, Starbuck thought, and a time for deciding he would be bottom man in a saw pit. He jumped, landing in a slurry of mud, sawdust and woodchips.

‘Take your coat off, boy, and that hog pistol with it.’

‘Mister Truslow!’ Starbuck made one last effort to retain a shred of control over this encounter. ‘Would you just read this letter?’

‘Listen, boy, your letter’s just words, and words never filled a belly yet. Your fancy Colonel is asking me for a favor, and you’ll have to work to earn him his answer. You understand me? If Washington Faulconer himself had come I’d have him down that pit, so leave off your whining, get off your coat, take hold of that handle, and give me some work.’

So Starbuck left off his whining, took off his coat, took hold of the handle and gave him some work.

It seemed to Starbuck that he was mired in a pit beneath a cackling and vengeful demon. The great pit saw, singing through the trunk, was repeatedly rammed down at him in a shower of sawdust and chips that stung Starbuck’s eyes and clogged his mouth and nostrils, yet each time he took a hand off the saw to try and cuff his face, Truslow would bellow a reproof. ‘What’s the matter, boy? Gone soft on me? Work!’

The pit was straddled by a pinewood trunk that, judging by its size, had to be older than the Republic. Truslow had grudgingly informed Starbuck that he was cutting the trunk into planks which he had promised to deliver for a new floor being laid at the general store at Hankey’s Ford. ‘This and two other trunks should manage it,’ Truslow announced before they were even halfway through the first cut, by which time Starbuck’s muscles were already aching like fire and his hands were smarting.

‘Pull, boy, pull!’ Truslow shouted. ‘I can’t keep the cut straight if you’re lollygagging!’ The saw blade was nine feet long and supposed to be powered equally by the top and bottom men, though Thomas Truslow, perched on top of the trunk in his nailed boots, was doing by far the greater amount of work. Starbuck tried to keep up. He gathered that his role was to pull down hard, for it was the downstroke that provided most of the cutting force, and if he tried to push up too hard he risked buckling the saw, so it was better to let Truslow yank the great steel blade up from the pit, but though that upward motion gave Starbuck a half second of blessed relief, it immediately led to the crucial, brutal downstroke. Sweat was pouring off Starbuck.

He could have stopped. He could have refused to work one more moment and instead have just let go of the great wooden handle and shouted up at this foul man that Colonel Faulconer was unaccountably offering him a fifty-dollar bonus to sign up as a soldier, but he sensed that Truslow was testing him, and suddenly he resented the Southern attitude that assumed he was a feeble New Englander, too educated to be of any real use and too soft to be trusted with real men’s work. He had been fooled by Dominique, condemned as pious by Ethan Ridley and now he was being ridiculed by this filthy, tobacco-stained, bearded fiend, and Starbuck’s anger made him whip the saw down again and again and again so that the great blade rang through the slashing wood grain like a church bell.

‘Now you’re getting it!’ Truslow grunted.

‘And damn you, damn you too,’ Starbuck said, though under his panting breath. It felt extraordinarily daring to use the swear words, even under his breath for, though the devil above him could not hear the cursing, heaven’s recording angel could, and Starbuck knew he had just added another sin to the great list of sins marked to his account. And swearing was among the bad sins, almost as bad as thieving. Starbuck had been brought up to hate blaspheming and to despise the givers of oaths, and even the profane weeks he had spent with Major Trabell’s foul-mouthed Tom company had not quelled his unhappy conscience about cursing, but somehow he needed to defy God as well as Truslow at this moment, and so he went on spitting the word out to give himself strength.

‘Hold it!’ Truslow suddenly shouted, and Starbuck had an instant fear that his muttered imprecations had been heard, but instead the halt had merely been called so that the work could be adjusted. The saw had cut to within a few inches of the pit’s side, so now the trunk had to be moved. ‘Catch hold, boy!’ Truslow tossed down a stout branch that ended in a crutch. ‘Ram that under the far end and heave when I tell you.’

Starbuck heaved, moving the great trunk inch by painful inch until it was in its new position. Then there was a further respite as Truslow hammered wedges into the sawn cut.

‘So what’s Faulconer offering me?’ Truslow asked.

‘Fifty dollars.’ Starbuck spoke from the pit and wondered how Truslow had guessed that anything was being offered. ‘You’d like me to read you the letter?’

‘You suggesting I can’t read, boy?’

‘Let me give you the letter.’

‘Fifty, eh? He thinks he can buy me, does he? Faulconer thinks he can buy whatever he wants, whether it’s a horse, a man or a whore. But in the end he tires of whatever he buys, and you and me’ll be no different.’

‘He isn’t buying me,’ Starbuck said, and had that lie treated with a silent derision by Truslow. ‘Colonel Faulconer’s a good man,’ Starbuck insisted.

‘You know why he freed his niggers?’ Truslow asked.

Pecker Bird had told Starbuck that the manumission had been intended to spite Faulconer’s wife, but Starbuck neither believed the story nor would he repeat it. ‘Because it was the right thing to do,’ he said defiantly.

‘So it might have been,’ Truslow allowed, ‘but it was for another woman he did it. Roper will tell you the tale. She was some dollygob church girl from Philadelphia come to tell us southrons how to run our lives, and Faulconer let her stroll all over him. He reckoned he had to free his niggers before she’d ever lie with him, so he did but she didn’t anyway.’ Truslow laughed at this evidence of a fool befuddled. ‘She made a mock of him in front of all Virginia, and that’s why he’s making this Legion of his, to get his pride back. He thinks he’ll be a warrior hero for Virginia. Now, take hold, boy.’

Starbuck felt he had to protect his hero. ‘He’s a good man!’

‘He can afford to be good. His wealth’s bigger than his wits, now take hold, boy. Or are you afraid of hard work, is that it? I tell you boy, work should be hard. No bread tastes good that comes easy. So take hold. Roper will be here soon enough. He gave his word, and Roper don’t break his word. But you’ll have to do till he comes.’ Starbuck took hold, tensed, pulled, and the hellish rhythm began again. He dared not think of the blisters being raised on his hands, nor of the burning muscles of his back, arms and legs. He just concentrated blindly on the downstroke, dragging the pit saw’s teeth through the yellow wood and closing his eyes against the constant sifting of sawdust. In Boston, he thought, they had great steam-driven circular saws that could rip a dozen trunks into planks in the same time it took to make just one cut with this ripping saw, so why in God’s name were men still using saw pits?

They paused again as Truslow hammered more wedges into the cut trunk. ‘So what’s this war about, boy?’

‘States’ rights’ was all Starbuck could say.

‘What in hell’s name does that mean?’

‘It means, Mister Truslow, that America disagrees on how America should be governed.’

‘You could fill a bushel the way you talk, boy, but it don’t add up to a pot of turnips. I thought we had a Constitution to tell us how to govern ourselves?’

‘The Constitution has evidently failed us, Mister Truslow.’

‘You mean we ain’t fighting to keep our niggers?’

‘Oh, dear God,’ Starbuck sighed gently. He had once solemnly promised his father that he would never allow that word to be spoken in his presence, yet ever since he had met Dominique Demarest he had ignored the promise. Starbuck felt all his goodness, all his honor in the sight of God, slipping away like sand trickling through fingers.

‘Well, boy? Are we fighting for our niggers or aren’t we?’

Starbuck was leaning weakly on the dirt wall of the pit. He stirred himself to answer. ‘A faction of the North would dearly like to abolish slavery, yes. Others merely wish to stop it spreading westward, but the majority simply believe that the slave states should not dictate policy to the rest of America.’

‘What do the Yankees care about niggers? They ain’t got none.’

‘It is a matter of morality, Mister Truslow,’ Starbuck said, trying to wipe the sweat-matted sawdust out of his eyes with his sawdust-matted sleeve.

‘Does the Constitution say anything worth a piece of beaver shit about morality?’ Truslow asked in a tone of genuine inquiry.

‘No, sir. No, sir, it does not.’

‘I always reckon when a man speaks about morals he don’t know nothing about what he’s saying. Unless he’s a preacher. So what do you think we should do with the niggers, boy?’ Truslow asked.

‘I think, sir’—Starbuck wished to hell he was anywhere but in this mud and sawdust pit answering this foulmouth’s questions—‘I think, sir,’ he said again as he tried desperately to think of anything that might make sense, ‘I think that every man, of whatever color, has an equal right before God and before man to an equal measure of dignity and happiness.’ Starbuck decided he sounded just like his elder brother, James, who could make any proposition sound pompous and lifeless. His father would have trumpeted the rights of the Negroes in a voice fit to rouse echoes from the angels, but Starbuck could not raise the energy for that kind of defiance.

‘You like the niggers, is that the size of it?’

‘I think they are fellow creatures, Mister Truslow.’

‘Hogs are fellow creatures, but it don’t stop me killing ’em come berry time. Do you approve of slavery, boy?’

‘No, Mister Truslow.’

‘Why not, boy?’ The grating, mocking voice sounded from the brilliant sky above.

Starbuck tried to remember his father’s arguments, not just the easy one that no man had the right to own another, but the more complex ones, such as how slavery enslaved the owner as much as it enslaved the possessed, and how it demeaned the slaveholder, and how it denied God’s dignity to men who were the ebony image of God, and how it stultified the slavocracy’s economy by driving white artisans north and west, but somehow none of the complex, persuasive answers would come and he settled for a simple condemnation instead. ‘Because it’s wrong.’

‘You sound like a woman, boy.’ Truslow laughed. ‘So Faulconer thinks I should fight for his slave-holding friends, but no one in these hills can afford to feed and water a nigger, so why should I fight for them that can?’

‘I don’t know, sir, I really don’t know.’ Starbuck was too tired to argue.

‘So I’m supposed to fight for fifty bucks, is that it?’ Truslow’s voice was scathing. ‘Take hold, boy.’

‘Oh, God.’ The blisters on Starbuck’s hands had broken into raw patches of torn skin that were oozing blood and pus, but he had no choice but to seize the pit saw’s handle and drag it down. The pain of the first stroke made him whimper aloud, but the shame of the sound made him grip hard through the agony and to tear the steel teeth angrily through the wood.

‘That’s it, boy! You’re learning!’

Starbuck felt as if he were dying, as if his whole body had become a shank of pain that bent and pulled, bent and pulled, and he shamelessly allowed his weight to sag onto the handles during each upstroke so that Truslow caught and helped his tiredness for a brief instant before he let his weight drag the saw down once again. The saw handle was soggy with blood, the breath was rasping in his throat, his legs could barely hold him upright and still the toothed steel plunged up and down, up and down, up and mercilessly down.

‘You ain’t gettin’ tired now, boy, are you?’

‘No.’

‘Hardly started, we are. You go and look at Pastor Mitchell’s church in Nellysford, boy, and you’ll see a wide heart-pine floor that me and my pa whipsawed in a single day. Pull on, boy, pull on!’

Starbuck had never known work like it. Sometimes, in the winter, he went to his Uncle Matthew’s home in Lowell and they would saw ice from the frozen lake to fill the family ice house, but those excursions had been playful occasions, interspersed with snowball fights or bouts of wild skating along the lake banks beneath the icicle-hung trees. This plank sawing was relentless, cruel, remorseless, yet he dared not give up for he felt that his whole being, his future, his character, indeed his very soul were being weighed in the furious balance of Thomas Truslow’s scorn.

‘Hold there, boy, time for another wedge.’

Starbuck let go of the pit saw’s handle, staggered, tripped and half fell against the pit’s wall. His hands were too painful to uncurl. His breath hurt. He had been half aware that a second man had come to the saw pit and had been chatting to Truslow these last few painful minutes, but he did not want to look up and see whoever else was witnessing this humiliation.

‘You ever see anything to match it, Roper?’ Truslow’s voice was mocking.

Starbuck still did not look up.

‘This is Roper, boy,’ Truslow said. ‘Say your greeting.’

‘Good day, Mister Roper,’ Starbuck managed to say.

‘He calls you mister!’ Truslow found that amusing. ‘He thinks you niggers are his fellow creatures, Roper. Says you’ve got the same equal rights before God as he has. You reckon that’s how God sees it, Roper?’

Roper paused to inspect the exhausted Starbuck. ‘I reckon God would want me in his bosom long before he ever took that,’ Roper finally answered, and Starbuck looked unwillingly upward to see that Roper was a tall black man who was clearly amused by Starbuck’s predicament. ‘He don’t look good for nothing, does he now?’ Roper said.

‘He ain’t a bad worker,’ Truslow, astonishingly, came to Starbuck’s defense, and Starbuck, hearing it, felt as though he had never in all his life received a compliment half so valuable. Truslow, the compliment delivered, jumped down into the pit. ‘Now I’ll show you how it’s done, boy.’ Truslow took hold of the pit saw’s handle, nodded up at Roper, and suddenly the great blade of steel blurred as the two men went into an instant and much practiced rhythm. ‘This is how you do it!’ Truslow shouted over the saw’s ringing noise to the dazed Starbuck. ‘Let the steel do the work! You don’t fight it, you let it slice the wood for you. Roper and me could cut half the forests in America without catching breath.’ Truslow was using one hand only, and standing to one side of the work so that the flood of dust and chips did not stream onto his face. ‘So what brings you here, boy?’

‘I told you, a letter from—’

‘I mean what’s a Yankee doing in Virginia. You are a Yankee, aren’t you?’

Starbuck, remembering Washington Faulconer’s assertion of how much this man hated Yankees, decided to brazen it out. ‘And proud of it, yes.’

Truslow jetted a stream of tobacco juice into a corner of the pit. ‘So what are you doing here?’

Starbuck decided this was not the time to talk of Mademoiselle Demarest, nor of the Tom company, so offered an abbreviated and less anguished version of his story. ‘I’ve fallen out with my family and taken shelter with Mister Faulconer.’

‘Why him?’

‘I am a close friend of Adam Faulconer.’

‘Are you now?’ Truslow actually seemed to approve. ‘Where is Adam?’

‘The last we heard he was in Chicago.’

‘Doing what?’

‘He works with the Christian Peace Commission. They hold prayer meetings and distribute tracts.’

Truslow laughed. ‘Tracts and prayers won’t help, because America don’t want peace, boy. You Yankees want to tell us how to live our lives, just like the British did last century, but we ain’t any better listeners now than we were then. Nor is it their business. Who owns the house uses the best broom, boy. I’ll tell you what the North wants, boy.’ Truslow, while talking, was whipping the saw up and down in his slicing, tireless rhythm. ‘The North wants to give us more government, that’s what they want. It’s these Prussians, that’s what I reckon. They keep telling the Yankees how to make better government, and you Yankees is fool enough to listen, but I tell you it’s too late now.’

‘Too late?’

‘You can’t mend a broken egg, boy. America’s in two pieces, and the North will sell herself to the Prussians and we’ll mess through as we are.’

Starbuck was far too tired to care about the extraordinary theories that Truslow had about Prussia. ‘And the war?’

‘We just have to win it. See the Yankees off. I don’t want to tell them how to live, so long as they don’t tell me.’

‘So you’ll fight?’ Starbuck asked, sensing some hope for the success of his errand.

‘Of course I’ll fight. But not for fifty dollars.’ Truslow paused as Roper hammered a wedge into the new cut.

Starbuck, whose breath was slowly coming back, frowned. ‘I’m not empowered to offer more, Mister Truslow.’

‘I don’t want more. I’ll fight because I want to fight, and if I weren’t wanting to fight then fifty times fifty dollars wouldn’t buy me, though Faulconer would never understood that.’ Truslow paused to spit a stream of viscous tobacco juice. ‘His father now, he knew that a fed hound never hunts, but Washington? He’s a milksop, and he always pays to get what he wants, but I ain’t for sale. I’ll fight to keep America the way she is, boy, because the way she is makes her the best goddamned country in the whole goddamned world, and if that means killing a passel of you chicken-shit Northerners to keep her that way, then so be it. Are you ready, Roper?’

The saw slashed down again, leaving Starbuck to wonder why Washington Faulconer had been willing to pay so dearly for Truslow’s enlistment. Was it just because this man could bring other hard men from the mountains? In which case, Starbuck thought, it would be money well spent, for a regiment of hardscrabble demons like Truslow would surely be invincible.

‘So what are you trained to be, boy?’ Truslow kept sawing as he asked the question.

Starbuck was tempted to lie, but he had neither the energy nor the will to sustain a fiction. ‘A preacher,’ he answered wearily.

The sawing abruptly stopped, causing Roper to protest as his rhythm was broken. Truslow ignored the protest. ‘You’re a preacher?’

‘I was training to be a minister.’ Starbuck offered a more exact definition.

‘A man of God?’

‘I hope so, yes. Indeed I do.’ Except he knew he was not worthy and the knowledge of his backsliding was bitter.

Truslow stared incredulously at Starbuck and then, astonishingly, he wiped his hands down his filthy clothes as though trying to smarten himself up for his visitor. ‘I’ve got work for you,’ he announced grimly.

Starbuck glanced at the wicked-toothed saw. ‘But …’

‘Preacher’s work,’ Truslow said curtly. ‘Roper! Ladder.’

Roper dropped a homemade ladder into the pit and Starbuck, flinching from the pain in his hands, let himself be chivied up its crude rungs.

‘Did you bring your book?’ Truslow demanded as he followed Starbuck up the ladder.

‘Book?’

‘All preachers have books. Never mind, there’s one in the house. Roper! You want to ride down to the Decker house? Tell Sally and Robert to come here fast. Take the man’s horse. What’s your name, mister?’

‘Starbuck. Nathaniel Starbuck.’

The name evidently meant nothing to Truslow. ‘Take Mister Starbuck’s mare,’ he called to Roper, ‘and tell Sally I won’t take no for an answer!’ All these instructions had been hurled over Truslow’s shoulders as he hurried to his log house. The dog scurried aside as its master stalked past, then lay staring malevolently at Starbuck, growling deep in its throat.

‘You don’t mind if I take the horse?’ Roper asked. ‘Not to worry. I know her. I used to work for Mister Faulconer. I know this mare, Pocahontas, isn’t she?’

Starbuck waved a feeble hand in assent. ‘Who is Sally?’

‘Truslow’s daughter.’ Roper chuckled as he untied the mare’s bridle and adjusted the saddle. ‘She’s a wild one, but you know what they say of women. They’re the devil’s nets, and young Sally will snare a few souls before she’s through. She don’t live here now. When her mother was dying she took herself off to Missus Decker, who can’t abide Truslow.’ Roper seemed amused by the human tangle. He swung himself into Pocahontas’s saddle. ‘I’ll be off, Mister Truslow!’ he called toward the cabin.

‘Go on, Roper! Go!’ Truslow emerged from the house carrying an enormous Bible that had lost its back cover and had a broken spine. ‘Hold it, mister.’ He thrust the dilapidated Bible at Starbuck, then bent over a water butt and scooped handfuls of rainwater over his scalp. He tried to pat the matted filthy hair into some semblance of order, then crammed his greasy hat back into place before beckoning to Starbuck. ‘Come on, mister.’

Starbuck followed Truslow across the clearing. Flies buzzed in the warm evening air. Starbuck, cradling the Bible in his forearms to spare his skinned palms, tried to explain the misunderstanding to Thomas Truslow. ‘I’m not an ordained minister, Mister Truslow.’

‘What’s ordained mean?’ Truslow had stopped at the edge of the clearing and was unbuttoning his filthy jeans. He stared at Starbuck, evidently expecting an answer, then began to urinate. ‘It keeps the deer off the crop,’ he explained. ‘So what’s ordained mean?’

‘It means that I have not been called by a congregation to be their pastor.’

‘But you’ve got the book learning?’

‘Yes, most of it.’

‘And you could be ordained?’

Starbuck was immediately assailed with guilt about Mademoiselle Dominique Demarest. ‘I’m not sure I want to be, anymore.’

‘But you could be?’ Truslow insisted.

‘I suppose so, yes.’

‘Then you’re good enough for me. Come on.’ He buttoned his trousers and beckoned Starbuck under the trees to where, in a tended patch of grass and beneath a tree that was brilliant with red blossom, a single grave lay. The grave marker was a broad piece of wood, rammed into the earth and marked with the one word Emly. The grave did not look old, for its blossom-littered earth ridge was still sparse with grass. ‘She was my wife,’ Truslow said in a surprisingly meek and almost shy voice.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Died Christmas Day.’ Truslow blinked, and suddenly Starbuck felt a wave of sorrow come from the small, urgent man, a wave every bit as forceful and overwhelming as Truslow’s more habitual emanation of violence. Truslow seemed unable to speak, as though there were not words to express what he felt. ‘Emily was a good wife,’ he finally said, ‘and I was a good husband to her. She made me that. A good woman can do that to a man. She can make a man good.’

‘Was she sick?’ Starbuck asked uneasily.

Truslow nodded. He had taken off his greasy hat, which he now held awkwardly in his strong hands. ‘Congestion of the brain. It weren’t an easy death.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Starbuck said inadequately.

‘There was a man might have saved her. A Yankee.’ Truslow spoke the last word with a sour hatred that made Starbuck shiver. ‘He was a fancy doctor from up North. He was visiting relatives in the valley last Thanksgiving.’ He jerked his head westward, indicating the Shenandoah Valley beyond the intervening mountains. ‘Doctor Danson told me of him, said he could work miracles, so I rode over and begged him to come up and see my Emily. She couldn’t be moved, see. I went on bended knee.’ Truslow fell silent, remembering the humiliation, then shook his head. ‘The man refused to move. Said there was nothing he could do, but the truth was he didn’t want to stir off his fat ass and mount a horse in that rain. They ran me off the property.’

Starbuck had never heard of anyone being cured of congestion of the brain and suspected the Yankee doctor had known all along that anything he tried would be a waste of time, but how was anyone to persuade a man like Thomas Truslow of that truth?

‘She died on Christmas Day,’ Truslow went on softly. ‘The snow was thick up here then, like a blanket. Just me and her, the girl had run off, damn her skin.’

‘Sally?’

‘Hell, yes.’ Truslow was standing to attention now with his hands crossed awkwardly over his breast, almost as if he was imitating the death stance of his beloved Emily. ‘Emily and me weren’t married proper,’ he confessed to Starbuck. ‘She ran off with me the year before I went to be a soldier. I was just sixteen, she weren’t a day older, but she was already married. We were wrong, and we both knew it, but it was like we couldn’t help ourselves.’ There were tears in his eyes, and Starbuck suddenly felt glad to know that this tough man had once behaved as stupidly and foolishly as Starbuck had himself just behaved. ‘I loved her,’ Truslow went on, ‘and that’s the truth of it, though Pastor Mitchell wouldn’t wed us because he said we were sinners.’

‘I’m sure he should have made no such judgment,’ Starbuck said gravely.

‘I reckon he should. It was his job to judge us. What else is a preacher for except to teach us conduct? I ain’t complaining, but God gave us his punishment, Mister Starbuck. Only one of our children lived, and she broke our hearts, and now Emily’s dead and I’m left alone. God is not mocked, Mister Starbuck.’

Suddenly, unexpectedly, Starbuck felt an immense surge of sympathy for this awkward, hard, difficult man who stood so clumsily beside the grave he must have dug himself. Or perhaps Roper had helped him, or one of the other fugitive men who lived in this high valley out of sight of the magistrates and the taxmen who infested the plains. At Christmastime, too, and Starbuck imagined them carrying the limp body out into the snow and hacking down into the cold ground.

‘We weren’t married proper, and she were never buried proper, not with a man of God to see her home, and that’s what I want you to do for her. You’re to say the right words, Mister Starbuck. Say them for Emily, because if you say the right words then God will take her in.’

‘I’m sure he will.’ Starbuck felt entirely inadequate to the moment.

‘So say them.’ There was no violence in Thomas Truslow now, just a terrible vulnerability.

There was silence in the small glade. The evening shadows stretched long. Oh dear God, Starbuck thought, but I am not worthy, not nearly worthy. God will not listen to me, a sinner, yet are we not all sinners? And the truth, surely, was that God had already heard Thomas Truslow’s prayer, for Truslow’s anguish was more eloquent than any litany that Starbuck’s education could provide. Yet Thomas Truslow needed the comfort of ritual, of old words lovingly said, and Starbuck gripped the book tight, closed his eyes and raised his face toward the dusk-shadowed blossoms, but suddenly he felt a fool and an imposter and no words would come. He opened his mouth, but he could not speak.

‘That’s right,’ Truslow said, ‘take your time.’

Starbuck tried to think of a passage of scripture that would give him a start. His throat was dry. He opened his eyes and suddenly a verse came to him. ‘Man that is born of a woman,’ he began, but his voice was scratchy and uncertain so he began again, ‘man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.’

‘Amen,’ Thomas Truslow said, ‘amen to that.’

‘He cometh forth like a flower …’

‘She was, she was, praise God, she was.’

‘And is cut down.’

‘The Lord took her, the Lord took her.’ Truslow, his eyes closed, rocked back and forth as he tried to summon all his intensity.

‘He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.’

‘God help us sinners,’ Truslow said, ‘God help us.’

Starbuck was suddenly dumb. He had quoted the first two verses of the fourteenth chapter of Job, and suddenly he was remembering the fourth verse, which asked who can bring a clean thing from an unclean? Then gave its hard answer, no one. And surely Truslow’s unsanctified household had been unclean?

‘Pray, mister, pray,’ Truslow pleaded.

‘Oh Lord God’—Starbuck clenched his eyes against the sun’s dying light—‘remember Emily who was thy servant, thy handmaid, and who was snatched from this world into thy greater glory.’

‘She was, she was!’ Truslow almost wailed the confirmation.

‘Remember Emily Truslow—’ Starbuck went on lamely.

‘Mallory,’ Truslow interrupted, ‘that was her proper name, Emily Marjory Mallory. And shouldn’t we kneel?’ He snatched off his hat and dropped onto the soft loamy soil.

Starbuck also dropped to his knees. ‘Oh, Lord,’ he began again, and for a moment he was speechless, but then, from nowhere it seemed, the words began to flow. He felt Truslow’s grief fill him, and in turn he tried to lay that grief upon the Lord. Truslow moaned as he listened to the prayer, while Starbuck raised his face to the green leaves as though he could project his words on strong hard wings out beyond the trees, out beyond the darkening sky, out beyond the first pale stars, out to where God reigned in all his terrible brooding majesty. The prayer was good, and Starbuck felt its power and wondered why he could not pray for himself as he prayed for this unknown woman. ‘Oh God,’ he finished, and there were tears on his face as his prayer came to an end, ‘oh dear God, hear our prayer, hear us, hear us.’

And then there was silence again, except for the wind in the leaves and the sound of the birds and from somewhere in the valley a lone dog’s barking. Starbuck opened his eyes to see that Truslow’s dirty face was streaked with tears, yet the small man looked oddly happy. He was leaning forward to hold his stubby, strong fingers into the dirt of the grave as if, by thus holding the earth above his Emily’s corpse, he could talk with her.

‘I’ll be going to war, Emily,’ he said, without any embarrassment at so addressing his dead woman in Starbuck’s presence. ‘Faulconer’s a fool, and I won’t be going for his sake, but we’ve got kin in his ranks, and I’ll go for them. Your brother’s joined this so-called Legion, and cousin Tom is there, and you’d want me to look after them both, girl, so I will. And Sally’s going to be just dandy. She’s got her man now and she’s going to be looked after, and you can just wait for me, my darling, and I’ll be with you in God’s time. This is Mister Starbuck who prayed for you. He did it well, didn’t he?’ Truslow was weeping, but now he pulled his fingers free of the soil and wiped them against his jeans before cuffing at his cheeks. ‘You pray well,’ he said to Starbuck.

‘I think perhaps your prayer was heard without me,’ Starbuck said modestly.

‘A man can never be sure enough, though, can he? And God will soon be deafened with prayers. War does that, so I’m glad we put our word in before the battles start drowning his ears with words. Emily will have enjoyed hearing you pray. She always did like a good prayer. Now I want you to pray over Sally.’

Oh God, Starbuck thought, but this was going too far! ‘You want me to do what, Mister Truslow?’

‘Pray over Sally. She’s been a disappointment to us.’ Truslow climbed to his feet and pulled his wide-brimmed hat over his hair. He stared at the grave as he went on with his tale. ‘She’s not like her mother, nor like me. I don’t know what bad wind brought her to us, but she came and I promised Emily as how I’d look after her, and I will. She’s bare fifteen now and going to have a child, you see.’

‘Oh.’ Starbuck did not know what else to say. Fifteen! That was the same age as his younger sister, Martha, and Starbuck still thought of Martha as a child. At fifteen, Starbuck thought, he had not even known where babies came from, assuming they were issued by the authorities in some secret, fuss-laden ceremony involving women, the church and doctors.

‘She says it’s young Decker’s babe, and maybe it is. And maybe it isn’t. You tell me Ridley was here last week? That worries me. He’s been sniffing round my Sally like she was on heat and him a dog. I was down the valley last week on business, so who knows where she was?’

Starbuck’s first impulse was to declare that Ridley was engaged to Anna Faulconer, so could not be responsible for Sally Truslow’s pregnancy, but some impulse told him that such a naive protest would be met with a bitter scorn and so, not knowing what else to say, he sensibly said nothing.

‘She’s not like her mother,’ Truslow spoke on, more to himself than to Starbuck. ‘There’s a wildness in her, see? Maybe it’s mine, but it weren’t Emily’s. But she says it’s Robert Decker’s babe, so let it be so. And he believes her and says he’ll marry her, so let that be so too.’ Truslow stooped and plucked a weed from the grave. ‘That’s where Sally is now,’ he explained to Starbuck, ‘with the Deckers. She said she couldn’t abide me, but it was her mother’s pain and dying she couldn’t abide. Now she’s pregnant, so she needs to be married with a home of her own, not living on charity. I promised Emily I’d look after Sally, so that’s what I’m doing. I’ll give Sally and her boy this homestead, and they can raise the child here. They won’t want me. Sally and me have never seen eye to eye, so she and young Decker can take this place and be proper together. And that’s what I want you to do, Mister Starbuck. I want you to marry them proper. They’re on their way here now.’

‘But I can’t marry them!’ Starbuck protested.