There’s a thousand fellows trying to buy equipment, and there’s a shortage of everything, so you need deep pockets. Let’s go get a drink.’
Ethan Ridley took a perverse delight in introducing Starbuck to the city’s taverns, especially the dark, rancid drinking houses that were hidden among the mills and lodging houses on the northern bank of the James River. ‘This ain’t like your father’s church, is it, Reverend?’ Ridley would ask of some rat-infested, rotting hovel, and Starbuck would agree that the liquor den was indeed a far cry from his ordered, Boston upbringing where cleanliness had been a mark of God’s favor and abstinence a surety of his salvation.
Ridley evidently wanted to savor the pleasure of shocking the Reverend Elial Starbuck’s son, yet even the filthiest of Richmond’s taverns held a romance for Starbuck solely because it was such a long way from his father’s Calvinist joylessness. It was not that Boston lacked drinking houses as poverty stricken and hopeless as any in Richmond, but Starbuck had never been inside Boston’s drinking dens and thus he took a strange satisfaction out of Ridley’s midday excursions into Richmond’s malodorous alleyways. The adventures seemed proof that he really had escaped his family’s cold, disapproving grasp, but Starbuck’s evident enjoyment of the expeditions only made Ridley try yet harder to shock him. ‘If I abandoned you in this place, Reverend,’ Ridley threatened Starbuck in one seamen’s tavern that stank from the sewage dripping into the river from a rusting pipe not ten feet from the stillroom, ‘you’d have your throat cut inside five minutes.’
‘Because I’m a Northerner?’
‘Because you’re wearing shoes.’
‘I’d be all right,’ Starbuck boasted. He had no weapons, and the dozen men in the tavern looked capable of slitting a congregation of respectable throats with scarce a twinge of conscience, but Starbuck would not let himself show any fear in front of Ethan Ridley. ‘Leave me here if you want.’
‘You wouldn’t dare stay here on your own,’ Ridley said.
‘Go on. See if I mind.’ Starbuck turned to the serving hatch and snapped his fingers. ‘One more glass here. Just one!’ That was pure bravado, for Starbuck hardly drank any alcohol. He would sip at a whiskey, but Ridley always finished the glass. The terror of sin haunted Starbuck, indeed it was that terror which gave the tavern excursions their piquancy, and liquor was one of the greater sins whose temptations Starbuck half-flirted with and half-resisted.
Ridley laughed at Starbuck’s defiance. ‘You’ve got balls, Starbuck, I’ll say that.’
‘So leave me here.’
‘Faulconer won’t forgive me if I get you killed. You’re his new pet puppy, Reverend.’
‘Pet puppy?’ Starbuck bridled at the words.
‘Don’t take offense, Reverend.’ Ridley stamped on the butt of a smoked cigar and immediately lit another. He was a man of impatient appetites. ‘Faulconer’s a lonely man, and lonely men like having pet puppies. That’s why he’s so keen on secession.’
‘Because he’s lonely?’ Starbuck did not understand.
Ridley shook his head. He was lounging with his back against the counter, staring through a cracked dirty window to where a two-masted ship creaked against a crumbling river quay. ‘Faulconer supports the rebellion because he thinks it’ll make him popular with his father’s old friends. He’ll prove himself a more fervent Southerner than any of them, because in a way he ain’t a Southerner at all, you know what I mean?’
‘No.’
Ridley grimaced, as though unwilling to explain himself, but then tried anyway. ‘He owns land, Reverend, but he don’t use it. He doesn’t farm it, he doesn’t plant it, he doesn’t even graze it. He just owns it and stares at it. He doesn’t have niggers, at least not as slaves. His money comes out of railroads and paper, and the paper comes out of New York or London. He’s probably more at home in Europe than here in Richmond, but that don’t stop wanting him to belong here. He wants to be a Southerner, but he ain’t.’ Ridley blew a plume of cigar smoke across the room, then turned his dark, sardonic gaze on Starbuck. ‘I’ll give you a piece of advice.’
‘Please.’
‘Keep agreeing with him,’ Ridley said very seriously. ‘Family can disagree with Washington, which is why he don’t spend too much time with family, but private secretaries like you and me ain’t allowed any disagreements. Our job is to admire him. You understand me?’
‘He’s admirable anyway,’ Starbuck said loyally.
‘I guess we’re all admirable,’ Ridley said with amusement, ‘so long as we can find a pedestal high enough to stand on. Washington’s pedestal is his money, Reverend.’
‘And yours too?’ Starbuck asked belligerently.
‘Not mine, Reverend. My father lost all the family money. My pedestal, Reverend, is horses. I’m the best damned horseman you’ll find this side of the Atlantic. Or any side for that matter.’ Ridley grinned at his own lack of modesty, then tossed back his glass of whiskey. ‘Let’s go and see if those bastards at Boyle and Gamble have found the field glasses they promised me last week.’
In the evenings Ridley would disappear to his half-brother’s rooms in Grace Street, leaving Starbuck to walk back to Washington Faulconer’s house through streets that were swarming with strange-looking creatures come from the deeper, farther reaches of the South. There were thin-shanked, gaunt-faced men from Alabama, long-haired leather-skinned horse riders from Texas and bearded homespun volunteers from Mississippi, all of them armed like buccaneers and ready to drink themselves into fits of instant fury. Whores and liquor salesmen made small fortunes, city rents doubled and doubled again, and still the railroads brought fresh volunteers to Richmond. They had come, one and all, to protect the new Confederacy from the Yankees, though at first it looked as if the new Confederacy would be better advised to protect itself from its own defenders, but then, obedient to the insistent commands of the state’s newly appointed military commander, all the ragtag volunteers were swept away to the city’s Central Fair Grounds where cadets from the Virginia Military Institute were brought to teach them basic drill.
That new commander of the Virginian militia, Major-General Robert Lee, also insisted on paying a courtesy call on Washington Faulconer. Faulconer suspected that the proposed visit was a ploy by Virginia’s new governor to take control of the Legion, yet, despite his misgivings, Faulconer could scarcely refuse to receive a man who came from a Virginia family as old and prominent as his own. Ethan Ridley had left Richmond the day before Lee’s visit, and so Starbuck was ordered to be present at the meeting. ‘I want you to make notes of what’s said,’ Faulconer warned him darkly. ‘Letcher’s not the kind of man to let a patriot raise a regiment. You mark my words, Nate, he’ll have sent Lee to take the Legion away from me.’
Starbuck sat at one side of the study, a notebook open on his knees, though in the event nothing of any great importance was discussed. The middle-aged Lee, who was dressed in civilian clothes and attended by one young captain in the uniform of the state militia, first exchanged civilities with Faulconer, then formally, almost apologetically, explained that Governor Letcher had appointed him to command the state’s military forces and his first duty was to recruit, equip and train those forces, in which connection he understood that Mister Faulconer was raising a regiment in Faulconer County?
‘A legion,’ Faulconer corrected him.
‘Ah yes, indeed, a legion.’ Lee seemed
