still shaking, and still hardly daring to believe he had escaped the crowd’s torment. ‘How did you know I was there, sir?’ he asked Washington Faulconer.
‘I didn’t realize it was you, Nate, I just heard that some young fellow claiming to know me was about to be strung up for the crime of being a Yankee, so I thought we should take a look. It was a teamster who told me, a Negro fellow. He heard you say my name and he knew my house, so he came and told my steward. Who told me, of course.’
‘I owe you an extraordinary debt, sir.’
‘You certainly owe the Negro fellow a debt. Or rather you don’t, because I thanked him for you with a silver dollar.’ Washington Faulconer turned and looked at his bedraggled companion. ‘Does that nose hurt?’
‘No more than a usual bloody nose, sir.’
‘Might I ask just what you’re doing here, Nate? Virginia doesn’t seem the healthiest place for a Massachusetts man to be running loose.’
‘I was looking for you, sir. I was planning to walk to Faulconer Court House.’
‘All seventy miles, Nate!’ Washington Faulconer laughed. ‘Didn’t Adam tell you we keep a town house? My father was a state senator, so he liked to keep a place in Richmond to hang his hat. But why on earth were you looking for me? Or was it Adam you wanted? He’s up North, I’m afraid. He’s trying to avert war, but I think it’s a little late for that. Lincoln doesn’t want peace, so I fear we’ll have to oblige him with war.’ Faulconer offered this mix of questions and answers in a cheerful voice. He was an impressive-looking man of middle years and medium height, with a straight back and wide square shoulders. He had short fair hair, a thick square-cut beard, a face that seemed to radiate frankness and kindness, and blue eyes that were crinkled in an expression of amused benignity. To Starbuck he seemed just like his son, Adam, whom Starbuck had met at Yale and whom Starbuck always thought of as the decentest man he had ever met. ‘But why are you here, Nate?’ Faulconer asked his original question again.
‘It’s a long story, sir.’ Starbuck rarely rode a horse and did it badly. He slouched in the saddle and jolted from side to side, making a horrid contrast to his two elegant companions, who rode their horses with careless mastery.
‘I like long stories,’ Washington Faulconer said happily, ‘but save it for when you’re cleaned up. Here we are.’ He gestured with his riding crop at a lavish four-storied stone-faced house, evidently the place where his father had hung his hat. ‘No ladies staying here this week, so we can be free and easy. Ethan will get you some clothes. Show him to Adam’s room, will you, Ethan?’
Negro servants ran from the house’s stable yard to take the horses and suddenly, after weeks of uncertainty and danger and humiliation, Starbuck felt himself being surrounded by security and comfort and safety. He could almost have wept for the relief of it. America was collapsing in chaos, riot was loose on its streets, but Starbuck was safe.
‘You’re looking a deal more human, Nate!’ Washington Faulconer greeted Starbuck in his study, ‘and those clothes more or less fit. Are you feeling better?’
‘Much better. Thank you, sir.’
‘Bath hot enough?’
‘Perfect, sir.’
‘That eye looks sore. Maybe a poultice before you sleep? We had to call a doctor for your Philadelphia friend. They’re trying to unpeel the poor fellow in the stable yard. While my problem is whether to buy one thousand rifles at twelve bucks each.’
‘Why shouldn’t we?’ Ethan Ridley, who had settled Starbuck into Adam’s room then arranged for his bath and a change of clothes, was now perched on a sofa at the window of Washington Faulconer’s study, where he was toying with a long-barreled revolver that he occasionally sighted at pedestrians in the street below.
‘Because I don’t want to take the first available guns, Ethan,’ Washington Faulconer said. ‘Something better may come along in a month or two.’
‘There’s not much better than the Mississippi rifle.’ Ridley silently picked off the driver of a scarlet barouche. ‘And the price won’t go down, sir. With respect, it won’t go down. Prices never do.’
‘I guess that’s true.’ Faulconer paused, but still seemed reluctant to make a decision.
A clock ticked heavily in a corner of the room. A wagon axle squealed in the street. Ridley lit a long thin cigar and sucked hungrily on its smoke. A brass tray beside him was littered with ash and cigar butts. He drew on the cigar again, making its tip glow fierce, then glanced at Starbuck. ‘Will the North fight?’ he demanded, evidently expecting that a Yankee like Starbuck must have the answer pat.
But Starbuck had no idea what the North intended to do in the aftermath of Fort Sumter’s fall. In these last weeks Nathaniel Starbuck had been much too distracted to think about politics, and now, faced with the question that was energizing the whole South country, he did not know what to respond.
‘In one sense it doesn’t matter if they fight or not,’ Washington Faulconer spoke before Starbuck could offer any answer. ‘If we don’t seem prepared to fight, Ethan, then the North will certainly invade. But if we stand firm, why, then they may back down.’
‘Then buy the guns, sir,’ Ridley urged, reinforcing his encouragement by pulling the trigger of his empty revolver. He was a lean tall man, elegant in black riding boots, black breeches and a black coat that was smeared with traces of cigar ash. He had long dark hair oiled sleek against his skull and a beard trimmed to a rakish point. In Adam’s bedroom, while Starbuck had tidied and cleaned himself, Ridley had paced up and down the room, telling Starbuck how he was planning to marry Washington Faulconer’s daughter, Anna, and how the prospect of war had delayed their wedding plans. Ridley had talked of the possible war as an irritation rather than a calamity, and his slow, attractive Southern accent had only made the confidence in his voice all the more convincing.
‘There goes twelve thousand dollars!’ Washington Faulconer now said, evidently putting his signature to a money draft as he spoke. ‘Buy the guns for me, Ethan, and well done.’ Starbuck wondered why Washington Faulconer was buying so many rifles, but he did not need to wonder that Faulconer could afford the weapons, for he knew his friend’s father to be one of the richest men in Virginia, indeed in all the precariously United States. Faulconer could boast that the most recent survey done of his family’s land in Faulconer County had been accomplished by a raw young surveyor named George Washington, and since that day not one acre had been lost to the family and a good many had been added. Among the new acres was the land on which Faulconer’s Richmond town house stood—one of the grandest houses on Clay Street that had, at its rear, a wide stable yard with a carriage house and quarters for a dozen grooms and stalls for thirty horses. The house boasted a ballroom, a music room, and what was commonly regarded as Richmond’s finest staircase, a magnificent circling stair that swept around and up a gilded well hung with family portraits, the oldest of which had been brought from England in the seventeenth century. The books in Washington Faulconer’s study had the family’s coat of arms tooled in gold into their leather covers, while the desks, chairs and tables had all been made by Europe’s finest craftsmen because, for a man as wealthy as Washington Faulconer, only the very best would do. Flowers stood on every table, not just for decoration, but in an attempt to overwhelm the smell of the city’s tobacco factories.
‘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
