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 on stage, 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 from 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 boarding house 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.’
