Rebel

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Your turn next, Yankee.” The small bespectacled man who had first discovered Starbuck’s identity had come to stand beside the Bostoner. “So what are you doing here?”

  The man’s tone had almost been friendly, so Starbuck, thinking he might have found an ally, answered him with the truth. “I escorted a lady here.”

  “A lady now! What kind of lady?” the small man asked. A whore, Starbuck thought bitterly, a cheat, a liar and a bitch, but God, how he had fallen in love with her, and how he had worshiped her, and how he had let her twist him about her little finger and thus ruin his life so that now he was bereft, impoverished and homeless in Richmond. “I asked you a question,” the man insisted.

  “A lady from Louisiana,” Starbuck answered mildly, “who wanted to be escorted from the North.”

  “You’d better pray she comes and saves you quick!” the bespectacled man laughed, “before Sam Pearce gets his hands on you.”

  Sam Pearce was evidently the red-faced bearded man who had become the master of ceremonies and who now supervised the stripping away of the dentist’s coat, vest, trousers, shoes, shirt and undershirt, leaving Morley Burroughs humiliated in the sunlight and wearing only his socks and a pair of long drawers, which had been left to him in deference to the modesty of the watching ladies. Sam Pearce now dipped a long-handled ladle into the vat and brought it up dripping with hot treacly tar. The crowd cheered. “Give it him, Sam!”

  “Give it him good!”

  “Teach the Yankee a lesson, Sam!”

  Pearce plunged the ladle back in the vat and gave the tar a slow stir before lifting the ladle out with its deep bowl heaped high with the smoking, black, treacly substance. The dentist tried to pull away, but two men dragged him toward the vat and bent him over its steaming mouth so that his plump, white, naked back was exposed to the grinning Pearce, who moved the glistening, hot mass of tar over his victim.

  The expectant crowd fell silent. The tar hesitated, then flowed off the ladle to strike the back of the dentist’s balding head. The dentist screamed as the hot thick tar scalded him. He jerked away, but was pulled back, and the crowd, its tension released by his scream, cheered.

  Starbuck watched, smelling the thick rank stench of the viscous tar that oozed past the dentist’s ears onto his fat white shoulders. It steamed in the warm spring air. The dentist was crying, whether at the ignominy or for the pain it was impossible to tell, but the crowd didn’t care; all they knew was that a northerner was suffering, and that gave them pleasure.

  Pearce scooped another heavy lump of tar from the vat. The crowd screamed for it to be poured on, the dentist’s knees buckled and Starbuck shivered.

  “You next, boy.” The tanner had moved to stand beside Starbuck. “You next.” He suddenly swung his fist, burying it in Starbuck’s belly to drive the air explosively out of his lungs and making the young man jerk forward against his bonds. The tanner laughed. “You’ll suffer, cuffee, you’ll suffer.”

  The dentist screamed again. A second man had leaped onto the wagon to help Pearce apply the tar. The new man used a short-handled spade to heave a mass of thick black tar out of the vat. “Save some for Starbuck!” the tanner shouted.

  “There’s plenty more here, boys!” The new tormentor slathered his spadeful of tar onto the dentist’s back. The dentist twitched and howled, then was dragged up from his knees as yet more tar was poured down his chest so that it dripped off his belly onto his clean white drawers. Trickles of the viscous substance were dribbling down the sides of his head, down his face and down his back and thighs. His mouth was open and distorted, as though he was crying, but no sound came from him now. The crowd was ribald at the sight of him. One woman was doubled over, helpless with mirth.

  “Where are the feathers?” another woman called.

  “Make him a chicken, Sam!”

  More tar was poured on till the whole of the dentist’s upper body was smothered in the gleaming black substance. His captors had released him, but he was too stricken to try and escape now. Besides, his stockinged feet were stuck in puddles of tar, and all he could do for himself was to try and paw the filthy mess away from his eyes and mouth while his tormentors finished their work. A woman filled her apron with feathers and climbed up to the wagon’s bed where, to huge cheers, the feathers were sprinkled over the humiliated dentist. He stood there, black draped, feathered, steaming, mouth agape, pathetic, and around him the mob howled and jeered and hooted. Some Negroes on the far sidewalk were convulsed in laughter, while even the minister who had been so pathetically protesting the scene was finding it hard not to smile at the ridiculous spectacle. Sam Pearce, the chief ringleader, released one last handful of feathers to stick in the congealing, cooling tar then stepped back and flourished a proud hand toward the dentist. The crowd cheered again.

  “Make him cluck, Sam! Make him cluck like a hen!”

  The dentist was prodded with the short-handled spade until he produced a pathetic imitation of a chicken’s cluck.

  “Louder! Louder!”

  Doctor Burroughs was prodded again, and this time he managed to make the miserable noise loud enough for the crowd’s satisfaction. Laughter echoed from the houses and sounded clear down to the river where the barges jostled at the quays.

  “Bring on the spy, Sam!”

  “Give it him good!”

  “Show us Starbuck’s bastard!”

  Men seized Starbuck, released his bonds and hurried him toward the wagon. The tanner helped them, still striking and kicking at the helpless Starbuck, spitting his hatred and taunting him, anticipating the humiliation of Elial Starbuck’s whelp. Pearce had crammed the dentist’s top hat onto its owner’s grotesque, tar-thick, feathered head. The dentist was shaking, sobbing silently.

  Starbuck was pushed hard against the wagon’s wheel. Hands reached down from above, grabbed his collar and heaved up. Men pushed at him, his knee cracked hard against the wagon side, then he was sprawling on the wagon bed, where his hand was smeared by a warm patch of spilt tar. Sam Pearce hauled Starbuck upright and displayed his bloody face to the crowd. “Here he is! Starbuck’s bastard!”

  “Fillet him, Sam!”

  “Push him in, Sam!”

  Pearce rammed Starbuck’s head over the vat, holding his face just inches from the stinking liquid. The vat had been stolen from its coals, but it was big enough and full enough to have retained almost all its heat. Starbuck tried to flinch away as a bubble slowly erupted just beneath his bleeding nose. The tar plopped tiredly back, then Pearce jerked him back upright. “Let’s have your clothes off, cuffee.”

  Hands pulled at Starbuck’s coat, tearing off its sleeves and ripping it clean off his back. “Strip him naked, Sam!” a woman screamed excitedly.

  “Give his pa something to preach about!” A man was jumping up and down beside the wagon. A child stood by the man, hand at her mouth, eyes bright, staring. The dentist, unremarked now, had sat on the wagon’s box, where he pathetically and uselessly tried to scrape the hot tar off his scorched skin.

  Sam Pearce gave the vat a stir. The tanner was spitting again and again at Starbuck while a gray-haired man fumbled at Starbuck’s waist, loosing the buttons of his pants. “Don’t you dare piss on me, boy, or I’ll leave you nothing to piss with.” He pulled the trousers down to Starbuck’s knees, provoking a shrill scream of approval from the crowd.

  And a gunshot sounded too.

  The gunshot cracked the still air of the street junction to startle a score of flapping birds up from the roofs of the warehouses that edged the Shockoe Slip. The crowd turned. Pearce moved to tear at Starbuck’s shirt, but a second gunshot sounded hugely loud, echoing off the far houses and causing the crowd to go very still. “Touch the boy again,” a confident, lazy voice spoke, “and you’re a dead man.”

  “He’s a spy!” Pearce tried to brazen out the moment.

  “He’s my guest.” The speaker was mounted on a tall black horse and was wearing a slouch hat, a long gray coat and high b
oots. He was carrying a long-barreled revolver, which he now pushed into a holster on his saddle. It was a marvelously insouciant gesture, suggesting he had nothing to fear from this mob. The man’s face was shadowed by the hat’s brim, but clearly he had been recognized, and as he spurred the horse forward the crowd silently parted to give him passage. A second horseman followed, leading a riderless horse.

  The first horseman reined in beside the wagon. He tilted his hat upward with the tip of a riding crop then stared with incredulity at Starbuck. “It’s Nate Starbuck! Yes?”

  “Yes, sir.” Starbuck was shivering.

  “You remember me, Nate? We met in New Haven last year?”

  “Of course I remember you, sir.” Starbuck was shaking, but with relief rather than fear. His rescuer was Washington Faulconer, father of Starbuck’s best friend and the man whose name Starbuck had earlier invoked to save himself from this mob’s wrath.

  “You seem to be getting a wrong impression of Virginian hospitality,” Washington Faulconer said softly. “Shame on you!” These last words were spoken to the crowd. “We’re not at war with strangers in our city! What are you? Savages?”

  “He’s a spy!” The tanner tried to restore the crowd’s supremacy.

  Washington Faulconer turned scornfully on the man. “And you’re a black-assed fool! You’re behaving like Yankees, all of you! Northerners might want a mobocracy for a government, but not us! Who is this man?” He pointed with his riding crop at the dentist.

  The dentist could not speak, so Starbuck, released from the grip of his enemies and with his trousers safely restored to his waist, answered for his fellow victim. “His name is Burroughs, sir. He’s a dentist passing through town.”

  Washington Faulconer glanced about until he saw two men he recognized. “Bring Mister Burroughs to my house. We shall do our best to make reparations to him.” Then, that remonstrance delivered to the shamed crowd, he looked back to Starbuck and introduced his companion, who was a dark-haired man a few years older than Starbuck. “This is Ethan Ridley.” Ridley was leading the riderless horse, which he now urged alongside the wagon bed. “Mount up, Nate!” Washington Faulconer urged Starbuck.

  “Yes, sir.” Starbuck stooped for his coat, realized that it was torn beyond repair, so straightened up empty-handed. He glanced at Sam Pearce, who gave a tiny shrug as though to suggest there were no hard feelings, but there were, and Starbuck, who had never known how to control his temper, stepped fast toward the big man and hit him. Sam Pearce twisted away, but not soon enough, and Starbuck’s blow landed on his ear. Pearce stumbled, put a hand out to save himself but only succeeded in plunging the hand deep into the tar vat. He screamed, jerked himself free, but his balance was gone, and he flailed hopelessly as he tripped off the wagon’s outer end to fall with skull-cracking force onto the road. Starbuck’s hand was hurting, stung by the wild and clumsy blow, but the crowd, with the unpredictability of an impassioned mob, suddenly started laughing and cheering him.

  “Come on, Nate!” Washington Faulconer was grinning at Pearce’s downfall.

  Starbuck stepped off the wagon directly onto the horse’s back. He fumbled with his feet for the stirrups, took the reins and kicked back with his tar-stained shoes. He guessed he had lost his books and clothes, but the loss was hardly important. The books were exegetical texts left over from his studies at the Yale Theological Seminary and at best he might have sold them for a dollar fifty. The clothes were of even less value, and so he abandoned his belongings, instead following his rescuers out of the crowd and up Pearl Street. Starbuck was 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-storeyed, 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, ma
king 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.