“There were arguments against accepting the appointment,” Bird continued when Starbuck had caught up with him. “First, the necessary close association with my brother-in-law, but upon balance that is preferable to the company of children, and second, the expressed wish of my dear intended, who fears that I might fall upon the field of battle. That would be tragic, Starbuck, tragic!” Bird stressed the enormity of the tragedy by gesturing violently with his right hand, almost sending a passing gentleman’s hat flying. “But my darling Priscilla understands that at this time a man must not be seen laggard in his patriotic duty and so she has consented, albeit with sweet reservations, to my going for a soldier.”
“You’re engaged to be married, sir?”
“You find that circumstance extraordinary, perhaps?” Bird demanded vehemently.
“I find it cause to offer you still further congratulations, sir.”
“Your tact exceeds your truthfulness,” Bird cackled, then swerved into the doorway of Shaffer’s, the tailors, where Colonel Faulconer’s three identical bespoke uniforms were indeed ready as promised, as was the much cheaper outfit that Faulconer had ordered for Starbuck. Pecker Bird insisted on examining the Colonel’s uniform, then ordered one exactly like it for himself, except, he allowed, his coat’s collar should only have a major’s single star and not the three gold stars that decorated the Colonel’s collar wings. “Put the uniform upon my brother-in-law’s account,” Bird said grandly as two tailors measured his awkward, bony frame. He insisted upon every possible accoutrement for the uniform, every tassel and plume and braided decoration imaginable. “I shall go into battle gaudy,” Bird said, then turned as the spring-mounted bell on the shop’s door rang to announce the entrance of a new customer. “Delaney!” Bird delightedly greeted a short, portly man who, with an owlish face, peered about myopically to discover the source of the enthusiastic greeting.
“Bird? Is that you? They have uncaged you? Bird! It is you!” The two men, one so lanky and unkempt, the other so smooth and round and neat, greeted each other with unfeigned delight. It was immediately clear that though they had not met for many months, they were resuming a conversation full of rich insults aimed at their mutual acquaintances, the best of whom were dismissed as mere nincompoops while the worst were utter fools. Starbuck, forgotten, stood fingering the parcels containing the Colonel’s three uniforms until Thaddeus Bird, suddenly remembering him, beckoned him forward.
“You must meet Belvedere Delaney, Starbuck. Mister Delaney is Ethan’s half-brother, but you should not allow that unhappy circumstance to prejudice your judgment.”
“Starbuck,” Delaney said, offering a half bow. He was at least twelve inches shorter than the tall Starbuck and a good deal more elegant. Delaney’s black coat, breeches and top hat were of silk, his top boots gleamed, while his puff-bosomed shirt was a dazzling white and his tie pinned with a gold-mounted pearl. He had a round myopic face that was sly and humorous. “You are thinking,” he accused Starbuck, “that I do not resemble dear Ethan. You were wondering, were you not, how a swan and a buzzard could be hatched from the same egg?”
“I was wondering no such thing, sir,” Starbuck lied.
“Call me Delaney. We must be friends. Ethan tells me you were at Yale?”
Starbuck wondered what else Ethan had divulged. “I was at the seminary, yes.”
“I shall not hold that against you, so long as you do not mind that I am a lawyer. Not, I hasten to say, a successful one, because I like to think of the law as my amusement rather than as my profession, by which I mean that I do a little probate work when it is plainly unavoidable.” Delaney was being deliberately modest, for his flourishing practice was being nurtured by an acute political sensibility and an almost Jesuitical discretion. Belvedere Delaney did not believe in airing his clients’ dirty linen in open court and thus did his subtle work in the quiet back rooms of the Capitol Building, or in the city’s dining clubs or in the elegant drawing rooms of the big houses on Grace Street and Clay Street. He was privy to the secrets of half Virginia’s lawmakers and was reckoned to be a rising power in the Virginian capital. He told Starbuck that he had met Thaddeus Bird at the University of Virginia and that the two men had been friends ever since. “You shall both come and have dinner with me,” Delaney insisted.
“On the contrary,” Bird said, “you shall have dinner with me.”
“My dear Bird!” Delaney pretended horror. “I cannot afford to eat on a country schoolmaster’s salary! The horrors of secession have stirred my appetites, and my delicate constitution requires only the richest of foods and the finest of wines. No, no! You shall eat with me, as will you, Mister Starbuck, for I am determined to hear all your father’s secret faults. Does he drink? Does he consort with evil women in the vestry? Reassure me on these matters, I beg you.”
“You shall dine with me,” Bird insisted, “and you will have the finest wine in the Spotswood’s cellars because, my dear Bird, it is not I who shall pay, but Washington Faulconer.”
“We are to eat on Faulconer’s account?” Delaney asked in delight.
“We are indeed,” Bird answered with relish.
“Then my business with Shaffer’s will wait for the morrow. Lead me to the trough! Lead on, dear Bird, lead on! Let us make gluttons of ourselves, let us redefine greed, let us consume comestibles as they have never been consumed before, let us wallow in the wines of France, and let us gossip. Above all, let us have gossip.”
“I’m supposed to be buying petticoats,” Starbuck demurred.
“I suspect you look better in trousers,” Delaney said sternly, “and besides, petticoats, like duty, can wait till the morrow. Pleasure summons us, Starbuck, pleasure summons us, let us surrender to its call.”
SEVEN SPRINGS, WASHINGTON FAULCONER’S HOUSE IN FAULCONER County, was everything Starbuck dreamed it would be, everything Adam had ever told him it would be, and everything Starbuck thought he might ever want a house to be. It was, he decided from the very first moment he saw it on that Sunday morning in late May, just perfect.
Seven Springs was a sprawling white building just two storeys high except where a white clock tower surmounted a stable gate and where a rickety cupola, steepled with a weathervane, graced the main roof. Starbuck had expected something altogether more pretentious, something with high pillars and elegant pilasters, with arching porticoes and frowning pediments, but instead the big house seemed more like a lavish farmhouse that over the years had absentmindedly spread and multiplied and reproduced itself until it was a tangle of steep roofs, shadowed reentrants and creeper-hung walls. The heart of the house was made of thick fieldstone, the outer wings were timber, while the black-shuttered and iron-balconied windows were shaded by tall trees under which were set white painted benches, long-roped swings, and broad tables. Smaller trees were brilliant with red and white blossom that fell to make drifts of color on the well-scythed lawn. The house and its garden cradled a marvelous promise of warm domesticity and unassuming comforts.
Starbuck, greeted by a Negro servant in the front hall, had first been relieved of the paper-wrapped bundles containing Washington Faulconer’s new uniforms, then a second servant took the carpetbag containing Starbuck’s own uniform, and afterward a turbanned maid came for the two heavy bundles of petticoats that had hung so awkwardly from Starbuck’s saddle bow.
He waited. A longcase clock, its painted face orbiting with moons, stars and comets, ticked heavily in a corner of the tiled hallway. The walls were papered in a floral pattern on which hung gold framed portraits of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Washington Faulconer. The portrait of Faulconer depicted him mounted on his magnificent black horse, Saratoga, and gesturing toward what Starbuck took to be the estate surrounding Seven Springs. The hallway grate held the ashes of a fire, suggesting that the nights were still cold in this upland county. Fresh flowers stood in a crystal vase on the table where two newspapers lay folded, their headlines celebrating North Carolina’s fo
rmal secession to the Confederate cause. The house smelt of starch, lye soap and apples. Starbuck fidgeted as he waited. He did not quite know what was expected of him. Colonel Faulconer had insisted that Starbuck bring the three newly made uniforms directly to Faulconer Court House, but whether he was to be a guest in the house or was expected to find a berth with the encamped Legion, Starbuck still did not know, and the uncertainty made him nervous.
A flurry of feet on the stairs made him turn. A young woman, fair haired, dressed in white, and excited, came running down the final flight, then checked on the bottom stair with her hand resting on the white-painted newel post. She solemnly inspected Starbuck. “You’re Nate Starbuck?” she finally asked.
“Indeed, ma’am.” He offered her a small, awkward bow.
“Don’t ’ma’am’ me, I’m Anna.” She stepped down onto the hall floor. She was small, scarce more than five feet tall, with a pale, waif-like face that was so anxiously wan that Starbuck, if he had not known her to be one of Virginia’s wealthiest daughters, might have thought her an orphan.
Anna’s face was familiar to Starbuck from the portrait that hung in the Richmond town house, but however accurately the picture had caught her narrow head and diffident smile, the painter had somehow missed the essence of the girl, and that essence, Starbuck decided, was oddly pitiable. Anna, despite her prettiness, looked childishly nervous, almost terrified, as if she expected the world to mock her and cuff her and discard her as worthless. That look of extraordinary timidity was not helped by the hint of a strabismus in her left eye, though the squint, if it existed at all, was very slight. “I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said, “because I was looking for an excuse not to attend church, and now I can talk to you.”
“You received the petticoats?” Starbuck asked.
“Petticoats?” Anna paused, frowning, as if the word were unfamiliar to her.
“I brought you the petticoats you wanted,” Starbuck explained, feeling as though he was speaking to a rather stupid child.
Anna shook her head. “The petticoats were for Father, Mister Starbuck, not me, though why he should want them, I don’t know. Maybe he thinks the supply will be constricted by war? Mother says we must stock up on medicines because of the war. She’s ordered a hundredweight of camphor, and the Lord knows how much niter paper and hartshorn too. Is the sun very hot?”
“No.”
“I cannot go into too fierce a sunlight, you see, in case I burn. But you say it isn’t fierce?” She asked the question very earnestly.
“It isn’t, no.”
“Then shall we go for a walk? Would you like that?” She crossed the hall and slipped a hand under Starbuck’s arm and tugged him toward the wide front door. The impetuous gesture was strangely intimate for such a timid girl, yet Starbuck suspected it was a pathetic appeal for companionship. “I’ve been so wanting to meet you,” Anna said. “Weren’t you supposed to come here yesterday?”
“The uniforms were a day late,” Starbuck lied. In truth his dinner with Thaddeus Bird and the beguiling Belvedere Delaney had stretched from the early afternoon to late suppertime, and so the petticoats had not been bought till late Saturday morning, but it hardly seemed politic to admit to such dalliance.
“Well, you’re here now,” Anna said as she drew Starbuck into the sunlight, “and I’m so glad. Adam has talked so much about you.”
“He often spoke of you,” Starbuck said gallantly and untruthfully, for in fact Adam had rarely spoken of his sister, and never with great fondness.
“You surprise me. Adam usually spends so much time examining his own conscience that he scarcely notices the existence of other people.” Anna, thus revealing a more astringent mind than Starbuck had expected, nevertheless blushed, as if apologizing for her apparently harsh judgment. “My brother is a Faulconer to the core,” she explained. “He is not very practical.”
“Your father is practical, surely?”
“He’s a dreamer,” Anna said, “a romantic. He believes that all fine things will come true if we just have enough hope.”
“And surely this house was not built by mere hopes?” Starbuck waved toward the generous facade of Seven Springs.
“You like the house?” Anna sounded surprised. “Mother and I are trying to persuade Father to pull it down and build something altogether grander. Something Italian, perhaps, with columns and a dome? I would like to have a pillared temple on a hill in the garden. Something surrounded by flowers, and very grand.”
“I think the house is lovely as it is,” Starbuck said.
Anna made a face to show her disapproval of Starbuck’s taste. “Our great-great-grandfather Adam built it, or most of it. He was very practical, but then his son married a French lady and the family blood became ethereal. That’s what Mother says. And she’s not strong either, so her blood didn’t help.”
“Adam doesn’t seem ethereal.”
“Oh, he is,” Anna said, then she smiled up at Starbuck. “I do so like northern voices. They sound so much cleverer than our country accents. Would you permit me to paint you? I’m not so good a painter as Ethan, but I work harder at it. You can sit beside the Faulconer River and look melancholy, like an exile beside the waters of Babylon.”
“You’d like me to hang my harp upon the willows?” Starbuck jested clumsily.
Anna withdrew her arm and clapped her hands with delight. “You will be marvelous company, Everyone else is so dull. Adam is being pious in the North, Father is besotted with soldiering, and Mother spends all day wrapped in ice.”
“In ice?”
“Wenham ice, from your home state of Massachusetts. I suppose, if there’s war, there’ll be no more Wenham ice and we shall have to suffer the local product. But Doctor Danson says the ice might cure Mother’s neuralgia. The ice cure comes from Europe, so it must be good.” Starbuck had never heard of neuralgia, and did not want to enquire into its nature in case it should prove to be one of the vague and indescribable feminine diseases that so often prostrated his mother and elder sister, but Anna volunteered that the affliction was a very modern one and was constituted by what she described as “facial headaches.” Starbuck murmured his sympathy. “But Father thinks she makes it up to annoy him,” Anna continued in her timid and attenuated voice.
“I’m sure that can’t be true,” Starbuck said.
“I think it might,” Anna said in a very sad voice. “I sometimes wonder if men and women always irritate each other?”
“I don’t know.”
“This isn’t a very cheerful conversation, is it?” Anna asked rather despairingly and in a tone that suggested all her conversations became similarly bogged down in melancholy. She seemed to sink further into despair with every second, and Starbuck was remembering Belvedere Delaney’s malicious tales of how intensely his half-brother disliked this girl, but how badly Ridley needed her dowry. Starbuck hoped those tales were nothing more than malicious gossip, for it would be a cruel world, he thought, that could victimize a girl as fey and tremulous as Anna Faulconer. “Did Father really say the petticoats were for me?” she suddenly asked.
“Your uncle said as much.”
“Oh, Pecker,” Anna said, as if that explained everything.
“It seemed a very strange request,” Starbuck said gallantly.
“So much is strange these days,” Anna said hopelessly, “and I daren’t ask Father for an explanation. He isn’t happy, you see.”
“No?”
“It’s poor Ethan’s fault. He couldn’t find Truslow, you see, and Father has set his heart on recruiting Truslow. Have you heard about Truslow?”
“Your uncle told me about him, yes. He made Truslow sound rather fearful.”
“But he is fearful. He’s frightful!” Anna stopped to look up into Starbuck’s face. “Shall I confide in you?”
Starbuck wondered what new horror story he was about to hear of the dreaded Truslow. “I should be honored by your confidence, Miss Faulconer,” he said very formally.
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“Call me Anna, please. I want to be friends. And I tell you, secretly, of course, that I don’t believe poor Ethan went anywhere near Truslow’s lair. I think Ethan is much too frightened of Truslow. Everyone’s frightened of Truslow, even Father, though he says he isn’t.” Anna’s soft voice was very portentous. “Ethan says he went up there, but I don’t know if that’s true.”
“I’m sure it is.”
“I’m not.” She put her arm back into Starbuck’s elbow and walked on. “Maybe you should ride up to find Truslow, Mister Starbuck?”
“Me?” Starbuck asked in horror.
A sudden animation came into Anna’s voice. “Think of it as a quest. All my father’s young knights must ride into the mountains and dare to challenge the monster, and whoever brings him back will prove himself the best, the noblest and the most gallant knight of all. What do you think of that idea, Mister Starbuck? Would you like to ride on a quest?”
“I think it sounds terrifying.”
“Father would appreciate it if you went, I’m sure,” Anna said, but when Starbuck made no reply she just sighed and pulled him toward the side of the house. “I want to show you my three dogs. You’re to say that they’re the prettiest pets in all the world, and after that we shall fetch the painting basket and we’ll go to the river and you can hang that shabby hat on the willows. Except we don’t have willows, at least I don’t think we have. I’m not good at trees.”
But there was to be no meeting with the three dogs, nor any painting expedition, for the front door of Seven Springs suddenly opened and Colonel Faulconer stepped into the sunlight.
Anna gasped with admiration. Her father was dressed in one of his new uniforms and looked simply grand. He looked, indeed, as though he had been born to wear this uniform and to lead free men across green fields to victory. His gray frock coat was thickly brocaded with gilt and yellow lace that had been folded and woven to make a broad hem to the coat’s edges, while the sleeves were richly embroidered with intricately looped braid that climbed from the broad cuffs to above the elbows. A pair of yellow kidskin gloves was tucked into his shiny black belt, beneath which a tasseled red silk sash shimmered. His top boots gleamed, his saber’s scabbard was polished to mirror brightness and the yellow plume on his cocked hat stirred in the small warm wind. Washington Faulconer was quite plainly delighted with himself as he moved to watch his reflection in one of the tall windows. “Well, Anna?” he asked.
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