Rebel

by Bernard Cornwell

  Adam took the flinch as evidence of remorse. “You have to pay back the man Trabell, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes. Of course I do.” That necessity weighed heavily on Starbuck’s conscience, at least when he allowed himself to remember the theft of Major Trabell’s money. Until a few hours ago, when he had still been planning his return north, he had convinced himself that he wanted nothing more than to repay Trabell, but now, with Adam home, Starbuck wanted nothing more than to stay in Virginia. “I wish I knew how,” he said vaguely.

  “I think you should go home,” Adam suggested firmly, “and put things straight with your family.”

  Starbuck had spent the last two days thinking precisely the same thing, though now he demurred from that sensible plan. “You don’t know my father.”

  “How can a man be scared of his own father, yet contemplate going into battle without fear?”

  Starbuck smiled quickly to acknowledge the point, then shook his head. “I don’t want to go home.”

  “Must we always do what we want? There is duty and obligation.”

  “Maybe things didn’t go wrong when I met Dominique,” Starbuck said, striking obliquely away from his friend’s stern words. “Maybe it went wrong when I first went to Yale. Or when I agreed to be baptized. I’ve never felt like a Christian, Adam. I should never have let Father baptize me. I should never have let him send me to seminary. I’ve been living a lie.” He thought of his prayers at a dead woman’s grave, and blushed. “I don’t think I’ve even been converted. I’m not a true Christian at all.”

  “Of course you are!” Adam was shocked at his friend’s apostasy.

  “No,” Starbuck insisted. “I wish I was. I’ve seen other men converted. I’ve seen the happiness in them, and the power of the Holy Spirit in them, but I’ve never really experienced the same thing. I’ve wanted to, I’ve always wanted to.” He paused. He could think of no one else to whom he could speak like this, only Adam. Good honest Adam who was like Faithful to John Bunyan’s Christian. “My God, Adam,” Starbuck went on, “but I’ve prayed for conversion! I’ve begged for it! But I’ve never known it. I think, maybe, that if I was saved, if I was born again, I’d have the strength to resist lust, but I don’t and I don’t know how to find that strength.” It was an honest, pathetic admission. He had been raised to believe that nothing in his whole life, not even his life itself, was as important as the necessity for conversion. Conversion, Starbuck had been taught, was the moment of being born again into Christ, that miraculous instant in which a man allowed Jesus Christ into his heart as his Lord and Savior, and if a man did allow that marvelous ingress to happen, then nothing would ever be the same again because all of life and all of subsequent eternity would be transmuted into a golden existence. Without salvation life was nothing but sin and hell and disappointment; with it there was joy, love and heaven everlasting.

  Except Starbuck had never found that moment of mystical conversion. He had never experienced the joy. He had pretended to, because such a pretense was the only way to satisfy his father’s insistence on salvation, yet all his life had been a lie since that moment of pretense. “There’s something worse,” he confessed to Adam now. “I’m beginning to suspect that real salvation, real happiness, doesn’t lie in the experience of conversion at all, but in abandoning the whole concept. Maybe I’ll only be happy if I can reject the whole paraphernalia?”

  “My God,” Adam said, horrified at the very idea of such Godlessness. He thought for a few seconds. “I don’t think,” he went on slowly, “that conversion depends on an outside influence. You can’t expect a magical change, Nate. True conversion comes from an inner determination.”

  “You mean Christ has nothing to do with it?”

  “Of course he does, yes, but he’s powerless unless you invite him in. You have to unleash his power.”

  “I can’t!” The protest was almost a wail, the cry of a young man desperate to be released from the travails of religious struggle, a struggle that pitted Christ and his salvation against the temptation of Sally Truslow and Dominique and of all the other forbidden and wonderful delights that seemed to tear Starbuck’s soul in two.

  “You should begin by going home,” Adam said. “It’s your duty.”

  “I’m not going home,” Starbuck said, utterly ignoring his recent decision to do just that. “I won’t find God at home, Adam. I need to be on my own.” That was not true. Starbuck, now that his friend had returned to Faulconer Court House, wanted to stay in Virginia because the summer which had looked so threatening under Washington Faulconer’s disapproval was suddenly promising to be golden again. “And why are you here?” Starbuck turned the questioning on his friend. “For duty?”

  “I suppose so.” Adam was uncomfortable with the question. “I suppose we all look for home when things seem bad. And they are bad, Nate. The North is going to invade.”

  Starbuck grinned. “So we fight them off, Adam, and that will be the end of it. One battle! One short, sweet battle. One victory, and then peace. You’ll get your convention then, you’ll get everything you want probably, but you have to fight one battle first.”

  Adam smiled. It seemed to him that his friend Nate existed only for sensation. Not for thought, which Adam liked to think was his own touchstone. Adam believed that the truth of everything, from slavery to salvation, could be adduced by reason, while Starbuck, he realized, was swayed solely by emotion. In some ways, Adam thought with a surprise, Starbuck resembled his father, the Colonel. “I’m not going to fight,” Adam said after a long pause. “I won’t fight.”

  It was Starbuck’s turn to be shocked. “Does your father know that?”

  Adam shook his head, but said nothing. It seemed that he too was wary of a father’s disapproval.

  “So why did you come home?” Starbuck asked.

  Adam was quiet for a long while. “I think,” he said at last, “because I knew that nothing I could say would help any longer. No one was listening to reason, only to passion. The people I thought wanted peace turned out to want victory more. Fort Sumter changed them, you see. It didn’t matter that no one had died there, the bombardment proved to them that the slave states would never yield to reason, and then they demanded that I add my voice to their demands, and those demands weren’t for moderation anymore, but for the destruction of all this.” He gestured at the Faulconer domain, at the sweet fields and heavy trees. “They wanted me to attack Father and his friends, and I refused to do it. So I came home instead.”

  “But you won’t fight?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Starbuck frowned. “You’re braver than me, Adam, my God you are.”

  “Am I? I wouldn’t have dared run away with a, with a”—Adam paused, unable to find a word delicate enough to describe the very indelicate Dominique—“I wouldn’t have dared risk my whole life for a whim!” He made it sound admirable instead of shameful.

  “It was nothing but stupidity,” Starbuck confessed.

  “And you’d never do it again?” Adam asked with a smile, and Starbuck thought of Sally Truslow, and said nothing. Adam plucked a blade of grass and twisted it about his finger. “So what do you think I should do?”

  So Adam’s mind was not made up after all? Starbuck smiled. “I’ll tell you exactly what to do. Just go along with your father. Play at soldiers, enjoy the encampment, have a marvelous summer. Peace will come, Adam, maybe after one battle, but peace will come, and it will be soon. Why ruin your father’s happiness? What do you gain by doing that?”

  “Honesty?” Adam suggested. “I have to live with myself, Nate.”

  Adam found living with himself difficult, as Nate well knew. Adam was a stern and demanding young man, especially of himself. He might forgive weakness in others, but not in his own character. “So why did you come back?” Starbuck went on the attack. “Just to raise your father’s hopes before disappointing him? My God, Adam, you talk about my duty to my father, what’s yours? To preach to him? To break
his heart? Why are you here? Because you expect your tenants and neighbors to fight, but think you can sit the battle out because you’ve got scruples? My God, Adam, you’d have done better to stay in the North.”

  Adam paused a long time before responding. “I’m here because I’m weak.”

  “Weak!” That was the last quality Starbuck would have ascribed to his friend.

  “Because you’re right; I can’t disappoint Father. Because I know what he wants, and it doesn’t seem such a great deal to give him.” Adam shook his head. “He’s such a generous man, and he’s so often disappointed in people. I really would like to make him happy.”

  “Then for God’s sake put on the uniform, play soldiers and pray for peace. Besides,” Starbuck said, deliberately lightening the mood, “I can’t bear the thought of a summer without your company. Can you imagine just me and Ethan as your father’s aides?”

  “You don’t like Ethan?” Adam had detected the distaste in Starbuck’s voice and seemed surprised by it.

  “He seems not to like me. I took fifty bucks off him in a bet and he hasn’t forgiven me for it.”

  “He’s touchy about money,” Adam agreed. “In fact I sometimes wonder if that’s why he wants to marry Anna, but that’s a very unworthy suspicion, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?”

  “Of course it is.”

  Starbuck remembered Belvedere Delaney voicing the same suspicion, but did not mention it. “Why does Anna want to marry Ethan?” he asked instead.

  “She just wants to escape,” Adam said. “Can you imagine life in Seven Springs? She sees marriage as her ticket to freedom.” Adam suddenly leaped to his feet and scrambled to pull on his trousers, his haste occasioned by the approach of a small dog cart that was being driven by Anna herself. “She’s here!” Adam warned Starbuck who, like his friend, hurriedly tugged on his pants and shirt and was just pulling on his stockings as Anna reined in. Her cart was escorted by three yapping spaniels that now leaped excitedly at Adam and Starbuck.

  Anna, sheltered from the sun by a wide, lace-fringed parasol, stared reproachfully at her brother. “You’re late for dinner, Adam.”

  “My Lord, is that the time?” Adam fumbled for his watch among his rumpled clothes. One of the spaniels leaped up and down at him while the other two lapped noisily from the river.

  “It doesn’t really matter that you’re late,” Anna said, “because there’s been some trouble at the camp.”

  “What trouble?” Starbuck asked.

  “Truslow discovered his son-in-law had joined the Legion while he was away. So he hit him!” Anna seemed very shocked at the violence.

  “He hit Decker?”

  “Is that his name?” Anna asked.

  “What happened to Decker’s wife?” Starbuck asked a little too urgently.

  “I’ll tell you at dinner,” Anna said. “Now why don’t you finish dressing, Mister Starbuck, then tie your tired horse to the back of the cart and ride home with me. You can hold the parasol and tell me all about the raid. I want to hear everything.”

  Ethan Ridley took Sally Truslow to Muggeridge’s Drapery and Millinery in Exchange Alley where he bought her a parasol in printed calico to match her pale green linen cambric dress. She was also wearing a fringed paisley shawl, yarn stockings, a wide-brimmed hat trimmed with silk lilies, white ankle-length boots and white lace gloves. She carried a small beaded handbag and, in rude contrast, her old canvas bag.

  “Let me hold the bag for you,” Ridley said. Sally wanted to try on a linen hat with a stiffened brim and a muslin veil.

  “Take care of it.” Sally gave him the bag reluctantly.

  “Of course.” The canvas bag was heavy, and Ridley wondered if she did have a gun in there. Ridley himself had a gun at his hip as part of his uniform. He was in the yellow trimmed gray of the Faulconer Legion, with a saber at his left hip and the revolver on his right side.

  Sally turned around in front of the cheval mirror, admiring the hat. “It’s real nice,” she said.

  “You look lovely,” Ridley said, though in truth he had found her company ever more grating in these last few days. She had no education, no subtlety and no wit. What she had was the face of an angel, the body of a whore, and his bastard in her belly. She also had a desperation to escape the narrow world of her father’s cramped homestead, but Ridley was too concerned for his own future to comprehend Sally’s plight. He did not see her as attempting to escape from an unbearable past, but as an extortioner trying to gouge a parasitical future. He did not see the fear in her, only the determination to take what she wanted. He despised her. At night, impassioned, he wanted nothing more than to be with her, but by day, exposed to her crude ideas and lacerating voice, he wanted only to be rid of her. And today he would be rid of her, but first it was necessary to lull her into complacency.

  He took her to Lascelles Jewelry Store on Eighth Street where he listened to the owner’s splenetic complaints about the proposal to lay a railroad line directly outside his shop window. The line, which would run down the center of the steep street, was intended to connect the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac rails with the Richmond and Petersburg line so that military supplies could be carried across the city without the need to unload one set of rail wagons into horse-drawn carts. “But have they considered the effect upon trade, Captain Ridley? Have they? No! And who will buy fine jewelry with locomotives smoking outside? It’s preposterous!”

  Ridley bought Sally a filigree necklace that was flashy enough to please her and cheap enough not to offend his parsimony. He also bought a narrow gold ring, scarce more than a curtain band, which he pushed into his uniform pocket. The purchases, with the parasol and linen hat, cost him fourteen dollars, and the brisket of beef that he bought as dinner in the Spotswood House cost another dollar thirty. He was lulling Sally’s apprehensions, and the price was worth it if she went quietly to whatever fate awaited her. He gave her wine to drink with the meal, and brandy afterward. She wanted a cigar and was quite unworried that no other lady in the dining room chose to smoke. “I’ve always liked a cigar. My ma used a pipe, but I like a cigar.” She smoked contentedly, oblivious of the amused stares of the other diners. “This is real nice.” She had taken to luxury like a starved cat to a creamery.

  “You should get used to this sort of place,” Ridley said. He lolled in his chair, an elegantly booted leg propped on the cold radiator that stood beneath the window and looked onto the hotel’s courtyard. His scabbarded saber hung from its slings on the radiator’s purge valve. “I am going to make you a lady,” he lied to her. “I am going to teach you how a lady speaks, how a lady behaves, how a lady eats, how a lady dances, how a lady reads, how a lady dresses. I am going to make you into a great lady.”

  She smiled. To be a great lady was Sally’s dream. She imagined herself in silks and lace, ruling a parlor like the one in Belvedere Delaney’s house, no, an even bigger parlor, a vast parlor, a parlor with cliffs for walls and a vaulted heaven for a ceiling and golden furniture and hot water all day long. “Are we really looking for a house this afternoon?” she asked wistfully. “I’m real tired of Mrs. Cobbold.” Mrs. Cobbold owned the boardinghouse in Monroe Street and was suspicious of Ridley’s relationship with Sally.

  “We’re not looking for a house,” Ridley corrected her, “but a set of rooms. My brother knows some that are for rent.”

  “Rooms.” She was suspicious.

  “Large rooms. Tall ceilings, carpets.” Ridley waved his hands to suggest opulence. “A place you can keep your own niggers.”

  “I can have a nigger?” she asked excitedly.

  “Two.” Ridley embroidered his promise. “You can have a maid and a cook. Then, of course, when the baby comes, you can have a nurse.”

  “I want a carriage, too. A carriage like that.” She gestured through the window at a four-wheeled carriage that had an elegant shell body slung on leather springs and a black canvas hood folded back to reveal an interior of scarlet buttoned le
ather. The carriage was drawn by four matching bays. A Negro coachman sat on the box while another black, either slave or servant, handed a woman up into the open coach.

  “That’s a barouche,” Ridley told her.

  “Barouche.” Sally tried the word and liked it.

  A tall, rather cadaverous man followed the woman into the barouche. “And that,” Ridley told Sally, “is our president.”

  “The skinny one!” She leaned forward to stare at Jefferson Davis who, his top hat in his hand, was standing in the carriage to finish a conversation with two men who stood on the hotel steps. His business finished, President Davis sat opposite his wife and crammed the glossy hat on his head. “Is that really Jeff Davis?” Sally asked.

  “It is. He’s staying in the hotel while they find him a house.”

  “I never thought I’d see a president,” Sally said, and watched wide-eyed as the barouche turned in the courtyard before clattering under the arch into Main Street. Sally smiled at Ridley. “You’re trying real hard to be nice, aren’t you?” she said, as though Ridley had personally arranged for the president of the Provisional Government of the Confederate States of America to parade for Sally’s benefit.

  “I’m trying real hard,” he said, and reached across the table to take hold of her left hand. He drew it toward him and kissed her fingers. “I’m going to go on trying real hard,” he said, “so that you’ll always be happy.”

  “And the baby.” Sally was beginning to feel motherly.

  “And our baby,” Ridley said, though the words very nearly stuck in his craw. But he managed to smile, then took the new gold ring out of his pocket, shook it free of its small wash-leather bag and placed it on her ring finger. “You should have a wedding ring,” he explained. Sally had started to wear the antique silver ring on her right hand, and her left was consequently bare.