The men would bring their own food and drink. Priscilla would sometimes have prepared a salad or a plate of biscuits, but the real business of the evenings was either to make music or else to raid Bird’s jumbled pile of books for passages to read aloud. Then they would argue into the darkness, setting the world to rights as Adam and Starbuck used to do when they were at Yale, though these new evenings of discussion were laced with news and rumors of the war. In western Virginia, where the Colonel’s raid had been so damply disappointing, the Confederacy suffered new defeats. The worst was at Philippi where northern forces won a humiliatingly easy victory that the northern newspapers dubbed the “Philippi Races.” Thomas Jackson, fearing to be cut off in Harper’s Ferry, abandoned the river town, and that event made it seem to the young officers in Faulconer Court House that the North was invincible, but then, a week later, came reports of a skirmish on the seaboard of Virginia where northern troops had sallied inland from a coastal fortress only to be bloodily repulsed in the fields around Bethel Church.
Not all the news was true. There were rumors of victories that never happened and peace talks that never occurred. One day it was announced that the European powers had recognized the Confederacy and that the North was consequently suing for peace, but that turned out to be false even though the Reverend Moss had sworn on a stack of Bibles that it was the gospel truth. Bird was amused by the summer’s alarms. “It’s just a game,” he said, “just a game.”
“War is hardly a game, Uncle,” Adam chided.
“Of course it’s a game, and the Legion is your father’s toy and a very expensive one too. Which is why I hope we never get used in battle because then the toy will be broken and your father will be inconsolable.”
“Do you really hope that, Thaddeus?” his wife asked. She liked to sit in the garden till dark, but then, because she had taken over sole responsibility for the school, she would go to bed and leave the men to argue by candlelight.
“Of course I hope that,” Bird said. “No one in his right mind wants a battle.”
“Nate does,” Adam said teasingly.
“I said ‘in his right mind,’” Bird pounced. “I am careful to be precise with my words, perhaps because I never went to Yale. Do you really want to see battle, Starbuck?”
Starbuck half-smiled. “I want to see the elephant.”
“Unnecessarily large, gray, curiously wrinkled and with burdensome droppings,” Bird remarked.
“Thaddeus!” Priscilla laughed.
“I hope there’s peace,” Starbuck amended his wish, “but I am half-curious to see a battle.”
“Here!” Bird tossed a book across to Starbuck. “There’s an account of Waterloo in there, I think it begins on page sixty-eight. Read that, Starbuck, and you’ll be cured of your desire to see elephants.”
“You’re not curious, Thaddeus?” his wife charged him. She was sewing a flag together, one of the many banners that would be used to decorate the town on the Fourth of July, which was now just two days away and was to be marked by a great gala at Seven Springs. There would be a feast, a parade, fireworks and dancing, and everyone in town was expected to contribute something to the celebration.
“I’m a little curious, of course.” Bird paused to light one of the thin, malodorous cigars that he favored. “I have a curiosity about all the extremes of human existence because I am tempted to believe that truth is best manifested in such extremes, whether it be in the excesses of religion, violence, affection or greed. Battle is merely a symptom of one of those excesses.”
“I would much rather that you applied yourself to the study of excessive affection,” Priscilla said mildly, and the young men laughed. They were all fond of Priscilla and touched by the evident tenderness that she and Bird felt for each other.
The talk drifted on. The yard, which was supposed to supply the schoolmaster with vegetables, had become overgrown with black-eyed Susans and daisies, though Priscilla had made space for some herbs that were pungent in the evening warmth. The back of the yard was bounded by two apple trees and a broken fence beyond which was a meadow and a long view across the wooded foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a lovely peaceful place.
“Are you taking a servant, Starbuck?” Lieutenant Davies asked. “Because if so I have to put his name in the servants’ book.”
Starbuck had been daydreaming. “A servant?”
“The Colonel, in his wisdom,” Bird explained, “has decreed that officers may provide themselves with a servant, but only, mark this, if the man is black. No white servants allowed!”
“I can’t afford a servant,” Starbuck said. “White or black.”
“I was rather hoping to make Joe Sparrow my servant,” Bird said wistfully, “though unless he blacks his face now, I can’t.”
“Why Sparrow?” Adam asked. “So you could whistle at each other?”
“Very amusing,” Bird was entirely unamused. “I promised Blanche I would keep him safe, that is why, but the Lord only knows how I’m supposed to do that.”
“Poor Runt,” Adam said. Joe Sparrow, a thin and scholarly sixteen-year-old, was universally known as Runt. He had won a scholarship to the University of Virginia where he was supposed to begin his studies in the fall, but he had broken his mother’s heart by joining the Legion. He had been one of the recruits shamed into volunteering by receiving a petticoat. His mother, Blanche, had pleaded with Washington Faulconer to excuse her boy, but Faulconer had been adamant that every young man had a duty to serve. Joe, like many of the men, was a three-month volunteer, and the Colonel had assured Blanche Sparrow that her son would have served his stint by the time his first semester began.
“The Colonel really should have excused him,” Bird said. “This war shouldn’t be fought by bookish boys, but by men like Truslow.”
“Because he’s expendable?” one of the sergeants asked.
“Because he understands violence,” Bird said, “which we all have to learn to understand if we are to be good soldiers.”
Priscilla peered at her stitches in the fading light. “I wonder what happened to Truslow’s daughter?”
“Did she ever talk with you, Starbuck?” Bird asked.
“With me?” Starbuck sounded surprised.
“It was just that she asked for you,” Bird explained. “On the night that she came here.”
“I thought you didn’t know her?” Adam said idly.
“I don’t. I met her at Truslow’s cabin, but not to notice.” Starbuck was glad that the dusk hid his blush. “No, she didn’t speak to me.”
“She asked for you and for Ridley, but of course neither of you was here.” Bird checked suddenly, as though aware that he had been indiscreet. “Not that it matters. Did you bring your flute, Sergeant Howes? I was thinking we might attempt the Mozart?”
Starbuck listened to the music, but he could find no joy in it. In these last weeks he felt he had come to an understanding of himself, or at least he had found an equilibrium as his moods had ceased to oscillate between black despair and dizzy hope. Instead he had taken pleasure in the long days of work and exercise, yet now the reminder of Sally Truslow had utterly destroyed his peace. And she had asked for him! And that revelation, so casually made, added new and bone-dry fuel to Starbuck’s dreams. She wanted his help, and he had not been here, so had she gone to Ridley? To that goddamned son of a supercilious bitch Ridley?
Next morning Starbuck confronted Ridley. They had hardly spoken in the last few weeks, not out of distaste, but simply because they kept separate friends. Ridley was leader of a small group of hard-riding, hard-drinking young officers who thought of themselves as rakes and daredevils and who despised the men who gathered in Pecker Bird’s garden to talk away the long evenings. Ridley, when Starbuck found him, was stretched full-length in his tent, recovering, he said, from a night in Greeley’s Tavern. One of his cronies, a lieutenant called Moxey, was sitting on the other bed with his head in his hands, groaning. Ridley similarly groaned when he
saw Starbuck. “It’s the Reverend! Have you come to convert me? I’m beyond conversion.”
“I’d like a word with you.”
“Go ahead.” Under the sunlit canvas Ridley’s face looked a sickly yellow.
“A word alone.”
Ridley turned to look at Moxey. “Go away, Mox.”
“Don’t mind me, Starbuck, I am oblivious,” Moxey said.
“He said to go away,” Starbuck insisted.
Moxey looked up at Starbuck, saw something hostile in the tall northerner’s face, so shrugged. “I am gone. I am vanishing. Good-bye. Oh, my God!” This last was in greeting to the brightness of the morning sun.
Ridley sat up and swung round so that his stockinged feet were on the groundsheet. “Oh, God.” He groaned, then groped inside one of his boots where he evidently kept his cigars and matches at night. “You’re looking awful grim, Reverend. Does goddamn Pelham want us to march to Rosskill and back? Tell him I’m sick.” He lit the cigar, inhaled deeply, then looked up at Starbuck with bloodshot eyes. “Lay your word on me, Starbuck. Do your worst.”
“Where’s Sally?” Starbuck blurted out the question. He had meant to be altogether more circumspect, but when the moment of confrontation came he could find no words other than the simple, bald question.
“Sally?” Ridley asked, then feigned disbelief. “Sally! Who in the name of God is Sally?”
“Sally Truslow.” Starbuck was already feeling foolish, wondering just what obscure yet undeniable passion was driving him to this humiliating enquiry.
Ridley shook his head tiredly, then sucked on the cigar. “Now why in the name of God, Reverend, would you think that I would know the first goddamned thing about Sally Truslow?”
“Because she ran away to Richmond. To you. I know that.” Starbuck knew no such thing, but Pecker Bird, pressed hard, had admitted giving Sally the address of Ridley’s brother in Richmond.
“She never found me, Reverend,” Ridley said. “But what if she had? Would it have mattered?”
Starbuck had no answer to that question. Instead he stood foolish and uncertain between the folded back flaps of Ridley’s tent.
Ridley hawked a gob of spittle that he shot past Starbuck’s boots. “I’m interested, Reverend, so tell me. Just what is Sally to you?”
“Nothing.”
“So why the hell are you bothering me this early in the goddamned morning?”
“Because I want to know.”
“Or is it that her daddy wants to know?” Ridley asked, betraying his first uncertainty of the conversation. Starbuck shook his head and Ridley laughed. “Are you on heat for her, Reverend?”
“No!”
“But you are, Reverend, you are. I can tell, and I’ll even tell you what to do about it. Go to Greeley’s Tavern in Main Street and pay the tall woman in the taproom ten bucks. She’s an ugly cow, but she’ll cure your ailments. You got ten bucks left of that fifty you took off me?” Starbuck said nothing and Ridley shook his head, as if despairing of the northerner’s common sense. “I ain’t seen Sally for weeks. Not for weeks. She’s married, I hear, and that was the end of her for me. Not that I ever knew her well, you understand me?” He stressed the question by jabbing the lit end of the cigar at Starbuck.
Starbuck wondered just what he had expected to achieve by this confrontation. A confession from Ridley? An address where Sally might be found? He had made a fool of himself, betraying his own vulnerability to Ridley’s mockery. Now, as awkwardly as he had begun the confrontation, he tried to back out of it. “I hope you’re not lying to me, Ridley.”
“Oh, Reverend, there’s so little you understand. Like good manners for a start. You want to accuse me of lying? Then you do it with a sword in your hand, or with a pistol. I don’t mind facing you in a duel, Reverend, but I’ll be damned if I have to sit here and listen to your goddamned whining and bitching without so much as a mug of coffee inside me. You mind asking my son of a bitch servant to get me some coffee on your way out? Hey, Moxey! You can come back in now. The Reverend and I have finished our morning prayers.” Ridley looked up at Starbuck and jerked his head in curt dismissal. “Now go away, boy.”
Starbuck went away. As he walked back down the tent lines he heard a mocking burst of laughter from Ridley and Moxey and the sound made him flinch. Oh God, he thought, but he had just made such a fool of himself. Such a goddamned fool. And for what? For a murderer’s daughter who just happened to be pretty. He walked away, defeated and disconsolate.
INDEPENDENCE DAY DAWNED CLEAR. IT PROMISED TO BE HOT, BUT there was a blessed breeze coming off the hills and the only clouds were wispy, high, and soon gone.
In the morning the Legion cleaned their uniforms. They used wire brushes, button sticks, blacking and soap until their woolen coats and trousers, leather boots and webbing belts, were as spotless as honest effort could achieve. They blacked their ammunition pouches, scrubbed their canteens and haversacks, and tried to unwrinkle the pasteboard tops and visors of their forage caps. They polished their belt buckles and hat badges, then oiled the walnut stocks of their rifles until the wood shone. At eleven o’clock, anticipating the girls who would even then be gathering in the grounds of Seven Springs, the companies formed in full uniform and kit. The fifty cavalrymen made an eleventh company that formed ahead of the others, while the two cannon, which had been pulled from the ruts their wheels had made in the long grass and then attached to their limbers, paraded with the regimental band at the rear of the Legion.
The Colonel was waiting at Seven Springs, leaving Major Pelham in temporary command. At five minutes past eleven Pelham ordered the Legion to stand to attention, to order arms, to fix bayonets and then to shoulder arms. Eight hundred and seventy-two men were on parade. They were not the Legion’s full strength, but those recruits who were too new to have learned their drill had been sent ahead to Seven Springs where they were employed in nailing strips of red baize to the church benches, which were being used for the communal dinner. Two massive tents had been raised on the south lawn to offer shade to the visitors, and a cook house established close to the stables where a pair of beefs and six hogs were being roasted whole by sweating cooks who had also been seconded from the Legion. The ladies of the town had donated vats of beans, bowls of salad, trays of corn cakes and barrels of dried peaches. There were pones of cornbread, and stands of sweet cured hams, smoked turkey and venison. There was hung beef with apple sauce, pickled cucumbers and, for the children, trays of doughnuts sprinkled with sugar. The teetotalers were provided with lemonade and sweet water from Seven Springs’s best well, while the rest had casks of ale and barrels of hard cider brought from the cellar of Greeley’s Tavern. There was wine available in the house, though past experience suggested that only a handful of gentry would bother with such a refined beverage. The provisions were generous and the decorations lavish as they always were at Seven Springs on Independence Day, but this year, in an attempt to demonstrate that the Confederacy was the true inheritor of America’s revolutionary spirit, Washington Faulconer had been especially munificent.
At eight minutes past eleven Sergeant Major Proctor ordered the Legion to advance and the band, led by the Bandmaster August Little, played “Dixie” as the fifty cavalrymen led the Legion out of the field. The cavalrymen rode with drawn sabers and the companies marched with fixed bayonets. The town was deserted, because the townsfolk had all gone to Seven Springs, but the troops made a fine show as they marched past the flag-hung courthouse, and under the banners strung across the streets, and past the Sparrows’ dry goods store that had a fancy window of eight large sheets of plate glass, which had been brought out from Richmond just one year before and were large enough to serve as a giant mirror in which the passing companies could admire their only slightly distorted selves. The march was noisy, not because anyone was speaking, but because the men were still not used to carrying their full kit. Their canteens banged against their bayonets, and their tin cups, hanging off the knapsacks, clanged against
their cartridge boxes.
The first spectators were waiting just inside the white gates of the Seven Springs estate. They were mostly children who, equipped with paper flags of the Confederacy, ran alongside the troops as they marched beneath the avenue of live oaks that led from the Rosskill Road to Seven Springs’s front door. The Legion did not march all the way to the house but instead struck off the driveway where a gap had been made in the snake fence beyond the trees and so circled the house to approach the flag-decked south lawns through two ever-thickening lines of onlookers who applauded the fine-looking troops. The cavalry, curbing in their excited horses to make them step high, made a particularly noble display as they rode past the reviewing stand on which Washington Faulconer presided with a politician who, until secession, had sat in the United States Congress. Faulconer and the erstwhile congressman were flanked by the Reverend Moss, Judge Bulstrode and Colonel Roland Penycrake, who was ninety-seven years old and had been a lieutenant in George Washington’s army at Yorktown. “I don’t mind him remembering Yorktown,” Washington Faulconer told Captain Ethan Ridley, who was the aide accompanying the Colonel on Independence Day, “but I do wish he didn’t keep reminding us at such length.” But on this day, of all days, it was churlish to deny the old man his moment of glory.
Adam, dressed in his fine uniform, led the cavalrymen. Major Pelham rode a plump docile mare at the head of the ten companies, while Major Pecker Bird, whose gorgeous uniform had arrived from Richmond to the general amusement of the Legion and chagrin of his brother-in-law, marched on foot at the head of the band. Second Lieutenant Starbuck, who had no real duties this day, rode the mare Pocahontas just behind Major Bird, who made no effort to keep in step with the drumbeat but strolled long-legged and easy just as if he were taking one of his day-long country walks.
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