Bernard Cornwell - The Bloody Ground

Starbuck walked into Richmond where he left Lucifer, his small luggage, and the letter for Belvedere Delaney at Sally’s house, then he led Martha Potter on a tour of Richmond’s drinking dens. Alcohol was officially banned from the city, but the government might as well have tried to outlaw breathing for all the difference their high-mindedness had made.

Starbuck began with the more respectable houses close to the Byrd Street depot of the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad, where Martha had last seen her husband. Starbuck spared her the brothels, reckoning that no whore would have endured a drunk for three days. Instead they would have picked Matthew Potter clean on the first night and then pitched him into the street to be swept up by the provosts. Once sober the lieutenant would have been sent to Camp Lee and his failure to arrive suggested that he had discovered some liquor-sodden haven, or worse.

Starbuck worked his way down the hierarchy of liquor shops. The first places he searched had some pretensions to gentility, maybe a gilded mirror or a stretch of tobacco-soaked carpet, but gradually the furnishings, like the liquor, worsened. He knocked on a half dozen doors in Locust Alley, but found no sign of the missing lieutenant. He tried Martin Street, where the whores hung out of the upper windows and made Martha blush. “He didn’t have the money to drink all these days, sir,” she told Starbuck.

“He might have,” Starbuck insisted.

“There weren’t more than three dollars in my purse.”

“Three dollars will take you a long way in this town, ma’am,” Starbuck said, “and I daresay he had a coat? He had a pair of boots? A revolver?”

“All those, yes.”

“Then he could sell those and be drunk for three months. Hell,” he said, then apologized. “Forgive my language, ma’am, but that’s where he is. The Hells. I think, ma’am, I’d better take you back to Miss Sally’s.”

“I’m coming with you,” Martha insisted. For all her timidity she was a dogged girl and no amount of Starbuck’s persuasion could convince her to abandon the search.

“Ma’am, it ain’t safe in the Hells.”

“But he might be injured.”

He might be dead, Starbuck thought. “I must insist, ma’am.”

“You can insist all you want, sir,” Martha said stubbornly, “but I’m still coming. I’ll just follow you if you won’t escort me.”

Starbuck took out his revolver and checked that all five cones were primed with percussion caps. “Ma’am,” he said, “where I’m going ain’t called the Hells for nothing. It’s in Screamersville, down by Penitentiary Bottom. Ugly names, ma’am, ugly place. Even the provosts don’t go there under company strength.”

Martha frowned. “They outlaws there?” she asked.

“In a manner, ma’am. Some deserters, a lot of thieves, and a lot of slaves. Only these slaves aren’t under orders, ma’am, they’re out of the Tredegar Iron Works and they’re tougher than the stuff they roll in the mills.”

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