Bernard Cornwell - Rebel

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, waiflike 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 supper-time, 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 inquire 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.