Bernard Cornwell: Rebel

Someone cheered the young man, admiring his spirit. There were about two hundred people in the crowd with some fifty more onlookers who half hung back from the proceedings and half encouraged them. The crowd itself was mischievous rather than ugly, like children given an unexpected vacation from school. Most of them were in working clothes, betraying that they had used the news of Fort Sumter’s fall as an excuse to leave their benches and lathes and presses. They wanted some excitement, and errant Northerners caught in the city’s streets would be this day’s best providers of that excitement.

The bald man rubbed his face. He had lost dignity in front of his friends and wanted revenge. ‘I asked you a question, boy.’

‘And I said it was not your business.’ The young man was trying to pick up his books, though two or three had already been snatched away. The prisoner already tied to the hotel’s window bars watched in silence.

‘So where are you from, boy?’ a tall man asked, but in a conciliatory voice, as though he was offering the young man a chance to make a dignified escape.

‘Faulconer Court House.’ The young man heard and accepted the note of conciliation. He guessed that other strangers had been accosted by this mob, then questioned and released, and that if he kept his head then he too might be spared whatever fate awaited the middle-aged man already secured to the railings.

‘Faulconer Court House?’ the tall man asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Your name?’

‘Baskerville.’ He had just read the name on a fascia board of a shop across the street; ‘Bacon and Baskerville,’ the board read, and the young man snatched the name in relief. ‘Nathaniel Baskerville.’ He embellished the lie with his real Christian name.

‘You don’t sound like a Virginian, Baskerville,’ the tall man said.

‘Only by adoption.’ His vocabulary, like the books he had been carrying, betrayed that the young man was educated.

‘So what do you do in Faulconer County, boy?’ another man asked.

‘I work for Washington Faulconer.’ Again the young man spoke defiantly, hoping the name would serve as a talisman for his protection.

‘Best let him go, Don!’ a man called.

‘Let him be!’ a woman intervened. She did not care that the boy was claiming the protection of one of Virginia’s wealthiest landowners; rather she was touched by the misery in his eyes as well as by the unmistakable fact that the crowd’s captive was very good-looking. Women had always been quick to notice Nathaniel, though he himself was too inexperienced to realize their interest.

‘You’re a Yankee, boy, aren’t you?’ the taller man challenged.

‘Not any longer.’

‘So how long have you been in Faulconer County?’ That was the tanner again.

‘Long enough.’ The lie was already losing its cohesion. Nathaniel had never visited Faulconer County, though he had met the county’s richest inhabitant, Washington Faulconer, whose son was his closest friend.

‘So what town lies halfway between here and Faulconer Court House?’ the tanner, still wanting revenge, demanded of him.

‘Answer him!’ the tall man snapped.

Nathaniel was silent, betraying his ignorance.

‘He’s a spy!’ a woman whooped.

‘Bastard!’ The tanner moved in fast, trying to kick Nathaniel, but the young man saw the kick coming and stepped to one side. He slapped a fist at the bald man, clipping an ear, then drove his other hand at the man’s ribs. It was like hitting a hog carcass for all the good it did. Then a dozen hands were mauling and hitting Nathaniel; a fist smacked into his eye and another bloodied his nose to hurl him back hard against the hotel’s wall. His carpetbag was stolen, his books were finally gone, and now a man tore open his coat and ripped his pocket book free. Nathaniel tried to stop that theft, but he was overwhelmed and helpless. His nose was bleeding and his eye swelling. The Negro teamster watched expressionless and did not even betray any reaction when a dozen men commandeered his wagon and insisted he jump down from the box. The men clambered aboard the vehicle and shouted they were going to Franklin Street where a gang was mending the road. The crowd parted to let the wagon turn while the carter, unregarded, edged his way to the crowd’s fringe before running free.

Nathaniel had been thrust against the window bars. His hands were jerked down hard across the bar’s spiked tops and tied with rope to the iron cage. He watched as one of his books was kicked into the gutter, its spine broken and its pages fluttering free. The crowd tore apart his carpetbag, but found little of value except a razor and two more books.

‘Where are you from?’ The middle-aged man who was Nathaniel’s fellow prisoner must have been a very dignified figure before the jeering crowd had dragged him to the railings. He was a portly man, balding, and wearing an expensive broadcloth coat.

‘I come from Boston.’ Nathaniel tried to ignore a drunken woman who pranced mockingly in front of him, brandishing her bottle. ‘And you, sir?’

‘Philadelphia. I only planned to be here for a few hours. I left my traps at the railroad depot and thought I’d look around the city. I have an interest in church architecture, you see, and wanted to see St. Paul’s Episcopal.’ The man shook his head sorrowfully, then flinched as he looked at Nathaniel again. ‘Is your nose broken?’

‘I don’t think so.’ The blood from his nostrils was salty on Nathaniel’s lips.

‘You’ll have a rare black eye, son. But I enjoyed seeing you fight. Might I ask your profession?’

‘I’m a student, sir. At Yale College. Or I was.’

‘My name is Doctor Morley Burroughs. I’m a dentist.’

‘Starbuck, Nathaniel Starbuck.’ Nathaniel Starbuck saw no need to hide his name from his fellow captive.

‘Starbuck!’ The dentist repeated the name in a tone that implied recognition. ‘Are you related?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I pray they don’t discover it,’ the dentist said grimly.

‘What are they going to do to us?’ Starbuck could not believe he was in real danger. He was in the plumb center of an American town in broad daylight! There were constables nearby, magistrates, churches, schools! This was America, not Mexico or Cathay.

The dentist pulled at his bonds, relaxed, pulled again. ‘From what they’re saying about road menders, son, my guess is tar and feathers, but if they find out you’re a Starbuck?’ The dentist sounded half-hopeful, as though the crowd’s animosity might be entirely diverted onto Starbuck, thus leaving him unscathed.

The drunken woman’s bottle smashed on the roadway. Two other women were dividing Starbuck’s grimy shirts between them while a small bespectacled man was leafing through the papers in Starbuck’s pocket book. There had been little money there, just four dollars, but Starbuck did not fear the loss of his money. Instead he feared the discovery of his name, which was written on a dozen letters in the pocket book. The small man had found one of the letters, which he now opened, read, turned over, then read again. There was nothing private in the letter, it merely confirmed the time of a train on the Penn Central Road, but Starbuck’s name was written in block letters on the letter’s cover and the small man had spotted it. He looked up at Starbuck, then back to the letter, then up at Starbuck yet again. ‘Is your name Starbuck?’ he asked loudly.

Starbuck said nothing.

The crowd smelled excitement and turned back to the prisoners. A bearded man, red-faced, burly and even taller than Starbuck, took up the interrogation. ‘Is your name Starbuck?’

Starbuck looked around, but there was no help in sight. The constables were leaving this mob well alone, and though some respectable-looking people were watching from the high windows of the houses on the far side of Cary Street, none was moving to stop the persecution. A few women looked sympathetically at Starbuck, but they were powerless to help. There was a minister in a frock coat and Geneva bands hovering at the crowd’s edge, but the street was too fired with whiskey and political passion for a man of God to achieve any good, and so the minister was contenting himself with making small ineffective cries of protest that were easily drowned by the raucous celebrants.