Bernard Cornwell - Rebel

Starbuck was tempted to lie, but he had neither the energy nor the will to sustain a fiction. ‘A preacher,’ he answered wearily.

The sawing abruptly stopped, causing Roper to protest as his rhythm was broken. Truslow ignored the protest. ‘You’re a preacher?’

‘I was training to be a minister.’ Starbuck offered a more exact definition.

‘A man of God?’

‘I hope so, yes. Indeed I do.’ Except he knew he was not worthy and the knowledge of his backsliding was bitter.

Truslow stared incredulously at Starbuck and then, astonishingly, he wiped his hands down his filthy clothes as though trying to smarten himself up for his visitor. ‘I’ve got work for you,’ he announced grimly.

Starbuck glanced at the wicked-toothed saw. ‘But …’

‘Preacher’s work,’ Truslow said curtly. ‘Roper! Ladder.’

Roper dropped a homemade ladder into the pit and Starbuck, flinching from the pain in his hands, let himself be chivied up its crude rungs.

‘Did you bring your book?’ Truslow demanded as he followed Starbuck up the ladder.

‘Book?’

‘All preachers have books. Never mind, there’s one in the house. Roper! You want to ride down to the Decker house? Tell Sally and Robert to come here fast. Take the man’s horse. What’s your name, mister?’

‘Starbuck. Nathaniel Starbuck.’

The name evidently meant nothing to Truslow. ‘Take Mister Starbuck’s mare,’ he called to Roper, ‘and tell Sally I won’t take no for an answer!’ All these instructions had been hurled over Truslow’s shoulders as he hurried to his log house. The dog scurried aside as its master stalked past, then lay staring malevolently at Starbuck, growling deep in its throat.

‘You don’t mind if I take the horse?’ Roper asked. ‘Not to worry. I know her. I used to work for Mister Faulconer. I know this mare, Pocahontas, isn’t she?’

Starbuck waved a feeble hand in assent. ‘Who is Sally?’

‘Truslow’s daughter.’ Roper chuckled as he untied the mare’s bridle and adjusted the saddle. ‘She’s a wild one, but you know what they say of women. They’re the devil’s nets, and young Sally will snare a few souls before she’s through. She don’t live here now. When her mother was dying she took herself off to Missus Decker, who can’t abide Truslow.’ Roper seemed amused by the human tangle. He swung himself into Pocahontas’s saddle. ‘I’ll be off, Mister Truslow!’ he called toward the cabin.

‘Go on, Roper! Go!’ Truslow emerged from the house carrying an enormous Bible that had lost its back cover and had a broken spine. ‘Hold it, mister.’ He thrust the dilapidated Bible at Starbuck, then bent over a water butt and scooped handfuls of rainwater over his scalp. He tried to pat the matted filthy hair into some semblance of order, then crammed his greasy hat back into place before beckoning to Starbuck. ‘Come on, mister.’

Starbuck followed Truslow across the clearing. Flies buzzed in the warm evening air. Starbuck, cradling the Bible in his forearms to spare his skinned palms, tried to explain the misunderstanding to Thomas Truslow. ‘I’m not an ordained minister, Mister Truslow.’

‘What’s ordained mean?’ Truslow had stopped at the edge of the clearing and was unbuttoning his filthy jeans. He stared at Starbuck, evidently expecting an answer, then began to urinate. ‘It keeps the deer off the crop,’ he explained. ‘So what’s ordained mean?’

‘It means that I have not been called by a congregation to be their pastor.’

‘But you’ve got the book learning?’

‘Yes, most of it.’

‘And you could be ordained?’

Starbuck was immediately assailed with guilt about Mademoiselle Dominique Demarest. ‘I’m not sure I want to be, anymore.’

‘But you could be?’ Truslow insisted.

‘I suppose so, yes.’

‘Then you’re good enough for me. Come on.’ He buttoned his trousers and beckoned Starbuck under the trees to where, in a tended patch of grass and beneath a tree that was brilliant with red blossom, a single grave lay. The grave marker was a broad piece of wood, rammed into the earth and marked with the one word Emly. The grave did not look old, for its blossom-littered earth ridge was still sparse with grass. ‘She was my wife,’ Truslow said in a surprisingly meek and almost shy voice.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Died Christmas Day.’ Truslow blinked, and suddenly Starbuck felt a wave of sorrow come from the small, urgent man, a wave every bit as forceful and overwhelming as Truslow’s more habitual emanation of violence. Truslow seemed unable to speak, as though there were not words to express what he felt. ‘Emily was a good wife,’ he finally said, ‘and I was a good husband to her. She made me that. A good woman can do that to a man. She can make a man good.’

‘Was she sick?’ Starbuck asked uneasily.

Truslow nodded. He had taken off his greasy hat, which he now held awkwardly in his strong hands. ‘Congestion of the brain. It weren’t an easy death.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Starbuck said inadequately.

‘There was a man might have saved her. A Yankee.’ Truslow spoke the last word with a sour hatred that made Starbuck shiver. ‘He was a fancy doctor from up North. He was visiting relatives in the valley last Thanksgiving.’ He jerked his head westward, indicating the Shenandoah Valley beyond the intervening mountains. ‘Doctor Danson told me of him, said he could work miracles, so I rode over and begged him to come up and see my Emily. She couldn’t be moved, see. I went on bended knee.’ Truslow fell silent, remembering the humiliation, then shook his head. ‘The man refused to move. Said there was nothing he could do, but the truth was he didn’t want to stir off his fat ass and mount a horse in that rain. They ran me off the property.’

Starbuck had never heard of anyone being cured of congestion of the brain and suspected the Yankee doctor had known all along that anything he tried would be a waste of time, but how was anyone to persuade a man like Thomas Truslow of that truth?

‘She died on Christmas Day,’ Truslow went on softly. ‘The snow was thick up here then, like a blanket. Just me and her, the girl had run off, damn her skin.’

‘Sally?’

‘Hell, yes.’ Truslow was standing to attention now with his hands crossed awkwardly over his breast, almost as if he was imitating the death stance of his beloved Emily. ‘Emily and me weren’t married proper,’ he confessed to Starbuck. ‘She ran off with me the year before I went to be a soldier. I was just sixteen, she weren’t a day older, but she was already married. We were wrong, and we both knew it, but it was like we couldn’t help ourselves.’ There were tears in his eyes, and Starbuck suddenly felt glad to know that this tough man had once behaved as stupidly and foolishly as Starbuck had himself just behaved. ‘I loved her,’ Truslow went on, ‘and that’s the truth of it, though Pastor Mitchell wouldn’t wed us because he said we were sinners.’

‘I’m sure he should have made no such judgment,’ Starbuck said gravely.

‘I reckon he should. It was his job to judge us. What else is a preacher for except to teach us conduct? I ain’t complaining, but God gave us his punishment, Mister Starbuck. Only one of our children lived, and she broke our hearts, and now Emily’s dead and I’m left alone. God is not mocked, Mister Starbuck.’

Suddenly, unexpectedly, Starbuck felt an immense surge of sympathy for this awkward, hard, difficult man who stood so clumsily beside the grave he must have dug himself. Or perhaps Roper had helped him, or one of the other fugitive men who lived in this high valley out of sight of the magistrates and the taxmen who infested the plains. At Christmastime, too, and Starbuck imagined them carrying the limp body out into the snow and hacking down into the cold ground.