Hinton gestured with his revolver and the engineer opened the throttle full and the thirty-ton locomotive lurched forward like a great wounded beast as it toppled a few degrees sideways. Starbuck feared it was about to plunge down the river's bank, dragging its full cars behind, but then, mercifully, the huge machine stuck fast. Steam began to jet from its farther side. One of its small front wheels spun free above the churned dirt while the drive wheels on the farther side of the engine churned a foot-deep trench into the railbed before the engineer discon­nected the pistons and more steam slashed out into the rain.

  "Set the tender ablaze!" Truslow yelled and Hinton ordered one of the engineers to take a shovel load of red hot timbers from the firebox and thrust it deep into the tender's cordwood. "More!" Truslow urged, "more!" Truslow had found the vent­ing faucet for the tender's water storage tank and turned it on. Water poured out of one end of the tender while the other began to blaze as fiercely as the burning boxcar.

  "Go!" Truslow shouted, "go!"

  The raiders pushed past the barricade and ran toward the bridge. Truslow stayed with two men to guard against any pur­suit as Captain Hinton led the others across the narrow planks laid beside the rails on the trestles. Colonel Faulconer was wait­ing on the farther bank and shouting at Hinton's men to hurry. "Light the fires! Medlicott!" Faulconer called down into the gorge. "Hurry!" Faulconer shouted at Hinton. "For God's sake! What held you up?"

  "Had to make sure the train didn't go back for help," Cap­tain Hinton said.

  "No one obeys orders here!" The Colonel had given the order to withdraw at least a quarter hour before and every sec­ond of the delay had been an insult to his already fragile authority. "Starbuck!" he shouted. "Didn't I order you to bring the men back?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Then why didn't you?"

  "My fault! Faulconer," Hinton intervened.

  "I gave you an order, Nate!" the Colonel shouted. His other men were already mounted, all but for Medlicott, who had struck a light to the mass of combustibles about the trestle leg. "Now the fuse!" the Colonel shouted.

  "Truslow!" Captain Hinton bellowed at the three men left on the far side of the gorge.

  Truslow, the leather bag in his hand, was the last man away from the barricade. As he crossed the bridge he kicked the planks aside, making pursuit difficult. A gun was fired from the far barricade, the smoke of its powder snatched instantly away by the breeze. The bullet struck a rail on the bridge and whined off across the river. Two dense plumes of smoke from the burning boxcar and tender were drifting low and acrid above the North Branch.

  "Fuse is lit!" Medlicott shouted and began clawing his way up the gorge's side. Behind him a dribble of smoke spat and writhed from the lit fuse as it snaked down the slope toward the great heap of timber and brush stacked about the gunpowder.

  "Hurry!" the Colonel shouted. A horse whinnied and reared. More men fired from the barricade, but Truslow was across the bridge now and well out of effective revolver range. "Come on, man!" Washington Faulconer shouted. Truslow still had his leather bag, just as all Hinton's men had similar bags. Faulconer must have known from the heavy bags why his order to withdraw had been so long ignored, but he chose to say nothing. Sergeant Medlicott, muddy and damp, scrambled out of the gorge and fumbled for his stirrup just as the smoking fuse darted into the pile of brush. Sergeant Truslow hauled himself into his saddle, and Faulconer turned away. "Let's go!" He led his men off the railroad's embankment. The fire in the gorge had to be quickening, for thick smoke was writhing about the trestle's lattice, though the gunpowder had still not exploded. "Come on!" Faulconer urged, and behind him the horses scrambled and slipped on the muddy slope until, at last, they were concealed from the train by foliage and, though a few random bullets ripped through the leaves and twigs, none of the Legion's men was hit.

  Faulconer stopped at the crest and turned to look back at the stricken train. The fires in the boxcar and tender had spread to the cars and the erstwhile passengers, wet and miser­able, now clambered up the wet slope to escape the danger.

  The long passenger cars served like funnels in which the heat roared fierce until the windows cracked open and released bil­lowing gusts of flame that licked into the driving rain.

  The train was a blazing wreck, its engine derailed and cars destroyed, but the bridge, which had been the object of the raid, still stood. The fuse had failed to detonate the gunpowder, probably because the powder was damp, while the fire, which had been supposed to dry the powder and then explode it if the fuse failed, now seemed to be succumbing to wet fuel and wind-driven rain. "If you had obeyed my orders," the Colonel charged Starbuck bitterly, "there would have been time to reset the charges."

  "Me, sir?" Starbuck was astonished at the unfairness of the accusation.

  Captain Hinton was equally surprised by the Colonel's words. "I told you, Faulconer, it was my fault."

  "I didn't give you the order, Hinton. I gave it to Starbuck, and the order was disobeyed." Faulconer spoke in a cold, clipped fury, then twisted his horse away and raked back with his spurs. The horse whinnied and started abruptly forward.

  "Goddamn Yankee," Sergeant Medlicott said softly, then followed Faulconer.

  "Forget them, Nate," Hinton said. "It wasn't your fault. I'll square the Colonel for you."

  Starbuck still could not believe that he was being blamed for the failure of the attack. He sat dumbstruck, appalled at the Colonel's unfairness. Down on the rail line, unaware that a handful of the raiders still lingered above them, some of the train's passengers were edging out onto the undamaged trestle while others had begun to pull the barricade clear of the bro­ken tracks. The fire in the gorge seemed to have gone out completely.

  "He's used to getting his own way." Truslow pulled his horse alongside Starbuck. "He thinks he can buy what he wants and have it perfect, right from the start."

  "But I didn't do anything wrong!"

  "You didn't have to. He wants someone to blame. And he reckons that if he pisses all over you, then you won't piss back at him. That's why he chose you. He wasn't going to piss on me, was he?" Truslow spurred on.

  Starbuck looked back to the gorge. The bridge was undam­aged and the cavalry raid, which had been intended as a glori­ous victory to launch the Legion's triumphant crusade, had turned into a muddled, rain-soaked farce. And Starbuck was being blamed.

  "Goddamn it," he swore aloud, defying his God, then turned and followed Truslow south.

  "Can this really be it?" Belvedere Delaney had a four-day-old copy of the Wheeling Intelligencer that had been brought to Richmond from Harper's Ferry. The Intelligencer, though a Virginian paper, was soundly pro-Union.

  "What?" Ethan Ridley was distracted and utterly uninter­ested in whatever the newspaper might have reported.

  "Thieves stopped an eastbound passenger train on Wednes­day last, one man hurt, locomotive temporarily unrailed." Delaney was condensing the story as he scanned the column. "Four cars badly burned, a boxcar and the passengers looted, rails torn up, replaced very next day." He peered at Ridley through gold-rimmed half-moon reading glasses. "You don't really think this can be the first great triumph of your Faulconer Legion, do you?"

  "It doesn't sound like Faulconer. Now listen, Bev."

  "No, you listen to me." The half-brothers were in Delaney's rooms in Grace Street. The parlor windows looked through velvet curtains at the graceful spire of St. Paul's and, beyond it, toward the elegant white Capitol Building that was now the seat of the Provisional Confederate government. "You listen, because I am going to read the best part to you," Delaney said with exaggerated relish. "*It might be thought, from their despicable behavior, that the plug-uglies who intercepted the cars on Wednesday were mere vagabond thieves, but thieves do not attempt to destroy railway trestles, and it is that feeble effort of destruction which has convinced authorities that the villains were southern agents and not common criminals, though how it is possible to differentiate, we cannot tell.' Isn't this delicious, Ethan? 'The world is well instructed now in southern manners, for the bravery of the rebels encompassed the robbing of women, the frightening of children, and an abject failure to destroy the Anakansett Bridge which, though lightly toasted, was carrying freight the very next day.' Lightly toasted! Isn't that amusing, Ethan?" "No, goddamn it, no!"

  "I think it's highly amusing. Let's see now, bold pursuit by Ohio cavalry, held up by rains, swollen streams. Rogues got clear away, so clearly the pursuit wasn't near bold enough. Raiders are thought to have retired east toward the Shenandoah Valley. 'Our brethren of eastern Virginia who so like to boast of their greater civilization, seem to have sent these men as emis­saries of that vaunted superiority. If this be the best we can hope to see of their belligerent skills then we can rest assured that the nation's crisis will be short-lived and that the glorious Union will be reknit within weeks.' Oh, splendid!" Delaney took off his reading glasses and smiled at Ridley. "Not a very impressive display if it was your future father-in-law. One toasted bridge? He'll have to do better than that!"

  "For God's sake, Bev!" Ridley pleaded.

  Delaney made a great play of folding the newspaper, then of slipping it into the rosewood rack of other newspapers and journals that stood beside his armchair. His parlor was wonder­fully comfortable with leather chairs, a big round polished table, books on every wall, plaster busts of great Virginians and, over the mantel, a massive mirror with a gilded frame of linked cherubs and aspiring angels. Some of Delaney's precious porce­lain collection was displayed on the mantel, while other pieces stood among the leather-bound books. Delaney now made his brother wait even longer as he polished the half-moon glasses and carefully folded them into a velvet-lined case. "What on earth," he finally asked, "do you expect me to do about the damned girl?"

  "I want you to help me," Ridley said pathetically.

  "Why should I? The girl is one of your whores, not one of mine. She sought you out, not me. She's carrying your child, not mine, and her father's revenge threatens your life, certainly not mine, and do I really need to continue?" Delaney stood, crossed to the mantel, and took one of his yellow paper-wrapped cigarettes, which he used to import from France, but which now, he supposed, would become rarer than gold dust. He 1it the cigarette with a spill ignited from the coal fire. It was astonishing that he should need a fire this late in the year, but the rains that had come thundering out of the east had brought unseasonably cold winds. "Besides, what can I do?" He went on airily. "You've already tried to buy her off and it didn't work. So clearly you'll just have to pay her more."

  "She'll just come back," Ridley said. "And back again."

  "So what exactly does she want?" Delaney knew he would have to help his half-brother, at least if he was to go on profit­ing from the Faulconer Legion purchases, but he wanted to stretch Ethan on the rack a little before he agreed to find a solution to the problem posed by Sally Truslow's unexpected arrival in the city.

  "She wants me to find her somewhere to live. She expects me to pay for that, then to give her still more money every month. Naturally I've got to keep her bastard too. Jesus Christ!" Ridley swore viciously as he considered Sally's outra­geous demands.

  "Not just her bastard, but yours, too," Delaney pointed out unhelpfully. "Indeed, my own nephew! Or niece. I think I'd prefer a niece, Ethan. Would she be a half-niece, do you think? Maybe I could be her half-godfather."

  "Don't be so damned unhelpful," Ridley said, then scowled through the window at a city being pounded by rain. Grace Street was almost empty. There was just one carriage clattering toward Capitol Square and two Negroes sheltering in the door­way of the Methodist Church. "Does Mrs. Richardson have anyone who can get rid of babies?" Ridley turned to ask. Mrs. Richardson presided over the brothel in which his half-brother had such a significant investment.

  Delaney gave a delicate shrug that might have signified almost anything.

  "Mind you," Ridley went on, "Sally wants to keep the bas­tard, and she says if I won't help her then she'll tell Washing­ton Faulconer about me. And she says she'll tell her father. You know what he'll do to me?"

  "I don't suppose he'll choose to have a prayer meeting with you," Delaney chuckled. "Why don't you take the inconvenient bitch down to the Tredegar works and leave her on a spoil heap?" The Tredegar Iron Works by the James River was Rich­mond's filthiest, darkest and grimmest place, and not many enquiries were made about the tragedies that occurred around its satanic edges. Men died in fights, whores were knifed in its alleys, and dead or dying babies were abandoned in its filthy canals. It was a corner of hell in downtown Richmond.

  "I'm not a murderer," Ridley said sullenly, though in truth he had considered some such extraordinary and saving act of violence, but he was much too frightened of Sally Truslow who, he suspected, was hiding a gun somewhere among her property. She had come to him three nights before, arriving at Belvedere Delaney's rooms in the early evening. Delaney had been in Williamsburg, swearing a will, so Ridley had been alone in the apartment when Sally had rung the front bell. He had heard a commotion at the front door and gone downstairs to find George, his brother's house slave, confronting a bedrag­gled, wet and angry Sally. She had pushed past George who, with his customary and dignified politeness, had been trying to keep her from entering the house. "Tell this nigger to keep his hands off me," she screamed at Ridley.

  "It's all right, George. She's my cousin," Ridley had said, then had arranged for Sally's bedraggled horse to be stabled and for Sally herself to be shown upstairs to his brother's par­lor. "What the hell are you doing here?" he had asked her in horror.

  "I came to you," she announced, "like you said I could." Her ragged clothes dripped water onto Belvedere Delaney's fine Persian rug that lay in front of his red marble fireplace. Wind and rain howled at the casements, but in this warm and com­fortable room, insulated by the thick velvet curtains under their deep-tasseled valances, the fire burned softly and the candle flames scarcely flickered. Sally turned about on the rug, admir­ing the books, the furniture and the leather chairs. She was dazzled by the reflection of candlelight from decanters, from the glint of gilded frames, and from the precious European porcelain on the mantel. "This is nice, Ethan. I never knew you had a brother?"

  Ridley had crossed to the credenza where he opened a silver humidor and took out one of the cigars his brother kept for vis­itors. He needed a cigar to help recover his poise. "I thought you were married?"

  "I'll take one of those cigars," Sally said.

  He lit the cigar, gave it to her, then took another for himself. "You're wearing a wedding ring," he said, "so you are married. Why don't you go back to your husband?"

  She deliberately ignored his question, instead holding her ring finger up to the candlelight. "The ring belonged to my ma and she had it from her ma. My pa wanted to keep it, but I made him give it me. Ma always wanted me to have it."

  "Let me see it." Ridley took her finger and felt the thrill he always felt when he touched Sally and he wondered just what accident of bone and skin and lip and eye had made such a terrible beauty out of this foul-mouthed, sour-minded child of the hills. "It's pretty." He turned the ring on her fin­ger, feeling the dry lightness of her touch. "It's quite old, too." He suspected it was very old, and perhaps quite special and so he tried to pull it off her finger, but Sally jerked her hand away.

  "My pa wanted to keep it," she looked at the ring, "so I took it away from him." She laughed and drew on the cigar. "Besides, I ain't married proper. No more proper than if I jumped a broomstick."

  That was precisely what Ridley feared, but he tried not to show any apprehension. "Your husband will still come looking for you, won't he?"

  "Robert?" She laughed. "He won't do anything. A gelded hog's got more balls than Robert. But what about your lady friend? What will your Anna do when she knows I'm here?"

  "Will she know?"

  "She will, honey, 'cos I'll tell her. Unless you keep your word to me. Which means looking after me proper. I want to live in a place like this." She turned around the room, admiring its comfort, then looked back at Ridley. "Do you know a man called Starbuck?"

  "I know a boy called Starbuck," Ridley said.

  "A good-looking boy," Sally said coquettishly. A length of ash dropped off her cigar onto a rug. "He was the one that married me off to Robert. My pa made him do it. He made it sound all proper, with a book and all, and he even wrote it down to make it legal, but I know it wasn't proper."

  "Starbuck married you?" Ridley was amused.

  "He was nice about it. Real nice." Sally cocked her head at Ridley, wanting him to be jealous. "So then I told Robert he should go for a soldier, and I came here. To be with you."

  "But I won't be staying here," Ridley said. Sally watched him, her eyes catlike. "I'm going to the Legion," Ridley explained. "I shall just finish my business here, then I shall go back."

  "Then I tell you what other business you've got to finish, honey." Sally walked toward him, unconsciously graceful as she crossed the rich rugs and wax-polished boards. "You're going to find me a place to live, Ethan. Somewhere nice, with carpets like this and real chairs and a proper bed. And you can visit me there, like you said you would. Ain't that what you said? That you'd find a place where I could live? Where you'd keep me? And love me?" The last three words were said very softly and so close that Ridley could smell the cigar smoke on her breath.

  "I said that, yes." And he knew he could not resist her, but he also knew that as soon as they had made love he would hate Sally for her vulgarity and commonness. She was a child, scarce fifteen, yet she knew her power and Ridley knew it too. He knew she would fight to have her way and she would not care what destruction she caused in the fighting, and so, the very next day, Ridley moved her out of his brother's Grace Street rooms. If Delaney had returned to find any of his precious porcelain broken he would never have agreed to help Ethan, and so Ridley had taken a front room at a boardinghouse on Monroe Street where he registered himself and Sally as a married couple. Now he pleaded for his brother's help. "For God's sake, Bev! She's a witch! She'll destroy everything!"

 

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