an easygoing man whose besetting sins were warfare and women. 'Both dangerous pursuits,' he liked to tell Starbuck, 'but why settle for dullness in this sad, bad world?'
Now, with his horse picketed, the Frenchman strolled with Starbuck through the Legion's camp lines. The weather was such that none of the men had bothered to make turf shelters, preferring instead to sleep on the open ground, and so the lines were little more than piles of belongings interrupted by the remnants of cooking fires. The Legion's new draftees were being drilled by Sergeant Major Tolliver while the veterans not on picket duty were either sleeping, playing cards, or reading.
Lassan, who seemed to have taken it on himself to educate Starbuck in matters military, was explaining why Lee could not afford a defensive strategy. 'Dig trenches and gun emplacements behind this river, my friend, and how are you to stop the Yankees simply strolling round the end of your earthworks ? You don't have enough men to guard a trench dug from the Chesapeake Bay to the Blue Ridge Mountains, so instead of digging you will have to march and tip the enemy off balance. It will be a war of maneuver, a cavalryman's war! Naturally you infantrymen will have to do the real fighting and dying, that's why God made infantrymen, but we cavalrymen will do your scouting for you.' Lassan scratched beneath his mildewed eye patch. 'You'll know things are getting warm, Nate, when Lee arrives.' 'Or when the Yankees attack,' Starbuck said. 'They won't. They're too sluggish. The North is like a man who has grown so fat he is unable to move fast. He just wants to roll over you and so crush you to death, while you have to slice him up into little pieces.'
Starbuck walked a few paces in silence. The two men had left the Brigade lines behind and were now walking toward a stand of trees that screened the south bank of the Rapidan. 'Can we win this war?' Starbuck finally asked the Frenchman.
'Oh, yes,' Lassan said without hesitation, 'but it will be expensive. If you kill enough Yankees, then they may think the game isn't worth the candle. You'll also need luck.' The Frenchman had sounded confident, but it nevertheless struck Starbuck as a gloomy prescription. 'Of course,' Lassan went on, 'if you could get European support, then everything changes.'
'Can we?' Starbuck asked, as if the question had not been debated endlessly in the Confederacy.
Lassan shook his head. 'France won't do anything unless Britain leads the way, and Britain has been burned too badly by its past American adventures, so Britain won't intervene unless the South looks capable of winning the war by itself, in which case you wouldn't need their help anyway, which all means,
It seemed an oddly unnecessary confession to Starbuck, perhaps because he was not entirely sure what the Frenchman meant by an 'establishment.' 'A business, you mean?' he asked.
'Dear Lord God, no!' Lassan laughed at the very thought. 'I've no head for commerce, none! No, I mean I have established a household. It's on Grace Street. You know it?'
'Very well.' Starbuck was amused by the thought of Lassan fussing with domestic arrangements.
'It's an apartment,' Lassan said. 'We have five rooms above a tailor's shop on the corner of Fourth Street. Then we have slave quarters downstairs at the back where there's a kitchen, a small garden for herbs, a peach tree, and a wooden stable. It's rented, of course, and the kitchen chimney smokes when the wind's in the west, but otherwise it's really very comfortable.' The middle-aged Lassan had never counted comfort as one of life's priorities, and he gave the word an ironic twist.
'You've got slaves?' Starbuck asked, surprised. Lassan shrugged. 'When in Rome,
He sounded embarrassed again. The two men had reached an old cart track that was much overgrown but was wide enough to let them walk side by side. 'You sound as if you've taken a wife,' Starbuck said lightly.
Lassan stopped and faced his friend. 'I have taken a companion,' he said very seriously. 'We are not married, nor shall we marry, but for the moment, at least, we suit each other.' Lassan paused. 'You introduced me to her.'
'Oh,' Starbuck said, coloring slightly and remembering how, when Lassan had first crossed the lines to attach himself to the rebel forces, he had asked Starbuck for an introduction to a house of pleasure in Richmond. Starbuck had sent Lassan to the best of all such houses, the most exclusive house, the house where Sally Truslow worked. 'It's Sally?' Starbuck asked.
'Indeed,' Lassan said. His one eye examined Starbuck anxiously.
Starbuck was quiet for a moment. Sally was the rebellious daughter of Sergeant Truslow and a girl with whom Starbuck sometimes thought he was in love himself. He had asked Sally to marry him earlier in the year, and at times Starbuck was still convinced that they could have made such a marriage work. He had been delighted when she had abandoned the brothel for the more lucrative job of being a spiritual medium, and Sally's seances were now famous in Richmond, a town obsessed with supernatural phenomena, but there was no doubt that her success had more than a little to do with the fact that the darkened shrine of Madame Royall, as Sally now called herself, was attached to Richmond's most notorious house of assignation, a proximity that added the spice of wickedness to her clients' visits. Starbuck had half dared to hope that Sally might want to complete her conversion to respectability by taking a husband, but instead she had taken a lover, and Starbuck understood that, in the gentlest possible way, he was now being warned away from Sally's bed. 'Good for you,' he told Lassan.
'She wanted to tell you herself,' Lassan said, 'but I insisted.'
'Thank you,' Starbuck said, wondering why he was suddenly so damned jealous. He had no call for jealousy. Indeed, if he was so in love with Sally, why did he sneak out of the Brigade's lines at night to visit the crude tavern just south of the camp? McComb's Tavern had been put out of bounds, but there was a red-haired girl working one of the upstairs rooms, and Starbuck was happy to risk Washington Faulconer's punishment to visit her. He had no call for jealousy, he told himself again, then began walking north along the cart track. 'You're a lucky man, Lassan.'
'Yes, I am.'
'And Sally's lucky, too,' Starbuck said gallantly, even though he could not help feeling betrayed.
'I think so,' the Frenchman said lightly. 'I am teaching her French.'
Starbuck forced a smile at the thought of Sally Truslow, a girl from a hardscrabble farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains, learning to speak French, except it was not so strange, for Sally had journeyed a long way from her father's comfortless house. She had learned society's manners, and how to dress and how to talk, and yet again Starbuck felt a pang of jealousy at the memory of Sally's exquisite beauty; then he again thought how unfair it was for him to be envious, for as often as he thought of Sally he also thought of Julia Gordon, Adam Faulconer's abandoned fiancйe, and he did not know which girl he preferred, or whether, in truth, he was simply a fool for any woman, even for a red-haired whore in a country tavern. 'I am glad for you, Lassan,' he said with forced generosity, 'truly.'
'Thank you,' Lassan said simply, and then stopped beside Starbuck where the cart track left the trees to run down to the river. A house had once stood on the nearer bank, but all that was left of the house now was a stub of broken brick chimney and the outlines of a stone foundation within which grew a thick and entangling clump of bushes. The farther bank of the river was a forest of shade trees that hung over the swirling water, though immediately opposite the house a cart track led between two willows into the far woods. Lassan stared at that distant cart track, then frowned. 'Do you see what I see, Nate?'
Starbuck had been thinking of Sally's startling beauty and of Julia Gordon's graver face, but now, sensing that he was being tested, he stared at the landscape and tried to see whatever was significant in it. A ruined house, a river, a far bank of thick trees, and then he saw the anomaly just as clearly as Lassan's trained eye had seen it.
The track that he and Lassan had followed to this spot did not end at the river but rather continued on the farther bank. Which meant there was a ford here. Which was strange because every crossing of the Rapidan was
