Rebel - Bernard Cornwell

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an older man dressed in respectable though disheveled clothes had been tied to the cast-iron palings that protected the hotel’s lower windows. The young man was still not the crowd’s prisoner, but neither was he free unless he could somehow satisfy their curiosity.

      ‘You got papers?’ another man shouted in his ear.

      ‘Lost your voice, son?’ The breath of his questioners was fetid with whiskey and tobacco. The young man made another effort to push against his persecutors, but there were too many of them and he was unable to prevent them from trapping him against a hitching post on the hotel’s sidewalk. It was mid-morning on a warm spring day. The sky was cloudless, though the dark smoke from the Tredegar Iron Works and the Gallegoe Mills and the Asa Snyder Stove Factory and the tobacco factories and Talbott’s Foundry and the City Gas Works all combined to make a rank veil that haloed the sun. A Negro teamster, driving an empty wagon up from the wharves of Samson and Pae’s Foundry, watched expressionless from atop his wagon’s box. The crowd had stopped the carter from turning his horses out of Shockoe Slip, but the man was too wise to make any protest.

      ‘Where are you from, boy?’ The bald tanner thrust his face close to the young man’s. ‘What’s your name?’

      ‘None of your business.’ The tone was defiant.

      ‘So we’ll find out!’ The bald man seized the bundle of books and tried to pull them away. For a moment there was a fruitless tug of war, then the frayed rope holding the books parted and the volumes spilt across the cobbles. The bald man laughed at the accident and the young man hit him. It was a good hard blow and it caught the bald man off his balance so that he rocked backward and almost fell.

      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

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