“I just wish I could share your certainty.” Faulconer looked gloomily down at the landing floor that was stained with dried tobacco juice that had missed the spittoons. “I’m not even sure any longer that Nate belongs here in the South,” Faulconer said heavily, then looked up as a clatter of boots and a murmur of voices sounded in the downstairs hall.

Robert Lee had arrived at last, and Starbuck’s character could be momentarily forgotten so that the Legion could be offered for battle.

George, Belvedere Delaney’s house slave, had conducted Starbuck as far as the front door of the house in Marshall Street where he had been greeted by a middle-aged woman of stern looks and apparent respectability. “My name is Richardson,” she had told Starbuck, “and Mister Delaney has given me his full instructions. This way, sir, if you would.”

It was a whorehouse. That much an astonished Starbuck realized as he was escorted through the hallway and past an open parlor door beyond which a group of girls sat dressed in laced bodices and white underskirts. Some smiled at him, others did not even look up from their hands of cards, but Starbuck faltered as he understood what trade was carried on in this comfortable, even luxurious house with its dark rugs, papered walls and gilt-framed landscapes. This was one of the dens of iniquity against which his father preached the awful threat of everlasting torture, a place of hellish horrors and unbridled sins, where a varnished hall stand with brass hooks, an umbrella tray and a beveled mirror held three officers’ hats, a silk top hat and a cane. “You may stay as long as you like, young man,” Mrs. Richardson said, pausing beside the hall stand to pass on Delaney’s instructions, “and there will be no charge. Please be careful of the loose stair rod.”

Mrs. Richardson led Starbuck up a stairway that was papered in flock and lit by a fringed oil lamp that hung on a long brass chain suspended from the stairwell’s high ceiling. Starbuck was in uniform and his scabbarded saber clattered awkwardly against the banisters. A curtained arch waited at the top of the stairs and beyond it the light was even dimmer, though not so dim that Starbuck could not see the framed prints on the wall. The pictures showed naked couples and at first he did not believe what he saw, then he looked again and blushed for what he did indeed see. A stern part of his conscience instructed him to turn back now. For all of his life Starbuck had struggled between sin and righteousness and he knew, better than any man, that the wages of sin were death, yet if all the choirs of heaven and all the preachers of earth had bellowed that message into his ears Starbuck could not have turned back at that moment.