“That.” He gestured at the discarded saber that was propped in its cheap scabbard against the windowsill. “I’m going to be a soldier. I’m going to be a very good soldier.” It was strange, he thought, but he had never said this before, not even to himself, but suddenly it all made such sense. “I’m going to be famous, Sally. I’m going to ride through this war like a, like a…” He paused, seeking the right word, then suddenly a bout of thunder cracked overhead, shaking the very house, and at the same instant a bolt of lightning sizzled through the Richmond sky like white fire blazing. “Like that!” Starbuck said, “just like that.”

Sally smiled. Her teeth looked very white in the darkness, and her hair, when the sheet lightning blanched the night, reflected like dark gold. “You won’t get rich being a soldier, Nate.”

“No, I guess I won’t at that.”

“And I’m expensive, honey.” She was only half teasing him.

“I’ll find the money somehow.”

She stirred in the dark, stubbing out her cigar and stretching her slender arms. “They’ve given you tonight. I don’t know why, but I guess Mister Delaney likes you, right?”

“I think he does, yes.” Starbuck’s heart was thumping in his chest. He thought how very naive he had been about Delaney, then how much he owed Delaney, and then how little he knew about Delaney. How blind he had been, he thought, how trusting. “Does Delaney own this place?” he asked.

“He has a bit of it, I don’t know how much. But he’s given you tonight, honey, all night, right till breakfast, and after that?”

“I said I’ll find the money.” Starbuck’s voice was choked and he was trembling.

“I can tell you how to earn it forever. For as long as you and I still want it.” Sally spoke soft in the darkness and the rain drummed on the street and on the roof.

“How?” It was a miracle Starbuck could speak at all, and even so the word came out like a croak. “How?” He said it again.

“Kill Ethan for me.”

“Kill Ethan,” Starbuck said as though he had not heard her correctly, and as though he had not spent these last days persuading himself that Ethan was his enemy and fantasizing a young man’s dreams of how he would destroy his enemy. “Kill him?” he asked in dread.