Ethan Ridley took a perverse delight in introducing Starbuck to the city’s taverns, especially the dark, rancid drinking houses that were hidden among the mills and lodging houses on the northern bank of the James River. “This ain’t like your father’s church, is it, Reverend?” Ridley would ask of some rat-infested, rotting hovel, and Starbuck would agree that the liquor den was indeed a far cry from his ordered, Boston upbringing where cleanliness had been a mark of God’s favor and abstinence a surety of his salvation.

Ridley evidently wanted to savor the pleasure of shocking the Reverend Elial Starbuck’s son, yet even the filthiest of Richmond’s taverns held a romance for Starbuck solely because it was such a long way from his father’s Calvinist joylessness. It was not that Boston lacked drinking houses as poverty stricken and hopeless as any in Richmond, but Starbuck had never been inside Boston’s drinking dens and thus he took a strange satisfaction out of Ridley’s midday excursions into Richmond’s malodorous alleyways. The adventures seemed proof that he really had escaped his family’s cold, disapproving grasp, but Starbuck’s evident enjoyment of the expeditions only made Ridley try yet harder to shock him. “If I abandoned you in this place, Reverend,” Ridley threatened Starbuck in one seamen’s tavern that stank from the sewage dripping into the river from a rusting pipe not ten feet from the stillroom, “you’d have your throat cut inside five minutes.”

“Because I’m a northerner?”

“Because you’re wearing shoes.”

“I’d be all right,” Starbuck boasted. He had no weapons, and the dozen men in the tavern looked capable of slitting a congregation of respectable throats with scarce a twinge of conscience, but Starbuck would not let himself show any fear in front of Ethan Ridley. “Leave me here if you want.”

“You wouldn’t dare stay here on your own,” Ridley said.

“Go on. See if I mind.” Starbuck turned to the serving hatch and snapped his fingers. “One more glass here. Just one!” That was pure bravado, for Starbuck hardly drank any alcohol. He would sip at a whiskey, but Ridley always finished the glass. The terror of sin haunted Starbuck, indeed it was that terror which gave the tavern excursions their piquancy, and liquor was one of the greater sins whose temptations Starbuck half-flirted with and half-resisted.

Ridley laughed at Starbuck’s defiance. “You’ve got balls, Starbuck, I’ll say that.”

“So leave me here.”

“Faulconer won’t forgive me if I get you killed. You’re his new pet puppy, Reverend.”

“Pet puppy?” Starbuck bridled at the words.

“Don’t take offense, Reverend.” Ridley stamped on the butt of a smoked cigar and immediately lit another. He was a man of impatient appetites. “Faulconer’s a lonely man, and lonely men like having pet puppies. That’s why he’s so keen on secession.”