Bird froze, staring at Starbuck as though the younger man had just uttered an extraordinary profanity. “My brother-in-law, I perceive, has been advertising his good qualities to you. His good qualities, Starbuck, are dollars. He buys affection, adulation and admiration. Without money he would be as empty as a Tuesday night pulpit. Besides he does not need to beat his servants or children because my sister can beat enough for twenty.”

Starbuck was offended by this ungrateful attack on his patron. “Mister Faulconer freed his slaves, did he not?”

“He freed twenty house slaves, six garden boys and his stable people. He never had field hands because he never needed them. The Faulconer fortune is not based on cotton or tobacco, but upon inheritance, railroads and investment, so it was a painless gesture, Starbuck, and principally done, I suspect, to spite my sister. It is, perhaps, the one good deed Faulconer ever did, and I refer to the exercise of spitefulness rather than to the act of manumission.” Bird, failing to find anywhere to put down his belongings, simply opened his arms and let them all drop untidily onto the music room’s parquet floor. “Faulconer wants you to deliver the uniforms.”

Starbuck was taken aback, but then realized the subject had abruptly been changed to the Colonel’s new finery. “He wants me to take them to Faulconer Court House?”

“Of course he does!” Bird almost screamed at Starbuck. “Must I state the obvious? If I say that Faulconer wishes you to deliver his uniforms, must I first define uniforms? And afterward identify Washington Faulconer? Or the Colonel, as we must all now learn to call him? Good God, Starbuck, and you were at Yale?”

“At the seminary.”