“Hell, yes.” Truslow was standing to attention now with his hands crossed awkwardly over his breast, almost as if he was imitating the death stance of his beloved Emily. “Emily and me weren’t married proper,” he confessed to Starbuck. “She ran off with me the year before I went to be a soldier. I was just sixteen, she weren’t a day older, but she was already married. We were wrong, and we both knew it, but it was like we couldn’t help ourselves.” There were tears in his eyes, and Starbuck suddenly felt glad to know that this tough man had once behaved as stupidly and foolishly as Starbuck had himself just behaved. “I loved her,” Truslow went on, “and that’s the truth of it, though Pastor Mitchell wouldn’t wed us because he said we were sinners.”

“I’m sure he should have made no such judgment,” Starbuck said gravely.

“I reckon he should. It was his job to judge us. What else is a preacher for except to teach us conduct? I ain’t complaining, but God gave us his punishment, Mister Starbuck. Only one of our children lived, and she broke our hearts, and now Emily’s dead and I’m left alone. God is not mocked, Mister Starbuck.”

Suddenly, unexpectedly, Starbuck felt an immense surge of sympathy for this awkward, hard, difficult man who stood so clumsily beside the grave he must have dug himself. Or perhaps Roper had helped him, or one of the other fugitive men who lived in this high valley out of sight of the magistrates and the taxmen who infested the plains. At Christmastime, too, and Starbuck imagined them carrying the limp body out into the snow and hacking down into the cold ground.

“We weren’t married proper, and she were never buried proper, not with a man of God to see her home, and that’s what I want you to do for her. You’re to say the right words, Mister Starbuck. Say them for Emily, because if you say the right words then God will take her in.”

“I’m sure he will.” Starbuck felt entirely inadequate to the moment.

“So say them.” There was no violence in Thomas Truslow now, just a terrible vulnerability.