“Take the ring, Robert,” Starbuck ordered, and was amazed at his temerity. He had been taught in seminary that the sacraments were solemn rituals offered to God by special men, the most Godly of men, yet here he was, a sinner, inventing this tawdry service in the flickering light of a moth-haunted lantern under a nascent Virginia moon. “Put your right hand on the Bible,” he told Robert, who lay his work-stained hand on the broken-spined family Bible that Starbuck was still holding. “Say after me,” Starbuck said, and somehow he invented a marriage oath that he administered to each in turn, and afterward he told Robert to put the ring on Sally’s finger, and then he declared them man and wife, and closed his eyes and raised his shut eyelids to the starry heaven. “May the blessing of Almighty God,” Starbuck said, “and his love, and his protection, be with you each, and keep you both from harm from this time on until the world’s ending. We ask it in the name of him who loved us so much that he gave his only son for our redemption. Amen.”

“Amen to that,” Thomas Truslow said, “and amen.”

“Praise be, amen,” Roper spoke from behind the couple.

“Amen and amen.” Robert Decker’s face was suffused with happiness.

“Is that all there is?” Sally Decker asked.

“The rest of your life is all there is,” her father snapped, “and you’ve made a promise to be faithful, and you keep that promise, girl, or you’ll suffer.” He snatched at her left hand and, though Sally tried to shrink back, he dragged her hard toward him. He looked down at the silver ring on her finger. “And you look after that ring, girl.”

Sally said nothing and Starbuck got the impression that by gaining the ring from her father she had won a victory over him, and the victory was far more important to her than the fact of the wedding.

Truslow let her hand go. “You’ll write their names in the Bible?” he asked Starbuck. “To make it proper?”

“Of course,” Starbuck said.

“There’s a table in the house,” Truslow said, “and a pencil in the jar on the mantel. Kick the dog if he troubles you.”