Starbuck carried the lantern and the Bible into the house that comprised one simply furnished room. There was a box bed, a table, a chair, two trunks, a fireplace with a pothook, a bench, a spinning wheel, a meal sifter, a rack of guns, a scythe and a framed portrait of Andrew Jackson. Starbuck sat at the table, opened the Bible and found the family register. He wished he had ink to write the entry, but Thomas Truslow’s pencil would have to suffice. He looked at the names in the register, which stretched back to when the first Truslows had come to the New World in 1710, and saw that someone had written the fact of Emily Truslow’s death on the last filled line of the register, writing her name in ill-formed block capitals and adding Mallory afterward in square brackets in case God did not know who Emily Truslow really was. Above that was the simple record of Sally Emily Truslow’s birth in May 1846, and Starbuck realized the girl was just two days over her fifteenth birthday.

“Sunday, May 26, 1861” he wrote with difficulty, hampered by the pain in his blistered hands. “Sally Truslow to Robert Decker, united in holy matrimony.” There was a column where the officiating minister was supposed to write his name. Starbuck hesitated, then put his name there: Nathaniel Joseph Starbuck.

“You ain’t a real preacherman, are you?” Sally had come into the house and challenged him with her stare.

“God makes us what we are, and what God has made me is not for you to question,” Starbuck said as sternly as he could, and felt horribly pompous, but he feared this girl’s effect on him and so retreated into pomposity.

She laughed, knowing he had lied. “You got a real nice voice, I will say that.” She came to the table and looked down at the open Bible. “I can’t read. A man promised to teach me, but he ain’t had time yet.”

Starbuck feared he knew who the man was, and though one part of him did not want confirmation, another part wanted the suspicion given solidity. “Did Ethan Ridley promise you that?” he asked her.

“You know Ethan?” Sally sounded surprised, then she nodded. “Ethan promised he’d teach me to read,” she said, “he promised me a lot, but he hasn’t kept a one of the promises. Not yet, anyways, but there’s still time, isn’t there?”

“Is there?” Starbuck asked. He told himself he was shocked by Ridley’s betrayal of the gentle Anna Faulconer, but he also knew that he was horribly jealous of Ethan Ridley.

“I like Ethan.” Sally was provoking Starbuck now. “He drew my picture. It was real good.”

“He’s a good artist,” Starbuck said, trying to keep his voice toneless.