Delaney opened the case to find a drawing, five inches by four inches, which showed a naked girl sitting in a woodland glade beside a small stream. Delaney was constantly astonished at his half-brother’s talent which, though untrained and lazily applied, was still startlingly good. God, he thought, poured his talents into the strangest vessels. “Have you exaggerated her looks?”

“No. Truly no.”

“Then she is indeed lovely. A nymph.”

“But a nymph with a tongue like a nigger driver and a temper to match.”

“And you’re done with her, yes?” Delaney enquired.

“Finished. Done.” Ridley, as he took back the portrait, hoped that was true. He had paid Sally a hundred silver dollars to keep silent, yet he had remained frightened that she would not keep her side of the bargain. Sally was an unpredictable girl with more than a touch of her father’s savagery, and Ethan Ridley had been terrified that she might appear in Faulconer Court House and brandish her pregnancy in front of Anna. Not that Washington Faulconer probably minded a man fathering bastards, but whelping them on slaves was one thing and having a girl as wild as Truslow’s daughter screaming her outrage up and down the main street of Faulconer Court House was something entirely different.

But now, thank God, Ridley had heard how Sally had been married off to her straw-haired puppy-boy. Ridley had heard no details of the wedding, nothing about the where or the how or the when, only that Truslow had sloughed his daughter off onto Decker and given the couple his patch of stony land, his beasts and his blessing, and by so doing he had left Ridley feeling much safer. “It’s all turned out well,” he grunted to Delaney, yet not without some regret, for Ethan Ridley suspected that he would never again in his life know a girl as beautiful as Sally Truslow. Yet to lie with her had been to play with fire and he had been lucky to have emerged unscorched.

Belvedere Delaney watched a pack of recruits trying to march in step. A cadet from the Virginia Military Institute who looked about half the age of the men he was drilling screamed at them to straighten their backs, to keep their heads up and to stop looking around like mill girls on an outing. “Does Colonel Faulconer drill his men like this?” Delaney asked.

“He believes drill will only blunt the men’s enthusiasm.”