“Hell, Nate Starbuck,” Sally said, “are you reckoning on staying here?”

He shook his head. “I thought I might let you buy me lunch at the Spotswood, then walk with me to Camp Lee.”

Sally waited until he had moved the offending boots from the ottoman. “Now why,” she asked, “would I want to do that?”

Starbuck smiled. “Because, Sally, if I’ve got to take a pack of skulking cowards to war, then they need to know I’m a lucky man. And how much luckier can a man be than to show up with someone like you on his arm?”

“Glad to see the Yankees haven’t shot your glib tongue out,” she said, disguising her pleasure at the compliment. “But are you reckoning on going into the Spotswood looking like that?”

“Got nothing else to wear.” He frowned at his disheveled uniform. “Hell, if it’s good enough for fighting battles it’s good enough for the Spotswood Hotel.” Six hours later a well-fed Starbuck walked with Sally and Lucifer west out of the city. Sally wore a bonnet and shawl over a simple blue dress that was nowhere near plain enough to hide her beauty. She carried a fringed parasol against the sun, which had at last appeared from the clouds and was sucking up the remnants of the rainstorm into drifting patches of mist. They walked past the State Penitentiary, crossed the head of Hollywood Cemetery where the freshly turned earth lay in grim rows like the battalions of the dead, and skirted the municipal waterworks, until at last they could see Camp Lee on its wide bluff above the river and canal. Starbuck had visited the camp earlier in the year and remembered it as a grim, makeshift place. It had once been the Richmond Central Fairgrounds, but the onset of war had turned it into a giant dumping ground for the battalions that had flocked to the defense of Richmond. Those battalions were now on Virginia’s northern border and the camp was a dirty stretch of muddy ground where conscripts received a rudimentary training and where stragglers were sent to be assigned to new battalions. At the war’s beginning the camp had been a favorite place for Richmonders to come and watch the troops being drilled, but that novelty had worn off and these days few people visited the dank, derelict-looking barracks where old moldering tents stood in rows and tarpaper huts flapped in the breeze. The gallows of the camp jail still topped the hill, and round the jail was clustered an array of wooden huts where most of the camp’s present occupants seemed to be billeted. Two sergeants playing horseshoes confirmed to Starbuck that the huts were the Special Battalion’s quarters and he walked slowly uphill toward the flat crest where a half dozen companies were being drilled. A few lackluster work parties were patching the decrepit buildings among which, like a palace among hovels, stood the house that the sergeants had said was Holborrow’s headquarters. The house was a fine two-story building with a wide verandah all around and slave quarters and kitchens in its backyard. Two flagpoles stood in front of the house, one with the Confederate’s stars and bars and the other flying a blue flag crested with the coat of arms of Georgia.