“Then you should be, ma’am.”

“I’m coming with you, Major.”

He led her down the hill past Johnny Worsham’s barn-like establishment where gambling tables crowded close to the stage on which a troupe of girls danced in between entertaining their clients upstairs. Two black men in bowler hats guarded the door and watched Starbuck with flat, cold stares. He led Martha over a wooden bridge that spanned a creek flooded with sewage and then into an alley that ran between damp brick walls. “You know the town pretty well, sir?” Martha asked, lifting her skirts as she stepped between the fetid rubbish that lay on the cobbles.

“I served a few weeks with the provosts here,” Starbuck said. They had been miserable weeks that had ended with his imprisonment on suspicion of being a Northern spy. A gutless little officer called Gillespie had made Starbuck’s life a hell in that prison, and that was one prospect of revenge that Starbuck treasured.

He stepped over a pile of garbage and turned into an unnamed street. The stench of the iron works hung heavy here and the sound of the furnaces roared to rival the foaming of the nearby river where it cascaded over the rapids. A dozen slaves lay in the smoke-dimmed sunlight with stone bottles of liquor, which they raised in an ironic salute as Starbuck passed. “Why ain’t they at work?” Martha demanded.

“They work hard enough,” Starbuck said. “You can’t whip a man into working hard, ma’am. You have to give them some rope and once the slaves are trusted in the Iron Works they can come and go pretty much as they please. Long as they stay down here and don’t go into the upper town, no one minds. This is their territory, not ours.”

“Matthew wouldn’t come here, would he?”

“Lots of soldiers do. There aren’t any rules here, and the liquor’s real cheap.”

A mad preacher in an ankle-length black coat stood on a corner yelling the good news of Christ to a town that was not listening. A dwarf woman, drunk to the wind, reeled down the cobbles singing, but otherwise there were not many people in the streets. Midday was the witching hour for the Hells, the time when the sun shone brightest and Screamersville’s denizens slept indoors as they prepared for the night’s business. Starbuck chose a random tavern and plunged inside. A few soldiers slouched on benches, but none was Potter. One offered Martha a dollar if she would go upstairs with him, while another looked up at her, sighed with lust, and then vomited. “I told you,” Starbuck said as he led her back into the street, “that this is no place for a lady.”

“Hell, Major,” Martha said sturdily, “no real lady would have married Matthew Potter. Besides, I’ve heard worse.”

She did hear worse that day, but she stayed close to Starbuck as they searched the canalside shacks where most of the Hells business was done. The smell of the place was nauseating; a mix of coal smoke, vomit, sewage, and raw liquor. They were summarily ejected from one house by four black men who had been playing cards. A thin white woman sat in the room’s corner with a bruised face. She spat when Starbuck entered and one of the men picked up a shotgun and rammed it into the stranger’s face. “She don’t want you here, mister,” the black man said.