It seemed an oddly unnecessary confession to Starbuck, perhaps because he was not entirely sure what the Frenchman meant by an "establishment." "A business, you mean?" he asked.

"Dear Lord God, no!" Lassan laughed at the very thought. "I've no head for commerce, none! No, I mean I have established a household. It's on Grace Street. You know it?"

"Very well." Starbuck was amused by the thought of Lassan fussing with domestic arrangements.

"It's an apartment," Lassan said. "We have five rooms above a tailor's shop on the corner of Fourth Street. Then we have slave quarters downstairs at the back where there's a kitchen, a small garden for herbs, a peach tree, and a wooden stable. It's rented, of course, and the kitchen chimney smokes when the wind's in the west, but otherwise it's really very comfortable." The middle-aged Lassan had never counted comfort as one of life's priorities, and he gave the word an ironic twist.

"You've got slaves?" Starbuck asked, surprised. Lassan shrugged. "When in Rome, mon ami." He took a cigar from his pouch, lit it, and handed it to Starbuck before lighting one for himself. "I can't say that I'm comfortable with the arrangement," he went on, "but I convince myself that the slaves are better off with me than with anyone else. I have a stable boy, there are two kitchen girls who clean as well, and of course an upstairs girl who looks after clothes and all the rest of the flummery."

He sounded embarrassed again. The two men had reached an old cart track that was much overgrown but was wide enough to let them walk side by side. "You sound as if you've taken a wife," Starbuck said lightly.

Lassan stopped and faced his friend. "I have taken a companion," he said very seriously. "We are not married, nor shall we marry, but for the moment, at least, we suit each other." Lassan paused. "You introduced me to her."

"Oh," Starbuck said, coloring slightly and remembering how, when Lassan had first crossed the lines to attach himself to the rebel forces, he had asked Starbuck for an introduction to a house of pleasure in Richmond. Starbuck had sent Lassan to the best of all such houses, the most exclusive house, the house where Sally Truslow worked. "It's Sally?" Starbuck asked.

"Indeed," Lassan said. His one eye examined Starbuck anxiously.

Starbuck was quiet for a moment. Sally was the rebellious daughter of Sergeant Truslow and a girl with whom Starbuck sometimes thought he was in love himself. He had asked Sally to marry him earlier in the year, and at times Starbuck was still convinced that they could have made such a marriage work. He had been delighted when she had abandoned the brothel for the more lucrative job of being a spiritual medium, and Sally's seances were now famous in Richmond, a town obsessed with supernatural phenomena, but there was no doubt that her success had more than a little to do with the fact that the darkened shrine of Madame Royall, as Sally now called herself, was attached to Richmond's most notorious house of assignation, a proximity that added the spice of wickedness to her clients' visits. Starbuck had half dared to hope that Sally might want to complete her conversion to respectability by taking a husband, but instead she had taken a lover, and Starbuck understood that, in the gentlest possible way, he was now being warned away from Sally's bed. "Good for you," he told Lassan.

"She wanted to tell you herself," Lassan said, "but I insisted."

"Thank you," Starbuck said, wondering why he was suddenly so damned jealous. He had no call for jealousy. Indeed, if he was so in love with Sally, why did he sneak out of the Brigade's lines at night to visit the crude tavern just south of the camp? McComb's Tavern had been put out of bounds, but there was a red-haired girl working one of the upstairs rooms, and Starbuck was happy to risk Washington Faulconer's punishment to visit her. He had no call for jealousy, he told himself again, then began walking north along the cart track. "You're a lucky man, Lassan."

"Yes, I am."

"And Sally's lucky, too," Starbuck said gallantly, even though he could not help feeling betrayed.

"I think so," the Frenchman said lightly. "I am teaching her French."

Starbuck forced a smile at the thought of Sally Truslow, a girl from a hardscrabble farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains, learning to speak French, except it was not so strange, for Sally had journeyed a long way from her father's comfortless house. She had learned society's manners, and how to dress and how to talk, and yet again Starbuck felt a pang of jealousy at the memory of Sally's exquisite beauty; then he again thought how unfair it was for him to be envious, for as often as he thought of Sally he also thought of Julia Gordon, Adam Faulconer's abandoned fiancйe, and he did not know which girl he preferred, or whether, in truth, he was simply a fool for any woman, even for a red-haired whore in a country tavern. "I am glad for you, Lassan," he said with forced generosity, "truly."

"Thank you," Lassan said simply, and then stopped beside Starbuck where the cart track left the trees to run down to the river. A house had once stood on the nearer bank, but all that was left of the house now was a stub of broken brick chimney and the outlines of a stone foundation within which grew a thick and entangling clump of bushes. The farther bank of the river was a forest of shade trees that hung over the swirling water, though immediately opposite the house a cart track led between two willows into the far woods. Lassan stared at that distant cart track, then frowned. "Do you see what I see, Nate?"

Starbuck had been thinking of Sally's startling beauty and of Julia Gordon's graver face, but now, sensing that he was being tested, he stared at the landscape and tried to see whatever was significant in it. A ruined house, a river, a far bank of thick trees, and then he saw the anomaly just as clearly as Lassan's trained eye had seen it.

The track that he and Lassan had followed to this spot did not end at the river but rather continued on the farther bank. Which meant there was a ford here. Which was strange because every crossing of the Rapidan was supposedly guarded to prevent a surprise Northern attack, yet here was a ford standing empty and unwatched. "Because no one knows the ford's here," Starbuck said. "Or maybe the roadbed is washed away?" he added.

"There's an easy way to find out," Lassan said. He had the instinctive caution of any soldier coming to a river, especially a river that divided two armies, but he had stared hard at the further bank through a small glass and was satisfied that no Yankees waited in ambush, and so he now walked into the sunlight, where he took off his spurred boots and hitched up his saber. Starbuck followed the Frenchman, wading into the river, which flowed fast, clear, and shallow across a bed of fine gravel. Long weeds trailed upstream, and a few fish darted in the shadows downstream, but nothing obstructed Lassan and Starbuck's progress; indeed, the water scarce reached either man's knees. At the far bank the road reared steeply up from the water, but not so steeply that a horse team could not have pulled a heavy gun and limber out of the river. "If the Yankees knew about this ford," Lassan said, "they could be round your backside in a trice."

"I thought you said they weren't going to attack us," Starbuck commented as he pulled himself up onto the northern bank.

"And I've also told you a hundred times that you must always expect the unexpected from your enemy," Lassan said as he sat in the shade of a willow and stared back across the river. He gestured upstream with the cigar. "What units are that way?"

"None," Starbuck said. "We're the westernmost brigade of the army."

"So the Yankees really could hook round your backside," Lassan said softly. He smoked in silence for a few seconds, then abruptly changed the subject back to his new house-hold. "Sally hopes you'll visit us when you're in Richmond. I hope so, too."