The Starbuck Chronicles: The Complete 4-Book Collection

Sam Pearce was evidently the red-faced bearded man who had become the master of ceremonies and who now supervised the stripping away of the dentist’s coat, vest, trousers, shoes, shirt and undershirt, leaving Morley Burroughs humiliated in the sunlight and wearing only his socks and a pair of long drawers, which had been left to him in deference to the modesty of the watching ladies. Sam Pearce now dipped a long-handled ladle into the vat and brought it up dripping with hot treacly tar. The crowd cheered. ‘Give it him, Sam!’

‘Give it him good!’

‘Teach the Yankee a lesson, Sam!’

Pearce plunged the ladle back in the vat and gave the tar a slow stir before lifting the ladle out with its deep bowl heaped high with the smoking, black, treacly substance. The dentist tried to pull away, but two men dragged him toward the vat and bent him over its steaming mouth so that his plump, white, naked back was exposed to the grinning Pearce, who moved the glistening, hot mass of tar over his victim.

The expectant crowd fell silent. The tar hesitated, then flowed off the ladle to strike the back of the dentist‘s balding head. The dentist screamed as the hot thick tar scalded him. He jerked away, but was pulled back, and the crowd, its tension released by his scream, cheered.

Starbuck watched, smelling the thick rank stench of the viscous tar that oozed past the dentist’s ears onto his fat white shoulders. It steamed in the warm spring air. The dentist was crying, whether at the ignominy or for the pain it was impossible to tell, but the crowd didn’t care; all they knew was that a Northerner was suffering, and that gave them pleasure.

Pearce scooped another heavy lump of tar from the vat. The crowd screamed for it to be poured on, the dentist’s knees buckled and Starbuck shivered.

‘You next, boy.’ The tanner had moved to stand beside Starbuck. ‘You next.’ He suddenly swung his fist, burying it in Starbuck’s belly to drive the air explosively out of his lungs and making the young man jerk forward against his bonds. The tanner laughed. ‘You’ll suffer, cuffee, you’ll suffer.’

The dentist screamed again. A second man had leaped onto the wagon to help Pearce apply the tar. The new man used a short-handled spade to heave a mass of thick black tar out of the vat. ‘Save some for Starbuck!’ the tanner shouted.

‘There’s plenty more here, boys!’ The new tormentor slathered his spadeful of tar onto the dentist’s back. The dentist twitched and howled, then was dragged up from his knees as yet more tar was poured down his chest so that it dripped off his belly onto his clean white drawers. Trickles of the viscous substance were dribbling down the sides of his head, down his face and down his back and thighs. His mouth was open and distorted, as though he was crying, but no sound came from him now. The crowd was ribald at the sight of him. One woman was doubled over, helpless with mirth.

‘Where are the feathers?’ another woman called.

‘Make him a chicken, Sam!’

More tar was poured on till the whole of the dentist’s upper body was smothered in the gleaming black substance. His captors had released him, but he was too stricken to try and escape now. Besides, his stockinged feet were stuck in puddles of tar, and all he could do for himself was to try and paw the filthy mess away from his eyes and mouth while his tormentors finished their work. A woman filled her apron with feathers and climbed up to the wagon’s bed where, to huge cheers, the feathers were sprinkled over the humiliated dentist. He stood there, black-draped, feathered, steaming, mouth agape, pathetic, and around him the mob howled and jeered and hooted. Some Negroes on the far sidewalk were convulsed in laughter, while even the minister who had been so pathetically protesting the scene was finding it hard not to smile at the ridiculous spectacle. Sam Pearce, the chief ringleader, released one last handful of feathers to stick in the congealing, cooling tar then stepped back and flourished a proud hand toward the dentist. The crowd cheered again.

‘Make him cluck, Sam! Make him cluck like a hen!’

The dentist was prodded with the short-handled spade until he produced a pathetic imitation of a chicken’s cluck.

‘Louder! Louder!’

Doctor Burroughs was prodded again, and this time he managed to make the miserable noise loud enough for the crowd’s satisfaction. Laughter echoed from the houses and sounded clear down to the river where the barges jostled at the quays.

‘Bring on the spy, Sam!’

‘Give it him good!’

‘Show us Starbuck’s bastard!’

Men seized Starbuck, released his bonds and hurried him toward the wagon. The tanner helped them, still striking and kicking at the helpless Starbuck, spitting his hatred and taunting him, anticipating the humiliation of Elial Starbuck’s whelp. Pearce had crammed the dentist’s top hat onto its owner’s grotesque, tar-thick, feathered head. The dentist was shaking, sobbing silently.

Starbuck was pushed hard against the wagon’s wheel. Hands reached down from above, grabbed his collar and heaved up. Men pushed at him, his knee cracked hard against the wagon side, then he was sprawling on the wagon bed, where his hand was smeared by a warm patch of spilt tar. Sam Pearce hauled Starbuck upright and displayed his bloody face to the crowd. ‘Here he is! Starbuck’s bastard!’

‘Fillet him, Sam!’

‘Push him in, Sam!’

Pearce rammed Starbuck’s head over the vat, holding his face just inches from the stinking liquid. The vat had been stolen from its coals, but it was big enough and full enough to have retained almost all its heat. Starbuck tried to flinch away as a bubble slowly erupted just beneath his bleeding nose. The tar plopped tiredly back, then Pearce jerked him back upright. ‘Let’s have your clothes off, cuffee.’

Hands pulled at Starbuck’s coat, tearing off its sleeves and ripping it clean off his back. ‘Strip him naked, Sam!’ a woman screamed excitedly.

‘Give his pa something to preach about!’ A man was jumping up and down beside the wagon. A child stood by the man, hand at her mouth, eyes bright, staring. The dentist, unremarked now, had sat on the wagon’s box, where he pathetically and uselessly tried to scrape the hot tar off his scorched skin.

Sam Pearce gave the vat a stir. The tanner was spitting again and again at Starbuck while a gray-haired man fumbled at Starbuck’s waist, loosing the buttons of his pants. ‘Don’t you dare piss on me, boy, or I’ll leave you nothing to piss with.’ He pulled the trousers down to Starbuck’s knees, provoking a shrill scream of approval from the crowd.

And a gunshot sounded too.

The gunshot cracked the still air of the street junction to startle a score of flapping birds up from the roofs of the warehouses that edged the Shockoe Slip. The crowd turned. Pearce moved to tear at Starbuck’s shirt, but a second gunshot sounded hugely loud, echoing off the far houses and causing the crowd to go very still. ‘Touch the boy again,’ a confident, lazy voice spoke, ‘and you’re a dead man.’

‘He’s a spy!’ Pearce tried to brazen out the moment.

‘He’s my guest.’ The speaker was mounted on a tall black horse and was wearing a slouch hat, a long gray coat and high boots. He was carrying a long-barreled revolver, which he now pushed into a holster on his saddle. It was a marvelously insouciant gesture, suggesting he had nothing to fear from this mob. The man’s face was shadowed by the hat’s brim, but clearly he had been recognized, and as he spurred the horse forward the crowd silently parted to give him passage. A second horseman followed, leading a riderless horse.

The first horseman reined in beside the wagon. He tilted his hat upward with the tip of a riding crop then stared with incredulity at Starbuck. ‘It’s Nate Starbuck! Yes?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Starbuck was shivering.

‘You remember me, Nate? We met in New Haven last year?’

‘Of course I remember you, sir.’ Starbuck was shaking, but with relief rather than fear. His rescuer was Washington Faulconer, father of Starbuck’s best friend and the man whose name Starbuck had earlier invoked to save himself from this mob’s wrath.

‘You seem to be getting a wrong impression of Virginian hospitality,’ Washington Faulconer said softly. ‘Shame on you!’ These last words were spoken to the crowd. ‘We’re not at war with strangers in our city! What are you? Savages?’

‘He’s a spy!’ The tanner tried to restore the crowd’s supremacy.

Washington Faulconer turned scornfully on the man. ‘And you’re a black-assed fool! You’re behaving like Yankees, all of you! Northerners might want a mobocracy for a government, but not us! Who is this man?’ He pointed with his riding crop at the dentist.

The dentist could not speak, so Starbuck, released from the grip of his enemies and with his trousers safely restored to his waist, answered for his fellow victim. ‘His name is Burroughs, sir. He’s a dentist passing through town.’

Washington Faulconer glanced about until he saw two men he recognized. ‘Bring Mister Burroughs to my house. We shall do our best to make reparations to him.’ Then, that remonstrance delivered to the shamed crowd, he looked back to Starbuck and introduced his companion, who was a dark-haired man a few years older than Starbuck. ‘This is Ethan Ridley.’ Ridley was leading the riderless horse, which he now urged alongside the wagon bed. ‘Mount up, Nate!’ Washington Faulconer urged Starbuck.

‘Yes, sir.’ Starbuck stooped for his coat, realized that it was torn beyond repair, so straightened up empty-handed. He glanced at Sam Pearce, who gave a tiny shrug as though to suggest there were no hard feelings, but there were, and Starbuck, who had never known how to control his temper, stepped fast toward the big man and hit him. Sam Pearce twisted away, but not soon enough, and Starbuck’s blow landed on his ear. Pearce stumbled, put a hand out to save himself but only succeeded in plunging the hand deep into the tar vat. He screamed, jerked himself free, but his balance was gone, and he flailed hopelessly as he tripped off the wagon’s outer end to fall with skull-cracking force onto the road. Starbuck’s hand was hurting, stung by the wild and clumsy blow, but the crowd, with the unpredictability of an impassioned mob, suddenly started laughing and cheering him.

‘Come on, Nate!’ Washington Faulconer was grinning at Pearce’s downfall.

Starbuck stepped off the wagon directly onto the horse’s back. He fumbled with his feet for the stirrups, took the reins, and kicked back with his tar-stained shoes. He guessed he had lost his books and clothes, but the loss was hardly important. The books were exegetical texts left over from his studies at the Yale Theological Seminary and at best he might have sold them for a dollar fifty. The clothes were of even less value, and so he abandoned his belongings, instead following his rescuers out of the crowd and up Pearl Street. Starbuck was still shaking, and still hardly daring to believe he had escaped the crowd’s torment. ‘How did you know I was there, sir?’ he asked Washington Faulconer.

‘I didn’t realize it was you, Nate, I just heard that some young fellow claiming to know me was about to be strung up for the crime of being a Yankee, so I thought we should take a look. It was a teamster who told me, a Negro fellow. He heard you say my name and he knew my house, so he came and told my steward. Who told me, of course.’

‘I owe you an extraordinary debt, sir.’

‘You certainly owe the Negro fellow a debt. Or rather you don’t, because I thanked him for you with a silver dollar.’ Washington Faulconer turned and looked at his bedraggled companion. ‘Does that nose hurt?’

‘No more than a usual bloody nose, sir.’

‘Might I ask just what you’re doing here, Nate? Virginia doesn’t seem the healthiest place for a Massachusetts man to be running loose.’

‘I was looking for you, sir. I was planning to walk to Faulconer Court House.’