Krishna
s is the start of the Starbuck Chronicles, another series by the versatile Bernard Cornwell. Unlike most of his other stories, this happens in the USA, around the time of the civil war.
The book starts at a tense situation right from the first paragraph.
Nathaniel Starbuck is caught by a mob and beaten in Richmond, Virginia. He is a native of Boston. He meets a fellow prisoner who seems to be well educated. Now, he is the son of Ethan? Starbuck, a preacher who is totally against slavery and preaches against the southerners, so catching Nathaniel is a coup for the angry mob. Nathaniel’s goose seem well and truly cooked. (Long time readers of Bernard will immediately recognize the plot pattern of his books here!). We learn that he was in love with a girl and escorted her to Richmond, and was betrayed by her.
Morley Burroughs, the dentist who was captured with Starbuck, was brought out to be tarred and feathered. Before Starbuck could be so treated, he is rescued by the Southern Lord Washington Falcouner. He learns with amusement that Nate was tricked by a girl in an itinerant play on whom Nate had a crush and not only joined the troup but also followed her to the South on a false promise of ‘her giving him what he wants’ and discovered that her lover was waiting for her! In anger, he decided to pursue them to the train station in Virginia, only to find that they had left and later he was caught by the crowd, where we met him earlier.
Falconer not only rescues him but employs him as his assistant – he realizes that Nate can never go back to the North, where he is liable to be lynched – he had also stolen money for the girl he was infatuated with. The irony of hiring the son of a prominent northern preacher and vocal abolitionist of slavery as his lieutenant in a Southern army that is preparing to go to war against Lincoln to preserve slavery escapes Falcouner.
He himself is a strange bird, not thinking much of General Lee, and also having personally freed all his slaves, to the disgust of his fellow noblemen.
Nate meets Falcouner’s daughter who is an eccentric and ebullient little girl.
Nate is sent to bring in the outlaw Truslow. He meets him and is put to a huge test that exhausts him but Truslow agrees to fight for the South. He also asks Nate to marry him to his dead ‘wife’ whom he never married – after learning that Nate trained to be a priest. He also gets his daughter Sally married to a local dimwitted man. Sally is breathtakingly beautiful and is pregnant, impregnated by a cousin of William Falcouner called Ethan.
Ethan delivers Sally into the hands of unscrupulous traffickers, deceiving her that they were going to see a landlord for her new apartment and is rid of her finally.
He meets her and is shocked to see that she was broken in spirit by repeated raping and beating until she became obedient and then sent to a brother where she seems to not just resigned to her life but seems to accept that it was the best place for a girl of her temperament to be.
Falconer, who was increasingly unhappy with him and always suspicious of his northerner origins and thus his loyalties to the Confederacy, takes him to the edge of the forest and advises him to go back to his father, who is expecting him (Falconer had written to the dad). As he goes, he stumbles into the Yankee army trying to attack the West in a surprise move and rides back to warn the South, only to be captured as a spy by the Colonel who is in charge.
The book, like Harlequin of the Grail Quest series, starts slowly but then gathers a momentum.
When the Commander of the Yankees realizes he is telling the truth, he sends Nate back to Falcouner’s army to fetch them. Falcouner is away and Bird and Adam decide to trust Nate and heroically get the army to face the sudden assault from the East. Meanwhile Ethan Ridley is disgusted and goes to inform Faulconer who is furious and rewards Ethan as the Major to replace Bird (but they are far away and have to reach the army first). Ethan is thrilled to have supplanted both Adam and Bird in Falcouner’s opinion and they ride back furiously to stop Bird’s ‘madness’.
The battle takes almost a quarter of the book and is interesting to read, as always Bernard’s battle scenes are. The initial surprise advantage dissolves into a seeming rout as the Yankees in their superior numbers overwhelm and threaten to surround the Confederate army and massacre them to a man.
How the battle ends, and how Starbuck goes back to the unit despite the General’s swearing that he saw Nate kill Ethan in cold blood is the rest of the story. Brilliant, and the ending is satisfying.
Another good start to a series. 7/10
– – Krishna