Starbuck Chronicles #01 - Rebel by Bernard Cornwell

Author:Bernard Cornwell [Cornwell, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Fiction
ISBN: 9780006179207
Publisher: Harpercollins Pub Ltd
Published: 2001-09-05T14:00:00+00:00

his breath as the wet glass plate was exposed inside the big wooden camera.

Adam immediately began to make faces over the photographer's shoulder. He grimaced, squinted, blew out his cheeks and waggled his fingers in his ears until, to his delight, Starbuck began laughing.

"No, no, no!" The photographer was distraught and slammed a cover over the plate. "It may not have been exposed long enough," he complained, "you will look like a ghost," but Starbuck rather liked that spectral thought and had no need of a carte de visite, let alone a keepsake, and so he wandered off through the crowd, eating on a hunk of bread and pork while Adam went to ready his horse for the steeplechase. Ethan Ridley was expected to win the race, which carried a generous fifty-dollar purse.

Sergeant Thomas Truslow had been playing bluff with a group of his cronies, but now stirred himself to watch as the horses thumped past on their first circuit of the steeplechase course. "I've got money on the boy," he confided in Starbuck. "Billy Arkwright, on the black." He pointed toward a skinny boy riding a small black horse. The boy, who looked scarce a day over twelve, was trailing a field of officers and farmers whose horses seemed to sail over the big fences before they turned out to the country for the second time around. Ridley-was comfortably in front, his chestnut jumping surely and scarcely winded after the first circuit, while Billy Arkwright's horse seemed too delicate to keep up, let alone survive the long second time around.

"You look as if you've lost your money," Starbuck said happily.

"What you know about horses, boy, I could write in the dust with one bladderful of weak piss." Truslow was amused. "So who would you put your money on?"

"Ridley?"

"He's a good horsemen, but Billy'll beat him." Truslow watched as the horsemen disappeared into the country, then shot Starbuck a suspicious look. "I hear you were asking Ridley about Sally." "Who told you that?"

"The whole goddamn Legion knows, because Ridley's been telling them. You think he knows where she is?" "He says not."

"Then I'd be obliged if you let sleeping bitches lie," Truslow said grimly. "The girl's gone, and that's all there is to it. I'm shot of her. I gave her a chance. I gave her land, a roof, beasts, a man, but nothing of mine was ever good enough for Sally. She'll be in Richmond now, making her living, and I daresay it'll be a good living until she crawls back here scabbed with the pox."

"I'm sorry," Starbuck said, because he could think of nothing else to say. He was just glad that Truslow had not asked why he had confronted Ridley.

"There's no harm done," Truslow said, "except that the damned girl took my Emily's ring. I should have kept it. If I don't die with that ring in my pocket, Starbuck, then I won't find my Emily again."

"I'm sure that's not true."

"I'm sure of it." Truslow stubbornly stuck to' his superstition, then nodded to the left.

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