ONE

      

      THE YOUNG MAN was trapped at the top end of Shockoe Slip where a crowd had gathered in Cary Street. The young man had smelt the trouble in the air and had tried to avoid it by ducking into an alleyway behind Kerr’s Tobacco Warehouse, but a chained guard dog had lunged at him and so driven him back to the steep cobbled slip where the crowd had engulfed him.

      ‘You going somewhere, mister?’ a man accosted him.

      The young man nodded, but said nothing. He was young, tall and lean, with long black hair and a clean-shaven face of flat planes and harsh angles, though at present his handsome looks were soured by sleeplessness. His skin was sallow, accentuating his eyes, which were the same gray as the fog-wrapped sea around Nantucket, where his ancestors had lived. In one hand he was carrying a stack of books tied with hemp rope, while in his other was a carpetbag with a broken handle. His clothes were of good quality, but frayed and dirty like those of a man well down on his luck. He betrayed no apprehension of the crowd, but instead seemed resigned to their hostility as just another cross he had to bear.

      ‘You heard the news, mister?’ The crowd’s spokesman was a bald man in a filthy apron that stank of a tannery.

      Again the young man nodded. He had no need to ask what news, for there was only one event that could have sparked this excitement in Richmond’s streets. Fort Sumter had fallen, and the news, hopes and fears of civil war were whipping across the American states.

      ‘So where are you from?’ the bald man demanded, seizing the young man’s sleeve as though to force an answer.

      ‘Take your hands off me!’ The tall young man had a temper.

      ‘I asked you civil,’ the bald man said, but nevertheless