Celia Garth: A Novel (2 page)

“I won’t go back!” Celia told herself fiercely. “They can’t make me!” But even as she said it she knew they
could
make her, because she was only twenty years old and until her next birthday other people would have the right to boss her around. “Please Lord,” Celia whispered, “let me stay in Charleston!”

Turning her head she looked up at the shop. Mrs. Thorley occupied a stately three-story corner building on Lamboll Street, in the aristocratic southern tip of town. This house had formerly been a residence, and still looked like one, except for a small neat sign over the door saying “Amelia Thorley, Sewing.” A larger sign would have been out of keeping with the tone of the establishment. It would also have been unnecessary. Everybody knew Mrs. Thorley’s shop. Not only was it the most fashionable place in town to have clothes made, but also it was the place where the smartest people gathered to flirt and gossip and hear the news. Besides women’s clothes Mrs. Thorley took orders for men’s shirts and cravats, so both ladies and gentlemen came to her shop. More than one romance had blossomed there.

As Celia had been to a good school and had graceful manners, she had been chosen to act as reception clerk—they called it “minding the parlor.” She loved it. In the parlor she heard the talk of the town and she met so many people—admiring men, and women who thought Mrs. Thorley should choose someone “more settled” to receive callers, and young girls who carefully paid her no attention. Some of these girls were former schoolmates of hers. But that was when Celia had been Miss Garth of Kensaw Plantation. Now that she was a sewing-girl they found that they did not remember her very well; they explained that at school Celia had gone around with another crowd entirely.

But in spite of such annoyances, working at Mrs. Thorley’s was fun.

Celia started toward Mr. Bernard’s warehouse, on the waterfront. She would know next week if they were going to let her stay. Next week, next week—her footsteps beat it out on the brick sidewalk. All her life Celia had had a keen sense of the future, maybe because her present had never been exciting enough to match her dreams. Now this awareness of tomorrow pushed on her and threatened her. If they would only let her show them! The day she was five years old, Celia’s Aunt Louisa had given her a needle and told her it was time she learned to make stitches. That day, Celia had found her talent. She could sew.

Now at twenty she could sew better than most women twice her age. She knew it, but nobody else in the shop knew it and she could not persuade them to let her prove it. Mrs. Thorley, though a competent woman of business, did not have a flexible mind. To her, an apprentice was a beginner who pulled bastings and sewed on buttons and did other dull little jobs that nobody else wanted. Celia felt a helpless anger as she walked along. She prayed again, “Please,
please
let me stay!”

She glanced toward the spire of St. Michael’s. “Faith without works is dead.” How often she had heard that text read in church. “All right, I’ll do something about it,” Celia told herself. “I’m not going back to the country and be a poor relation the rest of my life.” At that minute the sun popped out, straight ahead of her, and struck her in the eyes with the promise of a golden day. Celia laughed softly. The world was full of promises, and if you put your mind to it you could make them real.

Lamboll Street was coming to life. In front of one residence a Negro boy was sweeping the sidewalk, at another a man was polishing the knocker on the door. Farther down the street a colored girl, gilt rings in her ears and a red kerchief on her head, was scrubbing the front steps. The soapsuds had a fresh clean smell. As she passed, Celia said “Good morning,” and the Negroes answered, “Mornin’, miss, happy day.”

“Happy day to you,” said Celia. She turned from Lamboll Street toward the wharfs along the Cooper River.

Early as it was, the waterfront was clackety with business. Men were going down to buy goods brought by the ships, or to load rice and timber to be sent out; women both white and colored were on their way to the fish-stalls to get their choice of the morning catch; sailors hurried about, their pigtails bobbing and their wide breeches flapping around their knees. Soldiers in rebel blue were scrambling into rowboats, which would carry them to the harbor forts for guard duty. Celia wondered why they were so careful to keep guards at those forts. Now in the fall of 1779 the war had been going on nearly five years and everybody knew it was practically over. But the men were good-looking in their bright blue coats, with their guns catching the light. They were having a fine time, too, shouting greetings from boat to boat and waving at pretty women along the wharfs.

Except for their officers, these fellows were mostly very young. Many of them were boys in their teens. Crack marksmen, they had been hunting in the woods and swamps around Charleston all their lives, though few of them had ever shot at anything that could shoot back. They were not part of the Continental troops, but the state militia. The Continentals were full-time soldiers in the national army commanded by General Washington; the militia were volunteers who did regular shifts of duty but between shifts went on with their usual business.

There were not many Continentals left now in South Carolina. Early in the war, before the men in Congress had signed the Declaration of Independence, the British had tried to take Charleston. They had made a thundering attack on Fort Moultrie, out there at the harbor entrance. Celia had not been in town then, but she had heard so much about the battle that she felt as if she had seen it. Fort Moultrie was manned by the Second South Carolina Regiment. Like the fellows yonder in the rowboats, most of those men had never seen a battle, but they fought one nobody would ever forget. They tore the British ships to pieces.

Next morning, the ships that could still move limped out of sight. From that day to this—more than three years now—nobody in Charleston had heard a British gun. Once the British had come close on the land side, but they had thought better of it and slipped away in the middle of the night.

For some time the South Carolina Continentals had kept guard at Fort Moultrie, under command of Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Marion. But as no attack had come, Marion and his regiment had been sent out of the state to points where they were more needed.

Meanwhile, Charleston had become the gateway for the whole Revolution. The rebels held several other seaports, and tradesmen in Europe would have been glad to sell them goods. But the king’s navy patrolled the sea-lanes, and the king’s seamen were so alert that few ships could come directly from Europe to America.

Charleston, however, did not depend on ships that crossed the ocean. Close to Charleston, in the southern sea, were the West Indies. In those rich islands lived hundreds of merchants—Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Portuguese, even some Englishmen—willing to sell anything to anybody.

Ships from their own countries brought goods to these island merchants. Other ships left Charleston loaded with rice and timber and indigo. The Charleston shipmasters traded in the islands, then they scurried back home. They brought guns for the fighting men, plows and tools for the homefolks, silks and looking-glasses for people rich enough to ignore the war.

Part of their merchandise they sold to people who lived in Charleston. But most of it went at high prices to another group of daredevils, this time men who worked on land. These fellows loaded wagons and drove north. Some of them carried luxuries, which they sold to rich people in towns behind the king’s blockade; others took supplies to Washington’s army, and got nothing in return but thanks.

It was a dangerous business. The king’s navy kept a lookout for the Indies ships, and his army tried to catch the wagons. Some ships were taken, some men who started up the wagon track were never heard from again. But there were so many islands, so many crooked ways up the coast, and such bold men in the trade, that a surprising lot of stuff did get through.

One of the most enterprising of the shipowners bringing goods from the Indies was Godfrey Bernard, to whose warehouse Celia was going now. The warehouse was a brick building near the wharf where the boys were pushing off. As Celia approached, the sun caught her white kerchief and sleeve-ruffles till she fairly shone. The boys in the boats shouted at her and threw kisses over the water. Celia laughed, and as Mrs. Thorley was not here to see her, she tossed kisses back to them.

The heavy double doors of the warehouse stood open, and she went in. The entry was a small room, about fifteen feet wide and ten feet from the front door to another door at the back, which led to a storeroom. Facing the front was a counter on which stood a pair of scales, several account-books, and an inkpot with a tray of quills. Behind the counter, next to a window, a young man sat reading the
Gazette.
He was Darren Bernard, a cousin of Godfrey’s who worked for the great man in a miscellaneous capacity. Darren and Celia were good friends.

As he heard footsteps Darren glanced up, then recognizing Celia he sprang to his feet, letting the newspaper fall into the chair behind him. “It’s starting off to be a good day!” he greeted her. “You’re here for the gauze?” He came toward the counter.

Darren was a beautiful youth, strong and well made. His wavy brown hair was tied at the back of his neck with a ribbon bow. Always well dressed, today he wore a dark brown coat and light brown knee-breeches, with a white lawn cravat rippling down the front of his shirt. His white stockings fitted with hardly a wrinkle, and his knee-buckles and shoe-buckles were polished copper. Though Darren had nothing besides what he earned, he was such a likable fellow that he dined out nearly every day; and with all those free meals he could afford to dress like a gentleman of fashion.

Darren had been born of well-to-do parents, but his mother had died young, his father had drunk and gambled away all he owned and finally had been killed in a duel. When Darren was sixteen years old he had had to leave school and look for work. Since he wrote a good hand, his cousin Godfrey had given him a job keeping records. That was six years ago. His salary provided him with a room at an inn, a horse, and a servant who took care of his beautiful clothes. If anybody asked him what he did for a living, he replied good-naturedly, “I’m errand boy for my rich cousin.” He showed no resentment of his father’s profligate ways, and no ambition to mend his fortunes. Winsome and merry-minded, Darren enjoyed each day as it came and worried about tomorrow not at all.

He asked Celia if she had had breakfast, and she shook her head. “There’s a kettle on the fire in back,” Darren said. “Have you any scruples about drinking tea?”

“I’d love it!” she exclaimed.

Darren liked comfort. When it was his turn to mind the warehouse in the early morning he always had a hot drink on the fire. “I don’t know why anybody should mind drinking tea,” he remarked. “It’s all smuggled in these days, it’s not paying any tax to King George. Here’s the gauze—you can look at it while I’m bringing the tray.”

Dragging a chest from under the counter he took out seven rolls of gauze in different colors. Celia spread out her wrapping-cloth, and when he had laid the rolls on it Darren went into the back room, leaving her to gasp with pleasure at the lovely silk.

The gauze came in strips a yard wide and about thirty yards long, rolled on wooden rods like broomsticks. The colors were beautiful—dawn-pink and blue, green and greenish gold, red and orange and black—and the silk was so sheer that she could have read a book through it. One by one, Celia loosened the rolls and let the gauze flow through her fingers. Darren came in with a tea-tray, and as he set it on the counter she murmured, “Oh Darren, this is exquisite!”

He agreed, and asked, “What are you going to make with it?”

Celia picked up the teacup, tasted the tea, and felt a knot in her throat as she answered, “Nothing. It makes me so mad—” She broke off, looking up at his blithesome face. “I don’t think,” she added, “that you’d understand.”

“Why not?” he asked genially.

“You’re so content the way you are. Oh Darren, don’t you ever want to—to
be
somebody?”

Darren chuckled. “I am somebody. I’m an appreciator.”

“A what?”

“An appreciator,” said Darren. “A person who appreciates things.” He grinned. “People who do things need other people to appreciate them. Don’t they?”

In spite of her worriment Celia began to laugh. Darren went on.

“I’m fairly bright and I’ve got pretty good taste. I can appreciate books and music, and good clothes, and good food and wine—why Celia, I’m mighty important in the world.”

She agreed that he was. But Darren noticed that she was fingering the gauze again, and now there was such wistfulness in her look that he spoke to her with real concern. “Celia, what’s the trouble?”

Celia looked up. “Maybe you won’t understand, but I’m going to tell you anyhow. Talking will clear up my thoughts.”

Darren crossed his arms on the counter. “Go ahead.”

Celia told him her trial period was nearly over and she was afraid they might not give her a permanent job. “Or if they do,” she said, “they’ll keep me at buttons and bastings for years—till somebody dies or gets married or something like that. I’m the best dressmaker in town,” she exclaimed, “and nobody knows it but me. Darren, I can sew like a dream! But how, oh how can I prove it?”

Darren reflected. “Could you buy some fine cloth and make a dress, in your own time?”

“Buy it? With what? Apprentices don’t get wages, just their room and board. When I came to town last spring my uncle gave me ten dollars in paper money, for little things I might need. I’ve got four dollars left. Stuff like this—” she touched the gauze—“costs eighteen dollars a yard.”

“Wrong,” said Darren. “It costs thirty dollars a yard in paper money now. So much stuff is going up the wagon track, it makes things scarce in Charleston, and expensive. Yes, I see what you mean.”

“And it takes more than cloth to make a dress, Darren. It takes tools for measuring and cutting, and I haven’t any. And it takes time. Thousands of stitches to be set, one by one, and I have just an hour or two after supper. Oh, I’ve been thinking all over my mind! I
could
get some money if that was all. I’ve got some keepsakes that belonged to my mother. Her silver pins and earrings, and her silver shoe-buckles, and an old family necklace my father gave her when they were married—”