The Crimson Thread (15 page)

            “What is love, Bertie?” he asked. “It’s a mixture of attraction and respect and mutual need.”

            “I don’t need you,” she cried.

            “I know you don’t,” he came back quickly. “But I need you.”

            She looked at him cautiously. Did he need her?

            “It’s true. Without you my father just thinks I’m a fool. But you’re so brilliant. With you as my wife, he will think of us as one unit and value what we have to offer.”

            “Oh,” she observed coldly, “but you don’t value me for myself.”

            “Aren’t your brains part of yourself?” he argued. “Doesn’t your talent and artistry make up for the person who you are?”

            “I suppose so,” she said, conceding the point.

            “You see?”

            “But do you care for me?” she asked. “Do you love me?”

            “Would I be here begging for your forgiveness if I didn’t?”

            She looked at him uncertainly, not knowing the answer to that question. “And you still want to marry me?” she checked.

            “If you’ll have a drunken idiot like me,” he answered.

            “Will you start coming back from the office at a reasonable hour so we can spend time together?”

            He raised his hand. “I promise.”

            “All right, then,” she said. “We won’t speak of it again.”

            He grabbed her hands and kissed them. “Thank you, Bertie. You’re an angel. You’ll see – we are going to make a great team.”

The Last Straw
 

By December, Wellington’s textile mills had rooms and rooms filled with the converted fabric. Rows of seamstresses in the Wellington Clothing Factory down the road were working day and night on sewing machines to make copies of the three dresses Ray had created.

            J.P. depended on Eustace to report to him on their progress. Now he came to see for himself.

            “Bertie, my young woman, you have worked miracles,” he praised her on the day they toured the mill together. “This effort has put us slightly behind the fashion season, but I have so many orders for your stunning dresses that by Christmas we will have more than made up for it.”

            “I’m glad you’re pleased,” she said, and she was. It made life simpler. She was not as impressed with the results. James had advised against making any part of the new fabric or the dresses by hand, claiming, as Eustace had told her, that it was too costly and would cut too deeply into their profit margin. She argued that the increased value would enable them to raise the price, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

            To Bertie, the new dresses lacked the exquisite quality of the original gowns.

            As she and J.P. stood there, many spindles of red thread spun atop the whirring machinery, feeding down into the weave of the fabric. The young doffers often finished the day with their small hands dyed crimson red from the thread. “the dye shouldn’t be coming off like that,” she mentioned to J.P. as a little girl walked by, her red hands at her side. “The thread on the originals stayed put.”

            “Don’t worry about it,” J.P. dismissed her. “The women who but these dresses only wear them once, maybe twice. By the time the color starts to wear away, they’ll have discarded the dress. We save a bundle by using a lower-quality thread.”

            “It can’t be good for the children to have all that red dye on their hands,” she pointed out. “It seeps into their bodies.”

            “They’re young and strong,” he said, unconcerned. He walked away, heading for the front door. “Come, let’s tour the factory.”

            John waited out front to take them to the clothing factory. On the way, Bertie took the opportunity to speak to J.P. about something that had been weighing on her mind. “Do you think it is wise to be working the children the long hours that they labor?”

            “Who better? They’re children. Who has greater endurance or more energy than a child?” he countered. “We follow the labor laws as they exist. Just last year they limited us to using children ten and older, so that’s what we do.”

            “But they’re still growing,” she argued. “They need light and air and places to play. They need to be in school to learn so they can perhaps get a better job some day.”

            “What’s wrong with working for Wellington Industries?” J.P. asked, coloring slightly with anger.

            Bertie also flushed, not with anger but with embarrassment. “Nothing, except that it’s hard work for low pay.”

            “It’s unskilled labor,” J.P. barked. “Should I pay them the same as educated, skilled people? I think not!”

            J.P. was her employer as well as her future father-in-law. She didn’t want to anger him. But still…she had been practicing what she wanted to say to J.P since almost the first day she’d arrived. James didn’t want to hear about it. She couldn’t miss this chance to speak to J.P. now that he was a captive audience in the moving carriage.

”Maybe we could give them some extra breaks during the day and provide snacks for them. It would make them more efficient. It would keep the frail ones from fainting as I’ve often seen them do. It’s very dangerous when they faint on or near the machines…” She shut her eyes and shivered, remembering the horrific result when a little girl had fallen into a moving mechanical part as she passed out from hunger and the heat.

“It might cut medical costs,” he said.

“And we could have a school right there at the mill,” she suggested.

“How could they work and go to school?” J.P. snapped.

“We could break up their shifts, let them work half days and go to school for half days.”

“Bertie, do you fail to realize that we would have to pay them half of what we do now? Their families depend on that money.”

“Perhaps we could pay them the same,” she suggested timidly.

“For half the work?” J.P. thundered.

“It’s mere pennies that they earn,” she said.

He sighed irritably. “We’ll talk about this another time,” he said, putting her off. “The children are sweet and I’m sure you feel for them, but clearly you have no comprehension of the working of economics or of the service we provide these people, who would be starving without the employment we provide.”

“No, sir, I don’t understand economics,” she admitted, very aware of her lack of education. “I only know what a child deserves.”

“Believe me, they’re getting more than they deserve,” he insisted firmly. The carriage rolled into the factory driveway and J.P. turned toward it, leaning to see it from the window. She could tell from his movements that he meant to end the conversation. He slapped his knees gamely as the carriage rolled to a stop. “Let’s go see what the women have made of your beautiful dresses,” he suggested.   

            Getting out of the carriage, he walked briskly ahead of Bertie, not waiting for her. With a frustrated sigh, she followed. Clearly, she had not done anything but annoy him with her request for better conditions for the workers.

            “James is meeting me here,” he told her when she caught up with him at the entrance. “We’re a little early, so he may not be here yet.”

            “Have you ever considered getting one of those new talking machines, sir?” she asked.

            “Do you mean the contraption Bell invented?”

            “Yes, sir, Atlanta has the wires for them now,” she said. Nancy had told her about it.

            “I don’t see any wires around here,” he noted.

            “That’s true,” she agreed. “I was just thinking that if you had a telephone, you could have called James and told him we were arriving early.”

            “It’s a good idea, actually,” he admitted. “We could at least hook up the office in the city. I can see you’re going to be a great asset to Wellington Industries. I wish James was as committed to the company. At any rate, don’t worry about him. He’ll be surprised and delighted to see you. I didn’t tell him you were coming with me. Have you set a date for the wedding yet?”

            “We’ve both been so busy we haven’t had much chance to discuss it,” she said. At least James claimed he was busy. Despite his promise, he continued to come home late at night, and the long days spent at the mill made Bertie too tired to wait up for him. It occurred to her that maybe she didn’t wait up because she simply didn’t want to know what condition he was in.

            Not knowing made everything simpler.

            Eileen was flourishing in this lovely place. Nancy took her outside regularly and read to her under the magnolia tree. The pink had returned to Eileen’s cheeks and the sparkle was back in here blue eyes. This was a life Bertie never would have dreamed she could have provided for the little girl.

            If she broke things off with James, all this would go away. J.P. might not fire her – though he might. Even if she kept her position, her income would not buy anything like the lifestyle they were living now, not if she were paying rent and buying food and clothing, besides paying someone to care for Eileen.

            Her heart, she knew why James didn’t break the engagement. He wanted to please his father. He didn’t feel he was able to run his end of the business without her help, and maybe he wasn’t.

            She could imagine how their future would be: They would have little to do with each other but be married nonetheless. It would work out for everyone except that she would never have a man to truly love her. Could she live a loveless life like that? She didn’t know.

            Her parents had been poor, but they truly loved each other. It was easy to see in every glance, every gesture. Her father always put her mother’s happiness before his own, and she did the same with him. Growing up, Bertie had taken it for granted that she would someday know a love as her parents had. What a horrible disappointment to think that it now might never happen.

            While she was thinking these things, she walked with J.P. into the factory. A foreman hurried down the hall to greet them. “We weren’t expecting you so soon, sir,” he said apologetically.

            “Yes, we’re early,” J.P. replied.

            The foreman handed him a large book. “Mr. LaFleur sent these from France just today,” he told J.P. “They’re the latest pattern designs from Paris.”

            “Put them back in the back office. I’ll look at them later,” J.P. requested.

            “I’ll take them,” Bertie offered. “I left a sketch I did for a new design pattern there, and I’d love to show it to you.”

            “Very well,” he said. “Meet me in the main sewing room when you’ve retrieved your sketch.”

            Bertie’s mind was n her sketch as she hurried to the office with the large book cradled in her arms. It incorporated Chinese chrysanthemums right into the fabric, and she had ideas on how to calibrate the machines to produce a more handwoven quality for it.

            She had learned a great deal about the textile trade since coming to Georgia. Making this new fabric excited her. In part because it would be the first creation that was her own and had not been made by Ray.

            The door to the office was locked, but she quickly unlocked it and went in. James was seated behind the desk, his blond hair mussed and sticking up in places. One of the seamstresses was sitting on his lap.

            The young woman jumped up in alarm.

            James smiled. “Hi, Bertie. Miss McGinley here had a nasty splinter in her finger. I was helping her take it out.”

            Even if Bertie had allowed herself to be fooled by James, Miss McGinley’s guilty, red face proved that he was lying.

            James addressed the young woman. “All right, I’m pretty sure we got it, so you can return to work now.”

            Nodding unhappily, Miss McGinley rushed from the office.

            Bertie wanted to shout, even to throw something at him. She could threaten to have Miss McGinley dismissed; maybe she would even do it too.

            Then she recalled how charming James had been when she had been the hired seamstress’s assistant in the house; how he grinned and winked at her so flirtatiously. She remembered the day he had sneaked into her room, claiming he didn’t know it belonged to her. He’s probably known.

            James was a handsome, wealthy, dissolute drunkard and an outrageous flirt. He was incapable of applying himself to anything, neither school nor the business. Though she had once thought he was the prince of her dreams, she now saw him as weak, deceitful, and unattractive.

            She realized that this growing consciousness of who he really was had been like a wave pounding against a mental dam she’d constructed in her mind to keep such thoughts back. It had been battering at the dam for several weeks. Now the truth about him finally splashed over the top, flooding her mind with new insight.

            “We’ll speak at home,” she said coolly, turning to leave. What was the sense in making a scene?

            She was done with him – and this time for good.