Celia Garth: A Novel (13 page)

“Luke!”

He turned and saw her, and swept her into his arms. They hugged each other, neither of them concerned that his miry clothes were wrecking her lace and satin, and the ardor of his embrace was sending her hair-powder up in a cloud that settled on his whiskers and made him look as if he had fallen into the flour barrel.

By this time a dozen mud-dripping men had come in. The guests were surging around them, and now there were more exclamations as this one and that recognized friends under the beards. Celia saw Herbert and Eugene Lacy grab the elbows of one fellow, and at the same time Jimmy cried, “Why there’s Tom Lacy,” and he let go of her as he hurried forward. Celia stood still, uncertain what to do now.

She was almost within touching distance of Luke and Vivian. “You crazy fool,” Vivian was saying to him, “what have you been—”

Looking around at the dazzling room, Luke did not seem to hear her. “Mother, what is all this?” he asked. He spoke as if he had come upon some orgy in a strange land.

“A ball, silly—New Year’s Eve!”

“Oh,” Luke said. “New Year’s Eve.” He nodded vaguely, almost stupidly, like a man who had not for weeks past thought of what day it might be.

“Now tell me about you!” begged Vivian. She was so glad to see him that she was hardly aware of the others around her. Luke had pulled off his hat and was holding it crumpled in his hand, while dirty water dripped from the brim to the floor. All around the doorway were puddles and muddy footprints where the other men had come in. “You haven’t been all the way to Philadelphia in this time!” Vivian exclaimed.

One of Luke’s companions came hurrying over, elbowing fine gentlemen out of his way. He spoke to Luke.

Celia did not catch his words, but she heard Luke say, “Yes, yes, bring them in! Put them over there by the fire.” He turned sharply. “Clear that door! Can’t you hear me?—get out of the way.”

Two men came in carrying a stretcher. Behind them in the hall Celia saw more stretchers approaching. On the stretchers were men with blood on their shirts, and clumsy bandages on their heads or arms or legs. As the carriers set down the first stretcher by the fireplace she gave a gasp of horror, for the man lying there was Darren, and on Darren’s forehead was a tumble of golden-brown curls smeared with blood. Pushing through the crowd Celia rushed to the hearth and dropped on her knees beside him.

Darren seemed unconscious. Unlike Luke, he was shaved and he wore a good woolen suit, dripping now with the rain. Celia took his cold hand and rubbed it between her own. Leaning over the other side of the stretcher were Godfrey and Luke. “Darren will be all right,” Luke was saying, “if this rain doesn’t clog his lungs.” As he glanced up toward the carriers bringing another wounded man, he saw Celia. With strained courtesy he said, “Will you please move out of the way, ma’am?”

Evidently he saw her only as a blur. Celia got to her feet, feeling about as important as a fly on the wall.

Except for Luke and the men with him—about thirty of them besides the five or six who had been wounded—nobody seemed to know what had happened. The whole ballroom was a-buzz. Servants had crowded in, and were fluttering about as if they wished somebody would tell them what to do. The guests were asking questions of each other, or of the air; or were staring around as if they expected to see handwriting on the wall. Several men were hurrying hither and yon, nervously telling other people to be calm, while two or three women stood sobbing in the middle of the floor.

Just as Celia had the impression that nobody was acting with any sense, the group around the hearth parted as if they had heard a command. Down the aisle thus made came Vivian, a bottle in each hand. Behind her was Jimmy carrying a tray with glasses and a pitcher.

In spite of the dirty streaks on her white satin, Vivian looked elegant and tranquil. “We’ll have help for these men in a minute,” she said to Luke. “In the meantime a swig of brandy won’t hurt them, or you either.”

Luke gave her a grateful smile. Jimmy was already kneeling by the stretchers, and Vivian handed him the bottles as she went on talking to Luke. The only surgeon on the place, she said, was the Negro who took care of the animals, but he knows a good deal about treating human wounds too. One of the house-boys had been sent to bring him in. “And now,” Vivian ended crisply, “will you please tell me what’s been going on!”

Luke stood with one elbow on the marble mantelpiece, his hand hanging limp. In his other hand he held the glass of brandy that Jimmy had passed up to him. Now that his men were safe Luke was letting himself relax. He was tired, almost too tired to talk. On the floor Godfrey was raising Darren’s head and holding a drink to his lips; Jimmy was giving brandy and water to another man, and beside him, also giving aid, was the man he had addressed as Tom Lacy. A big fair young man, Tom had a bristly golden beard and a mane of straw-colored hair tied back with a leather cord.

Luke drained his glass. Still kneeling by the stretchers, Jimmy demanded, “Who did this, Luke?”

Luke drew a long tired breath. “Tories.”

“Tories!” gasped Jimmy, and with him everybody else near enough to have heard the word. In the country below Charleston Tory bands had done a lot of raiding and looting, but here near the Santee the rebel sentiment was so strong that they had made little trouble.

Luke nodded, a grim expression around his vivid blue eyes. “They were after a cargo of salt,” he said, “on one of Godfrey’s ships from Bermuda.”

Celia began to understand. There was no salt in South Carolina. From the first settlement of the colony their salt had come from the salt-springs of Bermuda, and now smuggling it in was a vital business. Luke went on,

“There’s a storehouse near the landing here, for bulky supplies that the Sea Garden boat brings up from Charleston. Godfrey had planned to store the salt there. Two or three days ago he got word that his ship was here, creeping among the islands, so he sent Darren and some others to get the salt into the storehouse. They were unloading the boat when a pack of Tories attacked. Thank God we came up in time.”

There was another flurry of questions. Luke said they had saved the salt and left men to guard it. Jimmy asked,

“What makes the Tories so bold, all of a sudden?”

“I suppose,” Luke said with a shrug, “they’ve heard the same news we have.”

More questions. The group around him had been thickening with every word he spoke. Now Vivian’s voice slipped like a thread of silk among the rougher voices of the men. “Tell us the news, Luke.”

He spoke crisply. “The British are on their way to attack Charleston.”

This time there was such a clatter of words that it was hard to make sense out of any of them. Celia moved closer, in time to hear Luke say,

“You’d better let Tom tell you. He’s the one who told me. I was on my way north with my wagon party when we met Tom and his fellows riding south. I let the wagons go on to Philadelphia without me—if there’s going to be trouble at home I want to be here.” He held out the brandy bottle to Tom.

Tom sat back on the floor, his legs crossed in front of him. Above his beard his face was stung red by the wind and his eyes looked sunken. When he spoke, his voice had the dull monotone of weariness.

Tom said that when he learned the British were preparing for an attack on Charleston, he and various other Carolinians who had been in the northern army had received permission to come home. He and several of his friends had left Philadelphia eight weeks ago. At that time, the British—who had been occupying New York for three years—had had a hundred ships in New York harbor ready to move south. Their leader was Sir Henry Clinton, commander-in-chief of the king’s forces in America. Everybody in Charleston would recognize his name, for Sir Henry Clinton had been in command of the British land forces at the battle of Fort Moultrie. His second in command now was the Earl of Cornwallis.

Clinton had plenty of men—British, Hessians, and of course here Tom’s voice lost its tired dullness and he spoke the word venomously—
Tories.
Naturally the Tories had a British commander. Americans were good enough to fight for his fat majesty but not good enough to lead their own regiments. These Tories were led by a Britisher named Tarleton. They called themselves “Tarleton’s Legion.”

While he talked Celia saw Vivian in the background, watching Luke, so glad to have him at home that she did not care how frightening was the news he brought. Plainly she was fonder of him than of Burton or Madge or Godfrey, just as she had cared more for Luke’s father than for any of her other husbands. Yet neither Luke nor his father would do what she wanted—and it occurred to Celia that maybe this was why she loved them best.

This was the first time Celia had seen Luke and Vivian together. She was surprised to notice how much alike they were. Luke was supposed to look like his father, and probably he did—for one thing, he had blue eyes while Vivian’s were brown, and his features were more rugged than hers—but there was a resemblance: the humorous look about their eyes, their determined mouths and strong chins, the general expression of both their faces. Nobody would be surprised to hear that they were mother and son.

Celia realized that she had not been listening to Tom Lacy, and she pulled her attention back. Tom was saying the British had sworn to turn Charleston into a pile of trash. They had two good reasons for it. One was that they had never gotten over their licking at Fort Moultrie. The other reason was that they had to stop those supply trains. Traffic on the wagon track was so secret that few people realized how thick it was. But the British commanders knew.

Tom was interrupted by the arrival of the Negro surgeon and his helpers. The other men moved aside. They pressed around Luke and Tom, eager to hear more.

Celia drew back against the wall. She had thought she was not tired, but now her legs ached and her back hurt and she wanted to rest. Looking for a chair, she made her way along the wall; but every chair was occupied, and everybody was talking while nobody listened. She heard Madge Penfield say, “Bobby’s only fifteen but he’s been begging to get into it—now I’ll never keep him at home.”

At last Celia paused by the hall door where Luke had come in—how long ago? Hardly an hour, but in that little time how everything had changed!

She looked around at the wreckage of her betrothal ball. The floor was scratched, tracked with mud, smeared with dirty water. She could smell blood and a sharp odor of medicine. Jimmy and Godfrey were carrying Darren toward a bedroom. All around, women were weeping and shivering, men were pacing, shouting, slashing the air with their arms as if they were making speeches in Congress. Several of them were peering out of the windows as if they expected to see King George himself come riding through the rain. At the punch-table Paul de Courcey and some other young cavaliers were raising glasses in celebration of the glorious deeds they were going to do.

Somebody had thrown open the doors to the dining room. Now the men were gobbling the exquisite supper, going back and forth with bread and meat in their dirty hands, dripping gravy on their coats, spilling scraps all over the floor. Half of them, guzzling out of bottles, were already red in the face and talking too loud.

Her beautiful party had turned ugly and threatening and sad. The British were on their way to attack Charleston, to kill her friends—she felt a clutch of terror. By next New Year’s Eve, some of the men in this room would be dead.

Celia prayed silently, “Please, Lord, don’t let me think about that! I can’t bear it.”

She heard determined footsteps coming her way. Above the confusion these steps had a sound of purpose. Turning her head she saw Luke striding toward the door. By the hearth he had not seen her, but now he did, and he stopped short.

“Why—Sassyface!” he exclaimed. His blue eyes looked her up and down—her fashionable coiffure, the emerald necklace, the dress of dark red velvet with the close bodice and flaring skirt. On his bewhiskered face appeared a grin of admiration. “Wow!” Luke said earnestly.

Celia smiled at him. He made her feel so much better. Luke continued,

“How enchanting you are. I haven’t seen anything like you since—since the last time I saw you.”

She wondered how many girls he had said that to, since the last time he saw her. Not that it mattered. What mattered was that he had swept away her rising panic and made her feel again like a girl at a party. “Where are you going?” she asked him. “Not back outdoors in all this rain!”

“Why yes. I’ve got to take care of Jerry.”

“Jerry?”

“My horse. I’ve put him under a shed, but I want to get him to the stable so he can have a rubdown and some corn. Though after seeing you,” he added, “I think I’ll let Jerry wait a few minutes longer.” His eyes flashed over her again. “Is your figure really that good,” he asked, “or do you do it with stuffing and whalebones?”

Celia began to laugh. “Do you think it’s any of your business?”

“I’m afraid not,” he answered sadly. “I wish it was. Maybe I’ve got no business right now but Jerry.”

Jerry, she thought, Jeremiah the prophet. That was Luke for you, flirting like a heathen and choosing a Bible name for his horse. “And you, all the time quoting the Bible,” she reproached him, “and even naming your horse out of it.”

Luke replied mirthfully. “I’m glad you noticed his name. Because—” he spoke with a slow teasing drawl—“because an ordinary person, now, might think Jerry was short for Jeremiah. But of course, an intelligent young woman like you has already recognized that Jerry is short for Jeroboam-the-son-of-Nebat-who-caused-Israel-to-sin, as recorded in the Books of the Kings.”

“I never heard of him in my life,” Celia retorted, and before they could say anything else another voice exclaimed, “There you are!” Jimmy came hurrying toward them. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said to Celia.

She smiled happily, and Jimmy said to Luke,

“Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”

“Gladly,” said Luke, “if you’ll tell me what for.”

“Didn’t anybody tell you that this ball is to celebrate our engagement?”