Celia Garth: A Novel (8 page)

“It just happens to be the sort of thing I can do,” he told her.

They had reached the shop. Luke walked with her up the steps and into the parlor. The customers had gone and Agnes was about to lock up. Celia knew from experience that Agnes was dismayed at seeing a visitor walk in so late, but Agnes came forward, smiling with longsuffering sweetness, and asked the gentleman how she could serve him.

Luke bowed. He said he was not a customer, he had merely been seeing Miss Garth back from her interview with his mother. But now that he was here, he was glad he had come in. He flirted with Agnes and flattered her, and asked if she worked here every day.

Agnes was charmed. Celia, lingering in the background, thought she had never seen a skirt-chaser more expert. Remembering how adroitly he had won her favor a few minutes ago, she decided he was a man to beware of. Probably had a girl in every town between here and Philadelphia. And him toting a Bible, too.

The parlor was well lighted, and now she observed that with his wine-colored coat Luke wore blue knee-breeches and heavy gray stockings. She was surprised at the stockings. They were knitted of thick yarn such as a laboring man would wear, but the knitter had made them in an elaborate lacework pattern like the stockings of a gentleman dandy. Celia thought such a fancy design on such coarse stockings was silly. She wondered if Vivian had made them, and doubted it. She could not imagine Vivian’s wasting her time like that.

Luke was asking Agnes how she kept herself so fresh and pretty after a day’s work. She didn’t look a bit tired, he said, but she must be. It was time she got some rest. He
would
like to take a look at the fashion dolls—that man-doll in the purple coat had given him an idea—but he did not want to detain her. Maybe Miss Garth would be willing to lock up after him.

As Celia was willing, and as Agnes really was tired (and looked it, in spite of Luke’s honeyed fibs), he got his way and she went upstairs in a happy frame of mind.

Celia was sitting on the arm of a chair near the doll cabinet. Luke crossed the room and rested one hand on the cabinet, but he spoke to her without glancing at the dolls. “When I leave Charleston again, my mother and stepfather will go back to Sea Garden. Would you go along, and make her another dress or two?”

“I’d love to!” exclaimed Celia. “If—” She bit her lip.

“If what?” he asked smiling.

“Why, if your mother wants me—and if Mrs. Thorley will let me.

“Oh,” Luke said. “If mother wants you she’ll arrange it with Mrs. Thorley. As for whether or not she’ll want you—” He grinned down at her. “I rather think she’s going to like you. She was quite doubtful before you came over. Jimmy Rand made an eloquent speech, that’s the only reason she said she’d see you at all. If she took you she must have been agreeably surprised.”

Celia thought with a glow of triumph, This will show Mrs. Thorley! But at the same time she remembered Vivian’s troubled hands twisting the lorgnette. With a sharp glance at Luke she suggested, “You think your mother will worry less about you if she has clothes to keep her busy?”

“I think,” Luke answered calmly, “that it’s none of your business, but since you ask me, yes.”

“Why don’t you stay home this winter?” Celia asked.

Luke smiled at one side of his mouth. “I’m no parlor patriot,” he said shortly.

“I suppose you’d call Jimmy Rand a parlor patriot!”

“Don’t be absurd,” said Luke. “Somebody has to guard Charleston harbor or I’d have no guns to load on my wagons. Remember what King David said about the men who stayed by the stuff?”

Celia shook her head.

“You’ll find it in the Bible. He said the men who stand on guard are just as important as the men who go into battle.”

She smiled, unwillingly. “You know a lot of smart answers out of the Bible.”

“Lot of smart answers there,” said Luke. He stuck his thumbs under his belt. “Now you stop bothering about my mother and me. You stick to your knitting.”

The word “knitting” brought Celia’s mind back to his stockings. There was a moment of silence. A chair stood by the wall, a dainty little chair without arms. Luke pulled it forward and perched on it like a large bird on a small twig, his heels hooked over the front rung, his elbows on his knees and his hands linked. “What are you staring at?” he asked.

“I didn’t realize I was staring,” she said with a touch of embarrassment. But since she did want to know, she took this chance to find out. “Mr. Ansell, who made your stockings?”

Luke went rigid as though with shock. His jaw dropped, his eyes were like two blue fires in his weatherbeaten face. For an instant he looked at her in amazement.

But only for an instant. Luke was used to shocks. He got himself in hand so fast that Celia almost thought she had made a mistake about his reaction. He relaxed, grinned, held out one leg and examined it. Finally, tucking his leg under the chair again, he hooked his heel over the rung as before. He replied serenely, “I did.”

This time she was the startled one. “You!”

Luke nodded. “On the wagon track.” Laughing at her surprise, he went on. “I’m no hero. As long as we’re moving, the job isn’t too fearsome. We’re so busy with the teams we don’t have time to think about how dangerous it is. But when we stop to rest—when the woods crunch, and every crunch may be redcoats or a gang of murdering robbers—then, dear lady, I’m scared. So I knit. With fancy patterns like this I have to count stitches. Eases my nerves.”

For a moment Celia said nothing. She still could not guess why he had been so jolted at her query, but she was beginning to know something else about him. She looked him over—his thick rippling hair and his sunburn, his aggressive blue eyes, his whole air of strength and defiance and daredevil stubbornness. In a wondering voice she said, “Mr. Ansell, you—”

She stopped, hardly knowing how to say it. With a puzzled interest he prompted her. “Yes? Go on.”

Celia said, “You
like
that, don’t you?”

“Like what?” he asked mischievously. “Knitting?”

“You know what I mean,” Celia retorted. “You like being scared.”

Luke began to laugh, softly and almost proudly, as if he enjoyed her keenness. “Not exactly,” he said, “but you understand it better than most people. What I like is the way I feel when I wake up in the morning, when I look around and say, ‘Good Lord, I’m still here!’”

Celia nodded slowly. Luke got to his feet.

“Now,” he said, “I’ll ask you something.”

She laughed a little. “All right.”

“Do you always notice so much about other people?”

“Why yes,” Celia said thoughtfully, “I think I do. I like to know about people.”

“You’re as sharp as my mother,” Luke said. With a smile that was half amused and half admiring, he went to the door. Hand on the doorknob he gave her a parting glance, his eyes going up and down in a way that made her pleasantly conscious of her blond hair and brown eyes and slim waistline. “I’ve enjoyed meeting you,” said Luke. “Good night.” Turning, he grinned at her over his shoulder. “Good night,” he repeated. “Sassyface.”

The door banged and he was gone. But he had slammed it so hard that the latch had not caught and the door was swinging open again. She went to fasten it.

By the lantern over the doorway she could see him striding off into the dark. He was singing.

“Now girls, why act so shy

When provoking men come by?

You know you’re only wondering

how you strike us—”

Celia stopped and listened. Luke’s voice was dwindling, but the wind was blowing her way and it brought his song back to where she stood.

“Oh forget the won’ts and can’ts!

For since half the world wears pants,

You might as well own up to it—

you like us!”

T
HE SAME WEEK THAT
Celia began to work for Vivian, Roy was married to Sophie Torrance in the church of St. James Goose Creek, seventeen miles above Charleston. Vivian serenely stayed home, but her son Burton Dale and his wife attended, and. so did Jimmy’s mother. Jimmy told Celia they said the bride and groom and Aunt Louisa had all seemed healthy and happy, but Uncle William had looked wretchedly unwell. Celia was sorry about Uncle William. She had always been fond of him, though she had not respected him much. She could not respect people who never got their own way.

Jimmy said the Torrances were indigo planters, and Tories. Most of the indigo people were Tories. Some years ago the gentlemen in Parliament, wanting British sources of indigo that would compete with the crops raised by Frenchmen in the French West Indies, had voted to pay a bonus on every pound of indigo raised in the king’s colonies. If the Americans should cut their ties with the king, of course his government would no longer pay them to raise indigo; therefore, Jimmy said to Celia, Mrs. Roy Garth would no doubt wear a green ribbon on her cap.

And from what Celia had said about Roy, Jimmy added with a wise twinkle, he wouldn’t be surprised if Roy turned Tory also.

He told Celia all this one evening when he walked with her back to the shop, and lingered in the little sitting room where the girls received callers. Celia agreed, laughing. For while Roy had never put himself to any trouble about the war, before she left home he had favored independence. Most of the rice planters favored independence because they were tired of British restrictions on the sale of their crop.

But though she was interested, after Jimmy had gone she hardly thought of Roy again. She did not have room in her head for anything but her work. Vivian was proving just as impossible a customer as they had warned her.

At first Celia had thought the situation ideal. Her workroom was on the third floor, overlooking the garden. Marietta brought her dinner at midday, and in the afternoon came in again to do any small services Celia might want. Everything was comfortable, everybody was pleasant. But there were times when Celia was in despair.

Vivian’s dress was to be made of a printed silk imported by Godfrey Bernard. Celia measured, diagrammed, figured her cutting and seaming with exquisite care. But even so, she was not always good enough.

Every morning Vivian would come up to the workroom, in a bewitching wrapper and a cap of lawn and ribbons, always lovely, always the great lady who walked with pride. Celia admired her, envied her, and dreaded her visits. There were days when Vivian approved of what had been sewn yesterday, but just as often she did not, and Celia spent the next few hours taking out the stitches she had so carefully put in. Vivian was not bad-tempered, but she was merciless. She knew what she wanted, and what she wanted was perfection (or something so close to perfection that Celia often thought it was beyond human reach). And always, like a little demon sitting on Celia’s shoulder and whispering into her ear, there was Mrs. Thorley’s ultimatum. You will please Mrs. Lacy, or you will go.

With all these difficulties, Celia did think she had a right to peace and quiet in which to work. But there was no such thing as peace and quiet with Luke in the house.

She did not see Luke again. But she was constantly, and wrath-fully, aware of him. Luke was all over the place, vital, noisy, always doing something, shouting to somebody to do something else, rattling up and down the stairs, warbling silly ditties at the top of his voice. Now and then she would have a respite while he was off collecting guns or gunpowder that had been smuggled into some secret cove, but in a day or two the racket of his presence would burst forth again. Celia wished he would make haste to load his stuff and be off to yell at mule-teams and George Washington.

Gradually she met the other members of the family. Marietta sketched their backgrounds for her.

Mr. Lacy was an urbane and scholarly gentleman of seventy. He had read as much Greek and Latin as Uncle William, but his head was not merely an attic of useless learning. Until he retired several years ago Mr. Lacy had been a successful rice planter. But he liked books better than people, and horses better still. Both in town and at Sea Garden he had fine stables and took regular horseback rides. He and Vivian had a quiet, friendly relationship that seemed agreeable to them both. Marietta said that Mr. Lacy and Luke, though so different, got along well. Luke called him “governor.”

Burton Dale was Vivian’s eldest son. In his forties, Burton was a big man, handsome in a thick, florid sort of way. Most of his clothes were too tight. Now in wartime the supply of good material was so limited that even rich men had to make their wardrobes last, and while the clothes stayed the same size the men sometimes put on extra inches.

Burton came to dinner now and then with his wife Elise. They were much alike—stiff-minded, very correct in their behavior, and a constant source of amusement to Vivian. They had two sons, but as Burton had married late his elder boy was only twelve years old.

Besides his plantation on Goose Creek, Burton had a town house in the lordly suburb of Ansonborough, at the north edge of Charleston. Favoring the rebel side in the war, he gave the army regular donations of both rice and money, and Celia supposed he would be happy to go on doing so as long as nobody asked him to make himself uncomfortable.

Marietta said Burton’s father had died of fever brought on when he went up to his rice-fields in the sickly season without taking any Peruvian bark with him. Burton had had four stepfathers. He addressed Mr. Lacy as “Sir.”

Vivian’s second son was Godfrey Bernard. His father was descended from one of the French Huguenots who fled to America when King Louis XIV forbade them to worship in France. Many of these Frenchmen had settled along the Santee River, where they had prospered so greatly that “rich as a Huguenot” became a proverb. Marietta said Vivian had had another son by this marriage, but he had died as a baby. Godfrey’s father had lost his life not long afterward, drowned while on an exploring trip among the tributary creeks up the river.

Godfrey and his wife Ida—they had no children—lived around the corner from Vivian on Tradd Street. Their back yards touched in the middle of the block, and Godfrey, an energetic fellow who looked younger than his forty years, often ran down to the dividing wall to hand Vivian a box of ginger or some other hard-to-get delicacy that one of his ships had brought in.