Celia Garth: A Novel (55 page)

It was dark when they reached town, and she could not see much as they drove through the streets. Godfrey had brought some firewood into the Lacys’ home on Meeting Street, and he and Darren had awkwardly spread sheets and blankets on the beds. Tired after her long journey, Celia slept soundly. But in the morning she walked around the house, and her heart felt sick.

For more than a year this house had been occupied by a Tory family. They knew they had lost the war, and every room was bruised with their resentment. Vivian’s furniture was scuffed and dented, ringed by wet glasses, scorched by careless smokers. The rugs were spotted with spilt food and drink. All through the house Celia saw broken hinges, peeling wallpaper, and a filthy army of cockroaches.

After a breakfast of provisions they had brought with them, Vivian called a conference of the servants. Celia offered to help, but Vivian smilingly shook her head. “You mind your own business. This is my house, remember?”

Luke and Herbert said they would go out and hear the news. Celia stopped Luke at the front door, to beg him, if he saw any nice muslin for sale, to buy it so the baby could have a pretty dress. She was so tired of old sheets and homespun.

Luke said he had never bought any such stuff in his life, but he would see what he could find. He and Herbert went out. As Celia turned from the door she saw Vivian in the hall giving the maids instructions about cleaning up. If Vivian shared her own apprehension that Charleston might have any incurable hurt, she was not saying so.

But Celia still felt her foreboding of yesterday. She started upstairs. First she had to feed the baby, then she wanted to go outside and see what the town looked like now.

When the baby fell asleep again she put on her cloak and went down. In a sitting room at one side of the hall, a colored man was making a fire while a girl dusted the chairs. That was like Vivian, to make one room comfortable at once. Celia opened the front door and went outside. On the sidewalk by the steps she paused and looked around, and as she looked she smiled, and told herself she had been foolish to feel such misgivings. Charleston was in an ugly muddle, to be sure. But everywhere she turned, she saw people busy putting it back in order.

The morning was full of wind and sun and the noise of rebuilding. All around her Celia could hear saws and hammers. On the roof of Simon Dale’s house next door workmen were making repairs. Across the street a man was replacing the broken lantern over a door. Farther down, another man was painting a wall blackened by a British shell. A hand-cart came down the street, pushed by a peddler calling that he had fine raw shrimp.

What had she dreaded? The redcoats were gone, and before long there would be scarcely anything to remind you that they had been here. Nothing but a few scars to be pointed out to children, scars of honor.

Celia had turned her head toward Broad Street. As she saw the steeple of St. Michael’s she started with pleasure. They had built a scaffolding around the steeple, and on the scaffolding men were at work. They were scraping off the black paint.

How good it would be to have the spire of St. Michael’s white again! At night the beacon would shine again over the town. And the bells would ring, the beautiful voice of Charleston.

She saw Godfrey and Darren coming down the street toward her. They waved, and Celia waved back. How well they looked.

Godfrey gave her a package of coffee, and she exclaimed with delight, for she had not tasted coffee in months. They accepted her invitation to come in by the fire, and Celia threw her cloak over a newly dusted chair and went to call Vivian.

Vivian came in, saying they were interrupting her housecleaning, but that task would take six weeks or maybe six months, and she couldn’t wait so long to hear the news of the town. The four of them sat around the fire. Darren told them about the gunpowder.

Remember, during the siege, they had moved ten thousand pounds of gunpowder from the magazine on Cumberland Street? They had stored the powder in a vault under the Exchange, and secured it with a hurriedly built brick wall. Well, when the redcoats were gone and the Americans marched in, the gunpowder was still there.

All the powder the redcoats used was brought in by ship. They would have been glad to pay for the powder hidden in the Exchange. But though many people knew it was there, nobody had told them.

Celia thought of the Charleston patriots—the rich ones impoverished and exiled, the poor ones struggling to feed their children by any job the British would let them hold. It would have been so easy. “What will you give me if I tell you where to find ten thousand pounds of gunpowder?”

She smiled with astonished gratitude. After so much cruelty and nastiness, it was good to learn how really magnificent people could be. She said so, and the two men agreed with her, but Vivian was laughing.

“What’s funny about it?” Godfrey demanded.

“Why so surprised?” Vivian asked. “You conceited creatures. You knew, all three of you, and you didn’t tell. What makes you think you’re so much better than the average?”

There was an instant of startled silence, then they all laughed too. Vivian had such a way of making sense.

Celia leaned back in her chair, stretching her feet toward the fire. Godfrey told about the deserters, hundreds of them, who crept out of hiding as soon as the British ships had gone across the horizon. He had found three of them hiding behind boxes in his own attic. They had not taken anything or done any harm. They liked America and wanted to stay here, that was all. One of them said he was going to be married to an American girl, a young lady named Becky Duren who worked at Mrs. Thorley’s shop. He was a private soldier, had been a farm laborer at home, and when they were married he was going up to her father’s farm and help with the work. Celia wondered if Becky really meant it this time.

The front door banged, and Luke’s voice shouted, “Where’s everybody?” Godfrey called an answer and Luke strode in. “Morning, boys. Celia, is this what you wanted?”

He dropped a bundle into her lap. Celia drew out a length of fine cambric, soft and silky—such cloth as she had not seen since she used to make clothes for Tory women. She sighed with ecstasy. “Oh Luke, it’s beautiful! Where did you get it?”

“Mrs. Thorley’s,” said Luke. He went to the hearth and held out his hands to the fire.

Celia gathered up the cambric and held it against her cheek. This was what she was born for. She had never known it so well as during the months when she had had to do without it. As long as she lived she would thrill to beautiful clothes as some people thrilled to painting and poetry. “I’m so happy,” she murmured, “to have things getting right!”

Vivian smiled at her. “We all are.”

“It will be so good,” Celia went on dreamily, “to have the church steeple white again, to hear the bells—”

The three men all gave a start. Godfrey and Darren sat up straight in their chairs. Luke, still standing, struck the mantelpiece with his fist. Godfrey said something to him, a question—in her shock Celia did not hear what it was, but she heard Luke answer, “Yes, I heard about it, at the Exchange.”

Celia had sat up too, frightened. The cambric slid out of her hands to the floor. It was as if a voice inside her was saying, I knew it! This is what I was afraid of. They’ve done something terrible to us, something we can’t make right.

She heard Vivian ask in alarm, “What’s the matter? Luke, Godfrey—what’s happened?”

At the same time Celia begged, more definitely, “Luke, what did they do?”

Luke’s eyes turned to Celia. He answered her question. “We’ll never hear the bells again. The redcoats took them.”

Vivian caught her breath. Celia put her hand up to her throat as if she felt herself choking. As so often when she was deeply moved, she had no words. But Vivian spoke, though her voice was strained with a sense of disaster.

“You mean—the redcoats—stole the bells of St. Michael’s?”

The others nodded. Celia looked from Luke to Godfrey, from Godfrey to Darren, and back again, as if hoping that one of them would tell her it was all a mistake. She felt almost as if they had announced the death of a person she loved, someone who had seemed to be getting well. She could not think of Charleston without the bells of St. Michael’s. Everybody in town reckoned time by the bells. Everybody, of whatever faith, loved the music of them as the morning came up or the sun went down.

Helplessly, Vivian asked, “But why?”

Godfrey pushed back his chair and stood up. “To sell,” he answered curtly. “Those bells are worth a lot of money.”

Luke began to poke the fire. He poked it viciously, as if he was beating something. They had borne so much, had lost so much. And now when they had thought it was over, the theft of the bells had come like a new insult. It was so cruel and so needless, this last indignity.

Godfrey stood leaning his elbow on the back of his chair, talking as if it was a relief to talk. He said it was lucky the redcoats had had to take all those Tories with them. Their ships had been so crowded that there had not been room for much loot. But they had taken all they could stuff in—fine furniture, silver, much public property. And the bells.

Luke set down the poker. “Stop talking about it.”

Godfrey gave a harsh little laugh. “I know how you feel,” he said. “It hit me the same way.”

Luke said he was going out again, to order some plantation tools. He wanted to get his mind off the bells. The others felt the same way. Godfrey said he and Darren had to check a shipment of goods, and Vivian said she would go back to her house-cleaning. Celia picked up her cloak. “I think I’ll go out too. I’ll feel better if I take a walk.”

Luke went out with her. In front of the house he said good-by, and started toward King Street.

Celia walked toward St. Michael’s, past a knot of boys watching the work of repair on the steeple. Losing the bells was like losing part of her life. She remembered hearing them that morning when Jimmy told her Vivian needed a dressmaker; and again that gray evening when Jimmy had first kissed her. She had not forgotten Jimmy; she never would.

Luke had said, “Of course, you were not in love with him.”

But she had been!

The minute she owned up to it she had a feeling of release. Pausing on the sidewalk she looked up at the steeple. She had loved Jimmy, she had been happy loving him, and the bells had been part of that happiness. What she had felt for Jimmy was not what she felt now for Luke—this was a different love because she herself was different. When she had realized her love for Luke she was no longer the young girl Jimmy had kissed. But she had loved Jimmy. Luke must know this. Only—she understood now, as she walked on—Luke did not want to know it.

Vivian would understand this. Vivian had loved Luke’s father best, but he was not the only man she had loved. But—if he had wanted to think he was, a woman as wise as Vivian would have been wise enough to let him think so.

All of a sudden, as she walked along the busy street in the bright winter chill, Celia knew that her aloneness was not gone. In some ways she was alone and so was everybody else. This dream of being completely one with another person—well, it was a beautiful dream. Everybody had areas of silence.

But maybe you were better for this. For if you had lonely places in your heart, you knew other people had lonely places too.

Even Luke?

The thought struck her sharply. She walked faster, thinking. There was a great deal about Luke that she did not know. They had never been really married—they had said “Yes” to a wedding ceremony and they had had a child, but they had not lived day after day in the intimacy that made people really know each other. Maybe they would find it hard to get used to that. Luke would, certainly. He was reckless, daredevilish—the change to being a peaceful citizen was going to be a hard change for him.

She remembered how the bells of St. Michael’s had rung when she was sailing out of Charleston harbor bound for Sea Garden to be married to Luke. It had seemed to her that they were saying, “We wish you happiness.”

The bells would remind her of so much. They would remind her—men like war, women don’t. Women like being peacetime homemakers, men don’t. Be gentle, Celia. Be understanding. You’ve got a rough road ahead of you and so has he. Everybody has lonely places. Even Luke.

She stopped and turned around, and looked back across the housetops to the steeple. This was what the bells would say, but they were not there to say it. The steeple was silent.

Celia wanted to cry out, No! It must not be this way. She could not, she simply could not, accept the idea that she would never hear the bells again, that her child would never hear that lovely whisper of music. Standing on the sidewalk, she looked up at the silent steeple.

“Please,” she whispered, “please don’t let it be always silent! Please God, give us back the bells!”

Gwen Bristow (1903–1980), the author of seven bestselling historical novels that bring to life momentous events in American history, such as the siege of Charleston during the American Revolution (
Celia Garth
) and the great California gold rush (
Calico Palace
), was born in South Carolina, where the Bristow family had settled in the seventeenth century. After graduating from Judson College in Alabama and attending the Columbia School of Journalism, Bristow worked as a reporter for New Orleans’
Times-Picayune
from 1925 to 1934. Through her husband, screenwriter Bruce Manning, she developed an interest in longer forms of writing—novels and screenplays.

After Bristow moved to Hollywood, her literary career took off with the publication of
Deep Summer
, the first novel in a trilogy of Louisiana-set historical novels, which also includes
The Handsome Road
and
This Side of Glory
. Bristow continued to write about the American South and explored the settling of the American West in her bestselling novels
Jubilee Trail
, which was made into a film in 1954, and in her only work of nonfiction,
Golden Dreams
. Her novel
Tomorrow Is Forever
also became a film, starring Claudette Colbert, Orson Welles, and Natalie Wood, in 1946.