by Gwen Bristow
The first sound of the bombardment had nearly stunned her. But now that this first shock had passed, her senses were awake again and what she realized made her shake with terror.
This was no token firing to remind you that the British were here. These guns meant business. She remembered what Tom Lacy-had said—that Sir Henry Clinton had not forgiven Charleston for his defeat at Fort Moultrie. This time he had vowed to turn the place into a pile of dust and corpses. And tonight he had started.
Burying her face in the seat of the chair Celia pressed her arms against her ears and clasped her hands behind her head. This shut out some of the noise but it did not make her stop shaking, long violent shakes that went through her whole body and made her neck jerk and her teeth chatter. Nobody came in to ask how she was, maybe because they did not know she was in the library, maybe because they were all too scared to think of her. She was not thinking of them either. All she could think was that any minute one of those shells might land in here and blow her to pieces.
But after a long time the shakes in her body began to lessen. The noise was still as great as ever, but somehow it was no longer so terrifying. Celia felt herself relaxing. Her hands untangled themselves. The fingers were stiff and her elbows were painful with tension. As she slowly raised her head, and sat back on her heels, she moved her arms and hands to get them feeling natural again.
The guns crashed. The room was full of great fluttering shadows thrown by the candle on the hearth. Suddenly it was lit for an instant by another flash from outside, as if the sky had cracked with great lightning.
Celia felt a sense of astonishment. She wet her lips. She heard another crash of cannon. She said in an awed voice,
“I haven’t been killed.”
She wet her lips again. The noise hit on her ears. She said,
“Maybe I’m not going to be killed.”
She got to her feet. Her legs were stiff, and she walked around the room in the noise, to ease them. As she walked she had a feeling that there was something familiar about all this.
At first she did not know what she was thinking of, but as the firing went on she remembered—the first time she had talked to Luke, in the parlor at Mrs. Thorley’s, when she had said to him, “You like being scared,” and he had answered, “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!’”
This was how she felt right now. She was still alive and it gave her a sense of triumph. Standing there in the bombardment, still trembling, Celia nodded slowly. This was what he had meant.
The firing lasted all night. Toward morning it lessened, but it went on at intervals all day.
Before daybreak Burton had promised Elise that they would leave. They would take their maidservants—the men he would have to leave on the earthworks—and Celia and Marietta too if they wanted to go. Celia said no.
When they had had a few hours’ sleep Marietta put on some hominy grits to cook, along with a pan of bacon. As soon as he had finished his breakfast Burton went out to arrange for sharing his boat with some friends who would help with the sailing.
Elise went to her room and began frantically opening her bureau drawers and throwing her clothes around and calling for somebody to pack them. Celia said she would do it—not that she loved Elise, but she wanted to keep occupied. The maids were bringing all sorts of tales about people who had been hurt last night, and Jimmy might have been among them. She did not want to think about it.
But while she was packing, a maid came to say that Mr. Darren Bernard was here to see her. Her heart jumping at the thought of the news he might have brought, Celia dashed downstairs and out to the front steps where Darren was waiting.
“How’s Jimmy, Darren?” she gasped as she reached him. “And you?”
“Fine, both of us. That’s what I came to tell you, and to ask how you are—all right?”
She nodded, nearly sobbing with relief. Darren drew her against the side of the open doorway and waited for her to get calm. Celia blinked, and looked up with great thankfulness. She noticed that it was a beautiful day, cool and clear, and an acacia tree across the street was blooming in a great big fluff of gold. How strange Darren looked, soiled and unshaven, with a long jagged tear in his stocking—Darren who had always been so well dressed. “Can you come in?” she asked. “A glass of wine, something to eat—”
He shook his head. “Too much to do. I had to pass here, and Jimmy told me to take five minutes, no more, to stop by and give you a note.” He drew the note from his pocket.
She thanked him. “Tell me what happened last night, Darren.”
Darren said a few men had been struck, and two small houses had been knocked flat, but altogether the bombardment had done remarkably little harm. He had no time to say more.
Celia went indoors and up to her room. Jimmy had written his note on a scrap of paper torn from some account book. He had scribbled hurriedly.
“My dearest,
I asked you to stay, now I am asking you to go. If Burton leaves town, or anyone else you know, go with them. Go to my mother at Bellwood. If you cannot get to her go to Vivian or any friends you have in the country. When this is over I’ll find you. Jimmy.”
Celia crumpled the note in her fist. From her open window she heard the chirp of a sparrow above the grumble of cannon. She said aloud,
“I am not going.”
She tore Jimmy’s note in half and then in half again.
“I am going to stay here,” she said, “because I love Jimmy.”
But even as she spoke she knew this was not the reason. She was going to stay with Jimmy not because she loved him but because he loved her. Until that gray Sunday afternoon last fall she had never had any feeling that anybody loved her. She had not known how precious it was, this knowledge of being loved. No, she was not going anywhere.
She gathered up the scraps of Jimmy’s note. There was no fire in the house, so she went downstairs and across the back porch and along the covered brick walk to the kitchen. Here the cook-fire smoldered in the fireplace, watched by a small black girl on a stool. Celia dropped the scraps on the fire and watched them burn.
CHAPTER 13
NOW AT LAST THEY were gone. Celia and Marietta were alone.
At the last minute Burton had had an attack of propriety. It disturbed him that Celia should be here with her only companion a maid no older than herself. For a moment Celia was afraid she was going to be carried off, but she reminded him that her twenty-first birthday was only a week ahead and after this Mr. Moreau would marry her to Jimmy. And so, glad not to have any more women on his hands, Burton let her have her way.
They left Friday, the seventh of April. It was surprising how peaceful the house was. The cannon were firing, but no shells were coming into town and by now Celia was so used to the distant grunts and grumblings that she hardly noticed them.
She planned that while Marietta did the cooking she would take care of the garden. They had plenty of rice and meat, but they would need vegetables too. That afternoon they went to the storeroom and cut off a slab of spiced beef, and put it in water to soak out the salt overnight so it could be roasted for tomorrow’s dinner. “We’ll have it with rice and gravy,” said Celia, “and some green peas. I’ll pick the peas in the morning.”
It was like playing house. In the evening when they had locked up, Celia took Robinson Crusoe to her room and read until she was sleepy. The guns were almost quiet as she blew out her candle.
She woke in the night with a feeling of having had an uncomfortable dream. The room was dark, and she could hear the guns in the distance. Moving restlessly, she realized that she was uncomfortable because she was too warm. She threw back the blankets but she was still too warm. Getting out of bed she pushed back the window-curtains and opened both windows as far as they would go. But the room still felt stuffy, and she had a hard time going back to sleep.
When she woke again it was morning. Before she opene
d her eyes she knew it was going to be a hot day. After breakfast she went out to the courtyard. Clouds were gathering over the sun and even here among the trees and flowerbeds the air seemed heavy. The birds were silent, as if they had no energy to sing, and the guns were silent too, as if the men had no energy to shoot. Celia felt her chemise clinging damply to her skin.
She wet her forefinger and held it up. After a moment one side of her finger began to be cold, the side toward the south.
Now she understood. In the night the wind had changed. No longer was it blowing from the west, from the high ground and the clean pine woods; it was coming over the swampy sea islands. As she lowered her hand Celia looked at a blue-jay pecking at the grass. In spite of the heat a shiver went over her as she said to him,
“Now those ships can get in.”
She went indoors and up the stairs to the attic. From oversight or consideration, Burton had left his spyglass, and Celia looked out to sea. The British ships were no closer to town than they had been yesterday—the tide was out, she noticed—but no longer were they just sitting there waiting. Alongside the sails, from masts to decks, the seamen had run lines of ropes; along the ropes they had strung small flags of different colors, and they were moving the flags to make changing designs. This was how ships talked to each other and to their friends on shore. Celia had no idea how to read the signals, but she did not need nautical language to guess that the admiral on his flagship was saying to Sir Henry Clinton on shore, “We are coming in! When the tide turns, we’ll be on our way!”
She was not the only one who guessed this. The Cooper River was crowded with fleeing boats—schooners, little fishing craft, even open rowboats where children crouched among bundles of food and clothing while their mothers sweated at the oars. Celia wondered where they were all going to sleep tonight.
As the day went on the south wind grew stronger, blowing clouds thick over the sky. Celia and Marietta had not much appetite for the spiced beef. They told each other it would taste better this evening when they could slice it cold, but they both knew they were not hungry because they were tense about the British ships.
As the afternoon advanced, they waited. They climbed out of the attic window to the roof and turned the spyglass in all directions. Around them the roofs and high windows were crowded with people. Not a gun sounded. All the soldiers—Americans, British, Tories, Hessians—were watching the ships. The men had mounted the earthworks, they stood on the gun platforms or were precariously balanced on the guns themselves, craning their necks. In the top of the black steeple of St. Michael’s stood Peter Timothy, a spyglass in one hand and a pen in the other, watching and making notes of what he saw, while messengers waited to take his reports to headquarters. The clock in the steeple showed that the time was close to four.
The day was tropic-hot, fifteen or twenty degrees hotter than yesterday. Celia could feel the sweat trickling down her face. She lowered the spyglass. Out there in the distance the men-of-war looked no bigger than butterflies. But even so far away she could see that they were tall ships, splendid and terrible. The tide was mounting toward its flood. As she watched, the men-of-war formed into a line, one behind another with long spaces between them and a pilot boat leading the line. They began to move.
The flags held stiff and jaunty in the wind, the white sails billowed high against the gray sky and the gray sea and the gray horizon line. Celia hardly breathed as the first ship came near the island seven miles away from her, where Fort Moultrie guarded the sea-gate of Charleston.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Marietta’s hand tensely holding the edge of the gable beside her. Celia’s own hands were stiff with excitement. Then it happened, what she and Marietta and everybody else had been waiting for. It was as if Fort Moultrie blew up into a thousand lights as the American guns opened fire.
They saw it, and then they heard it. Even at this distance the crash was so fierce that they ducked backward and put up their arms to shield their eyes. After an instant they looked again. Above the island and the men-of-war were pillars of smoke, sparkling with the exploding shells. At the head of the line the admiral’s flagship roared and flashed as her guns returned the fire. She looked as if she was sending out bolts of lightning.
The flagship passed the island and came on. Celia could not tell whether the ship had been damaged or not.
The guns of the fort roared away as other ships sailed into the smoke. And now Celia could see that one ship was gravely damaged—a mast was broken and dangling down, dragging part of the sails down with it—but the ship struggled crookedly on. Then in the midst of the black clouds she saw another ship catch fire. The fire leaped across the deck, catching the great sails like sheets of paper, and Celia stood with her lips parted, her whole body tingling with triumph, and Marietta cried out.
“Oh I can’t bear it—men on that ship—”
Slowly Celia turned her head. Marietta leaned against the gable, her eyes covered. Celia looked back at the ship. She had forgotten there were men on it. But even so, they were the king’s men, trying to kill her friends. She did not care if they got killed first.
“Miss Celia,” Marietta said brokenly, “I’d like to go in.”
Celia said, “All right,” and Marietta climbed back through the window. Celia stayed where she was, watching and listening, now looking at some detail through the glass, now lowering the glass to get a view of the whole. It all had a dreadful glory: the roars and lightnings, the blazing vessel, the other ships fighting their way through the smoke; on shore the thousands of soldiers in their many-colored uniforms, the people crowding roofs and windows, the other people fleeing by the boats in the river. Celia stood there spellbound.
The ships came in. Not all of them, for besides the one set afire from the fort another ran aground and was burned by her own crew so the Americans could not take her, and the men in the fort did serious damage to several others. Those that passed the fort came as close as they could to Charleston, though this was not very close because of the ships the Americans had sunk across the front of town. But they were near enough for Celia to see them clearly through her glass: the guns on deck pointing toward her, the sailors in wide flapping breeches and tarry pigtails, ready to shoot.
By St. Michael’s clock the time was nearly six. Celia’s legs, her back, her head and neck, were stiff and aching. Her hands were black from the dust of the roof, and there were black streaks on her skirt. She wondered if she was wicked, to have been so exhilarated by a battle. Well, not exactly wicked. But she might as well own up to it—she did not have Marietta’s gentleness, or Jimmy’s. She thought of Luke. He would not have shuddered when that ship caught fire, any more than she had. Luke would have shouted with glee.
What she needed now was to get washed. Climbing back through the attic window she went down to her room. In the mirror she looked even worse than she had thought—her hair was like last year’s bird-nest, her cap was all on one side, there was a black mark down her cheek, and her kerchief looked as if she had used it to dust the furniture. As she unpinned her cap she heard a knock on her door, and Marietta looked in.
“Miss Celia, Mr. Jimmy’s here. He says he can’t stay but a few minutes so please hurry—”
Celia was already hurrying. Jimmy waited at the foot of the staircase, and she almost tumbled into his arms.
He kissed her long and hard. At length he drew back a little and stood looking down at her as if his eyes would eat her up. He seemed not to notice that her hair was tousled and her face dirty; he gazed at her as if he had never seen a woman so beautiful.
“I was afraid you’d get away before I could say good-by,” he said. He spoke softly, almost in a whisper. “Godfrey told me Burton had definitely decided to leave town. Will he take you to Bellwood or to—”
Celia stiffened her courage to answer. “Burton left yesterday.”
She felt Jimmy give a start. He began to reply. She did not listen, but rushed on, explaining why she had stayed
behind, why she could not go.
“I want us to be together, Jimmy!” she finished. “Whatever happens to you, I want it to happen to me.”
For a moment Jimmy said nothing. His black eyes were intense in his gaunt face. She felt his arms tighten around her. He kissed her again, this time less with passion than with a deep understanding. His lips against hers, he said, “I did think you ought to go. I still think you should have gone. But now that you’ve made a fool of yourself, I’m glad of it.”
Celia felt a thrill of joy. She did not care what might happen. This was worth it.
But Jimmy stepped abruptly back from her. He held her hands, but now he spoke not like a lover but like a soldier giving commands. “Take every pitcher and bucket in the house,” he ordered, “and fill them, some with water and some with sand. Put them all over the house—close to the walls so you can get at them but won’t stumble over them in the dark.”
Celia remembered the burning ship. “You mean we may have fires in town?”
Jimmy had no time to answer questions. He went on with his orders. “Take some blankets and drinking-water down to the cellar. When the firing starts, you and Marietta stay there. Start filling those buckets now, before dark—keep one by you tonight when you go to bed.” He demanded, almost roughly, “You’ll do this?”
Celia’s throat felt thick, but she managed to say, “Yes, Jimmy.”
“I don’t know when I can see you again. But—” he smiled, and the smile was like a sudden light on his face—“I’ll get word to Mr. Moreau that we’re to be married as planned. Next week. I’ve been counting. The thirteenth of April is Thursday.”