Celia Garth: A Novel (33 page)

However, since people must eat, passes had to be given to fishermen and to farmers driving produce wagons. Darren had slipped out in a wagon on its way back home, hidden under the sacking that the driver had laid over his fruit-baskets that morning to keep off flies. Darren had chosen a steamy day of clouds and mosquitoes, when the guards in their woolen uniforms were so miserable that they were nearly out of their minds, and not too careful about inspecting. Once past the guards, the driver was enriched with money supplied by Godfrey, and Darren went looking for a horse.

Darren told them Godfrey was eager to aid the new army, but it was not so simple for Godfrey to get out of town as for an obscure fellow like himself. Godfrey and Ida had two British officers billeted in their home, and his absence from the dinner-table would be noticed at once. They would probably find him and bring him back before he had even tried to pass the guards.

However, said Darren, Godfrey and Ida were mighty fortunate in their billets. Some of the men quartered in private homes were behaving like pigs. But others were gentlemen, and the Bernards had two of these.

Celia heard this unwillingly. She did not want to hear anything good about any man on the same side as Tarleton.

“What about Tarleton?” she asked.

Darren gave a shrug. Tarleton, he said, was behaving just as might be expected. He had established himself in the home of a woman whose husband was a prisoner of war. Tarleton had made his hostess and her children—four children, of both sexes—all eat and sleep in one room, while he used the rest of the house to give parties for his officer friends and an assortment of harlots. When the poor woman pleaded that she be allowed to use two rooms, if only for the sake of decency, Tarleton replied that rebels deserved no consideration. It had been a matter of great pleasure to the patriots of Charleston when Tarleton came down with malaria. Unfortunately he did not die of it, but they were glad he was miserable for a few weeks.

Darren spent the night at Sea Garden and left the next day. After this, for three weeks they heard nothing at all.

Wretched weeks they were, hot and full of rain. The creeks overflowed, the woodland turned to a bog. They might as well have been in prison. Neither friends nor enemies could reach them. Vivian told Celia that Luke and Marion, with some others, had gone to join the army, and Celia, remembering Luke’s request, did not say she had heard this already. They did not know how many men Marion had with him, but they did know the men were ready to fight like fiends.

But this was all they knew.

Herbert sought refuge in his books. Vivian read too, and played the spinet by the hour. They both devised tasks to keep the servants busy, for the Negroes found it as hard as the white folks to bear this dragging isolation. Celia thought she had never felt so restless. As she could work outdoors only now and then, she begged for something else to do, and was glad when Vivian gave her the household mending. Day after day they prayed for the new army, and peered through the streaming window-panes for a messenger who might bring them news.

At last the rain stopped. The sun appeared, and with it came a wind from the sea. On a bright morning at the end of August they heard the clang of the landing-bell.

The folk at Sea Garden were so thirsty for news that they all, black and white, dropped whatever they were doing and ran toward the landing. Those who got there first stopped and stared. Those coming up behind, who could not see yet, heard a long deep groan of despair. They ran on, calling “What’s the news?” But the folk on the landing had not needed to ask the news. They saw it.

They saw a ramshackle rowboat, such a wretched thing that they wondered how it had made any journey at all. In the boat were seven beaten men, and by the landing-bell an eighth. Their clothes were caked with blood, and every man of them had an arm or leg tied up with rags. It was Darren who had rung the bell. He had barely managed to ring it, because he had only one arm he could use. The other arm hung in a sling made of cloth torn from his shirt.

Darren was saying thickly, “Please help us.” He leaned on the upright that held the bell, too tired to stand up any longer. There were a hundred questions, but all Darren could answer was, “This time it’s
really
over.”

Herbert ordered the cart, and brought the men to the house. While he worked with the Negro horse-doctor, Vivian tore up cloth for bandages, and Celia helped the maids bring food and pitchers of milk. At last they got the men cared for. That afternoon, Darren told them the story.

He said Washington had sent down a force of Maryland and Delaware Continentals. The men were well-trained, well-equipped, veterans of many battles. There were no better fighters in the army. On their way they had been joined by militia from Virginia and North Carolina. Cornwallis was to be attacked by a first-class force.

Congress had agreed with Washington when he chose this army from among his finest troops. But Congress had overruled his choice of a general. Washington wanted to send Nathanael Greene, the fighting Quaker who had won distinction at the battles of Trenton and Brandywine, and even more distinction in the thankless job of quartermaster-general. But Congress said no. They gave the command to Horatio Gates.

Gates was popularly called “the hero of Saratoga.” But Washington was not the only military man who thought he did not deserve to be called a hero. True, the battle of Saratoga had been a great American victory and Gates had been there. But the soldiers said Gates had merely been there. They said the victory had been won by other officers who did not have Gates’ talent for talking about themselves.

However, Congress chose Gates.

The army left Washington’s camp in New Jersey under the leadership of the Baron de Kalb, a brilliant German who had come to America early in the war to aid the rebels. De Kalb led them as far as North Carolina, where Gates joined them and took command. Here, too, Francis Marion and about twenty of his friends rode in. Luke was among them.

Marion’s men did not look pretty. Fugitives in the swamps for months past, they had broken their shoes and torn their clothes, and they were gaunt from scanty fare. They had good horses, but the horses, too, were hungry. Half the men had no guns, and those who did had no powder or shot to put into them.

Their leader did not look pretty either. In his months of eluding the British, slipping from swamp to cabin to plantation house, hiding under haystacks and horse-blankets, Marion’s broken ankle had had small chance to heal. He limped grotesquely. His own clothes had fallen apart, and he now wore a pair of somebody’s breeches, much too large, and a red coat somebody else had taken from a British soldier. He had neither comb nor razor, and no soap.

Baron de Kalb welcomed him. General Gates did not.

Gates had a self-assurance that amounted to self-worship. He had come to beat Cornwallis and he had no doubt that he was going to do it. He was not familiar with this part of the country, but that bothered him not at all.

Marion had been born in the region now held by the British under Cornwallis. He knew the roads and rivers, the best places to get food, the temper of the people. He had come to tell Gates what he knew. Gates was not interested.

As Marion was a fellow-officer of the Continental Army, Gates could not refuse to see him. But Gates had already made up his mind. Cornwallis was marching toward the British post at Camden. Gates had decided to go at once to meet him, give him a beating, and then march in triumph to Charleston.

Marion urged him not to be in such a hurry. The men had already marched four hundred miles in summer heat. Marion advised him to let them rest, and to give the militia more training before he made them face the British regulars. Gates was bored.

Choosing a bad road—and ignoring Marion and everybody else who told him there were better ones—he led his men through North Carolina, and made camp just about the South Carolina line. Here, by a stroke of luck, he had a chance to get rid of Marion.

Into camp came a messenger from Kingstree. He brought word that the men of the Kingstree neighborhood were organizing to fight, and they wanted an experienced leader. They had sent him to ask for Marion.

Fine, fine, said General Gates. Let Marion go right on and take charge of those men, and he had just the job for them. When he had won his victory—which he would do in a few days now—the British would naturally try to escape to the coast. Let Marion lead his men to the rivers and destroy all the boats he could find. With the boats gone, the British could not get away. They would be rounded up and made prisoners.

Marion did not say what he thought of this order. Gates was the commander and Marion had to obey. With his ragamuffin band Marion rode out of camp.

Thus it came about that Marion was not present at the battle of Camden, where Gates led his troops into the worst defeat an American army had taken since the war began.

Gates was so eager for his triumph that he would not wait to drill the militia. He would not wait to collect decent food supplies, nor even give his men time for proper cooking of the food they had. On the morning of the battle half his splendid veterans were so sick they could hardly stand. As for the militiamen, besides being queasy with bellyaches, many of them had never been in battle before, and they were so ill-trained that when they met the British they did not know what to do.

The battle did not last two hours. The men were cut to pieces, the ground strewn horribly with their dead and dying bodies. Those who lived to run away were chased for twenty miles by Tarleton and his cavalry.

Baron de Kalb fought until he fell with eleven wounds. He lived three days more, humanely tended by British surgeons under orders of Cornwallis, who knew a great soldier when he saw one, and gave him honor. As for Gates, he galloped away in blue panic. Mounted on a racehorse, he did not stop till he had gone seventy miles. As soon as he could find a fresh horse he started again, and he kept running until in three days he had gone two hundred miles from Camden. He never came back.

“And now?” asked Herbert.

“God knows,” said Darren.

The four of them—Herbert and Vivian, Darren and Celia—sat by a front window in the glow of late afternoon. Two men who had come with Darren had been put to bed; the others, whose wounds were less severe, sat on the lawn planning how they were going to get home.

Darren had fought with the militia. As they staggered away from Camden this chance group had found the ramshackle boat tied up at a landing not yet reached by Marion’s men. They took it and fled. In pain and nearly starved, sometimes they rowed, sometimes drifted, sometimes hid in the bushes while British horsemen galloped past. Often they saw smoke rising from some country house that was being looted and destroyed, for the British were dealing terrible punishment. Darren thought of Sea Garden, so out of the way that the redcoats had probably bypassed it. He led the others on, by crooked streams, through the pouring rain, till they got here.

Darren leaned back in his chair, his left arm in a sling, his handsome face sunken with weariness. He added that he might as well tell them all the bad news—here was a bit brought by the Continentals from Washington’s headquarters. Remember the French fleet, which they had so yearningly awaited in Charleston? Well, it had finally reached America. Heading for Charleston, the fleet met an outgoing ship which brought word that the British had already taken the city. The French commander turned north and put in at Newport, Rhode Island, to wait for orders. Three days later a British fleet reached Newport. Finding the French in the harbor the British had to anchor outside the entrance. So now there they were. The king’s men could not get in, the Frenchmen could not get out. The two fleets just sat there, making each other useless.

Celia looked around at the others. Darren, though slumped with defeat, was saying he was lucky to have only a trivial wound. Vivian and Herbert, though sick at the story of Camden, were glad that Luke had gone with Marion and that Tom was a prisoner, so neither of them had been there. Everybody, thought Celia, has something to be happy about. Everybody but me.

She remembered how glad she had been to hear that Gates’ army was on the way. They could not have given her back Jimmy, but if they had chased out the British they would have given her a sense of being free again. But they had failed. She had nothing.

She turned to Herbert. “Mr. Lacy, have we lost the war?”

Herbert spoke gravely. “Washington sent us the best he had. And pretty nearly
all
he had.”

Celia did not want to hear any more. She left them and went to the side porch, out of sight of the soldiers on the lawn.

In front of her she saw the gold and copper sky. The air was rich with the scent of honeysuckle, and she could hear birds chirping their evening songs. Such a beautiful world and such horrible things happened in it.

She knew now what she had to do. She had to go back to work at Mrs. Thorley’s. Sophie had said the shop was open. There was plenty of trade, and Mrs. Thorley would be glad to have her. And she needed work—she had no money but a few American bills, good for nothing now but to start the kitchen fire.

How she dreaded going back. She could just imagine what it would be like with the other girls. Dutiful sympathy, and under it smirks of triumph. Oh, she thought she was going to marry a rich man. Yes, and once she got in with those people she forgot about her old friends. She didn’t invite any sewing-girls to that ball New Year’s Eve. Well, it just goes to show you. Doesn’t do to put on airs too soon.

But that would not be all. They would talk like this for a while, then they would find something else to smirk about. That would not last forever. But the job in the shop—that would last, and last, and last. She thought of Miss Loring and Miss Perry, old maids who weren’t ever going to have any fun. Now she would be like them. In a few years more, the younger girls would be whispering, I hear that once she had a beau, but he died. They would giggle. You mean Miss Garth? I don’t believe any man was ever in love with that scrawny fussbudget.