The Crimson Thread (Once Upon a Time)

by Suzanne Weyn

  That night Bertie waited up for James. She hadn’t seen much of him since they came down to Georgia. He would go into the office and not come home until after she was asleep. Every morning at breakfast he promised to return earlier, but he never did. “You are working too hard,” she said. In fact, there were circles under his eyes, and he had grown pale and thin.

  Now she sat in the rocker on the front porch and waited. She took a banknote from her pocket and put it into an envelope. The amount consisted of the entire salary she had earned to date, plus the hefty bonus J. P. had paid her. J. P. had proven true to his word, and it was a significant amount.

  Also in the envelope was a letter to Finn. Since he and maybe Liam were the only two in the family who could read and write, they were the only ones to whom she sent letters.

  She was able to do this because Nancy did not mind writing the words Bertie dictated. Since realizing that Bertie couldn’t read or write but wanted to learn, Nancy took opportunities to teach Bertie while Eileen napped or played. Nancy and she grew closer by the day. Bertie was glad to have a friend in this big, lonely house.

  Now Bertie reviewed the letter she’d dictated, trying to identify the words she recalled speaking:

  My Dear Finn, This is to help you support Liam. Eileen’s and my needs are generously met here, so I have no expenses, and there is no need to save since I am about to marry James, who is the son of a wealthy man. I know you are working, so if there is money left over, please use it to send Liam to school. I see the children in the mills here and it breaks my heart to see how hard they work and for so little money. Many of the young boys remind me of Liam, and I hope that this money will make it possible for him not to have to work so that he might finally get the education that will enable him to have a less harsh life.

  The moon was high in the sky when a hired carriage pulled up to the porch. James tumbled out the carriage door, nearly falling. She stood to help, but he righted himself before she could reach him. “Hello, Bertie,” he mumbled, staggering drunkenly off to the right.

  “I thought you were working,” she said, outraged that he was in this condition. “You said you’d come home early, but you’ve been out drinking.”

  He waved her away. “You don’t need me here. You’ll do better without me. I’ll just muck everything up like I did when I ordered all that wrong fabric. You had to save me from that one, didn’t you? You’re a smart girl. You handle the work.”

  “I thought we were supposed to be a great team,” she reminded him.

  “We are,” he insisted, throwing himself heavily down onto the front steps, where he sprawled out, legs splayed. “You have the brains and talent. I inherit the money. You make me look good and I make you look good ’cause you get to spend my money on dresses, houses, and anything you want. It’s perfect.”

  “But why don’t you ever come home?”

  “This place is dull. Dull. Dull. Dull. It’s more fun in the city.”

  “Don’t you want to see me? We’re getting married. I thought you loved me,” she said, sitting alongside him on the step.

  “Mmmm,” he equivocated. “I don’t know that I ever said love. I thought you were pretty and I wanted to kiss you. But I would never have proposed to a girl like you.”

  “What do you mean ‘like me’?” she asked cautiously. Something inside her had turned cold at his words. Deep down inside, she was pretty sure she knew what he meant, but she wasn’t so sure she wanted to admit it.

  He laughed thickly, rolling his eyes. “Don’t you know, Bertrille?” he taunted. “What’s your real name, anyway? Colleen? Bridget?”

  She gasped. “How did you know?”

  “It’s Bridget, then! All you girls are named Bridget! Do you think that I never met an Irish servant girl before? The Miller family from Wales! There’s a laugh! My father’s man might be too stupid to tell the difference, but anyone with half a brain could tell you and your father are Irish. You and I might have had our fling, but I never would have proposed to you if you hadn’t worked your magic with those dresses.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” she demanded, her feelings wounded to their core. “Are you always so mean-spirited when you’re drunk?”

  He considered that a moment. “I don’t know. Maybe I am.”

  “Well, you needn’t marry me,” she said indignantly. “I can be employed by Wellington Industries without being married to you.” Turning sharply, she hurried into the house and up the stairs.

  Throwing herself onto the satin covers of her bed, she sobbed heavily until sleep overcame her.

  In the morning she was awakened by a rapping at her door. “Who is it?”

  “James. Let me in.”

  She didn’t want to see him and turned on her side with her back to the door without answering.

  He knocked again. “Go away,” she muttered.

  He pushed the door in slightly. “I’ve come to beg for forgiveness,” he stated in a penitent tone.

  “Do as you like,” she snapped, pulling her blanket up over her shoulder. “I am done with you.”

  He sat on the edge of her bed. He looked almost yellow, and his eyes appeared sunken. “Bertie, I don’t remember what I said exactly, but I recall enough to know that it was probably awful.”

  “Awful indeed,” she confirmed angrily.

  “Bertie, don’t hate me,” he begged pitifully. “It was the bourbon talking, not me. I didn’t mean a word of it.”

  “How do you know if you can’t remember?” she challenged.

  “I can tell you’re angry with me.”

  “That I am, to be sure.”

  “I’m sorry, so sorry. I’m so sick that I’m suffering as it is. Don’t punish me further.”

  “You said you didn’t want to marry me!” she exploded, “that you didn’t love me. You said I wasn’t high-class enough for you. What am I supposed to think now?”

  “That I was being a drunken fool?”

  She nodded vigorously. “Well, yes. Right! I think that for certain.” Tears pooled in her eyes, although crying was the last thing she wanted to do. “I’ll not marry a man who does not love me!”

  “What is love, Bertie?” he asked. “It’s a mixture of attraction and respect and mutual need.”

  “I don’t need you,” she cried.

  “I know you don’t,” he came back quickly. “But I need you.”

  She looked at him cautiously. Did he need her?

  “It’s true. Without you my father just thinks I’m a fool. But you’re so brilliant. With you as my wife, he will think of us as one unit and value what we have to offer.”

  “Oh,” she observed coldly, “but you don’t value me for myself.”

  “Aren’t your brains part of yourself?” he argued.

  “Doesn’t your talent and artistry make up the person who you are?”

  “I suppose so,” she said, conceding the point.

  “You see?”

  “But do you care for me?” she asked. “Do you love me?”

  “Would I be here begging for your forgiveness if I didn’t?”

  She looked at him uncertainly, not knowing the answer to that question. “And you still want to marry me?” she checked.

  “If you’ll have a drunken idiot like me,” he answered.

  “Will you start coming back from the office at a reasonable hour so we can spend time together?”

  He raised his hand. “I promise.”

  “All right, then,” she said. “We won’t speak of it again.”

  He grabbed her hands and kissed them. “Thank you, Bertie. You’re an angel. You’ll see—we are going to make a great team.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Last Straw

  By December, Wellington’s textile mills had rooms and rooms filled with the converted fabric. Rows of seamstresses in the Wellington Clothing Factory down the road were working day and night on sewing machines to make copies of the three dresses Ray had created.

 
; J. P. had depended on Eustace to report to him on their progress. Now he came to see for himself.

  “Bertie, my young woman, you have worked miracles,” he praised her on the day they toured the mill together. “This effort has put us slightly behind the fashion season, but I have so many orders for your stunning dresses that by Christmas we will have more than made up for it.”

  “I’m glad you’re pleased,” she said, and she was. It made life simpler. She was not as impressed with the results. James had advised against making any part of the new fabric or the dresses by hand, claiming, as Eustace had told her, that it was too costly and would cut too deeply into their profit margin. She argued that the increased value would enable them to raise the price, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

  To Bertie, the new dresses lacked the exquisite quality of the original gowns.

  As she and J. P. stood there, many spindles of red thread spun atop the whirring machinery, feeding down into the weave of the fabric. The young doffers often finished the day with their small hands dyed crimson red from the thread. “The dye shouldn’t be coming off like that,” she mentioned to J. P. as a little girl walked by, her red hands at her side. “The thread on the originals stayed put.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” J. P. dismissed her. “The women who buy these dresses only wear them once, maybe twice. By the time the color starts to wear away, they’ll have discarded the dress. We save a bundle by using a lower-quality thread.”

  “It can’t be good for the children to have all that red dye on their hands,” she pointed out. “It seeps into their bodies.”

  “They’re young and strong,” he said, unconcerned. He walked away, heading for the front door. “Come, let’s tour the factory.”

  John waited out front to take them to the clothing factory. On the way, Bertie took the opportunity to speak to J. P. about something that had been weighing on her mind. “Do you think it is wise to be working the children the long hours that they labor?”

  “Who better? They’re children. Who has greater endurance or more energy than a child?” he countered. “We follow the labor laws as they exist. Just last year they limited us to using children ten and older, so that’s what we do.”

  “But they’re still growing,” she argued. “They need light and air and places to play. They need to be in school to learn so they can perhaps get a better job some day.”

  “What’s wrong with working for Wellington Industries?” J. P. asked, coloring slightly with anger.

  Bertie also flushed, not with anger but with embarrassment. “Nothing, except that it’s hard work for low pay.”

  “It’s unskilled labor,” J. P. barked. “Should I pay them the same as educated, skilled people? I think not!”

  J. P. was her employer as well as her future father-in-law. She didn’t want to anger him. But still... she had been practicing what she wanted to say to J. P. since almost the first day she’d arrived. James didn’t want to hear about it. She couldn’t miss this chance to speak to J. P. now that he was a captive audience in the moving carriage.

  “Maybe we could give them some extra breaks during the day and provide snacks for them. It would make them more efficient. It would keep the frail ones from fainting as I’ve often seen them do. It’s very dangerous when they faint on or near the machines. . . .” She shut her eyes and shivered, remembering the horrific result when a little girl had fallen into a moving mechanical part as she passed out from hunger and the heat.

  “It might cut medical costs,” he said.

  “And we could have a school right there at the mill,” she suggested.

  “How could they work and go to school?” J. P. snapped.

  “We could break up their shifts, let them work half days and go to school for half days.”

  “Bertie, do you fail to realize that we would have to pay them half of what we do now? Their families depend on that money.”

  “Perhaps we could pay them the same,” she suggested timidly.

  “For half the work?” J. P. thundered.

  “It’s mere pennies that they earn,” she said.

  He sighed irritably. “We’ll talk about this another time,” he said, putting her off. “The children are sweet and I’m sure you feel for them, but clearly you have no comprehension of the working of economics or of the service we provide these people, who would be starving without the employment we provide.”

  “No, sir, I don’t understand economics,” she admitted, very aware of her lack of education. “I only know what a child deserves.”

  “Believe me, they’re getting more than they deserve,” he insisted firmly. The carriage rolled into the factory driveway and J. P. turned toward it, leaning to see it from the window. She could tell from his movements that he meant to end the conversation. He slapped his knees gamely as the carriage rolled to a stop. “Let’s go see what the women have made of your beautiful dresses,” he suggested.

  Getting out of the carriage, he walked briskly ahead of Bertie, not waiting for her. With a frustrated sigh, she followed. Clearly, she had not done anything but annoy him with her request for better conditions for the workers.

  “James is meeting me here,” he told her when she caught up with him at the entrance. “We’re a little early, so he may not be here yet.”

  “Have you ever considered getting one of those new talking machines, sir?” she asked.

  “Do you mean that contraption Bell invented?”

  “Yes, sir, Atlanta has the wires for them now,” she said. Nancy had told her all about it.

  “I don’t see any wires around here,” he noted.

  “That’s true,” she agreed. “I was just thinking that if you had a telephone, you could have called James and told him we were arriving early.”

  “It’s a good idea, actually,” he admitted. “We could at least hook up the office in the city. I can see you’re going to be a great asset to Wellington Industries. I wish James was as committed to the company. At any rate, don’t worry about him. He’ll be surprised and delighted to see you. I didn’t tell him you were coming with me. Have you set a date for the wedding yet?”

  “We’ve both been so busy we haven’t had much chance to discuss it,” she said. At least James claimed he was busy. Despite his promise, he continued to come home late at night, and the long days spent at the mill made Bertie too tired to wait up for him. It occurred to her that maybe she didn’t wait up because she simply didn’t want to know what condition he was in.

  Not knowing made everything simpler.

  Eileen was flourishing in this lovely place. Nancy took her outside regularly and read to her under the magnolia tree. The pink had returned to Eileen’s cheeks and the sparkle was back in her blue eyes. This was a life Bertie never would have dreamed she could have provided for the little girl.

  If she broke things off with James, all this would go away. J. P. might not fire her—though he might. Even if she kept her position, her income would not buy anything like the lifestyle they were living now, not if she were paying rent and buying food and clothing, besides paying someone to care for Eileen.

  In her heart, she knew why James didn’t break the engagement. He wanted to please his father. He didn’t feel he was able to run his end of the business without her help, and maybe he wasn’t.

  She could imagine how their future would be: They would have little to do with each other but be married nonetheless. It would work out for everyone except that she would never have a man to truly love her. Could she live a loveless life like that? She didn’t know.

  Her parents had been poor, but they truly loved each other. It was easy to see in every glance, every gesture. Her father always put her mother’s happiness before his own, and she did the same with him. Growing up, Bertie had taken it for granted that she would someday know a love as true as her parents had. What a horrible disappointment to think that it now might never happen.

  While she was thinking these things, she walked with J. P. into t
he factory. A foreman hurried down the hall to greet them. “We weren’t expecting you so soon, sir,” he said apologetically.

  “Yes, we’re early,” J. P. replied.

  The foreman handed him a large book. “Mr. LaFleur sent these from France just today,” he told J. P. “They’re the latest pattern designs from Paris.”

  “Put them in the back office. I’ll look at them later,” J. P. requested.

  “I’ll take them,” Bertie offered. “I left a sketch I did for a new design pattern there, and I’d love to show it to you.”

  “Very well,” he said. “Meet me in the main sewing room when you’ve retrieved your sketch.”

  Bertie’s mind was on her sketch as she hurried to the office with the large book cradled in her arms. It incorporated Chinese chrysanthemums right into the fabric, and she had ideas on how to calibrate the machines to produce a more handwoven quality for it.

  She had learned a great deal about the textile trade since coming to Georgia. Making this new fabric excited her, in part because it would be the first creation that was her own and had not been made by Ray.

  The door to the office was locked, but she quickly unlocked it and went in. James was seated behind the desk, his blond hair mussed and sticking up in places. One of the seamstresses was sitting on his lap.

  The young woman jumped up in alarm.

  James smiled. “Hi, Bertie. Miss McGinley here had a nasty splinter in her finger. I was helping her take it out.”

  Even if Bertie would have allowed herself to be fooled by James, Miss McGinley’s guilty, red face proved that he was lying.

  James addressed the young woman. “All right, I’m pretty sure we got it, so you can return to work now.”

  Nodding unhappily, Miss McGinley rushed from the office.

  Bertie wanted to shout, even to throw something at him. She could threaten to have Miss McGinley dismissed; maybe she would even do it too.

  Then she recalled how charming James had been when she had been the hired seamstress’s assistant in the house; how he grinned and winked at her so flirtatiously. She remembered the day he had sneaked into her room, claiming he didn’t know it belonged to her. He’d probably known.