Scarlett

33

Scarlett clapped her hands with delight when the hackney pulled up in front of Grandfather Robillard’s house. It was pink, just like Miss Eleanor had said. To think that I didn’t even notice when I visited before! Well, no matter, it was so long ago; what counts is now.

She hurried up one curving arm of the double iron-railed steps and through the opened door. Her aunts and Pansy could see to the luggage, she was dying with curiosity about the inside of the house.

Yes, it was pink everywhere—pink and white and gold. The walls were pink, and the covers on the chairs, and the draperies. With shiny white woodwork and columns, all trimmed with glimmering gilt. Everything looked perfect, too, not peeling and shabby like the paint and fabrics in most of the houses in Charleston and Atlanta. What a perfect place to be when Rhett came after her. He’d see that her family was every bit as important and impressive as his.

Rich, too. Her eyes moved rapidly, assessing the value of the meticulously maintained furnishings she could see through the open door to the drawing room. Why, she could paint every wall of Tara, inside and out, for what it must cost to gold leaf the plastered ceiling corners.

The old skinflint! Grandfather never sent a penny to help me after the War, and he doesn’t do a thing for the aunts, either.

Scarlett prepared for battle. Her aunts were terrified of their father, but she wasn’t. The fearful loneliness she’d known in Atlanta had made her timid, apprehensive, eager to please in Charleston. Now she had taken her life back into her own hands, and she felt vibrant with strength. Not man nor beast could bother her now. Rhett loved her, and she was queen of the world.

She coolly removed her hat and her fur cape and dropped them on a marble-topped console in the hall. Then she began to take off her apple green kid gloves. She could feel her aunts staring. They’d done plenty of that already. But Scarlett was very pleased to be wearing her green and brown plaid travelling costume instead of the drab outfits she’d worn in Charleston. She fluffed up the dark green taffeta bow that made her eyes sparkle so. When her gloves had joined hat and cape, she pointed to them. “Pansy, take these things upstairs and put them away in the prettiest bedroom you can find. Stop cringing in the corner like that, nobody’s going to bite you.”

“Scarlett, you can’t . . .”

“You must wait . . .” The aunts were wringing their hands.

“If Grandfather’s too mean to come out and meet us, we’ll just have to shift for ourselves. God’s nightgown, Aunt Eulalie! You grew up here, you and Aunt Pauline, can’t you just make yourselves at home?”

Scarlett’s words and manner were bold enough, but when a basso voice bellowed “Jerome!” from the rear of the house, she felt her palms grow damp. Her grandfather, she suddenly remembered, had eyes that cut right through you and made you wish you were anywhere except under his gaze.

The imposing black manservant who had admitted her now gestured Scarlett and her aunts toward the open door at the end of the hall. Scarlett let Eulalie and Pauline go first. The bedroom was a tremendous high-ceilinged space that had formerly been a spacious parlor. It was crowded with furniture, all the sofas and chairs and tables that had been in the parlor, plus a massive four-posted bed with gilt eagles crouching on top of the posts. In one corner of the room was a flag of France and a headless tailor’s dummy wearing the gold-epauletted medal-hung uniform that Pierre Robillard had worn when he was a young man and an officer in Napoleon’s army. The old man Pierre Robillard was in the bed, sitting erect against a mass of huge pillows, glaring at his visitors.

Why, he’s shrunk up to almost nothing. He was such a big old man, but he’s practically lost in that big bed, nothing but skin and bones. “Hello, Grandfather,” Scarlett said, “I’ve come to see you for your birthday. It’s Scarlett, Ellen’s daughter.”

“I haven’t lost my memory,” said the old man. His strong voice belied his fragile body. “But apparently your memory fails you. In this house, young people do not speak unless they are spoken to.”

Scarlett bit her tongue to keep silent. I’m not a child to be talked to that way, and you should be grateful anybody comes to see you at all. No wonder Mother was so happy to have Pa take her away from home!

“Et vous, mesfilles. Qu ’ist-ce-que vous voulez cette fois?” Pierre Robillard growled at his daughters.

Eulalie and Pauline rushed to the bedside, both speaking at once.

My grief! They’re talking French! What on earth am I doing here? Scarlett sank down onto a gold brocade sofa, wishing she was some place—any place—else. Rhett better come after me soon or I’ll go crazy in this house.

It was getting dark outside, and the shadowed corners of the room were mysterious. The headless soldier seemed about to move. Scarlett felt cold fingers on her spine and told herself not to be silly. But she was glad when Jerome and a sturdy-looking black woman came in carrying a lamp. While the maid pulled the curtains Jerome lit the gas lamps on each wall. He asked Scarlett politely if she would move so that he could get behind the sofa. When she stood, she saw her grandfather’s eyes on her, and she turned away from them. She found herself facing a big painting in an ornate gilt frame. Jerome lit one lamp, then a second, and the painting came to life.

It was a portrait of her grandmother. Scarlett recognized her at once from the painting at Tara. But this one was very different. Solange Robillard’s dark hair was not piled high on her head as in Tara’s portrait. It fell, instead, like a warm cloud over her shoulders and down her bare arms to the elbow, bound only by a fillet of gleaming pearls. Her arrogant thin nose was the same, but her lips held a beginning smile instead of a sneer, and her tip-tilted dark eyes looked from their corners at Scarlett with the laughing, magnetic intimacy that had challenged and lured everyone who’d ever known her. She was younger in this painting, but nevertheless a woman, not a girl. The provocative round breasts half-exposed at Tara were covered by the thin white silk gown she wore. Covered yet visible through the gauzy silk, a glimmer of white flesh and rosy nipples. Scarlett felt herself blushing. Why, Grandma Robillard doesn’t look like a lady at all, she thought, automatically disapproving as she’d been taught she should. Involuntarily she remembered herself in Rhett’s arms and the wild hunger for his hands on her. Her grandmother must have felt the same hunger, the same ecstasy, it was in her eyes and her smile. So it can’t be wrong, what I felt. Or was it? Was it some taint of shamelessness in her blood, handed down from the woman who smiled at her from the painting? Scarlett stared at the woman above her on the wall, fascinated.

“Scarlett,” Pauline whispered in her ear. “Père wants us to leave now. Say good night quietly, and come with me.”

Supper was a skimpy meal. Hardly enough, in Scarlett’s opinion, for one of the bright-plumaged fantasy birds painted on the plates that held it. “That’s because the cook’s preparing Père’s birthday feast,” Eulalie explained in a whisper.

“Four days ahead of time?” Scarlett said loudly. “What’s she doing, watching the chicken grow up?” Good heavens, she grumbled to herself, she’d be as skinny as Grandfather Robillard by Thursday if it was going to be like this. After the house was asleep she made her way silently down to the basement kitchen and ate her fill of the cornbread and buttermilk in the larder. Let the servants go hungry for a change, she thought, pleased that her suspicions had proven accurate. Pierre Robillard might keep the loyalty of his daughters when their stomachs were only half-filled, but his servants wouldn’t stay unless they had plenty to eat.

The next morning she ordered Jerome to bring her eggs and bacon and biscuits.

“I saw plenty in the kitchen,” she added.

And she got what she wanted. It made her feel much better about her meekness the night before. It’s not like me to knuckle under that way, she thought. Just because Aunt Pauline and Aunt Eulalie were shaking like leaves, that’s no reason for me to let the old man scare me. I won’t let it happen again.

Still, she was just as glad that she had the servants to deal with and not her grandfather. She could see that Jerome was offended, and it rather pleased her. She hadn’t had a show-down with anyone in a long time, and she did love to win. “The other ladies will have bacon and eggs, too,” she told Jerome. “And this isn’t enough butter for my biscuits.”

Jerome stalked off to report to the other servants. Scarlett’s demands were an affront to them all. Not because they meant more work; in fact she was only asking for what the servants always had for breakfast themselves. No, what bothered Jerome and the others was her youth and energy. She was a loud disruption of the house’s shrine-like, muted atmosphere. The servants could only hope that she would leave soon, and without wreaking too much havoc.

After breakfast, Eulalie and Pauline took her into each of the rooms on the first floor, talking eagerly about the parties and receptions they had seen in their youth, correcting each other constantly and arguing about decades-old details. Scarlett paused for a long time in front of the portrait of three young girls, trying to see her mother’s composed adult features in the chubby-cheeked five-year-old of the painting. Scarlett had felt isolated in Charleston’s web of intermarried generations. It was good to be in the house where her mother had been born and reared, in a city where she was part of the web.

“You must have about a million cousins in Savannah,” she said to the aunts. “Tell me about them. Can I meet them? They’re my cousins, too.”

Pauline and Eulalie looked confused. Cousins? There were the Prudhommes, their mother’s family. But only one very old gentleman was in Savannah, the widower of their mother’s sister. The rest of the family had moved to New Orleans many years ago. “Everyone in New Orleans speaks French,” Pauline explained. And as for the Robillards, they were the only ones. “Père had lots of cousins in France, brothers, too—two of them. But he was the only one to come to America.”

Eulalie broke in. “But we have many, many friends in Savannah, Scarlett. You can certainly meet them. Sister and I will be paying calls and leaving cards today, if Père doesn’t need us to stay home with him.”

“I’ll have to be back by three,” Scarlett said quickly. She didn’t want to be out when Rhett arrived, nor did she want to be other than at her best. She’d need plenty of time to bathe and dress before the train from Charleston got in.

But Rhett didn’t come, and when Scarlett left the carefully chosen bench in the immaculately maintained formal garden behind the house she felt chilled to the bone. She had refused her aunts’ invitation to accompany them that evening to the musicale they’d been invited to. If it was going to be anything like the tedious reminiscences of the old ladies they’d called on that morning, she’d be bored to death. But her grandfather’s malevolent eyes when he received his family for ten minutes before supper made her change her mind. Anything would be better than being alone in the house with Grandfather Robillard.

The Telfair sisters, Mary and Margaret, were the recognized cultural guardians of Savannah, and their musicale was nothing like the ones Scarlett had known before. Usually they were just ladies singing, showing off their “accomplishments,” accompanied by other ladies on the pianoforte. It was obligatory that ladies sing a little, play the piano a little, draw or paint watercolors a little and do fancy needlework a little. At the Telfairs’ house on Saint James’ Square, the standards were much more demanding. The handsome double drawing rooms had rows of gilt chairs across their centers, and at the curved end of one of the rooms a piano and a harp and six chairs with music stands in front of them promised some real performances. Scarlett made mental notes of all the arrangements. The double drawing rooms at the Butler house could easily be fixed the same way, and it would be a different kind of party from what everyone else did. She’d have a reputation as an elegant hostess in no time at all. She wouldn’t be old and frumpy looking like the Telfair sisters, either. Or as dowdy as the younger women who were here. Why was it that everywhere in the South people thought they had to look poor and patched to prove they were respectable?

The string quartet bored her, and she thought the harpist would never finish. She did enjoy the singers, even though she had never heard of opera; at least there was a man singing with the woman instead of two girls together. And after the songs in foreign languages, they did a group of songs she knew. The man’s voice was wonderfully romantic in “Beautiful Dreamer” and it throbbed with emotion when he sang “Come Back to Erin, Mavourneen, Mavourneen.” She had to admit he sounded a lot better than Gerald O’Hara in his cups.

I wonder what Pa would make of all this? Scarlett almost giggled aloud. He’d probably sing along and add something from a flask to the punch, too. Then he’d ask for “Peg in a Low Back’d Car.” Just as she had asked Rhett to sing it . . .

The room and the people in it and the music disappeared for her, and she heard Rhett’s voice booming inside the overturned sloop, felt his arms holding her to his warmth. He can’t do without me. He’ll come to me this time. It’s my turn.

Scarlett didn’t realize that she was smiling during a touching rendition of “Silver Threads Among the Gold.”

The next day she sent a telegram to her Uncle Henry, giving her address in Savannah. She hesitated, then added a question. Had Rhett transferred any money to her?

What if Rhett tried to play some kind of game again and stopped sending the money to keep up the house on Peachtree Street? No, surely he wouldn’t do that. Just the opposite. His letter said he was sending the half million.

It couldn’t be true. He was only bluffing when he wrote all those hurtful things. Like opium, he’d said. He couldn’t do without her. He’d come after her. It would be harder for him to swallow his pride than it would for any other man, but he’d come. He had to. He couldn’t do without her. Especially not after what happened on the beach . . .

Scarlett felt a warm weakness travelling through her body, and she forced herself to remember where she was. She paid for the telegram and listened attentively when the telegraph operator gave her directions to the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy. Then she set off at such a rapid pace that Pansy almost had to run to keep up. While she was waiting for Rhett to come, she should have just enough time to track down Carreen’s Mother Superior and get her to talk to the Bishop, as Rhett had suggested.

Savannah’s Convent of the Sisters of Mercy was a big white building with a cross over its tall closed doors, surrounded by a tall iron fence with closed gates surmounted by iron crosses. Scarlett’s rapid pace slowed, then she stopped. It was very different from the handsome brick house in Charleston.

“Is you going in there, Miss Scarlett?” Pansy’s voice had a quaver in it. “I better wait outside. I’m a Baptist.”

“Don’t be such a goose!” Pansy’s fearfulness gave Scarlett courage. “It’s not a church, just a home for nice ladies like Miss Carreen.” The gate opened at her touch.

Yes, said the elderly nun who opened the door when Scarlett rang the bell, yes, Charleston’s Mother Superior was there. No, she couldn’t ask her to see Mrs. Butler right now. There was a meeting in progress. No, she didn’t know how long it would last, nor whether the Mother Superior would be able to see Mrs. Butler when it was over. Perhaps Mrs. Butler would like to see the schoolrooms; the convent was very proud of its school. Or it was possible that a tour of the new Cathedral building could be arranged. After that, perhaps the Mother Superior could be sent a message, if the meeting had ended.

Scarlett forced herself to smile. The last thing on earth I want to do is admire a bunch of children, she thought angrily. Or look at some church, either. She was about to say that she’d simply come back later, then the nun’s words gave her an idea. They were building a new Cathedral, were they? That cost money. Maybe her offer to buy back Carreen’s share of Tara would be looked on more favorably here than it had been in Charleston, just like Rhett said. After all, Tara was Georgia property, probably controlled by the Bishop of Georgia. Suppose she offered to buy a stained glass window in the new Cathedral as Carreen’s dowry? The cost would be much higher than Carreen’s share of Tara was worth, and she’d make it clear that the window was in exchange, not in addition. The Bishop would listen to reason, and then he’d tell the Mother Superior what to do.

Scarlett’s smile became warmer, wider. “I’d be honored to see the Cathedral, Sister, if you’re sure it’s not too much trouble.”

Pansy’s mouth gaped open when she looked up at the soaring twin spires of the handsome Gothic-design Cathedral. The workmen on the scaffolding that surrounded the nearly completed towers looked small and nimble, like brightly garbed squirrels high in paired trees. But Scarlett had no eyes for the drama overhead. Her pulse was quickened by the organized hubbub on the ground, the sounds of hammering, sawing, and especially by the familiar resiny smell of fresh-cut lumber. Oh, how she missed the lumber mills and lumberyards. Her palms itched with the yearning to run her hands over the clean wood, to be busy, to be doing something, making a difference, running things—instead of taking tea from dainty cups with washed-out, dainty old ladies.

Scarlett heard barely a word of the descriptive wonders outlined by the young priest who was her escort. She did not even notice the surreptitious admiring looks of the burly laborers who stood back from their work to allow the priest and his companion free passage. She was too preoccupied to listen or notice. What fine straight trees had given up these timbers? It was the best heart pine she’d ever seen. She wondered where the mill was, what kind of saws it had, what kind of power. Oh, if only she was a man! Then she could ask, could go see the mill instead of this church. Scarlett scuffled her feet through a mound of fresh wood shavings and inhaled the tonic of the sharp scent of them.

“I must get back to the school for dinner,” said the priest apologetically.

“Of course, Father, I’m ready to go.” She wasn’t but what else could she say? Scarlett followed him out of the Cathedral and onto the sidewalk.

“Begging your pardon, Father.” The speaker was a huge, redfaced man wearing a red shirt that was heavily whitened by mortar dust. The priest looked diminutive and pale beside him.

“If you could be saying a small blessing on the work, Father? The lintel to the Chapel of the Sacred Heart was set not an hour ago.”

Why, he sounds just like Pa at his most Irish. Scarlett bowed her head for the priest’s blessing, as did the groups of workmen. Her eyes smarted from the tang of the cut pine and the quick tears for her father that she blinked away.

I’ll go see Pa’s brothers, she decided. No matter that they must be about a hundred years old, Pa would want me to go and say hello at least.

She walked with the priest back to the convent, and another placid refusal by the elderly nun when she asked to see the Mother Superior.

Scarlett kept her temper, but her eyes were dangerously bright. “Tell her I’ll be back this afternoon,” she said.

As the tall iron gate swung closed behind her Scarlett heard the sound of church bells from a few blocks away. “Bother!” she said. She was going to be late for dinner.

34

Scarlett smelled fried chicken as soon as she opened the door of the big pink house. “Take these things,” she said to Pansy, and she got out of her cape and hat and gloves with record speed. She was very hungry.

Eulalie looked at her with huge mournful eyes when she entered the dining room. “Père wants to see you, Scarlett.”

“Can’t it wait until after dinner? I’m starving.”

“He said ‘the minute she comes.’ ”

Scarlett picked up a steaming hot roll from the bread basket and took an angry bite as she swung on her heel. She finished it while she marched to her grandfather’s room.

The old man frowned at her over the tray that rested on his lap in the big bed. His plate, Scarlett saw, held only mashed potatoes and a mound of soggy-looking bits of carrot.

My grief! No wonder he looks so fierce. There’s not even any butter on the potatoes. Even if he doesn’t have a tooth in his head, they could feed him better than that.

“I do not tolerate a disregard for the schedule of my house,” said the old man.

“I’m sorry, Grandfather.”

“Discipline is what made the Emperor’s armies great; without discipline there is only chaos.”

His voice was deep, strong, fearsome. But Scarlett saw the sharp old bones jutting under his heavy linen nightshirt, and she felt no fear.

“I said I was sorry. May I go now? I’m hungry.”

“Don’t be impertinent, young lady.”

“There’s nothing impertinent about being hungry, Grandfather. Just because you don’t want to eat your dinner, it doesn’t mean nobody else should have any.”

Pierre Robillard pushed angrily at his tray. “Pap!” he growled. “Not fit for pigs.”

Scarlett edged toward the door.

“I have not dismissed you, Miss.”

She felt her stomach growl. The rolls would be cold by now, the chicken might even be gone, with Aunt Eulalie’s appetite being what it was.

“God’s nightgown, Grandfather, I’m not one of your soldiers! And I’m not scared of you like my aunts, either. What are you going to do to me, do you think? Shoot me for desertion? If you want to starve yourself to death, that’s up to you. I’m hungry, and I’m going to go have whatever dinner is left.” She was halfway out the door when a strange choking sound made her turn back. Dear God, have I given him apoplexy? Don’t let him die on me.

Pierre Robillard was laughing.

Scarlett put her hands on her hips and glared at him. He’d scared her half to death.

He waved her away with a long-fingered bony hand. “Eat,” he said, “eat.” Then he began laughing again.

“What happened?” asked Pauline.

“I didn’t hear shouting, did I, Scarlett?” said Eulalie.

They were sitting at table waiting for dessert. The dinner was gone. “Nothing happened,” Scarlett said through her teeth.

She picked up the small silver bell on the table and shook it furiously. When the stout black maid appeared carrying two small dishes of pudding, Scarlett stalked over to her. She put her hands on the woman’s shoulders and turned her around. “Now you march, and I mean march, not amble along. You go down to the kitchen and bring me my dinner. Hot and plenty of it and in a hurry. I don’t care which one of you was planning to eat it, but you’ll have to make do with the back and the wings. I want a thigh and a breast and plenty of gravy on my potatoes and a bowl of butter, with the rolls nice and hot. Go on!”

She sat down with a flounce, ready to do battle with her aunts if they said so much as one word. Silence filled the room until her dinner was served.

Pauline contained herself until Scarlett’s food was half-eaten. Then, “What did Père say to you?” she asked politely.

Scarlett wiped her mouth with her napkin. “He just tried to bully me the way he does you and Aunt ’Lalie, so I gave him a piece of my mind. It made him laugh.”

The two sisters exchanged shocked looks. Scarlett smiled and ladled more gravy onto the potatoes left on her plate. What geese her aunts were. Didn’t they know that you had to stand up to bullies like their father or else they’d trample right over you?

It never occurred to Scarlett that she was able to resist being bullied because she was a bully herself, or that her grandfather’s laughter was caused by his recognition of her resemblance to him.

When dessert was served, the bowls of tapioca had somehow become larger. Eulalie smiled gratefully at her niece. “Sister and I were just saying how much we enjoyed having you with us in our old home, Scarlett. Don’t you find Savannah a lovely little city? Did you see the fountain in Chippewa Square? And the theater? It’s nearly as old as Charleston’s. I remember how Sister and I used to look out of the windows of our schoolroom at the thespians coming and going. Don’t you remember, Sister?”

Pauline remembered. She also remembered that Scarlett had not told them she was going out that morning, nor where she had been. When Scarlett reported that she’d been to the Cathedral, Pauline put her finger to her lips. Père, she said, was unfortunately extremely opposed to Roman Catholicism. It had something to do with French history, she wasn’t sure what, but he got very angry about the Church. That was the reason she and Eulalie always left Charleston after Mass to come to Savannah and left Savannah on Saturday to return to Charleston. This year there was a particular difficulty; because Easter was so early, they would be in Savannah for Ash Wednesday. Naturally they had to attend Mass, and they could leave the house early and unobserved. But how could they keep their father from seeing the smudges of ash on their foreheads when they returned to the house?

“Wash your face,” said Scarlett impatiently, thereby revealing her ignorance and the recent date of her return to religion. She dropped her napkin on the table. “I’ve got to be off,” she said briskly. “I . . . I’m going to visit my O’Hara uncles and aunts.” She didn’t want anyone to know that she was trying to buy the convent’s share of Tara. Especially not her aunts, they gossiped too much. Why, they might even write to Suellen. She smiled sweetly. “What time do we leave in the morning for Mass?” She’d be sure to mention it to the Mother Superior. No need to let on that she’d forgotten all about Ash Wednesday.

What a bother it was that she’d left her rosary in Charleston. Oh, well, she could buy a new one at her O’Hara uncles’ store. If she remembered correctly, they had everything in there from bonnets to plows.

“Miss Scarlett, when are we going home to Atlanta? I don’t feel comfortable with the folks in your Grandpa’s kitchen. They is all so old. And my shoes is just about wore out from all this walking. When are we going home where you got all the fine carriages?”

“Stop that everlasting complaining, Pansy. We’ll go when I say go and where I say go.” Scarlett’s response had no real heat in it; she was trying to remember where her uncles’ store was, and having no luck. I must be catching old folks’ forgetfulness. Pansy’s right about that part. Everybody I know in Savannah is old. Grandfather, Aunt Eulalie, Aunt Pauline, all their friends. And Pa’s brothers are the oldest of all. I’ll just say hello and let them give me a nasty dry old man’s kiss on the cheek and buy my rosary and leave. There’s no real call to see their wives. If they cared about seeing me, they would have done something about keeping up all these years. Why, for all they know I could be dead and buried and not so much as a condolence note to my husband and children. A mighty tacky way to treat a blood relative, I call it. Maybe I’ll just forget about going to see any of them at all. They don’t deserve any visits from me after the way they neglected me, she thought, ignoring the letters from Savannah that she’d never answered, until finally they stopped coming.

She was ready to consign her father’s brothers and their wives permanently to oblivion in the recesses of her mind now. She was fixed on two things, getting control of Tara and getting the upper hand with Rhett. Never mind that the two were contradictory goals, she’d find a way to have both. And they demanded all the thinking she had time for. I’m not going to go trailing around looking for that musty old store, Scarlett decided. I’ve got to track down the Mother Superior and the Bishop. Oh, I do wish I hadn’t left those beads in Charleston. She looked quickly along the storefronts on the other side of Broughton Street, Savannah’s place to shop. Surely there must be a jeweler somewhere close by.

The bold gilt letters that spelled out O’HARA stretched across the wall above five gleaming windows almost directly opposite. My, they’ve come up in the world since I was here last, Scarlett thought. That doesn’t look musty at all. “Come on,” she said to Pansy, and she plunged into the tangled traffic of wagons, buggies, and pushcarts that filled the busy street.

The O’Hara store smelled of fresh paint, not long-settled dust. A green tarlatan banner draped across the front of the counter in the rear gave the reason in gold letters: GRAND OPENING. Scarlett looked around enviously. The store was more than twice the size of her store in Atlanta, and she could see that the stock was fresher and more varied. Neatly labelled boxes and bolts of bright fabrics filled shelves to the ceiling; barrels of meals and flours were lined up along the floor, not far from the big potbellied stove in the center; and huge glass jars of candy stood temptingly on the tall counter. Her uncles were moving up in the world for sure. The store she’d visited in 1861 wasn’t in the central, fashionable part of Broughton Street, and it was dark, cluttered, even more so than hers in Atlanta. It would be interesting to find out what this handsome expansion had cost her uncles. She might just consider a few of their ideas for her own business.

She walked quickly to the counter. “I’d like to see Mr. O’Hara, if you please,” she said to the tall, aproned man who was measuring out some lamp oil into a customer’s glass jug.

“In a moment, if you’ll be so kind as to wait, ma’am,” the man said without looking up. His voice had just a hint of brogue in it.

That makes sense, thought Scarlett. Hire Irish for a shop run by Irishmen. She looked at the labels on the shelved boxes in front of her while the man wrapped the oil in brown paper and made change. Hmmm, she should be keeping gloves that way, too, by size not by color. You could see the colors quick enough when you opened the box, but it was a real bother to search for the right size in a box of gloves that were all of them black. Why hadn’t she thought of it before?

The man behind the counter had to speak again before Scarlett heard him. “I’m Mr. O’Hara,” he repeated. “How might I be of service to you?”

Oh, no, this wasn’t the uncles’ store after all! They must still be where they’d always been. Scarlett explained hurriedly that she’d made a mistake. She was looking for an elderly Mr. O’Hara, Mr. Andrew or Mr. James. “Can you direct me to their store?”

“But this is their store. I’m their nephew.”

“Oh . . . oh, my goodness. Then you must be my cousin. I’m Katie Scarlett, Gerald’s daughter. From Atlanta.”

Scarlett held out both her hands. A cousin! A big, strong, not-an-old-man cousin of her own. She felt as if she’d just been given a surprise present.

“Jamie, that’s me,” said her cousin with a laugh, taking her hands in his. “Jamie O’Hara at your service, Scarlett O’Hara. And what a gift you are to a weary businessman, to be sure. Pretty as a sunrise, and dropping from out of the blue like a falling star. Tell me now, how do you come to be here for the grand opening of the new store? Come let me get you a chair.”

Scarlett forgot all about the rosary she’d meant to buy. She forgot about the Mother Superior, too. And about Pansy, who settled herself on a low stool in a corner and went to sleep at once with her head resting on a neat pile of horse blankets.

Jamie O’Hara mumbled something under his breath when he returned from the back room with a chair for Scarlett. There were four customers waiting to be served. In the next half hour more and more came in, so that there was no chance for him to say a word to Scarlett. He looked at her from time to time with apology in his eyes, but she smiled and shook her head. There was no need to apologize. She was pleased just to be there, in a warm, well-run store that was doing a good business, with a new-found cousin whose competence and skillful treatment of his customers was a delight to observe.

At last there was a brief moment when the only customers were a mother and her three daughters who were looking through four boxes of laces. “I’ll talk like a rushing river, then, while I can,” said Jamie. “Uncle James will be longing to see you, Katie Scarlett. He’s an old gentleman, but still active enough. He’s here every day until dinnertime. You may not know it, but his wife died, God rest her soul, and Uncle Andrew’s wife as well. It took the heart out of Uncle Andrew, and he followed her within a month. May they all be resting in the arms of the angels. Uncle James lives in the house with me and my wife and children. It’s not far from here. Will you come to tea this afternoon and see them all? My boy Daniel will be back soon from making deliveries, and I’ll walk you to the house. We’re celebrating my daughter Patricia’s birthday today. All the family will be there.”

Scarlett said she’d love to go to tea. Then she took off her hat and cape and walked over to the ladies at the laces. There was more than one O’Hara who knew how to run a store. Besides, she was too excited to sit still. A birthday for her cousin’s daughter! Let’s see, she’ll be my first cousin once removed. Although Scarlett had grown up without the usual many-generation family network of the South, she was still a Southerner, and could name the exact relationship of cousins to the tenth remove. She had revelled in watching Jamie while he worked, because he was the living confirmation of everything Gerald O’Hara had told her. He had the dark curly hair and blue eyes of the O’Haras. And the wide mouth and short nose in the round, florid face. Most of all, he was a big man, tall and broad through the chest with strong thick legs like the trunks of trees that could withstand any storm. He was an impressive figure. “Your Pa is the runt of the litter,” Gerald had said without shame for himself but with enormous pride in his brothers. “Eight children my mother had, and all boys, and me the last and the only one not as big as a house.” Scarlett wondered which of the brothers was Jamie’s father. No matter, she’d find out at the tea. No, not tea, the birthday party! For her first cousin once removed.

35

Scarlett looked up at her cousin Jamie with carefully concealed curiosity. In the daylight of the open street the lines and pouches beneath his eyes weren’t blended away by shadows, the way they were inside the store. He was a middle-aged man, running to weight and softness. She’d assumed somehow that because he was her cousin he must be her age. When his son came in, she was shocked to be introduced to a grown man, not a boy who delivered packages. And a grown man with flaming red hair, to boot. It took some getting used to.

So did the sight of Jamie in daylight. He . . . he wasn’t a gentleman. Scarlett couldn’t specify how she knew that, but it was as clear as glass. There was something wrong with his clothes; his suit was dark blue, but not dark enough, and it fit him too closely through the chest and shoulders and too loosely everywhere else. Rhett’s clothing was, she knew, the result of superlative tailoring and, on his part, demanding perfectionism. She wouldn’t expect Jamie to dress like Rhett—she’d never known man who dressed like Rhett. But any still, he could do something—whatever it was that men did—so that he wouldn’t look so . . . so common. Gerald O’Hara had always looked like a gentleman, no matter how worn or rumpled his coat might be. It didn’t occur to Scarlett that her mother’s quiet authority and influence might have been at work on her father’s transformation to gentleman landowner. Scarlett only knew that she’d lost most of her joy in discovering the existence of her cousin. Well, I only have to have a cup of tea and a piece of cake, and then I can leave. She smiled brilliantly at Jamie. “I’m so thrilled to be meeting your family that I’ve taken leave of my senses, Jamie. I should have bought a present for your daughter’s birthday.”

“Aren’t I bringing her the best gift of all when I walk in with you on my arm, Katie Scarlett?”

He does have a twinkle in his eye, just like Pa, Scarlett told herself. And Pa’s teasing brogue. If only he wasn’t wearing a Derby hat! Nobody wears Derby hats.

“We’ll be walking past your grandfather’s house,” Jamie said, striking horror to Scarlett’s heart. What if her aunts saw them—suppose she had to introduce them? They always thought Mother married beneath her; Jamie would be all the proof they could ever want. What was he saying? She had to pay attention.

“. . . leave off your servant-girl there. She’d feel out-of-place with us. We don’t have any servants.”

No servants? Good Lord! Everybody has servants, everybody! What kind of place do they live in, a tenement? Scarlett squared her jaw. This is Pa’s own brother’s son, and Uncle James is Pa’s own brother. I won’t disgrace his memory by being too cowardly to take a cup of tea with them, even if there are rats running across the floor. “Pansy,” she said, “when we get to the house, you go on in. I’ll be back directly, you tell them . . . You will walk me home, won’t you, Jamie?” She was brave enough to face a rat running across her foot, but she wasn’t willing to ruin her reputation for all time by walking alone on the street. Ladies just didn’t do that.

To Scarlett’s relief they walked along the street behind her grandfather’s house, not by the square in front of it where her aunts liked to promenade under the trees for their “constitutionals.” Pansy went willingly through the gate into the garden, already yawning anticipation of going back to sleep. Scarlett tried not to look anxious. She’d heard Jerome complaining to her aunts about the deterioration of the neighborhood. Only a few blocks to the east the fine old homes had degenerated into ramshackle boardinghouses for the sailors who manned the ships in and out of Savannah’s busy port. And for the waves of immigrants who arrived on some of the ships. Most of them, according to the snobbish, elegant old black man, were unwashed Irish.

James escorted her straight ahead, and she sighed silently with relief. Then, very soon, he turned onto the handsome, well-kept avenue called South Broad and announced, “Here we are,” in front of a tall, substantial brick house.

“How nice!” Scarlett said, with all her heart.

It was almost the last thing she got to say for some time. Instead of climbing the stairs to the big door on the high stoop, Jamie opened a smaller door at street level and ushered her into the kitchen and an overwhelming onslaught of people, all of them redheaded and all of them noisily welcoming when he shouted out above the hubbub of greetings, “This is Scarlett, my uncle Gerald O’Hara’s beautiful daughter come all the way from Atlanta to see Uncle James.”

There are so many of them, Scarlett thought when they rushed toward her. Jamie’s laughter when the youngest girl and a little boy grabbed him around the knees made it impossible to understand what he was saying.

Then a large stout woman, with hair redder than any of them, held out a roughened hand to Scarlett. “Welcome to the house,” she said placidly. “I’m Jamie’s wife, Maureen. Pay no attention to these savages; come sit by the fire and have a cup of tea.” She took Scarlett’s arm in a firm grip and drew her into the room. “Quiet, you heathens, let your Pa catch his breath, can’t you? Then wash your faces and come meet Scarlett one by one.” She plucked Scarlett’s fur cape from her shoulders. “Put this in a safe place, Mary Kate, else the baby will think it’s a kitten to pull the tail on, so soft is it.” The larger of the girls bobbed a curtsey in Scarlett’s direction and held out eager hands for the fur. Her blue eyes were huge with admiration. Scarlett smiled at her. And at Maureen, even though Jamie’s wife was pushing her down onto a Windsor chair as if she thought Scarlett was one of her children to be ordered around.

In an instant Scarlett found herself holding the biggest cup she had ever seen in one hand while, with the other, she was shaking hands with a startlingly beautiful young girl who whispered, “She looks like a princess,” to her mother, and, “I’m Helen,” to Scarlett.

“You should touch the furs, Helen,” said Mary Kate importantly.

“Is Helen the guest here, then, that you’re addressing yourself to her?” Maureen said. “What a disgrace for a mother to have such an eejit child.” Her voice was warm with affection and suppressed laughter.

Mary Kate’s cheeks stained with embarrassment. She curtseyed again and held out her hand. “Cousin Scarlett, I ask your pardon. I forgot myself in looking at your elegances. I’m Mary Kate, and it’s proud I am to be cousin to such a grand lady.”

Scarlett wanted to say no pardon was needed, but she had no chance. Jamie had taken off his hat and his suit coat and unbuttoned his vest. Under his right arm he was holding a child, a kicking, squealing, chubby, redheaded bundle of delighted struggle. “And this little devil is Sean, named John like a good American boy because he was born right here in Savannah. We call him Jacky. Say hello to your cousin, Jacky, if you’ve got a tongue in your head.”

“Hello!” shouted the little boy, then shrieked with excitement when his father turned him upside down.

“What’s all this now?” The noise, except for Jacky’s giggles, died down at once when the thin querulous tones cut through the racket. Scarlett looked across the kitchen and saw a tall old man who must be her Uncle James. There was a pretty girl with dark curly hair at his side. She looked alarmed and timid.

“Jacky woke Uncle James from his rest,” she said. “Is he hurt, then, to be howling so and to bring Jamie home early?”

“Not a bit of it,” said Maureen. She raised her voice. “You have a visitor, Uncle James. Come special to see you. Jamie left the store with Daniel so he could bring her to you. Come by the fire, tea’s ready. And see Scarlett.”

Scarlett stood up and smiled. “Hello, Uncle James, do you remember me?”

The old man stared at her. “Last time I saw you, you were mourning your husband. Have you found another one yet?”

Scarlett’s mind raced backwards. Good heavens, Uncle James was right. She’d come to Savannah after Wade was born, when she was wearing black for Charles Hamilton. “Yes, I have,” she said. And what would you say if I told you I found two husbands since then, nosy old man?

“Good,” pronounced her uncle. “There are too many unmarried women in this house already.”

The girl beside him let out a tiny cry, then turned and ran out of the room.

“Uncle James, you shouldn’t be tormenting her so,” said Jamie severely.

The old man walked to the fire and rubbed his hands before its warmth. “She shouldn’t be such a weeper,” he said. “The O’Haras don’t weep over their troubles. Maureen, I’ll have my tea now while I talk to Gerald’s girl.” He sat in the chair next to Scarlett’s. “Tell me about the funeral. Did you bury your father in fine style? My brother Andrew had the finest burial this city has seen in many a year.”

In her mind’s eye Scarlett saw the pitiful band of mourners around Gerald’s grave at Tara. So few of them. So many who should have been there were dead before her father, dead before their time.

Scarlett fixed her green eyes on the old man’s faded blue ones. “He had a glass-sided hearse with four black horses and black plumes on their heads, a blanket of flowers on his coffin and more on the roof, and two hundred mourners following the hearse in their rigs. He’s in a marble tomb, not a grave, and the tomb has a carved angel on top, seven feet high.” Her voice was cold and harsh. Take that, old man, she thought, and leave Pa alone.

James rubbed his dry hands together. “God rest his soul,” he said happily. “I always said Gerald had the most style of any of us; didn’t I tell you that, Jamie? The runt of the litter, and the quickest to fly off at an insult. He was a fine small man, was Gerald. Do you know how he came by that plantation of his? Playing poker with my money, that’s how. And not a penny of the profit did he offer to me.” James’ laughter was full and strong, the laughter of a young man. It was warm with life and rich amusement.

“Tell about how he came to leave Ireland, Uncle James,” said Maureen, refilling the old man’s cup. “Perhaps Scarlett never heard the tale.”

Great balls of fire! Are we going to have a wake? Scarlett stirred angrily in her chair. “I heard it a hundred times,” she said. Gerald O’Hara loved to boast about fleeing Ireland with a price on his head after he killed an English landlord’s rent agent with one blow of his fist. Everyone in Clayton County had heard it a hundred times, and no one believed it. Gerald was noisy in his rages, but the whole world could see the gentleness underneath.

Maureen smiled. “A mighty man, for all his small size, so I’ve always been told. A father to make a woman proud.”

Scarlett felt her throat clog with tears.

“He was that,” said James. “When do we have the birthday cake, Maureen? And where is Patricia?”

Scarlett looked around the circle of crimson-topped faces. No, she was sure she hadn’t heard the name Patricia. Maybe it was the dark-haired girl who had run away.

“She’s fixing her own feast, Uncle James,” said Maureen. “You know how particular she is. We’re to go next door as soon as Stephen comes to tell us she’s ready.”

Stephen? Patricia? Next door?

Maureen saw the questions on Scarlett’s face. “Did Jamie not tell you, Scarlett? There are three households of O’Haras here now. You’ve only just begun to meet your people.”

I’ll never get them all straight, thought Scarlett desperately. If only they’d stay in one place!

But there was no hope of that. Patricia was holding her birthday party in the double parlors of her house, with the sliding doors between them open as wide as they would go. The children—and there were many of them—were playing games that required a great deal of running and hiding and popping out from behind chairs and draperies. The adults darted from time to time after a child who was getting too boisterous, or swooped to pick up one of the small ones who had fallen and needed comforting. It didn’t seem to matter whose child it was. All the adults played parent to all the children.

Scarlett was grateful for Maureen’s red hair. All her children—the ones Scarlett had met next door, plus Patricia, plus Daniel, the son at the store, plus another grown boy whose name she couldn’t remember—were at least recognizable. The others were a hopeless muddle.

So were their parents. Scarlett knew that one of the men was named Gerald, but which one? They were all big men, with curly dark hair and blue eyes and winning smiles.

“Isn’t it confusing?” said a voice beside her. It was Maureen. “Don’t let it bother you, Scarlett, you’ll puzzle them out in time.”

Scarlett smiled and nodded politely. But she had no intention of “puzzling them out.” She was going to ask Jamie to walk her home just as soon as she could. It was too noisy here with all those brats running around. The silent pink house on the square seemed like a refuge. At least there she had her aunts to talk to. Here she couldn’t say a word to a soul. They were all too busy chasing children or hugging and kissing Patricia. Asking her about her baby, for heaven’s sake! As if they didn’t know that the only decent thing to do was pretend that you didn’t notice when a woman was pregnant. She felt like a stranger. Left out. Unimportant. Just like Atlanta. Just like Charleston. And these were her own kin! It made things a hundred times worse.

“We’ll be cutting the cake now,” Maureen said. She slipped her arm through Scarlett’s. “Then we’ll have a bit of music.”

Scarlett clenched her teeth. My grief, I’ve sat through one musicale already in Savannah. Can’t these people do anything else? She walked with Maureen to a settee covered in red plush and settled herself stiffly on the edge of the seat.

A knife clattering against a glass demanded everyone’s attention. Something that was almost silence came into the crowd. “I thank you for as long as it lasts,” Jamie said. He waved his knife menacingly at the laughter. “We’ve come to celebrate Patricia’s birthday, even though it will not arrive until next week. Today is Shrove Tuesday, a better time for feasting than the middle of Lent.” He threatened the laughter again. “And we have a further cause for celebration. A beautiful long lost O’Hara has been found again. I lift this glass for all the O’Haras in a toast to Cousin Scarlett and bid her welcome to our hearts and our homes.” Jamie threw back his head and poured the dark contents of his glass down his throat. “Bring on the feast!” He commanded with a sweeping gesture. “And the fiddle!”

There was an outburst of giggles from the doorway and the sound of his sing calls for silence. Patricia came over and seated herself next to Scarlett. Then, from a corner, a fiddle began to play. Jamie’s beautiful daughter Helen walked in carrying a platter of steaming small meat pies. She bent over to show them to Patricia and Scarlett, then carefully carried them to the heavy round parlor table in the center of the room and set the platter on the velvet cloth that covered it. Helen was followed by Mary Kate, then the pretty girl who had been with Uncle James, then the youngest of the O’Hara wives. All of them presented the platters they were carrying to Scarlett and Patricia before adding them to the food on the table. A roast of beef, a clove-studded ham, a bulging turkey. Then Helen appeared again with a huge bowl of steaming potatoes, followed more quickly now by the others with creamed carrots, roast onions, whipped sweet potatoes. Again and again the procession came until the table was covered with food and relishes of every kind. The fiddle—Scarlett saw that Daniel from the store was playing—played a flourishing arpeggio, and Maureen entered carrying a tower of a cake liberally trimmed with huge, vividly pink icing roses.

“Bakery cake!” screamed Timothy.

Jamie was immediately behind his wife. He held his two arms over his head. He was carrying three bottles of whiskey in each hand. The fiddle began to play an exuberant rapid tune, and everyone laughed and clapped. Even Scarlett. The drama of the procession was irresistible.

“Now Brian,” said Jamie. “You and Billy. The queens on their throne to the hearth.” Before Scarlett knew what was happening the settee was lifted and she was holding on to Patricia while they were swung back and forth and moved to a place near the glowing coals in the fireplace.

“Uncle James,” Jamie ordered, and the old man was carried, laughing, in his shy-backed chair to the other side of the mantel.

The girl who had been with James began to shoo the children, as if they were chickens, into the other parlor, where Mary Kate laid a tablecloth on the floor for them to sit on in front of the second fireplace.

In a surprisingly short time there was calm where there had been chaos. And while they ate and talked, Scarlett tried to “puzzle out” the adults.

Jamie’s two sons were so much alike that she could hardly believe that Daniel, at twenty-one, was almost three years older than Brian. When she smiled at Brian and said as much, he blushed as only a redhead can. The only other young man began to tease him unmercifully, but he stopped when the pink-cheeked girl next to him put her hand on his and said, “Stop it, Gerald.”

So that was Gerald. Pa would be so pleased to know that big handsome fellow was named after him. He called the girl Polly, and they’re so shiny with love they must be fresh-married. And Patricia’s being mighty bossy to the one Jamie called Billy, so they must be husband and wife, too.

But Scarlett had little time to listen for the names of the others. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to talk to her. And everything she said was cause for exclamation, repetition, admiration. She found herself telling Daniel and Jamie all about her store, Polly and Patricia about her dressmaker, Uncle James about the Yankees setting Tara on fire. She talked mostly about her lumber business and how she’d built it from one small mill into two mills, lumberyards, and now a whole village of new houses on the edge of Atlanta. Everyone was loudly approving. At last Scarlett had found people who didn’t think that talking about money was taboo. They were like she was, willing to work hard and determined to make money from it. She had already made hers, and they told her she was wonderful. She couldn’t imagine why she had ever wanted to leave this marvelous party and go back to the deadly quiet at her grandfather’s house.

“Will you give us some music, then, Daniel, if you’ve finished eating most of your sister’s cake?” said Maureen when Jamie uncorked a bottle of whiskey, and suddenly everyone except Uncle James was up and moving around in what seemed to be a practiced routine. Daniel began playing a rapid, squeaking tune on the fiddle and the others shouted criticism while the women quickly cleared the table and the men moved the furniture back against the walls, leaving Scarlett and her uncle sitting as if on an island. Jamie presented James with a glass of whiskey and waited, half bent, for the old man’s opinion.

“It’ll do,” was the judgment.

Jamie laughed. “Indeed I hope so, old man, for we have no other kind.”

Scarlett tried to catch Jamie’s eye, failed, finally called out to get his attention. She had to go now. Everyone was pulling chairs into a circle around the fire, and the smaller children were taking places on the floor at the adults’ feet. Obviously they were getting ready for the musicale, and once it started, it would be terribly rude to get up and go.

Jamie stepped over a small boy to get to Scarlett. “Here you are, then,” he said. To her horror he handed her a glass with several fingers of whiskey in it. What kind of person did he think she was? A lady didn’t drink whiskey. She didn’t drink anything stronger than tea, except champagne or a party punch or perhaps a very small glass of sherry. He couldn’t possibly know about the brandy she used to drink. Why, he was insulting her! No, he wouldn’t do that, it must be a joke. She forced a brittle laugh. “It’s time for me to go, Jamie. I’ve had a delightful time, but it’s getting late . . .”

“You’ll not be leaving just when the party begins, Scarlett?” Jamie turned toward his son. “Daniel, you’re driving your new-found cousin away with that screeching. Play a song for us, boy, not a cat fight.”

Scarlett tried to speak, but her words were drowned out by the cries of “play decent, Daniel,” and “give us a ballad,” and “a reel, boy, let’s have a reel.”

Jamie grinned. “I can’t hear you,” he shouted over the din. “I’m deaf as a stone to anyone asking to go.”

Scarlett felt her temper rising. When Jamie offered her the whiskey again, she stood up in a rage. Then, before she could knock the glass from his hand, she realized what Daniel had begun to play. It was “Peg in a Low Back’d Car.”

Pa’s favorite. She looked at Jamie’s ruddy Irish face and saw her father’s image. Oh, if only he could be here, he’d love this so. Scarlett sat down. She shook her head at the proffered drink, smiled weakly at Jamie. She was close to tears.

The music wouldn’t allow sadness. The rhythm was too infectious, too merry, and everyone was singing now, and clapping their hands. Scarlett’s foot began involuntarily to tap the beat under cover of her skirts.

“Come on, Billy,” said Daniel, singing it, really, to the tune. “Play with me.”

Billy opened the lid of a window seat and took out a concertina. The pleated leather bellows opened with a wheeze. Then he walked up behind Scarlett, reached over her head, and picked up something shiny from the mantel. “Let’s have some real music. Stephen—” He tossed a thin glinting tube to the dark silent man. “You, too, Brian.” There was another arc of silver through the air. “And, for you, dear mother-in-law—” His hand dropped something in Maureen’s lap.

A young boy clapped wildly. “The bones! Cousin Maureen’s going to play the bones.”

Scarlett stared. Daniel had stopped playing, and with the music gone she felt sad again. But she no longer wanted to leave. This party had nothing to do with the Telfairs’ musicale. There was easiness here, warmth, laughter. The parlors that had been so neatly arranged before were all hodge-podge now, furniture moved, chairs from both rooms crowded in a straggling half circle around the fire. Maureen lifted her hand with a clacking noise, and Scarlett saw that the “bones” were really thick pieces of smooth wood.

Jamie was still pouring and passing whiskey. Why, the women are drinking, too! Not in secret, not ashamed. They’re having as much fun as the men. I’ll have a drink, too. I’ll celebrate the O’Haras. She almost called out to Jamie, then she remembered. I’ll be going to grandfather’s. I can’t drink. Somebody would smell it on my breath. No matter. I feel as warm inside as if I had just had a drink. I don’t need it.

Daniel pulled the bow over the strings. “The Maid Behind the Bar,” he said. Everyone laughed. Including Scarlett, though she didn’t know why. In an instant the big room rang with the music of an Irish reel. Billy’s concertina whined vigorously, Brian piped the tune on his tin whistle, Stephen played his tin whistle in rippling counterpoint that wove in and out of Brian’s melody. Jamie beat time with his foot, the children clapped, Scarlett clapped, everyone clapped. Except Maureen. She threw up the hand holding the bones and the sharp staccato clacking made an insistent rhythm that held everything together. Faster, the bones demanded, and the others obeyed. The whistles soared higher, the fiddle scraped louder, the concertina puffed to keep up. A half dozen children got up and began to leap and hop across the bare floor in the center of the room. Scarlett’s hands grew hot from clapping, and her feet were moving as if she wanted to leap about with the children. When the reel came to an end, she fell back against the settee, exhausted.

“Come along, Matt, show the babies how to dance,” cried Maureen with a tempting rattle of the bones. The older man near Scarlett stood up.

“God save us, wait a bit,” Billy begged. “I need a bit of a rest. Give us a song, instead, Katie.” He squeezed a few notes out of the concertina.

Scarlett started to protest. She couldn’t sing, not here. She didn’t know any Irish songs except “Peg” and her father’s other favorite, “The Wearing o’ the Green.”

But, she saw, Billy didn’t mean her. A plain dark woman with big teeth was handing her glass to Jamie and standing. “There was a wild Colonial boy,” she sang in a pure sweet high voice. Before the line was finished, Daniel and Brian and Billy were accompanying her. “Jack Duggan was his name,” sang Katie. “He was born and raised in Ireland.” and Stephen’s whistle entered, an octave higher, with a strange heartbreaking silvery plaintiveness.

“. . . in a house called Castlemaine . . .” Everyone began to sing, except Scarlett. But she didn’t mind not knowing the words. She was still part of the music. It was all around her. And when the sad, brave song was over, she saw that everyone else had glistening eyes just like hers.

There was a happy song next, started by Jamie, then one that made Scarlett laugh and blush at the same time when she understood the double meaning of the words.

“Now me,” Gerald said. “I’ll sing my sweet Polly the ‘Londonderry air.’ ”

“Oh, Gerald!” Polly hid her blushing face in her hands. Brian played the first few notes. Then Gerald began to sing and Scarlett caught her breath. She’d heard talk of the Irish tenor, but she wasn’t prepared for the reality. And that voice like an angel’s was coming from her Pa’s namesake. Gerald’s loving young heart was exposed for all to see on his face and for all to hear in the high pure notes from his vibrating strong throat. Scarlett’s own throat felt choked by the beauty of it and the sharp painful longing to know love like that, so fresh and open. Rhett! her heart cried, even as her mind mocked the notion of simple directness from his dark complex nature.

At the end of the song Polly threw her arms around Gerald’s neck and hid her face in his shoulder. Maureen lifted the bones above her shoulder. “We’ll have a reel now,” she announced firmly. “My toes are fairly twitching.” Daniel laughed and began to play.

Scarlett had danced the Virginia reel a hundred times or more, but she’d never seen dancing like what happened next at Patricia’s birthday party. Matt O’Hara began it. With his shoulders straight and his arms stiff at his side he looked like a soldier when he stepped away from the circle of chairs. Then his feet began to pound and flash and twist and move so quickly that they blurred in Scarlett’s vision. The floor became a resounding drum under his heels, became like polished ice under his intricate impossible steps forward and back. He must be the best dancer in the whole world, Scarlett thought. And then Katie danced out to face him, her skirts held up in her two hands so that her feet were free to match his steps. Mary Kate was next, then Jamie joined his daughter. And beautiful Helen with a cousin, a little boy who couldn’t be older than eight. I don’t believe it, Scarlett thought. They’re magic, all of them. The music’s magic, too. Her feet moved, faster than they’d ever moved before, trying to mimic what she was seeing, trying to express the excitement of the music. I’ve got to learn to dance like that, I’ve just got to. It’s like . . . like you spin right up to the sun.

A sleeping child under the settee woke at the sounds of the dancing feet and began to cry. Like a contagion, crying spread to the other smallest children. The dancing and the music stopped.

“Make some mattresses from folded blankets in the other parlor,” Maureen said placidly, “and give them dry bottoms. Then we’ll close the doors most shut and they’ll sleep right along. Jamie, the bone-woman has a terrible thirst. Mary Kate, hand your Pa my glass.”

Patricia asked Billy to carry their three-year-old son. “I’ll get Betty,” she said, reaching beneath the settee. “Hush, hush.” She cradled the crying child to her. “Helen, close the curtains in the back, darling. There’ll be a strong moon tonight.”

Scarlett was still half in a trance from the spell of the music. She looked vaguely at the windows and was jolted back to reality. It was getting dark. The cup of tea she’d come for had stretched into hours. “Oh, Maureen, I’m going to be late for supper,” she gasped. “I’ve got to go home. My grandfather will be furious.”

“Let him be, the old loo-la. Stay for the party. It’s only beginning.”

“I wish I could,” said Scarlett fervently. “It’s the best party I’ve ever been to in my life. But I promised I’d be back.”

“Ah, well, then. A promise is a promise. You’ll come again?”

“I’d love to. Will you invite me?”

Maureen laughed comfortably. “Will you listen to the girl?” she said to the room at large. “There’s no inviting done here. We’re all a family, and you’re a part of it. Come anytime you like. My kitchen door has no lock, and there’s always a fire on the hearth. Jamie’s a fine hand with the fiddle himself, too . . . Jamie! Scarlett’s got to go. Put your coat on, man, and give her your arm.”

Just before they turned the corner Scarlett heard the music begin again. It was faint because of the thick brick walls of the house and the windows closed against the winter night. But she recognized what the O’Haras were singing. It was “The Wearing o’ the Green.”

I know all the words to that one; oh, I wish I hadn’t had to leave.

Her feet made little dance steps. Jamie laughed and matched her. “I’ll teach you the reel next time,” he promised.

36

Scarlett bore her aunts’ tight-lipped disapproval with easy disregard. Even being called on the carpet by her grandfather failed to upset her. She remembered Maureen O’Hara’s off-handed dismissal of him. Old loo-la, she thought, and giggled internally. It made her brave and impertinent enough to sashay over to his bed and kiss his cheek after he dismissed her. “Good night, Grandfather,” she said cheerfully.

“Old loo-la,” she whispered when she was safely in the hall. She was laughing when she joined her aunts at table. Her supper was brought promptly. The plate was covered with a brightly shining silver dish cover to keep the food hot. Scarlett was sure it was newly polished. This house could run really properly, she thought, if it just had someone to keep the servants in line. Grandfather lets them get away with murder. Old loo-la.

“What do you find so amusing, Scarlett?” Pauline’s tone was Icy.

“Nothing, Aunt Pauline.” Scarlett looked down at the mountain of food revealed when Jerome ceremoniously lifted the silver cover. She laughed aloud. For once in her life she wasn’t hungry, not after the feast at the O’Haras’. And there was enough food in front of her to feed a half dozen people. She must have put the fear of God into the kitchen.

The following morning at Ash Wednesday Mass Scarlett took her place beside Eulalie in the pew favored by the aunts. It was genteelly unobtrusive, entered from a side aisle and located well towards the back. Her knees had just begun to hurt from kneeling on the cold floor when she saw her cousins enter the church. They walked—of course, thought Scarlett—straight up the center aisle to almost the front, where they took up two full pews. What very large people they are, and so full of life. And color. Jamie’s sons’ heads look like warm fires in the light from the red stained glass, and not even their hats can hide the bright hair on Maureen and the girls. Scarlett was so engrossed in admiration and memories of the birthday party that she almost missed the arrival of the nuns from the convent. After she’d hurried her aunts to get to church early, too. She wanted to make sure that the Mother Superior from Charleston was still at hand in Savannah.

Yes, there she was. Scarlett ignored Eulalie’s frantic whispers ordering her to turn back around and face the altar. She studied the nun’s serene expression as she walked past. Today the Mother Superior would see her. Scarlett was determined. She spent her time during Mass daydreaming about the party she’d give after she restored Tara to all its former beauty. There’d be music and dancing, just like last night, and it would go on and on for days and days.

“Scarlett!” Eulalie his sed. “Stop humming like that.”

Scarlett smiled into her missal. She hadn’t realized she was humming. She had to admit that “Peg in a Low Back’d Car” wasn’t exactly church music.

“I don’t believe it!” Scarlett said. Her pale eyes were bewildered and hurt beneath her smudged forehead, and her fingers were closed like claws on the rosary she’d borrowed from Eulalie.

The elderly nun repeated her message with emotion-free patience. “The Mother Superior will be in retreat all day, in prayer and fasting.” She took pity on Scarlett and added an explanation. “This is Ash Wednesday.”

“I know it’s Ash Wednesday,” Scarlett almost shouted. Then she curbed her tongue. “Please say that I am very disappointed,” she said softly, “and I’ll come back tomorrow.”

As soon as she reached the Robillard house she washed her face.

Eulalie and Pauline were visibly shocked when she came downstairs and joined them in the drawing room, but neither of them said anything. Silence was the only weapon they felt it safe to use when Scarlett was in a temper. But when she announced that she was going to order breakfast, Pauline spoke up. “You’ll regret that before the day is out, Scarlett.”

“I can’t imagine why,” Scarlett answered. Her jaw was set.

It sagged when Pauline explained. Scarlett’s reintroduction to religion was so recent that she thought fasting meant simply having fish on Fridays instead of meat. She liked fish and had never objected to the rule. But what Pauline told her was objectionable in the extreme.

Only one meal a day during the forty days of Lent, and no meat at that meal. Sundays were the exception. Still no meat, but three meals were allowed.

“I don’t believe it!” Scarlett exclaimed for the second time within an hour. “We never did that at home.”

“You were children,” said Pauline, “but I’m sure your mother fasted as she should. I cannot understand why she didn’t introduce you to Lenten observance when you passed childhood, but then she was isolated out in the country without a priest’s guidance, and there was Mr. O’Hara’s influence to offset . . .” Her voice trailed off.

Scarlett’s eyes lit for battle. “And just what do you mean by ‘Mr. O’Hara’s influence,’ I’d like to know?”

Pauline dropped her gaze. “Everyone knows that the Irish take certain freedoms with the laws of the Church. You can’t really blame them, poor illiterate nation that they are.” She crossed herself piously.

Scarlett stamped her foot. “I’m not going to stand here and listen to such high and mighty French snobbery. My Pa was never anything but a good man, and his ‘influence’ was kindness and generosity, something you don’t know anything about. Furthermore, I’ll have you know, I spent all afternoon yesterday with his kin, and they’re fine people, every one of them. I’d a sight rather be influenced by them than by your whey-faced religious prissiness.”

Eulalie burst into tears. Scarlett scowled at her. Now she’ll sniff that sniff of hers for hours, I reckon. I can’t bear it.

Pauline sobbed loudly. Scarlett turned, staring. Pauline never wept.

Scarlett looked helplessly at the two bent gray heads and hunched shoulders, Pauline’s so thin and fragile looking.

My grief! She walked over to Pauline and touched her aunt’s knobby back. “I’m sorry, Auntie. I didn’t mean what I said.”

When peace had been restored, Eulalie suggested that Scarlett join her and Pauline for their walk around the square. “Sister and I always find that a constitutional is a great restorative,” she said brightly. Then her mouth quivered pathetically. “It keeps one’s mind off food, too.”

Scarlett agreed at once. She had to get out of the house. She was convinced she could smell bacon frying in the kitchen. She walked with her aunts around the square of green in front of the house, then the short distance to the next square, around it, then to the next square, and the next and the next. By the time they returned to the house she was dragging her feet almost as much as Eulalie was, and she was positive that she’d walked through or around every single one of the twenty-some squares that dotted Savannah and gave it its claim to unique charm. She was also positive that she was half-starved to death and bored to screaming-point. But at least it was time for dinner . . . She couldn’t remember ever tasting fish that was quite so delicious.

What a relief! Scarlett thought when Eulalie and Pauline went upstairs for their after-dinner naps. A little of their reminiscences of Savannah goes a long way. A lot of it could drive a person to murder. She wandered restlessly through the big house picking up bits of china and silver from tables and putting them back without really seeing them.

Why was the Mother Superior being so difficult? Why wouldn’t she talk to her at least? Why on earth would a woman like that have to spend a whole day in retreat, even a holy day like Ash Wednesday? Surely a Mother Superior was already as good as a person could be. Why did she need to spend a day in prayer and fasting?

Fasting! Scarlett ran back to the drawing room to look at the tall clock. It couldn’t be only four o’clock. Not even. It was seven minutes to four. And there’d be nothing at all to eat until dinnertime tomorrow. No, it wasn’t possible. It didn’t make sense.

Scarlett walked to the bell pull and jerked it four times. “Go put your coat on,” she told Pansy when the girl came running. “We’re going out.”

“Miss Scarlett, how come we going to the bakery? Cook, she say bakery stuff ain’t fit to eat. She does all the baking her own self.”

“I don’t care what Cook says. And if you tell one single soul we’ve been here, I’ll skin you alive.”

Scarlett ate two cookies and a dinner roll in the store. She carried two sacks of baked goods home and up to her room, hiding them under her cape.

A telegram had been placed neatly in the center of her bureau. Scarlett dropped the sacks of breads and cookies on the floor and ran to get it.

“Henry Hamilton,” it said as signature. Damn! She’d thought it was from Rhett, begging her to come home or telling her that he was on his way to fetch her. She crumpled the flimsy paper angrily in her fist.

Then she smoothed it out. Better see what Uncle Henry had to say. As she read the message, Scarlett began to smile.

So Rhett was looking for her. Just what she’d expected. Hah! She’d been so right to come to Savannah. She hoped Uncle Henry had had the sense to tell Rhett right away and by telegram, not letter. Why, he might be reading his right this minute, just like she was reading hers.

Scarlett hummed a waltz tune and danced around the room holding the telegram against her heart. He might even be on his way now. The train from Charleston arrived just about this time of day. She ran to the mirror to smooth her hair and pinch color into her cheeks. Should she change her dress? No, Rhett would notice, and it would make him think she wasn’t doing anything except wait for him. She rubbed toilet water on her throat and temples. There. She was ready. Her eyes, she saw, were glowing green like a prowling cat’s. She’d have to remember to drop her lashes over them. She took a stool to the window, seated herself where she’d be hidden by the curtain but still able to see out.

An hour later, Rhett hadn’t come. Scarlett’s small white teeth tore at a roll from the bakery bag. What a bother this Lent business was! Imagine having to hide in her room and eat rolls without even any butter to put on them. She was in a very bad mood when she went downstairs.

And there was Jerome with her grandfather’s supper tray! It was almost enough to make her turn Huguenot or Presbyterian like the old man.

Scarlett stopped him in the hall. “This food looks terrible,” she said. “Take it back and put big lumps of butter on the mashed potatoes. Put a thick slice of ham on the plate, too; I know you’ve got a ham down there, I saw it hanging in the larder. And add a pitcher of cream to pour on that pudding. A little bowl of strawberry jam, too.”

“Mr. Robillard, he can’t chew no ham. And his doctor say he’s not supposed to eat sweets, nor cream and butter neither.”

“The doctor doesn’t want him to starve to death, either. Now do what I say.”

Scarlett looked angrily at Jerome’s stiff back until he disappeared down the stairs. “Nobody should have to go hungry,” she said. “Not ever.” Her mood changed abruptly and she giggled. “Not even an old loo-la.”

37

Fortified by her rolls, Scarlett was cheerfully singing under her breath when she went downstairs Thursday. She found her aunts in a nervous frenzy of preparation for her grandfather’s birthday dinner. While Eulalie wrestled with branches of dark green magnolia leaves for arrangements on the sideboard and mantel, Pauline was going through stacks of heavy linen tablecloths and napkins, trying to find the ones she remembered as her father’s favorite.

“What difference does it make?” Scarlett asked impatiently. Talk about a tempest in a teapot! Grandfather wouldn’t even see the dining room table from his room. “Just pick the one that shows the darning least.”

Eulalie dropped an armload of rattling leaves. “I didn’t hear you come in, Scarlett. Good morning.”

Pauline nodded coldly. She had forgiven Scarlett for her insults, as a good Christian woman should, but in all likelihood she’d never forget them. “There are no darns in Mere’s linens, Scarlett,” she said. “They’re all in perfect condition.”

Scarlett looked at the stacks that covered the long table and remembered the worn, mended cloths that her aunts had in Charleston. If it was up to her, she’d pack up all this stuff and take it back to Charleston when they left on Saturday. Grandfather wouldn’t miss it, and the aunts could use it. I’ll never in my life be as afraid of anybody as they are of that old tyrant. But if I said what I think, Aunt Eulalie would start to sniffle, and Aunt Pauline would lecture me for an hour about duty to my elders. “I have to go buy a present for him,” she said aloud. “Is there any shopping you want me to do for you?”

And don’t dare, she said silently, offer to come with me. I’ve got to go to the convent to see the Mother Superior. She can’t still be in retreat. If I have to, I’ll stand by the gate and grab her when she comes out. I’m almighty tired of being turned away.

They were much too busy, her aunts said, to go shopping, and they were astonished that Scarlett had not yet selected and wrapped a gift for her grandfather. Scarlett left before they could describe the extent of their busyness and depth of their astonishment. “Old loo-las,” she said under her breath. She wasn’t at all sure what the Irish phrase meant, but the sound of it was enough to make her smile.

The trees in the square looked somehow thicker, the grass greener than the day before. The sun was warmer, too. Scarlett felt the quickened optimism that always accompanied the first hint of spring. Today would be a good day, she was sure of it—in spite of her grandfather’s birthday party. “Walk up, Pansy,” she said automatically, “don’t drag along like a turtle,” and she set off at a brisk pace along the packed sand-and-shell sidewalk.

The sound of hammering and men’s voices shouting at the Cathedral building carried clearly through the still, sunlit air. Scarlett wished for a moment that the priest would take her on another tour of the site. But that wasn’t what she was here for. She turned into the gate of the convent.

The same elderly nun answered the doorbell. Scarlett readied herself for combat.

But, “The Mother Superior is expecting you,” said the nun. “If you’ll follow me . . .”

Scarlett was almost dazed when she left the convent ten minutes later. It had been so easy! The Mother Superior agreed at once to talk to the Bishop. She’d send word, she said, very soon. No, she couldn’t say just when that would be, but certainly within a short time. She herself would be returning to Charleston the following week.

Scarlett was euphoric. Her smile and her eyes were so bright that the grocer in the small shop on Abercorn Street nearly forgot to charge her for the bow-bedecked box of chocolate candies she selected for her grandfather’s birthday present.

Her high spirits carried her through the final preparations for the birthday dinner that engulfed her when she got back to the Robillard house. They began to dim slightly when she learned that her grandfather would actually come to table for the six courses of his particularly favorite foods. Her spirits plummeted when the aunts informed her that she wasn’t allowed to eat many of the delicacies that would be served.

“Flesh is forbidden during Lent,” said Pauline sternly. “Be certain that no gravy touches the rice or vegetables you eat.”

“But be careful, Scarlett. Don’t let Père notice,” added Eulalie in a whisper. “He doesn’t approve of fasting.” Her eyes were rheumy with sorrow.

Brooding about missing out on the food, thought Scarlett unkindly. Then—I don’t blame her. The aromas from the kitchen were making her mouth water.

“There’ll be soup for us. And fish,” Eulalie said with sudden cheerfulness. “Cake, too, a beautiful, beautiful cake. A true feast, Scarlett.”

“Remember, Sister,” warned Pauline, “gluttony is a sin.”

Scarlett left them; she could feel herself losing control of her temper. It’s only a dinner, she reminded herself, just calm down. Even with Grandfather at table with us, it can’t be all that bad. After all, what could one old man do?

He could, Scarlett learned at once, refuse to allow anything other than French to be spoken. Her “Happy Birthday, Grandfather,” was ignored as if she hadn’t said it. Her aunts’ greetings were acknowledged by a cold nod, and he sat down in the huge throne-like chair at the head of the table.

Pierre Auguste Robillard was no longer a night-shirted, frail elderly man. Impeccably clothed in an old-fashioned frock coat and starched linen, his thin body looked larger, and his erect military bearing was impressive even when he was seated. His white hair was like an old lion’s ruff, his eyes were hawk-like under his big white brows, and his big bony nose looked like a predator’s beak. The certainty that it was a good day began to ooze out of Scarlett. She unfolded the huge starched linen napkin over her lap and knees and braced herself for she knew not what.

Jerome entered, bearing a big silver tureen on a silver tray the size of a small tabletop. Scarlett’s eyes widened. She’d never seen silver like that in her life. It was encrusted with ornamentation. An entire forest of trees circled the base of the tureen, their branches and leaves curving upward to surround the rim. Within the forest there were birds and animals—bears, deer, wild boar, hares, pheasant, even owls and squirrels on the limbs of the trees. The lid of the tureen was shaped like a tree stump covered with thick vines, each vine bearing clusters of miniature, perfect ripe grapes. Jerome placed the tureen in front of his master and lifted the lid with a white-gloved hand. Steam poured out, clouding the silver and spreading the delicious aroma of shrimp bisque throughout the room.

Pauline and Eulalie leaned forward, smiling anxiously.

Jerome took a soup plate from the sideboard and held it next to the tureen. Pierre Robillard lifted a silver ladle and silently filled the bowl. Then he watched with half-hooded eyes while Jerome carried the bowl and deposited it in front of Pauline.

The ceremony was repeated for Eulalie, then for Scarlett. Her fingers itched to grab her spoon. But she kept her hands in her lap while her grandfather served himself and tasted the soup. He shrugged eloquent dissatisfaction and dropped his spoon into his bowl.

Eulalie let out a strangled sob.

You old monster! Scarlett thought. She began to eat her soup. It was a velvety richness of flavor. She tried to catch Eulalie’s eyes so that she could show her aunt that she was enjoying the soup, but Eulalie was downcast. Pauline’s spoon was in the bowl, like her father’s. Scarlett lost all sympathy for her aunts. If they were going to be terrorized this easily, they deserved to go hungry. She wasn’t going to let the old man keep her from her dinner!

Pauline asked her father something, but because she was speaking French, Scarlett had no idea what her aunt had said. Her grandfather’s reply was so brief, and Pauline’s face so white, that he must have said something very insulting. Scarlett began to get angry. He’s going to ruin everything, and on purpose, too. Oh, I wish I could speak French. I wouldn’t just sit and take his nastiness.

She kept silent while Jerome removed the soup plates and the silver place plates and set down dinner plates and fish knives and forks. It seemed to take forever.

But the planked shad, when it came, was worth the wait. Scarlett looked at her grandfather. He wouldn’t dare pretend that he didn’t like this. He ate two small bites. The sound of knives and forks was terribly loud when they touched the plates. Pauline first, then Eulalie, gave up with most of their fish still on their plates. Scarlett looked defiantly at her grandfather over each forkful that she carried to her mouth. But even she was beginning to lose her appetite. The old man’s displeasure was souring.

The next dish revived her appetite. The potted doves looked as tender as dumplings, and their gravy was a rich brown river over pureed potatoes and turnips molded into light-as-air nests for the meat of the tiny birds. Pierre Robillard dipped the tines of his fork into the gravy, then touched them to his tongue. That was all.

Scarlett thought she would explode. Only the desperate entreaty in her aunts’ eyes kept her silent. How could anyone be as hateful as her grandfather? It was just plain impossible that he didn’t like the food. It wasn’t too hard for him to eat, even if he did have bad teeth. Or none at all, for that matter. She knew he liked tasty food, too. After she’d buttered and gravied the pap he was usually served, his plate had gone back to the kitchen as clean as if a dog had licked it. No, there must be some other reason he wasn’t eating. And she could see it in his eyes. They gleamed when he looked at her aunts’ pitiful disappointment. He’d rather make them suffer than enjoy eating his dinner. His birthday dinner, too.

What a difference between this birthday feast and the one for her cousin Patricia!

Scarlett looked at her grandfather’s skeletal ramrod body and his self-satisfied impassive face, and she despised him for the way he was tormenting her aunts. But even more she despised them for tolerating his tortures. They don’t have a shred of gumption. How can they just sit there like that and take it? Sitting silently at her grandfather’s table, in the gracious pink room in the handsome pink house, she seethed with loathing for everything and everyone. Even herself. I’m as bad as they are. Why on earth can’t I just speak up and tell him how nasty he’s acting? I don’t have to talk French to do it, he understands English as well as I do. I’m a grown woman, not a child who mustn’t speak until spoken to. What’s wrong with me? This is downright silly.

But she continued to sit quietly, her back not touching the chair, her left hand in her lap at all times. Just as if she were a child on her best company behavior. Her mother’s presence was unseen, not even imagined, but Ellen Robillard O’Hara was there, in the house where she’d grown up, at the table where she had so often sat as Scarlett was sitting, with her left hand resting on the starched linen napkin across her lap. And, for love of her, for need of her approval, Scarlett was incapable of defying the tyranny of Pierre Robillard.

She sat for what seemed an eternity, watching Jerome’s stately slow service. Plates were replaced again and again by new plates, knives and forks by fresh knives and forks; it seemed to Scarlett that the feast would never end. Pierre Robillard consistently tasted and rejected each carefully selected and prepared dish that was offered him. By the time Jerome brought in the birthday cake, the tension and misery of Scarlett’s aunts was palpable, and Scarlett herself was barely able to sit still in her chair, so urgent was her longing to escape.

The cake was coated in glossy swirled meringue that had been sprinkled liberally with silver dragees. A silver filigreed bud vase on top held curling fronds of Angel Hair ferns and miniature silk flags of France, the Emperor Napoleon’s army, and the regiment in which Pierre Robillard had served. The old man grunted, perhaps with pleasure, when it was placed before him. He turned his hooded eyes on Scarlett. “Cut it,” he said in English.

He hopes I’ll knock over the flags, she thought, but I’m not going to give him that pleasure. As she accepted the cake knife from Jerome with her right hand, with her left she quickly lifted the shining bud vase from the cake and put it on the table. She looked directly into her grandfather’s eyes and smiled her sweetest smile.

His lips twitched.

“And did he eat it?” Scarlett asked dramatically. “He did not! The old horror managed to get no more than two crumbs on the tip of his fork—after he scraped off that beautiful meringue as if it was mold or something else horrible—and put them in his mouth like he was doing the biggest favor in the world. Then he said he was too tired to open his presents, and he went back to his room. I wanted to wring his scrawny neck!”

Maureen O’Hara rocked back and forth, laughing with delight.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” Scarlett said. “He was mean and rude.”

She was disappointed in Jamie’s wife. She’d expected sympathy, not amusement.

“But of course you see, Scarlett. It’s the roguishness of it all. Your poor old aunts plotting their hearts out to please him, and himself sitting in his nightshirt like a wee toothless babe, plotting against them. The old villain. I’ve always had a weak spot in my heart for the deviltry of a rascal. I can see him now, sniffing the dinner to come and making his plans.

“And don’t you know he’s got that man of his sneaking in all those wonderful dishes for him to eat his fill behind his closed door? The old rascal. It does make me laugh, the clever wickedness of him.” Maureen’s laughter was so contagious that Scarlett finally joined in. She’d done the right thing, coming to Maureen’s neverlocked kitchen door after the disastrous birthday dinner.

“Let’s have our own piece of cake, then,” said Maureen comfortably. “You’re in practice, Scarlett, cut it for us; it’s under that towel there on the dresser. Cut some extra slices, too, the young ones will be home from school before long. I’ll be brewing some fresh tea.”

Scarlett had just seated herself near the fire with cup and plate when the door flew open with a bang and five young O’Haras invaded the quiet kitchen. She recognized Maureen’s redhaired daughters Mary Kate and Helen. The little boy, she soon learned, was Michael O’Hara; the two younger girls were his sisters Clare and Peg. All of them had dark curly hair that needed combing, darklashed blue eyes, and grubby little hands that Maureen told them to wash at once.

“But we don’t need clean hands,” Michael argued, “we’re going to the cowshed to play with the pigs.”

“Pigs live in the pigpen,” said tiny Peg with a self-important air. “Don’t they, Maureen?”

Scarlett was shocked. In her world, children never called adults by their first name. But Maureen seemed to find it nothing out of the ordinary. “They live in the pigpen if no one lets them out,” she said with a wink. “You weren’t thinking of taking the piglets out of the pen to play with, now, were you?”

Michael and his sisters laughed as if Maureen’s joke was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Then they ran through the kitchen to the back door that led into a large yard shared by all the houses.

Scarlett’s eyes took in the glowing coals on the hearth, the shiny copper of the tea kettle on the crane, and the pans hanging above the mantel. Funny, she’d thought she would never set foot in a kitchen again once the bad days at Tara were over. But this was different. It was a place to live, a happy place to be, not just the room where food was prepared and dishes washed. She wished she could stay. The static beauty of her grandfather’s drawing room made her shiver inside when she thought of it.

But she belonged in a drawing room, not a kitchen. She was a lady, accustomed to servants and luxury. She drained her cup hurriedly and put it down in its saucer. “You’ve saved my life, Maureen, I thought I’d go crazy if I had to stay with my aunts. But I’ve really got to go back now.”

“What a pity. You haven’t even had your cake. I’m told my cakes are worth eating.”

Helen and Mary Kate edged up to their mother’s chair, empty plates in hand. “Take a piece, then, but not all of it. The little ones will be in soon.”

Scarlett began to pull on her gloves. “I’ve got to go,” she repeated.

“If you must, then you must. I’ll hope you’ll stay longer for the dancing on Saturday, Scarlett? Jamie told me he’s going to teach you the reel. Maybe Colum will be back by then, too.”

“Oh, Maureen! Are you having another party on Saturday?”

“Not to say a party. But there’s always the music and the dancing when the week’s work is done and the men bring home their pay packets. You’ll be here?”

Scarlett shook her head. “I can’t. I’d love to, but I won’t still be in Savannah.” Her aunts expected her to go back to Charleston with them on Saturday morning’s train. She didn’t think she would, she’d never thought so. Surely Rhett would come for her long before then. Maybe he was at her grandfather’s right now. She shouldn’t have left the house.

She jumped to her feet. “I’ve got to run. Thank you, Maureen. I’ll stop by again before I leave.”

Maybe she’d bring Rhett to meet the O’Haras. He’d fit right in, another big dark-haired man with all the big dark-haired O’Haras. But he might slouch against the wall in that infuriating elegant way he had and laugh at all of them. He’d always laughed at her half Irishness, mocked her when she repeated what Pa told her a hundred times. The O’Haras were great and powerful landowners for centuries. Until the Battle of the Boyne.

I don’t know why he found that so funny. Just about everybody we know lost their land to the Yankees, it makes sense that Pa’s folks lost theirs the same way to whoever, the English, I think. I’ll ask Jamie or Maureen about it, if I get a chance. If Rhett doesn’t take me away first.

38

Hamilton’s promised letter was delivered to the Robillard house just as dark was setting in. Scarlett grabbed it like a line thrown to the drowning. She’d been listening to her aunts quarrelling for more than an hour about who was to blame for their father’s reaction to his birthday.

“This is about my Atlanta property,” Scarlett said. “Please excuse me, I’ll take it up to my room.” She didn’t wait for them to agree.

She locked the door to her room. She wanted to savor every word in private.

“What mess have you made this time?” the letter began, without salutation. The old lawyer’s handwriting was so agitated that it was difficult to read. Scarlett made a face and held it closer to the lamp.

Scarlett groaned. Who was Uncle Henry calling an old fool when he was such an old fool himself? No wonder Rhett hadn’t come for her. She peered again at Henry’s spidery script.

Leave Ashley alone, indeed! I’d like to know how comfortable and prosperous he’d be if I had left him alone. Uncle Henry, of all people, should have better sense than to fuss at me like a prissy old maid and jump to all kinds of nasty conclusions. He knows all about building the houses on the edge of town. Scarlett’s feelings were deeply wounded. Uncle Henry Hamilton was the closest thing she had to a father—or a friend in Atlanta—and his accusations cut deep. She scanned the few remaining lines quickly then scrawled a response for Pansy to take to the telegraph office.

If Uncle Henry hadn’t sounded so much like an old clucking hen, she would have trusted him to have bought gold and put it in her safe box. But anyone who didn’t have sense enough to give Rhett her address might not have sense about other things, too. Scarlett chewed on the knuckle of her left thumb, worried about her money. Maybe she should go to Atlanta and talk to Henry and her bankers and Joe Colleton. Maybe she should buy some more land out there on the edge of town, put up some more houses. Things would never be cheaper than they were now, with the aftereffects of the Panic still depressing business.

No! She had to put first things first. Rhett was trying to find her. She smiled to herself, and the fingers of her right hand smoothed the reddened skin over her thumb knuckle. He doesn’t fool me with that divorce talk. Or by transferring the money as if our deal was being carried out. What counts—the only thing that counts—is that he wants to know where I am. He won’t stay away long once Uncle Henry tells him.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Scarlett,” said Pauline in a cold tone, “of course you’ll be going home tomorrow. We always go back to Charleston on Saturday.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to. I told you, I’ve decided to stay in Savannah for a while.” Scarlett wouldn’t let Pauline bother her, nothing could bother her now that she knew Rhett was looking for her. She’d receive him right here, in this elegant pink and gold room, and she’d make him beg her to come back. After he’d been adequately humbled, she’d agree, and then he’d take her in his arms and kiss her . . .

“Scarlett! Will you have the kindness to answer me when I address a question to you?”

“What is it, Aunt Pauline?”

“What do you propose to do with yourself? Where are you going to stay?”

“Why, here, of course.” It had not entered Scarlett’s head that she might not be welcome to stay as long as she liked at her grandfather’s house. The tradition of hospitality was still fiercely cherished in the South, and it was unheard of for a guest to be asked to leave until he or she decided it was time.

“Père doesn’t like surprises,” Eulalie offered sadly.

“I believe that I can instruct Scarlett in the habits of this household without your help, Sister.”

“Of course you can, Sister, I’m sure I never suggested otherwise.”

“I’ll just go ask Grandfather,” Scarlett said, standing up. “Do you want to come along?”

Twittering, she thought, that’s what they’re doing. Terrified that visiting him without an express invitation might make Grandfather mad. Great balls of fire! What meanness can he do them that he hasn’t already done? She strode along the hallway, followed by her whispering, anxious aunts, and knocked on the old man’s door.

“Entrez, Jerome.”

“It’s not Jerome, Grandfather, it’s me, Scarlett. May I come in?”

There was a moment’s silence. Then Pierre Robillard’s deep strong voice called “Come in.” Scarlett tossed her head and smiled triumphantly at her aunts before she opened the door.

Her boldness flagged a bit when she looked at the stern hawklike face of the old man. But she couldn’t stop now. She advanced halfway across the thick carpet with a confident air. “I just wanted to tell you, Grandfather, that I’m going to stay for a while after Aunt Eulalie and Aunt Pauline leave.”

“Why?”

Scarlett was nonplussed. She wasn’t about to explain her reasons. She didn’t see why she should have to. “Because I want to,” she said.

“Why?” the old man asked again.

Scarlett’s determined green eyes met his suspicious faded blue ones. “I have my reasons,” she said. “Do you object?”

“What if I do?”

This was intolerable. She could not, would not go back to Charleston. It would be equivalent to surrender. She had to stay in Savannah.

“If you don’t want me here, I’ll go to my cousins. The O’Haras have already invited me.”

Pierre Robillard’south jerked, a travesty of a smile. “You don’t mind sleeping in the parlor with the pig, I take it.”

Scarlett’s cheeks reddened. She’d always known her grandfather disapproved of her mother’s marriage. He’d never accepted Gerald O’Hara in his house. She wanted to defend her father, and her cousins, from his prejudice against the Irish. If only she didn’t have this terrible suspicion that the children brought the baby pigs into the house to play with.

“Never mind,” said her grandfather. “Stay if you like. It’s a matter of supreme indifference to me.” He closed his eyes, dismissing her from his sight and his attention.

Scarlett refrained with difficulty from slamming the door when she left the room. What a horrid old man! Still, she had gotten what she wanted. She smiled at her aunts. “Everything’s all right,” she said.

For the remainder of the morning, and all afternoon Scarlett cheerfully went along with her aunts to leave their cards at the houses of all their friends and acquaintances in Savannah. “P.P.C.” they hand-lettered in the lower left corner. “Pour prendre congé—to take leave.” The custom had never been observed in Atlanta, but in the older cities of coastal Georgia and South Carolina, it was a required ritual. Scarlett thought it a great waste of time to inform people you were leaving. Especially when, only a handful of days earlier, her aunts had worn themselves out leaving cards at the same houses to inform the same people that they had arrived. She was sure that most of those people hadn’t bothered to leave cards at the Robillard house. Certainly there had been no callers.

On Saturday she insisted on going to the train depot with them, and she saw to it that Pansy put their valises exactly where they wanted them, in full view so that no one could steal them. She kissed their papery wrinkled cheeks, returned to the busy platform, and waved goodbye while the train chugged out of the station.

“We’ll stop at the bakery on Broughton Street before we go back to the house,” she told the driver of the rented carriage. It was still a long time until dinner.

She sent Pansy to the kitchen to order a pot of coffee and then took off her hat and gloves. How lovely and quiet the house was with the aunts gone. But that was definitely a film of dust on the hall table. She’d have to have a few words with Jerome. The other servants, too, if necessary. She wasn’t going to have things looking shabby when Rhett arrived.

As if he’d read her mind, Jerome appeared behind her. Scarlett jumped. Why on earth couldn’t the man make a decent amount of noise when he walked?

“This message come for you, Miss Scarlett.” He held out a silver tray with a telegram on it.

Rhett! Scarlett grabbed the thin paper with too-eager, clumsy fingers. “Thank you, Jerome. See to my coffee, please.” The butler was too curious by half, in her opinion. She didn’t want him reading over her shoulder.

As soon as he was gone, she ripped open the message. “Damn!” she said. It was from Uncle Henry.

The normally thrifty old lawyer must have been deeply agitated because the telegram was wastefully wordy.

Scarlett sank onto a chair when she read it. Her knees were like water, and her heart was racing. The old fool! A half million dollars—that was probably more money than the bank had seen since before the War. What was to stop the officers from just pocketing it and closing the bank? Banks were still closing all over the country, it was in the paper all the time. She’d have to go to Atlanta at once, change the money to gold, add it to her safe box. But that would take days. Even if there was a train today, she wouldn’t get to the bank before Monday. Plenty of time for her money to disappear.

A half million dollars. More money than she’d have if she sold everything she owned twice over. More money than her store and her saloon and her new houses would make in thirty years. She had to protect it, but how? Oh, she could kill Uncle Henry!

When Pansy came upstairs proudly carrying the heavy silver tray with the gleaming coffee service on it, she was met by a pale, wild-eyed Scarlett. “Put that thing down and get your coat on,” said Scarlett. “We’re going out.”

She had herself under control; there was even a little color in her cheeks from the walk when she hurried into the O’Hara store. Cousin or not, she didn’t want Jamie to know too much about her business. So her voice was charmingly girlish when she asked him to recommend a banker. “I’ve been so giddy that I just haven’t paid any attention to my spending money, and now that I’ve decided to stay a while longer, I need to have a few dollars transferred from my bank at home, but I don’t know a soul here in Savannah. I figured you’d be able to put in a good word for me, being a prosperous businessman and all.”

Jamie grinned. “I’ll be proud to escort you to the president of the bank, and I’ll vouch for him because Uncle James has done business with him for fifty years and more. But you’ll do better, Scarlett, to tell him you’re old Robillard’s granddaughter than that you’re O’Hara’s cousin. The word is, he’s a very warm old gentleman. Wasn’t he the smart one who sent his brass to France when Georgia decided to follow South Carolina out of the Union?”

But that meant her grandfather was a traitor to the South! No wonder he still had all that heavy silver and that undamaged house. Why hadn’t he been lynched? And how could Jamie laugh about it? Scarlett remembered Maureen laughing about her grandfather, too, when she should by rights have been shocked. It was all very complicated. She didn’t know what to think. In any case, she didn’t have time to think about it now, she had to get to the bank and arrange about her money.

“You’ll watch the store, then, Daniel, while I walk out with Cousin Scarlett?” Jamie was beside her, offering his arm. Scarlett put her hand in the bend of his elbow and waved goodbye to Daniel. She hoped it wasn’t far to the bank. It was nearly noon.

“Maureen will be delighted that you’ll be with us for a bit,” said Jamie as they walked along Broughton Street with Pansy trailing behind. “Will you be coming over this evening, then, Scarlett? I could call for you on my way home to walk you there.”

“I’d like that very much, Jamie,” she said. She’d go crazy in that big house with no one to talk to but her grandfather, and him only for ten minutes. If Rhett came, she could always send Pansy to the store with a note saying she’d changed her mind.

As it turned out, she was waiting impatiently in the front hall for Jamie when he arrived. Her grandfather had been exceptionally nasty when she told him she was going out for the evening. “This is not a hotel where you can come and go as you please, miss. You’ll match your schedule to the routine of my house, and that means in your bed by nine o’clock.”

“Of course, Grandfather,” she had said meekly. She was sure she’d be home long before then. And besides, she was regarding him with increased respect ever since her visit to the bank president. Her grandfather must be much, much richer than she’d imagined. When Jamie introduced her as Pierre Robillard’s granddaughter, the man nearly split his britches bowing and scraping. Scarlett smiled, remembering. Then, after Jamie left, when I told him I wanted to rent a safe box and transfer a half million to it, I thought he’d swoon at my feet. I don’t care what anybody says, having lots of money is the best thing in the world.

“I can’t stay late,” she told Jamie when he arrived. “I hope that’s all right. You won’t mind walking me back by eight-thirty?”

“I’ll be honored to walk you anywhere at any time at all,” Jamie vowed.

Scarlett truly had no idea that she wouldn’t be back until almost dawn.

39

The evening started quietly enough. So quietly, in fact, that Scarlett was disappointed. She’d been expecting music and dancing and some kind of celebration, but Jamie escorted her to the now familiar kitchen of his house. Maureen greeted her with a kiss on each cheek and a cup of tea in her hand, then returned to the preparation of supper. Scarlett sat down next to Uncle James, who was dozing. Jamie took off his coat, unbuttoned his vest, and lit a pipe, then settled down in a rocking chair for a quiet smoke. Mary Kate and Helen were setting the table in the adjoining dining room, chattering to one another over the rattle of knives and forks. It was a comfortable family scene, but not very exciting. Still, thought Scarlett, at least there’s going to be supper. I knew Aunt Pauline and Aunt Eulalie must be wrong about the whole fasting nonsense. Nobody would live on only one meal a day for weeks and weeks on purpose.

After a few minutes the shy girl with the cloud of beautiful dark hair came in from the hall with little Jacky by the hand. “Oh, there you are, Kathleen,” said Jamie. Scarlett made a mental note of the name. It suited the girl, so soft and youthful. “Bring the little man to his old Pa.” Jacky pulled his hand away and ran to his father, and the brief tranquillity was over. Scarlett winced at the little boy’s shouts of joy. Uncle James snorted in sudden waking. The street door opened and Daniel came in with his younger brother Brian. “Look what I found sniffing at the door, Ma,” said Daniel.

“Oh, so you’ve decided to grace us with your presence, then, Brian,” Maureen said. “I’ll have to tell the newspaper so they can put it on the front page.”

Brian grabbed his mother around the waist in a bear hug. “You wouldn’t turn a man out to starve, now, would you?”

Maureen made a pretense of anger, but she was smiling. Brian kissed the coiled masses of red hair on top of her head and released her.

“Now look what you’ve done to my hair, you wild Indian,” Maureen complained. “And shaming me in the bargain by not greeting your cousin Scarlett. You, too, Daniel.”

Brian leaned down from his great height and grinned at Scarlett. “Will you forgive me?” he said. “You were so small and elegantly silent there that I missed you altogether, Cousin Scarlett.” His thick red hair was bright in the glow from the fire, and his blue eyes were infectiously merry. “Will you plead for me with my cruel mother that I can have a few scraps from her table?”

“Go on with you, savage, and wash the dust off your hands,” Maureen ordered.

Daniel took his brother’s place when Brian headed for the sink. “We’re all glad you’re here with us, Cousin Scarlett.”

Scarlett smiled. Even with the racket from Jacky bouncing on Jamie’s knee, she was glad to be there, too. There was so much life in these big redheaded cousins of hers. It made the cold perfection of her grandfather’s house seem like a tomb.

While they ate at the big table in the dining room Scarlett learned the story behind Maureen’s mock anger at her son. Brian had moved a few weeks earlier from the room he had shared with Daniel, and Maureen was only semi-reconciled to his burst of independence. Granted he was only a few steps away, at his sister Patricia’s house; still, he was gone. It gave Maureen immense satisfaction that Brian still preferred her cooking to Patricia’s fancier menus. “Ah, well, what can you expect,” she said complacently, “when Patricia won’t allow the smell of fish to get into her fine lace curtains?” And she piled four glistening butter-coated fried fish on her son’s plate. “It’s a hardship to be such a lady during Lent, I’m sure.”

“Bite your tongue, woman,” said Jamie, “that’s your own daughter you’re maligning.”

“And who has a better right than her own mother?”

Old James spoke up then.

“Maureen has a point. I well remember my own mother’s sharp tongue . . .” He rambled fondly through a series of memories of his youth. Scarlett listened intently for mention of her father. “Now, Gerald,” said Old James, and she leaned toward him, “Gerald was always the apple of her eye, being the baby and all. He always got off with no more than a small scolding.” Scarlett smiled. It was just like Pa to be his mother’s favorite. Who could resist the soft heart he tried to hide under all his blustering? Oh, how she wished he could be here now with all his family.

“Are we going to Matthew’s after supper?” Old James asked. “Or is everyone coming here?”

“We’re going to Matt’s,” Jamie replied. Matt was the one who’d started the dancing at Patricia’s birthday, Scarlett remembered. Her feet began to tap.

Maureen smiled at her. “I believe there’s a readiness for a reel,” she said. She picked up the spoon by her plate, reached across Daniel and took his; then, placing their bowls back to back, she held the tips of the handles loosely together and tapped the spoons against her palm, against her wrist, her forearm, Daniel’s forehead. The rhythm of the beating was like playing the bones, but lighter, and the sheer silliness of making music with a pair of mismatched tablespoons was cause for delighted, spontaneous laughter from Scarlett. Without thinking about it, she began to pound on the table with her open hands, matching the beat of the spoons.

“It’s time we were going,” Jamie laughed. “I’ll get my fiddle.”

“We’ll bring the chairs,” said Mary Kate.

“Matt and Katie only have two,” Daniel explained to Scarlett. “They’re the newest O’Haras to come to Savannah.”

It didn’t matter at all that Matt and Katie O’Hara’s double parlors held almost no furniture. They had fireplaces for warmth, gaslit ceiling globes for light, and a broad, polished wood floor for dancing. The hours Scarlett passed in those bare rooms that Saturday were among the happiest she’d ever known.

Within the family the O’Haras shared love and happiness as freely and unconsciously as they shared the air they breathed. Scarlett felt within her the growth of something she had lost too long ago to remember. She became, like them, unaffected and spontaneous and open to carefree joy. She could shed the artifice and calculation that she’d learned to use in the battles for conquest and dominance that were part of being a belle in Southern society.

She had no need to charm or conquer; she was welcome as she was, one of the family. For the first time in her life she was willing to relinquish the spotlight to let someone else be the center of attention. The others were fascinating to her, primarily because they were her new-found family, but also because she’d never known anyone like them in her life.

Or almost never. Scarlett looked at Maureen, with Brian and Daniel making music behind her, Helen and Mary Kate clapping in time with the rhythm she was setting with the bones, and for a moment it was as if the vivid redheads were the youthful Tarletons come back to life. The twins, tall and handsome, the girls squirming with juvenile impatience to move on to the next adventure life held for them. Scarlett had always envied the Tarleton girls their free-and-easy ways with their mother. Now she saw the same easiness between Maureen and her children. And she knew that she, too, was welcome to laugh with Maureen, to tease and be teased, to share in the bounteous affection that Jamie’s wife showered on everyone around her.

At that moment Scarlett’s near-worship of her serene, self-contained mother shivered and suffered a tiny crack, and she began to free herself of the guilt she’d always felt because she couldn’t live up to her mother’s teachings. Perhaps it was all right if she wasn’t a perfect lady. The idea was too rich, too complicated. She’d think about it later. She didn’t want to think about anything now. Not yesterday, not tomorrow. The only thing that mattered was this moment and the happiness it held, the music and singing and clapping and dancing.

After the formal rituals of Charleston’s balls, the spontaneous home-made pleasures were intoxicating. Scarlett breathed deep of the joy and laughter around her, and it giddied her.

Matt’s daughter Peggy showed her the simplest steps of the reel, and there was, in some strange way, a rightness to learning from a seven-year-old child. And a rightness to the outspoken encouragement and even the teasing of the others, adults and children alike, because it was the same for Peggy as it was for her. She danced until her knees were wobbly, then she collapsed, laughing, in a heap on the floor at Old James’ feet, and he patted her head as if she were a puppy, and that made her laugh all the more, until she was gasping for breath when she cried out, “I’m having so much fun!”

There had been very little fun in Scarlett’s life, and she wanted it to last forever, this clean, uncomplicated joyfulness. She looked at her big, happy cousins, and she was proud of their strength and vigor and talent for music and for life. “We’re a fine lot, we O’Haras. There’s none can touch us.” Scarlett heard her father’s voice, boasting, saying the words he had so often said to her, and she knew for the first time what he had meant.

“Ah, Jamie, what a wonderful night this was,” she said when he was walking her home. Scarlett was so tired she was practically stumbling, but she was chattering like a magpie, too exhilarated to accept the peaceful silence of the sleeping city. “We’re a fine lot, we O’Haras.”

Jamie laughed. His strong hands caught her around the waist and he lifted her up and swung her in a giddy circle. “There’s none can touch us,” he said when he set her down.

“Miss Scarlett . . . Miss Scarlett!” Pansy woke her at seven with a message from her grandfather. “He wants you right this minute.”

The old soldier was formally dressed and fresh-shaven. He looked disapprovingly at Scarlett’s hastily combed hair and dressing gown from his imperial position in the great armchair at the head of the dining room table.

“My breakfast is unsatisfactory,” he announced.

Scarlett stared at him, slack-jawed. What did his breakfast have to do with her? Did he think she’d cooked it? Maybe he had lost his mind. Like Pa. No, not like Pa. Pa had had more than he could bear, that’s all, and so he retreated to a time and a world where the terrible’ things hadn’t happened. He was like a confused child. But there’s nothing confused or child-like about Grandfather. He knows exactly where and who he is and what he’s doing. What does he mean by waking me up after only a couple of hours’ sleep and complaining to me about his breakfast?

Her voice was carefully calm when she spoke. “What’s wrong with your breakfast, Grandfather?”

“It’s tasteless and it’s cold.”

“Why don’t you send it back to the kitchen, then? Tell them to bring what you want and make sure it’s hot.”

“You do it. Kitchens are women’s business.”

Scarlett put her hands on her hips. She looked at her grandfather with eyes as steely as his. “Do you mean to tell me that you got me out of bed to send a message to your cook? What do you take me for, some kind of servant? Order your own breakfast or starve, it’s all the same to me. I’m going back to bed.” Scarlett turned with a flounce.

“That bed belongs to me, young woman, and you occupy it by my grace and favor. I expect you to obey my orders as long as you’re under my roof.”

She was in a fine rage now, all hope of sleep gone. I’ll pack my things this minute, she thought. I don’t have to put up with this.

The seductive aroma of fresh coffee stopped her before she spoke. She’d have coffee first, then tell the old man off . . . And she’d better think a minute. She wasn’t ready to leave Savannah yet. Rhett must know, by now, that she was here. And she should get a message about Tara from the Mother Superior any minute.

Scarlett walked to the bell pull by the door. Then she took a chair at her grandfather’s right. When Jerome came in, she glared at him. “Give me a cup for my coffee. Then take this plate away. What is it, Grandfather, cornmeal mush? Whatever it is, Jerome, tell the cook to eat it herself. After she fixes some scrambled eggs and ham and bacon and grits and biscuits. With plenty of butter. And I’ll have a pitcher of thick cream for my coffee right this minute.”

Jerome looked at the erect old man, silently urging him to put Scarlett in her place. Pierre Robillard looked straight ahead, not meeting his butler’s eyes.

“Don’t stand there like a statue,” Scarlett snapped. “Do as you’re told.” She was hungry.

So was her grandfather. Although the meal was as silent as his birthday dinner had been, this time he ate everything that was brought to him. Scarlett watched him suspiciously from the corner of her eye. What was he up to, the old fox? She couldn’t believe that there wasn’t something behind this charade. In her experience, getting what you wanted from servants was the easiest thing in the world. All you had to do was shout at them. And Lord knows Grandfather’s good at terrifying people. Look at Aunt Pauline and Aunt Eulalie.

Look at me, for that matter. I hopped out of bed quick enough when he sent for me. I’ll not do that again.

The old man dropped his napkin by his empty plate. “I’ll expect you to be suitably dressed for future meals,” he said to Scarlett. “We shall leave the house in precisely one hour and seven minutes to go to church. That should provide adequate time for your grooming.”

Scarlett hadn’t intended to go to church at all, now that her aunts weren’t there to expect it and she’d gotten what she wanted from the Mother Superior. But her grandfather’s high-handedness had to be stopped. He was violently anti-Catholic, according to her aunts.

“I didn’t know you attended Mass, Grandfather,” she said. Sweetness dripped from the words.

Pierre Robillard’s thick white brows met in a beetling frown. “You do not subscribe to that papist idiocy like your aunts, I hope.”

“I’m a good Catholic, if that’s what you mean. And I’m going to Mass with my cousins, the O’Haras. Who—by the way—have invited me to come stay with them any time I want, for as long as I like.” Scarlett stood and marched in triumph from the room. She was halfway up the stairs before she remembered that she shouldn’t have eaten anything before Mass. No matter. She didn’t have to take Communion if she didn’t want to. And she’d certainly showed Grandfather. When she reached her room, she did a few steps of the reel that she’d learned the night before.

She didn’t for a minute believe that the old man would call her bluff about staying with her cousins. Much as she loved going to the O’Haras’ for music and dancing, there were far too many children there to make a visit possible. Besides, they didn’t have any servants. She couldn’t get dressed without Pansy to lace her stays and fix her hair.

I wonder what he’s really up to, she thought again. Then she shrugged. She’d probably find out soon enough. It wasn’t really important. Before he came out with it, Rhett would probably have come for her anyhow.

40

One hour and four minutes after Scarlett went up to her room, Pierre Auguste Robillard, soldier of Napoleon, left his beautiful shrine of a house to go to church. He wore a heavy overcoat and a wool scarf, and his thin white hair was covered with a tall hat made of sable that had once belonged to a Russian officer who died at Borodino. Despite the bright sun and the promise of spring in the air, the old man’s thin body was cold. Still, he walked stiffly erect, seldom using the malacca cane he carried. He nodded in a correct abbreviated bow to the people who greeted him on the street. He was very well known in Savannah.

At the Independent Presbyterian Church on Chippewa Square he took his place in the fifth pew from the front, the place that had been his ever since the gala dedication of the church nearly sixty years earlier. James Monroe, then president of the United States, had been at the dedication and had asked to be introduced to the man who had been with Napoleon from Austerlitz to Waterloo. Pierre Robillard had been gracious to the older man, even though a President was nothing impressive to a man who had fought alongside an Emperor.

When the service ended, he had a few words with several men who responded to his gesture and hurried to join him on the steps of the church. He asked a few questions, listened to a great many answers. Then he went home, his stern face almost smiling, to nap until dinner was served to him on a tray. The weekly outing to church grew more tiring all the time.

He slept lightly, as the very old do, and woke before Jerome brought his tray. While he waited for it, he thought about Scarlett.

He had no curiosity about her life or her nature. He hadn’t given her a thought for many years, and when she appeared in his room with his daughters he was neither pleased nor displeased to see her. She caught his attention only when Jerome complained to him about her. She was causing disruption in the kitchen with her demands, Jerome said. And she would cause Monsieur Robillard’s death if she continued to insist on adding butter and gravy and sweets to his bills.

She was the answer to the old man’s prayer. He had nothing to look forward to in his life except more months or years of the unchanging routine of sleep and meals and the weekly excursion to church. It did not disturb him that his life was so featureless; he had his beloved wife’s likeness before his eyes and the certainty that, in due time, he would be reunited with her after death. He spent the days and nights dreaming of her when he slept and turning memories of her in his mind when he was awake. It was enough for him. Almost. He did miss having good food to eat, and in recent years it had been tasteless, cold when it wasn’t burnt, and of a deadly monotony. He wanted Scarlett to change that.

Her suspicions of the old man’s motives were unfounded. Pierre Robillard had recognized the bully in her at once. He wanted it to function in his behalf now that he no longer had the strength to get what he wanted for himself. The servants knew that he was too old and tired to dominate them. But Scarlett was young and strong. He didn’t seek her companionship or her love. He wanted her to run his house the way he had once run it himself—which meant in accordance with his standards and subject to his dominance. He needed to find a way to accomplish that, and so he thought about her.

“Tell my granddaughter to come here,” he said when Jerome came in.

“She ain’t home yet,” said the old butler with a smile. He anticipated the old man’s anger with delight. Jerome hated Scarlett.

Scarlett was at the big City Market with the O’Haras. After the confrontation with her grandfather she had dressed, dismissed Pansy, and escaped through the garden to hurry, unaccompanied, the two short blocks to Jamie’s house. “I’ve come to have company going to Mass,” she told Maureen, but her real reason was to be someplace where people were nice to one another.

After Mass the men went in one direction, the women and children in another. “They’ll have a haircut and a gossip in the barber shop at the Pulaski House Hotel,” Maureen told Scarlett. “And most likely a pint or two in the saloon. It’s better than a newspaper for hearing what’s going on. We’ll get our own news at the Market while I buy some oysters for a nice pie.”

Savannah’s City Market had the same purpose and the same excitement as the Market in Charleston. Until she was back in the familiar hubbub of bargaining and buying and friends greeting friends, Scarlett hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it when the Season took precedence for women’s time.

She wished now that she’d taken Pansy with her after all; she could have filled a basket with the exotic fruits that came in through Savannah’s busy seaport if only she’d had her maid to carry it. Mary Kate and Helen were doing that chore for the O’Hara women. Scarlett let them carry some oranges for her. And she insisted on paying for the coffee and caramel rolls they all had at one of the stands.

Still, she refused when Maureen invited her to come home for dinner with them. She hadn’t told her grandfather’s cook that she wouldn’t be at the house. And she wanted to catch up on the sleep she’d missed. It wouldn’t do to look like death warmed over if Rhett came in on the afternoon train.

She kissed Maureen goodbye at the Robillard doorstep, called goodbye to the others. They were almost a block behind, slowed down by the unsteady steps of the little children and Patricia’s burdened by pregnancy pace. Helen ran up with a bulging paper sack. “Don’t forget your oranges, Cousin Scarlett.”

“I’ll take that, Miss Scarlett.” It was Jerome.

“Oh. All right. Here. You shouldn’t be so quiet, Jerome, you gave me a shock. I didn’t hear the door open.”

“I’ve been looking out for you. Mr. Robillard, he wants you.” Jerome looked at the straggle of O’Haras with unconcealed disdain.

Scarlett’s chin stiffened. Something was going to have to be done about the butler’s impertinence. She sailed into her grandfather’s room with an angry complaint on her lips.

Pierre Robillard gave her no time to speak. “You are dishevelled,” he said coldly, “and you have ruptured the schedule of my house. While you were consorting with those Irish peasants, the dinner hour has passed.”

Scarlett leapt hotly to the bait. “I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue when you refer to my cousins.”

The old man’s eyelids half hid the gleam in his eyes. “What do you call a man who’s in trade?” he said quietly.

“If you’re talking about Jamie O’Hara, I call him a successful, hard-working businessman, and I respect him for what he’s accomplished.”

Her grandfather set the hook. “And no doubt you admire his garish wife, too.”

“Indeed I do! She’s a kind and generous woman.”

“I believe that’s the impression her trade tries to make. You are aware, are you not, that she was a barmaid in an Irish saloon.”

Scarlett gasped like a landed fish. It couldn’t be true! Unwelcome pictures filled her mind. Maureen holding up her glass for another whiskey . . . playing the bones and singing lustily all the verses of bawdy songs . . . brushing her tousled bright hair off her red face without trying to pin it back up . . . lifting her skirts to her knees to dance the reel . . .

Common. Maureen was common.

They were all kind of common.

Scarlett felt like crying. She’d been so happy with the O’Haras, she didn’t want to lose them. But . . . here in this house where her mother had grown up, the gulf between Robillard and O’Hara was too broad to ignore. No wonder Grandfather’s ashamed of me. Mother would be heartbroken if she could see me walking on the street with a bunch like I just came home with. A woman in public without so much as a shawl over her pregnant belly, and a million children running all over the place like wild Indians, and not even a maid to carry the shopping. I must have looked as trashy as the rest of them. And Mother tried so hard to teach me to be a lady. She’d be happy she was dead if she knew that her daughter was friends with a woman who worked in a saloon.

Scarlett looked anxiously at the old man. Could he possibly know about the building she owned in Atlanta and rented to a saloonkeeper?

Pierre Robillard’s eyes were closed. He seemed to have slipped into the sudden sleep of old age. Scarlett tiptoed out of the room. When she closed the door behind her, the old soldier smiled, then went to sleep.

Jerome brought her the mail on a silver tray. He was wearing white gloves. Scarlett took the envelopes from the tray, a short nod her only thank you. It wouldn’t do to show her gratification, not if she was going to keep Jerome in his place. The previous evening, after waiting for an eternity in the drawing room for Rhett, who never showed up, she had given the servants a tongue-lashing they’d never forget. Jerome in particular. It was a godsend that the butler was so nearly impertinent; she needed someone to unload her anger and disappointment on.

Uncle Henry Hamilton was furious that she’d transferred the money to the Savannah bank. Too bad. Scarlett crumpled up his brief letter and dropped it on the floor.

The fat envelope was from Aunt Pauline. Her meandering complaints could wait, and they were sure to be complaints. Scarlett opened the stiff square envelope next.

She didn’t recognize the handwriting on the front.

It was an invitation. The name was unfamiliar, and she had to think hard before she remembered. Of course. Hodgson was the married name of one of those old ladies, the Telfair sisters. The invitation was for a ceremony of dedication for Hodgson Hall, with a reception to follow. “New home of the Georgia historical Society.” It sounded even deadlier than that awful musicale. Scarlett made a face and put the invitation aside. She’d have to find some letter paper and send her regrets. The aunts liked to be bored to death, but not she.

The aunts. Might as well get it over with. She tore open Pauline’s letter.

What the devil was Aunt Pauline saying? Was it possible that Miss Eleanor didn’t mention the note I left for her? Or that she didn’t get it? No, it wasn’t possible. Aunt Pauline was just making trouble.

Scarlet’s eyes moved quickly over Pauline’s complaints about the folly of Scarlett’s travelling after her ordeal when the boat capsized and about Scarlett’s “unnatural reticence” in not telling her aunts that she’d been in the accident.

Why couldn’t Pauline tell her what she wanted to know? There wasn’t a word about Rhett. She went through page after page of Pauline’s spiky handwriting, looking for his name. God’s nightgown! Her aunt could lecture longer than a hellfire preacher. There. At last.

Scarlett let the pages fall into her lap. Of course! Oh, thank God. That’s why Rhett hadn’t come after her yet. Why didn’t Uncle Henry tell me Rhett’s telegram came from Boston? Then I wouldn’t have driven myself crazy expecting him to show up on the doorstep any minute. Does Aunt Pauline say when he’s coming back?

Scarlett pawed through the jumble of letter sheets. Where had she stopped? She found her place and read eagerly to the end. But there was no mention of what she wanted to know. Now what am I going to do? Rhett might be gone for weeks. Or he might be on his way back right this very minute.

Scarlett picked up the invitation from Mrs. Hodgson again. At least it would be someplace to go. She’d have a screaming fit if she had to stay in this house day after day.

If only she could run over to Jamie’s every now and then, just for a cup of tea. But no, that was unthinkable.

And yet, she couldn’t not think of the O’Haras. The next morning she went with the sullen cook to the City Market to supervise what she bought and how much she paid for it. With nothing else to occupy her, Scarlett was determined to see her grandfather’s house in order. While she was having coffee, she heard a soft hesitant voice speak her name. It was lovely, shy young Kathleen. “I’m not familiar with all the American fishes,” she said. “Will you help me choose the best prawns?” Scarlett was bewildered until the girl gestured toward the shrimp.

“The angels must have sent you, Scarlett,” Kathleen said when her purchase was made. “I’d be lost for sure without you. Maureen wants only the best. We’re expecting Colum, you see.”

Colum—am I supposed to know him? Maureen or somebody mentioned that name once, too. “Why’s Colum so important?”

Kathleen’s blue eyes widened in amazement that the question could be asked. “Why? Well . . . because Colum’s Colum, that’s all. He’s . . .” She couldn’t find the words she was looking for. “He’s just Colum, that’s all. He brought me here, don’t you know? He’s my brother, like Stephen.”

Stephen. The quiet dark one. Scarlett hadn’t realized he was Kathleen’s brother. Maybe that’s why he’s so quiet. Maybe they’re all shy as mice in that family. “Which one of Uncle James’ brothers is your father?” she asked Kathleen.

“Ah, but my father’s dead, God rest his soul.”

Was the girl simple? “What was his name, Kathleen?”

“Oh, it’s his name you’re wanting to know! Patrick, that was his name, Patrick O’Hara. Patricia’s called after him, being Jamie’s firstborn and Patrick his own father’s name.”

Scarlett’s forehead creased in concentration. So Jamie was Kathleen’s brother, too. So much for thinking the whole family was shy. “Do you have any other brothers?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” Kathleen said with a happy smile, “brothers, and sisters, too. Fourteen of us all told. Still living, I mean.” And she crossed herself.

Scarlett drew away from the girl. Oh, Lord, more than likely the cook’s been listening, and it’ll get back to grandfather. I can hear him now. Talking about Catholics breeding like rabbits.

But in fact Pierre Robillard made no mention at all of Scarlett’s cousins. He summoned her for a presupper visit, announced that his bills were proving satisfactory, then dismissed her.

She stopped Jerome to check over the supper tray, examined the silver to see that it was gleaming and free of fingerprints. When she put the coffee spoon down it tapped against the soup spoon. I wonder if Maureen would teach me to play the spoons? The thought caught her off guard.

That night she dreamed about her father. She woke in the morning with a smile still on her lips, but her cheeks stiff with the dried streaks of tears.

At the City Market she heard Maureen O’Hara’s distinctive gusty laughter just in time to dart behind one of the thick brick piers and miss being seen. But she could see Maureen, and Patricia, looking as big as a house, and a straggle of children behind them. “Your father’s the only one of us not in a fever for your uncle to arrive,” she heard Maureen say. “He’s enjoying the special treats I fix for supper every night in hopes of Colum.”

I’d like a special treat myself, Scarlett thought rebelliously. I’m getting mighty tired of food soft enough for Grandfather. She turned on the cook. “Get some chicken, too,” she ordered, “and fry up a couple of pieces for my dinner.”

Her bad mood cleared up long before dinner, however. When she got back to the house, there was a note from the Mother Superior. The Bishop was going to consider Scarlett’s request to allow her to buy back Carreen’s dowry.

Tara. I’m going to get Tara! So busy was her mind with planning Tara’s rebirth that she didn’t notice the time passing at all, nor was she conscious of what was on her plate at mealtime.

She could see it so clearly in her mind. The house, gleaming fresh white on top of the hill; the clipped lawn green, so green, and thick with clover; the pasture, shimmering green with its deep satiny grass bending before the breeze, unrolling like a carpet down the hill and into the mysterious shadowy dark green of the pines that bordered the river and hid it from view. Spring with clouds of tender dogwood blossoms and the heady scent of wisteria; then summer, the crisp starched white curtains billowing from the open windows, the thick sweetness of honeysuckle flowing through them into all the rooms, all restored to their dreaming, polished quiet perfection. Yes, summer was the best. The long, lazy Georgia summer when twilight lasted for hours and lightning bugs signalled in the slow thickening darkness. Then the stars, fat and close in the velvet sky, or a moon round and white, as white as the sleeping house it lit on the dark, gently rising hill.

Summer . . . Scarlett’s eyes widened. That was it! Why hadn’t she realized it before? Of course. Summer—when she loved Tara most—summer was when Rhett couldn’t go to Dunmore Landing because of the fever. It was perfect. They’d spend October to June in Charleston, with the Season to break the monotony of all those stuffy boring tea parties, and the promise of summer at Tara to break the monotony of the Season. She could bear it, she knew she could. As long as there was the long summer at Tara.

Oh, if only the Bishop would hurry!

41

Pierre Robillard escorted Scarlett to the dedication ceremonies at Hodgson Hall. He was an imposing figure in his old-fashioned dress suit, with its satin knee breeches and velvet tailcoat, the tiny red rosette of the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole and a broad diagonal red sash across his chest. Scarlett had never seen anyone look quite so distinguished and aristocratic as her grandfather.

He could be proud of her, too, she thought. Her pearls and diamonds were of the first water, and her gown was magnificent, a shining column of gold brocaded silk trimmed with gold lace and a gold brocaded train that was a full four feet long. She’d never had a chance to wear it, because she’d had to dress so dowdy in Charleston. How lucky, after all, that she’d had all those clothes made before she went to Charleston. Why, there were a half dozen dresses that had hardly been on her back. Even without the trim that Rhett had taunted her into removing, they were much prettier than anything she’d seen on anybody in Savannah. Scarlett was preening as Jerome handed her up into the hired carriage to sit across from her grandfather.

The ride to the south end of town was silent. Pierre Robillard’s white-crowned head nodded, half-sleeping. It jerked upright when Scarlett exclaimed, “Oh, look!” There were crowds of people on the street outside the iron-fenced classical building, there to watch the arrival of Savannah’s elite society. Just like the Saint Cecilia. Scarlett held her head arrogantly high as a liveried attendant helped her from the carriage to the sidewalk. She could hear murmurs of admiration from the crowds. While her grandfather slowly stepped down to join her, she bobbed her head to set her earbobs flashing in the lamplight and cast her train from over her arm to spread out behind her for her entrance up the tall, red-carpeted steps to the Hall’s door.

“Ooooh,” she heard from the crowd and, “aaah,” “beautiful,” “who is she?” As she extended her white-gloved hand to rest on her grandfather’s velvet sleeve a familiar voice called out clearly, “Katie Scarlett, darling, you’re as dazzling as the Queen of Sheba!” She looked quickly, in a panic, to her left, then, even more quickly, turned away from Jamie and his brood as if she didn’t know them, and proceeded at Pierre Robillard’s slow, stately pace to mount the stairs. But the picture was seared into her mind. Jamie had his left arm around the shoulders of his laughing, bright-haired untidy wife, his derby hat tipped carelessly on the back of his curly head. Another man stood at his right side, illuminated by the street lamp. He was only as tall as Jamie’s shoulder, and his overcoated figure was thick, stocky, a dark block. His florid round face was bright, his eyes flashing blue, and his uncovered head a halo of silver curls. He was the very image of Gerald O’Hara, Scarlett’s Pa.

Hodgson Hall had a handsome, serious interior, appropriate to its scholarly purpose. Rich, polished wood panelling covered the walls and framed the historical Society’s collection of old maps and sketches. Huge brass chandeliers fitted with white glass-globed gaslights hung from the tall ceiling. They cast an unkind, bright, bleaching light on the pale, lined aristocratic faces below them. Scarlett sought instinctively for some shadow. Old. They all look so old. She felt panicky, as if somehow she was aging rapidly, as if old age were a contagion. Her thirtieth birthday had come and gone unnoticed while she was in Charleston, but now she was acutely aware of it. Everyone knew that once a woman was thirty, she just as well be dead. Thirty was so old that she’d never believed it could happen to her. It couldn’t be true.

“Scarlett,” said her grandfather. He held her arm above the elbow and propelled her toward the receiving line. His fingers were cold as death; she could feel the cold through the thin leather of the glove that covered her arm almost to her shoulder.

Ahead of her the elderly officers of the historical Society were welcoming elderly guests, one by one. I can’t! Scarlett thought frantically. I can’t shake all those dead cold hands and smile and say I’m happy to be here. I’ve got to get away.

She sagged against her grandfather’s stiff shoulder. “I’m not well,” she said. “Grandfather, I feel ill all of a sudden.”

“You are not permitted to feel ill,” he said. “Stand straight, and do what’s expected of you. You may leave after the ceremony of dedication, not before.”

Scarlett stiffened her spine and stepped forward. What a monster her grandfather was! No wonder that she’d never heard her mother say much about him; there was nothing nice to say. “Good evening, Mrs. Hodgson,” she said. “I’m so happy to be here.”

Pierre Robillard’s progress along the lengthy receiving line was much slower than Scarlett’s. He was still bowing stiffly over the hand of a lady halfway along when Scarlett was finished. She pushed her way through a group of people and hurried to the door.

Outside, she gulped the crisp air with desperation. Then she ran. Her train glittered in the lamplight on the stairs, on the gala red carpet, stretching up behind her as if it were floating free in the air. “The Robillard carriage. Quickly!” she begged the attendant. Responding to her urgency, he ran to the corner. Scarlett ran after him, heedless of her train on the rough bricks of the sidewalk. She had to get away before anyone could stop her.

When she was safely inside the carriage, she breathed in short gasps. “Take me to South Broad,” she told the driver when she could speak. “I’ll show you which house.” Mother left these people, she thought, she married Pa. She can’t blame me if I run away, too.

She could hear the music and laughter through the door to Maureen’s kitchen. Her two fists beat on it until Jamie opened it.

“It’s Scarlett!” he said with pleased surprise. “Come in, Scarlett darling, and meet Colum. He’s here at last, the best of all the O’Haras, saving only yourself.”

Now that he was close to her, Scarlett could see that Colum was years younger than Jamie and not really all that much like her father, except for his round face and short stature among his taller cousins and nephews. Colum’s blue eyes were darker, more serious, and his round chin had a firmness that Scarlett had seen on her father’s face only when he was on horseback, commanding his mount to take a jump higher than sanity allowed.

Colum smiled when Jamie introduced them, and his eyes were almost lost in a network of creases. Yet the warmth gleaming from them made Scarlett feel that meeting her was the happiest experience of his entire life. “And are we not the luckiest family on the face of the earth, to have such a creature one of us?” he said. “It only wants a tiara to complete your gold splendor, Scarlett darling. If the Queen of the Fairies could see you, wouldn’t she tear her spangled wings to ribbons in envy? Let the little girls have a look, Maureen, it will give them something to aspire to, to grow up as breathtaking as their cousin.”

Scarlett dimpled with pleasure. “I believe I’m hearing the famous Irish blarney,” she said.

“Not a bit of it. I wish only that I had the gift of poetry to say all I’m thinking.”

Jamie hit his brother on the shoulder. “You’re not doing too badly, for all that, you rogue. Step aside and give Scarlett a seat. I’ll fetch her a glass . . . Colum found us a keg of real Irish ale on his travels, Scarlett darling. You must have a taste.” Jamie spoke name and endearment the way Colum did, as if they made one word: Scarlettdarling.

“Oh, no, thank you,” she said automatically. Then, “Why not? I’ve never tasted ale.” She would have had champagne without thinking anything of it. The dark foamy brew was bitter, and she made a face.

Colum took the mug from her. “She adds to her perfection with every second that passes,” he said, “even to leaving all the drink for those with the bigger thirst.” His eyes smiled at her over the rim when he drank.

Scarlett returned the smile. It was impossible not to. As the evening wore on, she noticed that everyone smiled at Colum a lot, as if reflecting his pleasure. He was clearly enjoying himself so much. He was leaning back in a straight chair, tipped to rest against the wall near the fire, waving his hand to direct and encourage Jamie’s fiddling and Maureen’s rat-tat-tat with the bones. His boots were off, and his stockinged feet fairly danced on the rungs of the chair. He was the picture of a man at his ease; even his collar was off, and the neck of his shirt was open so that his laughter could vibrate in his throat.

“Tell us, Colum, about your travels,” someone would urge from time to time, but Colum always put them off. He needed music, he said, and a glass, to refresh his shirt and his dusty throat. Tomorrow was time enough for talking.

Scarlett’s heart, too, was refreshed by the music. But she couldn’t stay very long. She had to be home and in bed before her grandfather returned. I hope the driver keeps his promise and doesn’t tell him he brought me here. Grandfather wouldn’t care two pins how much I needed to get away from that mausoleum and have a little fun.

She barely made it. Jamie was hardly out of sight when the carriage rolled up to the door. She ran up the stairs with her slippers in her hand and her train bunched up under her arm. She pressed her lips together to keep from giggling. Playing truant was fun when you got away with it.

But she didn’t get away with it. Her grandfather never learned what she had done, but Scarlett knew, and the knowledge stirred the emotions that had warred within her all her life. Scarlett’s essential self was as much her heritage from her father as was her name. She was impetuous, strong-willed, and had the same coarse, forthright vitality and courage that had carried him across the dangerous waters of the Atlantic and to the pinnacle of his dreams-master of a great plantation and husband to a great lady.

Her mother’s blood gave her the fine bones and creamy skin that spoke of centuries of breeding. Ellen Robillard also instilled in her daughter the rules and tenets of aristocracy.

Now her instincts and her training were at war. The O’Haras drew her like a lodestone. Their earthy vigor and lusty happiness spoke to the deepest and best part of her nature. But she wasn’t free to respond. Everything she’d been taught by the mother she revered forbid her that freedom.

She was torn by the dilemma, and she couldn’t understand what was making her so miserable. She roamed restlessly through the silent rooms of her grandfather’s house, blind to their austere beauty, imagining the music and dancing at the O’Haras’, wishing with all her heart that she was with them, thinking as she’d been taught that such boisterous merriment was vulgar and lower class.

Scarlett didn’t care really that her grandfather looked down on her cousins. He was a selfish old man, she thought accurately, who looked down on everyone, including his own daughters. But her mother’s gentle inculcation had marked her for life. Ellen would have been proud of her in Charleston. In spite of Rhett’s jeering prediction, she had been recognized and accepted as a lady there. And she had liked it. Hadn’t she? Of course she had. It was also what she wanted, what she was meant to be. Why, then, was it so hard to stop herself from envying her Irish kin?

I won’t think about that now, she decided. I’ll think about it later. I’ll think about Tara instead. And she retreated into the idyll of her Tara, as it had been and as she’d make it again.

Then a note came from the Bishop’s secretary, and her idyll exploded in her face. He wouldn’t grant her request. Scarlett didn’t think at all. She clutched the note to her breast and ran, heedless and hatless and alone, to the unlocked door into Jamie O’Hara’s house. They’d understand how she felt, the O’Haras would. Pa told me so, again and again. “To anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them the land they live on is like their mother. It’s the only thing that lasts, that’s worth working for, worth fighting for . . .”

She burst through the door with Gerald O’Hara’s voice in her ear, and ahead of her she saw the compact stock body and silver head of Colum O’Hara, so like her father’s. It seemed right that he should be the one, certain that he’d feel what she felt.

Colum was standing in the doorway, looking into the dining room. When the outside door crashed open and Scarlett stumbled into the kitchen, he turned.

He was dressed in a dark suit. Scarlett looked at him through the daze of her pain. She stared at the unexpected white line across his throat that was his woman collar. A priest! No one had told her Colum was a priest. Thank God. You could tell a priest anything, even the deepest secrets of your heart.

“Help me, Father,” she cried. “I need someone to help me.”

42

“So there you have it,” Colum concluded. “Now, what can be done to remedy it? That’s what we must find.” He sat at the head of the long table in Jamie’s dining room. All the adults from the three O’Hara houses were in chairs around the table. Mary Kate and Helen’s voices could be heard through the closed door to the kitchen, where they were feeding the children. Scarlett was seated at Colum’s side, her face swollen and blotched from earlier storms of weeping.

“You mean to say, Colum, that the farm doesn’t go intact to the eldest child in America?” Matt asked.

“So it would seem, Matthew.”

“Well, then, Uncle Gerald was foolish not to leave a will and testament.”

Scarlett roused herself to glare at him. Before she could speak, Colum intervened. “The poor man wasn’t granted his old age, he had no time to think about his death and after, God rest his soul.”

“God rest his soul,” echoed the others, making the sign of the cross. Scarlett looked without hope at their solemn faces. What can they do? They’re just Irish immigrants.

But she soon learned that she was wrong. As the talking went on, Scarlett felt more and more hopeful. For there was quite a lot these Irish immigrants could do.

Patricia’s husband, Billy Carmody, was foreman of all the bricklayers working on the Cathedral. He had come to know the Bishop very well. “To my sorrow,” he complained. “The man interrupts the work three times a day to tell me it’s not being done fast enough.” There was a real urgency, Billy explained, because a Cardinal from Rome itself would be touring America in the autumn, and he might come to Savannah for the dedication. If it was done to suit his schedule.

Jamie nodded. “An ambitious man, our Bishop Gross, would you say? Not unwilling to be noticed by the Curia.”

He looked at Gerald. So did Billy, Matt, Brian, Daniel, and Old James. And the women—Maureen, Patricia, and Katie. Scarlett did, too, although she didn’t know why they were all looking.

Gerald took his young bride’s hand in his. “Don’t be shy, sweet Polly,” he said, “you’re an O’Hara now, same as the rest of us. Tell us which of us you would choose to talk to your Pa.”

“Tom MacMahon’s contractor for the whole job,” Maureen murmured to Scarlett. “A mention from Tom that the work might be slowed would make Bishop Gross promise anything. Doubtless he’s scared to trembling of MacMahon. Everyone else in the world is.”

Scarlett spoke up. “Let Colum do it.” She had no doubt that he was the best to do anything that needed doing. For all his small size and disarming smile, there was strength and power in Colum O’Hara.

A chorus of agreement sounded from all the O’Haras. Colum was the one to do what needed doing.

He smiled around the table, then at Scarlett alone. “We’ll help you, then. Isn’t it a grand thing to have a family, Scarlett O’Hara? Especially one with in-laws that can help, too? You’ll have your Tara, wait and see.”

“Tara? What’s this about Tara?” Old James demanded.

“’Tis the name Gerald gave his plantation, Uncle James.”

The old man laughed until it made him cough. “That Gerald,” he said when he could speak again, “for a small bit of a man, he always did have a high opinion of himself!”

Scarlett stiffened. No one was going to make fun of her Pa, not even his brother.

Colum spoke very softly to her. “Whist, now, he means no insult. I’ll explain it all later.”

And so he did, when he was escorting her to her grandfather’s house.

“Tara is a magical word to all us Irish, Scarlett, and a magical place. It was the center of all Ireland, the home of the High Kings. Before there was a Rome, or an Athens, far, far back when the world was young and hopeful, there ruled in Ireland great Kings who were as fair and beauteous as the sun. They passed laws of great wisdom and gave shelter and riches to poets. And they were brave giants of men who punished wrong with fearful wrath and fought the enemies of truth and beauty and Ireland with blood-gouted swords and stainless hearts. For hundreds and thousands of years they ruled their sweet green island, and there was music throughout the land. Five roads led to the hill of Tara from every corner of the country, and every third year did all the people come to feast in the banquet hall and hear the poets sing. This is not a story only, but a great truth for all the histories of other lands record it, and the sad words of the end are written in the great books of the monasteries. ‘In the Year of Our Lord five hundred fifty and four was held the last feast of Tara.’ ”

Colum’s voice faded slowly on the last word, and Scarlett felt her eyes sting. She was spellbound by his story and his voice.

They walked on in silence for a while. Then Colum said, “It was a noble dream your father had to build a new Tara in this new world of America. He must have been a fine man indeed.”

“Oh, he was, Colum. I loved him very much.”

“When next I go to Tara, I’ll think of him and of his daughter.”

“When next you go? Do you mean it’s still there? It’s a real place?”

“As real as the road beneath our feet. It’s a gentle green hill with magic in it and sheep grazing on it, and from the top you can see for great distances all around the same beautiful world the High Kings saw. It’s not far from the village where I live, where your father and mine were born, in County Meath.”

Scarlett was thunderstruck. Pa must have gone there, too, must have stood where the High Kings stood! She could picture him sticking out his chest and strutting the way he did when he was pleased with himself. It made her laugh softly.

When they reached the Robillard house she stopped reluctantly. She would have liked to walk for hours listening to Colum’s lilting voice. “I don’t know how to thank you for everything,” she told him. “I feel a million times better now. I’m so sure you’ll make the Bishop change his mind.”

Colum smiled. “One thing at a time, Cousin. First the fierce MacMahon. But what name shall I tell him, Scarlett? I see the band on your finger. You’re not O’Hara to the Bishop.”

“No, of course not. My married name is Butler.”

Colum’s smile collapsed, then returned. “It’s a powerful name.”

“In South Carolina it is, but I don’t see that it’s done me much good here. My husband’s from Charleston, his name is Rhett Butler.”

“I’m surprised he’s not helping you with your troubles.”

Scarlett smiled brightly. “He would if he could, but he had to go up North on business. He’s a very successful businessman.”

“I understand. Well, I’m happy to stand in as your helper, as best I can.”

She felt like hugging him, the way she used to hug her father when he gave her what she wanted. But she had an idea you shouldn’t go around hugging priests, even if they were your cousin. So she simply said good night and went into the house.

Colum walked away whistling “Wearing o’ the Green.”

“Where have you been?” Pierre Robillard demanded. “My supper was quite unsatisfactory.”

“I’ve been at my cousin Jamie’s house. I’ll order you another tray.”

“You’ve been seeing those people?” The old man quivered with outrage.

Scarlett’s anger swelled to meet his. “Yes, I have, and I intend to see them again. I like them very much.” She stalked out of the room. But she did see to a fresh supper tray for her grandfather before she went up to her room.

“What about your supper, Miss Scarlett?” Pansy asked. “You wants I should fetch you a tray upstairs?”

“No, just come up now and get me out of these clothes. I don’t want any supper.”

Funny, I don’t feel hungry at all, and I only had a cup of tea. All I want now is some sleep. All that crying wore me out. I could hardly get out the words to tell Colum about the Bishop, I was crying so hard. I believe I could sleep for a week, I’ve never felt so washed out in my life.

Her head felt light, her whole body heavy and relaxed. She sank into the soft bed and plunged at once into a deep refreshing sleep.

In all Scarlett’s life, she had faced her crises alone. Sometimes she had refused to admit she needed help, more often there had been nowhere she could turn. It was different now, and her body recognized the difference before her mind did. There were people to help her. Her family had willingly lifted her burden from her shoulders. She wasn’t alone any more. She could allow herself to let go.

Pierre Robillard slept little that night. He was disturbed by Scarlett’s defiance. Just so had her mother defied him, so many years before, and he had lost her forever. His heart had broken then; Ellen was his favorite child, the daughter most like her mother. He didn’t love Scarlett. All the love he had was in the grave with his wife. But he wouldn’t let Scarlett go without a fight. He wanted his last days to be comfortable, and she could see to it. He sat erect in bed, his lamp finally fading when the oil was gone, and he planned his strategy as if he were a general facing superior numbers.

After a fitful hour of rest shortly before dawn, he woke with his decision made. When Jerome brought his breakfast, the old man was signing a letter he had written. He folded and sealed it before he made room across his knees for the tray.

“Deliver this,” he said, handing the letter to his butler. “And wait for a reply.”

Scarlett opened the door a crack and stuck her head through. “You sent for me, Grandfather?”

“Come in, Scarlett.”

She was surprised to see that there was someone in the room. Her grandfather never had guests. The man bowed, and she inclined her head.

“This is my lawyer, Mr. Jones. Ring for Jerome, Scarlett. He’ll show you to the drawing room, Jones. Wait there until I send for you.”

Scarlett had hardly touched the bell pull before Jerome opened the door.

“Pull that chair up closer, Scarlett. I have a great deal to say to you, and I don’t want to strain my voice.”

Scarlett was mystified. The old man had all but said “please.” He sounded kind of feeble, too. Lord, I hope he’s not getting ready to die on me. I don’t want to have to deal with Eulalie and Pauline at his funeral. She moved a chair to a spot near the head of the bed. Pierre Robillard studied her from under lowered eyelids.

“Scarlett,” he said quietly when she was seated, “I am almost ninety-four years old. I am in good health, considering my age, but it is not likely in simple mathematics that I will live much longer. I am asking you, my grandchild, to stay with me for the time I have left.”

Scarlett started to speak, but the old man raised one thin hand to stop her. “I haven’t finished,” he said. “I do not appeal to your sense of family duty, even though I know that you have acted responsibly toward the needs of your aunts for many years.

“I am prepared to make you a fair offer, even a generous one. If you will remain in this house as its chatelaine and see to my comforts and conform with my wishes, you will inherit my entire estate when I die. It is not inconsiderable.”

Scarlett was dumbfounded. He was offering her a fortune! She thought about the obsequiousness of the bank manager, wondered just how much her grandfather was worth.

Pierre Robillard misunderstood Scarlett’s hesitation while her mind worked. He thought she was overcome with gratitude. His information did not include a report from the same bank manager, and he was unaware of her gold in the vaults. Satisfaction glimmered in his faded eyes. “I do not know,” he said, “nor do I wish to know what circumstances have led you to consider dissolving your marriage.” His posture and voice were stronger now that he believed he had the winning position. “But you will abandon any idea of divorce—”

“You’ve been reading my mail!”

“Anything that comes under this roof is rightfully my business.”

Scarlett was so enraged she couldn’t find words to express it. Her grandfather continued to speak. Precisely. Coldly. His words like icy needles.

“I despise rashness and stupidity, and you have been stupidly rash, leaving your husband without thought for your position. If you had had the intelligence to consult a lawyer, as I have done, you would have learned that South Carolina law does not encompass divorce for any reason. It is unique among the United States in this respect. You have fled to Georgia, it is true, but your husband is legally resident in South Carolina. There can be no divorce.”

Scarlett was still concentrating on the indignity of strangers pawing over her private letters. It must have been that sneak Jerome. He put his hands on my things, went through my bureau. And my own blood kin, my grandfather, put him up to it. She stood up and leaned forward, her fists pressed on the bed beside Pierre Robillard’s skeletal hand.

“How dare you send that man into my room?” she shouted at him, and she pounded on the thick layers of quilts.

Her grandfather’s hand darted upward as quickly as a snake’s striking. He caught her two wrists in the bony grip of his long fingers. “You will not raise your voice in this house, young woman. I detest noise. And you will conduct yourself with suitable decorum, as my granddaughter should. I am not one of your shanty Irish relations.”

Scarlett was shocked at his strength, and a little frightened. What had become of the feeble old man she’d almost felt sorry for? His fingers were like iron bands.

She burst out of his grip, then backed away until the chair stopped her. “No wonder my mother left this house and never came back,” she said. She hated her voice for its fearful quaver.

“Stop being melodramatic, girl. It tires me. Your mother left this house because she was headstrong and too young to listen to reason. She’d been disappointed in love and she took the first man who asked her. She lived to regret it, but what was done was done. You’re not a girl, as she was; you’re old enough to use your head. The contract is drawn up. Bring Jones in here; we will sign it and proceed as though your unseemly outburst had never occurred.”

Scarlett turned her back on him. I don’t believe him. I won’t listen to that kind of talk. She lifted the chair and carried it back to its usual place. With great care she set it down so that the feet fit the indentations they had made in the carpet over the years. She no longer felt afraid of him or sorry for him or even angry with him. When she turned to face him again, it was as if she’d never seen him before. He was a stranger. A tyrannical, sneaky, boring old man whom she didn’t know and didn’t care to know.

“There’s not enough money ever been minted to keep me here,” she said, and she was talking to herself more than to him. “Money can’t make living in a tomb bearable.” She looked at Pierre Robillard with blazing green eyes in a deathly pale face. “You belong here—you’re dead already except you won’t admit it. I’ll leave first thing in the morning.” She walked quickly to the door and pulled it open.

“I figured you’d be there listening, Jerome. Go on in.”

43

“Don’t be a cry-baby, Pansy, nothing’s going to happen to you. The train goes straight through to Atlanta, then it stops. Just don’t get off it before it gets there. I’ve pinned some money in a handkerchief and pinned the handkerchief in your coat pocket. The conductor already has your ticket, and he’s promised to look out for you. Great balls of fire! You’ve been snivelling about how much you wanted to go home, and now you’re going, so stop carrying on like that.”

“But Miss Scarlett, I never been on a train by myself.”

“Fiddle-dee-dee! You’re not by yourself at all. There are plenty of folks on the train. You just look out the window and eat that basket full of food Mrs. O’Hara fixed you and you’ll be home before you know it. I’ve sent a telegram to tell them to come meet you at the depot.”

“But Miss Scarlett, what am I to do without you to do for? I’m a lady’s maid. When are you going to be home?”

“When I get there. It all depends. Now climb up in that car, the train’s ready to leave.”

It all depends on Rhett, Scarlett thought, and Rhett better come pretty soon. I don’t know if I’m going to manage with my cousins or not. She turned and smiled at Jamie’s wife. “I don’t know how I’m ever going to thank you for taking me in, Maureen. I’m thrilled to death at the idea, but it’s caused you so much trouble.” It was her bright, girlish, social voice.

Maureen took Scarlett’s arm and walked her away from the train and Pansy’s forlorn face in the dust-streaked window of the coach. “Everything is grand, Scarlett,” she said. “Daniel is delighted to give you his room because he gets to move to Patricia’s with Brian. He’s been wanting to do it, but he didn’t dare say so. And Kathleen is near floating with joy that she’ll be your lady’s maid. It’s what she wants to train for anyhow, and she worships the ground under your feet. It’s the first time the silly girl’s been happy since she came here. You belong with us, not at the beck and call of that old loo-la. The brass of him, expecting that you’d stay there to housekeep for him. We want you for the love of you.”

Scarlett felt better. It was impossible to resist Maureen’s warmth. Still, she hoped it wouldn’t be long. All those children!

Just like a colt about to shy, Maureen thought. Under the light pressure of her hand she could feel the tension in Scarlett’s arm. What she needs, Maureen decided, is to open her heart and likely have a good old-fashioned bawling. It’s not natural for a woman to never tell nothing about herself, and this one hasn’t mentioned her husband at all. It makes a person wonder . . . But Maureen didn’t waste any time wondering. She’d observed when she was a girl washing glasses in her father’s bar that given enough time everyone came around to airing his troubles sooner or later. She couldn’t imagine that Scarlett would be any different.

The O’Hara houses were three tall brick houses in a row, with windows front and rear and shared interior walls. Inside, the layouts were identical. Each floor had two rooms: kitchen and dining room on the street level, double parlors on the first floor, and two bedrooms on each of the top two floors. A narrow hall with a handsome staircase ran the length of each house, and behind each one was an ample yard and a carriage house.

Scarlett’s bedroom was on the third floor of Jamie’s house. It had two single beds in it—Daniel and Brian had shared it until Brian moved to Patricia’s—and it was very plain, as befitted two young men, with only a wardrobe and a writing table and chair for furniture in addition to the beds. But there were brightly colored patchwork quilts on the beds and a big red and white rag rug on the polished floor. Maureen had hung a mirror over the writing table and covered it with a lace cloth, so Scarlett had a dressing table. Kathleen was surprisingly good with her hair, and she was eager to learn how to please, and she was right at hand. She slept with Mary Kate and Helen in the other third-floor bedroom.

The only little child in Jamie’s house was four-year-old Jacky, and he was usually over at one of the other houses, playing with cousins near his age.

During the day, with the men at work and the older children in school, the row of houses was a world of women. Scarlett expected to hate it. But nothing in Scarlett’s life had prepared her for the O’Hara women.

There were no secrets among them, and no reticences. They said whatever they thought, confided intimacies that made her blush, quarrelled when they disagreed, and hugged one another, weeping, when they made up. They treated all the houses as one, were in and out of the others’ kitchens at any hour for a cup of tea, shared the duties of shopping and baking and tending the animals in the yard and the carriage houses that had been converted into sheds.

Most of all they enjoyed themselves, with laughter and gossip and confidences and harmless intricate conspiracies against their men. They included Scarlett from the moment she arrived, assuming that she was one of them. Within days she felt she was. She went to the City Market with Maureen or Katie every day to search for the best foods at the best prices, and she giggled with young Polly and Kathleen about tricks with curling iron and ribbons, and she looked through swatches of upholstery fabric with house-proud Patricia long after Maureen and Katie threw up their hands at her finickiness. She drank innumerable cups of tea and listened to accounts of triumphs and worries; and, although she shared none of her own secrets, no one pressured her or held back the frank confession of their own. “I never knew that so many interesting things happened to people,” Scarlett told Maureen with genuine surprise.

The evenings had a different pattern. The men worked hard and were tired when they got home. They wanted a good meal and a pipe and a drink. And they always got it. After that the evening evolved by itself. Often the whole family ended up at Matt’s house, because he had five young children asleep upstairs. Maureen and Jamie could leave Jacky and Helen in Mary Kate’s care, and Patricia could bring her sleeping two-year-old and three-year-old without waking them. Before too long the music would begin. Later, when Colum came in, he would be the leader.

The first time Scarlett saw the bodhran, she thought it was an outsize tambourine. The metal-framed circle of stretched leather was more than two feet across, but it was shallow, like a tambourine, and Gerald was holding it in his hand, like a tambourine. Then he sat down, braced it on his knee and tapped on it with a wooden stick that he held in the middle, rocking it to strike one end, then the other, against the skin, and she saw that it was really a drum.

Not much of a drum, she thought. Until Colum picked it up. His left hand spread against the underside of the taut leather as if caressing it, and his right wrist was suddenly as fluid as water. His arm moved from top to bottom to top to center of the drum while his right hand made a curious, careless-looking motion that pounded the stick with a steady, blood-stirring rhythm. The tone and volume differed, but the hypnotic, demanding beat never varied, as fiddle, then whistle, then concertina joined in. Maureen held the bones lifeless in her hand, too caught up in the music to remember them.

Scarlett gave herself over to the drumbeat. It made her laugh, it made her cry, it made her dance as she’d never dreamed she could dance. It was only when Colum laid the bodhran down on the floor beside him and demanded a drink, saying “I’ve drummed myself dry,” that she saw that everyone else was as transported as she was.

She looked at the short, smiling pug-nosed figure with a shiver of awestruck wonder. This man was not like other men.

“Scarlett darling, you understand oysters better than I do,” said Maureen when they entered the City Market. “Will you find us the best of them? I want to make a grand oyster stew for Colum’s tea today.”

“For tea? Oyster stew’s rich enough for a meal.”

“And isn’t that the reason for it? He’s speaking at a meeting tonight, and he’ll need the strength of it.”

“What kind of meeting, Maureen? Will we all go?”

“It’s at the Jasper Greens, the American Irish volunteer soldiering group, so there’ll be no women. We wouldn’t be welcome.”

“What does Colum do?”

“Ah, well, first he reminds them they’re Irish, no matter how long they’ve been Americans, then he brings them to tears with longing and love for the Old Country, then he gets them to empty their pockets for the aid of the poor in Ireland. He’s a mighty speechmaker, says Jamie.”

“I can imagine. There’s something magic about Colum.”

“So you’ll find us some magical oysters, then.”

Scarlett laughed.

“They’ll not have pearls,” she said, mimicking Maureen’s brogue, “but they’ll make a glory of a broth.”

Colum looked down at the steaming, brimming bowl, and his eyebrows rose.

“Maureen, this is a hearty tea you serve.”

“The oysters looked particularly fat today at Market,” she said with a grin.

“Do they not print calendars in the United States of America?”

“Whist, Colum, eat your stew before it’s cold.”

“It’s Lent, Maureen, you know the rules for fasting. One meal a day, and that one we took at midday.”

So her aunts had been right! Scarlett slowly put her spoon down on the table. She looked at Maureen with sympathy. This good meal wasted. She’d have to do a terrible penance and she must feel miserably guilty. Why did Colum have to be a priest?

She was astonished to see Maureen smiling and dipping in her spoon to capture an oyster. “I’m not worried about Hell, Colum,” she said. “I have the O’Hara dispensation. You’re an O’Hara, too, so eat your oysters and enjoy them.”

Scarlett was bewildered. “What’s the O’Hara dispensation?” she asked Maureen.

Colum answered her, but without Maureen’s good humor. “Thirty years or so gone by,” he said, “Ireland was struck with famine. One year and again the next people starved. There was no food, so they ate grass, and then there was not even grass. It was a terrible thing, terrible. So many died, and there was no way to help them. Those that lived through it were granted dispensation from future hungers by priests in some parishes. The O’Haras lived in such a parish. They need not fast, save for forsaking meat.” He was staring down into the thick butter-flecked liquid in his bowl.

Maureen caught Scarlett’s eye. She put her finger to her lips for silence, then gestured with her spoon, urging Scarlett to eat.

After a long while Colum picked up his spoon. He did not look up while he ate the succulent oysters, and his thanks were perfunctory. Then he left to go to Patricia’s, where he shared a room with Stephen.

Scarlett looked at Maureen with curiosity. “Were you there in the Famine?” she asked cautiously.

Maureen nodded. “I was there. My father owned a bar, so we didn’t fare as bad as some. People will always find money for drink, and we could buy bread and milk. It was the poor farmers got the worst of it. Ah, it was terrible.” She put her arms across her breasts and shuddered. Her eyes were full of tears, and her voice broke when she tried to talk. “They only had potatoes, you see how it was. The corn they grew and the cows they raised and the milk and butter they got from them were always sold so they could pay the rent for their farms. For themselves they had a bit of butter and the skimmed milk and maybe a few chickens so that there was sometimes an egg for Sunday. But mostly they had potatoes to eat, only potatoes, and they made that enough. Then the potatoes turned to rot under the earth, and they had nothing.” She was silent, rocking back and forth holding herself. Her mouth was trembling. It became a shaking circle, and she gave a harsh, tormented cry, remembering.

Scarlett jumped up and put her arms around Maureen’s heaving shoulders.

Maureen wept against Scarlett’s breast. “You cannot imagine what it is to have no food.”

Scarlett looked at the smouldering coals on the hearth. “I know what it’s like,” she said. She held Maureen close, and she told about going home to Tara from burning Atlanta. There were no tears In Scarlett’s eyes or in her voice when she talked about the desolation and the long months of relentless gnawing hunger and near starvation. But when she spoke about finding her mother dead when she reached Tara, and her father’s pitiful broken mind, Scarlett broke down.

Then Maureen held her while she wept.

44

It seemed that the dogwood trees came into bloom overnight. Suddenly one morning, when Scarlett and Maureen were walking to the Market, there were clouds of blossoms above the grassy median in the avenue outside the house.

“Ah, isn’t it a lovely sight?” Maureen sighed gustily. “The morning light shining through the tender petals making them almost pink. By noon they’ll be white as a swan’s breast. It’s a grand thing, this city that plants flowering beauty for all to see!” She drew in a deep breath. “We’ll have a picnic in the park, Scarlett. To taste the spring green in the air. Come quickly, there’s a grand shopping to do. I’ll bake this afternoon, and after Mass tomorrow we’ll spend the day at the park.”

Was it Saturday already? Scarlett’s mind raced, calculating and remembering. Why, she’d been in Savannah almost a full month! A vise squeezed her heart. Why hadn’t Rhett come? Where was he? His business in Boston couldn’t have taken this long.

“. . . Boston,” said Maureen, and Scarlett stopped short. She grabbed Maureen’s arm and glared at her suspiciously. How could Maureen have known Rhett was in Boston? How could she know anything about him? I haven’t said a word to her.

“What’s the matter, Scarlett, darling? Have you turned your ankle?”

“What were you saying about Boston?”

“I said ’tis a shame Stephen won’t be with us for the picnic. He’s leaving today for Boston. There’ll be no trees flowering there, I’m bound. Still, he’ll have a chance to see Thomas and his family and bring back news of them. That’ll please Old James. To think of all the brothers scattering through America, it’s a wonderful thing . . .”

Scarlett walked quietly at Maureen’s side. She was ashamed of herself. How could I have been so horrid? Maureen’s my friend, the closest friend I ever had. She wouldn’t spy on me, pry into my private life. It’s just that it’s been so long, and I hadn’t even noticed. That’s why I’m so jumpy, probably, why I barked at Maureen like that. Because it’s been so long, and Rhett hasn’t come.

She murmured unthinking agreement to Maureen’s suggestions about food for the picnic while questions battered against the walls of her mind like birds trapped in a cage. Had she made a mistake not going back to Charleston with her aunts? Had she been wrong to leave in the first place?

This is driving me crazy. I can’t think about it or I’ll scream!

But her mind would not stop questioning.

Maybe she should talk to Maureen about it. Maureen was so comforting, and she was smart, really, about so many things. She’d understand. Maybe she could help.

No, I’ll talk to Colum! Tomorrow, at the picnic, there’ll be lots of time. I’ll tell him I want to talk, ask him to go for a walk. Colum will know what to do. In his own way, Colum was like Rhett. He was complete in himself, like Rhett, and everyone else looked unimportant next to him, just the way men seem somehow to become only boys, and Rhett the only man in the room. Colum got things done, too, just like Rhett, and laughed about the doing, just like Rhett.

Scarlett laughed to herself at the memory of Colum talking about Polly’s father. “Aye, he’s a grand, bold man, the mighty builder MacMahon. Arms like sledgehammers he has, fairly popping the seams of his costly coat, doubtless chosen by Mrs. MacMahon to match her parlor suite, else why would it be such a plushy object? A Godly man, too, with proper reverence for the shine it gives his soul to build God’s own house here in Savannah, America. I blessed him for it, in my own humble way. ‘Faith!’ I said. ‘It’s my belief you’re such a religious that you’re not taking a penny more than forty percent profit from the parish.’ Then didn’t his eyes flash and his muscles swell like a bull’s and his plushy sleeves make pretty little popping sounds along their silk-sewn seams? ‘Sure it is, Master Builder,’ says I, ‘that any other man would have made it fifty, seeing that the Bishop’s not an Irishman?’

“And then the good man showed his merit. ‘Gross!’ he roared, till I feared the windows would fly out into the street. ‘What manner of name is that for a Catholic?’ Then he told me stories about the iniquities of the Bishop that my collar forbids me to credit. I shared his sorrows and a glass or two with him, then I told him about the suffering of my poor little cousin. Righteous wrath he showed, the good man. It was all I could do to stop him tearing down the steeple with his own strong hands. It’s my belief he won’t call all the men out on strike, but I cannot be altogether certain. He will, he tells me, express to the Bishop his concern for Scarlett’s easiness of mind in terms the nervous little man cannot fail to understand, and as often as may be necessary to convince him of the gravity of the problem.”

Maureen said, “And why are you smiling at the cabbages, I’d like to know?”

Scarlett turned the smile onto her friend. “Because I’m happy that it’s spring and we’re going to have a picnic,” she said. And because she was going to have Tara, she was sure.

Scarlett had never seen Forsyth Park. Hodgson Hall was just across the street from it, but it had been dark when she went to the dedication ceremony. It caught her unaware, and it took her breath away. A pair of stone sphinxes flanked the entrance. The children looked longingly at the beasts they were forbidden to climb, then ran at full speed along the central path. They had to run around Scarlett. She was stopped in the middle of the path, staring ahead.

The fountain was two blocks from the entrance, but it was so enormous that it looked very close. Arcs and jets of water lifted and fell like showering diamonds from every direction. Scarlett was spellbound; she’d never seen anything so spectacular.

“Come along now,” said Jamie, “it gets better as you get closer.”

And it did. There was a bright sun that made rainbows in the dancing waters; they flashed, vanished, reappeared with every step Scarlett took. The whitewashed trunks of the trees that lined the path glimmered in the dappled shade from their leaves, leading to the sparkling dazzle of the fountain. When she reached the iron fence that circled the fountain’s basin, she had to tilt her head back to near dizziness to look at the nymph atop its third tier, a statue bigger than she was, the arm held high, grasping a staff that threw a plume of water high, high toward the brilliant blue sky.

“I like the serpent-men myself,” Maureen commented. “They always look to me like they’re enjoying themselves.” Scarlett looked where Maureen was pointing. The bronze mermen knelt in the huge basin on their elegantly coiled scaly tails with one hand on hip, the other holding a horn to the lips.

The men spread rugs under the oak tree Maureen selected, and the women put down their baskets. Mary Kate and Kathleen deposited Patricia’s little girl and Katie’s smallest boy on the grass to crawl. The older children were running and jumping in some game of their own design.

“I’ll rest my feet,” Patricia said. Billy helped her to sit with her back against the tree trunk. “Go on,” she said crossly, “no need for you to spend all day at my elbow.” He kissed her cheek, slid the straps of the concertina off his shoulder, and put it down beside her.

“I’ll play you a fine tune later,” he promised. Then he strolled toward a group of men in the distance who were playing baseball.

“Go get in trouble with him, Matt,” Katie suggested to her husband.

“Yes, go on, the lot of you,” Maureen said. She made shooing motions with her hands. Jamie and his tall sons set off at a run. Colum and Gerald walked behind them with Matt and Billy.

“They’ll be starving when they get back,” Maureen said. Her voice was rich with pleasure. “It’s a good thing we packed food for an army.”

What a mountain of food, Scarlett thought at first. Then she realized that it would probably all be gone inside an hour. Big families were like that. She looked with real affection at the women of her family, would feel equally fond of the men when they came back carrying their coats and hats, their collars open and their sleeves rolled up. She had put aside her class pretensions without noticing their departure. She no longer remembered her uneasiness when she learned that her cousins had been servants on the great estate near where they lived in Ireland. Matt was a carpenter there, Gerald a worker under him doing repairs on the dozens of buildings and miles of fence. Katie was a milkmaid, Patricia a parlormaid. And it made no difference. Scarlett was happy to be one of the O’Haras.

She knelt beside Maureen and began to help her. “I hope the men don’t dawdle,” she said. “This fresh air is making me right peckish.”

When there were only two pieces of cake and an apple left, Maureen began to boil water for tea over a spirit lamp. Billy Carmody picked up his concertina and winked at Patricia. “What’ll it be, Patsy? I promised you a tune.”

“Shhh, not yet, Billy,” said Katie. “The little ones are almost asleep.” Five small bodies were on one of the rugs in the densest shade of the tree. Billy began to whistle softly, then took up the tune with the concertina, almost muted. Patricia smiled at him. She smoothed the hair from Timothy’s forehead then started to sing the lullaby Billy was playing.

There was a moment of silence, then Timothy opened his eyes. “Again, please,” he said drowsily.

“Oh, yes, please, miss, sing it again.”

Everyone looked up, startled, at the strange young man who was standing nearby. He was holding a ragged cap in rough, dirty hands in front of his patched jacket. He looked about twelve years old, except that he had a stubble of dark whiskers on his chin.

“Begging your pardon, ladies and gentlemen,” he said earnestly. “I know I’m being too bold, crashing in on your party and all that. But my mam used to sing that song to me and me sisters, and when I heard it, it called my heart over.”

“Sit down, lad,” said Maureen. “There’s cake here with no one to eat it, and some grand cheese and bread in the basket. What’s your name, and where are you from?”

The boy knelt by her. “Danny Murray, milady.” He pulled on the stringy black hair over his forehead, then wiped his hand on his sleeve and held it out for the bread Maureen had taken out of the basket. “Connemara’s me home, when I’m there.” He bit hugely into the bread. Billy began to play.

“On wings of a wind . . .” sang Katie. The hungry boy swallowed and sang with her.

“. . . hear the wind blow,” they finished after three full repetitions. Danny Murray’s dark eyes were shining like black jewels.

“Eat, then, Danny Murray,” Maureen said. Her voice was rough with sentiment. “You’ll need your strength later. I’m going to brew up a pot of tea, then we’ll want to hear more of your singing. Your angel’s voice is like a gift from heaven.” It was true. The boy’s Irish tenor was as pure as Gerald’s.

The O’Haras busied themselves arranging teacups so the boy could eat unobserved.

“I learned a new song I think you might like,” he said while Maureen was pouring the tea. “I’m on a ship that stopped in Philadelphia before it come here. Shall I sing it for you?”

“What’s it called, Danny? I might know it,” Billy said.

“ ‘I’ll Take You Home’ ?”

Billy shook his head. “I’ll be glad to learn it from you.”

Danny Murray grinned. “I’ll be glad to show you.” He tossed the hair off his face and took a breath. Then he opened his lips, and music poured out of him like shining silver thread.

Scarlett joined in the applause. It was a lovely song.

“That was so grand I forgot to learn,” Billy said ruefully. “Sing it again, Danny, for me to get the tune.”

“No!” Kathleen O’Hara jumped to her feet. Her face was streaked with tears. “I can’t listen again, I can’t!” She wiped her eyes with her palms. “Forgive me,” she sobbed. “I have to go.” She stepped carefully over the sleeping children and ran away.

“I’m sorry,” said the boy.

“Whist, it’s not your fault, lad,” said Colum. “It’s real pleasure you’ve given. The poor girl’s pining for Ireland is the truth of it, and by chance her name is Kathleen. Tell me, do you know ‘The Curragh of Kildare’? It’s a specialty of Billy’s, him with the music box. It would be a rare favor were you to sing with him playing and make him sound like a musician.”

The music went on until the sun dropped behind the trees and the breeze became chill. Then they went home. Danny Murray couldn’t accept Jamie’s invitation to supper. He had to be back at his ship by dark.

“Jamie, I’m thinking I should take Kathleen with me when I go,” said Colum. “She’s been here long enough to get over being homesick, but her heart’s still aching.”

Scarlett nearly poured boiling water on her hand instead of in the teapot. “Where are you going, Colum?”

“Back to Ireland, darling. I’m only visiting.”

“But the Bishop hasn’t changed his mind about Tara, yet. And there’s something else I want to talk to you about.”

“Well, I’m not leaving this minute, Scarlett darling. There’s time for everything. What do you think, with your woman’s heart? Should Kathleen go back?”

“I don’t know. Ask Maureen. She’s been up there with her ever since we got back.” What difference did it make what Kathleen did? It was Colum that mattered. How could he just pick up and leave when she needed him? Oh, why did I just sit there singing with that filthy dirty boy? I should have gotten Colum to go for a walk the way I planned.

Scarlett only picked at the cheese toast and potato soup they had for supper. She felt like crying.

“Oof,” Maureen groaned when the kitchen was tidy again. “I’m going to take my old bones to bed early tonight. Sitting on the ground all those hours has me stiff as a plow handle. You, too, Mary Kate and Helen. Tomorrow’s a school day.”

Scarlett felt stiff, too. She stretched in front of the fire. “Good night,” she said.

“Stay a bit,” Colum said, “while I finish my pipe. Jamie’s yawning so, I can tell he’s about to abandon me.”

Scarlett took a chair across from Colum’s, and Jamie patted her head on his way to the stairs.

Colum drew on his pipe. The smell of the tobacco was sweetly acrid. “A glowing hearth is good for talking by,” he said after a while. “What’s on your mind and your heart, Scarlett?”

She sighed deeply. “I don’t know what to do about Rhett, Colum. I’m afraid I might have ruined everything.” The kitchen was warm and dimly lit, the perfect setting for opening her heart. In addition, Scarlett had a muddled notion that, because Colum was a priest, everything she told him would be kept secret from the rest of the family, as if she were confessing in the cramped little closed booth in the church.

She started from the beginning, with the truth about her marriage. “I didn’t love him, at least I didn’t know it if I did. I was in love with someone else. And then, when I knew it was Rhett I loved, he didn’t love me any more. That’s what he said, anyhow. But I don’t believe that’s true, Colum; it just can’t be.”

“Did he leave you?”

“Yes. But then I left him. That’s what I wonder, if it was a mistake.”

“Let me get this straight . . .” With infinite patience Colum unravelled the tangle of Scarlett’s story. It was well after midnight when he knocked the dottle out of his long-cold pipe and put it in his pocket.

“You did just what you should have, my dear,” he said. “Because we wear our collars backwards some people think that priests are not men. They’re wrong. I can understand your husband. I can even feel great compassion for his problem. It’s deeper and more hurtful than yours, Scarlett. He’s fighting himself, and for a strong man that’s a mighty battle. He’ll come after you, and you must be generous to him when he does, for he will be battlesore.”

“But when, Colum?”

“That I cannot tell you. I know this, though. It’s he that must do the seeking, you can’t do it for him. He has to fight himself alone, until he faces his need for you and admits it is good.”

“You’re sure he’ll come?”

“That I’m sure of. And now I’m to bed. You do the same.”

Scarlett nestled into her pillow and tried to fight the heaviness of her eyelids. She wanted to stretch this moment, to enjoy the satisfaction that Colum’s certainty had given her. Rhett would be here—maybe not as soon as she wanted, but she could wait.

45

Scarlett was none too pleased when Kathleen woke her up the next morning. After sitting up so late talking to Colum, she’d much rather have slept longer.

“I’ve brought your tea,” said Kathleen softly. “And Maureen asks will you be wanting to go to the Market with her this morning?”

Scarlett turned her head away and closed her eyes again. “No, I think I’ll go back to sleep.” She could feel Kathleen hovering. Why didn’t the silly girl just go away and let her sleep? “What do you want, Kathleen?”

“Begging your pardon, Scarlett, I wondered if you’d be getting dressed? Maureen wants me to go in your place if you’re not going, and I don’t know when we’ll be back.”

“Mary Kate can help me.” Scarlett mumbled into her pillow.

“Oh, no. She’s been off to school for ages. It’s all but nine already.”

Scarlett forced her eyes open. She felt as if she could sleep forever—if people would let her. “All right,” she sighed, “get my things out. I’ll wear the red and blue plaid.”

“Oh, you do look so lovely in that one,” Kathleen said happily. She said the same whatever Scarlett chose. Kathleen considered Scarlett quite the most elegant and beautiful woman in the world.

Scarlett drank her tea while Kathleen arranged her hair in a thick figure-eight across the nape of the neck. I look like the wrath of God, she thought. There were faint shadows under her eyes. Maybe I should wear the pink dress, it’s better with my skin, but then Kathleen would have to do the laces again, the pink has a smaller waist, and her fussing is driving me crazy. “That’s fine,” she said when the last hairpin was in, “now go on.”

“Would you care for another cup of tea?”

“No. Go on.” I’d really like coffee, Scarlett thought. Maybe I should go to the Market after all . . . No, I’m too tired to walk up and down, up and down, looking at every single thing. She powdered under her eyes and made a face at herself in the looking glass before she went downstairs to rummage up some breakfast.

“My grief!” she said when she saw Colum reading the newspaper in the kitchen. She’d thought there was no one in the house.

“I came to ask you a favor,” he said. He wanted some feminine advice in selecting things for people back in Ireland. “I can manage the lads myself, and their fathers, but the lasses are a mystery. Scarlett will know, I told myself, what’s the latest thing in America.”

She laughed at his perplexed expression. “I’d love to help, Colum, but you have to pay me—with a cup of coffee and a sweet roll at the bakery on Broughton Street.” She no longer felt tired at all.

“I don’t know why you asked me to come with you, Colum! You don’t like a single thing I’ve suggested.” Scarlett looked with exasperation at the piles of kid gloves, lace handkerchiefs, clocked silk stockings, beaded bags, painted fans, and lengths of silks, velvets, and satins. The drapers’ assistants had pulled out all the choicest wares of the most fashionable shop in Savannah, and Colum had shaken his head no to everything.

“I apologize for all the trouble I’ve given,” he said to the stiffly smiling clerks. He offered Scarlett his arm. “I beg your pardon, too, Scarlett. I fear I didn’t make it clear enough what I was wanting. Come along, and I’ll pay the debt I owe you; then we’ll try once more. A cup of coffee would be welcome.”

It was going to take more than a cup of coffee to make her forgive him for this wild goose chase! Scarlett ostentatiously ignored the proffered arm and sailed out of the shop.

Her temper improved when Colum suggested they go to the Pulaski House for coffee. The huge hotel was very fashionable, and Scarlett had never been there. When they were seated on a tufted velvet settee in one of the ornate, marble-columned reception rooms, she looked around her with satisfaction. “This is nice,” she said happily when a white-gloved waiter brought a laden silver tray to the marble-topped table in front of them.

“You look right at home in your elegant finery amidst all the grand marble and potted palms,” he said, smiling. “That’s why we crossed paths instead of travelling together.” People in Ireland, he explained, led lives more simple than Scarlett knew. More simple, perhaps, than she could even imagine. They lived on their farms, in the countryside, with no city nearby at all, only a village with a church and a blacksmith and a public house where the mail-coach stopped. The only store at all was a room in the corner of the public house where you could mail a letter and buy tobacco and a few foodstuffs. Travelling wagons came by with ribbons and trinkets and papers of pins. People found their entertainment by going to other people’s houses.

“But that’s just like plantation life,” Scarlett exclaimed. “Why, Tara’s five miles from Jonesboro, and when you get there there’s nothing much but a train depot and a puny little feed store.”

“Ah, no, Scarlett. Plantations have mansion houses, not simple whitewashed farmers’ homes.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Colum O’Hara! The Wilkes’ Twelve Oaks was the only mansion house in all Clayton County. Most folks have houses that started out with a couple of rooms and a kitchen, then added on what they needed.”

Colum smiled and admitted defeat. Nevertheless, he said, the gifts for the family couldn’t be city things. The girls would do better with a length of cotton than one of satin, and they wouldn’t know what to do with a painted fan.

Scarlett put her cup in its saucer with a decisive clink. “Calico!” she said. “I’ll bet you they’d love calico. It comes in all kinds of bright patterns and makes up into pretty frocks. We all had calico for everyday stay-at-home dresses.”

“And boots,” Colum said. He took a thick packet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. “I have the names and sizes here.”

Scarlett laughed at the length of the paper. “They sure saw you coming, Colum.”

“What?”

“Never mind. It’s an American saying.” Every man, woman, and child in County Meath must have put their name on Colum’s list, she thought. It was just like Aunt Eulalie’s “As long as you’re going shopping, would you just pick up something for me?” Somehow she never remembered to pay for whatever it was, and Scarlett would bet Colum’s Irish friends would turn out just as forgetful.

“Tell me more about Ireland,” she said. There was plenty of coffee left in the pot.

“Ah, it’s a rare beautiful island,” said Colum softly. He talked with love in his lilting voice about green hills crowned with castles, of rushing streams rimmed with flowers and leaping with fish, of walking between fragrant hedgerows in misty rain, of music everywhere, of a sky wider and higher than any other sky with a sun as gentle and warming as a mother’s kiss . . .

“You sound almost as homesick as Kathleen.”

Colum laughed at himself. “I won’t weep when the ship sails, it’s true. There’s none who admire America more than I do, and I look forward to visiting, but I will not shed a tear when the ship sails for home.”

“Maybe I will. I don’t know what I’ll do without Kathleen.”

“Don’t do without her, then. Come with us and see the home of your people.”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“It would be a grand adventure. Ireland’s beautiful any time, but in the spring the tenderness of it would break your heart.”

“I don’t need a broken heart, thank you, Colum. What I need is a maid.”

“I’ll send you Brigid, she’s longing to come. I suppose she should have been the one all along, not Kathleen, only we wanted Kathleen away.”

Scarlett scented gossip. “Why would you want to send that sweet girl away?”

Colum smiled. “Women and their questions,” he said. “You’re all alike both sides of the ocean. We didn’t approve of the man who wanted to court her. He was a soldier, and a heathen besides.”

“You mean a Protestant. Did she love him?”

“Her head was turned by his uniform, that was the all of it.”

“Poor girl. I hope he’s waiting for her when she gets home.”

“Thanks be to God, his regiment’s gone back to England. He’ll bother her no more.”

Colum’s face was hard as granite. Scarlett held her tongue.

“What about that list?” she asked after she gave up expecting Colum to speak. “We’d better get back to our shopping. You know, Colum, Jamie has everything you want at his store. Why don’t we just go there?”

“I couldn’t put him in a fix. He’d feel bound to make me a price that would hurt him.”

“Honestly, Colum, you don’t have the brains of a flea about business! Even if Jamie sells to you at cost, it will make him look better to his suppliers, and he’ll get a bigger discount next order.” She laughed at Colum’s bewilderment. “I have a store myself, I know what I’m saying. Let me explain . . .”

She talked a blue streak while they walked to Jamie’s. Colum was fascinated and obviously impressed, asking question after question.

“Colum!” Jamie boomed when they entered the store. “We were just wishing for you. Uncle James, Colum’s here.” The old man came out from the storeroom with his arms full of bunting fabric.

“You’re the answer to a prayer, man,” he said. “Which is the color that we want?” He spilled the fabric onto a counter. It was all green, but four closely related shades.

“That one’s the prettiest,” Scarlett said.

Jamie and her uncle asked Colum to make a choice.

Scarlett was miffed. She’d already told them which was the best. What would a man know, even Colum?

“Where will you have it?” he asked.

“Over the window outside and in,” Jamie replied.

“Then we’ll look at it there, for the light on it,” said Colum. He looked as serious as if he was picking out the color to print money, Scarlett thought crossly. What was all the fuss about?

Jamie noticed her pout. “It’s to decorate for Saint Paddy’s Day, Scarlett darling. Colum’s the one to say what’s closest to the true green of a shamrock. It’s been too long since we’ve seen them, Uncle James and me.”

The O’Haras had been talking about Saint Patrick’s Day ever since the first time she met them. “When is it?” Scarlett asked, more polite than interested.

The three men gaped at her.

“You don’t know?” Old James said incredulously.

“I wouldn’t ask if I knew, would I?”

“It’s tomorrow,” Jamie said, “tomorrow. And, Scarlett darling, you’re going to have the finest time of your life!”

Savannah’s Irish—like the Irish everywhere—had always celebrated on March 17. It was the feast day of the patron saint of Ireland, and feast day was the secular meaning, as well as the canonical. Although it came during Lent, there was no fasting on Saint Patrick’s Day. There was, instead, food and drink and music and dancing. Catholic schools were closed, and Catholic businesses, except for saloons, which expected and achieved one of their biggest days of the year.

There had been Irish in Savannah from its earliest days—the Jasper Greens first fought in the American Revolution—and Saint Patrick’s Day had always been a major holiday for them. But during the bleak depressed decade since the defeat of the South, the entire city had begun to join in. March 17 was Savannah’s Spring Festival, and for one day everyone was Irish.

There were gaily decorated booths in every square selling food and lemonade, wine, coffee, and beer. Jugglers and men with trick dogs gathered crowds on street corners. Fiddlers played from the steps of City Hall and proud, peeling houses throughout the city. Green ribbons fluttered from flowering tree branches, shamrocks made of paper or of silk were for sale from boxes carried by enterprising men, women, and children from square to square. Broughton Street was bedecked with green bunting in shop windows, and ropes of fresh green vines strung between lampposts to canopy the parade route.

“Parade?!” Scarlett exclaimed when she was told. She touched the green silk ribbon rosettes Kathleen had pinned in her hair. “Are we finished? Do I look all right? Is it time to go?”

It was time. First early Mass, and then a celebration all day and into the night. “Jamie tells me there’ll be fireworks starring the sky over the park until you’re fair giddy from the splendor of it all,” Kathleen said. Her face and eyes were shining with excitement.

Scarlett’s green eyes were suddenly calculating. “I’ll bet you don’t have parades and fireworks in your village, Kathleen. You’ll be sorry if you don’t stay in Savannah.”

The girl smiled radiantly. “I’ll remember it forever and tell the tale by all the hearths of all the houses. Once home, it will be a grand thing to have seen America. Once home.”

Scarlett gave up. There was no budging the silly girl.

Broughton Street was lined with people, all of them sporting green. Scarlett laughed aloud when she saw one family. With all those scrubbed-up children wearing green bows or scarves or feathers in their hats, they were just like the O’Haras. Except that they were all black. “Didn’t I tell you everyone is Irish today?” Jamie said with a grin.

Maureen elbowed her. “Even the loo-las are wearing the green,” she said, jerking her head toward a pair nearby. Scarlett craned her neck to see. Good grief! It was her grandfather’s stuffy lawyer and a boy who must be his son. Both of them were wearing green cravats. She looked curiously up and down the street at the smiling people, searching for other familiar faces. There was Mary Telfair with a group of ladies, all of them with green ribbons on their hats. And Jerome! Where had he found a green coat, for pity’s sake? Surely her grandfather wasn’t here; please, God, don’t let him be. He’d manage to make the sun stop shining. No, Jerome was with a black woman wearing a green sash. Fancy that, old prune-face Jerome with a girlfriend! At least twenty years younger, too.

A street vendor was handing out lemonade and coconut candy cakes to each O’Hara in turn, starting with the eager children. When he got to her, Scarlett accepted with a smile and bit into the candy. She was eating on the street! No lady would do that, even if she were dying of starvation. Take that, Grandfather! she thought, delighted by her own wickedness. The coconut was fresh, moist, sweet. Scarlett enjoyed it very much, even though it lost its thrilling defiance when she saw that Miss Telfair was nibbling on something that she was holding between her kid-gloved thumb and forefinger.

“I still say the cowboy in the green hat was the best,” Mary Kate insisted. “He did all those fancy things with the rope, and he was so handsome.”

“You just say that because he smiled at us,” Helen said scornfully. Ten years old was too young to be sympathetic with the romantic dreams of fifteen. “The best was the float with the leprechauns dancing on it.”

“Those weren’t leprechauns, silly. There aren’t any leprechauns in America.”

“They were dancing around a big bag of gold. Nobody would have a bag of gold except leprechauns.”

“You’re such a child, Helen. They were boys in costumes is all. Couldn’t you see that the ears were false? One of them had fallen off.”

Maureen intervened before the argument could get out of hand. “It was a grand parade, every bit of it. Come along, girls, and hold on to Jacky’s hand.”

Strangers the day before, strangers again the day after, on Saint Patrick’s Day people joined hands and danced, joined voices and sang. They shared the sun and the air and the music and the streets.

“It’s wonderful,” Scarlett said when she tasted a chicken drumstick from one of the food stalls. And, “It’s wonderful,” she said when she saw the green chalk shamrocks on the brick paths of Chatham Square. “It’s wonderful,” about the mighty granite eagle with a green ribbon around its neck on the Pulaski Monument.

“What a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful day,” she cried, and she spun around and around before she sank exhausted onto a newly vacated bench next to Colum. “Look, Colum, I’ve got a hole in the bottom of my boot. Where I come from everybody says you can tell the best parties because they’re the ones where you dance your slippers right through. And these aren’t even slippers, they’re boots. This must be the best party ever!”

“It’s a grand day, to be sure, and there’s the evening still to come, with the Roman candles and all. You’ll be worn through just like your boot, Scarlett darling, if you don’t take a little rest. It’s near four o’clock. Let’s go to the house now for a bit.”

“I don’t want to. I want to dance some more and eat some more pork barbecue and have one of those green ices and taste that awful green beer Matt and Jamie were drinking.”

“And so you shall tonight. You observe, do you not, that Matt and Jamie gave up an hour ago or more?”

“Sissies!” Scarlett proclaimed. “But you’re not. You’re the best of the O’Haras, Colum. Jamie said so, and he was right.”

Colum smiled at her flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes. “Saving only yourself,” he said. “Scarlett, I’m going to take off your boot now, hold it up, the one with the hole in it.” He unlaced the neat black kid lady’s boot, removed it and upended it to empty the sand and crushed shell fragments. Then he picked up a discarded ice cream cornet and folded the thick paper to fit inside the boot. “This should get you home. I’m supposing you’ve got more boots there.”

“Of course I do. Oh, that does feel much better. Thank you, Colum. You always know what to do.”

“What I know right now is we’ll go home and have a cup of tea and a rest.”

Scarlett hated to admit it, even to herself, but she was tired. She walked slowly beside Colum along Drayton Street, smiling at the smiling people thronging the street. “Why is Saint Patrick the patron saint of Ireland?” she asked. “Is he the saint of any place else?”

Colum blinked once, astonished by her ignorance. “All saints are saints for every person and every place in the world. Saint Patrick is special to the Irish because he brought us Christianity when we were still being lied to by the Druids, and he drove out all the snakes from Ireland to make it like the Garden of Eden without the serpent.”

Scarlett laughed. “You’re making that up.”

“Indeed I am not. There’s not a single snake the length and breadth of Ireland.”

“That’s wonderful. I do purely hate snakes.”

“You really should come with me when I go home, Scarlett. You’d love the Old Country. The ship takes only two weeks and a day to Galway.”

“That’s very fast.”

“It is that. The winds blow towards Ireland and carry the homesick travellers home as fast as a cloud flying across the sky. It’s a grand sight to see all the sails set, and the big ship fairly dancing over the sea. The white gulls fly out with her until the land is almost lost from view, then they turn back, crying because they cannot come all the way. The dolphins take over the escort then, and sometimes a great whale, spouting like a fountain with astonishment to have the beautiful sail-topped companion. It’s a lovely thing, sailing. You feel so free you think you could fly.”

“I know,” said Scarlett. “That’s just what it’s like. You feel so free.”

46

Scarlett thrilled Kathleen by wearing her green watered silk gown to the festivities at Forsyth Park that night, but she horrified the girl by insisting on wearing her thin green morocco leather slippers instead of boots. “But the sand and the bricks are that rough, Scarlett, they’ll take out the soles of your elegant slippers!”

“I want them to. I want, one time in my life, to dance through two pairs of shoes at one party. Just brush my hair, please, Kathleen, and put the green velvet ribbon on to hold it. I want to feel it loose and flying when I dance.” She had slept for twenty minutes and felt that she could dance until dawn.

The dancing was on the broad plaza of granite blocks that surrounded the fountain, the water glittering like jewels and whispering beneath the merry, driving rhythms of the reel and the lilting beauty of the ballads. She danced one reel with Daniel, her small feet in their dainty slippers flashing like little green flames in the intricate patterns of the dance. “You’re a marvel, Scarlett darling,” he shouted. He put his hands around her waist and lifted her above his head, then turned, turned, turned while his feet pounded to the insistent beat of the bodhran. Scarlett stretched her arms wide and lifted her face to the moon, turning, turning in the fountain’s silver mist.

“That’s how I feel tonight,” she told her cousins when the first Roman candle flew up into the sky and burst into showering brightness that made the moon look wan.

Scarlett hobbled Wednesday morning. Her feet were swollen and bruised. “Don’t be silly,” she said when Kathleen exclaimed about the condition of her feet, “I had a wonderful time.” She sent Kathleen downstairs as soon as her corset was laced. She didn’t want to talk yet about all the pleasures of Saint Patrick’s Day; she wanted to turn over the memories slowly, by herself. It didn’t really make any difference if she was a little late for breakfast; she wouldn’t be walking to the Market today anyhow. She’d just leave off stockings and wear her felt house slippers and stay in.

There certainly were a lot of steps from the third floor down to the kitchen. Scarlett had never noticed how many when she was running down them. Now each one meant a stab of pain if she didn’t carefully ease her weight down. No matter. It was worth staying in for a day—or even two—to have had the joyful dancing. Maybe she could ask Katie to shut the cow in her shed. Scarlett was afraid of cows, she always had been, all her life. If Katie shut it up, though, she could sit outside in the yard. The spring air smelled so fresh an sweet through the open windows that she longed to be out in it.

There . . . almost to the parlor floor. I’m over halfway. I wish I could go faster. I’m hungry.

As Scarlett gingerly lowered her right foot to the first step on the final flight of stairs to the kitchen, the smell of frying fish rose up to meet her. Damn, she thought, it’s no-meat time again. What I’d really like is some nice thick bacon.

Suddenly, without warning, her stomach contracted and her throat filled. Scarlett turned in panic and lurched to the window. She held on to the open curtains with frantic grasping hands while she leaned out of the window and vomited into the thick green leaves of the young magnolia tree in the yard. She was sick again and again until she was weak, and her face was wet with tears and clammy sweat. Then she slid helplessly down into a huddled miserable heap on the hall floor.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, but the feeble gesture did nothing to erase the sour, bitter taste inside. If only I could have a drink of water, she thought. Her stomach contracted in response, and she gagged.

Scarlett put her hands over her middle and wept. I must have eaten something gone to poison in the heat yesterday. I’m going to die right here, like a dog. She took short panting breaths. If only she could loosen her stays; they were cramping her aching stomach, cutting off the air she needed. The rigid whalebones felt like a cruel iron cage.

She had never in all her life felt so sick.

She could hear the family’s voices from below, Maureen asking where she was, Kathleen saying she’d be down any minute. Then a door banged, and she heard Colum. He was asking for her, too. Scarlett clenched her teeth. She had to get up. She had to go downstairs. She would not be discovered like this, bawling like a baby because she had partied too much. She wiped the tears from her face with the hem of her skirt, and pulled herself upright.

“There she is,” Colum said when Scarlett appeared in the doorway. Then he hurried to her. “Poor little Scarlett darling, you look like you’re walking on broken glass. Here, let me put you at ease.” He picked her up before she could say a word and carried her to the chair that Maureen quickly pulled up close to the hearth.

Everyone bustled about, their breakfast forgotten, and in only seconds Scarlett found herself with her feet on a cushion and a cup of tea in her hands. She blinked back the tears in her eyes, tears of weakness and happiness. It was so nice to be taken care of, to be loved. She felt a thousand times better now. She took a cautious small sip of tea, and it was good.

She had a second cup, then a third and a piece of toast. But she averted her eyes from the fried fish and potatoes. No one seemed to notice. There was too much hubbub getting the children’s books and lunchbags sorted out and shooing them off to school.

When the door closed behind them, Jamie kissed Maureen on the lips, Scarlett on the top of her head, Kathleen on her cheek. “I’ll be off to the store now,” he said. “The bunting must come down and the headache remedy must be put on the counter where all the sufferers can get to it easy. Celebrating is a fine thing, but the day after can be a fearsome burden.”

Scarlett bent her head to hide her blushing face.

“Now you just stay as you are, Scarlett,” Maureen ordered. “Kathleen and I will have the kitchen cleared in no time, then we’ll go to the Market while you have a little rest. Colum O’Hara, you stay where you are, too; I don’t want your big boots getting in my way. I want you under my eye, too; it’s little enough I get to see of you. If it wasn’t for Old Katie Scarlett’s birthday, I’d beg you not to leave so soon for Ireland.”

“Katie Scarlett?” said Scarlett.

Maureen dropped the sudsy cloth she was holding. “And did no one think to tell you?” she said. “Your grandmother that you were named for is going to be a century old next month.”

“And still as sharp-tongued as when she was a girl,” Colum chuckled. “It’s something for all the O’Haras to pride themselves on.”

“I’ll be home for the feast,” Kathleen said. She glowed with happiness.

“Oh, I wish I could go,” Scarlett said. “Pa used to tell so many stories about her.”

“But you can, Scarlett darling. And think what a joy for the old woman.”

Kathleen and Maureen rushed to Scarlett’s side, urging, encouraging, persuading, until Scarlett was giddy. Why not? she asked herself.

When Rhett came for her, she would have to go back to Charleston. Why not put it off a little longer? She hated Charleston. The drab dresses, the interminable calls and committees, the walls of politeness that shut her out, the walls of decaying houses and broken gardens that shut her in. She hated the way Charlestonians talked—the flat, drawn-out vowels, the private language of cousins and ancestors; the words and phrases in French and Latin and God only knew what other languages, the way they all knew places she’d never been and people she’d never heard of and books she’d never read. She hated their society—the dance cards and receiving lines and the unspoken rules that she was supposed to know and didn’t, the immorality that they accepted, and the hypocrisy that condemned her for sins she never committed.

I don’t want to wear colorless dresses and say “yes ma’am” to old biddies whose grandfather on their mother’s side was some famous Charleston hero or something. I don’t want to spend ever single Sunday morning listening to my aunts picking at each other. I don’t want to have to think the Saint Cecilia Ball is the be-all and end-all of life. I like Saint Patrick’s Day better.

Scarlett laughed aloud. “I’m going to go!” she said. Suddenly she felt wonderful, even in her stomach. She stood up to hug Maureen and she barely noticed the pain in her feet.

Charleston could wait until she got back. Rhett could wait, too. Lord knows she’d waited for him often enough. Why shouldn’t she visit the rest of her O’Hara kin? It was only two weeks and a day on a great sailing ship to that other Tara. And she’d be Irish and happy for a while yet before she settled down to Charleston’s rules.

Her tender, wounded feet tapped out the rhythm of a reel.

Only two days later, she was able to dance for hours at the party to celebrate Stephen’s return from Boston. And not long after that, she found herself in an open carriage with Colum and Kathleen, on her way to the docks along Savannah’s riverfront.

It had been no trouble at all to get ready. Americans did not need passports for entrance to the British Isles. They didn’t even need letters of credit, but Colum insisted that she get one from her banker. “Just in case,” Colum said. He didn’t say in case of what. Scarlett didn’t care. She was intoxicated with the adventure of it all.

“You’re sure we’ll not miss our boat, Colum?” Kathleen fretted. “You were late coming for us. Jamie and them left an hour ago to walk over.”

“I’m sure, I’m sure,” Colum soothed. He winked at Scarlett. “And if I was tardy a bit, it was no fault of mine, seeing that Big Tom MacMahon wanted to pledge his promise about the Bishop in a glass or two, and I couldn’t insult the man.”

“If we miss our boat, I’ll die,” Kathleen moaned.

“Whist, stop your worrying, Kathleen mavourneen. The captain won’t sail without us; Seamus O’Brien’s a friend of many years’ standing. But he’ll be no friend of yours if you call the Brian Boru a boat. A ship she is, and a fine shining vessel she is, too. You’ll see for yourself soon enough.”

At that moment the carriage turned beneath an arch, and they plunged, skidding and jolting, down a dark, slippery, cobblestoned ramp. Kathleen screamed. Colum laughed. Scarlett was breathless from the thrill of it.

Then they were at the river. The tumult and color and chaos were even more exciting than the precipitous ride down to it. Ships of every size and kind were tied up to jutting wooden piers, more ships than she’d ever seen in Charleston. Loaded wagons pulled by heavy dray horses rattled wooden or iron wheels over the wide cobbled street in a constant din. Men shouted. Barrels rolled down wooden chutes onto wooden decks with a deafening clatter. A steamship blew its piercing whistle; another rang its clangorous bell. A row of barefooted loaders moved across a gangplank, carrying bales of cotton and singing. Flags in bright colors and gaudy decorated pennants snapped in the wind. Gulls swooped and squawked.

Their driver stood up and cracked his whip. The buggy jerked forward, scattering a crowd of gaping pedestrians. Scarlett laughed into the gusty wind. They careened around a phalanx of barrels awaiting loading, clattered past a slow-moving dray, and pulled to a jouncing halt.

“I hope you’re not expecting to be paid extra for the white hairs you’ve put on my head,” Colum said to the driver. He jumped down and held up his hand to Kathleen to help her down.

“You’ve not forgotten my box, Colum?” she said.

“All the traps are here betimes, darling. Go on over, now, and give your cousins a kiss to say goodbye.” He pointed towards Maureen. “You can’t miss that red hair shining like a beacon.”

When Kathleen ran off, he spoke quietly to Scarlett. “You’ll not forget what I told you about the name, now, Scarlett darling?”

“I won’t forget.” She smiled, enjoying the harmless conspiracy.

“You’ll be Scarlett O’Hara and no other on this voyage and in Ireland,” he had told her with a wink. “It’s nothing to do with you or yours, Scarlett darling, but Butler is a powerful famous name in Ireland, and all of its fame is heinous.”

Scarlett didn’t mind at all. She was going to enjoy being an O’Hara for as long as she could.

The Brian Boru was, as Colum had promised, a fine, shining ship. Her hull was gleaming white with gilt scroll trim. Gilt trimmed the emerald-colored cover of the gigantic paddle wheels as well, and her name in gilt letters two feet high was painted on them in a frame of gilt arrows. The Union Jack flew from her flagstaff, but a green silk banner decorated with a golden harp waved boldly from her forward mast. She was a luxury passenger ship, catering to the expensive tastes of rich Americans who travelled to Ireland for sentiment—to see the villages where emigrant grandfathers were born—or for show—to visit, in all their finery, the villages where they had been born. The public rooms and staterooms were oversized and overdecorated. The crew was trained to satisfy every whim. There was a disproportionately large hold, compared to the usual passenger ship, because Irish-Americans carried with them gifts for all their relatives and returned with multiple souvenirs of their visits. The baggage handlers treated every trunk and every crate as if it were full of glass. Often it was. It was not unknown for prosperous third-generation American Irish wives to light every room in their new houses with Waterford crystal chandeliers.

A broad platform with sturdy railings was built across the top of the paddle wheel on which Scarlett stood with Colum and a handful of adventurous passengers to wave a final goodbye to her cousins. There’d been time only for hasty farewells on the dock because the Brian Boru had to catch the outgoing tide. She blew excited kisses to the massed O’Haras. There’d been no school this morning for the children, and Jamie had even closed the store for an hour so that he and Daniel could come down and see them off.

Slightly behind and to one side of the others stood quiet Stephen. He raised his hand once in a signal to Colum.

It signified that Scarlett’s trunks had been opened and repacked en route to the ship. Among the layers of tissue paper and petticoats and frocks and gowns were the tightly wrapped, oiled rifles and the boxes of ammunition he had purchased in Boston.

Like their fathers and grandfathers and generations before them, Stephen, Jamie, Matt, Colum, and even Uncle James were all militantly opposed to English rule over Ireland. For more than two hundred years the O’Haras had risked their lives to fight, sometimes even kill, their foes, in abortive, ill-fated small actions. Only in the past ten years had an organization begun to grow. Disciplined and dangerous, financed from America, the Fenians were becoming known throughout Ireland. They were heroes to the Irish peasant, anathema to English landowners, and to English military forces revolutionaries fit only for death.

Colum O’Hara was the most successful fund-raiser and one of the foremost clandestine leaders of the Fenian Brotherhood.