Scarlett

by Alexandra Ripley

  “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.”