Scarlett

by Alexandra Ripley

  “I don’t understand. What do I have to do?”

  “You’ve already done it. You’re respected and admired, trusted and honored. The title’s awarded, not inherited. You have only to be what you are. You are The O’Hara.”

  “I think I’ll have a cup of tea,” said Scarlett weakly. She didn’t know what Mrs. Fitzpatrick was talking about. Was she joking? Mocking? No, she could tell this was not a woman who made jokes. What did it mean, “The” O’Hara? Scarlett tried it silently on her tongue. The O’Hara. It was like a drumbeat. Deep, hidden, buried, primitive, something within her kindled. The O’Hara. A light grew in her pale tired eyes, making them glow green, fire emerald. The O’Hara.

  I’ll have to think about that tomorrow . . . and every day for the rest of my life. Oh, I feel so different, so strong. “. . . only be what you are . . .” she said. What does that mean? The O’Hara.

  “Your tea, Mrs. O’Hara.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Fitzpatrick.” Somehow the intimidating self-confidence of the older woman had become admirable, not irritating. Scarlett took the cup and looked into the other woman’s eyes. “Please have some tea with me,” she said. “We need to talk about a cook and other things. We have only six weeks, and a lot to do.”

  Scarlett had never been in the Big House. Mrs. Fitzpatrick hid her astonishment and her own curiosity about it. She’d been housekeeper to a prominent family, directress of a very big house, but it had not approached the Big House at Ballyhara in magnificence. She helped Scarlett turn the huge tarnished brass key in the great rusted lock and threw her weight against the door. “Mildew,” she said when the smell hit them. “We’ll need an army of women with pails and scrubbing brushes. Let’s have a look at the kitchen first. No cook worth having is going to come to a house without a first-class kitchen. This part of the house can be done later. Just ignore the paper falling off the walls and the animal droppings on the floor. The cook won’t even see these rooms.”

  Curved colonnades connected two large wing buildings to the main block of the house. They followed the one to the east first and found themselves in a large corner room. Doors opened onto interior corridors that led to more rooms and a staircase to yet more rooms. “You’ll put your steward to work here,” said Mrs. Fitzpatrick when they returned to the large corner room. “The other rooms will do for servants and storerooms. Stewards do not live in the Big House; you’ll have to give him a dwelling in the town, a large one, in keeping with his position as manager of the estate. This is obviously the Estate Office.”

  Scarlett didn’t reply at once. She was seeing another office in her mind, and the wing of another Big House. “Bachelor guests” had used the wing at Dunmore Landing, Rhett had said. Well, she didn’t plan to have a dozen rooms’ worth of bachelor guests, or any other kind of guests. But she could certainly use an office, just like Rhett’s. She’d get the carpenter to make her a big desk, twice as big as Rhett’s, and she’d hang the estate maps on the walls, and she’d look out the window just the way he did. But she would see the cleancut stones of Ballyhara, not a pile of burnt bricks, and she’d have fields of wheat, not a passel of flower bushes.

  “I’ll be the steward at Ballyhara, Mrs. Fitzpatrick. I don’t intend to have a stranger manage my place.”

  “I mean no disrespect, Mrs. O’Hara, but you don’t know what you’re saying. It’s a full-time occupation. Not only maintaining the stores and supplies, but also listening to complaints and settling disputes between workers and farmers and the people of the town.”

  “I’ll do it. We’ll put benches along that hallway for people to sit on, and I’ll see anyone with a problem on the first Sunday of every month after Mass.” Scarlett’s firm jaw told the housekeeper that there was no point in arguing.

  “And Mrs. Fitzpatrick—there will be no spittoons, is that clear?”

  Mrs. Fitzpatrick nodded, even though she had never heard the word before. In Ireland, tobacco was smoked in a pipe, not chewed.

  “Good,” said Scarlett. “Now let’s find this kitchen you’re so worried about. It must be in the other wing.”

  “Do you feel up to walking all that way?” asked Mrs. Fitzpatrick.

  “It has to be done,” said Scarlett. Walking was torture for her feet and her back, but there was no question about doing it. She was appalled by the condition of the house. How would it ever be done in six weeks? It has to be, that’s all. The baby must be born in the Big House.

  “Magnificent,” was Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s pronouncement about the kitchen. The room was cavernous and two stories high, with broken skylights in the roof. Scarlett was sure she’d never been in a ballroom half as large. A tremendous stone chimney nearly covered the wall at the far end of the room. Doors on each side of it led to a stonesinked scullery on the north side, an empty room on the south. “The cook can sleep here, that’s good and that”—Mrs. Fitzpatrick pointed upward—“is the most intelligent arrangement I’ve ever seen.” A balustraded gallery ran the length of the kitchen wall at the second-story level. “The rooms above the cook’s and the scullery will be mine. The kitchen maids and the cook will never know when I might be watching them. That should keep them alert. The gallery must connect to the second floor of the house itself. You can come over, too, to see what’s going on in the kitchen below. They’ll keep working all the time.”

  “Why couldn’t I just go in the kitchen and see?”

  “Because they’d stop working to curtsey and wait for orders while the food scorched.”

  “You keep talking about ‘they’ and ‘maids,’ Mrs. Fitzpatrick. What happened to the cook? I thought we were going to get one woman.”

  Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s hand gestured to the expanses of floor and wall and windows. “One woman couldn’t manage all this. No competent woman would try. I’d like to see the storerooms and laundry, probably in the basement. Do you want to come down?”

  “Not really. I’ll sit outside, away from the smell.” She found a door. It led out into an overgrown walled garden. Scarlett backed into the kitchen. A second door opened onto the colonnade. She lowered herself to the paved floor and leaned against a column. A heavy fatigue pressed on her. She’d no idea the house would need so much work. From the outside it looked as if it was almost intact.

  The baby kicked and she absentmindedly pushed the foot or whatever back down. “Hey, little baby,” she murmured, “what do you think of this? They’re calling your mother ‘The O’Hara.’ I hope you’re impressed. I sure am.” Scarlett closed her eyes to take it all in.

  Mrs. Fitzpatrick came out, brushing cobwebs from her clothes. “It will do,” she said succinctly. “Now what we both need is a good meal. We’ll go to Kennedy’s bar.”

  “The bar? Ladies don’t go unescorted to bars.”

  Mrs. Fitzpatrick smiled. “It’s your bar, Mrs. O’Hara. You can go there whenever you please. You can go anywhere at all, whenever you like. You are The O’Hara.”

  Scarlett turned the thought over in her mind. This wasn’t Charleston or Atlanta. Why shouldn’t she go to the bar? Hadn’t she nailed down half the floorboards herself? And didn’t everyone say that Mrs. Kennedy, the barkeeper’s wife, made a pastry for her meat pies that would melt in your mouth?

  The weather turned rainy, not the brief showers or misty days that Scarlett had gotten used to, but real torrents of rain that lasted sometimes for three to four hours. The farmers complained about the soil compacting if they walked on the newly cleared fields to spread the cartloads of manure Scarlett had bought. But Scarlett, forcing herself to walk daily to check the progress at the Big House, blessed the mud on the ungravelled drive because it cushioned her swollen feet. She gave up boots altogether and kept a bucket of water inside her front door to rinse her feet when she came in. Colum laughed when he saw it. “The Irish in you is strengthening every day, Scarlett darling. Did you learn that from Kathleen?”

  “From the cousins when they came in from the fields. They always washed the earth off their feet. I
figured it was because Kathleen would be mad if they tracked up her clean floor.”

  “Not a bit of it. They did it because Irishmen—and women too—have done it as long as anyone’s great-grandfather can remember. Do you shout ‘seachain’ before you throw the water out?”

  “Don’t be silly, of course not. I don’t put a bowl of milk on the doorstep every night either. I don’t believe I’m likely to drench any fairies or give them supper. That’s all childish superstition.”

  “So you say. But one day a pooka’s going to get you for your insolence.” He looked nervously under her bed and pillow.

  Scarlett had to laugh. “All right, I’ll bite, Colum. What’s a pooka? Second cousin to a leprechaun, I suppose.”

  “The leprechauns would shudder at the suggestion. A pooka is a fearful creature, malicious and sly. He’ll curdle your cream in an instant or tangle your hair with your own brush.”

  “Or swell my ankles, I guess. That’s as malicious as anything I’ve ever been through.”

  “Poor lamb. How much longer?”

  “About three weeks. I’ve told Mrs. Fitzpatrick to clean out a room for me and order in a bed.”

  “Are you finding her helpful, Scarlett?”

  She had to admit she was. Mrs. Fitzpatrick wasn’t so taken with her position that she minded working hard herself. Plenty of times Scarlett had found her scrubbing the stone floor and stone sinks in the kitchen herself to show the maids how to do it.

  “But Colum, she’s been spending money like there’s no end to it. Three maids I’ve got up there already, just to get things nice enough so that a cook will be willing to come. And a stove the likes of which I’ve never seen, all kinds of burners and ovens and a well thing for hot water. It cost almost a hundred pounds, and ten more to haul it from the railroad. Then, after all that, nothing would do but to have the smith make all kinds of cranes and spits and hooks for the fireplace. Just in case the cook doesn’t like stove ovens for some things. Cooks must be more spoiled than the Queen.”

  “More useful, too. You’ll be glad when you sit down to your first good meal in your own dining room.”

  “So you say. I’m happy enough with Mrs. Kennedy’s meat pies. I ate three last night. One for me and two for this elephant inside me. Oh, I’ll be so happy when this is over . . . Colum?” He’d been away, and Scarlett didn’t feel as easy with him as she used to, but she needed to ask him anyhow. “Have you heard about this ‘The O’Hara’ business?”

  He had and he was proud of her and he thought it was deserved. “You’re a remarkable woman, Scarlett O’Hara. No one who knows you thinks otherwise. You’ve ridden over blows that would fell a lesser woman—or a man as well. And you’ve never moaned or asked pity.” He smiled roguishly. “You’ve done what’s near miraculous, too, getting all these Irish to work the way they have. And spitting in the eyes of the English officer—well, they say you put out the sight in one of them from a hundred paces.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “And why should a grand tale be tarnished by the truth? Old Daniel himself was the first who called you The O’Hara, and he was there.”

  Old Daniel? Scarlett flushed with pleasure.

  “You’ll be swapping stories with Finn MacCool’s ghost one day soon, to hear the talk. The whole countryside’s richer for having you here.” Colum’s light tone darkened. “There’s one thing I want to caution you about, Scarlett. Don’t turn up your nose at people’s beliefs; it’s insulting to them.”

  “I never do! I go to Mass every Sunday, even though Father Flynn looks like he might fall asleep any minute.”

  “I’m not speaking of the Church. I’m talking about the fairies and the pookas and that. One of the mighty deeds you’re praised for is moving back to the O’Hara land when everyone knows it’s haunted by the ghost of the young lord.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I can, and I am. It matters not whether you believe or not. The Irish people do. If you mock what they believe in, you’re spitting in their eyes.”

  Scarlett could see that, silly as it all was. “I’ll hold my tongue, and I won’t laugh, unless it’s at you, but I’m not going to holler before I empty the bucket.”

  “You don’t have to. They’re saying you’re so respectful you whisper real soft.”

  Scarlett laughed until she disturbed the baby and was kicked mightily. “Now look what you did, Colum. My insides are black and blue. But it’s worth it. I haven’t laughed like that since you went away. Stay home for a while, will you?”

  “That I will. I want to be one of the first to see this elephant child of yours. I’m hoping you’ll name me a godfather.”

  “Can you do that? I’m counting on you to baptize him or her or them.

  Colum’s smile vanished. “I cannot do that, Scarlett darling. Anything else you ask me, though it be to fetch you the moon for a bauble. I do not perform the sacraments.”

  “Whyever not? That’s your job.”

  “No, Scarlett, that’s the job of a parish priest or on special occasions a bishop or archbishop or more. I’m a missionary priest, working to ease the sufferings of the poor. I perform no sacraments.”

  “You could make an exception.”

  “That I could not, and that’s an end of it. But the grandest of godfathers I’ll be, if asked, and see to it that Father Flynn doesn’t drop the babe in the font or on the floor, and I’ll teach him his catechism with such eloquence that he’ll think he’s learning a limerick instead. Do ask me, Scarlett darling, or you’ll break my yearning heart.”

  “Of course I’ll ask you.”

  “Then I’ve got what I came for. Now I can go beg a meal in a house that adds salt.”

  “Go on, then. I’m going to rest until the rain stops then go see Grandmother and Kathleen while I can. The Boyne’s almost too high to ford already.”

  “One more promise, and I’ll stop fussing you. Stay in your house Saturday evening with your door shut tight and your curtains drawn. It’s All Hallows’ Eve, and the Irish believe all the fairies are out from all the time since the world began. And, as well, goblins and ghosts and spirits carrying their heads under their arms and all manner of unnatural things. Pay heed to the customs and close yourself in safe from seeing them. None of Mrs. Kennedy’s meat pies. Boil some eggs. Or, if you’re really feeling Irish, have a supper of whiskey washed down with ale.”

  “No wonder they see spooks! But I’ll do as you say. Why don’t you come over?”

  “And be in the house all night with a seductive lass like you? I’d have me collar taken away.”

  Scarlett stuck out her tongue at him. Seductive, indeed. To an elephant maybe.

  The trap wobbled alarmingly when she crossed the ford and she decided not to stay long at Daniel’s. Her grandmother was looking drowsy, so Scarlett didn’t sit down. “I just stopped in for a second, Grandmother, I won’t keep you from your nap.”

  “Come kiss me goodbye, then, Young Katie Scarlett. You’re a lovely girl to be sure.” Scarlett embraced the tough tiny body gently, kissed the old cheek firmly. Almost at once her Grandmother’s chin dropped on her chest.

  “Kathleen, I can’t stay long, the river’s rising so. By the time it’s down I doubt I’ll be able to get in the trap at all. Have you ever seen such a giant baby?”

  “Yes, I have, but you don’t want to hear it. Every baby’s the only baby is my observation of mothers. You’ll have a minute for a bite and a cup of tea?”

  “I shouldn’t but I will. May I take Daniel’s chair? It’s the biggest.”

  “You’re welcome to it. Daniel’s never been so warm towards any of us as he is to you.”

  The O’Hara, thought Scarlett. It warmed her even more than the tea and the smoke-smelling clean fire.

  “Have you the time to see Grandmother, Scarlett?” Kathleen put a stool beside Daniel’s chair with tea and cake on it.

  “I went there first. She’s napping now.”

  “That�
�s grand, then. It would be a pity if she missed telling you goodbye. She’s taken out her shroud from the box where she keeps her treasures. She’ll be dead ere long.”

  Scarlett stared at Kathleen’s serene face. How can she say things like that in the same tone of voice as talking about the weather or something? And then drink tea and eat cake as calm as you please?

  “We’re all hoping for a few dry days first,” Kathleen went on. “The roads are that deep in mud people will have trouble getting to the wake. But we’ll have to take what comes.” She noticed Scarlett’s horror and misinterpreted it.

  “We’ll all miss her, Scarlett, but she’s ready to go, and those that live as long as Old Katie Scarlett have a way of knowing when their time is on them. Let me fill your cup, what’s left must be cold.”

  It clattered in its saucer as Scarlett put it down. “I really can’t, Kathleen, I’ve got to cross the ford, I have to go.”

  “You’ll send word when the pains start? I’ll be happy to stay with you.”

  “I will, and thank you. Will you give me a hand up in the trap?”

  “Will you take a bit of cake for later? I can wrap it in no time.”

  “No, no, thank you, truly, but I’m worried about the water.”

  I’m more fretful about going crazy, Scarlett thought when she drove off.

  Colum was right, the Irish are all spook-minded. Who’d have thought it of Kathleen? And my own grandmother having a shroud all ready. Heaven only knows what they get up to on Halloween. I’m going to lock the door and nail it shut, too. This stuff is giving me the shivers.

  The pony lost its footing for a long terrifying moment crossing the ford.

  Might as well face it, no more travel for me until after the baby. I wish I’d accepted the cake.