Scarlett

by Alexandra Ripley

  Colum’s face was only a pale blur in the shadows. His collar was startlingly white. “Come where we can see,” he said quietly, and he walked to a place where thin slats of sunlight slanted down from the boarded-over windows.

  Scarlett couldn’t believe her eyes. Colum was smiling at her. “Ach, the pity of it is, if we’d had the inn this would never have happened. I wanted to keep you out of it, Scarlett darling, it’s a worrisome thing once you know.”

  How could he smile? How did he dare? She started, too horrified to speak.

  Colum told her about the Fenian Brotherhood.

  When he finished, she found her voice. “Judas! You filthy, lying traitor. I trusted you. I thought you my friend.”

  “I said it was a worrisome thing.”

  She felt too heartsick to be angry at his smiling, rueful response. Everything was a betrayal, all of it. He’d been using her, deceiving her from the moment they met. They all had—Jamie and Maureen, all her cousins in Savannah and Ireland, all the farmers on Ballyhara, all the people in Ballyhara town. Even Mrs. Fitz. Her happiness was a delusion. Everything was a delusion.

  “Will you listen now, Scarlett?” She hated Colum’s voice, the music of it, the charm. I won’t listen. Scarlett tried to close her ears, but his words crept between her fingers. “Remember your South, with the boots of the conqueror upon her, and think of Ireland, her beauty and her life’s blood in the murdering hands of the enemy. They stole our language from us. Teaching a child to speak Irish is a crime in this land. Can you not see it, Scarlett, if your Yankees were speaking in words you did not know, words you learned at the point of a sword because ‘stop’ must be a word you knew to the very pit of your knowing, else you would be killed for not stopping. And then your child being taught her tongue by those same Yankees, and your child’s tongue not your own so that she knew not what words of love you said to her, you knew not what need she told you in the Yankee tongue and could not give her her desire. The English robbed us of our language and with that robbing they took our children from us.

  “They took our land, which is our mother. They left us nothing when our children and our mother were lost. We knew defeat in our souls.

  “Do you but think of it now, Scarlett, when your Tara was being taken from you. You battled for it, you’ve told me how. With all your will, all your heart, all your wit, all your might. Were lies needed, you could lie, deceptions, you could deceive, murder, you could kill. So it is with us who battle for Ireland.

  “And yet we are more fortunate than you. Because we have yet time for the sweetnesses of life. For music and dance and love. You know what it is to love, Scarlett. I watched the growth and the blossoming with your babe. Do you not see that love feeds without gluttony on itself, that love is an always brimming cup, from which drinking fills again and still more.

  “So it is with our love for Ireland and her people. You are loved by me, Scarlett, by us all. You are not unloved because Ireland is our love of loves. Must you not care for your friends because you care for your child? One does not deny the other. You thought I was your friend, you say, your brother. And so I am, Scarlett, and will be until time ends. Your happiness gladdens me, your sorrow is my grief. And yet Ireland is my soul; I can hold nothing traitorous if it be done to free her from her bondage. But she does not take away the love I have for you; she makes it more.”

  Scarlett’s hands had slid on their own volition from her ears down to where they now hung limply by her sides. Colum had enthralled her as he always did when he spoke that way, though she understood no more than half of what he was saying. She felt as if she were somehow wrapped ’round in gossamer which warmed and bound at the same time.

  The unconscious man on the floor groaned. Scarlett looked at Colum with fear. “Is that man a Fenian?”

  “Yes. He’s on the run. A man he thought his friend denounced him to the English.”

  “You gave him that gun.” It was not a question.

  “Yes, Scarlett. You see, I keep no more secrets from you. I have concealed weapons throughout this English church. I am the armorer for the Brotherhood. When the day arrives, as soon it will, many thousands of Irishmen will be armed for the uprising, and those arms will come from this English place.”

  “When?” Scarlett dreaded his reply.

  “There’s no date set. We need five more shipments, six if it can be done.”

  “That’s what you do in America.”

  “It is. I raise the money, with help from many, then others find a way to buy weapons with it, and I bring them into Ireland.”

  “On the Brian Boru.”

  “And others.”

  “You’re going to shoot the English.”

  “Yes. We will be more merciful, though. They have killed our women and children as well as our men. We will kill soldiers. A soldier is paid to die.”

  “But you’re a priest,” she said, “you can’t kill.”

  Colum was still for several minutes. Dust motes turned lazily in the stripes of light from the window to his bowed head. When he lifted it, Scarlett saw that his eyes were dark with sorrow.

  “When I was a boy of eight,” he said, “I watched the wagons of wheat and the droves of cattle on the road from Adamstown toward Dublin and the English banquet tables there. I also watched my sister die of hunger because she was but two years old and had no strength to carry her without food. Three, my brother was, and he, too, had too little strength. The smallest always were the first to die. They cried because they were hungry and were too young to understand when they were told there was no food. I understood, for I was eight and wiser. And I did not cry because I knew that crying uses strength needed to survive without food. Another brother died, he was seven, and then the six-year-old and the one who was five, and to my eternal shame I have forgot which was the girl and which the boy. My mother went then, but I have always thought she died more from the pain of her broken heart than from the pain of her empty belly.

  “It takes many months to starve to death, Scarlett. It is not a merciful death. For all those months the wagons of food rolled past us.” Colum’s voice sounded lifeless. Then it livened.

  “I was a likely lad. Once ten, and the Famine years past and with food to fill me, I was quick at my studies, good at my books. Our priest thought me full of promise and he told my father that perhaps, with diligence, I might in time be accepted in the seminary. My father gave me everything he could give. My older brothers did more than their share of work on the farm so that I need do none and could be diligent at my books. No one grudged me for ’tis a great honor to a family to have a son who is a priest. And I took from them without thought for I had pure, encompassing faith in the goodness of God and the wisdom of Holy Mother Church, which I believed to be a vocation, a call to the priesthood.” His voice rose.

  “Now I will learn the answer, I believed. The seminary contains many holy books and holy men and all the wisdom of the Church. I studied and I prayed and I searched. I found ecstasy in prayer, knowledge in studies. But not the knowledge I was seeking. ‘Why?’ I asked my teachers, ‘why must little children die from hunger?’ But the only answer given me was, ‘Trust in God’s wisdom and have faith in His love.’ ”

  Colum raised his arms above his tortured face, raised his voice to a shout. “God, my Father, I feel Your presence and Your almighty power. But I cannot see Your face. Why have You turned away from Your people the Irish??” His arms dropped.

  “There is no answer, Scarlett,” he said brokenly, “there has never been an answer. But I saw a vision, and I have followed it. In my vision the starving children came together and their weakness was less weak in their numbers. They rose up in their thousands, their fleshless small arms reaching out, and they overturned the carts heaped with food, and they did not die. It is my vocation now to turn over those carts, to drive out the English from their banqueting tables, to give Ireland the love and mercy that God has denied her.”

  Scarlett gasped at his blasph
emy. “You’ll go to Hell.”

  “I am in Hell! When I see soldiers mocking a mother who must beg to buy food for her children, it is a vision from Hell. When I see old men pushed into the muck of the street so that soldiers will have the sidewalks, I see Hell. When I see evictions, floggings, the groaning carts of grain passing the family with a square meter of potatoes to keep them from death, I say that all Ireland is Hell, and I will gladly suffer death and then torment for all eternity to spare the Irish one hour of Hell on earth.”

  Scarlett was shaken by his vehemence. She groped for understanding. Suppose she hadn’t been there when the English came with the battering ram to Daniel’s house? Suppose all her money was gone, and Cat was hungry? Suppose the English soldiers really were like Yankees and stole her animals and burned the fields she’d watched greening?

  She knew what it was to be helpless before an army. She knew the feeling of hunger. They were memories no amount of gold could ever quite erase.

  “How can I help you?” she asked Colum. He was fighting for Ireland, and Ireland was the home of her people and her child.

  68

  The ship captain’s wife was a stout, red-faced woman who took one look at Cat and held out her arms. “Will she come to me?” Cat reached out in reply. Scarlett was sure Cat was interested in the eyeglasses hanging on a chain around the woman’s neck, but she didn’t say so. She loved to hear Cat admired, and the captain’s wife was doing just that. “What a little beauty she is—no, sweetheart, they go on your nose, not in your mouth—with such lovely olive skin. Was her father Spanish?”

  Scarlett thought quickly. “Her grandmother,” she said.

  “How nice.” She extracted the glasses from Cat’s fingers and substituted a ship’s biscuit.

  “I’m a grandmother four times over, it’s the most wonderful thing in the world. I started sailing with the captain when the children were grown because I couldn’t stand the empty house. But now there’s the added pleasure of the grandchildren. We’ll go to Philadelphia for cargo after Savannah, and I’ll have two days there with my daughter and her two.”

  She’s going to talk me to death before we’re out of the bay, Scarlett thought. I’ll never be able to stand two weeks of this.

  She discovered very soon that she needn’t have worried. The captain’s wife repeated the same things so often that Scarlett had only to nod and say “My goodness” at intervals without listening at all. And the older woman was wonderful with Cat. Scarlett could take her exercise on deck without worry about the baby.

  She did her best thinking then, with the salt wind in her face. Mostly she planned. She had a lot to do. She had to find a buyer for her store. And there was the house on Peachtree Street. Rhett paid for the upkeep, but it was ridiculous to have it sitting there empty when she’d never use it again . . .

  So she’d sell the Peachtree Street house and the store. And the saloon. That was sort of too bad. The saloon produced excellent income and was no trouble at all. But she’d made up her mind to cut herself free of Atlanta, and that included the saloon.

  What about the houses she was building? She didn’t know anything at all about that project. She had to check and make sure the builder was still using Ashley’s lumber . . .

  She had to make sure Ashley was all right. And Beau. She’d promised Melanie.

  Then, when she was done with Atlanta, she would go to Tara. That must be last. Because once Wade and Ella learned they were going home with her, they’d be anxious to get going. It wouldn’t be fair to keep them dangling. And saying goodbye to Tara would be the hardest thing she had to do. Best to do it quickly; it wouldn’t hurt so much then. Oh, how she longed to see it.

  The long slow miles up the Savannah River from the sea to the city seemed to go on forever. The ship had to be towed by a steampowered tugboat through the channel. Scarlett walked restlessly from one side of the deck to the other with Cat in her arms, trying to enjoy the baby’s excited reaction to the marsh birds’ sudden eruption into flight. They were so close now, why couldn’t they get there? She wanted to see America, hear American voices.

  At last. There was the city. And the docks. “Oh, and listen, Cat, listen to the singing. Those are black folks’ songs, this is the South, feel the sun? It will last for days and days. Oh, my darling, my Cat, Momma’s home.”

  Maureen’s kitchen was just as it had been, nothing had changed. The family was the same. The affection. The swarms of O’Hara children. Patricia’s baby was a boy, almost a year old, and Katie was pregnant. Cat was embraced at once into the daily rhythms of the three-house home. She regarded the other children with curiosity, pulled their hair, submitted to hers being pulled, became one of them.

  Scarlett was jealous. She won’t miss me at all, and I cannot bear to leave her, but I have to. Too many people in Atlanta know Rhett and might tell him about her. I’d kill him before I’d let him take her from me. I can’t take her with me. I have no choice. The sooner I go, the sooner I’ll be back. And I’ll bring her own brother and sister as a gift for her.

  She sent telegrams to Uncle Henry Hamilton at his office, and to Pansy at the house on Peachtree Street, and took the train for Atlanta on the twelfth of May. She was both excited and nervous. She’d been gone so long—anything might have happened. She wouldn’t fret about it now, she’d find out soon enough. In the meantime she’d simply enjoy the hot Georgia sun and the pleasure of being all dressed up. She’d had to wear mourning on the ship, but now she was radiant in emerald green Irish linen.

  But Scarlett had forgotten how dirty American trains were. The spittoons at each end of the car were soon surrounded by evil-smelling tobacco juice. The aisle became a filthy debris trap before twenty miles were done. A drunk lurched unevenly past her seat and she suddenly realized that she should not be travelling alone. Why, anybody at all could move my little hand valise and sit next to me! We do things an awful lot better in Ireland. First Class means what it says. Nobody intrudes on you in your own little compartment. She opened the Savannah newspaper as a shield. Her pretty linen suit was already rumpled and dusty.

  The hubbub at the Atlanta Depot and the shouting daredevil drivers in the maelstrom at Five Points made Scarlett’s heart race with excitement, and she forgot the grime of the train. How alive it all was, and vital, and always changing. There were buildings she’d never seen before, new names above old storefronts, noise and hurry and push.

  She looked eagerly out the window of her carriage at the houses on Peachtree Street, identifying the owners to herself, noting the signs of better times for them. The Merriwethers had a new roof, the Meades a new color paint. Things weren’t nearly as shabby as they’d been when she left a year and a half back.

  And there was her house! Oh. I don’t remember it being so crowded on the lot like that. There’s hardly any yard at all. Was it always so close to the street? For pity’s sake, I’m just being silly. What difference does it make? I’ve already decided to sell it anyhow.

  This was no time to sell, said Uncle Henry Hamilton. The depression was no better, business was bad everywhere. The hardest hit market of all was real estate, and the hardest hit real estate was the big places like hers. People were moving down, not up.

  The little houses, now, like the ones she’d been building on the edge of town, they were selling as fast as people could put them up. She was making a fortune there. Why did she want to sell anyhow? It wasn’t as if the house cost her anything, Rhett paid all the bills with money left over, too.

  He’s looking at me like I smelled bad or something, Scarlett thought. He blames me for the divorce. For a moment she felt like protesting, telling her side of the story, telling what had really happened. Uncle Henry was the only one left who was on my side. Without him there won’t be a soul in Atlanta who doesn’t look down on me.

  And it doesn’t matter a bit. The idea burst in her mind like a Roman candle. Henry Hamilton’s wrong in judging me just like everybody else in Atlanta was wrong in judging
me. I’m not like them, and I don’t want to be. I’m different, I’m me. I’m The O’Hara.

  “If you don’t want to bother with selling my property, I won’t take it against you, Henry,” she said. “Just tell me so.” There was a simple dignity in her manner.

  “I’m an old man, Scarlett. It would probably be better for you to hook up with a younger lawyer.”

  Scarlett rose from her chair, held out her hand, smiled with real fondness for him. It was only after she was gone that he could put words to the difference in her. “Scarlett’s grown up. She didn’t call me ‘Uncle Henry.’ ”

  “Is Mrs. Butler at home?”

  Scarlett recognized Ashley’s voice immediately. She hurried from the sitting room into the hall; a quick gesture of her hand dismissed the maid who’d answered the door. “Ashley, dear, I’m so happy to see you.” She held out both her hands to him.

  He clasped them tightly in his, looking down at her. “Scarlett, you’ve never looked lovelier. Foreign climates agree with you. Tell me where you’ve been, what you’ve been doing. Uncle Henry said you’d gone to Savannah, then he lost touch. We all wondered.”

  I’ll just bet you all wondered, especially your adder-tongued old sister, she thought. “Come in and sit down,” she said, “I’m dying to hear all the news.”

  The maid was hovering to one side. Scarlett said quietly as she passed her, “Bring us a pot of coffee and some cakes.”

  She led the way into the sitting room, took one corner of a settee, patted the seat beside her. “Sit here beside me, Ashley, do. I want to look at you.” Thank the Lord, he’s lost that hangdog look he had. Henry Hamilton must have been right when he said that Ashley was doing fine. Scarlett studied him through lowered lashes while she busied herself clearing room on a table for the coffee tray. Ashley Wilkes was still a handsome man. His thin aristocratic features had become more distinguished with age. But he looked older than his years. He can’t be more than forty, Scarlett thought, and his hair’s more silver than gold. He must spend a lot more time in the lumberyard than he used to, he’s got a nice color to his skin, not that office gray look he had before. She looked up with a smile. It was good to see him. Especially looking so fit. Her obligation to Melanie didn’t seem so burdensome now.