Scarlett (109 page)

Still, it would be nice to hear about Atlanta folks. She knew, from the profits she was making, that the little houses were selling, so Ashley’s business must be good. What about Aunt Pittypat, though? And India? Had she dried up so much she was dust? And all those people who had once been so important to her so long ago? I wish I’d kept in touch with the aunts myself instead of leaving money with my lawyer to send them their allowance from. I was right not letting them know where I was, I was right to protect Cat from Rhett. But maybe he wouldn’t do anything now; look at the way he was at the Castle. If I write to Eulalie, I’ll get all the Charleston news from her. I’ll hear about Rhett. Could I bear it to hear that he and Anne are blissfully happy, raising racehorses and Butler babies? I don’t believe I want to know. I’ll let the aunts stay like they are.

All I’d get anyhow is a million crossed pages of lecturing, and I get enough lecturing from Mrs. Fitz to fill that hole. Maybe she’s right about giving some parties; it is a shame to have that house and all those servants standing idle. But she’s dead wrong about Cat. I don’t give a fig what Anglo mothers do, I’m not going to have a nanny running Cat’s life. I see little enough of her now, the way she’s always off at the stables or in the kitchen or wandering over the place or up a tree somewhere. And the idea of sending her away to some convent school is just plain crazy! When she’s old enough, the school in Ballyhara will do just fine. She’ll have friends there, too. It’s worrisome to me sometimes that she never wants to play with any other children… What on earth is going on? It’s not Market Day. Why’s the bridge all jammed up with people like this?

Scarlett leaned down from the buggy and touched a hurrying woman on the shoulder. “What’s happening?” The woman looked up. Her eyes were bright, her whole face excited.

“It’s a flogging. Better hurry, or you’ll miss it.”

A flogging. Scarlett didn’t want to see some poor devil of a soldier being whipped. She had an idea that flogging was punishment in the military. She tried to turn the buggy around, but the pushing, hurrying mass of people avid to see the spectacle caught her up in their press. Her horse was buffeted, her buggy rocked and pushed. The only thing she could do was get down and hold the bridle, soothe the horse with strokes and soft sounds, walking at the pace of the people around her.

When forward motion stopped, Scarlett could hear the whistling of the lash and the dreadful liquid sound it made when it landed. She wanted to cover her ears, but she needed her hands to gentle the frightened horse. It seemed to her that the ghastly noises went on forever.

“… one hundred. That’s it,” she heard, then the groaning disappointment of the mob. She held tightly on to the bridle; the pushing and shoving was worse than before as the crowd dispersed.

She didn’t shut her eyes until too late. She’d already seen the mutilated body, and the picture was burned on her brain. He was tied onto an upright spoked wheel, his wrists and ankles bound with leather thongs. A purple-stained blue shirt hung over his rough woolen pants from the waist, baring what must have once been a broad back. Now it was a giant red wound with loose red strips of flesh and skin hanging from it.

Scarlett turned her head into the horse’s mane. She felt sick. Her horse tossed his head nervously, throwing her away. There was a terrible sweet smell in the air.

She heard someone vomiting, and her stomach heaved. She leaned over as best she could without releasing the bridle and was sick onto the cobbles.

“All right then, lad, there’s no shame to losing your breakfast after a flogging. Go along to the pub and have a large whiskey. Marbury’ll help me cut him down.” Scarlett raised her head to look at the speaker, a British soldier in the uniform of a sergeant in the Guards. He was talking to an ashen-faced private. The private stumbled away. Another came forward to assist the sergeant. They cut the leather from behind the wheel, and the body fell into the blood-soaked mud beneath it.

That was green grass last week, Scarlett thought. This can’t be. That’s meant to be soft green grass.

“What about the wife, Sergeant?” A pair of soldiers were holding the arms of a silent, straining woman in a hooded black cloak.

“Let her go. It’s over. Let’s go. The cart will come later to take him away.”

The woman ran after the men. She caught the sergeant’s gold-striped sleeve. “Your officer promised I could bury him,” she cried. “He gave me his word.”

The sergeant shoved her away. “I only had orders for the flogging, the rest is none of my business. Leave me be, woman.”

The black-cloaked figure stood alone on the street, watching the soldiers walk into the bar. She made one sound, a shuddering sob. Then she turned and ran to the wheel, the blood-covered body. “Danny, oh Danny, oh my dear.” She crouched, then kneeled in the ghastly mud, trying to lift torn shoulders and lolling head into her lap. Her hood fell away, revealing a pale fine-boned face, neatly chignoned golden hair, blue eyes in shadowed circles of grief. Scarlett was frozen in place. To move, to clatter wheels over cobbles would be an obscene intrusion on the woman’s tragedy.

A dirty little boy ran barefoot across the square. “Can I have a button or something, lady? My ma wants a keepsake.” He shook the woman’s shoulder.

Scarlett raced over the cobbles, the blood-spattered grass, the edge of the churned mud. She grabbed the boy’s arm. He looked up, startled, mouth gaping. Scarlett slapped his face with all the strength in her arm. The sound of it was like the crack of a rifle shot. “Get out of here, you filthy little devil! Get out of here.” The boy ran, bawling with fear.

“Thank you,” said the wife of the man who had been beaten to death.

She was in it now, Scarlett knew. She had to do what little could be done. “I know a doctor in Trim,” she said. “I’ll go get him.”

“A doctor? Will he want to bleed him, do you think?” Her bitter, desperate words were English-accented, like the voices at the Castle balls.

“He’ll prepare your husband for burial,” said Scarlett quietly.

The woman’s bloody hand seized the hem of Scarlett’s skirt. She lifted it to her lips, an abject kiss of gratitude. Scarlett’s eyes clouded with tears. My God, I don’t deserve this. I would have turned the buggy if I could. “Don’t,” she said, “please don’t.”

The woman’s name was Harriet Stewart, her husband’s Daniel Kelly. That was all Scarlett knew until Daniel Kelly was in the closed coffin inside the Catholic Chapel. Then the widow, who had spoken only to answer the priest’s questions, looked around her with wild, darting eyes. “Billy, where’s Billy? He should be here.” The priest found out that there was a son, locked in a room at the hotel to keep him away from the flogging. “They were very kind,” said the woman, “they let me pay with my wedding ring, though it’s not gold.”

“I’ll bring him,” Scarlett said. “Father? You’ll take care of Mrs. Kelly?”

“That I will. Bring a bottle of brandy, too, Mrs. O’Hara. The poor lady’s near breaking.”

“I will not break down,” Harriet Kelly said. “I cannot. I must take care of my boy. He’s such a little boy, only eight.” Her voice was thin and brittle as new ice.

Scarlett hurried. Billy Kelly was a sturdy blond boy, big for his age, loud with anger. At his captivity behind the thick locked door. At the British soldiers. “I’ll get a rod of iron from a smithy and smash their heads till they shoot me,” he shouted. The innkeeper needed all his burly strength to hold the boy.

“Don’t be a fool, Billy Kelly!” Scarlett’s sharp words were like cold water thrown in the child’s face. “Your mother needs you, and you want to add to her grief. What kind of man are you?”

The innkeeper could release him then. The boy was still. “Where is my mother?” he said, and he sounded as young and frightened as he was.

“Come with me,” said Scarlett.

H
arriet Stewart Kelly’s story was revealed slowly. She and her son had been at Ballyhara for more than a week before Scarlett learned even the bare bones of it. Daughter of an English clergyman, Harriet had taken a post as assistant governess in the family of Lord Witley. She was well educated, for a woman, nineteen, and completely ignorant of the world.

One of her duties was to accompany the children of the house on their rides before breakfast. She fell in love with the white smile and playful lilting voice of the groom who also accompanied them. When he asked her to run away with him, she thought it the most romantic adventure in the world.

The adventure ended on the small farm of Daniel Kelly’s father. There were no references and so no jobs for a runaway groom or governess. Danny worked the stony fields with his father and brothers, Harriet did what his mother told her to do, for the most part scrubbing and darning. She had mastered fine embroidery as one of the accomplishments necessary to a lady. That Billy was her only child was testimony to the death of the romance. Danny Kelly missed the world of fine horses in grand stables and the dashing striped waistcoat, top hat, and tall leather boots that were a groom’s dress livery. He blamed Harriet for his fall from grace, consoled himself with whiskey. His family hated her because she was English, and Protestant.

Danny was arrested when he attacked an English officer in a bar. His family gave him up for dead when he was sentenced to a hundred stripes of the whip. They were already holding the wake when Harriet took Billy’s hand and a loaf of bread and set out to walk the twenty miles to Trim, the site of the insulted officer’s regimental barracks. She pled for her husband’s life. She was granted his body for burial.

“I’ll take my son to England, Mrs. O’Hara, if you will lend me the fare. My parents are dead, but I have cousins who might give us a home. I’ll repay you from my wages. I’ll find some kind of work.”

“What nonsense,” said Scarlett. “Haven’t you noticed that I have a little girl running wild as a woods colt? Cat needs a governess. Besides, she’s already attached herself to Billy like a shadow. She needs a friend even more. You’d be doing me a mighty big favor if you’d stay, Mrs. Kelly.”

It was true, as far as it went. What Scarlett didn’t say was that she had no confidence at all in Harriet’s ability to get herself on the right boat to England, much less earn a living once she got there. She’s got plenty of spine but no smarts, was Scarlett’s summing-up. The only things she knows are things she learned out of books. Scarlett’s opinion of bookish people had never been very high.

Despite her scorn for Harriet’s lack of practical sense, Scarlett was pleased to have her in the house. Ever since she’d returned from Dublin, Scarlett had found the big house disturbingly empty. She hadn’t expected to miss Charlotte Montague, but she had. Harriet filled the gap nicely. In many ways she was even better company than Charlotte, because Harriet was fascinated by even the smallest thing the children did, and Scarlett heard about small adventures that Cat would not have thought worth reporting.

Billy Kelly was company for Cat, too, and Scarlett’s uneasiness about Cat’s isolation was laid to rest. The only drawback to Harriet’s presence was Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s hostility. “We don’t want English at Ballyhara, Mrs. O,” she had said when Scarlett brought Harriet and her son from Trim. “It was bad enough having the Montague woman here but at least she did something useful to you.”

“Well, maybe you don’t want Mrs. Kelly, but I do, and it’s my house!” Scarlett was tired of being told what she should and shouldn’t do. Charlotte had done it, and now Mrs. Fitz. Harriet never criticized her at all. On the contrary. She was so grateful for the roof over her head and Scarlett’s hand-me-down clothes that sometimes Scarlett felt like shouting at her not to be so all-fired meek and mild.

Scarlett felt like shouting at everybody, and she was ashamed of herself, because there was absolutely no reason for her ill temper. Never in memory had there been such a growing season, everyone said. The grain was already half again as tall as normal, and the potato fields were thick with strong green growth. One glorious sunny day followed another, and the celebrations at weekly Market Day in Trim lasted long into the soft warm night. Scarlett danced until her shoes and stockings had holes in them, but the music and laughter failed to raise her spirits for long. When Harriet sighed romantically about the young couples walking along the river with their arms entwined, Scarlett turned away from her with an impatient shrug of the shoulders. Thank goodness for the invitations that were coming daily in the mail, she thought. The house parties were beginning soon. It seemed that the elegant festivities in Dublin and the temptations of the shops had made Trim Market Day lose most of its appeal.

By the end of May the waters of the Boyne were so low that one could see the stones laid centuries before as footing for the ford. The farmers were looking anxiously at the clouds blown by the west wind across the beautiful low sky. The fields needed rain. The brief showers that refreshed the air wet the soil only enough to draw the roots of wheat and timothy grass toward the surface, weakening the stalks.

Cat reported that the north track to Grainne’s cottage was turning into a beaten path. “She has more butter than she can eat,” Cat said, spreading her own butter on a muffin. “People are buying spells for rain.”

“You’ve decided to be friends with Grainne?”

“Yes. Billy likes her.”

Scarlett smiled. Whatever Billy said was law to Cat. It was lucky the boy was so good natured; Cat’s adoration could have been a terrible trial. Instead he was as patient as a saint. Billy had inherited his father’s “way with horses.” He was teaching Cat to be an expert rider, far beyond anything that Scarlett could have done. As soon as Cat was a few years older, she’d be on a horse, not a pony. She mentioned at least twice a day that ponies were for little girls and Cat was a big girl. Fortunately it was Billy who said “not big enough.” Cat would never have accepted it from Scarlett.