Scarlett (11 page)

When she settled back in her carriage, Scarlett’s stomach gave out an audible rumble. She smiled from ear to ear. Thank heaven it had waited.

Back home she ordered the cook to heat up her dinner and serve it again. While she waited to be called to the table she looked through the other pages of the newspapers, avoiding the stories about the Panic. There was a column she’d never bothered with before that was fascinating to her now. It contained news and gossip from Charleston, and Rhett or his mother or sister or brother might be mentioned.

They weren’t, but she hadn’t really expected anything. If there was anything really exciting going on in Charleston she’d learn about it from Rhett next time he came home. Being interested in his folks and the place he’d grown up would be a proof to him that she loved him, no matter what he might believe. How often, she wondered, was “often enough to keep down gossip”?

Scarlett couldn’t get to sleep that night. Every time she closed her eyes she saw the wide front door of Aunt Pitty’s house, closed and bolted against her. It was India’s doing, she told herself. Uncle Henry couldn’t possibly be right that every door in Atlanta was going to be closed.

But she hadn’t thought he was right about the Panic, either. Not until she read the newspapers, and then she discovered it was even worse than he’d told her.

Insomnia was no stranger to her; she’d learned years before that two or three brandies would calm her down and help her sleep. She padded silently downstairs and to the dining room sideboard. The cut-glass decanter flashed rainbows from the light of the lamp she held in her hand.

The next morning she slept later than usual. Not because of the brandy but because, even with its aid, she’d been unable to sleep until just before dawn. She couldn’t stop worrying about what Uncle Henry had said.

On her way down to the store she stopped in at Mrs. Merriwether’s bakery. The clerk behind the counter looked through her and turned a deaf ear when she spoke.

She treated me like I didn’t even exist, she realized with horror. As she crossed the sidewalk from the shop to her carriage, she saw Mrs. Elsing and her daughter approaching on foot. Scarlett paused, ready to smile and say hello. The two Elsing ladies stopped dead when they saw her, then, without a word or a second look, turned and walked away. Scarlett was paralyzed for a moment. Then she scurried into her carriage and hid her face in the shadowy corner of the deep enclosure. For one horrible instant she was afraid she was going to be sick all over the floor.

When Elias stopped the carriage in front of the store, Scarlett stayed in the sanctuary of her carriage. She sent Elias inside with the clerks’ pay envelopes. If she got out, she might see someone she knew, someone who would cut her dead. It was unbearable even to think of it.

India Wilkes must be behind this. And after I was so generous with her, too! I won’t let her get away with it, I won’t. Nobody can treat me this way and get away with it.

“Go to the lumberyard,” she ordered Elias when he returned. She’d tell Ashley. He’d have to do something to stop India’s poison. Ashley wouldn’t stand for it, he’d make India behave, and all India’s friends, too.

Her already heavy heart sank even lower when she saw the lumberyard. It was too full. Stacks and stacks of pine boards were golden and sweetly resinous in the autumn sun. There wasn’t a wagon to be seen, or a loader. Nobody was buying.

Scarlett wanted to cry. Uncle Henry said this would happen, but I never thought it could be this bad. How could people not want that beautiful clean lumber? She inhaled deeply. Fresh-cut pine was the sweetest perfume in the world to her. Oh, how she missed the lumber business, she would never understand how she’d let Rhett trick her into selling it to Ashley. If she was still running it, this would never have happened. She would have sold the lumber somehow to someone. Panic touched the edge of her mind and she pushed it away. Things were awful all around, but she mustn’t fuss at Ashley. She wanted him to help her.

“The yard looks wonderful!” she said brightly. “You must have the sawmill running day and night to keep such a good stock up, Ashley.”

He looked up from the account books on his desk and Scarlett knew that all the cheerfulness in the world be wasted on him. He looked no better than when she’d given him the talking-to.

He stood, tried to smile. His ingrained courtesy was stronger than his exhaustion, but his despair was greater than both.

I can’t tell him anything about India, Scarlett thought, or about the business either. He’s got all he can bear just making himself draw the next breath. It’s like there’s nothing holding him together but his clothes.

“Scarlett, dear, how kind of you to stop by. Won’t you sit down?”

“Kind,” is it? God’s nightgown! Ashley sounds like a wind-up music box of polite things to say. No, he doesn’t. He sounds like he doesn’t know what’s coming out of his mouth, and I reckon that’s closer to the truth. Why should he care that I’m chancing whatever’s left of my reputation by coming here without a chaperone? He doesn’t care anything about himself—any fool could see that—why should he care anything about me? I can’t sit down and make polite conversation, I can’t stand it. But I have to.

“Thank you, Ashley,” she said, and sat on the chair he was holding. She would force herself to stay for fifteen minutes and make empty, lively remarks about the weather, tell amusing stories about what a good time she’d had at Tara. She couldn’t tell him about Mammy, it would upset him too much. Tony coming home, though, that was different. It was good news. Scarlett started to speak.

“I’ve been down to Tara—”

“Why did you stop me, Scarlett?” said Ashley. His voice was flat, lifeless, devoid of real questioning. Scarlett couldn’t think what to say.

“Why did you stop me?” he asked again, and this time there was emotion in the words, anger, betrayal, pain. “I wanted to be in the grave. Any grave, not just Melanie’s. It’s the only thing I’m fit for… No, don’t say whatever you were going to say, Scarlett. I’ve been comforted and boosted up by so many well-meaning people that I’ve heard it all a hundred times over. I expect better of you than the usual platitudes. I’ll be grateful if you’ll say what you must be thinking, that I’m letting the lumber business die. Your lumber business that you invested all your heart in. I’m a miserable failure, Scarlett. You know it. I know it. The whole world knows it. Why do we all have to act as though it isn’t so? Blame me, why don’t you? You can’t possibly find any words harsher than those I say to myself, you can’t ‘hurt my feelings.’ God, how I hate that phrase! As if I had any feelings left to hurt. As if I could feel anything at all.”

Ashley shook his head with slow, heavy swings from side to side. He was like a mortally wounded animal brought down by a pack of predators. From his throat burst one tearing sob, and he turned away. “Forgive me, Scarlett, I beg of you. I had no right to burden you with my troubles. Now I have the shame of this outburst to add to my other shames. Be merciful, my dear, and leave me. I will be grateful if you will go now.”

Scarlett fled without a word.

Later she sat at her desk with all her legal records neatly stacked in front of her. It was going to be even harder to keep her promise to Melly than she’d expected. Clothing and household goods weren’t nearly enough.

Ashley wouldn’t lift a finger to help himself. She was going to have to make him successful whether he cooperated or not. She’d promised Melanie.

And she couldn’t bear to see the business she had built go under.

Scarlett made a list of her assets.

The store, building and trade. It produced nearly a hundred a month in profits, but that would almost certainly go down some when the Panic got to Atlanta and people had no money to spend. She made a note to order more cheap goods and stop replacing luxury items like wide velvet ribbon.

The saloon on her lot near the depot. She didn’t actually own it, she leased the land and building to the man who did, for thirty dollars a month. People would likely be drinking more than ever when times got hard, maybe she should raise the rent. But a few more dollars a month wouldn’t be enough to bail out Ashley. She needed real money.

The gold in her safe box. She had real money, more than twenty-five thousand dollars of real money. She was a wealthy woman in her own right by most people’s reckoning. But not by hers. She still didn’t feel safe.

I could buy the business back from Ashley, she thought, and for a moment her mind hummed with excitement, with possibilities. Then she sighed. That wouldn’t solve anything. Ashley was such a fool he’d insist on taking only what he could get on the open market, and that was hardly anything. Then, when she made a success of the business he’d feel like more of a failure than ever. No, no matter how much she would love to get her hands on that lumberyard and the sawmills, she had to make Ashley successful at it.

I just don’t believe that there’s no market for lumber. Panic or no Panic, people have got to be building something, if it’s only a shed for a cow or a horse.

Scarlett riffled through the stack of books and papers. She’d had an idea.

There it was, the plot of the farmland Charles Hamilton left her. The farms produced almost no income at all. What good did a couple of baskets of corn and a single bale of seedy cotton do her? Sharecropping was a waste of good land unless you had about a thousand acres and a dozen good farmers. But her hundred acres were right on the edge of Atlanta now, the way things were growing. If she could find a good builder—and they must all be feeling mighty hungry for work—she could put up a hundred gim-crack houses, maybe two hundred. Everybody who was losing money was going to have to draw in their horns and live closer to the bone. Their big houses would be the first thing to go, and they’d have to find someplace they could afford to live.

I won’t make any money, but at least I won’t be losing much. And I’ll see to it that the builder uses only lumber from Ashley, and the best he’s got, too. He’ll be making money—not a fortune, but good steady income—and he’ll never know it came from me. I can manage that somehow. All I need is a builder who can keep his mouth shut. And not steal too much.

The following day Scarlett drove out to give the sharecropping farmers notice to vacate.

Y
es, ma’am, Mrs. Butler, I’m hungry for work all right,” said Joe Colleton. The builder was a short, lean man in his forties; he looked much older because his thick hair was snow white, and his face was leathered by long exposure to the sun and the weather. He was frowning, and the deep creases in his brow shadowed his dark eyes. “I need work, but not bad enough to work for you.”

Scarlett almost turned on her heel to leave; she didn’t have to swallow insults from some jumped-up poor white. But she needed Colleton. He was the only honest-to-the-bone builder in Atlanta; she’d learned that when she was selling lumber to them all in the boom years of rebuilding after the War. She felt like stamping her foot. It was all Melly’s fault. If it hadn’t been for that silly condition that Ashley mustn’t know she was helping him, she could have used any builder at all because she would watch him like a hawk and oversee every part of the work herself. How she’d love to do it, too.

But she couldn’t be seen to be involved. And she couldn’t trust anyone except Colleton. He had to agree to take the job, she had to make him agree. She put her small hand on his arm. It looked very delicate in its tight kid glove. “Mr. Colleton, it’ll break my heart if you say no to me. I need somebody very special to help me.” She looked at him with appealing helplessness in her eyes. Too bad he wasn’t taller. It was hard to be a frail little lady with somebody your own size. Still, it was often these banty rooster little men who were most protective of women. “I don’t know what I’ll do if you turn me down.”

Colleton’s arm stiffened. “Mrs. Butler, you sold me green lumber once, after you told me it was cured. I don’t do business twice with somebody that cheats me once.”

“That must have been a mistake, Mr. Colleton. I was green myself, just learning the lumber business. You remember how it was those days. The Yankees were breathing down our necks every waking minute. I was scared to death all the time.” Her eyes swam in unshed tears, and her very lightly rouged lips trembled. She was a small forlorn figure. “My husband, Mr. Kennedy, was killed when the Yankees broke up a Klan meeting.”

Colleton’s direct, knowing gaze was disconcerting. His eyes were on a level with hers, and they were as hard as marble. Scarlett took her hand off his sleeve. What was she going to do? She couldn’t fail, not in this. He had to take the job.

“I made a deathbed promise to my dearest friend, Mr. Colleton.” Her tears were unplanned now. “Mrs. Wilkes asked me to help, and now I’m asking you.” The whole story tumbled out—how Melanie had always sheltered Ashley… Ashley’s ineptness as a businessman… his attempt to bury himself with his wife… the stacks of unsold lumber… the need for secrecy…

Colleton held up his hand to stop her. “All right, Mrs. Butler. If it’s for Mrs. Wilkes, I’ll take the job.” His hand dropped, extended. “I’ll shake on it, you’ll get the best-built houses with the best materials in them.”

Scarlett put her hand in his. “Thank you,” she said. She felt as if she’d scored the triumph of her life.

It was only some hours later that she remembered that she hadn’t intended to use the best of everything, only the best lumber. The miserable houses were going to cost her a fortune, and out of her own hard-earned money, too. She wouldn’t get any credit for helping Ashley, either. Everybody would still slam their doors in her face.