Scarlett (17 page)

Scarlett threw the letter onto the table. So that was the story that Rhett was handing out! That she wouldn’t leave the store and go to Charleston with him. What a blackhearted liar he was! She’d begged him to take her with him when he left. How dare he spread such slander? She’d have some choice words to say to Mister Rhett Butler when he came home.

She strode to the sideboard, splashed brandy into her glass. Some fell onto the gleaming wooden surface. A swipe with her sleeve mopped it up. He’d probably deny it, the skunk. Well, she’d shake Aunt Eulalie’s letter in his face. Let’s see him call his mother’s best friend a liar!

Suddenly her rage left her, and she felt cold. She knew what he’d say: “Would you rather I told the truth? That I left you because living with you was intolerable?”

The shame of it. Anything was better than that. Even the loneliness while she waited for him to come home. Her hand lifted the glass to her lips, and she drank deep.

The movement caught her eye, reflected in the mirror above the sideboard. Slowly Scarlett lowered her hand and set the glass down. She looked into her own eyes. They widened in shock at what they saw. She hadn’t really looked at herself for months, and she couldn’t believe that pale, thin, sunken-eyed woman had anything to do with her. Why, her hair looked as if it hadn’t been washed for weeks!

What had happened to her?

Her hand reached automatically for the decanter, providing the answer. Scarlett pulled her hand away, and she saw that it was shaking.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered. She clutched the edge of the sideboard for support and stared at her reflection. “Fool!” she said. Her eyes closed and tears slid slowly down her cheeks, but she brushed them away with quivering fingers.

She wanted a drink more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life. Her tongue darted across her lips. Her right hand moved on its own volition, closed around the neck of the glittering diamond-cut glass. Scarlett looked at her hand as if it belonged to a stranger, at the beautiful heavy crystal decanter and the promise of escape that lay within it. Slowly, watching her movements in the mirror, she lifted the decanter and backed away from her frightening reflection.

Then she drew in a long breath and swung her arm with all the strength she could find. The decanter sparkled blue and red and violet in the sunlight as it crashed into the huge mirror. For an instant Scarlett saw her face cracking into pieces, saw her twisted smile of victory. Then the silvered glass fragmented, and tiny shards spattered onto the sideboard. The top of the mirror seemed to lean forward from its frame, and huge jagged pieces fell crashing with a sound like cannon fire onto the sideboard, the floor, the pieces that had fallen first.

Scarlett was crying, and laughing, and shouting at the destruction of her own image. “Coward! Coward! Coward!”

She didn’t feel the tiny cuts that flying bits of glass made on her arms and neck and face. Her tongue tasted salt; she touched the trickle of blood on her cheek and looked in surprise at her reddened fingers.

She stared at the place where her reflection had been, but it was gone. She laughed unevenly. Good riddance.

The servants had rushed to the door when they heard the noise. They stood very close to one another, afraid to enter the room, looking fearfully at Scarlett’s rigid figure. She turned her head suddenly towards them, and Pansy let out a little cry of terror at the sight of her blood-smeared face.

“Go away,” Scarlett said calmly. “I am perfectly all right. Go away. I want to be by myself.” They obeyed without a word.

She was by herself whether she wanted to be or not, and no amount of brandy would make it any different. Rhett wasn’t coming home, this house wasn’t home to him any more. She’d known that for a long time but she’d refused to face it. She’d been a coward and a fool. No wonder she hadn’t known that woman in the mirror. That cowardly fool wasn’t Scarlett O’Hara. Scarlett O’Hara didn’t—what did they call it?—drown her sorrows. Scarlett O’Hara didn’t hide and hope. She faced the worst the world could hand her. And she went out into the danger to take what she wanted.

Scarlett shuddered. She had come so close to defeating herself.

No more. It was time—long past time—to take her life in her own hands. No more brandy. She had flung away that crutch.

Her whole body was crying out for a drink, but she refused to listen. She’d done harder things in her life, she could do this. She had to.

She shook her fist at the broken mirror. “Bring on your seven years bad luck, damn you.” Her defiant laugh was ragged.

She leaned against the table for a moment while she gathered her strength. She had so much to do.

Then she walked over the destruction around her, her heels breaking the mirror into bits. “Pansy!” she called from the doorway. “I want you to wash my hair.”

Scarlett was trembling from head to toe, but she made her legs carry her to the staircase and climb the long flight of stairs. “My skin must be like corduroy,” she said aloud, concentrating her mind away from the cravings of her body. “I’ll need to use quarts of rosewater and glycerine. And I have to get all new clothes. Mrs. Marie can hire extra sewing help.”

It shouldn’t take more than a few weeks to get over her weakness and get back to looking her best. She wouldn’t let it.

She had to be strong and beautiful, and she had no time to waste. She’d lost too much of it already.

Rhett hadn’t come back to her, so she’d have to go to him.

To Charleston.

O
nce her mind was made up, Scarlett’s life changed radically. She had a goal, now, and all her energy poured into achieving it. She’d think later about exactly how she was going to get Rhett back, after she arrived in Charleston. For now, she had to get ready to go.

Mrs. Marie threw up her hands and declared it impossible to make a complete new wardrobe in only a few weeks; Uncle Henry Hamilton put his fingertips together and expressed his disapproval when Scarlett told him what she needed him to do. Their opposition made Scarlett’s eyes gleam with the joy of battle, and in the end she won. By the beginning of November Uncle Henry had taken over the financial management of the store and saloon with a guarantee that the money would go to Joe Colleton. And Scarlett’s bedroom was a chaos of color and laces—her new clothes laid out to be packed for the trip.

She was still thin, and there were faint bruise-like shadows under her eyes, because the nights had been torments of sleeplessness and fierce efforts of will to resist the rest promised by the decanter of brandy. But she had won that battle, too, and her normal appetite for food had returned. Her face was already filled out enough so that a dimple flickered when she smiled, and her bosom was enticingly plump. With a skillful application of rouge on her lips and cheeks, she looked almost like a girl again, she was sure.

It was time to go.

*   *   *

Goodbye, Atlanta, Scarlett said silently when the train pulled out of the station. You tried to beat me down, but I wouldn’t let you. I don’t care if you approve of me or not.

She told herself that the chill she felt must be from a draft. She wasn’t afraid, not a bit. She was going to have a wonderful time in Charleston. Didn’t people always say that it was the partyingest town in the whole South? And there was no question at all about being invited everywhere; Aunt Pauline and Aunt Eulalie knew everybody. They’d know all about Rhett, where he was living, what he was doing. All she’d have to do was…

No sense thinking about that now. She’d decide when she got there. If she thought about it now, she might feel nervous about going, and she had made up her mind to go.

Gracious! It was silly even to imagine being nervous. It wasn’t as if Charleston was the end of the world. Why, Tony Fontaine went off to Texas, a million miles away, just as easy as if it was no more than a ride over to Decatur. She’d been to Charleston before, too. She knew where she was going…

It didn’t mean a thing that she had hated it. After all, she’d been so young then, only seventeen, and a new widow with a baby, besides. Wade Hampton hadn’t even cut his teeth yet. That was over twelve years ago. Everything would be completely different now. It was all going to work out just fine, just the way she wanted.

“Pansy, go tell the conductor to move our things, I want to sit closer to the stove. There’s a draft from this window.”

Scarlett sent a telegram to her aunts from the station in Augusta where she changed to the South Carolina railroad line:

ARRIVING FOUR PM TRAIN FOR VISIT STOP ONLY ONE SERVANT STOP LOVE SCARLETT

She had thought it all out. Exactly ten words, and there was no risk that her aunts would wire back some excuse to keep her from coming, because she was already on her way. Not that they’d be likely to. Eulalie was forever begging her to come see them, and hospitality was still the unwritten law of the land in the South. But no sense gambling when you could have a sure thing, and she had to have her aunts’ house and protection to begin with. Charleston was a mighty stuck-up, proud place, and Rhett was obviously trying to turn people against her.

No, she wouldn’t think about that. She was going to love Charleston this time. She was determined. Everything was going to be different. Her whole life was going to be different. Don’t look back, she’d always told herself. Now she truly meant it. Her whole life was behind her, further behind with each turn of the wheels. All the demands of her businesses were in Uncle Henry’s hands, her responsibilities to Melanie were taken care of, her children were settled at Tara. For the first time in her adult life she was free to do anything she wanted to do, and she knew what that was. She’d prove to Rhett that he was wrong when he refused to believe that she loved him. She’d show him that she did. He’d see. And then he’d be sorry he’d left her. He’d put his arms around her and kiss her, and they’d be happy forever after… Even in Charleston if he insisted on staying there.

Lost in her daydream, Scarlett didn’t notice the man who got onto the train at Ridgeville until he lurched against the arm of her seat. Then she recoiled as if he had struck her. He was in the blue uniform of the Union Army.

A Yankee! What was he doing here? Those days were done, and she wanted to forget them forever, but the sight of the uniform brought them all back. The fear when Atlanta was under siege, the brutality of the soldiers when they stripped Tara of its pitiful store of food and set fire to the house, the explosion of blood when she shot the straggler before he could rape her… Scarlett felt her heart pounding with terror all over again, and she almost cried out. Damn them, damn them all for destroying the South. Damn them most of all for making her feel helpless and afraid. She hated the feeling, and she hated them!

I won’t let it upset me, I won’t. I can’t let anything bother me now, not when I need to be at my best, ready for Charleston and Rhett. I won’t look at the Yankee, and I won’t think about the past. Only the future counts now. Scarlett stared resolutely out the window at the hilly countryside, so similar to the land around Atlanta. Red clay roads through stands of dark pine woods and fields of frost-darkened crop stubble. She’d been travelling for more than a day, and she might as well have never left home. Hurry, she urged the engine, do hurry.

“What’s Charleston like, Miss Scarlett?” Pansy asked for the hundredth time just as the light was beginning to fade outside the window.

“Very pretty, you’ll like it fine,” Scarlett answered for the hundredth time. “There!” She pointed at the landscape. “See that tree with the stuff hanging off it? That’s the Spanish moss I told you about.”

Pansy pressed her nose to the sooty pane. “Oooh,” she whimpered. “It looks like ghosts moving. I’m scared of ghosts, Miss Scarlett.”

“Don’t be a ninny!” But Scarlett shivered. The long, swaying, gray wisps of moss were eerie in the gray light, and she didn’t like the way it looked either. It meant that they were moving into the Lowcountry, though, close to the sea and to Charleston. Scarlett peered at her lapel watch. Five-thirty. The train was over two hours late. Her aunts would have waited, she was sure. But even so, she wished she wouldn’t be arriving after dark. There was something so unfriendly about the dark.

The cavernous station in Charleston was poorly lit. Scarlett craned her neck, searching for her aunts or for a coachman who might be their servant, looking for her. What she saw instead were a half dozen more soldiers in blue uniform, carrying guns slung over their shoulders.

“Miss Scarlett—”Pansy tugged on her sleeve. “There’s soldiers everywhere.” The young maid’s voice was quavering.

Her fear forced Scarlett to appear brave. “Just act like they’re not here at all, Pansy. They can’t hurt you, the War’s been over for practically ten years. Come on.” She gestured to the porter who was pushing the cart with her luggage. “Where would I find the carriage that’s meeting me?” she asked haughtily.

He led the way outside, but the only vehicle there was a ramshackle buggy with a swaybacked horse and a dishevelled black driver. Scarlett’s heart sank. Suppose her aunts were out of town? They went to Savannah to visit their father, she knew. Suppose her telegram was just sitting on the front stoop of a dark, empty house?