Scarlett (34 page)

“Deal,” she said, “I feel lucky.” Only a few more days and she would be at a ball, dancing with Rhett. He was keeping away from her now, managing things so that they were never alone together, but on the dance floor they would be together—and touching—and alone, no matter how many other couples were on the floor.

Scarlett held the white camellias Rhett had sent her to the cluster of curls at the nape of her neck and twisted her head to see herself in the looking glass. “It looks like a glob of fat on a bunch of sausages,” she said with disgust. “Pansy, you’ll have to do my hair different. Pile it on top.” She could pin the flowers in between the waves, that wouldn’t be too bad. Oh, why did Rhett have to be so mean, telling her that his precious old plantation flowers were the only jewels she could wear? It was bad enough that her ball gown was so dowdy. But with nothing to dress up the plainness except a bunch of flowers—she might as well wear a flour sack with a hole cut for her head. She’d counted on her pearls and her diamond earbobs.

“You don’t have to brush a hole in my scalp,” she grumbled at Pansy.

“Yes’m.” Pansy continued to brush the long dark mass of hair with vigorous strokes, eradicating the curls that had taken so long to arrange.

Scarlett looked at her reflection with growing satisfaction. Yes, that was much better. Her neck was really too pretty to cover. It was much better to wear her hair up. And her earbobs would show up better. She was going to wear them, no matter what Rhett had told her. She had to be dazzling, she had to win the admiration of every man at the ball, and the hearts of at least a few. That would make Rhett sit up and take notice.

She fastened the diamonds into her earlobes. There! She tilted her head from side to side, pleased with the effect.

“Do you like this, Miss Scarlett?” Pansy gestured toward her handiwork.

“No. Do it fuller above the ears.” Thank goodness Rosemary had turned down her offer to lend Pansy this evening. Though why Rosemary hadn’t jumped at the chance was a mystery; she needed all the help she could get. She’d probably bundle her hair into the same lumpy old-maid bun she always wore. Scarlett smiled. Entering the ballroom with Rhett’s sister would only call attention to how much prettier she was.

“That’s fine, Pansy,” she said, good humor restored. Her hair shone like a raven’s wing. The white flowers would actually be very becoming. “Hand me some hairpins.”

A half hour later, Scarlett was ready. She took one final look in the tall pier glass. The deep blue watered silk of her gown shimmered in the lamp light and made her powdered bare shoulders and bosom look as pale as alabaster. Her diamonds sparkled brilliantly, as did her green eyes. Black velvet ribbon in loops bordered the gown’s train and a wide black velvet bow lined with paler blue silk sat atop the gown’s bustle, emphasizing her tiny waist. Her slippers were made of blue velvet with black laces, and narrow black velvet ribbon was tied around her throat and each wrist. White camellias tied with black velvet bows were pinned to her shoulders and filled a silver-lace bouquet holder. She had never looked lovelier, and she recognized it. Excitement made her cheeks rosy with natural color.

Scarlett’s first ball in Charleston was full of surprises. Almost nothing was the way she expected it to be. First she was told that she’d have to wear her boots, not her dancing slippers. They were going to walk to the Ball. She would have ordered a hackney if she’d known that, she couldn’t believe that Rhett hadn’t done it. It didn’t help that Pansy was supposed to carry her slippers in a Charleston contraption called a “slipper bag” because she didn’t have a slipper bag, and it took Miss Eleanor’s maid fifteen minutes to find a basket to use instead. Why hadn’t anyone told her she needed one of the miserable things? “We didn’t think of it,” Rosemary said. “Everybody has slipper bags.”

Everybody in Charleston maybe, thought Scarlett, but not in Atlanta. People don’t walk to balls there, they ride. Her happy anticipation of her first Charleston ball began to change to uneasy apprehension. What else was going to be different?

Everything, she discovered. Charleston had developed formalities and rituals in the long years of its history that were unknown in the vigorous semi-frontier world of North Georgia. When the fall of the Confederacy cut off the lavish wealth that had allowed the formality to develop, the rituals survived, the only thing that remained of the past, cherished and unchangeable for that reason.

There was a receiving line inside the door of the ballroom at the top of the Wentworth house. Everyone had to line up on the stairs, waiting to enter the room one by one and then shake hands and murmur something to Minnie Wentworth, then to her husband, their son, their son’s wife, their daughter’s husband, their married daughter, their unmarried daughter. While, all the time, the music was playing and earlier arrivals were dancing, and Scarlett’s feet were itching to dance.

In Georgia, she thought impatiently, the people giving the party come forward to meet their guests. They don’t keep them waiting in line like a chain gang. It’s a sight more welcoming than this foolishness.

Just before she followed Mrs. Butler into the room, a dignified manservant offered her a tray. A pile of folded papers was on it, little booklets held together by thin blue twine with a tiny pencil hanging from it. Dance cards? They must be dance cards. Scarlett had heard Mammy talk about balls in Savannah when Ellen O’Hara was a girl, but she’d never quite believed that parties were so peaceful that a girl looked in a book to see who she was supposed to dance with. Why, the Tarleton twins and the Fontaine boys would have split their britches laughing if anyone told them they had to write their names on a tiny piece of paper with a little pencil so dinky that it would break in a real man’s fingers! She wasn’t even sure she wanted to dance with the kind of pantywaist who’d be willing to do that.

Yes, she was! She was sure she’d dance with the devil himself, horns and tail and all, just to be able to dance. It seemed like ten years, not one, since the Masquerade Ball in Atlanta.

“I’m so happy to be here,” said Scarlett to Minnie Wentworth, and her voice throbbed with sincerity. She smiled at all the other Wentworths, each in turn, and then she was through the line. She turned toward the dancing, her feet already moving in time to the music, and she drew in her breath. Oh, it was so beautiful—so strange and yet so familiar, like a dream she only half-remembered. The candlelit room was alive with music, with the colors and rustling of whirling skirts. Along the walls dowagers were sitting in fragile gold-painted chairs just as they always had, whispering behind their fans to one another about the things they had always whispered about: the young people who were dancing too close together, the latest horror story of someone’s daughter’s prolonged childbirth, the newest scandal about their dearest friends. Waiters in full-dress suits moved from group to group of men and women who weren’t dancing with silver trays of filled glasses and frosted silver julep cups. There was a hum of blended voices, punctuated by laughter, high and deep, the age-old beloved noise of fortunate light-hearted people enjoying themselves. It was as if the old world, the beautiful carefree world of her youth, still existed, as if nothing was changed, and there had never been a War.

Her sharp eyes could see the scabby paint on the walls and the spur-gouges in the floor under the layers of wax, but she refused to notice. Better to enter the illusion, to forget the War and the Yankee patrols on the street outside. There was music and there was dancing and Rhett had promised to be nice. Nothing more was needed.

Rhett was more than merely nice; he was charming. And no one on earth could be more charming than Rhett when he wanted to be. Unfortunately he was just as charming to everyone else as he was to her. She alternated wildly between pride that every other woman envied her and raging jealousy that Rhett was paying attention to so many others. He was attentive to her, she couldn’t accuse him of neglect. But he was attentive to his mother, too, and to Rosemary, and to dozens of other women who were dreary old matrons in Scarlett’s opinion.

She told herself that she mustn’t care, and after a while she didn’t. As each dance ended, she was immediately surrounded by men who insisted that her previous partner introduce them so that they could beg her for the dance to follow.

It was not simply that she was new in town, a fresh face in a crowd of people who all knew each other. She was compellingly alluring. Her decision to make Rhett jealous had added a reckless glitter to her fascinating, unusual green eyes, and a heated flush of excitement colored her cheeks like a red flag signalling danger.

Many of the men who vied for her dances were the husbands of friends she’d made, women she had called on, had partnered at the whist table, had gossiped with over coffee at the Market. She didn’t care. Time enough to mend the damage after Rhett was hers again. In the meantime she was being admired and complimented and flirted with, and she was in her element. Nothing had really changed. Men still responded the same way to her fluttering eyelashes and flickering dimple and outrageous flattery. They’ll believe any lie you tell them, long as it makes them feel like heroes, she thought, with a wicked smile of delight that made her partner miss a step. She jerked her toes out from under his foot. “Oh, do say you forgive me!” she begged. “I must have caught my heel in the hem of my dress. What a dreadful mistake to make, especially when I’m lucky enough to be waltzing with a wonderful dancer like you.”

Her eyes were beguiling and the rueful pout that went with her apology made her lips look as if they were ready for a kiss. There were some things that a girl never forgot how to do.

“What a lovely party!” she said happily when they were walking back to the house.

“I’m pleased that you had a nice time,” Eleanor Butler said. “And I’m very, very pleased for you, too, Rosemary. You seemed to be enjoying yourself.”

“Hah! I hated it, Mama, you should know that. But I’m so happy that I’m going to Europe that it didn’t bother me to go to the silly Ball.”

Rhett laughed. He was walking behind Scarlett and Rosemary, his mother’s hand in his left arm. His laughter was warm in the cold December night. Scarlett thought of the warmth of his body, imagined that she could sense it at her back. Why wasn’t she on his arm, close to that warmth? She knew why: Mrs. Butler was old, it was appropriate that her son support her. But that didn’t lessen Scarlett’s longing.

“Laugh all you please, brother, dear,” Rosemary said, “but I don’t think it’s funny.” She was walking backwards now, half-trampling the train of her gown. “I didn’t get to say two words to Miss Julia Ashley all night because I had to dance with all those ridiculous men.”

“Who’s Miss Julia Ashley?” Scarlett asked. The name commanded her interest.

“She’s Rosemary’s idol,” said Rhett, “and the only person I’ve ever been afraid of in my adult life. You would have noticed Miss Ashley if you’d seen her, Scarlett. She always wears black, and she looks like she’s been drinking vinegar.”

“Oh, you—!” Rosemary sputtered. She ran to Rhett and hit him on the chest with her fists.

“
Pax
!” he cried. He put his right arm around her and pulled her close to his side.

Scarlett felt the wind cold off the river. She lifted her chin against it, turned forward and walked the remaining few steps to the house alone.

A
nother Sunday meant another lecture from Eulalie and Pauline, Scarlett was sure of it. She was, in fact, more than a little frightened about her behavior at the Ball. Perhaps she’d been just a little bit too—lively, that was it. But she hadn’t had fun like that in so long, and it wasn’t her fault that she attracted so much more attention than the prissy Charleston ladies, was it? Besides, she was really only doing it for Rhett, so he would stop being so cold and distant to her. No one could blame a wife for trying to hold her marriage together.

She suffered in silence the heavy unexpressed disapproval of her equally silent aunts during the walk to and from Saint Mary’s. Eulalie’s mournful sniffling during Mass set her teeth on edge, but she managed to block it out by daydreaming about the moment when Rhett would abandon his stiff-necked pride and admit that he still loved her. For he did, didn’t he? Whenever he held her in his arms to dance she felt like her knees had turned to water. Surely she couldn’t feel the lightning in the air when they touched unless he felt it too. Could she?

She’d find out soon. He’d have to do more than just rest his gloved hand on her waist for dancing when New Year’s Eve came. He’d have to kiss her at midnight. Only five more days to get through, and then their lips would meet and he’d have to believe how much she truly loved him. Her kiss would tell him more than words ever could…

The ancient beauty and mystery of the Mass unfolded before her unseeing eyes while Scarlett imagined her wishes coming true. Pauline’s sharp elbow stabbed her whenever her responses were late.

The silence continued unbroken when they sat down for breakfast. Scarlett felt as if every nerve in her body were exposed to the air, to Pauline’s icy stare, to the sound of Eulalie’s sniffing. She couldn’t stand it any longer, and she burst out in angry attack at them before they could attack her.

“You told me that everybody walked everywhere, and I’ve got broken blisters all over my feet from doing what you said. Last night the street in front of the Wentworths’ ball was chock full of carriages!”

Pauline raised her eyebrows and tightened her lips. “Do you see what I mean, Sister?” she said to Eulalie. “Scarlett is determined to turn her back on everything that Charleston stands for.”