Scarlett (37 page)

“Stay where you are,” Rhett shouted back. “I’ll be back to talk to you as soon as I get the ladies settled.” Rosemary stumbled on a loose stone in the path and Rhett jerked her upright before she could fall. “I don’t care if your leg’s broken,” he muttered, “keep walking.”

“I’m all right,” Rosemary said. She sounds cool as ice, thought Scarlett. She despised herself for feeling so nervous. Thank goodness they were almost at the house now. Only a few more steps and they’d be around it. She was unaware that she was holding her breath until they neared the house front. When she saw the green terraces that stepped down to the butterfly lakes and the river, she let her breath out in a whoosh of release.

Then she drew it in sharply. As they turned the corner onto the brick terrace she saw ten white men sitting on it, leaning back against the house wall. They were all of them thin, lanky, their pale bare ankles showing between their clumsy heavy shoes and the bottoms of their faded overalls. Across their knees they held rifles or shotguns in a loose, accustomed grip. Battered wide-brimmed hats pulled low on their foreheads shadowed their eyes, but Scarlett knew they were looking at Rhett and his women. One of them expelled a stream of brown tobacco juice across the lawn in front of Rhett’s fine riding boots.

“You can thank God you didn’t spatter my sister, Clinch Dawkins,” Rhett said, “or I’d have had to kill you. I’ll talk to you boys in a few minutes, I’ve got other things to do right now.” He spoke easily, casually. But Scarlett could feel the tension in his hand holding her arm. She lifted her chin and walked with firm strong steps to match Rhett’s. No poor white trash was going to face Rhett down, or her either.

She blinked in the sudden darkness when she entered the house. What a stink! Her eyes adjusted rapidly and Scarlett saw the reason for the benches and spittoons in the main room downstairs. More weathered, hungry-looking poor whites were sprawled on the seats, filling every inch of space. They, too, were armed, and their hat brims made their eyes a secret. The floor was spotted with spit and pools of juice ringed the spittoons. Scarlett pulled her arm from Rhett’s hold, gathered up her skirts to the top of her ankles and walked to the staircase. Two steps up, she dropped them again, letting the train of her riding habit drag through the dust. She’d be damned if she’d treat that rabble to a look at a lady’s ankle. She mounted the rickety staircase as if she hadn’t a care in the world.

“What’s happening, Miss Scarlett? Ain’t nobody will tell me nothing!” Pansy started wailing the moment the bedroom door closed behind her.

“Hush up!” Scarlett ordered. “Do you want everybody in South Carolina to hear you?”

“I don’t want to have nothing to do with nobody in South Carolina, Miss Scarlett. I want to go back to Atlanta, to my own folks. I don’t like this place.”

“Nobody cares two pins what you like and don’t like, so you just march yourself over to that corner and sit on that stool and keep quiet. If I hear one peep out of you, I’ll… I’ll do something terrible.”

She looked at Rosemary. If Rhett’s sister broke down, too, she didn’t know what she’d do. Rosemary looked very pale, but she seemed composed enough. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at the pattern of the coverlet as if she’d never seen one before.

Scarlett walked to the window that overlooked the back lawn. If she stayed to one side of it, no one below could see her looking out. She lifted the muslin curtain with cautious fingers and peered out. Was Rhett out there? Dear God, he was! She could just make out the top of his hat, a dark circle in the middle of a big crowd of dark heads and gesticulating dark hands. The separate groups of black men had come together in one threatening mass.

They could stomp him to death in half a minute flat, she thought, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Her hand crumpled the thin curtain in anger at her helplessness.

“Better get away from that window, Scarlett,” said Rosemary. “If Rhett starts worrying about you and me, he’ll be distracted from whatever it is he has to do.”

Scarlett whirled to the attack. “Don’t you care what’s happening?”

“I care plenty, but I don’t know what’s happening. And neither do you.”

“I know that Rhett’s about to be swamped by a bunch of raging darkies. Why don’t those trashy tobacco spitters use the guns they’re sitting around with?”

“Then we’d really be in a fix. I know some of the black men, they work at the phosphate mine. They don’t want anything to happen to Rhett or they’d lose their jobs. Besides, plenty of them are Butler people. They belong here. It’s the whites I’m scared of. I expect Rhett is, too.”

“Rhett’s not scared of anything!”

“Of course he is. He’d be a fool if he wasn’t. I’m plenty scared and so are you.”

“I am not!”

“Then you’re a fool.”

Scarlett’s jaw dropped. The whiplash in Rosemary’s voice shocked her more than the insult. Why, she sounds just like Julia Ashley. A half hour with that old she-dragon and Rosemary’s turned into a monster.

She turned hurriedly to the window again. It was beginning to get dark. What was happening?

She couldn’t see a thing. Only dark shapes on the dark ground. Was Rhett one of them? She couldn’t tell. She put her ear against the windowpane and strained to hear. The only sound was a muffled whimpering from Pansy.

If I don’t do something I’ll go mad, she thought, and she began to pace back and forth across the small room. “Why does a big plantation like this have such cramped little bedrooms?” she complained. “You could fit two rooms like this into any one of the rooms at Tara.”

“Do you really want to know? Then sit down. There’s a rocker over by the other window. You can rock instead of walking. I’ll light the lamp and I’ll tell you all about Dunmore Landing if you’d like to hear.”

“I can’t bear to sit still! I’m going down there and find out what’s going on.” Scarlett groped in the darkness for the doorknob.

“If you do, he’ll never forgive you,” said Rosemary.

Scarlett’s hand fell to her side.

The match striking was as loud as a pistol shot. Scarlett felt the nerves jump under her skin. Then she turned, surprised to see that Rosemary looked just the same as always. She was in the same place, too, sitting on the edge of the bed. The kerosene lamp made the random colors of the coverlet look very bright. Scarlett hesitated for a moment. Then she walked to the rocking chair and plopped down into it.

“All right. Tell me about Dunmore Landing.” She began to rock with an angry push of her feet. The chair squeaked as Rosemary talked about the plantation that meant so much to her. Scarlett rocked with vicious pleasure.

The house they were in, Rosemary began, had small bedrooms because it was built as quarters for bachelor guests only. Above the floor they were on was another floor of small rooms for the guests’ manservants. The rooms downstairs where Rhett’s office and the dining room were now had been used as guest rooms also—a place for late-night toddies and card games and sociability. “All the chairs were red leather,” Rosemary said softly. “I used to love to go in there and sniff the leather and whiskey and cigar smoke smell when all the men were out hunting.

“The Landing’s named after the place the Butlers lived before our great-great-grandfather left England for Barbados. Our great-grandfather came to Charleston from there around a hundred and fifty years ago. He built the Landing and put in the gardens. His wife’s name before she married great-grandfather was Sophia Rosemary Ross. That’s where Ross and I get our names from.”

“Where’d Rhett get his name?”

“He’s named after our grandfather.”

“Rhett told me your grandfather was a pirate.”

“He did?” Rosemary laughed. “He would say that. Granddaddy ran the English blockade in the Revolution just like Rhett ran the Yankee blockade in our war. He was bound and determined to get his rice crop out, and he wouldn’t let anything stop him. I imagine he did some pretty sharp trading on the side, but mainly he was a rice planter. Dunmore Landing has always been a rice plantation. That’s why I get so mad at Rhett—”

Scarlett rocked faster. If she starts going on about rice again, I’ll scream.

The loud double report of a shotgun crashed through the night and Scarlett did scream. She jumped up from the chair and ran toward the door. Rosemary leapt up and ran after her. She threw her strong arms around Scarlett’s middle and held her back.

“Let me go, Rhett might be—” Scarlett croaked. Rosemary was squeezing the breath out of her.

Rosemary’s arms tightened. Scarlett struggled to get free. She heard her own strangled breath loud in her ears and—strangely more distinct—the creak creak creak of the rocker, slowing even as her breath was slowing. The lighted room seemed to be turning dark.

Her flailing hands fluttered weakly and her straining throat made a faint rasping noise. Rosemary let her go. “I’m sorry,” Scarlett thought she heard Rosemary say. It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was to draw great gulps of air into her lungs. It even made no difference that she’d fallen onto her hands and knees. It was easier to breathe that way.

It was a long time before she could speak. She looked up then, saw Rosemary standing with her back against the door. “You almost killed me,” Scarlett said.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I had to stop you.”

“Why? I was going to Rhett. I’ve got to go to Rhett.” He meant more to her than all the world. Couldn’t this stupid girl understand that? No, she couldn’t, she’d never loved anybody, never had anybody love her.

Scarlett tried to scrabble to her feet. Oh, sweet Mary, Mother of God, I’m so weak. Her hands found the bedpost. Slowly she pulled herself upright. She was as white as a ghost, her green eyes blazed like cold flames.

“I’m going to Rhett,” she said.

Rosemary struck her then. Not with her hands or even her fists. Scarlett could have withstood that.

“He doesn’t want you,” Rosemary said quietly. “He told me so.”

R
hett paused in midsentence. He looked at Scarlett and said, “What is this? No appetite? And they say that country air is supposed to make people hungry. You astonish me, my dear. I do believe this is the first time I’ve ever seen you peck at your food.”

She looked up from her untouched plate to glare at him. How did he even dare to speak to her when he had been talking about her behind her back? Who else had he talked to besides Rosemary? Did everybody in Charleston know that he had walked out in Atlanta and that she’d made a fool of herself by coming after him?

She looked down and continued to push bits of food from place to place.

“So then what happened?” Rosemary demanded. “I still don’t understand.”

“It was just what Miss Julia and I expected. Her field hands and my phosphate diggers had cooked up a plot. You know that work contracts are signed on New Year’s Day for the year to follow. Miss Julia’s men were going to tell her that I paid my miners almost twice what she paid and that she’d have to jack up their salaries or they’d come to me. My men were going to play the same game, only the other way around. It never entered their heads that Miss Julia and I were on to them.

“The grapevine started humming the minute we rode over to Ashley Barony. All of them knew the game was up. You saw how industrious all the Barony workers were in the rice fields. They didn’t want to risk losing their jobs, and they’re all scared to death of Miss Julia.

“Things weren’t quite that smooth here. Word had gotten out that the Landing blacks were scheming something, and the white sharecroppers across the Summerville road got edgy. They did what poor whites always do, grabbed their guns and got ready for a little shooting. They came to the house and broke in and stole my whiskey, then passed the bottle around to get up a good head of steam.

“After you were safely out of range I told them I’d take care of my business myself, and I high-tailed it out to the back of the house. The blacks were scared, as well they might be, but I persuaded them that I could calm the whites down and that they should go home.

“When I got back to the house, I told the sharecroppers that I’d settled everything with the workers and they should go on home, too. I probably gave it to them too fast. I was so relieved myself that there hadn’t been any trouble that it made me careless. I’ll be smarter next time. If, God forbid, there is a next time. Anyhow, Clinch Dawkins flew off the handle. He was looking for trouble. He called me a nigger lover and cocked that cannon of a shotgun he’s got and turned it in my direction. I didn’t wait to find out if he was drunk enough to shoot, I just stepped over and knocked it up. The sky got a couple of holes in it.”

“Is that all?” Scarlett half-shouted. “You could have let us know.”

“I was too busy, my pet. Clinch’s pride was wounded, so he pulled a knife. I pulled mine and we had an active ten minutes or so before I cut off his nose.”

Rosemary gasped.

Rhett patted her hand. “Only the end of it. It was too long anyhow. His looks are significantly improved.”

“But Rhett, he’ll come after you.”

Rhett shook his head. “No, I can assure you he won’t. It was a fair fight. And Clinch is one of my oldest companions. We were in the Confederate Army together. He was loader for the cannon I commanded. There’s a bond between us that a small slice of nose can’t damage.”