Scarlett (39 page)

Rhett’s swivel chair swung around. He rubbed his hand over his chin, and Scarlett could almost hear the rasp of the unshaven whiskers. He had shadows under his eyes, visible even in the shadowy room, and his black hair was dishevelled, a cowlick standing up on the crown, an untidy lock falling on his forehead. He stood, yawned, and stretched. “I believe it’s safe to sleep a little now. You and Rosemary stay in the house till I wake up.” He lay down on a wooden bench and fell asleep at once.

Scarlett watched him as he slept.

I mustn’t ever tell him again that I love him. That makes him feel pressured. And when he turns nasty, I feel small and cheap for having said it. No, I’ll never say it again, not until he’s told me first that he loves me.

R
hett was busy from the moment he woke after an hour’s heavy sleep, and he told Rosemary and Scarlett bluntly to keep away from the butterfly lakes. He was building a platform there for the speeches and hiring ceremonies the next day. “Working men don’t take kindly to the presence of women.” He smiled at his sister. “And I certainly don’t want Mama asking me why I permitted you to learn such a colorful new vocabulary.”

At Rhett’s request, Rosemary led Scarlett on a tour of the overgrown gardens. The paths had been cleared but not gravelled, and Scarlett’s hem was soon black from fine dust. How different everything was from Tara, even the soil. It seemed unnatural to her that the paths and the dust weren’t red. The vegetation was so thick, too, and many of the plants were unfamiliar. It was too lush for her upland taste.

But Rhett’s sister loved the Butler plantation with a passion that surprised her. Why, she feels about this place just the way I feel about Tara. Maybe I can get along with her after all.

Rosemary did not notice Scarlett’s efforts to find a common ground. She was lost in a lost world: Dunmore Landing before the War. “This was called ‘the hidden garden’ because of the way the tall hedges along the paths kept you from seeing it until all of a sudden you were in it. When I was little I’d hide in here whenever bath time was coming. The servants were wonderful to me—they’d thrash around the hedges shouting back and forth about how they knew they’d never find me. I thought I’d been so clever. And when my Mammy stumbled through the gate, she’d always act surprised to see me… I loved her so much.”

“I had a Mammy, too. She—”

Rosemary was already moving on. “Down this way is the reflecting pool. There were black swans and white ones. Rhett says maybe they’ll come back once the reeds are cut out and all that filthy algae cleaned up. See that clump of bushes? It’s really an island, purpose built for the swans to nest on. It was all grass, of course, clipped when it wasn’t nesting season. And there was a miniature Greek temple of white marble. Maybe the pieces are somewhere in the tangle. A lot of people are afraid of swans. They can do terrible injury with their beaks and wings. But ours let me swim with them once the cygnets were out of the nest. Mama used to read me
The Ugly Duckling
sitting on a bench by the pool. When I learned my letters, I read it to the swans…

“This path goes to the rose garden. In May you could smell them for miles on the river before you ever got to the Landing. Inside the house, on rainy days with the windows closed, the sweetness from all the big arrangements of roses made me feel sick as a dog…

“Down there by the river was the big oak with the treehouse in it. Rhett built it when he was a boy, then Ross had it. I’d climb up with a book and some jam biscuits and stay for hours and hours. It was much better than the playhouse Papa had the carpenters make for me. That was much too fancy, with rugs on the floors and furniture in my size and tea sets and dolls…

“Come this way. The cypress swamp is over there. Maybe there’ll be some alligators to watch. The weather’s been so warm they’re not likely to be in their winter dens.”

“No, thank you,” said Scarlett. “My legs are getting tired. I believe I’ll sit on that big stone for a while.”

The big stone turned out to be the base of a fallen, broken statue of a classically draped maiden. Scarlett could see the stained face in a thicket of brambles. She wasn’t really tired of walking, she was tired of Rosemary. And she certainly had no desire to see any alligators. She sat with the sun warm on her back and thought about what she’d seen. Dunmore Landing was beginning to come to life in her mind. It hadn’t been at all like Tara, she realized. Life here had been lived on a scale and in a style she knew nothing about. No wonder Charleston people had a reputation for thinking they were the be-all and end-all. They had lived like kings.

Despite the warmth of the sun she felt chilled. If Rhett worked day and night for the rest of his life, he’d never make this place what it once was, and that was exactly what he was determined to do. There wasn’t going to be much time in his life for her. And knowing about onions and yams wouldn’t be much help to her in sharing his life, either.

Rosemary returned, disappointed. She hadn’t seen a single ’gator. She talked nonstop while they were walking back to the house, giving their old names to gardens that were now only areas of rank weeds, boring Scarlett with complex descriptions of the varieties of rice once grown in fields that were now gone to marsh grass, reminiscing about her childhood. “I hated it when summer came!” she complained.

“Why?” asked Scarlett. She had always loved summer when there were parties every week and lots of visitors and noisy, shouting racing on back roads between the fields of ripening cotton.

Rosemary’s answer wiped away the apprehensions that were preying on her mind. In the Lowcountry, Scarlett learned, summertime was citytime. There was a fever that rose from the swamps to lay whites low. Malaria. Because of it everyone left their plantations from the middle of May until after the first frost in late October.

So Rhett would have time for her, after all. There was the Season, too, for nearly two more months. He had to be there to escort his mother and sister—and her. She’d be glad to let him fiddle with his flowers for five months a year if she could have the other seven. She’d even learn the names of his camellias.

What was that? Scarlett stared at the tremendous white stone object. It looked like an angel was standing on a big box.

“Oh, that’s our tomb,” said Rosemary. “A century and a half of Butlers, all in neat rows. When I got toes up, that’s where I’ll be put, too. The Yankees shot off big chunks of the angel’s wings, but they had the decency to leave the dead alone. I heard that some places they dug up graves to look for jewelry.”

Child of an Irish immigrant father, Scarlett was overwhelmed by the permanence of the tomb. All those generations, and all the generations to come, forever and ever, amen. “I’m going back to a place with roots that go deep,” Rhett had said. Now she understood what he had meant. She felt sorrow for what he had lost, and envy that she had never had it.

“Come on, Scarlett. You’re standing there as if you were planted. We’re almost back to the house. You can’t be too tired to walk that little bit.”

Scarlett remembered why she had agreed in the first place to go on the walk with Rosemary. “I’m not the least bit tired!” she insisted. “I think we should gather some pine branches and things to decorate the house a little. These are the holidays, after all.”

“Good idea. They’ll cut the stink. There’s plenty of pine, and holly, too, in the wood next to where the stables used to be.”

And mistletoe, Scarlett added silently. She wasn’t taking any chances with the New Year’s Eve midnight ritual.

“Very nice,” said Rhett when he came up to the house after the platform was built and draped with red, white, and blue bunting. “It looks festive, just right for the party.”

“What party?” asked Scarlett.

“I invited the sharecropper families. It makes them feel important, and God willing the men will be too hungover from rotgut whiskey to make trouble tomorrow when the blacks are here. You and Rosemary and Pansy will go upstairs before they come. It’s likely to get rough.”

Scarlett watched the Roman candles arc through the sky from her bedroom window. The fireworks to celebrate the New Year lasted from midnight until nearly one o’clock. She wished with all her heart that she had stayed in the city. Tomorrow she’d be cooped up all day while the blacks celebrated, and by the time they got back to town on Saturday it would probably be too late to wash and dry her hair for the Ball.

And Rhett had never kissed her.

During the days that followed, Scarlett recaptured all the giddy excitement of what she remembered as the best time of her life. She was a belle, with men clustered around her at receptions, with her dance card filled as soon as she entered the ballroom, with all her old games of flirtation producing the same admiration that they had before. It was like being sixteen again, with nothing to think about other than the last party and the compliments she’d been paid, and the next party and how she would wear her hair.

But it was not long before the thrills became flat. She was not sixteen, and she didn’t really want a string of beaux. She wanted Rhett, and she was no closer to winning him back than she had been. He kept up his end of their bargain: he was attentive to her at parties, pleasant to her whenever they were together in the house—with other people. Yet she was sure that he was looking at the calendar, counting the days until he’d be rid of her. She began to feel moments of panic. What if she lost?

The panic always bred anger. She focused it on young Tommy Cooper. The boy was always hanging around Rhett with hero-worship clear on his face. And Rhett responded, too. It enraged her. Tommy had been given a small sailboat for Christmas, and Rhett was teaching him to sail. There was a handsome brass telescope in the card room on the second floor, and Scarlett ran to it whenever she could on the afternoons that Rhett was out with Tommy Cooper. Her jealousy was like probing an aching tooth with her tongue, but she couldn’t resist the compulsion to cause herself pain. It’s not fair! They’re laughing and having fun and skimming the water as free as a bird. Why not take me sailing? I loved it so that time we came back from the Landing, I’d love it even more in that tiny boat the Cooper boy has. Why, it’s alive, it moves so quickly, so lightly, so… so happily!

Fortunately, there were few afternoons that she was at home and near the spy glass. Although the evening receptions and balls were the main events of the Season, there were also other things to be done. The dedicated whist players continued to gamble, Miss Eleanor’s Confederate Home committee had meetings about fund raising to buy books for the school and to repair a leak that suddenly appeared in the roof, there were still calls to pay and to receive. Scarlett became hollow-eyed and pale from fatigue.

It would all have been worth it if Rhett was the one feeling jealous and not her. But he seemed to be unaware of the admiration she was provoking. Or worse, uninterested.

She had to make him notice, make him care! She decided to choose one man from her dozens of admirers. Someone handsome… rich… younger than Rhett. Someone he’d have to feel jealous of.

Heavens, she looked like a ghost! She put on rouge, and heavy perfume, and her most innocent expression for the hunt.

*   *   *

Middleton Courtney was tall and fair, with sleepy-lidded pale eyes and extremely white teeth that he flashed in a wicked-looking smile. He was the epitome of what Scarlett considered a sophisticated man about town. Best of all, he, too, had a phosphate mine and it was twenty times the size of Rhett’s.

When he bowed over her hand in greeting, Scarlett closed her fingers over his. He looked up from his bow and smiled. “Dare I hope that you’ll honor me with the next dance, Mrs. Butler?”

“If you hadn’t asked me, Mr. Courtney, it would have broken my poor heart.”

When the polka ended Scarlett opened her fan in the slow unfurling known as “languishing fall.” She fluttered it near her face to lift the appealing tendrils of hair above her green eyes. “My goodness,” she said breathlessly, “I’m afraid that if I don’t get a little air I’m liable to keel right over into your arms, Mr. Courtney. Will you be so kind?” She took his proffered arm and leaned on it while he escorted her to a bench beneath a window.

“Oh, please, Mr. Courtney, do sit here beside me. I’ll get a terrible crick in my neck if I have to look up at you.”

Courtney seated himself. Rather close. “I’d hate to be the cause of any injury to such a beautiful neck,” he said. His eyes moved slowly down her throat to her white bosom. He was as skillful as Scarlett was at the game they were playing.

She kept her eyes modestly lowered, as if she didn’t know what Courtney was doing. Then she glanced up through her eyelashes and quickly down again.

“I hope my silly weak spell isn’t keeping you from dancing with the lady closest to your heart, Mr. Courtney.”

“But the lady you speak of is the lady closest to my heart right now, Mrs. Butler.”

Scarlett looked him directly in the eyes and smiled enchantingly. “You be careful, Mr. Courtney. You’re liable to turn my head,” she promised.

“I certainly intend to try,” he murmured close to her ear. His breath was warm on her neck.

Very soon the public romance between them was the most talked-about topic of the Season. The number of times they danced together at each ball… the time Courtney took Scarlett’s punch cup from her hand and put his lips where hers had been on the edge… overheard snippets of their innuendo-laden raillery…