Scarlett (58 page)

A half million dollars. More money than she’d have if she sold everything she owned twice over. More money than her store and her saloon and her new houses would make in thirty years. She had to protect it, but how? Oh, she could kill Uncle Henry!

When Pansy came upstairs proudly carrying the heavy silver tray with the gleaming coffee service on it, she was met by a pale, wild-eyed Scarlett. “Put that thing down and get your coat on,” said Scarlett. “We’re going out.”

She had herself under control; there was even a little color in her cheeks from the walk when she hurried into the O’Hara store. Cousin or not, she didn’t want Jamie to know too much about her business. So her voice was charmingly girlish when she asked him to recommend a banker. “I’ve been so giddy that I just haven’t paid any attention to my spending money, and now that I’ve decided to stay a while longer, I need to have a few dollars transferred from my bank at home, but I don’t know a soul here in Savannah. I figured you’d be able to put in a good word for me, being a prosperous businessman and all.”

Jamie grinned. “I’ll be proud to escort you to the president of the bank, and I’ll vouch for him because Uncle James has done business with him for fifty years and more. But you’ll do better, Scarlett, to tell him you’re old Robillard’s granddaughter than that you’re O’Hara’s cousin. The word is, he’s a very warm old gentleman. Wasn’t he the smart one who sent his brass to France when Georgia decided to follow South Carolina out of the Union?”

But that meant her grandfather was a traitor to the South! No wonder he still had all that heavy silver and that undamaged house. Why hadn’t he been lynched? And how could Jamie laugh about it? Scarlett remembered Maureen laughing about her grandfather, too, when she should by rights have been shocked. It was all very complicated. She didn’t know what to think. In any case, she didn’t have time to think about it now, she had to get to the bank and arrange about her money.

“You’ll watch the store, then, Daniel, while I walk out with Cousin Scarlett?” Jamie was beside her, offering his arm. Scarlett put her hand in the bend of his elbow and waved goodbye to Daniel. She hoped it wasn’t far to the bank. It was nearly noon.

“Maureen will be delighted that you’ll be with us for a bit,” said Jamie as they walked along Broughton Street with Pansy trailing behind. “Will you be coming over this evening, then, Scarlett? I could call for you on my way home to walk you there.”

“I’d like that very much, Jamie,” she said. She’d go crazy in that big house with no one to talk to but her grandfather, and him only for ten minutes. If Rhett came, she could always send Pansy to the store with a note saying she’d changed her mind.

As it turned out, she was waiting impatiently in the front hall for Jamie when he arrived. Her grandfather had been exceptionally nasty when she told him she was going out for the evening. “This is not a hotel where you can come and go as you please, miss. You’ll match your schedule to the routine of my house, and that means in your bed by nine o’clock.”

“Of course, Grandfather,” she had said meekly. She was sure she’d be home long before then. And besides, she was regarding him with increased respect ever since her visit to the bank president. Her grandfather must be much, much richer than she’d imagined. When Jamie introduced her as Pierre Robillard’s granddaughter, the man nearly split his britches bowing and scraping. Scarlett smiled, remembering. Then, after Jamie left, when I told him I wanted to rent a safe box and transfer a half million to it, I thought he’d swoon at my feet. I don’t care what anybody says, having lots of money is the best thing in the world.

“I can’t stay late,” she told Jamie when he arrived. “I hope that’s all right. You won’t mind walking me back by eight-thirty?”

“I’ll be honored to walk you anywhere at any time at all,” Jamie vowed.

Scarlett truly had no idea that she wouldn’t be back until almost dawn.

T
he evening started quietly enough. So quietly, in fact, that Scarlett was disappointed. She’d been expecting music and dancing and some kind of celebration, but Jamie escorted her to the now familiar kitchen of his house. Maureen greeted her with a kiss on each cheek and a cup of tea in her hand, then returned to the preparation of supper. Scarlett sat down next to Uncle James, who was dozing. Jamie took off his coat, unbuttoned his vest, and lit a pipe, then settled down in a rocking chair for a quiet smoke. Mary Kate and Helen were setting the table in the adjoining dining room, chattering to one another over the rattle of knives and forks. It was a comfortable family scene, but not very exciting. Still, thought Scarlett, at least there’s going to be supper. I knew Aunt Pauline and Aunt Eulalie must be wrong about the whole fasting nonsense. Nobody would live on only one meal a day for weeks and weeks on purpose.

After a few minutes the shy girl with the cloud of beautiful dark hair came in from the hall with little Jacky by the hand. “Oh, there you are, Kathleen,” said Jamie. Scarlett made a mental note of the name. It suited the girl, so soft and youthful. “Bring the little man to his old Pa.” Jacky pulled his hand away and ran to his father, and the brief tranquillity was over. Scarlett winced at the little boy’s shouts of joy. Uncle James snorted in sudden waking. The street door opened and Daniel came in with his younger brother Brian. “Look what I found sniffing at the door, Ma,” said Daniel.

“Oh, so you’ve decided to grace us with your presence, then, Brian,” Maureen said. “I’ll have to tell the newspaper so they can put it on the front page.”

Brian grabbed his mother around the waist in a bear hug. “You wouldn’t turn a man out to starve, now, would you?”

Maureen made a pretense of anger, but she was smiling. Brian kissed the coiled masses of red hair on top of her head and released her.

“Now look what you’ve done to my hair, you wild Indian,” Maureen complained. “And shaming me in the bargain by not greeting your cousin Scarlett. You, too, Daniel.”

Brian leaned down from his great height and grinned at Scarlett. “Will you forgive me?” he said. “You were so small and elegantly silent there that I missed you altogether, Cousin Scarlett.” His thick red hair was bright in the glow from the fire, and his blue eyes were infectiously merry. “Will you plead for me with my cruel mother that I can have a few scraps from her table?”

“Go on with you, savage, and wash the dust off your hands,” Maureen ordered.

Daniel took his brother’s place when Brian headed for the sink. “We’re all glad you’re here with us, Cousin Scarlett.”

Scarlett smiled. Even with the racket from Jacky bouncing on Jamie’s knee, she was glad to be there, too. There was so much life in these big redheaded cousins of hers. It made the cold perfection of her grandfather’s house seem like a tomb.

While they ate at the big table in the dining room Scarlett learned the story behind Maureen’s mock anger at her son. Brian had moved a few weeks earlier from the room he had shared with Daniel, and Maureen was only semi-reconciled to his burst of independence. Granted he was only a few steps away, at his sister Patricia’s house; still, he was gone. It gave Maureen immense satisfaction that Brian still preferred her cooking to Patricia’s fancier menus. “Ah, well, what can you expect,” she said complacently, “when Patricia won’t allow the smell of fish to get into her fine lace curtains?” And she piled four glistening butter-coated fried fish on her son’s plate. “It’s a hardship to be such a lady during Lent, I’m sure.”

“Bite your tongue, woman,” said Jamie, “that’s your own daughter you’re maligning.”

“And who has a better right than her own mother?”

Old James spoke up then. “Maureen has a point. I well remember my own mother’s sharp tongue…” He rambled fondly through a series of memories of his youth. Scarlett listened intently for mention of her father. “Now, Gerald,” said Old James, and she leaned toward him, “Gerald was always the apple of her eye, being the baby and all. He always got off with no more than a small scolding.” Scarlett smiled. It was just like Pa to be his mother’s favorite. Who could resist the soft heart he tried to hide under all his blustering? Oh, how she wished he could be here now with all his family.

“Are we going to Matthew’s after supper?” Old James asked. “Or is everyone coming here?”

“We’re going to Matt’s,” Jamie replied. Matt was the one who’d started the dancing at Patricia’s birthday, Scarlett remembered. Her feet began to tap.

Maureen smiled at her. “I believe there’s a readiness for a reel,” she said. She picked up the spoon by her plate, reached across Daniel and took his; then, placing their bowls back to back, she held the tips of the handles loosely together and tapped the spoons against her palm, against her wrist, her forearm, Daniel’s forehead. The rhythm of the beating was like playing the bones, but lighter, and the sheer silliness of making music with a pair of mismatched tablespoons was cause for delighted, spontaneous laughter from Scarlett. Without thinking about it, she began to pound on the table with her open hands, matching the beat of the spoons.

“It’s time we were going,” Jamie laughed. “I’ll get my fiddle.”

“We’ll bring the chairs,” said Mary Kate.

“Matt and Katie only have two,” Daniel explained to Scarlett. “They’re the newest O’Haras to come to Savannah.”

It didn’t matter at all that Matt and Katie O’Hara’s double parlors held almost no furniture. They had fireplaces for warmth, gaslit ceiling globes for light, and a broad, polished wood floor for dancing. The hours Scarlett passed in those bare rooms that Saturday were among the happiest she’d ever known.

Within the family the O’Haras shared love and happiness as freely and unconsciously as they shared the air they breathed. Scarlett felt within her the growth of something she had lost too long ago to remember. She became, like them, unaffected and spontaneous and open to carefree joy. She could shed the artifice and calculation that she’d learned to use in the battles for conquest and dominance that were part of being a belle in Southern society.

She had no need to charm or conquer; she was welcome as she was, one of the family. For the first time in her life she was willing to relinquish the spotlight to let someone else be the center of attention. The others were fascinating to her, primarily because they were her new-found family, but also because she’d never known anyone like them in her life.

Or almost never. Scarlett looked at Maureen, with Brian and Daniel making music behind her, Helen and Mary Kate clapping in time with the rhythm she was setting with the bones, and for a moment it was as if the vivid redheads were the youthful Tarletons come back to life. The twins, tall and handsome, the girls squirming with juvenile impatience to move on to the next adventure life held for them. Scarlett had always envied the Tarleton girls their free-and-easy ways with their mother. Now she saw the same easiness between Maureen and her children. And she knew that she, too, was welcome to laugh with Maureen, to tease and be teased, to share in the bounteous affection that Jamie’s wife showered on everyone around her.

At that moment Scarlett’s near-worship of her serene, self-contained mother shivered and suffered a tiny crack, and she began to free herself of the guilt she’d always felt because she couldn’t live up to her mother’s teachings. Perhaps it was all right if she wasn’t a perfect lady. The idea was too rich, too complicated. She’d think about it later. She didn’t want to think about anything now. Not yesterday, not tomorrow. The only thing that mattered was this moment and the happiness it held, the music and singing and clapping and dancing.

After the formal rituals of Charleston’s balls, the spontaneous home-made pleasures were intoxicating. Scarlett breathed deep of the joy and laughter around her, and it giddied her.

Matt’s daughter Peggy showed her the simplest steps of the reel, and there was, in some strange way, a rightness to learning from a seven-year-old child. And a rightness to the outspoken encouragement and even the teasing of the others, adults and children alike, because it was the same for Peggy as it was for her. She danced until her knees were wobbly, then she collapsed, laughing, in a heap on the floor at Old James’ feet, and he patted her head as if she were a puppy, and that made her laugh all the more, until she was gasping for breath when she cried out, “I’m having so much fun!”

There had been very little fun in Scarlett’s life, and she wanted it to last forever, this clean, uncomplicated joyfulness. She looked at her big, happy cousins, and she was proud of their strength and vigor and talent for music and for life. “We’re a fine lot, we O’Haras. There’s none can touch us.” Scarlett heard her father’s voice, boasting, saying the words he had so often said to her, and she knew for the first time what he had meant.

“Ah, Jamie, what a wonderful night this was,” she said when he was walking her home. Scarlett was so tired she was practically stumbling, but she was chattering like a magpie, too exhilarated to accept the peaceful silence of the sleeping city. “We’re a fine lot, we O’Haras.”

Jamie laughed. His strong hands caught her around the waist and he lifted her up and swung her in a giddy circle. “There’s none can touch us,” he said when he set her down.

“Miss Scarlett… Miss Scarlett!” Pansy woke her at seven with a message from her grandfather. “He wants you right this minute.”

The old soldier was formally dressed and fresh-shaven. He looked disapprovingly at Scarlett’s hastily combed hair and dressing gown from his imperial position in the great armchair at the head of the dining room table.