Scarlett (59 page)

“My breakfast is unsatisfactory,” he announced.

Scarlett stared at him, slack-jawed. What did his breakfast have to do with her? Did he think she’d cooked it? Maybe he had lost his mind. Like Pa. No, not like Pa. Pa had had more than he could bear, that’s all, and so he retreated to a time and a world where the terrible things hadn’t happened. He was like a confused child. But there’s nothing confused or child-like about Grandfather. He knows exactly where and who he is and what he’s doing. What does he mean by waking me up after only a couple of hours’ sleep and complaining to me about his breakfast?

Her voice was carefully calm when she spoke. “What’s wrong with your breakfast, Grandfather?”

“It’s tasteless and it’s cold.”

“Why don’t you send it back to the kitchen, then? Tell them to bring what you want and make sure it’s hot.”

“You do it. Kitchens are women’s business.”

Scarlett put her hands on her hips. She looked at her grandfather with eyes as steely as his. “Do you mean to tell me that you got me out of bed to send a message to your cook? What do you take me for, some kind of servant? Order your own breakfast or starve, it’s all the same to me. I’m going back to bed.” Scarlett turned with a flounce.

“That bed belongs to me, young woman, and you occupy it by my grace and favour. I expect you to obey my orders as long as you’re under my roof.”

She was in a fine rage now, all hope of sleep gone. I’ll pack my things this minute, she thought. I don’t have to put up with this.

The seductive aroma of fresh coffee stopped her before she spoke. She’d have coffee first, then tell the old man off… And she’d better think a minute. She wasn’t ready to leave Savannah yet. Rhett must know, by now, that she was here. And she should get a message about Tara from the Mother Superior any minute.

Scarlett walked to the bell pull by the door. Then she took a chair at her grandfather’s right. When Jerome came in, she glared at him. “Give me a cup for my coffee. Then take this plate away. What is it, Grandfather, cornmeal mush? Whatever it is, Jerome, tell the cook to eat it herself. After she fixes some scrambled eggs and ham and bacon and grits and biscuits. With plenty of butter. And I’ll have a pitcher of thick cream for my coffee right this minute.”

Jerome looked at the erect old man, silently urging him to put Scarlett in her place. Pierre Robillard looked straight ahead, not meeting his butler’s eyes.

“Don’t stand there like a statue,” Scarlett snapped. “Do as you’re told.” She was hungry.

So was her grandfather. Although the meal was as silent as his birthday dinner had been, this time he ate everything that was brought to him. Scarlett watched him suspiciously from the corner of her eye. What was he up to, the old fox? She couldn’t believe that there wasn’t something behind this charade. In her experience, getting what you wanted from servants was the easiest thing in the world. All you had to do was shout at them. And Lord knows Grandfather’s good at terrifying people. Look at Aunt Pauline and Aunt Eulalie.

Look at me, for that matter. I hopped out of bed quick enough when he sent for me. I’ll not do that again.

The old man dropped his napkin by his empty plate. “I’ll expect you to be suitably dressed for future meals,” he said to Scarlett. “We shall leave the house in precisely one hour and seven minutes to go to church. That should provide adequate time for your grooming.”

Scarlett hadn’t intended to go to church at all, now that her aunts weren’t there to expect it and she’d gotten what she wanted from the Mother Superior. But her grandfather’s high-handedness had to be stopped. He was violently anti-Catholic, according to her aunts.

“I didn’t know you attended Mass, Grandfather,” she said. Sweetness dripped from the words.

Pierre Robillard’s thick white brows met in a beetling frown. “You do not subscribe to that papist idiocy like your aunts, I hope.”

“I’m a good Catholic, if that’s what you mean. And I’m going to Mass with my cousins, the O’Haras. Who—by the way—have invited me to come stay with them any time I want, for as long as I like.” Scarlett stood and marched in triumph from the room. She was halfway up the stairs before she remembered that she shouldn’t have eaten anything before Mass. No matter. She didn’t have to take Communion if she didn’t want to. And she’d certainly showed Grandfather. When she reached her room, she did a few steps of the reel that she’d learned the night before.

She didn’t for a minute believe that the old man would call her bluff about staying with her cousins. Much as she loved going to the O’Haras’ for music and dancing, there were far too many children there to make a visit possible. Besides, they didn’t have any servants. She couldn’t get dressed without Pansy to lace her stays and fix her hair.

I wonder what he’s really up to, she thought again. Then she shrugged. She’d probably find out soon enough. It wasn’t really important. Before he came out with it, Rhett would probably have come for her anyhow.

O
ne hour and four minutes after Scarlett went up to her room, Pierre Auguste Robillard, soldier of Napoleon, left his beautiful shrine of a house to go to church. He wore a heavy overcoat and a wool scarf, and his thin white hair was covered with a tall hat made of sable that had once belonged to a Russian officer who died at Borodino. Despite the bright sun and the promise of spring in the air, the old man’s thin body was cold. Still, he walked stiffly erect, seldom using the malacca cane he carried. He nodded in a correct abbreviated bow to the people who greeted him on the street. He was very well known in Savannah.

At the Independent Presbyterian Church on Chippewa Square he took his place in the fifth pew from the front, the place that had been his ever since the gala dedication of the church nearly sixty years earlier. James Monroe, then president of the United States, had been at the dedication and had asked to be introduced to the man who had been with Napoleon from Austerlitz to Waterloo. Pierre Robillard had been gracious to the older man, even though a President was nothing impressive to a man who had fought alongside an Emperor.

When the service ended, he had a few words with several men who responded to his gesture and hurried to join him on the steps of the church. He asked a few questions, listened to a great many answers. Then he went home, his stern face almost smiling, to nap until dinner was served to him on a tray. The weekly outing to church grew more tiring all the time.

He slept lightly, as the very old do, and woke before Jerome brought his tray. While he waited for it, he thought about Scarlett.

He had no curiosity about her life or her nature. He hadn’t given her a thought for many years, and when she appeared in his room with his daughters he was neither pleased nor displeased to see her. She caught his attention only when Jerome complained to him about her. She was causing disruption in the kitchen with her demands, Jerome said. And she would cause Monsieur Robillard’s death if she continued to insist on adding butter and gravy and sweets to his meals.

She was the answer to the old man’s prayer. He had nothing to look forward to in his life except more months or years of the unchanging routine of sleep and meals and the weekly excursion to church. It did not disturb him that his life was so featureless; he had his beloved wife’s likeness before his eyes and the certainty that, in due time, he would be reunited with her after death. He spent the days and nights dreaming of her when he slept and turning memories of her in his mind when he was awake. It was enough for him. Almost. He did miss having good food to eat, and in recent years it had been tasteless, cold when it wasn’t burnt, and of a deadly monotony. He wanted Scarlett to change that.

Her suspicions of the old man’s motives were unfounded. Pierre Robillard had recognized the bully in her at once. He wanted it to function in his behalf now that he no longer had the strength to get what he wanted for himself. The servants knew that he was too old and tired to dominate them. But Scarlett was young and strong. He didn’t seek her companionship or her love. He wanted her to run his house the way he had once run it himself—which meant in accordance with his standards and subject to his dominance. He needed to find a way to accomplish that, and so he thought about her.

“Tell my granddaughter to come here,” he said when Jerome came in.

“She ain’t home yet,” said the old butler with a smile. He anticipated the old man’s anger with delight. Jerome hated Scarlett.

Scarlett was at the big City Market with the O’Haras. After the confrontation with her grandfather she had dressed, dismissed Pansy, and escaped through the garden to hurry, unaccompanied, the two short blocks to Jamie’s house. “I’ve come to have company going to Mass,” she told Maureen, but her real reason was to be someplace where people were nice to one another.

After Mass the men went in one direction, the women and children in another. “They’ll have a haircut and a gossip in the barber shop at the Pulaski House Hotel,” Maureen told Scarlett. “And most likely a pint or two in the saloon. It’s better than a newspaper for hearing what’s going on. We’ll get our own news at the Market while I buy some oysters for a nice pie.”

Savannah’s City Market had the same purpose and the same excitement as the Market in Charleston. Until she was back in the familiar hubbub of bargaining and buying and friends greeting friends, Scarlett hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it when the Season took precedence for women’s time.

She wished now that she’d taken Pansy with her after all; she could have filled a basket with the exotic fruits that came in through Savannah’s busy seaport if only she’d had her maid to carry it. Mary Kate and Helen were doing that chore for the O’Hara women. Scarlett let them carry some oranges for her. And she insisted on paying for the coffee and caramel rolls they all had at one of the stands.

Still, she refused when Maureen invited her to come home for dinner with them. She hadn’t told her grandfather’s cook that she wouldn’t be at the house. And she wanted to catch up on the sleep she’d missed. It wouldn’t do to look like death warmed over if Rhett came in on the afternoon train.

She kissed Maureen goodbye at the Robillard doorstep, called goodbye to the others. They were almost a block behind, slowed down by the unsteady steps of the little children and Patricia’s burdened by pregnancy pace. Helen ran up with a bulging paper sack. “Don’t forget your oranges, Cousin Scarlett.”

“I’ll take that, Miss Scarlett.” It was Jerome.

“Oh. All right. Here. You shouldn’t be so quiet, Jerome, you gave me a shock. I didn’t hear the door open.”

“I’ve been looking out for you. Mr. Robillard, he wants you.” Jerome looked at the straggle of O’Haras with unconcealed disdain.

Scarlett’s chin stiffened. Something was going to have to be done about the butler’s impertinence. She sailed into her grandfather’s room with an angry complaint on her lips.

Pierre Robillard gave her no time to speak. “You are dishevelled,” he said coldly, “and you have ruptured the schedule of my house. While you were consorting with those Irish peasants, the dinner hour has passed.”

Scarlett leapt hotly to the bait. “I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue when you refer to my cousins.”

The old man’s eyelids half hid the gleam in his eyes. “What do you call a man who’s in trade?” he said quietly.

“If you’re talking about Jamie O’Hara, I call him a successful, hard-working businessman, and I respect him for what he’s accomplished.”

Her grandfather set the hook. “And no doubt you admire his garish wife, too.”

“Indeed I do! She’s a kind and generous woman.”

“I believe that’s the impression her trade tries to make. You are aware, are you not, that she was a barmaid in an Irish saloon.”

Scarlett gasped like a landed fish. It couldn’t be true! Unwelcome pictures filled her mind. Maureen holding up her glass for another whiskey… playing the bones and singing lustily all the verses of bawdy songs… brushing her tousled bright hair off her red face without trying to pin it back up… lifting her skirts to her knees to dance the reel…

Common. Maureen was common.

They were all kind of common.

Scarlett felt like crying. She’d been so happy with the O’Haras, she didn’t want to lose them. But… here in this house where her mother had grown up, the gulf between Robillard and O’Hara was too broad to ignore. No wonder Grandfather’s ashamed of me. Mother would be heartbroken if she could see me walking on the street with a bunch like I just came home with. A woman in public without so much as a shawl over her pregnant belly, and a million children running all over the place like wild Indians, and not even a maid to carry the shopping. I must have looked as trashy as the rest of them. And Mother tried so hard to teach me to be a lady. She’d be happy she was dead if she knew that her daughter was friends with a woman who worked in a saloon.

Scarlett looked anxiously at the old man. Could he possibly know about the building she owned in Atlanta and rented to a saloonkeeper?

Pierre Robillard’s eyes were closed. He seemed to have slipped into the sudden sleep of old age. Scarlett tiptoed out of the room. When she closed the door behind her, the old soldier smiled, then went to sleep.

Jerome brought her the mail on a silver tray. He was wearing white gloves. Scarlett took the envelopes from the tray, a short nod her only thank you. It wouldn’t do to show her gratification, not if she was going to keep Jerome in his place. The previous evening, after waiting for an eternity in the drawing room for Rhett, who never showed up, she had given the servants a tongue-lashing they’d never forget. Jerome in particular. It was a godsend that the butler was so nearly impertinent; she needed someone to unload her anger and disappointment on.