Scarlett (74 page)

“Let’s go,” she said after one more look at the river. All of a sudden she felt very tired.

“Colum, I think I’m going to kill dear cousin Molly. If you could have heard that horrible Robert last night at dinner telling us how privileged we were to walk on the Earl’s dumb garden paths. He must have said it about seven hundred times, and every single time Molly chirped away for ten minutes about what a thrill it was.

“And then, this morning, she practically swooned when she saw me in these Galway clothes. No chirpy little lady voice then, let me tell you. She lectured me about ruining her position and being an embarrassment to Robert. To Robert! He should be embarrassed every time he sees his dumb fat face in a looking glass. How dare Molly lecture me about disgracing him?”

Colum patted Scarlett’s hand. “She’s not the best companion I’d wish for you, Scarlett darling, but Molly has her virtues. She did lend us the trap for the day, and we’ll have a grand outing with no thought of her to cloud it. Look at the blackthorn flowers in the hedges, and the wild cherries blooming their hearts out in that farmyard. It’s too fine a day to waste on rancor. And you look like a lovely Irish lass in your striped stockings and red petticoat.”

Scarlett stretched out her feet and laughed. Colum was right. Why should she let Molly ruin her day?

They went to Trim, an ancient town with a rich history that Colum knew would interest Scarlett not at all. So he told her instead about Market Day every Saturday, just like Galway, only, he had to acknowledge, considerably smaller. But with a fortune-teller most Saturdays, something you seldom found in Galway, and a glorious fortune promised if you paid tuppence, reasonable happiness for a penny, and tribulation foretold only if your pocket could produce merely a ha’penny.

Scarlett laughed—Colum could always make her laugh—and touched the drawstring bag hanging between her breasts. It was hidden by her shirt and her Galway blue cloak. No one would ever know she was wearing two hundred dollars in gold instead of a corset. The freedom was almost indecent. She had not been out of the house without stays since she was eleven years old.

He showed her Trim’s famous castle, and Scarlett pretended interest in the ruins. Then he showed her the store where Jamie had worked from the time he was sixteen until he went to Savannah at the age of forty-two, and Scarlett’s interest was real. They talked with the shopkeeper, and of course nothing would do but to close the shop and accompany the owner upstairs to meet his wife, who would surely die from the sorrow of it if she couldn’t hear the news from Savannah straight from Colum’s own lips and meet the visiting O’Hara who was already the talk of the countryside for her beauty and her American charm.

Then neighbors had to be told what a special day it was and who was there, and they hurried to the rooms above the shop until Scarlett was sure the walls must be bulging.

Then, “The Mahoneys will be wounded by the slight if we come to Trim without seeing them,” Colum said when at last they left Jamie’s former employer. Who? They’re Maureen’s family, to be sure, with the grandest bar in all Trim and had Scarlett ever tried a bit of porter? The number of people was even larger this time, with more arriving every minute, and soon there were fiddlers and food. The hours sped by, and the long twilight was setting in when they started the short journey to Adamstown. The first shower of the day—a phenomenon to have so much sun, said Colum—intensified the scent of the blossoms in the hedgerows. Scarlett pulled up the hood of her cloak, and they sang all the way to the village.

“I’ll stop in here in the bar and learn if there’s a letter for me,” Colum said. He looped the pony’s reins around the village pump. In an instant heads thrust through the open half doors of all the buildings.

“Scarlett,” cried Mary Helen, “the baby’s got another tooth, come have a cup of tea and admire it.”

“No, Mary Helen, you come along here with the babe and tooth and husband and all,” said Clare O’Gorman, née O’Hara. “Isn’t she my own first cousin and my Jim dying to meet her?”

“And my cousin, too, Clare,” shouted Peggy Monaghan. “And me with a barm brack on my hearth because I learned her partiality for it.”

Scarlett didn’t know what to do. “Colum!” she called.

It was easy enough, he said. They’d just go to each house in turn, starting with the closest, gathering friends as they went. When the entire village was in one of the houses, that’s where they’d stay for a while.

“Not too long, mind you, because you’ll have to get into your finery for Molly’s dinner table. She has her imperfections, as do we all, but you cannot thumb your nose at her under her own roof. She’s tried too hard to shed those kinds of petticoats to be able to support seeing them in her dining room.”

Scarlett put her hand on Colum’s arm. “Do you think I can stay at Daniel’s?” she asked. “I truly hate being at Molly’s… What are you laughing about, Colum?”

“I’ve been wondering how I could persuade Molly to let us have the trap one more day. Now I think she can be convinced to make it available for the rest of your visit. You take yourself in there to see the new tooth, and I’ll go have a small talk with Molly. Don’t take this wrong, Scarlett darling, but she’ll likely promise anything if I promise to take you elsewhere. She’ll never live down what you said about Robert’s elegant kid gloves for cow tending. It’s the most cherished story in every kitchen from here to Mullingar.”

Scarlett was installed in the room “above” the kitchen by suppertime. Uncle Daniel even smiled when Colum told the tale of Robert’s gloves. This remarkable occurrence was added to the tale, making it an even better story for the next telling.

*   *   *

Scarlett adjusted with astonishing ease to the simplicity of Daniel’s two-room cottage. With a room of her own, a comfortable bed, and Kathleen’s tireless unobtrusive cleaning and cooking, Scarlett had only to enjoy herself on her holiday. And she did—enormously.

D
uring the following week Scarlett was busier and, in some ways, happier than she had ever been. She felt stronger physically than she could remember ever feeling. Freed from the constriction of fashionable tight lacing and the metal cage of corset stays, she could move more quickly and breathe deeply for the first time in many years. In addition, she was one of those women whose vitality increased in pregnancy as if in response to the needs of the life growing within her. She slept deeply and woke at cockcrow with a raging appetite for breakfast and for the day ahead.

Which always produced both the comfortable delight of familiar pleasures and the stimulation of new experience. Colum was eager to take her out “adventuring,” as he called it, in Molly’s pony trap. But first he had to tear her away from her new friends. They poked their heads in at Daniel’s door immediately after breakfast. For a visit, to invite her to visit them, with a story she might not have heard yet, or a letter from America that could use some explanation of the meaning of some words or phrases. She was the expert on America and was begged to tell what it was like, over and over again. She was also Irish, though she’d suffered, poor dear, from the lack of knowing it, and there were dozens of things to tell her and teach her and show her.

There was an artlessness about the Irish women that disarmed her; it was as if they were from another world, as foreign as the world they all believed in where fairies of all kinds did magical and enchanting things. She laughed openly when Kathleen put a saucer of milk and a plate of crumbled bread on the doorstep every evening in case any “little people” passing by were hungry. And when both saucer and plate were empty and clean in the morning Scarlett said sensibly that one of the barn cats must have been at them. Her skepticism bothered Kathleen not at all, and Kathleen’s fairy supper became, for Scarlett, one of the most charming things about living with the O’Haras.

Another was the time she spent with her grandmother. She’s tough as shoe leather, Scarlett thought with pride, and she fancied that her grandmother’s blood in her veins was what had gotten her through the desperate times in her life. She ran over to the little cottage often, and if Old Katie Scarlett was awake and willing to talk, she’d sit on a stool and ask for stories about her Pa growing up.

Eventually she’d give in to Colum’s urgings and climb up into the trap for the day’s adventure. Warm in her wool skirts, protected by cloak and hood, she learned within a few days to pay no attention to the gusting wind from the west or the brief light rains that so often rode on it.

Just such a rain was falling when Colum took her to “the real Tara.” Scarlett’s cloak billowed around her when she reached the top of the uneven stone steps up the side of the low hill where Ireland’s High Kings had ruled and made music, and loved and hated, and feasted and battled and, in the end, been defeated.

There’s not even a castle. Scarlett looked around her and saw nothing except a scattering of grazing sheep. Their fleece looked gray under the gray sky in the gray light. She shivered, surprising herself. A goose walked over my grave. The childhood explanation flickered in her mind, making her smile.

“It pleases you?” asked Colum.

“Um, yes, it’s very pretty.”

“Don’t lie, Scarlett darling, and don’t search for prettiness at Tara. Come with me.” He held out his hand and Scarlett put hers in it.

Together they walked slowly across the rich grass to an uneven area of what looked to her like grassy lumps in the earth. Colum walked over some of them and stopped. “Saint Patrick himself stood where we are standing now. He was a man then, a simple missionary, no bigger, likely, than I am. Sainthood came later and he grew in people’s minds to a giant of a man, invincible, armed with God’s Holy Word. It’s better, I believe, to remember that he was a man first. He must have been frightened—alone, in his sandals and frieze cloak, facing the power of the High King and his magicians. Patrick had only his faith and his mission of truth and the need to tell it. The wind must have been cold. His need must have been like a consuming flame. He had already broken the High King’s law, lighting a great bonfire on a night when it was the law that all fires should be put out. He could have been killed for the trespass, he knew that. He had purposed the great risk to draw the eye of the King and prove to him the magnitude of the message he, Patrick, bore. He did not fear death; he feared only that he would fail God. That he did not do. King Laoghaire, from his ancient jewelled throne, gave the bold missionary the right to preach without hindrance. And Ireland became Christian.”

There was, in Colum’s quiet voice, something that compelled Scarlett to listen and to try to understand what he was saying and something more besides. She’d never thought about saints at all; they were just names of holy days. Now, looking at Colum’s short stocky figure and ordinary face and graying hair tousled by the wind, she could imagine the face and figure of another ordinary-looking man, in the same stance of readiness. He wasn’t afraid to die. How could anyone not be afraid to die? What must it be like? She felt a human wrench of envy of Saint Patrick, of all the saints, even, somehow, of Colum. I don’t understand, and I never will, she thought. The realization came slowly, a heavy weight. She had learned a great and painful and stirring truth. There are things too deep, too complex, too conflicted for explanation or everyday understanding. Scarlett felt alone and exposed to the western wind.

Colum walked on, leading her. It was only a few dozen paces to the place where he stopped. “There,” he said, “that row of low mounds, do you see it?” Scarlett nodded.

“You should have music and a glass of whiskey to stave off the wind and open your eyes, but I have none to give you, so perhaps you should close them to see. That is all we have left of the banqueting hall of the thousand candles. The O’Haras were there, Scarlett darling, and the Scarletts, and everyone you know—Monaghan, Mahoney, MacMahon, O’Gorman, O’Brien, Danaher, Donahue, Carmody—others you’ve yet to meet, as well. All the heroes were there. The food, it was grand and plentiful, and the drink. And music to lift the heart right out of your body. A thousand guests it held, lit by the thousand candles. Can you see it, Scarlett? The flames glowing twice, thrice, ten times over, reflected as they were in the gold bracelets on their arms and in the gold cups that travelled to their mouths, and in the deep reds and greens and blues of the great gold-clasped jewels that held their carmine cloaks across their shoulders. What mighty appetites they had—for the venison and boar and roast goose gleaming in its fat—for the mead and the poteen—for the music that brought their fists to pounding on the tables with gold plates jouncing and rattling one upon the next. Can you see your Pa? And Jamie? And that rascal young Brian with his side-looking gaze at the women? Ach, what revelry! Can you see it, Scarlett?”

She laughed with Colum. Yes, Pa would have been bellowing out “Peg in a Low Back’d Car” and calling for his cup to be filled just one more time because singing put such a terrible thirst on a man. How he would have loved it. “There’d be horses,” she said confidently. “Pa always had to have a horse.”

“Horses as strong and beautiful as great waves rushing at the shore.”

“And somebody patient to put him to bed after.”

Colum laughed. He put his arms around her and hugged her, then let her go. “I knew you’d feel the glorious fact of it,” he said. There was pride in his words, pride in her. Scarlett smiled at him, her eyes like living emeralds.