Scarlett (82 page)

“Fiddle-dee-dee,” she said, “the Captain of the militia gave it to me. A woman living alone who’s known to have a lot of gold should have some protection, he said. He’d have posted one of his sissy-britches soldiers at the door if I’d let him.”

Colum’s laughter made her eyebrows rise. She didn’t think what she’d said was all that amusing.

The larder shelves held butter, milk, sugar, a rack with two plates in it, a bowl of eggs, a ham hanging from the ceiling, and a loaf of stale bread. Buckets of water stood in a corner with a tin of lamp oil and a washstand outfitted with bowl, pitcher, soap dish and soap, and a towel rack with one towel on it. Scarlett’s clothes hung from nails on the wall.

“You’re not using the upstairs, then,” Colum commented.

“Why should I? I have all I need here.”

“You’ve done wonders, Colum, I’m really impressed.” Scarlett stood in the center of Ballyhara’s famously wide street and looked at the activity everywhere along the length of it. Hammering could be heard from every direction; there was the smell of fresh paint; new windows sparkled in a dozen buildings; and in front of her, a man on a ladder was putting up a gold-lettered sign above the door of the building that Colum had first earmarked for work.

“Did we really need to finish the bar first?” Scarlett asked. She’d been asking the same thing ever since Colum made the announcement.

“You’ll find more willing workers if there’s a place for them to have a pint when their work’s done,” he said for the thousandth time.

“So you’ve said, every time you opened your mouth, but I still can’t see why it won’t just make them worse. Why, if I didn’t keep after them, nothing would ever get done on time. They’d be just like them!” Scarlett jerked her thumb at the groups of interested observers along the street. “They should be back wherever they come from, doing their own work, not watching while other people work.”

“Scarlett darling, it’s the national character to take the pleasures life has to offer first and worry about duties later. It’s what gives the Irish their charm and their happiness.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s charming, and it doesn’t make me one bit happy. It’s practically August already and not one single field’s been cleared yet. How can I possibly plant in the spring if the fields aren’t cleared and manured in the fall?”

“You’ve got months yet, Scarlett darling. Just look what you’ve already done in only weeks.”

Scarlett looked. The frown disappeared from her forehead and she smiled. “That’s true,” she said.

Colum smiled with her. He said nothing about the soothing and pressuring he had had to do to prevent the men putting down their tools and walking away. They didn’t take well to being bossed by a woman, especially one as demanding as Scarlett. If the underground links of the Fenian Brotherhood hadn’t committed them to the resurrection of Ballyhara, he didn’t know how many would be left, even with Scarlett paying above-average wages.

He, too, looked along the busy street. It would be a good life for these men, and others too, he thought, when Ballyhara was restored. Already he had two more barkeepers asking to come in, and a man who owned a profitable dry-goods store in Bective wanted to relocate. The houses, even the smallest ones, were better than the hovels occupied now by most of the farm laborers he’d chosen. They were as eager as Scarlett for the roofs and windows to be repaired so that they could leave their landlords and get started on the fields of Ballyhara.

Scarlett darted into her house and out again, gloves and covered milk jug in her hand. “I hope you’ll keep everybody working and not have a big celebration to open the bar while I’m gone,” she said. “I’ll ride over to Daniel’s for some bread and milk.” Colum promised to keep the work going. He said nothing about the folly of her jouncing along on a saddleless pony in her condition. She’d already bitten his head off for suggesting that it was unwise.

“For pity’s sake, Colum, I’m barely past five months. That’s hardly pregnant at all!”

She was more worried than she’d ever let him know. None of her earlier babies had given her so much trouble. She had an ache in her lower back that never went away, and occasionally there were spots of blood on her underclothes or her sheets that made her heart turn over. She washed them out with the strongest soap she had, the one meant for floors and walls, as if she could wash out the unknown cause together with the spots. Dr. Meade had warned her after her miscarriage that the fall had injured her severely, and she had taken an unconscionably long time to recover, but she refused to admit there might be anything really wrong. The baby wouldn’t be kicking so strong if it wasn’t healthy. And she had no time to be vaporish.

Frequent trips had created a well-defined track through Ballyhara’s overgrown fields to the ford. The pony followed it almost by itself now, and Scarlett had time to think. She’d better get a horse pretty soon, she was getting too heavy for the pony. That was different, too. She’d never gotten so big before when she was carrying a baby. Suppose she had twins! Wouldn’t that just be something? That would really pay Rhett back. She already had two rivers on her place to his one at Dunmore Landing. Nothing would please her more than to have two babies, just in case Anne had one. The thought of Rhett giving Anne a baby was too painful to bear. Scarlett turned her eyes and her mind onto the fields of Ballyhara. She just had to get started on them, she just had to, no matter what Colum said.

As always she paused by the tower before she rode to the ford. What good builders those long-ago O’Haras were, and how smart. Old Daniel had actually talked for almost a full minute when she mentioned how sorry she was that the stairs were gone. There were never any stairs outside, he said, only inside. A ladder gave people access to the door, set twelve feet up from the ground. When danger came people could run to the tower, pull the ladder up behind them, and fire arrows or throw stones or pour hot oil down on the attackers from the narrow slit windows, safe from assault by enemies below them.

One of these days I’ll haul a ladder back here and have a look inside. I hope there aren’t any bats. I do hate bats. Why didn’t Saint Patrick get rid of them too when he was cleaning out the snakes?

Scarlett looked in on her grandmother, found her asleep, then stuck her head in Daniel’s door. “Scarlett! What a happy thing it is to see you. Come in, do, and tell us the latest wonders you’ve done at Ballyhara.” Kathleen reached for the teapot. “I was hoping you’d come. There’s warm barm brack.” Three of the village women were there. Scarlett pulled up a stool and joined them.

“How’s the baby?” asked Mary Helen.

“Perfect,” said Scarlett. She looked around the familiar kitchen. It was friendly and comfortable but she could hardly wait for Kathleen to have her new kitchen, the one in the largest house in Ballyhara town.

Scarlett had already mentally designated the houses she was going to give the family. They’d all have grand, spacious homes. Colum’s was the smallest, only one of the gate houses where the estate adjoined the town, but he had chosen it for himself, so she wouldn’t argue. And he’d never have a family anyhow, being a priest. But there were much bigger houses in the town. She’d chosen the best for Daniel because Kathleen was with him and they’d probably want Grandmother with them too, plus there had to be room for Kathleen’s family when she married, which she’d easily do with the dowry Scarlett would give her, including the house. Then a house for each of Daniel’s and Patrick’s sons too, even spooky Sean who lived with Grandmother. Plus farmland, as much as they wanted, so that they’d be able to marry, too. She thought it was terrible the way that young men and women couldn’t get married because they had no land and no money to get any. The English landlords were truly heartless, the way they kept the Irish ground down under their heels. The Irish did all the labor to grow the wheat or oats, fatten the cattle and sheep, and then they had to sell to the English, at the prices the English set, for the English to export the grain and stock to England, where they’d make more money for more Englishmen. No farmer ever had much left when his rent was paid, and that could be raised at the whim of the English. It was worse than sharecropping, it was like being under the Yankees after the War, when they took anything they wanted, then boosted the taxes on Tara sky high. No wonder the Irish hated the English so. She’d hate the Yankees till her dying day.

But soon the O’Haras would be free of all that. They’d be so surprised when she told them! It wouldn’t be much longer, either. When the houses were finished and the fields ready—she wasn’t about to give them halfway-done presents, she wanted everything to be perfect. They’d been so good to her. And they were her family.

The gifts were her cherished secret; she hadn’t even told Colum yet. She’d been hugging it to herself ever since the night in Galway when the plan came to her. It added to her pleasure every time she looked at Ballyhara’s street that she knew just which houses would be O’Hara houses. She’d have lots of places to go then, lots of fires to pull up a stool to, lots of homes with cousins in them for her baby to play with and go to school with and have huge holiday celebrations with at the Big House.

Because naturally that’s where she and the baby would be. In the huge, enormous, fantastically elegant Big House. Bigger than the house on East Battery, bigger than the house at Dunmore Landing, even before the Yankees burned nine-tenths of it. And with land that had been O’Hara land before anybody ever heard of Dunmore Landing or Charleston, South Carolina, or Rhett Butler. How his eyes would bug out, how his heart would break when he saw his beautiful daughter—oh, please let it be a girl—in her beautiful home, and she was an O’Hara and her mother’s child alone.

Scarlett cherished the daydream of sweet revenge. But that was years away, and the O’Hara houses were soon. As soon as she could make them ready.

C
olum appeared at Scarlett’s door late in August when the sky was still rosy with dawn. Ten burly men stood silently behind him in the mist-heavy half light. “Here are the men to clear your fields,” he said. “Are you happy at last?”

She screeched with delight. “Let me get my shawl against the damp,” she said, “and I’ll be right out. Take them down to the first field beyond the gate.” She hadn’t finished dressing yet, her hair was all tumbled and her feet were bare. She tried to hurry but excitement made her clumsy. She’d been waiting so long! And it was getting more difficult every day to get her boots on. My grief, I’m as big as a house already. I must be going to have triplets.

The devil take it! Scarlett piled her unbrushed hair into a wad and stabbed hairpins in it to hold it, then she grabbed her shawl and ran along the street with her feet bare.

The men were grouped glumly around Colum on the weed-choked drive inside the open gate. “Never seen such a sight… those be more like trees than weeds… looks like all nettles to me… a man could spend a lifetime an acre…”

“A fine lot you are,” Scarlett said clearly. “Are you afraid to get your hands dirty?”

They looked at her with disdain. They’d all heard about the little woman with the driving ways, nothing womanly about her.

“We were discussing the best way to get started,” Colum said soothingly.

Scarlett was in no mood to be placated. “You don’t get started at all if you discuss long enough. I’ll show you how you get started.” She put her left hand on the lower curve of her distended belly to support it, then she leaned over, and her right hand grasped a big handful of nettles at the base. With a grunt and a heave she ripped them from the earth. “There,” she said contemptuously, “now you’re started.” She threw the spiny plants at the men’s feet. Blood was oozing from wounds all over her hand. Scarlett spit in her palm then wiped her hand on her black widow’s skirt and walked heavily away on her pale, fragile-looking feet.

The men stared at her back. First one, then another, then all of them took their hats off.

They were not the only ones who had learned to respect Scarlett O’Hara. Painters had discovered that she would climb the tallest ladder they had, moving like a crab to accommodate her shape, in order to point out overlooked spots or uneven brush strokes. Carpenters who attempted to use inadequate numbers of nails would find her hammering when they came to work. She slammed newly made or newly hung doors with a bang “that would wake the dead” to test hinges, and stood up inside chimneys with a flaming bundle of rushes in her hand to look for soot and test how well they drew. The roofers reported with awe that “only Father O’Hara’s strong arm kept her from walking the roof tree and counting the slates.” She drove everyone hard and herself harder.

And when it grew too dark to work, there were three free pints at the bar for every man who had stayed on the job that late, and even when their drinking and bragging and complaining was done, they could see her through her kitchen window bending over her papers and writing by lamplight.

“Did you wash your hands?” Colum asked when he entered the kitchen.

“Yes, and put some salve on too. It was a mess. I just get so mad sometimes I don’t think what I’m doing. I’m fixing breakfast. Want some?”

Colum sniffed the air. “Porridge without salt? I’d rather have some boiled nettles.”

Scarlett grinned. “Then pick your own. I’m leaving out salt for a while, it’ll keep my ankles from swelling the way they’ve taken to doing lately… not that it’s going to make much difference soon. I can’t see my boots to lace them now, I won’t be able to reach them in a week or two. I’ve figured it out, Colum. I’m having a litter, not a baby.”