Scarlett (50 page)

His bold slashing handwriting was starkly black on the cream-colored paper. Scarlett touched it lovingly before she began to read.

There is nothing that I can say about what happened yesterday except that I am profoundly ashamed and sorry to have been the cause of such great pain and danger for you.

Scarlett wriggled with pleasure.

Your courage and valiant spirits were truly heroic, and I shall always regard you with admiration and respect.

I regret bitterly all that occurred after we escaped from the long ordeal. I said things to you that no man should say to a woman, and my actions were reprehensible.

I cannot, however, deny the truth of anything I said. I must not and will not ever see you again.

According to our agreement, you have the right to remain in Charleston at my mother’s house until April. I am frankly hoping that you will not choose to do so, because I will visit neither the city house nor Dunmore Landing until I receive information that you have returned to Atlanta. You cannot find me, Scarlett. Don’t try.

The cash settlement I promised will be transferred to you immediately in care of your Uncle Henry Hamilton.

I ask you to accept my sincere apologies for everything about our lives together. It was not meant to be. I wish you a happier future.

Rhett

 

Scarlett stared at the letter, at first too shocked to hurt. Then too angry.

Finally she held it in her two hands and tore the heavy paper slowly into shreds, talking as she destroyed the thick dark words. “Not this time you don’t, Rhett Butler. You ran away from me that time before, in Atlanta, after you made love to me. And I drooped around, lovesick, waiting for you to come back. Well, now I know a lot more than I did then. I know you can’t get me out of your head, no matter how hard you try. You can’t live without me. No man could make love to a woman the way you made love to me and then never see her again. You’ll come back, just like you came back before. But you won’t find me waiting. You’ll have to come find me. Wherever I am.”

She heard Saint Michael’s tolling the hour… six… seven… eight… nine… ten. Every other Sunday, she had gone to Mass at ten o’clock. Not today. She had more important things to do.

She slid out of bed and ran to the bellpull. Pansy’d better come quick. I want to be packed and at the station in time for the train to Augusta. I’ll go home, and I’ll make sure Uncle Henry’s got my money, and then I’ll start right in on the work at Tara.

… But I haven’t got it yet.

“Morning, Miss Scarlett. It’s mighty fine to see you looking so fit after what happen—”

“Stop that babbling and get out my valises.” Scarlett paused. “I’m going to Savannah. It’s my grandfather’s birthday.”

She’d meet her aunts at the train depot. The train left for Savannah at ten of twelve. And tomorrow she’d find the Mother Superior and make her talk to the Bishop. No point in going home to Atlanta without the deed to Tara in her hand.

“I don’t want that nasty old dress,” she said to Pansy. “Get out the ones I brought when I came here. I’ll wear what I like. I’m over being so eager to please.”

*   *   *

“I wondered what all the fuss was about,” said Rosemary. She eyed Scarlett’s fashionable clothes with curiosity. “Are you going someplace, too? Mama said you probably would sleep all day.”

“Where is Miss Eleanor? I want to tell her goodbye.”

“She’s already left for church. Why don’t you write her a note? Or I can give her a message.”

Scarlett looked at the clock. She hadn’t much time. The hackney was waiting outside. She dashed into the library and grabbed paper and pen. What should she say?

“Your carriage is waiting, Missus Rhett,” said Manigo.

Scarlett scrawled a few sentences, saying that she was going to her grandfather’s birthday and was sorry to miss seeing Eleanor before she left.
Rhett will explain everything
, she added.
I love you.

“Miss Scarlett—” called Pansy nervously. Scarlett folded the note and sealed it.

“Please give this to your mother,” she said to Rosemary. “I must hurry. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Scarlett,” said Rhett’s sister. She stood in the doorway to watch Scarlett and her maid and her luggage move off down the street. Rhett hadn’t been so well organized when he departed late the night before. She had begged him not to go because he’d looked so unwell. But he had kissed her goodbye and set off into the darkness on foot. It wasn’t hard to figure out that somehow Scarlett was driving him away.

With slow deliberate movements Rosemary struck a match and burned Scarlett’s note. “Good riddance,” she said aloud.

S
carlett clapped her hands with delight when the hackney pulled up in front of Grandfather Robillard’s house. It was pink, just like Miss Eleanor had said. To think that I didn’t even notice when I visited before! Well, no matter, it was so long ago; what counts is now.

She hurried up one curving arm of the double iron-railed steps and through the opened door. Her aunts and Pansy could see to the luggage, she was dying with curiosity about the inside of the house.

Yes, it was pink everywhere—pink and white and gold. The walls were pink, and the covers on the chairs, and the draperies. With shiny white woodwork and columns, all trimmed with glimmering gilt. Everything looked perfect, too, not peeling and shabby like the paint and fabrics in most of the houses in Charleston and Atlanta. What a perfect place to be when Rhett came after her. He’d see that her family was every bit as important and impressive as his.

Rich, too. Her eyes moved rapidly, assessing the value of the meticulously maintained furnishings she could see through the open door to the drawing room. Why, she could paint every wall of Tara, inside and out, for what it must cost to gold leaf the plastered ceiling corners.

The old skinflint! Grandfather never sent a penny to help me after the War, and he doesn’t do a thing for the aunts, either.

Scarlett prepared for battle. Her aunts were terrified of their father, but she wasn’t. The fearful loneliness she’d known in Atlanta had made her timid, apprehensive, eager to please in Charleston. Now she had taken her life back into her own hands, and she felt vibrant with strength. Not man nor beast could bother her now. Rhett loved her, and she was queen of the world.

She coolly removed her hat and her fur cape and dropped them on a marble-topped console in the hall. Then she began to take off her apple green kid gloves. She could feel her aunts staring. They’d done plenty of that already. But Scarlett was very pleased to be wearing her green and brown plaid travelling costume instead of the drab outfits she’d worn in Charleston. She fluffed up the dark green taffeta bow that made her eyes sparkle so. When her gloves had joined hat and cape, she pointed to them. “Pansy, take these things upstairs and put them away in the prettiest bedroom you can find. Stop cringing in the corner like that, nobody’s going to bite you.”

“Scarlett, you can’t…”

“You must wait…” The aunts were wringing their hands.

“If Grandfather’s too mean to come out and meet us, we’ll just have to shift for ourselves. God’s nightgown, Aunt Eulalie! You grew up here, you and Aunt Pauline, can’t you just make yourselves at home?”

Scarlett’s words and manner were bold enough, but when a basso voice bellowed “Jerome!” from the rear of the house, she felt her palms grow damp. Her grandfather, she suddenly remembered, had eyes that cut right through you and made you wish you were anywhere except under his gaze.

The imposing black manservant who had admitted her now gestured Scarlett and her aunts toward the open door at the end of the hall. Scarlett let Eulalie and Pauline go first. The bedroom was a tremendous high-ceilinged space that had formerly been a spacious parlor. It was crowded with furniture, all the sofas and chairs and tables that had been in the parlor, plus a massive four-posted bed with gilt eagles crouching on top of the posts. In one corner of the room was a flag of France and a headless tailor’s dummy wearing the gold-epauletted medal-hung uniform that Pierre Robillard had worn when he was a young man and an officer in Napoleon’s army. The old man Pierre Robillard was in the bed, sitting erect against a mass of huge pillows, glaring at his visitors.

Why, he’s shrunk up to almost nothing. He was such a big old man, but he’s practically lost in that big bed, nothing but skin and bones. “Hello, Grandfather,” Scarlett said, “I’ve come to see you for your birthday. It’s Scarlett, Ellen’s daughter.”

“I haven’t lost my memory,” said the old man. His strong voice belied his fragile body. “But apparently your memory fails you. In this house, young people do not speak unless they are spoken to.”

Scarlett bit her tongue to keep silent. I’m not a child to be talked to that way, and you should be grateful anybody comes to see you at all. No wonder Mother was so happy to have Pa take her away from home!

“
Et vous, mes filles. Qu’est-ce-que vous voulez cette fois?
” Pierre Robillard growled at his daughters.

Eulalie and Pauline rushed to the bedside, both speaking at once.

My grief! They’re talking French! What on earth am I doing here? Scarlett sank down onto a gold brocade sofa, wishing she was some place—any place—else. Rhett better come after me soon or I’ll go crazy in this house.

It was getting dark outside, and the shadowed corners of the room were mysterious. The headless soldier seemed about to move. Scarlett felt cold fingers on her spine and told herself not to be silly. But she was glad when Jerome and a sturdy-looking black woman came in carrying a lamp. While the maid pulled the curtains Jerome lit the gas lamps on each wall. He asked Scarlett politely if she would move so that he could get behind the sofa. When she stood, she saw her grandfather’s eyes on her, and she turned away from them. She found herself facing a big painting in an ornate gilt frame. Jerome lit one lamp, then a second, and the painting came to life.

It was a portrait of her grandmother. Scarlett recognized her at once from the painting at Tara. But this one was very different. Solange Robillard’s dark hair was not piled high on her head as in Tara’s portrait. It fell, instead, like a warm cloud over her shoulders and down her bare arms to the elbow, bound only by a fillet of gleaming pearls. Her arrogant thin nose was the same, but her lips held a beginning smile instead of a sneer, and her tip-tilted dark eyes looked from their corners at Scarlett with the laughing, magnetic intimacy that had challenged and lured everyone who’d ever known her. She was younger in this painting, but nevertheless a woman, not a girl. The provocative round breasts half-exposed at Tara were covered by the thin white silk gown she wore. Covered yet visible through the gauzy silk, a glimmer of white flesh and rosy nipples. Scarlett felt herself blushing. Why, Grandma Robillard doesn’t look like a lady at all, she thought, automatically disapproving as she’d been taught she should. Involuntarily she remembered herself in Rhett’s arms and the wild hunger for his hands on her. Her grandmother must have felt the same hunger, the same ecstasy, it was in her eyes and her smile. So it can’t be wrong, what I felt. Or was it? Was it some taint of shamelessness in her blood, handed down from the woman who smiled at her from the painting? Scarlett stared at the woman above her on the wall, fascinated.

“Scarlett.” Pauline whispered in her ear. “Père wants us to leave now. Say goodnight quietly, and come with me.”

Supper was a skimpy meal. Hardly enough, in Scarlett’s opinion, for one of the bright-plumaged fantasy birds painted on the plates that held it. “That’s because the cook’s preparing Père’s birthday feast,” Eulalie explained in a whisper.

“Four days ahead of time?” Scarlett said loudly. “What’s she doing, watching the chicken grow up?” Good heavens, she grumbled to herself, she’d be as skinny as Grandfather Robillard by Thursday if it was going to be like this. After the house was asleep she made her way silently down to the basement kitchen and ate her fill of the cornbread and buttermilk in the larder. Let the servants go hungry for a change, she thought, pleased that her suspicions had proven accurate. Pierre Robillard might keep the loyalty of his daughters when their stomachs were only half-filled, but his servants wouldn’t stay unless they had plenty to eat.

The next morning she ordered Jerome to bring her eggs and bacon and biscuits. “I saw plenty in the kitchen,” she added. And she got what she wanted. It made her feel much better about her meekness the night before. It’s not like me to knuckle under that way, she thought. Just because Aunt Pauline and Aunt Eulalie were shaking like leaves, that’s no reason for me to let the old man scare me. I won’t let it happen again.

Still, she was just as glad that she had the servants to deal with and not her grandfather. She could see that Jerome was offended, and it rather pleased her. She hadn’t had a show-down with anyone in a long time, and she did love to win. “The other ladies will have bacon and eggs, too,” she told Jerome. “And this isn’t enough butter for my biscuits.”