Scarlett (27 page)

He was wearing the uniform of a Union soldier.

Mrs. Savage screamed and threw a book from her bedside table at him. He went through the curtains onto the piazza before her husband reached her room.

A Yankee! Suddenly everyone was afraid. Women alone were frightened for themselves; women with husbands were frightened for themselves and even more afraid for their husbands, because if a man injured a Union soldier, he’d go to prison or even be hanged.

The next night and the next, the soldier materialized in a woman’s bedroom. On the third night, the report was the worst of all. It wasn’t moonlight that woke Theodosia Harding, it was the movement of a warm hand on the coverlet over her breasts. Only darkness met her eyes when she opened them. But she could hear strangled breathing, feel a crouching presence. She cried out, then fainted from fear. No one knew what might have happened next. Theodosia had been sent to cousins in Summerville. Everyone said she was in a state of collapse. Near idiocy, added the ghoulish.

A delegation of Charleston men went to Army headquarters with the elderly lawyer Josiah Anson as their spokesman. They were going to begin their own night patrols in the old part of the city. If they surprised the intruder, they’d deal with him themselves.

The commandant agreed to the patrols. But he warned that if any Union soldier was hurt, the responsible man or men would be executed. There’d be no vigilante justice or random attacks on Northern troops under the guise of protecting Charleston’s women.

Scarlett’s fears—long years of them—crashed on her like a tidal wave. She had grown contemptuous of the occupation troops; like everyone else in Charleston she ignored them, acted as if they were not there, and they got out of her way as she walked briskly down the sidewalk on her way to pay a call or go shopping. Now she was afraid of every blue uniform she saw. Any one of them might be the midnight intruder. She could imagine him all too well, a figure springing out from the dark.

Her sleep was broken by hideous dreams—memories, really. Again and again she saw the Yankee straggler who’d come to Tara, smelled the rank smell of him, saw his filthy, hairy hands pawing through the trinkets in her mother’s work box, his red-rimmed eyes hot with violent lust staring at her and his broken-toothed mouth wet and twisted in an anticipatory leer. She’d shot him. Obliterated the mouth and the eyes in an explosion of blood and bits of bone and viscous red-streaked gobbets of his brains.

She’d never been able to forget the echoing boom of the shot and the ghastly red spatterings and her fierce, rending triumph.

Oh, if only she had a pistol to protect herself and Miss Eleanor from the Yankee!

But there was no weapon in the house. She ransacked cupboards and trunks, wardrobes and dresser drawers, even the shelves behind the books in the library. She was defenseless, helpless. For the first time in her life she felt weak, unable to face and overcome any obstacle in her way. It all but crippled her. She begged Eleanor Butler to send a message to Rhett.

Eleanor temporized. Yes, yes, she’d send word. Yes, she’d tell him what Alicia had said about the hulking size of the man and the unearthly glint of moonlight in his inhumanly black eyes. Yes, she’d remind him that she and Scarlett were two women alone in the big house at night, that the servants all went to their own homes after supper except for Manigo, and old man, and Pansy, a small, weak girl.

Yes, she’d make the note urgent, and she’d dispatch it right away—on the very next trip of the boat that brought game from the plantation.

“But when will that be, Miss Eleanor? Rhett has to come now! That magnolia tree is practically a ladder from the ground to the piazza outside our rooms!” Scarlett clutched Mrs. Butler’s arm, shook it for emphasis.

Eleanor patted her hand. “Soon, dear, it’s bound to be soon. We haven’t had any duck for a month, and roast duck is a particular favorite of mine. Rhett knows that. Besides, everything will be all right now. Ross and his friends are going to patrol every night.”

Ross! Scarlett screamed inwardly. What could a drunk like Ross Butler do? Or any of the Charleston men? Most of them were old men or cripples or still boys. If they’d been any use, they wouldn’t have lost the stupid War. Why should anyone trust them to fight the Yankees now?

She battered her need against Eleanor Butler’s impenetrable optimism, and she lost.

For a while it seemed the patrols were effective. There were no reports of intruders, and everyone calmed down. Scarlett had her first “at home” day, which was so well attended that her Aunt Eulalie complained that there wasn’t enough cake to go around. Eleanor Butler tore up the note she had written Rhett. People went to church, went shopping, played whist, took out their evening clothes to air them and make repairs before the Season began.

Scarlett came in from her round of morning calls with glowing cheeks from walking too quickly. “Where’s Mrs. Butler?” she demanded of Manigo. When he replied that she was in the kitchen Scarlett ran to the back of the house.

Eleanor Butler looked up at Scarlett’s rushed entry. “Good news, Scarlett! I had a letter from Rosemary this morning. She’ll be home day after tomorrow.”

“Better wire her to stay,” Scarlett snapped. Her voice was harsh, emotionless. “The Yankee got to Harriet Madison last night. I just heard.” She looked at the table near Mrs. Butler. “Ducks? Those are ducks you’re plucking! The plantation boat came! I can go back to the plantation on it to get Rhett.”

“You can’t go alone in that boat with four men, Scarlett.”

“I can take Pansy, whether she likes it or not. Here, give me a sack and some of those biscuits. I’m hungry. I’ll eat them on the way.”

“But Scarlett—”

“But me no buts, Miss Eleanor. Just hand me the biscuits. I’m going.”

What am I doing? Scarlett thought, near panic. I should never have dashed off this way, Rhett’s going to be furious with me. And I must look awful. It’s bad enough just to show up where I don’t belong; at least I could look pretty. I had it all planned so different.

She had thought about it a thousand times, what it would be like when next she saw Rhett. Sometimes she imagined that he’d come home to the house late; she’d be in her nightdress, the one with the drawstring neck—tied loose—and she’d be brushing her hair before bedtime. Rhett had always loved her hair, he said it was a live thing; sometimes—in the early days—he’d brush it for her, to see the blue cracklings of electricity.

Often she pictured herself at the tea table, dropping a piece of sugar into a cup with the silver tongs elegantly held in her fingers. She’d be chatting cozily with Sally Brewton, and he’d see how much at home she was, how welcomed by Charleston’s most interesting people. He’d catch up her hand and kiss it, and the tongs would drop, but it wouldn’t matter…

Or she was with Miss Eleanor after supper, the two of them in their chairs before the fire, so comfortable together, so close, but with a place waiting for him. Only once had she envisioned going to the plantation, because she didn’t know what the place was like, except that Sherman’s men had burned it. Her daydream began all right—she and Miss Eleanor arrived with hampers of cakes and champagne in a lovely green-painted boat, resting against piles of silk cushions, holding bright flowered parasols. “Picnic,” they called out, and Rhett laughed and ran to them, his arms open. But then it fizzled out, in blankness. Rhett hated picnics, for one thing. He said you might as well live in a cave if you were going to eat sitting on the ground like an animal instead of in a chair at a table like a civilized human being.

Certainly she had never thought of the possibility that she’d show up like this, squashed amid boxes and barrels of God knows what on a scabby boat that smelled to high heaven.

Now that she was away from the city, she was more worried about Rhett’s anger than about the prowling Yankee. Suppose he just tells the boatmen to turn right around and take me back?

The boatmen dipped their oars into the green-brown water only to steer; the tide’s invisible, powerful, slow current carried them. Scarlett looked impatiently at the banks of the wide river. It didn’t seem to her that they were moving at all. Everything was the same: wide stretches of tall brown grasses that swayed slowly—oh, so slowly—in the tidal current, and behind them thick woods draped with motionless gray curtains of Spanish moss, under them the tangled growth of overgrown evergreen shrubs. It was all so silent. Why weren’t there any birds singing, for heaven’s sake? And why was it getting so dark already?

It began to rain.

Long before the oars started a steady pull toward the left bank she was soaked to the skin and shivering, miserable in body and mind. The bump of the bow against a dock jarred her from her huddled desolation. She looked up through the blur of rain on her face and saw a figure in streaming black oilskins, illuminated by a blazing torch. The face was invisible under a deep hood.

“Throw me a line.” Rhett leaned forward, one arm outstretched. “Good trip, boys?”

Scarlett pushed against the crates nearest her to stand. Her legs were too cramped to hold her, and she fell back, toppling the topmost crate with a crash.

“What the hell?” Rhett caught the noosed rope that snaked to him from the boatman and dropped the circle over a mooring post. “Toss up the stern line,” he ordered. “What’s making that racket? Are you men drunk?”

“No sir, Mister Rhett,” the boatmen chorused. It was the first time they had spoken since they had left the dock in Charleston. One of them gestured toward the two women in the stern of the barge.

“My God!” said Rhett.

D
o you feel better now?” Rhett’s voice was carefully controlled.

Scarlett nodded dumbly. She was wrapped in a blanket, wearing a coarse work shirt of Rhett’s underneath, and sitting on a stool near an open fire with her bare feet in a tub of hot water.

“How are you doing, Pansy?” Scarlett’s maid, on another stool in another blanket cocoon, grinned and allowed as how she was doing just fine excepting that she was powerful hungry.

Rhett chuckled. “And so am I. When you dry out, we’ll eat.”

Scarlett pulled the blanket more closely around her. He’s being too nice, I’ve seen him like this before, all smiles and warm as sunshine. Then it would turn out that he was really mad enough to spit nails all the time. It’s because Pansy’s here, that’s why he’s putting on this act. When she’s gone, he’ll turn on me. Maybe I can say I need her to stay with me—but for what? I’m already undressed, and I can’t put my clothes on again until they dry, and Lord knows when that will be, with the rain outside and the inside so dank. How can Rhett bear to live in this place? It’s awful!

The room they were in was lit only by the fire. It was a large square, perhaps twenty feet to a side, with a packed-earth floor and stained walls that had lost most of their plaster. It smelled of cheap whiskey and tobacco juice, with an underlay of scorched wood and fabric. The only furniture was an assortment of crude stools and benches, plus a scattering of dented metal cuspidors. The mantelpiece over the wide fireplace and the frames around the doors and windows looked like some kind of mistake. They were made of pine, beautifully carved with a delicate fretwork design and oiled to a glowing golden brown. In one corner there was a rough staircase with splintered wooden treads and a sagging, unsafe railing. Scarlett’s and Pansy’s clothes were draped over the length of it. The white petticoats billowed from time to time when a draft caught them, like ghosts lurking in deep shadows.

“Why didn’t you stay in Charleston, Scarlett?” Supper was over and Pansy had been sent to sleep with the old black woman who cooked for Rhett. Scarlett squared her shoulders.

“Your mother didn’t want to disturb you in your paradise here.” She looked around the room disdainfully. “But I believe you should know what’s going on. There’s a Yankee soldier creeping into bedrooms at night—ladies’ bedrooms—and handling them. One girl went clean out of her mind and had to be sent off.” She tried to read his face, but it was expressionless. He was looking at her, silent, as if he was waiting for something.

“Well? Don’t you care that your mother and I could be murdered in our beds, or something worse?”

Rhett’s mouth turned down in a derisive smile. “Am I hearing correctly? Maidenly timidity from the woman who drove a wagon through the entire Yankee army because it was in her way? Come, now, Scarlett. You’ve been known to tell the truth. Why did you come all this way in the rain? Were you hoping to catch me in the arms of a light o’ love? Did Henry Hamilton recommend that as a way to get me to start paying your bills again?”

“What on earth are you talking about, Rhett Butler? What has Uncle Henry got to do with anything?”

“Such convincing ignorance! I compliment you. But you can’t expect me to believe for an instant that your crafty old lawyer didn’t notify you when I cut off the money I was sending to Atlanta. I’m too fond of Henry Hamilton to credit such negligence.”

“Stopped sending the money? You can’t do that!” Scarlett’s knees turned to jelly. Rhett couldn’t mean it. What would happen to her? The house on Peachtree Street—the tons of coal it took to heart it, the servants to clean and cook and wash and keep the garden and the horses and polish the carriages, the food for all of them—why, it cost a fortune. How could Uncle Henry pay the bills? He’d use her money! No, no that couldn’t be. She’d scrabbled along with no food in her belly, broken shoes on her feet, her back breaking and her hands bleeding while she worked in the fields to keep from starving. She’d given up all her pride, turned her back on everything she’d been taught, done business with low-down people not fit to spit on, schemed and cheated, worked day and night for her money. She wouldn’t let it go, she couldn’t. It was hers. It was the only thing she had.