Scarlett (83 page)

“I’ve ‘figured it out,’ as you say, myself. You need a woman to help you.” He expected Scarlett to protest; she automatically denied every suggestion that she couldn’t do everything herself. But she agreed. Colum smiled; he had just the woman for the job, he said, someone who could help with everything, even the bookkeeping if necessary. An older woman, but not too old to accept Scarlett’s rule, and not so spineless that she wouldn’t stand up to her when necessary. She was experienced at managing work and people and money, too. In fact, she was housekeeper at a Big House of an estate near Laracor, on the other side of Trim. She had knowledge of childbirth, though she was no midwife. She’d had six children herself. She could come to Scarlett now, to take care of her and this house until the Big House was repaired. Then she’d hire the women needed to run it, and she’d run them.

“You’ll admit, Scarlett darling, that you’ve nothing in America quite like a Big House in Ireland. It needs a practiced hand. You’ll need a steward, too, to manage the butler and the footmen and like that, plus a head stableman to rule the grooms, and a dozen or so gardeners with one to boss them—”

“Stop!” Scarlett was shaking her head furiously. “I’m not planning to start a kingdom here. I need a woman to help me, I grant you that, but I’ll only be using a few rooms of that pile of stone up there to start with. So you’ll have to ask this paragon of yours if she’s willing to give up her high-and-mighty position. I doubt if she’ll say yes.”

“I’ll ask her, then.” Colum was sure she would agree, even if she had to scrub floors. Rosaleen Mary Fitzpatrick was the sister of a Fenian who’d been executed by the English, and the daughter and granddaughter of men who’d gone down in the Ballyhara coffin ships. She was the most passionate and dedicated member of his inner circle of insurgents.

Scarlett took three boiled eggs out of the bubbling water in the kettle, then poured water into the teapot. “You could have an egg or two if you’re too proud to eat my porridge,” she offered. “Without salt, of course.”

Colum declined.

“Good, I’m hungry.” She spooned porridge onto a plate, cracked the eggs and added them. The yolks were runny. Colum averted his eyes.

Scarlett ate hungrily and efficiently, talking rapidly between mouthfuls. She told him her plan for the whole family, to have all the O’Haras living in moderate luxury at Ballyhara.

Colum waited until she finished eating before he said, “They won’t do it. They’ve been farming the land they’re on for nearly two hundred years.”

“Of course they will. Everybody always wants better than they’ve got, Colum.”

He shook his head in reply.

“I’ll prove you wrong. I’ll ask them right now! No, that’s not in my plan. I want to have everything ready first.”

“Scarlett, I brought you your farmers. This morning.”

“Those lazybones!”

“You didn’t tell me what you were planning. I hired those men. Their wives and children are on their way here right now to move into the cottages at the end of the street. They’ve quit the landlords they had before.”

Scarlett bit her lip. “That’s all right,” she said after a minute. “I’m putting the family in houses, anyhow, not cottages. These men can work for the cousins.”

Colum opened his mouth, then closed it. There was no point in arguing. And he was certain that Daniel would never move.

Colum called Scarlett down from the ladder she was on, inspecting fresh plaster, in midafternoon. “I want you to see what your ‘lazybones’ have done,” he said.

Scarlett was so overjoyed that tears came to her eyes. There was a scythed and sickled path wide enough to drive the trap where she had ridden the pony before. Now she could visit Kathleen again, and get milk for her tea and her oatmeal. She’d felt too heavy to ride for the past week and more.

“I’ll go this very minute,” she said.

“Then let me lace up your boots.”

“No, they press on my ankles. I’ll go barefoot, now that I’ve got a cart to ride in and a road to ride on. You can hitch up the pony, though.”

Colum watched her drive off with a feeling of relief. He went back to his gate house and his books, his pipe, and his glass of good whiskey with a sense of a reward well earned. Scarlett O’Hara was the most exhausting individual of any gender, any age, any nationality he’d ever met.

And why, he wondered, does my mind always add “poor lamb” to every opinion I have of her?

She looked like a poor lamb indeed when she burst in on him just before summer’s late darkness fell. The family had—very kindly and very often—turned down her invitation and then her appeals to come to Ballyhara.

Colum had come to believe that Scarlett had become almost incapable of tears. She had not cried when she’d received the notice of the divorce, nor even when the ultimate blow fell with the announcement that Rhett had married again. But on this warm rainy night in August, she sobbed and wept for hours, until she fell asleep on his comfortable couch, a luxury unknown in her Spartan two rooms. He covered her with a lightweight coverlet and went to his bedroom. He was glad that she had found release for her grief, but he feared she would not see her outburst in the same light. So he left her alone; she might prefer not to see him for a few days. Strong people didn’t like witnesses to their weak moments.

He was mistaken. Again, he thought. Would he ever really get to know this woman? In the morning, he found Scarlett was sitting at his kitchen table, eating the only eggs he had. “You’re right, you know, Colum. They are a lot better with salt… And you might start thinking about good tenants for my houses. They’ll have to be prosperous because everything in those houses is the best there is, and I expect a good rent.”

Scarlett was profoundly hurt, even though she didn’t show it again and never referred to it. She continued to ride over to Daniel’s in the trap several times a week, and she worked just as hard as ever on Ballyhara, although her pregnancy was increasingly burdensome. By the end of September the town was done. Every building was clean, freshly painted inside and out, with strong doors and good chimneys and tight roofs. The population was growing by leaps and bounds.

There were two more bars, a cobbler’s shop for boots and harness, the dry-goods store that had moved from Bective, an elderly priest for the small Catholic church, two teachers for the school, which would begin classes as soon as authorization came from Dublin, a nervous young lawyer who was hoping to build a practice, with an even more nervous young wife who peered from behind her lace curtains at the people on the street. The farmers’ children played games in the street, their wives sat on their doorsteps and gossiped, the post rider from Trim came every day to leave the mail with the scholarly gentleman who had opened a shop with books and writing paper and ink in the one-room annex to the dry-goods store. There was a promise that an official post office would be designated after the first of the year, and a doctor had taken the lease on the largest of the houses, to begin occupancy the first week of November.

This last was the best news of all for Scarlett. The only hospital in the area was at the Work House in Dunshauglin, fourteen miles away. She’d never seen a Work House, the last refuge of the penniless, and she hoped she never would. She firmly believed in work instead of begging, but she’d rather not have to look at the unfortunates who ended up there. And it was certainly no way for a baby to start life.

Her own doctor. That was more her style. He’d be right at hand, too, for croup and chicken pox and all those things babies always got. Now all she had to do was put out word that she’d want a wet nurse in mid-November.

And get the house ready.

“Where is this perfect Fitzpatrick woman of yours, Colum? I thought you told me she’d agreed to come a month ago.”

“She did agree a month ago. And gave a month’s notice, like any responsible person has to do. She’ll be here on October first, that’s Thursday next. I’ve offered her the use of my house.”

“Oh, have you? I thought she was supposed to housekeep me. Why doesn’t she stay here?”

“Because, Scarlett darling, your house is the only building in Ballyhara that hasn’t been repaired.”

Scarlett looked around her kitchen-workroom in surprise. She had never paid any attention before to how it looked; it was only temporary, a convenient spot for watching the work on the town.

“It is disgusting, isn’t it?“ she said. “We’d best get the house done fast so I can move.” She smiled, but with difficulty. “The truth is, Colum, I’m nearly worn out. I’ll be glad to be done with the work so I can rest some.”

What Scarlett didn’t say was that the work had become just that—work—after the cousins said they wouldn’t move. It had taken the joy out of rebuilding the O’Hara lands when the O’Haras wouldn’t be enjoying them. She’d tried and tried to figure out why they’d turned her down. The only answer that made sense to her was that they didn’t want to be too close to her, that they didn’t really love her, despite all their kindnesses and warmth. She felt alone now, even when she was with them, even when she was with Colum. She’d believed he was her friend, but he’d told her they’d never come. He knew them, was one of them.

Her back hurt all the time now. Her legs, too, and her feet and ankles were so swollen that walking was agony. She wished she wasn’t having the baby. It was making her ill, and it had given her the idea of buying Ballyhara in the first place. And she had six—no, six and a half—more weeks of this.

If I had the energy, I’d bawl, she thought despondently. But she found another weak smile for Colum.

He looks like he wants to say something and doesn’t know what to say. Well, I can’t help him. I’m clean out of conversation.

There was a knock on the street door. “I’ll go,” Colum said. That’s right, run like a rabbit.

He came back to the kitchen with a package in his hand and an unconvincing smile on his face. “That was Mrs. Flanagan, from the store. The tobacco you ordered for Grandmother came in, she brought it over. I’ll take it to her for you.”

“No.” Scarlett heaved herself to her feet. “She asked me to get it. It’s the only thing she’s ever asked for. You hitch up the pony and help me into the trap. I want to take it to her.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“Colum, there’s barely room on the seat for me, let alone the two of us. Just bring me the trap and get me in it. Please.”

And how I’ll get out of it, God only knows.

Scarlett wasn’t very happy when her cousin Sean came out from her grandmother’s cottage at the sound of her arrival. “Spooky Sean” she called him to herself, just as she always thought of her cousin Stephen in Savannah as “Spooky Stephen.”

They gave her the shivers because they always watched silently while the other O’Haras were talking and laughing. She didn’t care much for people who didn’t talk and laugh. Or for people who seemed to be thinking secret thoughts. When Sean offered his arm to help her walk into the house, she sidestepped clumsily to avoid him.

“No need,” she said gaily, “I can manage just fine.” Even more than Stephen, Sean made her nervous. All failure made Scarlett nervous, and Sean was the O’Hara who had failed. He was Patrick’s third son. The eldest died, Jamie worked in Trim instead of farming, so when Patrick died in 1861, Sean inherited the farm. He was “only” thirty-two at the time, and the “only” was an excuse he thought adequate for all his troubles. He mismanaged everything so badly that there was a real chance the lease would be lost.

Daniel, as the eldest, called Patrick’s children together. Although he was sixty-seven, Daniel had more faith in himself than in Sean or in his own son Seamus, who was also “only” thirty-two. He’d worked beside his brother all his life; now that Patrick was gone, he wouldn’t hold his tongue and watch their life’s work go, too. Sean would have to go instead.

Sean went. But not away. He had lived with his grandmother for twelve years now, letting her take care of him. He refused to do any work on Daniel’s farm. He made Scarlett’s hackles rise. She walked away from him as fast as her bare swollen feet would carry her.

“Gerald’s girl!” said her grandmother. “It’s glad I am to see you, Young Katie Scarlett.”

Scarlett believed her. She always believed her grandmother. “I’ve brought your tobacco, Old Katie Scarlett,” she said with genuine cheerfulness.

“What a grand thing to do. Will you have a pipe with me?”

“No, thank you, Grandmother. I’m not quite that Irish yet.”

“Ach, that’s a shame. Well, I’m as Irish as God makes them. Fill a pipe for me, then.”

The tiny cottage was quiet except for the sound of her grandmother’s soft sucking pulls on the stem of her pipe. Scarlett put her feet up on a stool and closed her eyes. The peacefulness was balm.

When she heard shouting outside, she was furious. Couldn’t she have a half hour’s quiet? She hurried as best she could into the farmyard, ready to scream at whoever was making the racket.

What she saw was so terrifying that she forgot her anger, the pain in her back, the agony in her feet, everything except her fear. There were soldiers in Daniel’s farmyard, and constables, and an officer on a curvetting horse with a naked saber in his hand. The soldiers were setting up a tripod of tree trunks. She hobbled across to join Kathleen, who was weeping in the doorway.

“Here’s another one of them,” said one of the soldiers. “Look at her. These miserable Irish breed like rabbits. Why don’t they learn to wear shoes instead?”