There was an English seasoning in her Irish voice. Still soft, but it had lost some music to clipped consonants.

I know what she is, Scarlett realized, she’s businesslike. The thought made her feel better. She could deal with a businesswoman whether she liked her or not.

“I am confident that you will find my services useful, Mrs. O’Hara,” said Mrs. Fitzpatrick, and there was no possible doubt that Mrs. Fitzpatrick was confident about everything she did or said. Scarlett felt irritated. Was this woman challenging her? Did she intend to run things?

Mrs. Fitzpatrick was still speaking: “I would like to express my pleasure at meeting you and in working for you. I shall be honored to be housekeeper for The O’Hara.”

What did she mean?

The dark brows arched. “Do you not know? Everyone is talking of nothing else.” Mrs. Fitzgerald’s thin wide mouth parted in a gleaming smile. “No woman in our lifetime has ever done it, perhaps no woman in many hundreds of years. They’re calling you The O’Hara, head of the family O’Hara, in all its branches and ramifications. In the days of the High Kings, each family had its leader, representative, champion. Some distant ancestor of yours was The O’Hara who stood for all the valor and pride of all other O’Haras. Today that designation has been reborn for you.”

“I don’t understand. What do I have to do?”

“You’ve already done it. You’re respected and admired, trusted and honored. The title’s awarded, not inherited. You have only to be what you are. You are The O’Hara.”

“I think I’ll have a cup of tea,” said Scarlett weakly. She didn’t know what Mrs. Fitzpatrick was talking about. Was she joking? Mocking? No, she could tell this was not a woman who made jokes. What did it mean, “The” O’Hara? Scarlett tried it silently on her tongue. The O’Hara. It was like a drumbeat. Deep, hidden, buried, primitive, something within her kindled. The O’Hara. A light grew in her pale tired eyes, making them glow green, fire emerald. The O’Hara.

I’ll have to think about that tomorrow . . . and every day for the rest of my life. Oh, I feel so different, so strong. “. . . only be what you are . . .” she said. What does that mean? The O’Hara.

“Your tea, Mrs. O’Hara.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Fitzpatrick.” Somehow the intimidating self-confidence of the older woman had become admirable, not irritating. Scarlett took the cup and looked into the other woman’s eyes. “Please have some tea with me,” she said. “We need to talk about a cook and other things. We have only six weeks, and a lot to do.”


Scarlett had never been in the Big House. Mrs. Fitzpatrick hid her astonishment and her own curiosity about it. She’d been housekeeper to a prominent family, directress of a very big house, but it had not approached the Big House at Ballyhara in magnificence. She helped Scarlett turn the huge tarnished brass key in the great rusted lock and threw her weight against the door. “Mildew,” she said when the smell hit them. “We’ll need an army of women with pails and scrubbing brushes. Let’s have a look at the kitchen first. No cook worth having is going to come to a house without a first-class kitchen. This part of the house can be done later. Just ignore the paper falling off the walls and the animal droppings on the floor. The cook won’t even see these rooms.”

Curved colonnades connected two large wing buildings to the main block of the house. They followed the one to the east first and found themselves in a large corner room. Doors opened onto interior corridors that led to more rooms and a staircase to yet more rooms. “You’ll put your steward to work here,” said Mrs. Fitzpatrick when they returned to the large corner room. “The other rooms will do for servants and storerooms. Stewards do not live in the Big House; you’ll have to give him a dwelling in the town, a large one, in keeping with his position as manager of the estate. This is obviously the Estate Office.”

Scarlett didn’t reply at once. She was seeing another office in her mind, and the wing of another Big House. “Bachelor guests” had used the wing at Dunmore Landing, Rhett had said. Well, she didn’t plan to have a dozen rooms’ worth of bachelor guests, or any other kind of guests. But she could certainly use an office, just like Rhett’s. She’d get the carpenter to make her a big desk, twice as big as Rhett’s, and she’d hang the estate maps on the walls, and she’d look out the window just the way he did. But she would see the cleancut stones of Ballyhara, not a pile of burnt bricks, and she’d have fields of wheat, not a passel of flower bushes.

“I’ll be the steward at Ballyhara, Mrs. Fitzpatrick. I don’t intend to have a stranger manage my place.”

“I mean no disrespect, Mrs. O’Hara, but you don’t know what you’re saying. It’s a full-time occupation. Not only maintaining the stores and supplies, but also listening to complaints and settling disputes between workers and farmers and the people of the town.”

“I’ll do it. We’ll put benches along that hallway for people to sit on, and I’ll see anyone with a problem on the first Sunday of every month after Mass.” Scarlett’s firm jaw told the housekeeper that there was no point in arguing.

“And Mrs. Fitzpatrick—there will be no spittoons, is that clear?”

Mrs. Fitzpatrick nodded, even though she had never heard the word before. In Ireland, tobacco was smoked in a pipe, not chewed.

“Good,” said Scarlett. “Now let’s find this kitchen you’re so worried about. It must be in the other wing.”

“Do you feel up to walking all that way?” asked Mrs. Fitzpatrick.

“It has to be done,” said Scarlett. Walking was torture for her feet and her back, but there was no question about doing it. She was appalled by the condition of the house. How would it ever be done in six weeks? It has to be, that’s all. The baby must be born in the Big House.

“Magnificent,” was Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s pronouncement about the kitchen. The room was cavernous and two stories high, with broken skylights in the roof. Scarlett was sure she’d never been in a ballroom half as large. A tremendous stone chimney nearly covered the wall at the far end of the room. Doors on each side of it led to a stonesinked scullery on the north side, an empty room on the south. “The cook can sleep here, that’s good and that”—Mrs. Fitzpatrick pointed upward—“is the most intelligent arrangement I’ve ever seen.” A balustraded gallery ran the length of the kitchen wall at the second-story level. “The rooms above the cook’s and the scullery will be mine. The kitchen maids and the cook will never know when I might be watching them. That should keep them alert. The gallery must connect to the second floor of the house itself. You can come over, too, to see what’s going on in the kitchen below. They’ll keep working all the time.”

“Why couldn’t I just go in the kitchen and see?”

“Because they’d stop working to curtsey and wait for orders while the food scorched.”

“You keep talking about ‘they’ and ‘maids,’ Mrs. Fitzpatrick. What happened to the cook? I thought we were going to get one woman.”

Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s hand gestured to the expanses of floor and wall and windows. “One woman couldn’t manage all this. No competent woman would try. I’d like to see the storerooms and laundry, probably in the basement. Do you want to come down?”

“Not really. I’ll sit outside, away from the smell.” She found a door. It led out into an overgrown walled garden. Scarlett backed into the kitchen. A second door opened onto the colonnade. She lowered herself to the paved floor and leaned against a column. A heavy fatigue pressed on her. She’d no idea the house would need so much work. From the outside it looked as if it was almost intact.

The baby kicked and she absentmindedly pushed the foot or whatever back down. “Hey, little baby,” she murmured, “what do you think of this? They’re calling your mother ‘The O’Hara.’ I hope you’re impressed. I sure am.” Scarlett closed her eyes to take it all in.

Mrs. Fitzpatrick came out, brushing cobwebs from her clothes. “It will do,” she said succinctly. “Now what we both need is a good meal. We’ll go to Kennedy’s bar.”

“The bar? Ladies don’t go unescorted to bars.”

Mrs. Fitzpatrick smiled. “It’s your bar, Mrs. O’Hara. You can go there whenever you please. You can go anywhere at all, whenever you like. You are The O’Hara.”

Scarlett turned the thought over in her mind. This wasn’t Charleston or Atlanta. Why shouldn’t she go to the bar? Hadn’t she nailed down half the floorboards herself? And didn’t everyone say that Mrs. Kennedy, the barkeeper’s wife, made a pastry for her meat pies that would melt in your mouth?


The weather turned rainy, not the brief showers or misty days that Scarlett had gotten used to, but real torrents of rain that lasted sometimes for three to four hours. The farmers complained about the soil compacting if they walked on the newly cleared fields to spread the cartloads of manure Scarlett had bought. But Scarlett, forcing herself to walk daily to check the progress at the Big House, blessed the mud on the ungravelled drive because it cushioned her swollen feet. She gave up boots altogether and kept a bucket of water inside her front door to rinse her feet when she came in. Colum laughed when he saw it. “The Irish in you is strengthening every day, Scarlett darling. Did you learn that from Kathleen?”

“From the cousins when they came in from the fields. They always washed the earth off their feet. I figured it was because Kathleen would be mad if they tracked up her clean floor.”

“Not a bit of it. They did it because Irishmen—and women too—have done it as long as anyone’s great-grandfather can remember. Do you shout ‘seachain’ before you throw the water out?”