“You’re The O’Hara,” Pegeen nearly shouted, “you’ve got the say.”


“She’s got the truth of it, Scarlett,” said Kathleen when Scarlett complained to her. “You are The O’Hara.” Before Scarlett could say anything, Kathleen smiled and told her it made no difference anyhow. She was going to be leaving Daniel’s cottage soon; she was going to marry a boy from Dunsany. He’d asked her only the Saturday before, Market Day in Trim. “I haven’t told the others yet, I wanted to wait for you.”

Scarlett hugged Kathleen. “How exciting! You’ll let me give the wedding, won’t you? We’ll have a wonderful party.”

“So I got off the hook,” she told Mrs. Fitz that night. “But only by the skin of my teeth. I’m not so sure being The O’Hara is exactly what I thought it would be.”

“And what was that, exactly, Mrs. O?”

“I don’t know. More fun, I guess.”


In August the potatoes were harvested. It was the best crop they’d ever had, the farmers said. Then they began to reap the wheat. Scarlett loved to watch them. The shiny sickles flashed in the sun and the golden stalks fell like rippling silk. Sometimes she took the place of the man who followed the reaper. She’d borrow the staff with a curved end that the farmers called the loghter-hook and draw up the fallen wheat into small sheaves. She couldn’t master the quick twisting movement the man made to tie each sheaf with a stalk of wheat, but she became very handy with the loghter-hook.

It sure beats picking cotton, she told Colum. Yet there were still moments when sharp pangs of homesickness caught her off guard. He understood her feelings, he said, and Scarlett was sure he did. He truly was the brother she’d always wanted.

Colum seemed preoccupied, but he said it was nothing more than his impatience that the wheat took precedence over finishing the work on the inn that Brendon Kennedy was making in the building next to his bar. Scarlett remembered the desperate man in the church, the man Colum had said was “on the run.” She wondered if there were more of them, what Colum did for them. But she’d really rather not know, and she didn’t ask.

She preferred to think about happy things, like Kathleen’s wedding. Kevin O’Connor wasn’t the man Scarlett would have picked for her, but he was clearly head over heels in love, and he had a good farm with twenty cows at grass, so he was considered a very good catch. Kathleen had a substantial dowry, in cash saved up from selling butter and eggs, and in her owning all the kitchen implements of Daniel’s house. She sensibly accepted a gift of a hundred pounds from Scarlett. It wasn’t necessary to add it to her dowry, she said with a conspiratorial wink.

The great disappointment for Scarlett was that she couldn’t hold the wedding party at the Big House. Tradition demanded that the wedding take place in the house the couple would live in. The best Scarlett could do was contribute several geese and a half dozen barrels of porter to the wedding feast. Even that was going over the edge a bit, Colum warned her. The groom’s family were the hosts.

“Well, if I’m going to go over the edge, I might as well go way over,” Scarlett told him. She warned Kathleen, too, in case she wanted to object. “I’m coming out of mourning. I’m sick to death of wearing black.”

She danced every reel at the wedding party, wearing bright blue and red petticoats under a dark green skirt, and stockings striped in yellow and green.

Then she cried all the way home to Ballyhara. “I’m going to miss her so much, Colum. I’ll miss the cottage, too, and all the visitors. I’ll never go there again, not with nasty Pegeen handing out her nasty old tea.”

“Twelve miles isn’t the end of the earth, Scarlett darling. Get yourself a good riding horse instead of driving your buggy, and you’ll be in Dunsany in no time at all.”

Scarlett could see the sense to that, although twelve miles was still a long way. What she refused to consider at all was Colum’s quiet suggestion that she start thinking about marrying again.

She woke up in the night sometimes, and the darkness in her room was like the dark mystery of Rhett’s eyes meeting hers when her ship was leaving Charleston. What had he been feeling?

Alone in the silence of the night, alone in the vastness of the ornate bed, alone in the black blankness of the unlit room, Scarlett wondered, and dreamed of impossible things, and sometimes wept from the ache of wanting him.


“Cat,” said Cat clearly when she saw her reflection in the mirror.

“Oh, thank God,” Scarlett cried aloud. She’d been afraid her baby was never going to talk. Cat had rarely gurgled and cooed like other babies, and she looked at people who talked baby talk to her with an expression of profound astonishment. She walked at ten months, which was early, Scarlett knew, but a month later she was still practically mute except for her laughter. “Say ‘ma-ma,’ ” Scarlett begged. To no avail.

“Say ‘ma-ma,’ ” she tried again after Cat spoke, but the little girl wriggled out of her grasp and plunged recklessly across the floor. Her walking was more enthusiastic than skillful.

“Conceited little monster,” Scarlett called after her. “All babies say ‘ma-ma’ for their first word, not their own name.”

Cat staggered to a halt. She looked back at Scarlett with a smile that Scarlett said later was “positively diabolical.” “Mama,” she said casually. Then she lurched off again.

“She probably could have said it all along if she’d wanted to,” Scarlett bragged to Father Flynn. “She tossed it to me like a bone to a dog.”

The old priest smiled tolerantly. He had listened to many proud mothers in his long years. “It’s a grand day,” he offered pleasantly.

“A grand day in every way, Father!” exclaimed Tommy Doyle, the youngest of Ballyhara’s farmers. “It’s sure that we’ve made the harvest of harvests.” He refilled his glass, and Father Flynn’s. A man was entitled to relax and enjoy himself at the Harvest Home celebration.

Scarlett allowed him to give her a glass of porter, too. The toasts would be starting soon and it would be bad luck if she didn’t share them with at least a sip. After the good luck that had blessed Ballyhara all year, she wasn’t about to risk inviting any bad.

She looked at the long, laden tables set up the length of Ballyhara’s wide street. Each was decorated with a ribbon-tied sheaf wheat. Each was surrounded by smiling people enjoying themselves. This was the best part of being The O’Hara. They had all worked, each in his or her own way, and now they were all together, the whole population of the town, to celebrate the results of that work.

There was food and drink, sweets and a small carousel for children, a wooden platform for dancing later in front of the unfinished inn. The air was golden with afternoon light, the wheat golden on the table, a golden feeling of happiness bathed in shared repletion. It was exactly what Harvest Home was meant to be.

The sound of horses coming made mothers look for their younger children. Scarlett’s heart stopped for a moment when she couldn’t find Cat. Then she saw her sitting on Colum’s knee at the end of the table. He was talking to the man beside him. Cat was nodding as if she understood every word. Scarlett grinned. What a funny little girl her daughter was.

A group of militia rode into the end of the street. Three men, three officers, their polished brass buttons more golden than the wheat. They slowed their horses to a walk, and the noise around the tables died away. Some of the men rose to their feet.

“At least the soldiers have the decency not to gallop past, stirring up dust,” said Scarlett to Father Flynn. But when the men reined in before the deserted church she fell silent, too.

“Which way to the Big House?” said one of the officers. “I’m here to talk to the owner.”

Scarlett stood up. “I am the owner,” she said. She was amazed that her suddenly dry mouth could make any sound at all.

The officer looked at her tumbled hair and bright peasant clothes. His lips curled in a sneer. “Very amusing, girl, but we’re not here to play games.”

Scarlett felt an emotion that had become almost a stranger to her, a wild, elated anger. She stepped up onto the bench she’d been sitting on and put her hands on her hips. She looked insolent and she knew it.

“No one invited you here—soldier—to play games or anything else. Now what do you want? I am Mrs. O’Hara.”

A second officer walked his horse forward a few steps. He dismounted and came on foot to stand in front of and below Scarlett’s position on the bench. “We’re to deliver this, Mrs. O’Hara.” He removed his hat and one of his white gauntlets and handed a scrolled paper up to Scarlett. “The garrison is going to second a detachment to Ballyhara for its protection.”

Scarlett could feel tension, like a storm, in the warm end-of-summer atmosphere. She unrolled the paper and read it slowly, twice. She could feel the knots in her shoulders relax when the full meaning of the document was clear to her. She lifted her head and smiled so everyone could see her. Then she turned the full force of her smile on the officer looking up at her. “That’s mighty sweet of the colonel,” she said, “but I’m really not interested, and he can’t send any soldiers to my town without my agreement. Will you tell him for me? I don’t have any unrest here in Ballyhara at all. We get along real fine.” She held the vellum sheet down to the officer. “Youall look a mite parched, would you like a glass of ale?” The admiring expression on her face had enchanted men just like this officer from the day she turned fifteen. He blushed and stammered exactly like dozens of young men she’d beguiled in Clayton County, Georgia.