Alexandra Ripley - Scarlett

“A gentleman to see ye.” The maid held out a card. Her eyes were even rounder than usual.

Scarlett ran down the stairs. “Bart! What a surprise. Come in, we can sit on the steps. I don’t have any furniture.” She was genuinely pleased to see him, but she couldn’t take him up to her sitting room. Cat was having her nap next door.

Bart Morland sat down on the stone steps as if it were the most natural thing in the world to have no furniture. He’d had the devil of a time finding her, he said, until he ran into the postman in the bar. That was his only excuse for being so late delivering her trophy from the hunt.

Scarlett looked at the silver plaque with her name and the date of the hunt. The fox pad was no longer bloody, that was something, but it was not a thing of beauty.

“Disgusting, isn’t it?” said Bart cheerfully.

Scarlett laughed. No matter what Colum said, she liked John Morland. “Would you like to say hello to Half Moon?”

“Thought you’d never suggest it. I was wondering how to drop a really weighty hint. How is he?”

Scarlett made a face. “Underexercised, I’m afraid. I feel guilty about it, but I’ve been very busy. It’s haying time.”

“How’s your crop?”

“So far, so good. If we don’t get a real rain.”

They walked through the colonnade and out to the stable. Scarlett was going to pass it on the way to the pasture and Half Moon, but Bart stopped her. Could he go inside? Her stables were famous, and he’d never seen them. Scarlett was puzzled, but she agreed readily. The horses were at work or pasture, so there was nothing to see except empty stalls, but if he wanted to see them—

The stalls were separated by granite columns with Doric capitals. Tall vaulting sprang up from the columns to meet and cross and create a ceiling of stone that looked as light and weightless as air and sky.

John Morland cracked his knuckles, then apologized. When he was really excited, he said, he did it without thinking. “You don’t find it extraordinary to have a stable that looks like a cathedral? I’d put an organ in it and play Bach to the horses all day.”

“Probably give them strangles.”

Morland’s whooping laugh made Scarlett laugh, too; he sounded so comic. She filled a small bag with oats for him to feed Half Moon.

Walking beside Morland, Scarlett searched her mind for some way to interrupt his admiring chatter about her stables, something casual she could say to start him talking about Rhett.

There was no need. “I say, what luck for me that you’re friends with Rhett Butler,” Bart exclaimed. “If he hadn’t introduced us, I’d never have gotten a look at those stables of yours.”

“I was so surprised to run into him like that,” Scarlett said quickly. “How do you happen to know him?”

He didn’t really know Rhett at all, Bart replied. Some old friends had written to him a month ago, saying that they were sending Rhert to look at his horses. Then Rhett had arrived, bearing a letter of introduction from them. “He’s a remarkable fellow, really serious about horses. Knows a lot, too. I wish he could have stayed longer. Are you old friends? He never quite got around to telling me.”

Thank goodness, thought Scarlett. “I have some family in Charleston,” she said. met him when I was visiting there.”

“Then you must have met my friends the Brewtons! When I was at Cambridge I’d go down to London for the Season just in hopes that Sally Brewton might have come over. I was mad for her, just like everybody else.”

“Sally Brewton! That monkey face?” Scarlett blurted before she thought.

Bart grinned. “The very same. Isn’t she marvelous? She’s such an original.”

Scarlett nodded enthusiastically, and smiled. But in truth she’d never understand how men could be mad for anyone that ugly.

John Morland assumed that everyone who knew Sally must certainly adore her, and he talked about her for the next half hour while he leaned on the pasture fence and tried to entice Half Moon to come get the oats he held in his palm.

Scarlett half-listened while she thought her own thoughts. Then Rhett’s name captured her full attention. Bart chuckled as he recounted the gossip Sally had included in her letter. Rhett had fallen into the oldest snare in history, it seemed. Some orphanage was having an outing at his country place, and one of the orphans turned up missing when it was time to leave. So what did he do but go off with the schoolteacher to search for it. All ended well, the child was found, but not until after dark. Which meant, of course, that the spinster teacher was compromised, and Rhett had to marry her.

The best part was that he’d been run out of town years before when he refused to make an honest woman out of another girl he’d been indiscreet with.

“You’d think he would have learned to be careful after the first time,” Bart chortled. “He must be a lot more absentminded than he appears. Don’t you find that hilarious, Scarlett? Scarlett?”

She gathered her wits. “Speaking as a female, I’d say it serves Mr. Butler right. He has the look of a man who’s caused a lot of girls a lot of trouble when he wasn’t being absentminded.”

John Morland whooped with laughter. The sound attracted Half Moon, who approached the fence warily. Bart shook the bag of oats.

Scarlett was elated, and yet she felt like crying. So that was why Rhett had been so quick to divorce and remarry. What a sly boots Anne Hampton is. She had me fooled good and proper. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just wretched luck for me that it took so long to find the stray orphan. And that Anne is Miss Eleanor’s special favorite. And that she looks so much like Melly.

Half Moon backed away from the oats. John Morland reached into a pocket of his jacket and found an apple. The horse nickered in anticipation.

“Look here, Scarlett,” Bart said as he broke the apple. “I’ve got something a bit ticklish to talk to you about.” He extended his open palm with one quarter of the apple on it for Half Moon.

“A bit ticklish!” If he only knew how ticklish his conversation had already been. Scarlett laughed. “I don’t mind you spoiling that animal rotten, if that’s what you mean,” she said.

Heavens no! Bart’s gray eyes widened. What could have put such a thought in her head?

It was something truly delicate, he explained. Alice Harrington—she was the stoutish one at the hunt who’d ended up in the ditch—was having a house party at Midsummer Night, and she wanted to invite Scarlett but didn’t have the nerve. He’d been appointed diplomat to sound her out about it.

Scarlett had a hundred questions. Essentially they boiled down to when, where, and what to wear. Colum would be furious, she was sure, but she didn’t care. She wanted to get dressed up and drink champagne and ride like the wind again over streams and fences following the hounds and the fox.

Harrington House was a huge block of a house made of Portland stone. It wasn’t far from Ballyhara, just past a crossroads village named Pike Corner. The entrance was hard to find; there were no gates and no gatehouse, only a pair of unadorned and unmarked stone columns. The gravel drive skirted a broad lake then turned into a plain gravelled area in front of the stone house.

A footman came out of the front door at the sound of the buggy’s wheels. He handed Scarlett down, then turned her over to a maid who was waiting in the hallway. “My name is Wilson, miss,” she said with a curtsey. “Will you be wanting to rest a bit after your journey or will you be joining the others?” Scarlett chose to join the others, and the footman led her the length of the hall to an open door onto a lawn.

“Mrs. O’Hara!” shouted Alice Harrington. Now Scarlett remembered her vividly. “Ended up in a ditch” hadn’t been much of a description, nor had “stout.” Fat and loud would have identified Alice Harrington for her at once. She moved toward Scarlett with a surprisingly light step and bellowed that she was happy to see her. “I do hope you like croquet, I’m terrible, and my team would adore to lose me.”

“I’ve never played,” Scarlett said.

“All the better! You’ll have beginner’s luck.” She held out her mallet. “Green stripes, it’s perfect for you. You have such unusual eyes. Let me introduce everyone, then you can take my place and give my team a chance.”

Alice’s team—now Scarlett’s—was made up of an elderly man in tweeds introduced as General Smyth-Burns, and a couple in their arly twenties who both wore spectacles, Emma and Chizzie Fulwich. The General presented the opponents to her, Charlotte Montague, a tall, thin woman with beautifully dressed gray hair, Alice’s cousin Desmond Grantley, who was as rotund as she, and an elegant pair named Genevieve and Ronald Bennet. “Watch out for Ronald,” said Emma Fulwich, “he cheats.”

The game was fun, Scarlett thought, and the scent of freshly mowed lawn was better than flowers. Her competitive instincts were at their full height before her third turn came around, and she earned a “Well done!” and a pat on the shoulder from the General when she whacked Ronald Bennet’s ball far out onto the lawn.

When the game was over Alice Harrington halloed them an invitation to tea. The table was set up under a tremendous beech tree; its shade was welcome. So was the sight of John Morland. He was listening attentively to the young woman sitting beside him on the bench, but he waggled his fingers at Scarlett in greeting. The rest of the house party was there, too. Scarlett met Sir Francis Kinsman, a handsome rakehell type, and his wife, and she pretended convincingly that she remembered Alice’s husband Henry, from the hunt at Bart’s.