“Did you like your birthday, darling?”

Cat smiled drowsily. “Yes. Sleepy, Momma.”

“I know you are, angel. It’s way past your nap time. Come on . . . into bed . . . you can nap in Momma’s big bed because this is a big birthday.”

Cat sat up as soon as Scarlett laid her down. “Where’s Cat’s present?”

“I’ll get it, darling.” Scarlett brought the big china dollbaby from its box where Cat had left it.

Cat shook her head. “The other one.” She turned on her stomach and slid down under the eiderdown to the floor, landing with a thump. Then she crawled under the bed. She backed out with a yellow tabby cat in her arms. “For pity’s sake, Cat, where did that come from? Give it to me before it scratches you.”

“Will you give it back?”

“Of course, if you want it. But it’s a barn cat, baby, it might not want to stay in the house.”

“It likes me.”

Scarlett gave in. The cat hadn’t scratched Cat, and she looked so happy with it. What harm could it possibly do to let her keep it? She put the two of them in her bed. I’ll probably end up sleeping with a hundred fleas, but a birthday is a birthday.

Cat nestled into the pillows. Her drooping eyes opened suddenly. “When Annie brings my milk,” she said, “my friend can drink mine.” Her green eyes closed and she went limp with sleep.

Annie tapped on the door, came in with a cup of warm milk. She told them when she got back to the kitchen that Mrs. O’Hara had laughed and laughed, she couldn’t think why. She’d said something about cats and milk. If anybody wanted to know what she thought, said Mary Moran, she thought it would be a lot more seemly for that baby to have a decent Christian name, may the saints protect her. All three maids and the cook crossed themselves three times.

Mrs. Fitzpatrick saw and heard from the bridge. She crossed herself, too, and said a silent prayer. Cat would soon be too big to keep protected all the time. People were afraid of fairy changelings, and what people feared, they tried to destroy.

Down in Ballyhara town, mothers were scrubbing their children with water in which angelica root had steeped all day. It was a known protection against witches and spirits.


The horn did it. Scarlett was exercising Half Moon when both of them heard the horn and then the hounds. Somewhere close by in the countryside people were hunting. For all she knew, Rhett might even be with them. She put Half Moon over three ditches and four hedges on Ballyhara, but it wasn’t the same. She wrote to Charlotte Montague the next day.

Two weeks later three wagons rolled heavily up the drive. The furniture for Mrs. Montague’s rooms had arrived. The lady followed in a smart carriage, along with her maid.

She directed the disposition of the furniture in a bedroom and sitting room near Scarlett’s, then left her maid to see to her unpacking. “Now we begin,” she said to Scarlett.


“I might just as well not be here at all,” Scarlett complained. “The only thing I’m allowed to do is sign bank drafts for scandalous amounts of money.” She was talking to Ocras, Cat’s tabby. The name meant “hungry” in Irish and had been given by the cook in an exasperated moment. Ocras ignored Scarlett, but she had no one else to talk to. Charlotte Montague and Mrs. Fitzpatrick seldom asked her opinion about anything. Both of them knew what a Big House should be, and she didn’t.

Nor was she very interested. For most of her life the house she lived in had simply been there, already as it was, and she’d never thought about it. Tara was Tara, Aunt Pittypat’s was Aunt Pitty’s, even though half of it belonged to her. Scarlett had involved herself only with the house Rhett built for her. She’d bought the newest and most expensive furnishings and decorations, and she’d been pleased with them because they proved how rich she was. The house itself never gave her pleasure; she hardly saw it. Just as she didn’t really see the Big House at Ballyhara. Eighteenth-century Palladian, Charlotte said, and what, pray tell, was so important about that? What mattered to Scarlett was the land, for its richness and its crops, and the town, for its rents and services and because no one, not even Rhett, owned his own town.

However, she understood perfectly well that accepting invitations placed an obligation on her to return them, and she couldn’t invite people to a place that had furniture in only two rooms. She was lucky, she upposed, that Charlotte Montague wanted to transform the Big House for her. She had more interesting things to do with her time.

Scarlett was firm about the points that mattered to her: Cat must have a room next to her own, not in some nursery wing with a nanny; and Scarlett would do her own accounts, not turn all her business over to a bailiff. Other than that, Charlotte and Mrs. Fitz could do whatever they liked. The costs made her wince, but she had agreed to give Charlotte a free hand and it was too late to back out once she’d shaken hands on it. Besides, money just didn’t matter to her now the way it used to.

So Scarlett took refuge in the Estate office and Cat made the kitchen her own while workmen did unknown, expensive, noisy, smelly things to her house for months on end. At least she had the farm to run, and her duties as The O’Hara. Also she was buying horses.

“I know little or nothing about horses,” said Charlotte Montague. It was a statement that made Scarlett’s eyebrows skid upwards. She’d come to believe that there was nothing on earth Charlotte didn’t claim to be an expert on. “You’ll need at least four saddle horses and six hunters, eight would be better, and you must ask Sir John Morland to assist you in selecting them.”

“Six hunters! God’s nightgown, Charlotte, you’re talking about more than five hundred pounds!” Scarlett shouted. “You’re crazy.” She brought her voice down to normal sound, she’d learned that shouting at Mrs. Montague was a waste of energy; nothing bothered the woman. “I’ll educate you a little about horses,” she said with venomous sweetness. “You can only ride one. Teams are for carriages and plows.”

She lost the argument. As usual. That was why she didn’t bother to argue about John Morland’s help, she told herself. But Scarlett knew that really she had been hoping to have a reason to see Bart. He might have some news of Rhett. She rode over to Dunsany the next day. Morland was delighted by her request. Of course he’d help her find the best hunters in all Ireland . . .

“Do you ever hear from your American friend, Bart?” She hoped the question sounded casual, she’d waited long enough to get it in. John Morland could talk about horses even longer than Pa and Beatrice Tarleton.

“Rhett, do you mean?” Scarlett’s heart turned over at the sound of his name. “Yes,  he’s much more responsible about his correspondence than I am.” John gestured towards the untidy pile of letters and bills on his desk.

Would the man just get on with it? What about Rhett?

Bart shrugged, turned his back to the desk. “He’s determined to enter the filly he bought from me in the Charleston races. I told him she was bred for hurdles and not for the flat, but he’s sure her speed will compensate. I’m afraid he’s going to be disappointed. In another three or four years, perhaps he might prove right, but when you remember that her dam was out of . . .”

Scarlett stopped listening. John Morland would talk bloodlines all the way back to the Flood! Why couldn’t he tell her what she wanted to know? Was Rhett happy? Had he mentioned her?

She looked at the young Baronet’s animated, intense face and forgave him. In his own eccentric way, he was one of the most charming men in the world.

John Morland’s life was built around horses. He was a conscientious landlord, interested in his estate and his tenants. But breeding and training race horses was his true passion, followed closely by fox hunting in the winter on the magnificent hunters he kept for himself.

Possibly they compensated for the romantic tragedy of Bart’s absolute devotion to the woman who had gained possession of his heart when they were both not much more than children. Her name was Grace Hastings. She’d been married to Julian Hastings for nearly twenty years. John Morland and Scarlett shared a bond of hopeless love.

Charlotte had told her what “everyone in Ireland” knew—John was relatively immune to husband-hunting women because he had little money. His title and his property were old—impressively old—but he had no income except his rents, and he spent almost every shilling of that on his horses. Even so, he was very handsome in an absentminded way, tall and fair with warm, interested gray eyes and a breathtakingly sweet smile that accurately reflected his goodhearted nature. He was strangely innocent for a man who had spent all of his forty-some years in the worldly circles of British society. Occasionally a woman with money of her own, like the Honourable Louisa, fell in love with him and made a determined pursuit that embarrassed Morland and amused everyone else. His eccentricities became more pronounced then; his absentmindedness bordered on vacancy, his waistcoats were often buttoned wrong, his contagious whooping laughter became sometimes inappropriate, and he rearranged his collection of paintings by George Stubbs so often that the walls of his house became peppered with holes.

A beautiful portrait of the famous horse Eclipse was balanced perilously on a stack of books, Scarlett noticed. It made no difference to her, she wanted to know about Rhett. I’ll go ahead and ask, she decided. Bart won’t remember anyhow. “Did Rhett say anything about me?”

Morland blinked, his mind on the filly’s forebears. Then her question registered. “Oh, yes, he asked me if you might possibly sell Half Moon. He’s thinking about starting up the Dunmore Hunt again. He wants me to keep my eye open for any more like Half Moon, too.”