Alexandra Ripley - Scarlett

Scarlett hurried downstairs and to the dining room, where she tossed her mail onto the table in a heap. She poured brandy into a glass and drank a reviving swallow at the sideboard before carrying the glass to the table and sitting in her chair. Now she’d just sip her drink while she calmly read her letters . . .

A circular for a newly arrived dentist. Pooh. Her teeth were just fine, thank you very much. Another one for milk delivery. An announcement of a new play at DeGives. Scarlett sorted irritably through the envelopes. Wasn’t there any real mail? Her hand stopped when it touched a thin crackling onionskin envelope addressed in a spidery script. Aunt Eulalie. She downed the remainder of her brandy and ripped open the letter. She always hated the preachy, prissy missives from her dead mother’s sister. But Aunt Eulalie lived in Charleston. She might mention Rhett. His mother was her closest friend.

Scarlett’s eyes moved rapidly, squinting to make out the words. Aunt Eulalie always wrote on both sides of the thin paper, and often she “crossed” the letter, writing on the page then turning it to a right angle and writing across the previous lines. All to say a great deal about precious little.

The unseasonably warm autumn . . . she said that every year . . . Aunt Pauline having trouble with her knee . . . she’d had trouble with her knee as long as Scarlett could remember . . . a visit to Sister Mary Joseph . . . Scarlett made a face. She couldn’t think of her baby sister Carreen by her religious name, even though she’d been in the convent in Charleston for eight years . . . the bake sale for the Cathedral building fund was far behind schedule because contributions were not coming in, and couldn’t Scarlett—great balls of fire! She kept the roof over her aunts’ heads, did she have to roof a cathedral, too? She turned the page over, frowning.

Rhett’s name leapt from the tangle of criss-crossed words.

Scarlett threw the letter onto the table. So that was the story that Rhett was handing out! That she wouldn’t leave the store and go to Charleston with him. What a blackhearted liar he was! She’d begged him to take her with him when he left. How dare he spread such slander? She’d have some choice words to say to Mister Rhett Butler when he came home.

She strode to the sideboard, splashed brandy into her glass. Some fell onto the gleaming wooden surface. A swipe with her sleeve mopped it up. He’d probably deny it, the skunk. Well, she’d shake Aunt Eulalie’s letter in his face. Let’s see him call his mother’s best friend a liar!

Suddenly her rage left her, and she felt cold. She knew what he’d say: “Would you rather I told the truth? That I left you because living with you was intolerable?”

The shame of it. Anything was better than that. Even the loneliness while she waited for him to come home. Her hand lifted the glass to her lips, and she drank deep.

The movement caught her eye, reflected in the mirror above the sideboard. Slowly Scarlett lowered her hand and set the glass down. She looked into her own eyes. They widened in shock at what they saw. She hadn’t really looked at herself for months, and she couldn believe that pale, thin, sunken-eyed woman had anything to do with her. Why, her hair looked as if it hadn’t been washed for weeks!

What had happened to her?

Her hand reached automatically for the decanter, providing the answer. Scarlett pulled her hand away, and she saw that it was shaking.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered. She clutched the edge of the sideboard for support and stared at her reflection. “Fool!” she said. Her eyes closed and tears slid slowly down her cheeks, but she brushed them away with quivering fingers.

She wanted a drink more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life. Her tongue darted across her lips. Her right hand moved on its own volition, closed around the neck of the glittering diamondcut glass. Scarlett looked at her hand as if it belonged to a stranger, at the beautiful heavy crystal decanter and the promise of escape that lay within it. Slowly, watching her movements in the mirror, she lifted the decanter and backed away from her frightening reflection.

Then she drew in a long breath and swung her arm with all the strength she could find. The decanter sparkled blue and red and violet in the sunlight as it crashed into the huge mirror. For an instant Scarlett saw her face cracking into pieces, saw her twisted smile of victory. Then the silvered glass fragmented, and tiny shards spattered onto the sideboard. The top of the mirror seemed to lean forward from its frame, and huge jagged pieces fell crashing with a sound like cannon fire onto the sideboard, the floor, the pieces that had fallen first.

Scarlett was crying, and laughing, and shouting at the destruction of her own image. “Coward! Coward! Coward!”

She didn’t feel the tiny cuts that flying bits of glass made on her arms and neck and face. Her tongue tasted salt; she touched the trickle of blood on her cheek and looked in surprise at her reddened fingers.

She stared at the place where her reflection had been, but it was gone. She laughed unevenly. Good riddance.

The servants had rushed to the door when they heard the noise. They stood very close to one another, afraid to enter the room, looking fearfully at Scarlett’s rigid figure. She turned her head suddenly towards them, and Pansy let out a little cry of terror at the sight of her blood-smeared face.

“Go away,” Scarlett said calmly. “I am perfectly all right. Go away. I want to be by myself.” They obeyed without a word.

She was by herself whether she wanted to be or not, and no amount of brandy would make it any different. Rhett wasn’t coming home, this house wasn’t home to him any more. She’d known that for a long time but she’d refused to face it. She’d been a coward and a fool. No wonder she hadn’t known that woman in the mirror. That cowardly fool wasn’t Scarlett O’Hara. Scarlett O’Hara didn’t—what did they call it?—drown her sorrows. Scarlett O’Hara didn’t hide and hope. She faced the worst the world could hand her. And she went out into the danger to take what she wanted.

Scarlett shuddered. She had come so close to defeating herself.

No more. It was time—long past time—to take her life in her own hands. No more brandy. She had flung away that crutch.

Her whole body was crying out for a drink, but she refused to listen. She’d done harder things in her life, she could do this. She had to.

She shook her fist at the broken mirror. “Bring on your seven years bad luck, damn you.” Her defiant laugh was ragged.

She leaned against the table for a moment while she gathered her strength. She had so much to do.

Then she walked over the destruction around her, her heels breaking the mirror into bits. “Pansy!” she called from the doorway. “I want you to wash my hair.”

Scarlett was trembling from head to toe, but she made her legs carry her to the staircase and climb the long flight of stairs. “My skin must be like corduroy,” she said aloud, concentrating her mind away from the cravings of her body. “I’ll need to use quarts of rosewater and glycerine. And I have to get all new clothes. Mrs. Marie can hire extra sewing help.”

It shouldn’t take more than a few weeks to get over her weakness and get back to looking her best. She wouldn’t let it.

She had to be strong and beautiful, and she had no time to waste. She’d lost too much of it already.

Rhett hadn’t come back to her, so she’d have to go to him.

To Charleston.

Once her mind was made up, Scarlett’s life changed radically. She had a goal, now, and all her energy poured into achieving it. She’d think later about exactly how she was going to get Rhett back, after she arrived in Charleston. For now, she had to get ready to go.

Mrs. Marie threw up her hands and declared it impossible to make a complete new wardrobe in only a few weeks; Uncle Henry Hamilton put his fingertips together and expressed his disapproval when Scarlett told him what she needed him to do. Their opposition made Scarlett’s eyes gleam with the joy of battle, and in the end she won. By the beginning of November Uncle Henry had taken over the financial management of the store and saloon with a guarantee that the money would go to Joe Colleton. And Scarlett’s bedroom was a chaos of color and laces—her new clothes laid out to be packed for the trip.

She was still thin, and there were faint bruise-like shadows under her eyes, because the nights had been torments of sleeplessness and fierce efforts of will to resist the rest promised by the decanter of brandy. But she had won that battle, too, and her normal appetite for food had returned. Her face was already filled out enough so that a dimple flickered when she smiled, and her bosom was enticingly plump. With a skillful application of rouge on her lips and cheeks, she looked almost like a girl again, she was sure.