“Miss Eleanor, don’t cry,” she said ineffectively. “Don’t feel bad. Please, I need to ask you something.”

Mrs. Butler breathed deeply; she wiped her eyes and composed her face. “What is it, my dear?”

“I have to know,” Scarlett said urgently. “You’ve got to tell me. Truly, do I—what he said—do I look like that?” She needed reassurance, had to have the approval of this loving, lemon-scented lady.

“Precious child,” said Eleanor, “it doesn’t matter a tinker’s dam what you look like. Rhett loves you, and therefore I love you, too.”

Mother of God! She’s saying that I look like a whore but it doesn’t matter. Is she crazy? Of course it matters, it matters more than anything else in the world. I want to be a lady, like I was meant to be!

She grabbed Mrs. Butler’s hands in a desperate grip, not knowing that she was causing her agonizing pain. “Oh, Miss Eleanor, help me! Please, I need you to help me.”

“Of course, dear. Tell me what you want.” There was only serenity and affection on Mrs. Butler’s face. She had learned many years before how to hide any pain she felt.

“I need to know what I’m doing wrong, why I don’t look like a lady. I am a lady, Miss Eleanor, I am. You knew my mother, you must know it’s so.”

“Of course you are, Scarlett, and of course I know. Appearances are so deceiving, it’s really not fair. We can take care of everything with practically no effort at all.” Mrs. Butler gently disengaged her throbbing, swollen fingers from Scarlett’s grasp. “You have so much vitality, dear child, all the vigor of the world you grew up in. It’s misleading to people here in the old, tired low-country. But you mustn’t lose it, it’s too valuable. We’ll simply find ways to make you somewhat less visible, more like us. Then you’ll be more comfortable.”

And so will I, Eleanor Butler thought silently. She would defend to her dying breath the woman she believed Rhett loved, but it would be much easier if Scarlett stopped wearing paint on her face and expensive, ill-considered clothes. Eleanor welcomed the opportunity to remake Scarlett in the Charleston mold.

Scarlett gratefully swallowed Mrs. Butler’s diplomatic assessment of her problem. She was too shrewd to believe it completely—she had seen Miss Eleanor manage Eulalie and Pauline. But Rhett’s mother would help her, and that was what counted, at least for now.

14

The Charleston that had molded Eleanor Butler and drawn Rhett back after decades of adventuring was an old city, one of the oldest in America. It was crowded onto a narrow triangular peninsula between two wide tidal rivers that met in a broad harbor connected to the Atlantic. First settled in 1682, it had, from its earliest days, a romantic languor and sensuality foreign to the brisk pace and Puritan self-denial of the New England colonies. Salt breezes stirred palm trees and wisteria vines, and flowers bloomed year-round. The soil was black, rich, free of stones to blunt a man’s plow; the waters teemed with fish, crab, shrimp, terrapin and oysters, the woods with game. It was a rich land, meant to be enjoyed.

Ships from all over the globe anchored in the harbor for cargoes of the rice grown on Charlestonians’ vast plantations along the rivers; they delivered the world’s luxuries for the pleasure and adornment of the small population. It was the wealthiest city in America.

Blessed by reaching its maturity in the Age of Reason, Charleston used its wealth in the pursuit of beauty and knowledge. Responsive to its climate and natural bounties, it used its riches also for the enjoyment of the senses. Each house had its chef and its ballroom, every lady her brocades from France and her pearls from India. There were learned societies and societies for music and dancing, schools of science and schools of fencing. It was civilized and hedonistic in a balance that created a culture of exquisitely refined grace in which incomparable luxury was tempered by a demanding discipline of intellect and education. Charlestonians painted their houses in all the colors of the rainbow and hung them with shaded porches through which sea breezes carried the scent of roses like a caress. Inside every house there was a room with globe, telescope, and walls of books in many languages. In the middle of the day they sat at dinner for six courses, each offering a choice of dishes in quietly gleaming, generations-old silver pieces. Conversation was the sauce of the meal, wit its preferred seasoning.

This was the world which Scarlett O’Hara, one-time belle of a rural county in the raw red frontier earth of north Georgia, now intended to conquer, armed only with energy, stubbornness, and a dreadful need. Her timing was terrible.

For more than a century, Charlestonians had been renowned for their hospitality. It wasn’t unusual to entertain a hundred guests, fully half of whom were unknown to host and hostess except through letters of introduction. During Race Week—the climax of the city’s social season—owners from England, France, Ireland, and Spain often brought their horses months in advance to accustom them to the climate and water. The owners stayed at the homes of their Charleston competitors; their horses were stabled, as guests, next to the horses the Charleston host would be running against them. It was an open-handed, open-hearted city.

Until the War came. Fittingly, the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor. To most of the world Charleston was the symbol of the mysterious and magical, moss-hung, magnolia-scented South. To Charlestonians as well.

And to the North. “Proud and arrogant Charleston” was the refrain in New York and Boston newspapers. Union military officials were determined to destroy the flower-filled, pastel-painted old city. The harbor entrance was blockaded first; later, gun emplacements on nearby islands fired shells into narrow streets and houses in a siege that lasted for almost six hundred days; finally Sherman’s Army came with its torches to burn the plantation houses on the rivers. When the Union troops marched in to occupy their prize, they faced a desolate ruin. Wild grasses grew in the streets and choked the gardens of windowless, shell-scarred, broken-roofed houses. They also faced a decimated population that had become as proud and arrogant as their Northern reputation.

Outsiders were no longer welcome in Charleston.

People repaired their roofs and windows as best they could and locked their doors. Among themselves, they restored the cherished habits of gaiety. They met for dancing in looted drawing rooms where they toasted the South in water from cracked and mended cups. “Starvation parties,” they called their gatherings, and laughed. The days of French champagne in crystal flutes might be gone, but they were still Charlestonians. They had lost their possessions but they had almost two centuries of shared tradition and style. No one could take that from them. The War was over, but they weren’t defeated. They would never be defeated, no matter what the damn Yankees did. Not so long as they stuck together. And kept everyone else out of their closed circle.

The military occupation and the outrages of Reconstruction tested their mettle, but they held fast. One by one the other states of the Confederacy were readmitted to the Union, their state governments restored to the state’s population. But not South Carolina. And especially not Charleston. More than nine years after the end of the War, armed soldiers patrolled the old streets, enforcing curfew. Constantly changing regulations covered everything from the price of paper to the licensing of marriages and funerals. Charleston became more and more derelict outwardly, but ever stronger in its determination to preserve the old ways of life. The Bachelors’ Cotillion was reborn, with a new generation to fill the gaps caused by the carnage of Bull Run, Antietam, and Chancellorsville. After their working hours as clerks or laborers, former plantation owners took the streetcars or walked to the outskirts of the city to rebuild the two-mile oval of the Charleston Race Course and to plant the blood-soaked churned mud of the land around it with grass seed bought with combined widow’s mites.

Little by little, by symbols and by inches, Charlestonians were regaining the essence of their beloved lost world. But there was no room in it for anyone who didn’t belong there.

15

Pansy couldn’t hide her amazement at the orders Scarlett gave her when she was unlacing for bed the first night in the Butler house. “Take the green walking-out costume I wore this morning and give it a good brushing. Then take off every speck of trimming, including the gold buttons, and sew on some plain black buttons instead.”

“Where I going to find any black buttons, Miss Scarlett?”

“Don’t bother me with fool questions like that. Ask Mrs. Butler’s maid—what’s her name? Celie. And wake me up tomorrow at five o’clock.”

“Five o’clock?”

“Are you deaf? You heard me. Now scoot. I want that green outfit ready to put on when I get up.”

Scarlett sank gratefully into the feather mattress and down pillows on the big bed. It had been an over-full, over-emotional day. Meeting Miss Eleanor, then shopping, then that silly Confederate Home meeting, then Rhett appearing from nowhere with the silver tea service . . . Her hand stretched over to the empty space beside her. She wanted him there, but perhaps it was better to wait a few days, until she was really accepted in Charleston. That miserable Ross! She wouldn’t think about him or those horrible things he’d said and done. Miss Eleanor had denied him the house, and she wouldn’t have to see him, she hoped not ever again. She’d think about something else. She’d think about Miss Eleanor, who loved her and who was going to help her get Rhett back, even if she didn’t know that’s what she was doing.