Alexandra Ripley - Scarlett

“He didn’t even shoot him? I suppose he was drunk.” Her voice was thick with contempt. Then it skidded high with fear. “Then the prowler’s still around!”

Rhett patted her shoulder. “No. Rest assured, my dear, you’ll hear no more of the prowler. My brother and little Lucinda’s hasty wedding have put the fear of God into the Yankees.” He chuckled with rich, private enjoyment.

“What’s so funny?” demanded Scarlett suspiciously. She hated it when people laughed and she didn’t know why.

“Nothing you would understand,” said Rhett. “I was congratulating myself on single-handedly solving a problem and then my bungling brother went me one better: he inadvertently gave the whole city something to enjoy and feel proud about. Look at them, Scarlett.”

The porch was more crowded than ever. Lucinda Wragg, now Lucinda Grimball, was throwing flowers from her bouquet down to the soldiers.

“Humph! I’d sooner throw brickbats myself!”

“I’m sure you would. You’ve always liked the obvious. Lucinda’s way requires imagination.” His amused, lazy drawl had become viciously cutting.

Scarlett tossed her head. “I’m going back inside. I’d a far sight rather be suffocated than insulted.”

Unseen in the shadow of a nearby column, Rosemary cringed at the cruelty she heard in Rhett’s voice and the angry hurt in Scarlett’s. Later that night, after bedtime, she tapped on the door of the library where Rhett was reading, then entered and closed the door behind her.

Her face was blotched red from weeping. “I thought I knew you, Rhett,” she blurted, “but I don’t at all. I heard you talking to Scarlett tonight on the porch of the Hall. How could you be so mean to your own wife? Who are you going to turn on next?”

Rhett rose quickly from his chair and started towards his sister with his arms outstretched. But Rosemary held her hands up in front of her, palms outward, and backed away. His face darkened with pain, and he stood very still, his arms at his sides. He wanted—above all things—to shield Rosemary from hurt, and now he was the source of her anguish.

His mind was filled with Rosemary’s short sad story and his part in it. Rhett had never regretted or explained anything he had done in his tempestuous younger years. There was nothing he was ashamed of. Except the effects on his young sister.

Because of his rebellious defiance of family and society, his father had disowned him. Rhett’s name was only an inked-over line in the Butler family Bible when Rosemary’s birth was recorded. She was more than twenty years his junior. He did not even see her until she was thirteen, an awkward girl with long legs, large feet, and budding breasts. Their mother had disobeyed her husband for one of the few times in her life when Rhett began the dangerous life of blockade runner through the Union fleet and into Charleston Harbor. She came by night to the dock where his ship was moored, bringing Rosemary to meet him. The deep vein of loving tenderness in Rhett was inexpressively moved by the confusion and need that he sensed in his young sister, and he welcomed her to his shirt with all the warmth that their father had never been able to give. In turn, Rosemary gave him the trust and loyalty that their father had never inspired. The bond between brother and sister had never been severed, despite the fact that they saw each other no more than a dozen times from first meeting until Rhett came home to Charleston eleven years later.

He had never forgiven himself for accepting their mother’s reassurance that Rosemary was well and happy and sheltered by the money he lavished on them once his father was dead and could no longer intercept and return it. He should have been more alert, more attentive, he accused himself later. Then perhaps his sister would not have grown up distrusting men the way she did. Perhaps she would have loved and married and had children.

As it was, when he returned home he found a twenty-four-year-old woman with the same awkwardness of the thirteen-year-old he had first met. She was uncomfortable with all men except him; she used the distant lives in novels as a substitute for the uncertainty of life in the world; she rejected the conventions of society about how a woman should look and think and behave. Rosemary was a bluestocking, distressingly forthright, and totally lacking in feminine wiles and vanity.

Rhett loved her, and he respected her prickly independence. He couldn’t make up for the years he’d missed, but he could give her the rarest gift of all—his inner self. He was completely honest with Rosemary, talked to her as an equal and, on occasion, even confided the secrets of his shirt to her, as he had never done to any other person. She recognized the immensity of his gift, and she adored him. In the fourteen months that Rhett had been home, the over-tall, ill-at-ease, innocent spinster and the oversophisticated, disillusioned adventurer had become the closest of friends.

Now Rosemary felt betrayed. She’d seen a side of Rhett that she hadn’t known existed, a streak of cruelty in the brother she’d known as unfailingly kind and loving. She was confused and distrustful.

“You haven’t answered my question, Rhett.” Rosemary’s reddened eyes were accusing.

“I’m sorry, Rosemary,” he said cautiously. “I am deeply sorry you happened to hear me. It was something I had to do. I want her to go away and leave all of us alone.”

“But she’s your wife!”

“I left her, Rosemary. She wouldn’t divorce me as I offered, but she knew the marriage was over.”

“Then why is she here?”

Rhett shrugged. “Perhaps we should sit down. It’s a long, tiring story.”

Slowly, methodically, rigidly unemotional, Rhett told his sister about Scarlett’s two earlier marriages, about his proposal and Scarlett’s agreement to marry him for his money. He also told her about Scarlett’s near-obsessive love for Ashley Wilkes throughout all the years he’d known her.

“But if you knew that, why on earth did you marry her?” Rosemary asked.

“Why?” Rhett’s mouth twisted in a smile. “Because she was so full of fire and so recklessly, stubbornly brave. Because she was such a child beneath all her pretenses. Because she was unlike any woman I had ever known. She fascinated me, infuriated me, drove me mad. I loved her as consumingly as she loved him. From the day I first laid eyes on her. It was a kind of disease.” There was a weight of sorrow in his voice.

He bowed his head into his two hands and laughed shakily. His voice was muffled and blurred by his fingers. “What a grotesque practical joke life is. Now Ashley Wilkes is a free man and would marry Scarlett on a moment’s notice, and I want to be rid of her. Naturally that makes her determined to have me. She wants only what she cannot have.”

Rhett raised his head. “I’m afraid,” he said quietly, “afraid that it will all begin again. I know that she’s heartless and completely selfish, that she’s like a child who cries for a toy and then breaks it once she has it. But there are moments when she tilts her head at a certain angle, or she smiles that gleeful smile, or she suddenly looks lost—and I come close to forgetting what I know.”

“My poor Rhett.” Rosemary put her hand on his arm.

He covered it with his own. Then he smiled at her, and he was himself again. “You see before you, my dear, the man who was once the marvel of the Mississippi riverboats. I’ve gambled all my life, and I’ve never lost. I’ll win this hand, too. Scarlett and I have made a deal. I couldn’t risk having her here in this house too long. Either I would fall in love with her again or I would kill her. So I dangled gold in front of her, and her greed for money outbalanced the undying love she professes for me. She will be leaving for good when the Season is over. Until then all I have to do is keep her at a distance, outlast her, and outwit her. I’m almost looking forward to it. She hates to lose, and she lets it show. It’s no fun beating someone who’s a good loser.” His eyes laughed at his sister. Then they sobered. “It would destroy Mama if she knew the truth about my miserable marriage, but she’d be ashamed if she knew that I’d walked out on it, no matter how unhappy it was. A terrible dilemma. This way, Scarlett will leave, I will be the injured but bravely stoic party, and there’ll be no disgrace.”

“And no regrets?”

“Only for having been a fool once—years ago. I’ll have the very powerful solace of not being a fool the second time. It does a lot to erase the humiliation of the first time.”

Rosemary stared, unabashedly curious. “What if Scarlett changed? She might grow up.”

Rhett grinned. “To quote the lady herself—‘when pigs fly.’ ”

“Go away.” Scarlett buried her face in a pillow.

“It’s Sunday, Miss Scarlett, you can’t sleep late. Miss Pauline and Miss Eulalie is expecting you.”

Scarlett groaned. It was enough to make a person turn Episcopalian. At least they got to sleep later; the service at Saint Michael’s wasn’t until eleven o’clock. She sighed and got out of bed.

Her aunts wasted no time in beginning to lecture her about what would be expected of her in the upcoming Season. She listened impatiently while Eulalie and Pauline lectured her on the importance of decorum, inconspicuousness, deference to her elders, ladylike behavior. For heaven’s sake! She’d cut her teeth on all those rules. Her mother and Mammy had drummed them into her from the time she could walk. Scarlett set her jaw mutinously and stared at her feet as they walked to Saint Mary’s. She just wouldn’t listen, that’s all.