Scarlett’s words and manner were bold enough, but when a basso voice bellowed “Jerome!” from the rear of the house, she felt her palms grow damp. Her grandfather, she suddenly remembered, had eyes that cut right through you and made you wish you were anywhere except under his gaze.

The imposing black manservant who had admitted her now gestured Scarlett and her aunts toward the open door at the end of the hall. Scarlett let Eulalie and Pauline go first. The bedroom was a tremendous high-ceilinged space that had formerly been a spacious parlor. It was crowded with furniture, all the sofas and chairs and tables that had been in the parlor, plus a massive four-posted bed with gilt eagles crouching on top of the posts. In one corner of the room was a flag of France and a headless tailor’s dummy wearing the gold-epauletted medal-hung uniform that Pierre Robillard had worn when he was a young man and an officer in Napoleon’s army. The old man Pierre Robillard was in the bed, sitting erect against a mass of huge pillows, glaring at his visitors.

Why, he’s shrunk up to almost nothing. He was such a big old man, but he’s practically lost in that big bed, nothing but skin and bones. “Hello, Grandfather,” Scarlett said, “I’ve come to see you for your birthday. It’s Scarlett, Ellen’s daughter.”

“I haven’t lost my memory,” said the old man. His strong voice belied his fragile body. “But apparently your memory fails you. In this house, young people do not speak unless they are spoken to.”

Scarlett bit her tongue to keep silent. I’m not a child to be talked to that way, and you should be grateful anybody comes to see you at all. No wonder Mother was so happy to have Pa take her away from home!

“Et vous, mesfilles. Qu ’ist-ce-que vous voulez cette fois?” Pierre Robillard growled at his daughters.

Eulalie and Pauline rushed to the bedside, both speaking at once.

My grief! They’re talking French! What on earth am I doing here? Scarlett sank down onto a gold brocade sofa, wishing she was some place—any place—else. Rhett better come after me soon or I’ll go crazy in this house.

It was getting dark outside, and the shadowed corners of the room were mysterious. The headless soldier seemed about to move. Scarlett felt cold fingers on her spine and told herself not to be silly. But she was glad when Jerome and a sturdy-looking black woman came in carrying a lamp. While the maid pulled the curtains Jerome lit the gas lamps on each wall. He asked Scarlett politely if she would move so that he could get behind the sofa. When she stood, she saw her grandfather’s eyes on her, and she turned away from them. She found herself facing a big painting in an ornate gilt frame. Jerome lit one lamp, then a second, and the painting came to life.

It was a portrait of her grandmother. Scarlett recognized her at once from the painting at Tara. But this one was very different. Solange Robillard’s dark hair was not piled high on her head as in Tara’s portrait. It fell, instead, like a warm cloud over her shoulders and down her bare arms to the elbow, bound only by a fillet of gleaming pearls. Her arrogant thin nose was the same, but her lips held a beginning smile instead of a sneer, and her tip-tilted dark eyes looked from their corners at Scarlett with the laughing, magnetic intimacy that had challenged and lured everyone who’d ever known her. She was younger in this painting, but nevertheless a woman, not a girl. The provocative round breasts half-exposed at Tara were covered by the thin white silk gown she wore. Covered yet visible through the gauzy silk, a glimmer of white flesh and rosy nipples. Scarlett felt herself blushing. Why, Grandma Robillard doesn’t look like a lady at all, she thought, automatically disapproving as she’d been taught she should. Involuntarily she remembered herself in Rhett’s arms and the wild hunger for his hands on her. Her grandmother must have felt the same hunger, the same ecstasy, it was in her eyes and her smile. So it can’t be wrong, what I felt. Or was it? Was it some taint of shamelessness in her blood, handed down from the woman who smiled at her from the painting? Scarlett stared at the woman above her on the wall, fascinated.

“Scarlett,” Pauline whispered in her ear. “Père wants us to leave now. Say good night quietly, and come with me.”


Supper was a skimpy meal. Hardly enough, in Scarlett’s opinion, for one of the bright-plumaged fantasy birds painted on the plates that held it. “That’s because the cook’s preparing Père’s birthday feast,” Eulalie explained in a whisper.

“Four days ahead of time?” Scarlett said loudly. “What’s she doing, watching the chicken grow up?” Good heavens, she grumbled to herself, she’d be as skinny as Grandfather Robillard by Thursday if it was going to be like this. After the house was asleep she made her way silently down to the basement kitchen and ate her fill of the cornbread and buttermilk in the larder. Let the servants go hungry for a change, she thought, pleased that her suspicions had proven accurate. Pierre Robillard might keep the loyalty of his daughters when their stomachs were only half-filled, but his servants wouldn’t stay unless they had plenty to eat.

The next morning she ordered Jerome to bring her eggs and bacon and biscuits.

“I saw plenty in the kitchen,” she added.

And she got what she wanted. It made her feel much better about her meekness the night before. It’s not like me to knuckle under that way, she thought. Just because Aunt Pauline and Aunt Eulalie were shaking like leaves, that’s no reason for me to let the old man scare me. I won’t let it happen again.

Still, she was just as glad that she had the servants to deal with and not her grandfather. She could see that Jerome was offended, and it rather pleased her. She hadn’t had a show-down with anyone in a long time, and she did love to win. “The other ladies will have bacon and eggs, too,” she told Jerome. “And this isn’t enough butter for my biscuits.”

Jerome stalked off to report to the other servants. Scarlett’s demands were an affront to them all. Not because they meant more work; in fact she was only asking for what the servants always had for breakfast themselves. No, what bothered Jerome and the others was her youth and energy. She was a loud disruption of the house’s shrine-like, muted atmosphere. The servants could only hope that she would leave soon, and without wreaking too much havoc.

After breakfast, Eulalie and Pauline took her into each of the rooms on the first floor, talking eagerly about the parties and receptions they had seen in their youth, correcting each other constantly and arguing about decades-old details. Scarlett paused for a long time in front of the portrait of three young girls, trying to see her mother’s composed adult features in the chubby-cheeked five-year-old of the painting. Scarlett had felt isolated in Charleston’s web of intermarried generations. It was good to be in the house where her mother had been born and reared, in a city where she was part of the web.

“You must have about a million cousins in Savannah,” she said to the aunts. “Tell me about them. Can I meet them? They’re my cousins, too.”

Pauline and Eulalie looked confused. Cousins? There were the Prudhommes, their mother’s family. But only one very old gentleman was in Savannah, the widower of their mother’s sister. The rest of the family had moved to New Orleans many years ago. “Everyone in New Orleans speaks French,” Pauline explained. And as for the Robillards, they were the only ones. “Père had lots of cousins in France, brothers, too—two of them. But he was the only one to come to America.”

Eulalie broke in. “But we have many, many friends in Savannah, Scarlett. You can certainly meet them. Sister and I will be paying calls and leaving cards today, if Père doesn’t need us to stay home with him.”

“I’ll have to be back by three,” Scarlett said quickly. She didn’t want to be out when Rhett arrived, nor did she want to be other than at her best. She’d need plenty of time to bathe and dress before the train from Charleston got in.


But Rhett didn’t come, and when Scarlett left the carefully chosen bench in the immaculately maintained formal garden behind the house she felt chilled to the bone. She had refused her aunts’ invitation to accompany them that evening to the musicale they’d been invited to. If it was going to be anything like the tedious reminiscences of the old ladies they’d called on that morning, she’d be bored to death. But her grandfather’s malevolent eyes when he received his family for ten minutes before supper made her change her mind. Anything would be better than being alone in the house with Grandfather Robillard.


The Telfair sisters, Mary and Margaret, were the recognized cultural guardians of Savannah, and their musicale was nothing like the ones Scarlett had known before. Usually they were just ladies singing, showing off their “accomplishments,” accompanied by other ladies on the pianoforte. It was obligatory that ladies sing a little, play the piano a little, draw or paint watercolors a little and do fancy needlework a little. At the Telfairs’ house on Saint James’ Square, the standards were much more demanding. The handsome double drawing rooms had rows of gilt chairs across their centers, and at the curved end of one of the rooms a piano and a harp and six chairs with music stands in front of them promised some real performances. Scarlett made mental notes of all the arrangements. The double drawing rooms at the Butler house could easily be fixed the same way, and it would be a different kind of party from what everyone else did. She’d have a reputation as an elegant hostess in no time at all. She wouldn’t be old and frumpy looking like the Telfair sisters, either. Or as dowdy as the younger women who were here. Why was it that everywhere in the South people thought they had to look poor and patched to prove they were respectable?