“There’s not enough money ever been minted to keep me here,” she said, and she was talking to herself more than to him. “Money can’t make living in a tomb bearable.” She looked at Pierre Robillard with blazing green eyes in a deathly pale face. “You belong here—you’re dead already except you won’t admit it. I’ll leave first thing in the morning.” She walked quickly to the door and pulled it open.

“I figured you’d be there listening, Jerome. Go on in.”

43

“Don’t be a cry-baby, Pansy, nothing’s going to happen to you. The train goes straight through to Atlanta, then it stops. Just don’t get off it before it gets there. I’ve pinned some money in a handkerchief and pinned the handkerchief in your coat pocket. The conductor already has your ticket, and he’s promised to look out for you. Great balls of fire! You’ve been snivelling about how much you wanted to go home, and now you’re going, so stop carrying on like that.”

“But Miss Scarlett, I never been on a train by myself.”

“Fiddle-dee-dee! You’re not by yourself at all. There are plenty of folks on the train. You just look out the window and eat that basket full of food Mrs. O’Hara fixed you and you’ll be home before you know it. I’ve sent a telegram to tell them to come meet you at the depot.”

“But Miss Scarlett, what am I to do without you to do for? I’m a lady’s maid. When are you going to be home?”

“When I get there. It all depends. Now climb up in that car, the train’s ready to leave.”

It all depends on Rhett, Scarlett thought, and Rhett better come pretty soon. I don’t know if I’m going to manage with my cousins or not. She turned and smiled at Jamie’s wife. “I don’t know how I’m ever going to thank you for taking me in, Maureen. I’m thrilled to death at the idea, but it’s caused you so much trouble.” It was her bright, girlish, social voice.

Maureen took Scarlett’s arm and walked her away from the train and Pansy’s forlorn face in the dust-streaked window of the coach. “Everything is grand, Scarlett,” she said. “Daniel is delighted to give you his room because he gets to move to Patricia’s with Brian. He’s been wanting to do it, but he didn’t dare say so. And Kathleen is near floating with joy that she’ll be your lady’s maid. It’s what she wants to train for anyhow, and she worships the ground under your feet. It’s the first time the silly girl’s been happy since she came here. You belong with us, not at the beck and call of that old loo-la. The brass of him, expecting that you’d stay there to housekeep for him. We want you for the love of you.”

Scarlett felt better. It was impossible to resist Maureen’s warmth. Still, she hoped it wouldn’t be long. All those children!

Just like a colt about to shy, Maureen thought. Under the light pressure of her hand she could feel the tension in Scarlett’s arm. What she needs, Maureen decided, is to open her heart and likely have a good old-fashioned bawling. It’s not natural for a woman to never tell nothing about herself, and this one hasn’t mentioned her husband at all. It makes a person wonder . . . But Maureen didn’t waste any time wondering. She’d observed when she was a girl washing glasses in her father’s bar that given enough time everyone came around to airing his troubles sooner or later. She couldn’t imagine that Scarlett would be any different.


The O’Hara houses were three tall brick houses in a row, with windows front and rear and shared interior walls. Inside, the layouts were identical. Each floor had two rooms: kitchen and dining room on the street level, double parlors on the first floor, and two bedrooms on each of the top two floors. A narrow hall with a handsome staircase ran the length of each house, and behind each one was an ample yard and a carriage house.

Scarlett’s bedroom was on the third floor of Jamie’s house. It had two single beds in it—Daniel and Brian had shared it until Brian moved to Patricia’s—and it was very plain, as befitted two young men, with only a wardrobe and a writing table and chair for furniture in addition to the beds. But there were brightly colored patchwork quilts on the beds and a big red and white rag rug on the polished floor. Maureen had hung a mirror over the writing table and covered it with a lace cloth, so Scarlett had a dressing table. Kathleen was surprisingly good with her hair, and she was eager to learn how to please, and she was right at hand. She slept with Mary Kate and Helen in the other third-floor bedroom.

The only little child in Jamie’s house was four-year-old Jacky, and he was usually over at one of the other houses, playing with cousins near his age.

During the day, with the men at work and the older children in school, the row of houses was a world of women. Scarlett expected to hate it. But nothing in Scarlett’s life had prepared her for the O’Hara women.

There were no secrets among them, and no reticences. They said whatever they thought, confided intimacies that made her blush, quarrelled when they disagreed, and hugged one another, weeping, when they made up. They treated all the houses as one, were in and out of the others’ kitchens at any hour for a cup of tea, shared the duties of shopping and baking and tending the animals in the yard and the carriage houses that had been converted into sheds.

Most of all they enjoyed themselves, with laughter and gossip and confidences and harmless intricate conspiracies against their men. They included Scarlett from the moment she arrived, assuming that she was one of them. Within days she felt she was. She went to the City Market with Maureen or Katie every day to search for the best foods at the best prices, and she giggled with young Polly and Kathleen about tricks with curling iron and ribbons, and she looked through swatches of upholstery fabric with house-proud Patricia long after Maureen and Katie threw up their hands at her finickiness. She drank innumerable cups of tea and listened to accounts of triumphs and worries; and, although she shared none of her own secrets, no one pressured her or held back the frank confession of their own. “I never knew that so many interesting things happened to people,” Scarlett told Maureen with genuine surprise.

The evenings had a different pattern. The men worked hard and were tired when they got home. They wanted a good meal and a pipe and a drink. And they always got it. After that the evening evolved by itself. Often the whole family ended up at Matt’s house, because he had five young children asleep upstairs. Maureen and Jamie could leave Jacky and Helen in Mary Kate’s care, and Patricia could bring her sleeping two-year-old and three-year-old without waking them. Before too long the music would begin. Later, when Colum came in, he would be the leader.

The first time Scarlett saw the bodhran, she thought it was an outsize tambourine. The metal-framed circle of stretched leather was more than two feet across, but it was shallow, like a tambourine, and Gerald was holding it in his hand, like a tambourine. Then he sat down, braced it on his knee and tapped on it with a wooden stick that he held in the middle, rocking it to strike one end, then the other, against the skin, and she saw that it was really a drum.

Not much of a drum, she thought. Until Colum picked it up. His left hand spread against the underside of the taut leather as if caressing it, and his right wrist was suddenly as fluid as water. His arm moved from top to bottom to top to center of the drum while his right hand made a curious, careless-looking motion that pounded the stick with a steady, blood-stirring rhythm. The tone and volume differed, but the hypnotic, demanding beat never varied, as fiddle, then whistle, then concertina joined in. Maureen held the bones lifeless in her hand, too caught up in the music to remember them.

Scarlett gave herself over to the drumbeat. It made her laugh, it made her cry, it made her dance as she’d never dreamed she could dance. It was only when Colum laid the bodhran down on the floor beside him and demanded a drink, saying “I’ve drummed myself dry,” that she saw that everyone else was as transported as she was.

She looked at the short, smiling pug-nosed figure with a shiver of awestruck wonder. This man was not like other men.


“Scarlett darling, you understand oysters better than I do,” said Maureen when they entered the City Market. “Will you find us the best of them? I want to make a grand oyster stew for Colum’s tea today.”

“For tea? Oyster stew’s rich enough for a meal.”

“And isn’t that the reason for it? He’s speaking at a meeting tonight, and he’ll need the strength of it.”

“What kind of meeting, Maureen? Will we all go?”

“It’s at the Jasper Greens, the American Irish volunteer soldiering group, so there’ll be no women. We wouldn’t be welcome.”

“What does Colum do?”

“Ah, well, first he reminds them they’re Irish, no matter how long they’ve been Americans, then he brings them to tears with longing and love for the Old Country, then he gets them to empty their pockets for the aid of the poor in Ireland. He’s a mighty speechmaker, says Jamie.”

“I can imagine. There’s something magic about Colum.”

“So you’ll find us some magical oysters, then.”

Scarlett laughed.

“They’ll not have pearls,” she said, mimicking Maureen’s brogue, “but they’ll make a glory of a broth.”


Colum looked down at the steaming, brimming bowl, and his eyebrows rose.

“Maureen, this is a hearty tea you serve.”

“The oysters looked particularly fat today at Market,” she said with a grin.

“Do they not print calendars in the United States of America?”