Scarlett wanted to cry. Uncle Henry said this would happen, but I never thought it could be this bad. How could people not want that beautiful clean lumber? She inhaled deeply. Fresh-cut pine was the sweetest perfume in the world to her. Oh, how she missed the lumber business, she would never understand how she’d let Rhett trick her into selling it to Ashley. If she was still running it, this would never have happened. She would have sold the lumber somehow to someone. Panic touched the edge of her mind and she pushed it away. Things were awful all around, but she mustn’t fuss at Ashley. She wanted him to help her.

“The yard looks wonderful!” she said brightly. “You must have the sawmill running day and night to keep such a good stock up, Ashley.”

He looked up from the account books on his desk and Scarlett knew that all the cheerfulness in the world would be wasted on him. He looked no better than when she’d given him the talking-to.

He stood, tried to smile. His ingrained courtesy was stronger than his exhaustion, but his despair was greater than both.

I can’t tell him anything about India, Scarlett thought, or about the business either. He’s got all he can bear just making himself draw the next breath. It’s like there’s nothing holding him together but his clothes.

“Scarlett, dear, how kind of you to stop by. Won’t you sit down?”

“Kind,” is it? God’s nightgown! Ashley sounds like a wind-up music box of polite things to say. No, he doesn’t. He sounds like he doesn’t know what’s coming out of his mouth, and I reckon that’s closer to the truth. Why should he care that I’m chancing whatever’s left of my reputation by coming here without a chaperone? He doesn’t care anything about himself—any fool could see that—why should he care anything about me? I can’t sit down and make polite conversation, I can’t stand it. But I have to.

“Thank you, Ashley,” she said, and sat on the chair he was holding. She would force herself to stay for fifteen minutes and make empty, lively remarks about the weather, tell amusing stories about what a good time she’d had at Tara. She couldn’t tell him about Mammy, it would upset him too much. Tony coming home, though, that was different. It was good news. Scarlett started to speak.

“I’ve been down to Tara—”

“Why did you stop me, Scarlett?” said Ashley. His voice was flat, lifeless, devoid of real questioning. Scarlett couldn’t think what to say.

“Why did you stop me?” he asked again, and this time there was emotion in the words, anger, betrayal, pain. “I wanted to be in the grave. Any grave, not just Melanie’s. It’s the only thing I’m fit for . . . No, don’t say whatever you were going to say, Scarlett. I’ve been comforted and boosted up by so many well-meaning people that I’ve heard it all a hundred times over. I expect better of you than the usual platitudes. I’ll be grateful if you’ll say what you must be thinking, that I’m letting the lumber business die. Your lumber business that you invested all your heart in. I’m a miserable failure, Scarlett. You know it. I know it. The whole world knows it. Why do we all have to act as though it isn’t so? Blame me, why don’t you? You can’t possibly find any words harsher than those I say to myself, you can’t ‘hurt my feelings.’ God, how I hate that phrase! As if I had any feelings left to hurt. As if I could feel anything at all.”

Ashley shook his head with slow, heavy swings from side to side. He was like a mortally wounded animal brought down by a pack of predators. From his throat burst one tearing sob, and he turned away. “Forgive me, Scarlett, I beg of you. I had no right to burden you with my troubles. Now I have the shame of this outburst to add to my other shames. Be merciful, my dear, and leave me. I will be grateful if you will go now.”

Scarlett fled without a word.

Later she sat at her desk with all her legal records neatly stacked in front of her. It was going to be even harder to keep her promise to Melly than she’d expected. Clothing and household goods weren’t nearly enough.

Ashley wouldn’t lift a finger to help himself. She was going to have to make him successful whether he cooperated or not. She’d promised Melanie.

And she couldn’t bear to see the business she had built go under.

Scarlett made a list of her assets.

The store, building and trade. It produced nearly a hundred a month in profits, but that would almost certainly go down some when the Panic got to Atlanta and people had no money to spend. She made a note to order more cheap goods and stop replacing luxury items like wide velvet ribbon.

The saloon on her lot near the depot. She didn’t actually own it, she leased the land and building to the man who did, for thirty dollars a month. People would likely be drinking more than ever when times got hard, maybe she should raise the rent. But a few more dollars a month wouldn’t be enough to bail out Ashley. She needed real money.

The gold in her safe box. She had real money, more than twenty-five thousand dollars of real money. She was a wealthy woman in her own right by most people’s reckoning. But not by hers. She still didn’t feel safe.

I could buy the business back from Ashley, she thought, and for a moment her mind hummed with excitement, with possibilities. Then she sighed. That wouldn’t solve anything. Ashley was such a fool he’d insist on taking only what he could get on the open market, and that was hardly anything. Then, when she made a success of the business he’d feel like more of a failure than ever. No, no matter how much she would love to get her hands on that lumberyard and the sawmills, she had to make Ashley successful at it.

I just don’t believe that there’s no market for lumber. Panic or no Panic, people have got to be building something, if it’s only a shed for a cow or a horse.

Scarlett riffled through the stack of books and papers. She’d had an idea.

There it was, the plot of the farmland Charles Hamilton left her. The farms produced almost no income at all. What good did a couple of baskets of corn and a single bale of seedy cotton do her? Sharecropping was a waste of good land unless you had about a thousand acres and a dozen good farmers. But her hundred acres were right on the edge of Atlanta now, the way things were growing. If she could find a good builder—and they must all be feeling mighty hungry for work—she could put up a hundred gim-crack houses, maybe two hundred. Everybody who was losing money was going to have to draw in their horns and live closer to the bone. Their big houses would be the first thing to go, and they’d have to find someplace they could afford to live.

I won’t make any money, but at least I won’t be losing much. And I’ll see to it that the builder uses only lumber from Ashley, and the best he’s got, too. He’ll be making money—not a fortune, but good steady income—and he’ll never know it came from me. I can manage that somehow. All I need is a builder who can keep his mouth shut. And not steal too much.

The following day Scarlett drove out to give the sharecropping farmers notice to vacate.

7

“Yes, ma’am, Mrs. Butler, I’m hungry for work all right,” said Joe Colleton. The builder was a short, lean man in his forties; he looked much older because his big hair was snow white, and his face was leathered by long exposure to the sun and the weather. He was frowning, and the deep creases in his brow shadowed his dark eyes. “I need work, but not bad enough to work for you.”

Scarlett almost turned on her heel to leave; she didn’t have to swallow insults from some jumped-up poor white. But she needed Colleton. He was the only honest-to-the-bone builder in Atlanta; she’d learned that when she was selling lumber to them all in the boom years of rebuilding after the War. She felt like stamping her foot. It was all Melly’s fault. If it hadn’t been for that silly condition that Ashley mustn’t know she was helping him, she could have used any builder at all because she would watch him like a hawk and oversee every part of the work herself. How she’d love to do it, too.

But she couldn’t be seen to be involved. And she couldn’t trust anyone except Colleton. He had to agree to take the job, she had to make him agree. She put her small hand on his arm. It looked very delicate in its tight kid glove. “Mr. Colleton, it’ll break my heart if you say no to me. I need somebody very special to help me.” She looked at him with appealing helplessness in her eyes. Too bad he wasn’t taller. It was hard to be a frail little lady with somebody your own size. Still, it was often these banty rooster little men who were most protective of women. “I don’t know what I’ll do if you turn me down.”

Colleton’s arm stiffened. “Mrs. Butler, you sold me green lumber once, after you told me it was cured. I don’t do business twice with somebody that cheats me once.”

“That must have been a mistake, Mr. Colleton. I was green myself, just learning the lumber business. You remember how it was those days. The Yankees were breathing down our necks every waking minute. I was scared to death all the time.” Her eyes swam in unshed tears, and her very lightly rouged lips trembled. She was a small forlorn figure. “My husband, Mr. Kennedy, was killed when the Yankees broke up a Klan meeting.”

Colleton’s direct, knowing gaze was disconcerting. His eyes were on a level with hers, and they were as hard as marble. Scarlett took her hand off his sleeve. What was she going to do? She couldn’t fail, not in this. He had to take the job. “I made a deathbed promise to my dearest friend, Mr. Colleton.” Her tears were unplanned now. “Mrs. Wilkes asked me to help, and now I’m asking you.” The whole story tumbled out—how Melanie had always sheltered Ashley . . . Ashley’s ineptness as a businessman . . . his attempt to bury himself with his wife . . . the stacks of unsold lumber . . . the need for secrecy . . .

Colleton held up his hand to stop her. “All right, Mrs. Butler. If it’s for Mrs. Wilkes, I’ll take the job.” His hand dropped, extended. “I’ll shake on it, you’ll get the best-built houses with the best materials in them.”

Scarlett put her hand in his. “Thank you,” she said. She felt as if she’d scored the triumph of her life.

It was only some hours later that she remembered that she hadn’t intended to use the best of everything, only the best lumber. The miserable houses were going to cost her a fortune, and out of her own hard-earned money, too. She wouldn’t get any credit for helping Ashley, either. Everybody would still slam their doors in her face.

Not really everybody. I’ve got plenty of my own friends, and they’re a lot more fun than those frumpy old Atlanta people.

Scarlett put aside the sketch Joe Colleton had made on a paper sack for her to study and approve. She’d be a lot more interested when he gave her the numbers for his estimate; what difference did it make what the houses looked like or where he put the stairs?

She took her velvet-covered visiting book from a drawer and again to make a list. She was going to give a party. A big one, with musicians and rivers of champagne and huge amounts of the best, most expensive food. Now that she was done with deep mourning, it was time to let her friends know that she could be invited to their parties, and the best way to do it was to invite them to a party of her own.

Her eye skimmed quickly past the names of Atlanta’s old families. They all think I should be in deep mourning for Melly, no sense asking them. And there’s no need to wrap myself in crape, either. She wasn’t my sister, only my sister-in-law, and I’m not even sure that counts since Charles Hamilton was my first husband and there’ve been two since him.

Scarlett’s shoulders slumped. Charles Hamilton had nothing to do with anything, nor did wearing crape. She was in the truest kind of mourning for Melanie; it was a perpetual weight and worry in her heart. She missed the gentle, loving friend who had been so much more important to her than she had ever realized; the world was colder and darker without Melanie. And so lonely. Scarlett had been back from the country for only two days, but she had known enough loneliness in the two nights to strike fear deep into her heart.

She could have told Melanie about Rhett leaving; Melanie was the only person she could ever confide in about such a disgraceful thing. Melly would have told her what she needed to hear, too. “Of course he’ll be back,” she would have said, “he loves you so.” Those were her very words, right before she died. “Be kind to Captain Butler, he loves you so.”