Alexandra Ripley - Scarlett

“Why?” asked Scarlett. She had always loved summer when there were parties every week and lots of visitors and noisy, shouting racing on back roads between the fields of ripening cotton.

Rosemary’s answer wiped away the apprehensions that were preying on her mind. In the low-country, Scarlett learned, summertime was citytime. There was a fever that rose from the swamps to lay whites low. Malaria. Because of it everyone left their plantations from the middle of May until after the first frost in late October.

So Rhett would have time for her, after all. There was the Season, too, for nearly two more months. He had to be there to escort his mother and sister—and her. She’d be glad to let him fiddle with his flowers for five months a year if she could have the other seven. She’d even learn the names of his camellias.

What was that? Scarlett stared at the tremendous white stone object. It looked like an angel was standing on a big box.

“Oh, that’s our tomb,” said Rosemary. “A century and a half of Butlers, all in neat rows. When I go toes up, that’s where I’ll be put, too. The Yankees shot off big chunks of the angel’s wings, but they had the decency to leave the dead alone. I heard that some places they dug up graves to look for jewelry.”

Child of an Irish immigrant father, Scarlett was overwhelmed by the permanence of the tomb. All those generations, and all the generations to come, forever and ever, amen. “I’m going back to a place with roots that go deep,” Rhett had said. Now she understood what he had meant. She felt sorrow for what he had lost, and envy that she had never had it.

“Come on, Scarlett. You’re standing there as if you were planted. We’re almost back to the house. You can’t be too tired to walk that little bit.”

Scarlett remembered why she had agreed in the first place to go on the walk with Rosemary. “I’m not the least bit tired!” she insisted. “I think we should gather some pine branches and things to decorate the house a little. These are the holidays, after all.”

“Good idea. They’ll cut the stink. There’s plenty of pine, and holly, too, in the wood next to where the stables used to be.”

And mistletoe, Scarlett added silently. She wasn’t taking any chances with the New Year’s Eve midnight ritual.

“Very nice,” said Rhett when he came up to the house after the platform was built and draped with red, white, and blue bunting. “It looks festive, just right for the party.”

“What party?” asked Scarlett.

“I invited the sharecropper families. It makes them feel important, and God willing the men will be too hungover from rotgut whiskey to make trouble tomorrow when the blacks are here. You and Rosemary and Pansy will go upstairs before they come. It’s likely to get rough.”

Scarlett watched the Roman candles arc through the sky from her bedroom window. The fireworks to celebrate the New Year lasted from midnight until nearly one o’clock. She wished with all her heart that she had stayed in the city. Tomorrow she’d be cooped up all day while the blacks celebrated, and by the time they got back to town on Saturday it would probably be too late to wash and dry her hair for the Ball.

And Rhett had never kissed her.

During the days that followed, Scarlett recaptured all the giddy excitement of what she remembered as the best time of her life. She was a belle, with men clustered around her at receptions, with her dance card filled as soon as she entered the ballroom, with all her old games of flirtation producing the same admiration that they had before. It was like being sixteen again, with nothing to think about other than the last party and the compliments she’d been paid, and the next party and how she would wear her hair.

But it was not long before the thrills became flat. She was not sixteen, and she didn’t really want a string of beaux. She wanted Rhett, and she was no closer to winning him back than she had been. He kept up his end of their bargain: he was attentive to her at parties, pleasant to her whenever they were together in the house—with other people. Yet she was sure that he was looking at the calendar, counting the days until he’d be rid of her. She began to feel moments of panic. What if she lost?

The panic always bred anger. She focused it on young Tommy Cooper. The boy was always hanging around Rhett with hero-worship clear on his face. And Rhett responded, too. It enraged her. Tommy had been given a small sailboat for Christmas, and Rhett was teaching him to sail. There was a handsome brass telescope in the card room on the second floor, and Scarlett ran to it whenever she could on the afternoons that Rhett was out with Tommy Cooper. Her jealousy was like probing an aching tooth with her tongue, but she couldn’t resist the compulsion to cause herself pain. It’s not fair! They’re laughing and having fun and skimming the water as free as a bird. Why not take me sailing? I loved it so that time we came back from the Landing, I’d love it even more in that tiny boat the Cooper boy has. Why, it’s alive, it moves so quickly, so lightly, so . . . so happily!

Fortunately, there were few afternoons that she was at home and near the spy glass. Although the evening receptions and balls were the main events of the Season, there were also other things to be done. The dedicated whist players continued to gamble, Miss Eleanor’s Confederate Home committee had meetings about fund raising to buy books for the school and to repair a leak that suddenly appeared in the roof, there were still calls to pay and to receive. Scarlett became hollow-eyed and pale from fatigue.

It would all have been worth it if Rhett was the one feeling jealous and not her. But he seemed to be unaware of the admiration she was provoking. Or worse, uninterested.

She had to make him notice, make him care! She decided to choose one man from her dozens of admirers. Someone handsome . . . rich . . . younger than Rhett. Someone he’d have to feel jealous of.

Heavens, she looked like a ghost! She put on rouge, and heavy perfume, and her most innocent expression for the hunt.

Middleton Courtney was tall and fair, with sleepy-lidded pale eyes and extremely white teeth that he flashed in a wicked-looking smile. He was the epitome of what Scarlett considered a sophisticated man about town. Best of all, he, too, had a phosphate mine and it was twenty times the size of Rhett’s.

When he bowed over her hand in greeting, Scarlett closed her fingers over his. He looked up from his bow and smiled. “Dare I hope that you’ll honor me with the next dance, Mrs. Butler?”

“If you hadn’t asked me, Mr. Courtney, it would have broken my poor heart.”

When the polka ended Scarlett opened her fan in the slow unfurling known as “languishing fall.” She fluttered it near her face to lift the appealing tendrils of hair above her green eyes. “My goodness,” she said breathlessly, “I’m afraid that if I don’t get a little air I’m liable to keel right over into your arms, Mr. Courtney. Will you be so kind?” She took his proffered arm and leaned on it while he escorted her to a bench beneath a window. 

“Oh, please, Mr. Courtney, do sit here beside me. I’ll get a terrible crick in my neck if I have to look up at you.”

Courtney seated himself. Rather close. “I’d hate to be the cause of any injury to such a beautiful neck,” he said. His eyes moved slowly down her throat to her white bosom. He was as skillful as Scarlett was at the game they were playing.

She kept her eyes modestly lowered, as if she didn’t know what Courtney was doing. Then she glanced up through her eyelashes and quickly down again.

“I hope my silly weak spell isn’t keeping you from dancing with the lady closest to your heart, Mr. Courtney.” 

“But the lady you speak of is the lady closest to my heart right now, Mrs. Butler.”

Scarlett looked him directly in the eyes and smiled enchantingly. “You be careful, Mr. Courtney. You’re liable to turn my head,” she promised.

“I certainly intend to try,” he murmured close to her ear. His breath was warm on her neck.

Very soon the public romance between them was the most talked-about topic of the Season. The number of times they danced together at each ball . . . the time Courtney took Scarlett’s punch cup from her hand and put his lips where hers had been on the . . . overheard snippets of their innuendo-laden raillery . . .

Middleton’s wife, Edith, looked increasingly drawn and pale. And no one could understand Rhett’s imperturbability.

Why didn’t he do something? the little world of Charleston society wondered.

The yearly races were second only to the Saint Cecilia Ball as the crowning event of Charleston’s social season. Indeed there were many people—largely bachelors—who considered them the only event. “You can’t gamble on a bunch of waltzes,” they grumbled mutinously.

Before the War, the Season had included a full week of racing, and the Saint Cecilia Society hosted three balls. Then came the years of siege; an artillery shell ignited a path of fire through the city that consumed the building where the balls had always been held; and the long, landscaped oval track, its clubhouse, and its stables were used as a Confederate Army encampment and hospitals for the wounded.

In 1865 the city surrendered. In 1866 an enterprising and ambitious Wall Street banker named August Belmont bought the monumental carved stone entrance pillars of the old Race Course and had them transported north to become the entrance to his Belmont Park racetrack.

The Saint Cecilia Ball found a borrowed home only two years after the end of the War and Charlestonians rejoiced that the Season could begin again. It took longer to regain and restore the fouled and rutted land of the Race Course. Nothing was quite the samethere was one ball, not three; Race Week was Race Day; the entrance pillars could not be recovered, and the Clubhouse had been replaced by half-roofed tiers of wooden benches. But on the bright afternoon in late January 1875, the entire remaining population of old Charleston was en fête for the second year of racing. The streetcars of all four City Railway lines were diverted to the Rutledge Avenue route that ended near the Race Course, the cars were hung with green and white bunting, the Club colors, and the horses pulling them had green and white ribbons braided in their tails and manes.

Rhett presented his three ladies with green and white striped parasols when they were ready to leave the house and inserted a white camellia into his buttonhole. His white smile was brilliant in his tanned face. “The Yankees are taking the bait,” he said. “The esteemed Mr. Belmont himself has sent down two horses, and Guggenheim has one. They don’t know about the brood mares Miles Brewton hid in the swamp. Their get grew into a mettlesome family—a bit shaggy from swamp living and unbeautiful from crossbreeding with strays from the cavalry—but Miles has a wonder of a three-year-old that’s going to make every big-money pocket a lot lighter than it expected to be.”

“You mean there’s betting?” Scarlett asked. Her eyes glittered.

“Why else would anyone race?” Rhett laughed. He tucked folded banknotes into his mother’s reticule, Rosemary’s pocket, and Scarlett’s glove. “Put it all on Sweet Sally and buy yourselves a trinket with your winnings.”

What a good mood he’s in, Scarlett thought. He put the banknote inside my glove. He could have just handed it to me, he didn’t have to touch my hand that way—no, not my hand, my bare wrist. Why, it was practically a caress! He’s noticing me now that he thinks I’m interested in somebody else. Really noticing me, not just paying polite attention. It’s going to work!

She’d been worried that maybe letting Middleton have every third dance was going too far. People had been talking, she knew. Well, let them talk if a little gossip would bring Rhett back to her.

When they entered the grounds of the Race Course, Scarlett gasped. She’d had no idea it was so big! Or that there’d be a band! And so many people. She looked around with delight. Then she caught hold of Rhett’s sleeve. “Rhett . . . Rhett . . . there are Yankee soldiers all over the place. What does it mean? Are they going to stop the races?”

Rhett smiled. “Don’t you think Yankees gamble, too? Or that we should mind relieving them of some of their money? God knows, they didn’t object to taking all of ours. I’m glad to see the gallant colonel and his officers sharing in the simple pleasures of the vanquished. They’ve got a lot more money to lose than our kind do.”