As always she paused by the tower before she rode to the ford. What good builders those long-ago O’Haras were, and how smart. Old Daniel had actually talked for almost a full minute when she mentioned how sorry she was that the stairs were gone. There were never any stairs outside, he said, only inside. A ladder gave people access to the door, set twelve feet up from the ground. When danger came people could run to the tower, pull the ladder up behind them, and fire arrows or throw stones or pour hot oil down on the attackers from the narrow slit windows, safe from assault by enemies below them.

One of these days I’ll haul a ladder back here and have a look inside. I hope there aren’t any bats. I do hate bats. Why didn’t Saint Patrick get rid of them too when he was cleaning out the snakes?


Scarlett looked in on her grandmother, found her asleep, then stuck her head in Daniel’s door. “Scarlett! What a happy thing it is to see you. Come in, do, and tell us the latest wonders you’ve done at Ballyhara.” Kathleen reached for the teapot. “I was hoping you’d come. There’s warm barm brack.” Three of the village women were there. Scarlett pulled up a stool and joined them.

“How’s the baby?” asked Mary Helen.

“Perfect,” said Scarlett. She looked around the familiar kitchen. It was friendly and comfortable but she could hardly wait for Kathleen to have her new kitchen, the one in the largest house in Ballyhara town.

Scarlett had already mentally designated the houses she was going to give the family. They’d all have grand, spacious homes. Colum’s was the smallest, only one of the gate houses where the estate adjoined the town, but he had chosen it for himself, so she wouldn’t argue. And he’d never have a family anyhow, being a priest. But there were much bigger houses in the town. She’d chosen the best for Daniel because Kathleen was with him and they’d probably want Grandmother with them too, plus there had to be room for Kathleen’s family when she married, which she’d easily do with the dowry Scarlett would give her, including the house. Then a house for each of Daniel’s and Patrick’s sons too, even spooky Sean who lived with Grandmother. Plus farmland, as much as they wanted, so that they’d be able to marry, too. She thought it was terrible the way that young men and women couldn’t get married because they had no land and no money to get any. The English landlords were truly heartless, the way they kept the Irish ground down under their heels. The Irish did all the labor to grow the wheat or oats, fatten the cattle and sheep, and then they had to sell to the English, at the prices the English set, for the English to export the grain and stock to England, where they’d make more money for more Englishmen. No farmer ever had much left when his rent was paid, and that could be raised at the whim of the English. It was worse than sharecropping, it was like being under the Yankees after the War, when they took anything they wanted, then boosted the taxes on Tara sky high. No wonder the Irish hated the English so. She’d hate the Yankees till her dying day.

But soon the O’Haras would be free of all that. They’d be so surprised when she told them! It wouldn’t be much longer, either. When the houses were finished and the fields ready—she wasn’t about to give them halfway-done presents, she wanted everything to be perfect. They’d been so good to her. And they were her family.

The gifts were her cherished secret; she hadn’t even told Colum yet. She’d been hugging it to herself ever since the night in Galway when the plan came to her. It added to her pleasure every time she looked at Ballyhara’s street that she knew just which houses would be O’Hara houses. She’d have lots of places to go then, lots of fires to pull up a stool to, lots of homes with cousins in them for her baby to play with and go to school with and have huge holiday celebrations with at the Big House.

Because naturally that’s where she and the baby would be. In the huge, enormous, fantastically elegant Big House. Bigger than the house on East Battery, bigger than the house at Dunmore Landing, even before the Yankees burned nine-tenths of it. And with land that had been O’Hara land before anybody ever heard of Dunmore Landing or Charleston, South Carolina, or Rhett Butler. How his eyes would bug out, how his heart would break when he saw his beautiful daughter—oh, please let it be a girl—in her beautiful home, and she was an O’Hara and her mother’s child alone.

Scarlett cherished the daydream of sweet revenge. But that was years away, and the O’Hara houses were soon. As soon as she could make them ready.

60

Colum appeared at Scarlett’s door late in August when the sky was still rosy with dawn. Ten burly men stood silently behind him in the mist-heavy half light. “Here are the men to clear your fields,” he said. “Are you happy at last?”

She screeched with delight. “Let me get my shawl against the damp,” she said, “and I’ll be right out. Take them down to the first field beyond the gate.” She hadn’t finished dressing yet, her hair was all tumbled and her feet were bare. She tried to hurry but excitement made her clumsy. She’d been waiting so long! And it was getting more difficult every day to get her boots on. My grief, I’m as big as a house already. I must be going to have triplets.

The devil take it! Scarlett piled her unbrushed hair into a wad and stabbed hairpins in it to hold it, then she grabbed her shawl and ran along the street with her feet bare.

The men were grouped glumly around Colum on the weed-choked drive inside the open gate. “Never seen such a sight . . . those be more like trees than weeds . . . looks like all nettles to me . . . a man could spend a lifetime an acre . . .”

“A fine lot you are,” Scarlett said clearly. “Are you afraid to get your hands dirty?”

They looked at her with disdain. They’d all heard about the little woman with the driving ways, nothing womanly about her.

“We were discussing the best way to get started,” Colum said soothingly.

Scarlett was in no mood to be placated. “You don’t get started at all if you discuss long enough. I’ll show you how you get started.” She put her left hand on the lower curve of her distended belly to support it, then she leaned over, and her right hand grasped a big handful of nettles at the base. With a grunt and a heave she ripped them from the earth. “There,” she said contemptuously, “now you’re started.” She threw the spiny plants at the men’s feet. Blood was oozing from wounds all over her hand. Scarlett spit in her palm then wiped her hand on her black widow’s skirt and walked heavily away on her pale, fragile-looking feet.

The men stared at her back. First one, then another, then all of them took their hats off.

They were not the only ones who had learned to respect Scarlett O’Hara. Painters had discovered that she would climb the tallest ladder they had, moving like a crab to accommodate her shape, in order to point out overlooked spots or uneven brush strokes. Carpenters who attempted to use inadequate numbers of nails would find her hammering when they came to work. She slammed newly made or newly hung doors with a bang “that would wake the dead” to test hinges, and stood up inside chimneys with a flaming bundle of rushes in her hand to look for soot and test how well they drew. The roofers reported with awe that “only Father O’Hara’s strong arm kept her from walking the roof tree and counting the slates.” She drove everyone hard and herself harder.

And when it grew too dark to work, there were three free pints at the bar for every man who had stayed on the job that late, and even when their drinking and bragging and complaining was done, they could see her through her kitchen window bending over her papers and writing by lamplight.


“Did you wash your hands?” Colum asked when he entered the kitchen.

“Yes, and put some salve on too. It was a mess. I just get so mad sometimes I don’t think what I’m doing. I’m fixing breakfast. Want some?”

Colum sniffed the air. “Porridge without salt? I’d rather have some boiled nettles.”

Scarlett grinned. “Then pick your own. I’m leaving out salt for a while, it’ll keep my ankles from swelling the way they’ve taken to doing lately . . . not that it’s going to make much difference soon. I can’t see my boots to lace them now, I won’t be able to reach them in a week or two. I’ve figured it out, Colum. I’m having a litter, not a baby.”

“I’ve ‘figured it out,’ as you say, myself. You need a woman to help you.” He expected Scarlett to protest; she automatically denied every suggestion that she couldn’t do everything herself. But she agreed. Colum smiled; he had just the woman for the job, he said, someone who could help with everything, even the bookkeeping if necessary. An older woman, but not too old to accept Scarlett’s rule, and not so spineless that she wouldn’t stand up to her when necessary. She was experienced at managing work and people and money, too. In fact, she was housekeeper at a Big House of an estate near Laracor, on the other side of Trim. She had knowledge of childbirth, though she was no midwife. She’d had six children herself. She could come to Scarlett now, to take care of her and this house until the Big House was repaired. Then she’d hire the women needed to run it, and she’d run them.

“You’ll admit, Scarlett darling, that you’ve nothing in America quite like a Big House in Ireland. It needs a practiced hand. You’ll need a steward, too, to manage the butler and the footmen and like hat, plus a head stableman to rule the grooms, and a dozen or so gardeners with one to boss them—”

“Stop!” Scarlett was shaking her head furiously. “I’m not planning to start a kingdom here. I need a woman to help me, I grant you that, but I’ll only be using a few rooms of that pile of stone up there to start with. So you’ll have to ask this paragon of yours if she’s willing to give up her high-and-mighty position. I doubt if she’ll say yes.”

“I’ll ask her, then.” Colum was sure she would agree, even if she had to scrub floors. Rosaleen Mary Fitzpatrick was the sister of a Fenian who’d been executed by the English, and the daughter and granddaughter of men who’d gone down in the Ballyhara coffin ships. She was the most passionate and dedicated member of his inner circle of insurgents.

Scarlett took three boiled eggs out of the bubbling water in the kettle, then poured water into the teapot. “You could have an egg or two if you’re too proud to eat my porridge,” she offered. “Without salt, of course.”

Colum declined.

“Good, I’m hungry.” She spooned porridge onto a plate, cracked the eggs and added them. The yolks were runny. Colum averted his eyes.

Scarlett ate hungrily and efficiently, talking rapidly between mouthfuls. She told him her plan for the whole family, to have all the O’Haras living in moderate luxury at Ballyhara.

Colum waited until she finished eating before he said, “They won’t do it. They’ve been farming the land they’re on for nearly two hundred years.”

“Of course they will. Everybody always wants better than they’ve got, Colum.”

He shook his head in reply.

“I’ll prove you wrong. I’ll ask them right now! No, that’s not in my plan. I want to have everything ready first.”

“Scarlett, I brought you your farmers. This morning.”

“Those lazybones!”

“You didn’t tell me what you were planning. I hired those men. Their wives and children are on their way here right now to move into the cottages at the end of the street. They’ve quit the landlords they had before.”

Scarlett bit her lip. “That’s all right,” she said after a minute. “I’m putting the family in houses, anyhow, not cottages. These men can work for the cousins.”

Colum opened his mouth, then closed it. There was no point in arguing. And he was certain that Daniel would never move.


Colum called Scarlett down from the ladder she was on, inspecting fresh plaster, in midafternoon. “I want you to see what your ‘lazybones’ have done,” he said.

Scarlett was so overjoyed that tears came to her eyes. There was a scythed and sickled path wide enough to drive the trap where she had ridden the pony before. Now she could visit Kathleen again, and get milk for her tea and her oatmeal. She’d felt too heavy to ride for the past week and more.

“I’ll go this very minute,” she said.

“Then let me lace up your boots.”

“No, they press on my ankles. I’ll go barefoot, now that I’ve got a cart to ride in and a road to ride on. You can hitch up the pony, though.”