So, here's to Kinderby and bribery, who coaxed an update out of me! I hope you guys enjoy it. Thanks to everyone who's left reviews, and especially to longtime reader annablake. Thanks to iso, as always. Oh, and I stole a little from MM here and there to make this work.
They were home again in mid-May. By that time, Alexander was a strong, cheerful baby who sat contently in Scarlett's arms and surveyed the train depot around him with a great deal of interest. His mother, in turn, looked much better than when she had left Atlanta. The hunted, exhausted air had gone from her face and her cheeks were rounded and faintly pink. Her green eyes were alert and sparkling again. She smiled at the sight of Bonnie and Rhett, who had come to meet them at the depot, and ruffled Bonnie's inky black curls with one hand. Mindful of the palpable interest of the crowds surrounding them, she turned a cheek for Rhett's lips—a caress she would not have invited otherwise. He took his cue from her. He kissed her cheek briefly and then tickled Alexander's tummy with one finger, as had been his custom before their departure. "Hello," he said to the bundle in her arms, while Scarlett's head was still angled away from him and she could not see his face. And that was all. He didn't offer to take the child from her or comment on his growth. For a moment, the old helpless anger that had drained away her strength and sent her running from Atlanta earlier that spring rose in her throat again in a bitter wave.
On the way home, she was full of County news. Will thought the cotton might do well this year, which they needed badly after the low prices last fall. He had a new mouth to feed as well. Suellen had had a baby—another girl, just as whiny and likely to take after her mother as her other two. Sally and Alex Fontaine had married last fall, and Sally too was having a baby—she spelled this last out so the children would not comprehend. It was strange, when you thought about it, her having been married to his brother and his having been engaged to Dimity Munroe… She chattered on rapidly, not willing to let any silence fall between them in the carriage. Yet there were many things that she left out. Images of the County as it was now that she didn't like to think about, but also stories of Alexander. How Suellen was clearly jealous for having failed to give birth to a boy herself. How Alexander liked to sleep on Will's shoulder. How Alex Fontaine had laughed and said she'd done well to name a child after a war hero such as himself. It seemed like every other day at Tara had become entangled with a story about her son and now had to be left out. It was Ella in the end who remedied the omission.
"Alex can make bubbles with his mouth," she informed her sister and stepfather, who were sitting opposite her in the carriage.
"Can he now?" Rhett asked with a small smile. There was something in his dark face that looked almost eager—or it would have, had Scarlett not known how good he was at indulging Ella.
"Oh yes," Ella nodded. "He'll show you."
It was impossible to convince little Alexander to perform on cue, yet she gave it her best try. It wasn't long before she was trying to blow spit bubbles herself to inspire her brother, and Bonnie followed suit. An exasperated Scarlett tried to admonish them—to little effect, for as long as Rhett seemed entertained, Bonnie would not heed her and even the easily cowed Ella felt safe to misbehave. And then Alexander finally grasped the game. He blew a smiling bubble, swinging his arms and legs down at the same time with enough force to propel himself off his mother's lap, had her arm not been firmly around him. He grinned so proudly that Scarlett, too, started to laugh.
It didn't take long for life in Atlanta to resume its rhythms from before their journey to Tara. Rhett maintained his punctilious courtesy—and his distance. He was engrossed in Bonnie and in his campaign to court Atlanta's approval, a task in which he seemed to have succeeded almost beyond belief. He had taken to attending political meetings outside the house during Scarlett's confinement the previous year, sometimes taking Bonnie with him. But it was only now that she was back and could see some of the people he had taken to inviting to their house in the evenings, that she realized to what extent he had really made his way back into the town's good graces. Men who had once thought hanging too good for Rhett could now be found in her parlor, drinking with him as if he was a capital fellow.
It seemed to Scarlett at times that they were living in two different worlds—and, of the two, hers had been severely diminished. Many of her Carpetbagger and Scalawag friends had left town after the governor's resignation the previous October, and those left were no fun to be around anymore. The combined efforts of Melanie and Rhett had ensured that she was begrudgingly accepted by Atlanta's society; yet she was firmly on its margins and did not welcome the prospect of an arduous battle to regain what she'd once lost. These days her world revolved almost entirely around the house, the new baby—and thoughts of Ashley. It had been a long time since she'd last seen him alone, for she naturally could not see him during her confinement and had somehow not thought of it during the dark months afterwards. But now, her forces renewed by the stay at Tara, she thought of him constantly.
She longed above all to see him again and assure herself that he still loved her, that his love had not died with the shameful scandal last year or their long separation. She longed to see him and have him look at her with that lazy silver smile of his, the one that made her feel as if she was fourteen again and nothing could ever be wrong with the world. She would have stayed at Tara longer if she hadn't craved his presence, craved to be alone with him again so she could wrap the certainty of his love around her like a warm, comforting blanket. Everything around her was disenchanted, apart from this one thing. Thank God that she had the mills and, through them, a reason to see Ashley again. It was the only thing that made life bearable these days.
::o::o::o::
"Hush, Mister Alex, hush! You gonna wake up your sister!"
Rhett appeared in the doorway of Scarlett's bedroom and surveyed the scene in front of him with a raised eyebrow. Mammy was pacing the room with a wailing Alexander in her arms. Against her shoulder his little face had turned bright red. Scarlett had been at home earlier, when Rhett and Bonnie had left for a walk, but there was no sign of her now.
"Have the Huns invaded?" he asked mildly from the doorway.
"Mister Rhett," Mammy wheeled around, "you're home! Mister Alex's teeth comin' out and he ain't happy. Miss Ella's asleep in the nursery and he gonna wake her up."
"Bonnie's asleep as well." They'd had to come home much earlier than he'd intended, for she had started to fall asleep before him on the saddle. "I take it Scarlett's not home?"
"No, sir," Mammy replied and a look passed between the two of them. But she didn't say anything more. Rhett's eyes were drawn to the vanity, to the disarray of jewelry boxes, hairpins and pots of rouge that had been so familiar to him once. He nodded softly, as if to himself, and was gone.
He returned less than five minutes later. In that interval, not only that Alexander had not stopped crying, but his wails seemed to have gotten louder and more insistent, as if Mammy's murmured soothing had ceased to work at all. At that pace, he was going to wake up both of his sisters soon. Rhett leaned against the doorjamb, hands in his pockets, and the old woman stopped her pacing to throw him a vaguely pleading look.
"No sign of quieting?"
"Maybe if you hold him, Mister Rhett. You mighty good with babies. You know Miss Bonnie didn't hush up for nobody else."
He threw her an inscrutable look, but Mammy did not blink under the scrutiny. She waited silently in place until Rhett finally nodded curtly and made his way to them, his hands still firmly jammed in his pockets. And then she passed the baby into his arms, whose relaxed comfort was belied by the tense line of Rhett's shoulders. Startled by the change, Alexander ceased his crying. He watched his father with wide eyes and hiccupped.
"I gonna go down get him a little chamomile, see if he settle down," Mammy announced and was gone with the speed of a woman half her age. Father and son studied each other in silence for a few moments after the door closed.
"So, little fellow, shall we wipe your nose?" Rhett asked softly, drawing a handkerchief from his breast pocket. He only got to dab gently at the boy's cheeks, before little fists closed around the cloth and Alex drew its corner into his mouth.
"Ah, we've got ourselves a toothless little rodent," his father said good-naturedly. "But you're severely mistaken, my boy, if you think I am going to let you chew up my handkerchief like that. Don't give me that look. It might work on your mother and Mammy, but I'm wise to it, you know."
::o::o::o::
It happened in the blink of an eye.
Her heart had beat an eager tattoo as her carriage neared the lumber yard. If Hugh Elsing and his men were not there, she would have to drive on, for she couldn't visit Ashley alone like that, not after what had happened last spring. But they were all at their posts, loading lumber onto wagons, and she waved hello to them with a studiedly casual air, as she breathed a sigh of relief. She had waited for the right moment ever since she'd come back, waited for Bonnie and Rhett to be out for a whole afternoon. She didn't think Rhett would say anything to her now, but she hadn't wanted to risk that nasty knowing look in his eyes. She left the door open as she went into the little office, knowing that the working men were safely out of earshot and she would in effect be alone with Ashley.
Yet something had been wrong from the very beginning, even before that terrible split second of her revelation. Ashley had come from behind his desk to greet her and the sun from the windows had slanted brightly on his hair. And even in that golden light, her first thought had been that he looked tired and faded almost to greyness, and her heart did not constrict in tenderness as before, but in impatience. He had no business looking so old, she thought and castigated herself immediately for her disloyalty.
"Scarlett, how are you?" he greeted her and his smile was his drowsy smile of old, despite an intangible note of distance in it now. "If you are here for this month's ledgers, I am afraid I will have to disappoint you once again. They have defeated me as soundly as ever. But I will get them to you within the week, I promise."
"Oh, don't lets talk about the ledgers!" she said quickly, for she didn't want to be annoyed with him. She knew full well that all of the past months' ledgers had had to be redone by Rhett. She dimpled sweetly at him, hoping he would understand all she could not put in words. "I came by for them, yes, but also… just to see how you were."
"How I am?" he inclined his head in gentle teasing. "It's you who's been the traveler."
But he caught the almost pleading look in her eyes and acquiesced. He talked then of the mills and of life in Atlanta, smoothly avoiding the personal, enveloping the foibles of everyone around him in that kind, detached humor of his that she had never been able to grasp. And as she listened to the soft cadence of his words, a sort of baffled disillusion grew inside her. For somewhere along the way something had gone wrong. She'd only seen him a few times over the last year, and every time she had had the impression that something was lacking. She'd wished Melanie and Rhett to the end of the earth so many times, for it was their constant presence that made Ashley so restrained, made him seem almost like a fading picture of himself in which she struggled to find the lines that she so loved. But if they were alone together, if she had him to herself for only a few minutes, it would be like old times again, she knew.
But now—now they were alone and her heart was not singing in her chest. If anything, she was slightly bored with his tales and miserable at the realization with the sinking, desperate misery of one who's lost their path through a dark forest and grasps around blindly to regain it. Never analytical, she couldn't grasp what was missing. She only knew there was a word somewhere that would make everything all right between them again, and if Ashley didn't say it, she would have to—except that she couldn't think what it was. She couldn't tell him that she missed him, that she loved him, not while there was any danger they'd be overheard, not while he looked like a stranger instead of her Ashley.
What she really wished she could tell him was something of herself, of her life—and have him make sense of it, the way Rhett once used to, except in a better light, for Ashley always saw the good and noble in her. Yet when she thought of what to tell him, there was nothing. She would have liked to discuss her businesses with someone, but Ashley was no good for that. The weight of her day to day life pressed on her too, but it was too diffuse to be made sense of, even had she wanted to do it. She could tell him about the County, of course. She could tell him all she had kept out of her story to Rhett—the desolation of the abandoned fields, the hardness in people's eyes, the decay. He would smile that sad smile of his and he would say something melancholy and beautiful whose meaning she would yearn to grasp but fail. At any other time in the past that prospect would have filled her with both wild hope and despair, but not now.
Now she didn't want to hear the beautiful convoluted things he had to say, she realized in a flash. She resisted the thought for a second, for this was after all Ashley. How could she not want to hear what he had to say, when it might finally provide the answer to the fine, unattainable question that was him, the question she had been trying to solve for years? It felt disloyal, it felt almost sacrilegious. But it was too late. The knowledge could not be pushed back. Her mind pressed on, like a finger pulling at a small hole in the seam of a fabric until the whole cloth lay split apart for good. And as Ashley leaned back against his seat and the afternoon sun caressed his hair again, she thought dispassionately to herself, "I do not love him."
The knowledge washed over her in the blink of an eye, and she struggled to fight against it in a cold panic. "But I do love him! I've loved him for years! It cannot be true! Love cannot change to apathy in a minute!" But it could change and it had changed. It was useless to try to combat the idea. It was there, in front of her eyes, as solid as death, and just as unescapable. It was why, when she looked at him now, it was like she was seeing him from a very great distance. Like he could be any other man. It was why his voice—still drawling, resonant, musical—no longer made her heart leap. Oh, Ashley! she thought in numb misery.
"Are you all right, Scarlett?" He'd been talking to her, she realized but could only nod mutely in response. "Would you mind if I left you alone for a moment? Hugh will need the bill for that transport, I'm afraid."
At first all she felt was a painful rush of relief that he hadn't read her countenance and found out her betrayal. For once he knew, there would be no going back, and the thought filled her with almost superstitious fear. Yet fast on the heels of that feeling, another, more insidious, seeped into her consciousness. How could he not tell that she was not all right, that she had in fact received a blow to the very foundation of her being? How could he leave her alone at a time like this? This was after all Ashley, who'd always known her mind better than she had, who saw things in her that were invisible to anyone else. "My dear, he doesn't even know you've got a mind," a softly jeering voice whispered in her memory. It couldn't be true, could it? She had resisted that cynical voice for years, but now, the dazzling light of her love dimmed low, she saw that it had been right.
She cast her mind over their long acquaintance, over all the precious moments she'd clutched so tenderly to her chest before, searching for a hint that she was wrong. But there was none. "He doesn't love me," she said slowly to herself. "How could he love me when he doesn't even know me? He wants me like—like Rhett wants that Watling woman. But he doesn't love me and never has." Her mind, always brutally straightforward once on the path of honesty, absorbed this new realization and she probed at it gingerly, surprised to find that it did not hurt as much as she would have expected. He didn't love her and she didn't care, for she didn't love him either. And she hadn't loved him for a long time. Her love had not just melted in a moment; it had been gone for years. She hadn't loved him last April, when he'd embraced her in this office. And, if she was honest with herself, she'd hardly thought of him at all after that, before she went to Tara.
When had it happened, when had she ceased to love him without noticing it? Oh, but what did it matter? Perhaps she'd never really loved him. Perhaps she'd made a pretty suit of clothes and fell in love with it. And, when Ashley had come riding along, so handsome and different, she'd put that suit on him and made him wear whether it fitted him or not. She couldn't see what he really was beneath it—and if she had, she would not have loved him at all. For there was no comfort in him, no security, only weakness and endless talk of honor, sacrifice and high notions. Oh, Ashley she thought again, but this time with bitter weariness. Without warning, the afternoon had turned to ashes in her mouth.
By the time he came back into the room, Scarlett was already up and ready to leave. She would have paced the office in impatience, but there was an almost painful weightlessness in her feet and the pit of her stomach, as if she had fallen from a very great height and could not quite tell if she was done falling. She needed to go home.
"I'm sorry, Scarlett—" Ashley started, but she interrupted him immediately.
"No, don't worry. I do have to go home now. I didn't tell them I would be this long," she said with a small pale smile. She stopped in the doorway and said without turning, "And Ashley, do send me those ledgers tomorrow. I can't wait any longer for them."
She would never afterwards remember the ride home. She'd had somehow managed to make mechanical small talk with Hugh on her way to her carriage, for a corner of her mind recognized that he mustn't think anything was amiss, not on her first visit to the lumber yard in a year. And then she'd sunk in her seat, trying her best not to think of the shape of her new world, now that one of its main pillars had collapsed. She'd have time to think of that tomorrow. She'd have time to think of that for the rest of her life. For now, it was enough to go home. The baby would need to be fed soon and she would take supper in her room as well. That prospect of almost cozy order was soothing, and she forced her mind to focus on it. Anything more and the residual strand of strength that was carrying her would snap.
Yet even that small comfort was to flee from her grasp. When she entered her room, there was no sign of either Mammy or Prissy, and Alex was not in his crib. She frowned and turned to go to the nursery, but then something caught her eye. Her heart hitched in alarm when she saw Rhett's frame in the big velvet armchair by the window. He was never in her room. Perhaps something had happened to Alex, perhaps he was here to tell her… But as she took two hasty steps towards him, she froze, arrested. For, if her eyes were not deceiving her, he was not merely lounging in the big armchair, he was asleep. And on his chest was Alex, who looked like he had succumbed to sleep while chewing on his father's neckcloth, a corner of which was still in his mouth. His little fists were buried in the richly-embroidered cloth, and one of Rhett's hands was curled protectively around his back. This scene—as unexpected, as it was tender—struck Scarlett like an underhanded blow to the chest, the last that afternoon had to deliver, and she reeled from it. She could see it already. Rhett would have Alex now, like he already had Bonnie. And, on this day, she had nothing.
Late in the afternoon, when Rhett came downstairs, he found her sitting on the sofa in the dark parlor. He cleared his throat.
"I believe your presence is required upstairs," he said without elaborating and she nodded briefly. She would need to feed the baby now. As she rose to leave the room, the light from the hallway fell on her face and he drew in a swift breath at the pale misery written on it. In her white face, her eyes were red-rimmed and vacant.
"Have you been to the lumber office today?" he asked when she'd already reached the door.
She answered him without turning and Rhett stared at the doorway long after she'd left, a look of speculative bitterness on his face.