As it turned out, making a chateau out of a chalet is extremely messy work.
Scarlett woke Monday morning to head-splitting noise as the workers arrived and proceeded to erect scaffolding all around the back of the house.
She gave a rushed explanation about the current undertakings to the children at breakfast and then hurried to dress and go outside, where she found crews absolutely teaming about. That Tate was fast!
"First the paint, then removal of the - er - chalet features and addition of chateau features. And then we will stucco," he rattled off, quickly walking around while Scarlett tried to keep up. It felt backward but Tate assured her it would all work out. Seeing the façade transformed first would do Scarlett's heart good.
The picket fence at the top of the roof, the jigsaw and scrollwork, the towers, and the red and blue glass, that after a while had reminded her of some type of pretentious stained glass in a mockery of a church - all hitting the ground. Today. She hated that Rhett had to miss it.
"You'll need to order a new front door," Tate said, looking handsome and professional in riveted pants and a blue work shirt rolled up over his tanned arms as he surveyed progress. He enjoyed this work and it showed. "I'll get you some drawings on appropriate entrances later today. It will take a couple of weeks to get one made."
Scarlett tried to surreptitiously look around and see if Leif was anywhere, but she didn't see him. Well, he had other business, she assured herself as she tried to quell her disappointment.
"Leif left town to attend to a problem at one of his other properties," Tate said, his eyes dancing and all-too-knowing. "He told me he'd contact you for a financial meeting by the end of the week."
Scarlett nodded and turned away before he saw her pinkened cheeks. She needed to get busy, very busy. Move the beds – whatever to do with her huge bed? The master bedroom at the new house was big enough, but it would crowd it.
Still, she directed the others to pack up the rest of the bedrooms for once and for all and get them to the Inman House. She could not live here one more day with all this construction and remodeling disarray. All furniture had to go for the painting and remodeling or much of it anyway. She asked Pork to pack up Rhett's room and put it all in the guest room down from hers at Inman Park. They would have to share a bath. Awkward. Separate water closets, at least. It was the nicest next to hers and had all the room he would need. Far be it from her to offend Mr. Butler by putting him in a too-small room.
Of course, he might never stay overnight at the Inman Park house. But she had to offer him something, she felt. Would only be polite.
As far as Bonnie's bedroom - she couldn't. She just couldn't. She had been living and dealing with it for eighteen months, but Rhett might get upset. She decided to leave it for last, along with her office. Surely he would be home sometime soon. It had been more than the standard six to eight weeks. Dread filled her stomach as she realized this, as she pushed the thoughts away for the time being.
She had the workers set aside her favorite divan as well as a lamp she'd purchased in New Orleans on her honeymoon and a few other items she treasured. They would go along with her books in the guest house. She smiled a secret smile to herself. She planned to make that charming little guest house her own retreat. She giggled at the thought.
Scarlett then had Pork ready the buggy and she set off on a few errands. First, she stopped by the upholstery shop and arranged for the afternoon pickup of the furniture to be reupholstered. Second, she stopped by the mill to ask Ashley if he knew a woodworker who could make a door from Tate's prototype sketchings. He smiled at her enthusiasm and seemed mildly interested in her progress and promised to stop by the job site at his earliest convenience.
"When will Rhett be back?" he asked, carefully watching her expression. "Do you think he'll handle all the changes well?" A frisson of foreboding made its way down her spine.
"I don't see why not," she tossed her head in an age-old habit that made Ashley's grin widen despite his apparently sorry mood. "It's really none of his concern anymore." She laid a hand on Ashley's arm. "I'm meeting new people and staying busy. You should too, Ashley. You should get out and try to shake off the cobwebs."
She then told him about General Hampton's upcoming visit and he appeared suitably impressed, even seemed to perk up a bit. But then he turned when they were speaking and looked so much like his father with his graying hair it took her back, to that day during the war, when Mr. Wilkes had stopped by her carriage on his way to join the fighting and asked about Melly. "I would have liked to have seen my first grandchild," he had said, looking out over Atlanta in that faraway voice.
'Just like a Wilkes,' she thought bitterly, 'giving up before the fighting's even started.'
Scarlett's eyes teared up and she remembered another day she cried at the lumber mill with Ashley over the past and how that had turned out. She quickly bid him farewell and Ashley reminded her to read Emma, and she realized as she left that he was lost in thought again, probably of the past. She thanked her lucky stars for her new acquaintances and plans for the future as she took off in her buggy.
Onward and upward, as the poem goes. She stopped by the signmaker's last thing. When she returned home she went straight inside and surveyed her foyer again. Tate's sketchings had shown the lobby to be straight ahead from the front door. With a large space above it, right when you walked in, currently covered in garish wallpaper now that the mirrors were down.
All her life she had claimed her Irish side, never really the French, not much, anyway. But the more she looked at that high, bare space, the more she thought of her grandmother Solange Robillard's portrait at Tara. So she sat down in her office and wrote a quick note to Suellen asking that it be shipped out to her on the next train, and she would cover the expense.
If the color scheme was to be off whites, blues and greens, she could incorporate some of the Impressionist art Rhett had chosen, which would go well with the theme. Those ghastly huge gas lights would be removed with the staircase. What had she been thinking?
After lunch Tate let her borrow a couple of his workers to pull down the remaining paintings and upholsterer sent his wagons to pick up what could be reupholstered as promised. She sent a couple of horsehair chairs to the store for customers to sit in, (they wouldn't sit long, which suited her purposes, she wanted them shopping, not lazing about her store, after all) and a few more pieces to the old folks' home.
With most of the furniture moved the carpet laid bare and Scarlett wrinkled her nose at all the cigar holes. She hadn't realized how many there had been. What an underhanded thing to do, for Rhett to throw his cigars down and let them burn holes in the carpets. Who does that? What kind of a man purposefully burns holes in the carpet of his own home? Neanderthal. He'd really hated it here, she thought dismally. Or perhaps it was just another passive way he showed disrespect.
Tuesday most of the moving to Inman Park was completed, which was a very good thing as General Hampton apparently stopped by during one of her trips back and forth and left a calling card, explaining that he would call again at the new house on Thursday afternoon. They spent the night in Inman Park and by Wednesday much progress at Peachtree had been made. Scarlett rushed over after getting the children settled with Aunt Pitty for the day and spent the next couple of hours pulling down the heavy velvet portieres with Prissy.
Now the entryway and foyer/lobby were mostly empty except for one, very large, very red, patterned velvet settee.
It was made of intricately carved black walnut. Heavy and huge. Not the right style and much too big for the space that would be allotted. By itself, it looked positively garish. Scarlett had no idea what to do with it.
Well, we're going to have to have lessons on it this afternoon while the children are still visiting with Aunt Pitty this evening, she decided. It was Wednesday, sewing circle. Pitty liked to show off to her niece and nephew when she had company. Scarlett suspected it made her feel less of an old maid.
Scarlett stopped working and tried to breathe deeply. She directed the workers to move the sofa next to her office, so she could do paperwork while Prissy and her friend did their letter practice.
Phoebe was a little taller than Prissy, a pretty girl, slightly darker-skinned and fairly lively, and dressed neatly in a yellow frock. She answered Scarlett's questions dutifully. She and Prissy conversed in low voices about their lessons and appeared to be good friends.
Ella had made Phoebe her own sheets of letters and drawings so she and Prissy worked through those and then Scarlett started them on sounds and two-letter words. Dilcey sent out a simple sandwich tray around 6:30 pm with lemonade. There would be two working kitchens for a while. All the back and forth! It exhausted Scarlett, but she found somehow she liked it. It meant progress.
After a bit more instruction Scarlett felt that her students had enough to work on for the next few days on their own and started picking up her work area for the day.
As she dusted the supper crumbs off the sofa she remarked aloud to the girls about how she needed it to be gone immediately; it would be in the marble-layers way very soon.
"My boss lady might take it," Phoebe ventured shyly. "She likes red, it's her favorite color."
"It's also huge," Scarlett said, frowning at the offending object and the seven-foot-tall, dark wood and velvet-trimmed mirror beside it. "Her parlor's big, too," Phoebe said.
"If she doesn't want it, I can maybe put it at my mother's," Phoebe said. "She can cover it with a blanket if she needs to, um, you know, change the color." Scarlett shot her a look.
"But I'm sure my boss lady can use it," Phoebe amended.
Scarlett started to ask her who her 'boss lady' was when a loud, cracking sound distracted her as a huge piece of awning crashed to the ground outside the front window in a cloud of dust. Good lord! She had to get out of this house before it became dangerous! With a mental effort she got back to the matter at hand.
"Fine," Scarlett said, deciding that moment she was too relieved to look a gift horse in the mouth and question any further. She went to the door and commandeered a couple of workers to load the sofa on a wagon for Pork to haul off.
"You go with Pork on your way home and tell your mistress she would be doing me a great favor if she would accept this sofa as my personal gift to her, and I send it with my blessing."
Phoebe nodded.
"And take that mirror too," Scarlett called out to her back as she left. "It's a matching piece, she might as well have both."
There was a good bit of daylight left and it was time to get back to work. That dreadful wallpaper wasn't going to peel itself off.
A while later she heard the wagon pull back into the driveway. Pork gave her a funny look but didn't say anything as he made his way across the entryway.
"So the lady kept it?" Scarlett asked. She turned slightly away from her task and toward him as she spoke.
Pork nodded, looking slightly discomposed, and grabbing Prissy's arm, quickly pulled her behind him to the kitchen.
OOOOooooOOOOoooo
Rhett walked down the main Nassau pier in a decidedly better mood than he had been in lately. Two weeks, maybe three until his boat would be ready to return to the states. He decided to rent a small boat and sail around the smaller islands. A beautiful day, after all, and not much use being in the islands if you don't see anything beyond Nassau.
Slowly he drifted out to sea, the water glittering below as the brilliant sun shined across it. The calm after the storm had afforded excellent fishing. Whiskey and cigars had been delivered. He was still a little wary of the island women, however, but overall the last leg of the trip had been much improved. He'd read, and spent plenty of time in the sun. He had lost much over the last year and a half, after all. The extra time on the island had worked and at least somewhat cleared his mind, and tried to heal his heart.
But he still thought too damn much about her. He couldn't help but notice it was getting harder to stop.
Once he'd slowed down the insidious mind game came back, blowing in like smoke. He felt like he'd missed something, some big piece of a puzzle, some clue. He went back to that last conversation with his attorney, the one where he had been taken aback by the questions, and more importantly, his answers. How undeveloped his own reactions had been upon inspection, after time had passed and tempers cooled.
Could it be that her actions weren't that devastatingly bad? At least not all of them? Could the disastrous demise of their relationship somehow be connected to an ongoing, cascading, unfortunate series of events, complicated by nothing less than a massively pernicious war and literal famine, abreast of mutual strong and disparate pride and insecurities, as well as many, many missed opportunities?
Could his own actions and faults, in fact, be more than a little to blame?
He didn't like this.
This second-guessing of decisions. He was a man of action. Rhett Butler made decisions. And stuck with them.
He never should have married her. He had known since the day his father threw him out, possibly before, that he was a wanderer, never to be tied down. Taken about three months to bore of Charleston society when he decided after Bonnie's death to look for peace and charm. He went back to wandering. It had served him well his entire life until that one fateful April trip to a backwoods barbecue. He would be cursing Frank Kennedy, for more reasons than one, until the day he himself died.
Except for Ella. Sweet Ella, whom he loved dearly. It's not her fault who fathered her. Or who failed to mother her, for that matter. Wade, either. Fine young man, despite the trials of his early start. Good, sweet children. She didn't value what she had.
He had needed to take action after all the pain, and leaving Scarlett had felt so right in the moment, and for months afterward.
He maneuvered the boat against a small sandbar where at least a dozen flamingos were hunting for shrimp, their bright feathers ruffling in the island breeze. He wondered what Scarlett would say if he brought her here, if she would laugh and cavort with him across the sand, and try to gather the seashells and the bright pink and coral feathers on the beach. If they would frolic, gambol, play in the sun and water together. He'd wanted that, dreamed of it during the dreary war when he was in the Confederate army. There had been far too little play in their union.
Damn it. Damn her and the primordial energy she radiated, that innate and still somehow untapped sensuality, the hint, the all-consuming hint of something erotic and divine simmering below the surface. All men who could sense it were drawn to it. Something he could never capture, a myth, encased in her selfishness, avarice, and vanity. Aside from one night, that drunken, unfortunate night he barely remembered, the results of which had been deplorably sad in too many ways.
She was a siren, a succubus. She was his doom. Calling to him and reeling him in.
The call was getting stronger every day. He could feel the pull across the Atlantic.
For so long his heart had been a dark place where his daughter still lived and suffered, a painful, bruised, damaged muscle. Lately, however, there were places in his heart that felt like they might be coming back to life, and that scared him most of all.
She was trying to move on, he thought, remembering her last letter. Getting the house in her name, doing some remodeling, asking for a regular visitation schedule. Looked like she was setting down into a life of domesticity.
She said she'd be 'far, far away' if he gave notice of his visit. But he didn't want her to be far away. He wanted to see the love in her eyes - that fickle love he knew wasn't real - in person so he could crush it. Because that was so satisfying, as many times as she had crushed him.
He didn't know exactly when he had turned into this vindictive and spiteful man, but he was sure it had been a long time coming.
He felt a moment of remorse as he recalled that last visit when he grabbed her wrists too forcefully. She had merely laid her hand on his arm and caressed it, just slightly, after he'd shown a particular kindness to the children; he'd liked it a little too much.
'I have made my decision,' he told himself again, 'and I will make it stand.'
It would be easier to pack her in the boxes of his past and move on. That way he wouldn't really have to deal with any of it. That is the best, the most practical solution. And he was a supremely practical man, after all.
It would never be in his best interest to reflect on how young she had been when he'd first set his sights on her, still was, and how she had so obviously remembered and believed every single thing he had ever said to her, even the most unspeakably cruel. How he had seen that belief in her eyes, because underneath it all, even if she hadn't realized she loved him, she'd believed in him, more than anything, and at some level, he had always known it.
He'd believed in her, too.
Talking to Belle might help, it always did. Although Belle had cooled off since that last visit after he'd lost it with Scarlett and he went to her railing about it. He noticed a slightly glazed look in her eyes as he raged on about his wife's many shortcomings. And perhaps, just perhaps, a tiny bit of pity. Well, he wasn't putting up with that for a moment. He wouldn't stand pity from the likes of Belle, not regarding his feelings for Scarlett, no matter how good a friend and how many times she'd taken him to bed over the years when he couldn't take it anymore, just for the mindless release it afforded him, no matter how many times she'd put him back together.
Without her, though, his mind whispered, how would he have lived through what happened to Bonnie?
Perhaps she was tired of waiting on him to return from his trips. Or just tired of his years-long black humor and the fact that he loved, well, he had loved someone else. Of course, he knew what it was like to bed someone he adored when they didn't reciprocate the feelings. It could be that Belle's one-sided love had worn out after more than twenty years, as well.
A minuscule twinge of guilt. He'd used her. He let her take care of him the way he let Pork take care of him, a servant, someone paid to do it. They are, after all, just doing their job. So he wouldn't have to be grateful, wouldn't have to feel. It was merely a transaction, when you got down to it, and he didn't owe them anything other than the cold, hard cash. Even though he knew she loved him and he didn't love her.
Perhaps he'd buy Belle a small present. Something bright and needlessly gaudy, or something practical, as befitting her station. You could show your gratitude by showering people with gifts and let the gifts speak as to your affection. Beautiful tokens of sentiment, such lovely substitutions for the real thing.
They'd never worked for Scarlett however, another miscalculation on his part. He frowned. As greedy as she was, he had been certain for years all he had to do for her love was throw money at it. A poor investment, indeed.
Rhett pushed off the sandbar and headed his sails back toward the main island.
Yet, for Belle, a gift was definitely in order. She deserved one and he could find it while he was shopping for Wade and Ella too. Perhaps he'd even pick up something for Pork, hell, for Prissy and Dilcey as well. He'd need a crate, perhaps two.
As for Scarlett? She didn't deserve a gift. She deserved hell. And he'd be sure to bring it. In spades.
OOOOooooOOOOoooo
A/N Long chapter, almost split it again. Your feedback is vital to this story and oh-so-appreciated. Rhett's coming folks, and he's bringing hell with him … . Shocker. Hahaha.
FYI I have a huge red sofa and an over-sized gilt-trimmed mirror in my own dang living room. And I like it.
Fun fact: When were Neanderthals discovered?
1864
It was the partial skeleton of a male Neanderthal unearthed during quarrying operations in the Neander Valley in Germany in 1856 that was first recognized as a distinct form of human. It was named as a new human species, Homo neanderthalensis, eight years later in 1864.
10/21/2020
Just so you know I am working out the next few chapters of my GWTW fic the Force that through the yada yada yada. I work on this story for a couple of hours just about every day, but it is slow going. It's just the way I write. Right now I am listening to 'Emma' on Audible, reading all I can find on Wade Hampton III (there is surprisingly little available so I have to scour the internet, and some of his speeches are only available through paid subscriptions to scholarly historical publications). I feel that I even need to re-familiarize myself with the Gettysburg Address.
Then there's the hotel menu to work out (landlocked Atlanta offers some challenges for traditional New Orleans fare, which is heavy on seafood) and you know, there's Scarlett and Rhett to deal with, Ella and Wade, etc.
Of course, this is fic and I don't have the time or inclination to make it entirely historically accurate. The vast majority of the research I do will never make it into the story, but it makes me comfortable and gets me in the right frame of mind, and that's the point of it. It may seem silly that I would do all this instead of just getting peeps together to fight, make up, and bump uglies; but that's not how I roll. Gotta do it my way. Hope you understand :)