Thank you for all of your kind words. I am most certainly not a Scarlett. This is definitely the last type of story I want to be reading and certainly not writing. The majority of it is done, I will do my best to write the last few scenes to what I had wanted them to be. Thanks for your patience.
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Part Twenty-seven
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Melanie Wilkes' funeral was likely the most sought after invitation that autumn. It made sense after the crash that the only invitation they would get would be to something so tragic.
Some that traveled together and discussed the good times. The party she had put on 2 years prior for her husband's birthday, his first since the war.
The parties she had put on at her sister's for they could all see her strong influence. It had certainly taken her enough time to truly influence her sister-in-law that silly girl had nearly ruined Ashley Wilkes' good name with how she threw herself at him for attention. Miss Melly and Captain Butler had put the selfish girl to rights.
Scarlett O'Hara Hamilton Kennedy Butler had certainly deserved to be knocked down a peg or two, but not her daughter and sister. Not so near to each other. As they began to gather and meet word began to spread of a baby, word of a little girl. Nearly everyone agreed the baby would be called Melanie. They all knew all the fine flowers were because of the wealthy Captain Butler, everyone knew how he admired Miss Melly so, most assumed that he would have married Miss Melly had he been able. Yes, the little girl would undoubtedly be called Melanie.
There was an extra disappointment that there would be no chance of seeing Scarlett Butler when only a handful had since July, but the gossip of a new baby at such a dreadful event. Well, they were at least grateful for that.
As Dr. Meade arrived they descended, he gave them no details regarding the baby or the birth. He simply told them that mother and baby were well and he could not imagine that the parents were relieved it was a girl, but rather that it was healthy as all parents should feel. He had scorned the idea that they could believe it were so easy to replace a child.
As they were all gathered another whisper began to trickle through the room. Scarlett had been spotted leaving the house in a colored dress. A dusty pink dress.
The scandal of it all overtook them. Bonnie Butler hadn't even been gone half a year and her vain mother had the gall to wear colors.
They had all thought Scarlett changed, but they were obviously wrong.
Shortly before the procession was to begin, Captain Butler finally arrived in a dark suit, his hat in his hand, making no move to greet the crowd of mourners ready to descend faster than they had on Dr. Meade. He easily moved past them all to look down at Miss Melly in her casket.
Likely realizing what a great woman he had lost and he was now left to parent his wife alone.
They inquired after his wife and new daughter the moment they could.
"Claire," he spoke her name reverently.
"Do you mean Clara?" someone remarked.
"No Claire, Ella has been learning French. It means clear, bright."
"Isn't that a man's name?"
"When it doesn't have an e," he supplied, already weary by the conversation.
"Does she have a middle name?"
"Irene," he supplied.
"Irene?" several of them repeated confused by the name for that was certainly not Melanie either.
Eirene or Irene, the Goddess of Peace, Wade had found the name in one of Rhett's books. She was also the Goddess of Spring. The new life their family so desperately needed. "We wanted her to have a name of her own," he supplied.
He was more than a little relieved when they began to prepare for the funeral procession.
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It was five days after Claire's birth and Rhett found himself in the stockroom of Kennedy's trying to make sense of an error the clerk had made.
"Can you imagine wearing pink when her daughter's only been gone three months? How those children will turn out without Mrs. Wilkes, it's no wonder their family left so abruptly."
"I presume you take offense to my choice in my wife's garments?" Rhett said stepping into the doorframe to see Mrs. Merriweather talking to another old biddy, making it clear that he had been the one to reject their precious rules.
"Captain Butler, we didn't know you were here."
"Of course, you only talk about people behind their backs," he nodded.
"The rules of mourning exist for a reason; it is how we pay respect to the dead."
"Whose dead? Bonnie would have been horrified to see her mother in such a dress, she absolutely wouldn't have wanted to hug her. What of the living? What of our four living children? Should our toddler not have been able to comfortably rest against his mother? Should our baby have never been born because you demanded her mother's grief swallow her whole. Never having a single second to forget the agony in our lives. The hole left in us by not having Bonnie. Did you want Scarlett so weakened that she wouldn't survive the birth? How much grieving do we need to publicly do for you? We live in a house where we see and hear our daughter in every inch of. We see and hear her in each one of our children."
"Captain Butler this is how things are done."
"Why, tell me why. Why for any of the foolish rules we follow. You blindly follow these rules and scorn those who actually have the audacity to think, to question."
"Captain Butler, you're grieving. I am sure the town will forgive you of your-"
"I don't want to be forgiven, not by you, not by this town. The only person I want forgiveness from, I can't ask it of her." He looked at them and sighed before he headed towards the door.
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The family that had left suddenly according to the town and likely them if he ever asked, had returned two days after Claire's birth. Mammy had thankfully had the sense to have a wire sent the day after Melly's death before Claire had even been born.
The grieving children had a grandmother, great aunts and an aunt to comfort them as their mother remained in bed. With every day that passed her interest in the children decreased, older and younger. Scarlett had no interest in anything aside from her pillow and blankets. Mammy had been forcing her upright to eat and had plaited Scarlett's hair to survive her descent into exhausted melancholy.
He wanted to shake her out of it, force her to hold and adore the baby she had wanted for so long.
Mammy continued to try as she forced the baby on Scarlett to nurse, but even she had started to give up and pass the hungry newborn off to a wet-nurse.
He couldn't do anything, but watch as she was finally allowed to grieve. She no longer wanted to be held, she just wanted to be left alone.
He walked into the sitting room to find his sister on the floor with Nicholas. He laughed at the sight of his sister dressed fully for the day sitting on the floor with her nephew. He was taken aback at how unfair the world was that at 34 she would never be a mother; she would never have a family of her own. She had never taken a social misstep, her reputation never effected by his own.
She had become engaged just before she turned 21, but her fiancé had caught a fever and been dead within a week. She'd been 22, when the war started, a mere 22. She had just started being courted again when all the men began riding off to war and then 26 when so few men began returning home and by that point the family had been poverty-stricken. There was no courting, no entertaining. No man foolish enough to take on the burden of caring for the Butler family. She had been nearly 28 by the time Rhett had finally made it so she no longer struggled to survive. The only men left to want her were the ones seeking the new Butler money or widowers. It was an awful thing to know that in order for his sister to find the joy of a family of her own, another woman would likely have to pass on.
Pauline was in the corner in an armchair holding a sleeping Claire as she read. Claire was always being held. He understood it now how precious new life was after loss. Pauline had given birth to seven children, when the war began she had four and a husband. When it ended she only had two children. Her daughter, three years older than Scarlett, who had married impulsively at the start of the war and her oldest son, who had joined the war two years in when he turned 18 and had been 20 when it ended and heir to a razed plantation in Effingham County. Pauline's husband and youngest son at just 16 had ridden off to war in '64 when it reached their county and neither had returned. There had been a ten-year-old girl lost to an illness after she had her mother had fled to her aunt's in Charleston. Pauline hadn't seen her son since he was 22 when he'd admitted defeat at trying to rebuild their family's legacy and he'd gone west.
Eulalie was on the sofa with her sewing, often looking up from her task to view Nicholas playing. She had lost her two oldest boys to the war. She had been nearly twenty when she married just months after Ellen, to a widower from Charleston, so neither of her boys had been old enough to legally be in the war when they died in it, in the same battle as their half-brother. She'd lost her husband to the same illness that took Pauline's daughter. Her two youngest children had managed to survive, the oldest, a daughter was now 18 and Rhett was fairly certain she had not traveled with her mother on either on these recent trips due to what an association with the Butlers of Atlanta could do to her marriage prospects. She had always been such a charming girl that doted over Bonnie on their visits. Eulalie's youngest, her last remaining son was 16. It suddenly occurred to Rhett that he would need to write her remaining stepson to see how he faired with the recent economic shift. He could imagine the crushing burden facing the forty-year-old lawyer, who was supporting his own family and still providing support for his brother's widow and her children and his father's widow and her children.
Rhett hadn't lingered over the losses until Bonnie. All of the losses to illness, accidents and war. They had pained him, they had cut him, but he hadn't lingered over them. He had taken them as a part of life, a part people must suffer to continue to live, but with Bonnie with his precious Bonnie, he understood how great the struggle was for so many people to continue on.
He often found himself thinking of Wade waiting for him outside of the parlor on the day they buried Bonnie. Reminding him that he still had Nicky. He still had a child depending on him. He still had child to love.
Without the children, Rhett could have faded away. He imagined he would have preferred that to the constant struggle to survive.
He turned rather than face the family for longer than the greeting they had shared. The babies were occupied and happy.
He would check on Scarlett and then retreat into his study until the children arrived home from school.
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He sat in the nursery holding Claire after his mother informed him that Scarlett's milk was starting to dry up. Claire was seven days old and her mother continued to have no interest in her.
Scarlett had no interest in anything, even her decadent baths were now only forced washes by Mammy.
Scarlett had survived the fall of Atlanta, had survived the death of her mother, had survived having to carry her entire family through the war and its aftermath. She had survived the Yankees and a fire, but marriage to him.
Marriage to him had been the thing that had finally broken Scarlett.
Thanks for reading.