Catherine Butler looked down at the small thrashing figure on the bed. The flame from the gilded ceramic lamp on the dresser, caught and flared as she gently adjusted the glare. Yellow light spilled across the dim corners of the room, chasing the shadows on the walls which retreated quickly under its spreading glow.
The house was still and quiet except for the girl who tossed restlessly on the big bed, her eyes closed, and her hands stretched out in front of her, as though grasping at something in the air. The bedcovers, that only an hour ago, had been neatly tucked in around the prone figure, now lay wrinkled and bunched in disarray, spilling out and trailing along the sides of the bed.
The girl opened her mouth and the shrill sound of, yet another scream echoed along the hallways, as Catherine ,walking swiftly, made her way towards the bed. In her hands, she carried a small china bowl, half-filled with water and a fresh strip of cotton cloth hung limply over one arm. Setting the bowl down by the side table and drawing the small upholstered footstool closer to the bed, she seated herself next to the writhing figure and placed a cool hand on the girl's damp brow .
A thin film of clammy sweat coated her fingers and Catherine felt a twinge of guilt. It had taken her a little longer, this evening to come to the girl. When the screaming began, she had been in the East Wing of the huge mansion, in the rooms adjacent to Raydon's, with Thomas, the head valet and chief butler to Rufus along with an army of maids.
Unquestioningly loyal to Catherine and a devout servant of the Butler house for forty years, Thomas had watched, with his lower lip sticking out in glowering disapproval as Catherine had followed the maids around the rooms." Miss Catherine, ma'am, I tole yuh and tole yuh, I done take care of dis 'ere cleanin. It is below de dignity of a great lady of the house to be runnin aroun' dem maids dis way", he had grumbled darkly. But Catherine smiling happily had insisted on seeing to the cleaning herself and the already spotless rooms had been dusted and polished over and over again until every inch of it gleamed and shone.
It had been a year and Catherine had not once, set foot in these rooms since their rightful owner had ridden out of the Butler's home and their lives last summer, with nothing to spare but a pair of pistols to his name and her blessing on his head.
It had been bad enough that the eldest son of Rufus Butler was an avant-garde and a born renegade with no tolerance for the bigoted ordinances and prejudices of the nobles and lords of the Charleston aristocracy, but what had made it worse, was that this time, the scandal had involved the shooting of a young lord, a boy of his own son's age ,who also happened to be the wealthy offspring of Rufus's close circle of landed gentry. The gentleman in question had been stripped naked and then paraded around the lower parts of town where the negro settlements lived, before being challenged to a duel. The scorching shame of the incident had burned the ears of Charleston's elite upper crust, especially after it came to light that the "gentleman" had disgraced himself by trying to cheat in the duel and had lost miserably, after which, he then, had been forced on his knees in front of a black slave girl and made to beg her forgiveness, before he was spared his life.
Rufus, livid with rage at the perceived insult to white aristocracy and roiling under the brunt of reproachful whispers from his peers, had demanded that his son render an immediate apology to the family of the young lord. It had mattered little to Rufus, that Rhett had caught the boy attempting to rape the girl, a young black slave and a child, hardly ten years of age, who in her efforts to escape the wretch, had been savagely beaten and brutalized and nearly blinded in one eye before Rhett had managed to rescue her.
It had been Catherine who, with her pleas and tearful threats, had succeeded in preventing Rufus from entirely disowning his son, when Rhett, standing before his enraged father, had remained defiant and unrepentant and upon being ordered to apologize, had coolly replied that the only thing he was sorry for, was for not having killed the boy instead of maiming him.
That night, Rhett had left for West Point instead, with just the clothes on his back and his pockets empty; his ears stinging with the sound of his father's insults and a mind that was made up to never return to the house of the man who had failed him as a father.
Also, on that eventful night, Catherine standing on the porch, with tears spilling from her eyes had realized, with a chill in her heart, the change that had come over her son. For as he rode into the night, Rhett wore a look on his dark face that would come to mark him as the man he would soon be- a man whose Christian name would inspire much fear and evoke greater awe than even the Butler surname.
But Rhett was coming home now. Rufus had sent out the telegram himself last evening.
And Rufus had done so because of the girl.
Rhett was coming home and the irony of it all was, that Catherine realized that she could not dare to be happy about one son without being sad about the other.
