It's the same chapter, except, Rhett's point-of-view has been removed. I felt it was unnecessary. The next chapter is new, and I hope you'd like it. Thanks for reading.

Chapter 6

The morning rays hit her eyelids and she woke up with a start. Her limbs were pressed against the rough wood and ached when she tried to move them. Her neck was stiff and painful. Her eyes snapped open and she looked around to see miles and miles of fields stretching far ahead among small houses blackened by soot and for a moment she wondered what she was doing there. And then she remembered everything; the night of horrors, Rhett's desertion, Melanie's baby, and the Yankees. The Yankees! Thank God they hadn't found them!

She rose hastily and saw Melanie — Melanie! All the blood seemed to have left her face, leaving it so deathly pale like an old, dead woman's face except for the shallow rise and fall of her chest. The baby was sleeping peacefully, crushing her chest and Wade clung to her leg. Thank God nobody had died! Her eyes fell on the wagon. There was a white tailcoat folded neatly above a waistcoat — his waistcoat. She felt like burning it, burning every bit of evidence that he existed in her life and that such a night as yesterday's had never happened and close her eyes and ears until it was all over. But she simply rose up to wake Melanie and Wade. There was a lot of work to be done.

The horse lay a few feet beside them, mosquitoes and flies buzzing around its stinking body, the blood on its welts a dull, dry brown. It was clearly dead. A small path stretched before them lined with thin, short grass that grew in small tangles yet intact with no leather footprints, yet untouched by Yankees.

"Melanie," she asked, "can you stand?"

She rose painstakingly, wincing slightly, clutching the baby, but it was useless. She fell back, tears of pain forming in her eyes. "Stay," Scarlett said curtly, and the tears fell from her large brown eyes.

Together they pushed, Wade and Scarlett, and not a single complaint was heard from his side as his small red hands rubbed against the coarse wood, noticing neither the ache that settled in his arms nor yesterday's hunger for fear of making his mother angry. Presently, a bend of the road opened into a wider road lined with a gravel path on the right winding into an avenue of cedars. Why, it was the Mallory place! Her heart rejoiced at the thought of friends and help. But no bustling darkies and no vague sounds of life and activity were heard; the place was still as death. She walked towards the house, noticing with fear the unmowed grass covered with red mud, trampled by horse hooves. She looked up expecting to see a familiar white clapboard house; she saw a blackened ruin.

She took a deep shuddering breath. Suppose Tara were like this too? No, she would think about that later. She walked back to the wagon. Melanie's eyes were opened and she whispered with cracking lips: "Water." Yes, they needed to find some water to continue. She walked back to the burnt building, behind the empty slave quarters and spotted the well with clear, sparkling water. Drawing it up with fatigued arms, she drank from it noisily until she was full and went back to a grateful Melanie. Suddenly, she remembered the baby would die without her milk.

"Melanie, do you think you can— er, nurse the baby?"

Melanie blushed and said in a mortified tone: "Oh Scarlett! I don't think I have any—I can't. Oh, I'm such a poor mother! What if he dies?" And she looked at Scarlett with a frightened, pleading expression.

"Oh don't cry, Melanie!" she said. If she began to cry as well, then she'd curse God and die. A man in the Bible had done just that. Cursed God and died. She knew how he must have felt. Why did Melanie care so much about that ugly baby that almost killed her anyway? Its cheekbones looked too much like Ashley's. Thank God he hadn't inherited Ashley's lazy gray eyes that now seemed to her as dead as the old nag that lay in the field.

She wandered into the orchard towards the apple trees. There were no apples; the branches were emptied of all the apples that hung on them by the Yankees, except for a few rotten ones that lay on the ground. She picked a few of the good ones and put them in her skirt, before walking back to the wagon as hot pebbles entered her feet. Oh why hadn't she worn sturdier boots? Why hadn't she brought a sunbonnet or something more to eat? But of course, she had thought Rhett would take care of her but he had gone to die in the worthless war because he felt ashamed! Of course he had abandoned her, just like Charles and Ashley and the Tarleton twins! Rhett, who enjoyed the pleasures of wine and women, who only knew soft linen and good food and jeered at the South had set his varnished boots upon the tramp and toil of the war, where hunger marched bitterly with disease and weariness. Why? A pang of regret filled her; had Rhett really been so very ashamed? The idea was so very thrilling and fascinating, that momentarily she felt only curious and a bit fascinated. But Wade started crying and she rushed over to him, stumbling over a rock and cursing the ground bitterly before moving on.

How swiftly she would walk home if Melanie and Wade weren't in the way! How she would run to her Mother's comforting embrace and Pa's silly jokes! But the muffled moans of Melanie and Wade's soft cries with the baby's mewling voice growing faint as the afternoon grew hot were all her responsibility, like weights around her neck dragging her below to the ground even as she struggled to rise up. The cries annoyed her increasingly as she pushed along.

Death was in the air. The shelled houses with black, sooty walls and black chimneys standing still. Lighting, raging storm and blazing fire couldn't frighten her as much as the still, dead houses that lay like ash upon burnt graves. This was not the fire that burnt to the brim in Atlanta, frightful as it was; this was stone cold terror. The countryside lay as under some dread enchantment Or worse still, thought Scarlett with a chill, like the familiar and dear face of a mother, beautiful and quiet at last, after death agonies. She felt that the once-familiar woods were full of ghosts. Thousands had died in the fighting near Jonesboro. They were here in these haunted woods where the slanting afternoon sun gleamed eerily through unmoving leaves, friends and foes, peering at her in her rickety wagon, through eyes blinded with blood and red dust—glazed, horrible eyes.

Oh, to have Ellen comfort her and drive away all the ghosts and sights of dead animals eaten by flies on the ground, to hear her whisper a quiet, "Hush, hush," and have her capable hands take care of Melly and the baby. "Why did God invent babies," she thought, "howling, whining useless creatures that were dependent on her for everything." She wondered tiredly why she had ever married Charles Hamilton. She pushed on, her hand leaving crimson prints on the strip of dark wood as Wade tottered beside her, too tired to push.

What a mad, desolate world. She, Scarlett, who had never felt the sun burning down her face without a veil shielding her, whose hands were always gloved as she held the reins of gentle mares, who never had a scratch on her pale skin and had the prettiest gowns to last her for years was now exposed to childbirth, sickness and hunger with a tattered dress and worn shoes as the sun rained down upon her back as mercilessly as a field hand's and her hands bled and burned like dark skin whipped in anger. What place was this, so different from the land she knew and loved so well?

Rhett's words, long said and long forgotten, rang through her mind: "We brought this upon ourselves. Someday, after the fires will rage and burn everything down, the South will be ashes, a white corpse, and people will look at the dried ground and wonder why they ever spilt blood over it; it certainly wasn't worth their lives and families." She had laughed at his words, shrugging off the uncomfortable imagery his words invoked. But the world indeed looked like a white corpse now.

She dropped her hands and pushed the wagon with her back, crossing the MacIntosh property and rounding upon the house. She heard a rustle, and her overstrained nerves cracked; she jumped, her hand hit the wagon and she groaned through the pain. Wade started crying again after briefly cowering in fear. She barely glanced at him and looked towards the bushes; it was a cow. They could take it, she decided swiftly, they'd have milk for Melly's baby.

Scarlett had always been scared of cows. It was one of those trifling, unexplainable fears of childhood that never quite made sense. But she couldn't afford to let idle fears rule her mind now; she had to act. She tore her lace-trimmed petticoat, the only thing she had that was pretty—and whole. It gave a pained moo and she shrunk back in fear—wounded animals were always dangerous. But she approached it nevertheless and tied the petticoat to its horns. It didn't resist. Then, she dragged the wagon to the petticoat's other end and tied it to the wagon and started pulling it towards the hill, where Tara lay a few meters ahead. The cow mooed mournfully at every step and she was afraid she would shake her horns or kick her but she didn't care.

Only a few minutes ahead lay Tara! And there lay safety—or death. Either it was burnt, like the other plantations, or it had some sign of life yet. What good would the cow do them anyway if there should be no one at Tara? She couldn't milk her and, even if she could, the cow would probably kick anyone who touched her sore udder.

"Dear—are we home yet?" Melanie asked.

Home! If only Melanie knew! There was no home to reach at the end of this frenzied, pointless journey, no rows of cotton and no white building. She replied as gently as she could, despite the constriction in her throat, "It'll be soon, Melly. We'll reach and then we can get the cow milked to feed your baby."

"Poor baby," Melanie said, and went to sleep.

Words of a song she had sung with Rhett on Aunt Pitty's old piano rang through her mind,

"Just a few more days for to tote the weary load . . ."

She could not recall the rest. "Just a few more steps," hummed her mind, "just a few more steps for to tote the weary load."

Then they topped the rise and before them lay the oaks of Tara, a towering dark mass against the darkening sky. Scarlett looked hastily to see if there was a light anywhere. There was none. "They are gone!" said her heart, like cold lead in her breast. "Gone!" She turned the horse's head into the driveway, and the cedars, meeting over their heads, cast them into midnight blackness. Peering up the long tunnel of darkness, straining her eyes, she saw ahead—or did she see? Were her tired eyes playing her tricks?—the white bricks of Tara blurred and indistinct Home! Home! The dear white walls, the windows with the fluttering curtains, the wide verandas—were they all there ahead of her, in the gloom? Or did the darkness mercifully conceal such a horror as the Macintosh house?

The avenue seemed miles long and her footsteps leading the cow were too slow. Her legs were lead, heavy as iron but with sudden, frenzied strength. Eagerly, her eyes sought the roof in the dark. It seemed intact. Could it be? Could Tara have—? No, it couldn't survive the war, surely—

Surely, the black mass rising was Tara, white walls shining through the gloom, untouched—untouched by the war was home! Home! She dropped the bloodied reins and ran forward, forgetting Melly and Wade and everyone else at the sight of the white walls. A cry of joy escaped her lips that died quickly as she stumbled over something. She saw with a vague sense of wonder the blood from her hands from the deep scratches of the wagon, until all was pain—her tired legs that seemed to have lost their iron-like strength, her weak arms and tired mind. She lost her breath, gasping through the effect of the fall on her starved body. A light from the veranda moved forward and she saw a blue-shirted figure move toward her. She screamed in terror. The Yankees had come—as she always feared! She had run home, to safety, to the comfort of her childhood with timorous joy—and now she had been thrust back into terror. She gasped in fear and desperation; she grasped for the last straws of sanity; she felt herself lose consciousness. And then the world was darkness.

She woke up in her bedroom in Tara. It was the same, worn furniture, the small bed, the mirror with the oak vanity with the small wooden box with her pins, but something was different. She wondered what it was—what made the light dull, the shadows shift differently? The light. It seemed to enter at a strange angle, not reflecting off the white cotton and making the whole room dull. It made the room strangely unfamiliar, as if she had never hidden under the bed to escape Mammy and had never sneaked pastries from the kitchen during Christmas to hoard for later. But, well, she had; that was just absurd.

She walked unsteadily on her blistered feet—oh what a terrible, feverish night! And then she froze. A Yankee had found her. What if Tara was filled with—

Impossible thought! She searched for Charlie's pistol—there! How curious that it was untouched! She snatched it and walked with slow steps into the adjoining room. And her breath stopped.

There, on the guest room bed, lay Ellen, delirious. The Yankee was at her side, feeding her something, Mammy holding down Ellen's hands. She marched forward, fear and fury and blazing determination in her gait, the gun propped straight at the Yankee's head.

"Get out," she said coldly. The Yankee only looked up from his white bottle and stared at her with a steady, understanding gaze. This annoyed her even more.

To her surprise and confusion, with an indignant "Miss Scarlett!" Mammy ran over to her and tried to snatch the gun away, but she did not deter. Nothing mattered in that moment, no restraining hand could still the sheer determination that took hold of her. She pointed the gun at Mammy instead, feeling not a drop of remorse but only a vague sense of amusement.

"Why is he here Mammy?" she asked after a moment of stunned silence, lowering the gun and pointing it back at the Yankee who had kept the bottle back in his pocket and was looking at the now asleep Ellen. "Don't touch her!" she added, as he made a move to touch her forehead.

"I'm afraid I must, Madam, for my patient is ill and her temperature must be checked." Patient? Oh God, was he an army doctor? She dropped the gun in shock.

"You're a doctor?"

"Indeed."

"Why aren't you in the army?"

"I deserted."

"Oh."

"Now, Miss—Mrs—if you'll excuse me, I must take my leave."

With that, he left the room. She turned back to Mammy to see tears in her eyes.

"Would you have shot me if the gentleman didn't tell you?" she asked.

A chill ran through Scarlett, and she felt it keenly without the overpowering rush of adrenaline in her body. Shoot Mammy! Never! "Oh Mammy! I'm so sorry!"

Genuine tears appeared in her eyes, and she wiped them away hastily and left the room with the rifle, hiding it away in a dark corner of her bedroom. She returned back to find Mammy wiping her mother's forehead with a wet rag. She looked at Ellen; feeling returned; she burst into childish tears at the sight of her dear face, pale as death and looking ten years older than she was, lying so sick on the bed. Hastily, Mammy came to her, and her head was on her comforting bosom as she cried her heart out for the sudden upheaval her life took, the state of her burnt Georgia with its whitewashed walls darkened and neighbours deserted—or worse, dead! "There, there, my lamb," said Mammy, comforting as ever, gently pushing her out of the room and tucking her in. She felt her blistered feet being washed and her corset being taken off and then there was only sleep.

Sometime later she woke up to a thunderstorm in her room. A flash of lightning illuminated the dark briefly, exposing withered fields for a second before the dark returned. Scarlett walked with unsteady steps to the adjoining room. A faint scream was heard above the storm.

There in the room lay Ellen, not still and quiet like the ghost of a sleeping queen but with a wildness of a madwoman; her hair tangled, her form risen and her hand outstretched. She froze. And Scarlett realised it was her mother who screamed.

'Phillippe! Philippe!' she called out. Phillippe? Who was this, and why was her mother calling for him? Another bolt of lightning struck, illuminating her face and then she collapsed on the bed. Scarlett made a startled movement and made it to the bed, to find Mammy emerging from the boudoir with a glass of water.

'Hush! Hush Miss Ellen!'

'Where is he! They all—"

"Miss Ellen! You don't be talking like that!"

"My love, he left me! He never—"

"Miss Ellen!"

And Ellen took a startled breath but all the strength seemed to leave her body. She collapsed back into the pillows, dead. Mammy burst into tears. Scarlett was still in shock. This woman, with her passionate protests, was not her mother! She moved away, dazed, almost disgusted at the hysterical scene that seemed so unreal. She felt a part of her break, but she couldn't cry. She rose up and stumbled slightly on something on the carpet. It was a book. She picked it up and walked back into her room. It was raining now.