Chapter 10
Bamboozled.
That's what Rhett had done to her, Scarlett thought as she made her way back to the cabin. He'd bamboozled her, and she couldn't see a way out of it.
Not that she wanted to, deep inside. But that was beside the point.
His words echoed through her mind, again and again.
… a curiosity I intend to satisfy completely. And repeatedly, as time allows.
And what did they have, exactly, besides time? She stared out the rough-hewn kitchen window at the frozen mountainous tundra and tried to muster a shudder, but a wicked shiver took its place. Traitorous body.
It didn't get better as the day went on, either. Oh, why ever had she opened her mouth?
She could only assume that because the situation wasn't already awkward enough for him as it stood, Rhett took it upon himself to launch a campaign of ruthless seduction upon every inch of her person.
For the remainder of the evening, he escorted her to the root cellar, the woodpile, and even the privy, all the while filling her ears with whispers of sweet nothings and savory profanities, so far beyond anything she'd ever imagined her face turned a near-permanent shade of chagrin.
When he wasn't escorting her he found any available opportunity to bestow upon her a trailing touch of his warm hand or a seemingly innocuous brush of his hard, taut body against hers.
By supper, every nerve under her skin was on edge. He was making her wait on purpose, teasing on purpose. He hadn't even acted this way in New Orleans, for God's sake.
Scarlett became unnerved to the point she tried to avoid him, skittering aside or even outside when he was busy with the children or something, anything else. Once right before bedtime he caught her doing just that and pushed her against the outdoor cabin wall, laying a kiss on her that by itself and of its own rendered the term wholly inadequate.
When he pulled away she felt discombobulated, whether at the overture or its end, she wasn't sure. Rhett merely regarded her with reckless appraisal before striding off, whistling a jaunty tune.
She stared dazedly at his retreat. It occurred to her, all too belatedly, that he might indeed, as she had earlier pointed out, have nowhere to run; but then again, neither did she.
Scarlett had become prey.
With the children he behaved perfectly on point, never doing a thing untoward or so much as looking at her in a manner they would question. How sly and smooth a character she'd chosen for a husband, if you could call it choosing.
But she would catch his gaze over their heads and if she thought he'd watched her before–she'd known nothing of watching, then.
Rhett had always been a man of vigor and confidence, but now even more so, as if someone had lit him up from inside. How could that be? It came to her in a rush so sudden she nearly dropped her spoon into her watered-down tea. With both her revelations, the first one concerning her diminished feelings for Ashley, and in addition, her interest in resuming their marital relations, in one fell swoop she'd effectively tipped her hand to a professional gambler, dealt him a royal flush, and then loaded his dice for good measure.
In the moment she felt it all ranked up there with the biggest mistakes of her life. And that was saying something.
Victory over her and her former success at ousting him from the marital bed was a sure thing, cut and dried, an open and shut case. He couldn't lose, and he knew it. And the prospect had made him positively drunk with its inevitability.
My goose is cooked, she lamented internally. Along with that cursed turkey.
He approached her again as she went outside to fill the cauldron with snow for the hundredth time that day. She jumped at his voice murmuring her name in what only could be described as a sultry manner.
The long day had worn on her. "What's the matter with you," she hissed as she whirled on him. "Could you possibly do me a favor and contain your vulgar impulses until we retire?" Her eyes blazed despite her fatigue.
"Bedtime will come soon enough. Might you have a little mercy?"
He grinned, mischievous, reminding her of the boy he must have once been.
"Nervous, are you? You should be." He leaned one leg on the woodpile. "I only assumed since you admitted to missing my place in your boudoir these last two years that you might have missed my presence in other places."
She gasped in indignation. "I never said I missed you—" but she had missed him. Mostly she'd missed her companion, her sounding board, her trusted friend that she hadn't trusted in some time.
The way he was smiling, she couldn't give him the satisfaction.
She set her jaw. "I could change my mind."
"You won't. You want this."
At her dubious look, he smirked, but with a tinge of darkness. "We could talk about the time Ashley Wilkes lost control with you instead—"
His mouth tightened, but then he grinned again. Nothing was going to ruin his good humor, she could tell.
"Fine. Do what you want, you will anyway. You're exhausting."
"And you're exhausted." He wrapped his arms around her from behind and rubbed his forehead in her hair, a gesture of a level of intimacy they'd not shared in so long that her mind went momentarily blank. "I'll not have you when you are this weary."
She pulled away and turned again to stare. I'll not have you—there went that blasted shiver again. Surely he didn't mean it. Weariness had never been an excuse before, despite all his detached politeness between the sheets. Of course, she'd never worked this hard when —
"You should rest," he went on, seemingly unperturbed. "I'll take care of the girls."
'"They need baths before tomorrow."
He nodded. "I'll get the water ready so all you'll have to do is the bathing."
Despite his words, she expected some type of overture at nightfall, but he merely kissed her on her forehead and whispered 'tomorrow' before rolling over. She glared at his back before crossing her arms over her chest, silently fuming.
She could have sworn his shoulders shook slightly with what she strongly suspected was laughter at her expense, but she wasn't one hundred percent sure.
The day of Wade's birthday dawned early and bright. The temperature rose overnight, still not above freezing, but in the mid-twenties at least, Scarlett surmised upon rising. Positively balmy considering what they'd been up against so far.
When she got out of bed and started her morning tasks she noticed Rhett outside chopping wood; they didn't need wood. But she was glad for the respite. She had to cobble together a celebratory meal and party, after all.
She also noticed him carrying larger armfuls of indecipherable items from the girls' room out the front door in a stealthy manner as she cooked, but she was far too busy to pay it much mind.
He helped as he could and kept the children occupied which was more valuable, although she enjoyed watching him chop onions and potatoes. His wildly incongruous appearance in the kitchen made her laugh, and hard. She shooed him away when it became hard to concentrate on her tasks.
He and the children used old torn sheets from the junk corner to turn Wade's loft into a fort and to make a teepee out of the girls' beds. Cowboys and Indians and Pioneers were the planned activities, but Rhett had to be the cowboy and the pioneer as everyone else was Indian. Once presented with it, Wade would not take off the headdress, and the games commenced.
Rhett and her brood combined forces and they drew her into play despite her protests once she had supper preparations at a stopping point. Rhett himself brushed and braided her hair over her shoulder and intertwined feathers in it and then, of course, the girls wanted the same, and he obliged.
Scarlett watched him so diligently fixing her daughters' hair with his broad fingers, and the laughter died in her throat, replaced with something else she could not name.
Time for the feast.
Scarlett served little plates of sardines and anchovies as appetizers. Roast and smoked turkey for the main courses, the rest of the collards, beans, potatoes, and rutabagas creamed with a precious amount of butter, and real cornbread, not corn pone or johnny cake.
And then the cake! Scarlett had fretted over what to do—she recalled a simple breakfast cake recipe and so she embellished it with the cranberries and the canned sweet milk and even managed a type of buttery glaze over the top, flavoring it all with the maple syrup. It might have been a disaster; miraculously, it was not.
It went against her instincts to squander after she had been so careful, but something told her she must make this occasion special. Her children needed it, and truth be told, so did she. She'd never set much store by the domestic arts before, and there were always others to practice them. But here there was only her, and she wanted badly, she found, to have the event be a success.
Once it came time to cut the cake Rhett made the children tea with generous lashings of honey and put whiskey in his and Scarlett's.
Wade, suddenly shy for a savage that had whooped and hollered all day long in a floor-length feathered native concoction, seemed quite surprised at the respectable pile of gifts, all wrapped in whatever scrap brown paper or yellowed newsprint the cabin provided.
He made over the cornhusk soldiers from the girls, the hand-stitched wallet filled with paper money from Scarlett, and the gold pieces from his stepfather. He was in the process of thanking them again for the headdress when Rhett produced another package from behind his back, a large and long one.
Scarlett and Wade gasped simultaneously once he unwrapped it. Snowshoes! Wade gave a joyful shout and Scarlett did not berate him and gazed with amazement at the stupendous gift. Rhett watched her with a smile.
"How?" she whispered.
"There was an old snowshoe mold in the smokehouse under my bench, accompanied by some dry-rotted snow shoes, but the leather was still good. I've been stealing Wade's boots at night and making over the old laces."
Wade put the snowshoes on, and Scarlett had to work to conceal her envy. They were long, the kind made for moving fast downhill. She wondered if they would fit her.
She wondered if Rhett had made a pair for himself, as well. And if so, when he intended to use them …
After the cake and presents and post-dinner games (would the games never cease!) Rhett made his announcement.
"Time for stories before bed, special ones you have never heard, as requested by Wade and courtesy of your mother." He stretched his long legs out as if they were on Aunt Pitty's porch and lit a cigar in celebration.
Scarlett stared haplessly. She was no storyteller, for the love of all that was holy. Her brood settled on the broad planked wood floor in front of the fireplace and she and Rhett sat in the rocking chairs they had claimed as their own.
Three expectant faces turned up to her.
"They are children, Scarlett," Rhett said, in a gentle tone he usually reserved for others. "Tell them of your childhood. They'll understand more than you realize. "
She gazed at her hopeful children's faces, really looked and saw them for who and what times of her life they represented. They would never know who she had been before they came. Even Wade had only briefly known his mother before the war changed her, and he'd been an infant, at that.
Their tender hearts were in their faces all at once, and it was almost too much to take. She'd been tender-hearted too, long ago; well, hadn't she?
She turned her gaze on Rhett, wondering if he had ever been so young and tender-hearted, even once.
But this wasn't Rhett's story; it was hers.
And so she began.
Slowly she sifted through the rumpled and crumpled, faded mental images, stiltedly at first, but then gaining a painstaking momentum as she went along.
She told a story of a lost civilization, one that perhaps never should have existed; but it did exist, all the same. Through the blur of time, her childhood home appeared a paradise of a sort, and she and her playmates its tiny gods and goddesses, after a fashion. A place where a man could come from nothing and forge a kingdom. A home that somehow possessed beauty and grace despite its nefarious and brutal base.
She remembered, oh she remembered! How she'd tried not to think of the past all these years; but at night, of course, her mind would betray her, and it would come back in blurry, ghostly forms. These recollections, though, were not of phantoms, but real, as real as anything she had ever known, or ever would.
The boys, those beloved friends of her youth, were as clear as when they still lived, and she spoke of Rafe and Cade, of little Joe and Alex, of Tony and Stu and Brent, of Tom and Boyd. She'd forgotten how much she'd adored Boyd. She missed them, oh how she'd missed them! And loved them all, a little.
And it wasn't just Ashley, even if at the time he seemed the best of them, a brightly shining thing before turning so bleak and forlorn. She'd forgotten how the bright others burned, as well.
She realized as she spoke how much more she'd missed the running and jumping, the laying in the grass and watching clouds go by, the magic of the place. The rights and privileges to enjoy that they, none of them, none of her friends or certainly not she ever questioned.
Her voice started as a whisper and grew stronger as she went on. She spoke of her mother who was younger than she herself was now, when Scarlett was a small child, and even her sisters, when they were so very small, and Pa when his hair was still black and his body hale. She spoke of the summers that went on and on, the lessons she abhorred but the joyous sound of the kitchen cheesecloth-screened door when she leaped out of it after they were done, tugging the gloves her mother made her wear in the mornings (to get used to the idea, she'd said) off with her teeth.
Late summer evenings filled with fireflies and moonlit wanderings, days spent gathering scuppernongs for jelly and muscadines for pies, and sometimes wine.
The Tara of her youth never saw cold weather, only during the war did she remember the Tara of winter. In childhood, it was always spring and summer in her mind.
She spoke of the birds and how they filled the air with song, and how the flowers and blossoms flooded that same air with fragrance, a fragrance she could still capture when she closed her eyes and tried. She spoke of rose gardens and the orangery her father constructed for her mother near the carriage house, a sanctuary filled with the waftings of citrus blossoms and the year-round lemon verbena that would always and forever conjure the essence of Ellen in her mind.
The huge barn owl that sat watch in the ancient oak outside her bedroom window every night for so many years; the mice and chipmunks and squirrels she'd fed and made into pets, the raccoon and the portly possum who visited at dusk to the point they had names and were part of this family, this paradise, because how could they deny these creatures belonging?
She spoke of how Tara seemed alive to her, a conscious being; how when her bare feet touched the ground she could feel the pulse of it run through her like lightning, electricity, but a benign kind. How she was a part of that ground. How she ran through storms, how even the snakes in the river seemed charmed, seemed to belong.
The house servants, the field hands, all of the slaves made a vital part of it and how it ran like a clock, perfectly ordered, perfectly beautiful to her child's mind. The laughter drifting up from the quarters cemented this in her memory, laughter from the most content workers in the county, for those who knew her father to be a soft touch and a fundamentally fair man.
Mostly she spoke of how she always, but always felt protected, felt safe.
Her heart ached as she went on as doggedly as she'd once walked alongside a broken down wagon lest her weight be the last straw for its dying horse.
She touched on the foolish assumptions that all was well and would never end and unburdened herself of the load of aching memories she'd locked away for so long, careful to keep the sadness out of her voice and speak as if she were telling a compelling tale of a time far, far away and long, long ago.
The children held onto her every word, eyes large and unblinking, captivated by both the story and their mother's telling it in such a rare form.
Scarlett spoke until she became hoarse, and then she talked more. She finished with her voice thick and throat raw from unshed tears. She stopped at her sixteenth birthday, only saying the war started mere weeks after that.
A weighted silence fell. She looked at her sleepy children, who had stayed up far past their bedtimes. They were all drowsing, and she knew not how long this had been the case.
For a fleeting moment, she faced how she'd shrouded her grief over the loss of her world's wondrous appeal with fake things, tinsel, glitter, and gilt. She thought of her life back in Atlanta, now nearly odious in retrospect, and felt true regret as to how she'd tried to recreate her former existence with an overly grandiose abode coupled with new muddied money, and monied mud-dwellers, low-brows that no amount of wealth could truly change. And how brittle she'd become as a result of all of it.
She looked to her husband, expecting at least some type of derisive response now that the children wouldn't hear, and there he sat: Rhett, with those piercing, all-perceiving eyes, too smart probably for his own good, and definitely for hers, wearing that unreadable expression, of course.
Yet he surprised her.
"Thank you, Scarlett, I'm sure that meant a great deal to—well, to everyone," he said quietly and without his usual eloquence or double-edged compliments.
She paused for a beat, then stood up and automatically went through the motions of preparing the cabin and children for bed. Put up dishes, plucked feathers out of tousled heads, pulled day shifts off and nightgowns on. Rhett helped her, for once wordless, and they worked in tandem. Ella roused enough to sleepily beg Wade to stay in their bedroom's teepee, Bonnie joining in with her considerable nearly two-year-old charm, and he, not completely awake himself, relented.
After they were all down for the night Rhett continued to help her put the cabin to rights, before clearing his throat.
"There at the end, you were looking at the children and the sadness was overcome by something else, almost as if you'd come to a realization."
She glanced at him briefly before returning her attention to the dishes. "I was thinking about how so much of what I've done has been an effort to get back to a semblance of the life I had before if you must know. I was thinking of our house in Atlanta, and how those new people would never hold a candle, and could never compare to the ones I grew up around. I don't know why I ever thought they would."
"Yet you associate with that trash on a daily basis."
"The trash I associate with are the people who will have me," she said wearily. "Just as the trash you associate with after dark are the ones who will have you."
"Not anymore. I have redeemed myself."
She snorted. "Rooster today, feather duster tomorrow. The Old Guard never forgets anything. Trust me."
He didn't reply and she looked up to see him regarding her again, and it annoyed her to no end.
"Why did you make me remember, why did you tell me to speak—"
"Would you want to forget? Truly?"
"Yes. No," she shook her head. "Sometimes. For the most part."
"I heated more water should you need it before we commence with the rest of our evening," Rhett changed the topic smoothly as he approached the front door.
"It seems we have an assignation, Mrs. Butler. Meet me—" he turned and gave her a look that must have melted many a woman before her; since her, but she wouldn't think of that tonight—"in my lair."
And with that, he disappeared into the night.
Scarlett found the water he'd left and bathed by the window. She dressed in the yellow silk nightgown she'd brought from the train and looked at herself in the broken mirror over the kitchen sink. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes were bright, vulnerable; no double a result of the revelations already this evening. How many more were in store?
Rhett was right about one thing, however, although she wouldn't admit it to him. She wanted this. She wanted what she'd had before, and thrown away with both hands. God help her, she did.
Mostly the camaraderie, the closeness, the small touches of ardor, the satisfaction of knowing his satisfaction. The kisses, of course. As far as the rest of it, well, Rhett certainly knew his way around a woman's body, and if the actual act wasn't that much fun for her, again, she was a lady, after all, and she knew it meant more to him than he let on; it took all she had to admit that she wanted to be the one who gave it to him.
She glanced back at the cabin before she left, the children snug in their beds, the fire burning low. Hurrying to the smokehouse, she entered and felt the need to knock at the door to Rhett's tiny abode for some reason, and so she did. Rhett answered, eyes alight, and looking as debonair as if he were hosting a fine party back home.
She peered past him and drew in a breath at the sight.
He'd hauled the rest of the mattresses up from the junked corner and arranged them so the entire width of the small room was now a high and cushioned berth, piled with pillows from their bed and what appeared to be all the quilts not in use at the moment.
The room was laden corner to corner with evergreen branches, holly, and red berries, so fragrant from the copious and heady winter outdoors scents that the usual smoky smell had diminished to a bare faintness. The remnants of broken candles burned in every corner, a twinkly glowing presence to the indoor winter wonderland awaiting her.
Enchanted, Scarlett felt touched and slightly agog despite herself at all his efforts. She felt like it was her first wedding night. She felt faint.
He raised an eyebrow as she shed her coat to reveal the barely-there nightgown beneath.
"We have no wine or brandy but still this—" he brandished the now half-bottle of whiskey before pouring them both a generous shot in the chipped mugs she hadn't seen him pilfer from the cabin kitchen.
She shot it with that quick flick of her wrist that still managed to make him smile.
He turned to the door. The inside latch made an exaggerated click when he fastened it.
"As you so recently pointed out I have been remiss in my, er, tutelage, no thanks to your own actions," he set the bottle carefully down. "Yet here we are. And now I find we must make up for lost time."
OOOOooooOOOOoooo
Happy October weekend my lovelies! One of my favorite times of the year. I will write more later, just wanted to get this to you for the weekend so I rushed it. I'm off to South Carolina to pick muscadines for a pie. My brother has a big vine he never told me about, I haven't picked muscadines since I left Mississippi! Confession - I've never made a pie of them either, never even knew such a thing existed until I saw it in my research for a post-Civil War cake recipe without eggs. We always just ate what we picked, usually right when we picked them. The trick is you have to push the pulp through a sieve to get rid of the big seeds. Time-consuming, but I'll get it done.
I also made the Civil War breakfast cake in honor of this story. It turned out pretty good but I cheated and added vanilla. Madagascar bourbon vanilla can elevate a plain cake in a snap.
Anywho, I hope you are all having a wonderful harvest season. Once again, traffic stats are down and I will have no idea if anyone is reading this chapter at all unless you leave me a comment, so let me know how you feel! It means the world and spurs me on. Happy Fall and do whatever spices your pumpkin! Peace, misscyn