Scarlett (76 page)

“His only sorrow was that he had but one son, and he the only child. But he lived to see his grandson born, before he went to Hell. And that grandson, too, had neither brother nor sister. But he was handsome and fair, and he became lord of Ballyhara and its cathedral stable and grand village. As did his son after him.

“I remember him, the young lord of Ballyhara. I was but a child and I thought him all things wondrous and fine. He rode a tall roan horse, and when the gentry trampled our corn under the hooves of their horses as they hunted the fox, he always threw coins to us children. He sat so tall and slim in his pink coat and white breeches and high, shining boots. I couldn’t understand why my father took the coins away from us and broke them and cursed the lord for the giving of them.”

Colum stood and began to pace the riverbank. When he continued his story, his voice was thin from the strain of controlling it. “The Famine came, and with it the starvation and death. ‘I cannot stand to see my tenants under such suffering,’ said the lord of Ballyhara. ‘l will buy two strong ships and give them free and safe passage to America, where there is food in abundance. I care not that my cows lament because there is no one to milk them and my fields fill with nettles because there is no one to cultivate them. I care more for the people of Ballyhara than for the cattle or the corn.’

“The farmers and villagers kissed his hand for his goodness, and many of them prepared for their voyage. But not all could bear the pain of leaving Ireland. ‘We will stay, though we starve,’ they told the young lord. He sent word, then, through the countryside that any man or woman had but to ask, and the untaken berth would be given free, with gladness.

“My father cursed him again. He raged at his two brothers, Matthew and Brian, for accepting the Englishman’s gift. But they were firm to go… They drowned, with all the rest, when the rotten ships sank in the first heavy sea. They gained the bitter name ‘coffin ships.’

“A man of Ballyhara lay in wait in the stables, not caring that they were as beautiful as a cathedral. And when the young lord came to mount his tall roan horse, he seized him and he hanged the golden-haired lord of Ballyhara in the tower by the Boyne where once O’Haras watched for dragon ships.”

Scarlett’s hand flew to her mouth. Colum was so pale, pacing and talking in that voice that wasn’t his voice. The tower! It must be the same. Her hand closed tight across her lips. She mustn’t speak.

“No one knows,” Colum was saying, “the name of the man in the stable. Some say one name, some say another. When the English soldiers came, the men left at Ballyhara would not point to him. The English hanged them all, in payment for the death of the young lord.” Colum’s face was white in the sun-spattered shade of the trees. A cry burst from his throat. Wordless and inhuman.

He turned to Scarlett, and she shrank away from his wild eyes and tormented face. “A VIEW?” he shouted; it was like a cannon firing. He sank to his knees on the yellow bank of flowers and bent forward to hide his face. His body shuddered.

Scarlett’s hands reached toward him, then fell limply in her lap. She didn’t know what to do.

“Forgive me, Scarlett darling,” said the Colum she knew, and he raised his head. “Me sister Molly is the eejit of the Western world for saying such a thing. She always did have a talent for enraging me.” He smiled, and the smile was almost convincing. “We have time to ride across Ballyhara if you want to see it. It’s been deserted for near thirty years, but there’s been no vandalism. No one will go near it.”

He held out his hand, and the smile in his ashen face was real. “Come. The horses are just here.”

Colum’s horse broke a path through the brambles and tangled growth, and soon Scarlett could see the mammoth stone walls of the tower ahead of them. He held up his hand to alert her, then he reined in. He cupped his hands in a funnel around his mouth. “
Seachain
,” he shouted, “
seachain
.” The strange syllables echoed from the stones.

He turned his head, and his eyes were merry. There was color in his cheeks. “That’s Gaelic, Scarlett darling, the Old Irish. There’s a
cailleach
, a wise woman, lives in a hut somewhere nearby. She’s a witch as old as Tara, some say, and the wife that ran off from Paddy O’Brien of Trim twenty years back, if you listen to others. I called out to warn her we’re passing. She might not like being surprised. I don’t say I believe in witches, mind, but it never does any harm to be respectful.”

They rode on to the clearing around the tower. Up close Scarlett could see that the stones had no mortar between them and yet they had not shifted even an inch from their places. How old did Colum say it was? A thousand years? Two thousand? No matter. She wasn’t afraid of it, the way she’d been when Colum was talking in that unnatural way. The tower was only a building, the finest work she’d ever seen. It’s not scary at all. In fact, it kind of invites me over. She rode closer, ran her fingers over the joins.

“You’re very brave, Scarlett darling. I warned you, there are those who say the tower’s haunted by a hanging man.”

“Fiddle-dee-dee! There’s no such thing as ghosts. Besides, the horse wouldn’t come close if it was here. Everybody knows that animals can sense those things.”

Colum chuckled.

Scarlett laid her hand against the stone. It was smooth from aeons of weathering. She could feel the warmth of the sun in it and the cold of the rain and the wind. An unaccustomed peacefulness entered her heart. “You can tell it’s old,” she said, knowing that her words were inadequate, knowing that it didn’t matter.

“It survived,” Colum said. “Like a mighty tree with roots that go deep to the center of the earth.”

“Roots that go deep.” Where had she heard that before? Of course. Rhett said that about Charleston. Scarlett smiled, stroking the ancient stones. She could tell him a thing or two about roots going deep. Just wait till the next time he started bragging about how old Charleston was.

The house at Ballyhara was built of stone as well, but its stone was dressed granite, each block a perfect rectangle. It looked strong, enduring; the broken windowpanes and paint-lost windowframes were a jarring incongruity in the untouched permanence of the stone. It was a big house, with flanking wings that were themselves bigger than almost any house Scarlett knew. Built to last, she said to herself. It was really a shame nobody lived in it, a waste. “Didn’t the Ballyhara lord have any children?” she asked Colum.

“No.” He sounded satisfied. “There was a wife, I believe, who went back to her own people. Or to an asylum. Some say she went mad.”

Scarlett sensed she’d better not admire the house to Colum. “Let’s look at the village,” she said. It was a town, too large to be a village, and there was not a whole window anywhere, or an unbroken door. It was derelict and despised, and it made Scarlett’s flesh crawl. Hatred had done this. “What’s the best way home?” she asked Colum.

T
he Old One’s birthday is tomorrow,” Colum said when he left Scarlett at Daniel’s house. “A man with any judgment would be called away until then, and I like to pretend I am one of those men. Tell the family I’ll be back on the morning.”

Why was he so skittish? Scarlett wondered. There couldn’t be all that much to do for one old woman’s birthday. A cake, of course, but what else was there? She’d already decided to give her grandmother the lovely lace collar she’d bought in Galway. There’d be plenty of time to buy another on the way home. Good heavens, that’s the end of this week!

Scarlett discovered as soon as she was through the door that what she was going to have was a lot of hard manual labor. Everything in Old Katie Scarlett’s house had to be scrubbed and polished, even if it was already clean, and in Daniel’s house as well. Then the farmyard outside the old cottage had to be weeded and swept clean, ready for the benches and chairs and stools to hold everyone who couldn’t squeeze into the cottage itself. And the barn cleaned and scrubbed and fresh straw put down for all who would sleep the night. It was going to be a very big party; not many made it to a hundred years.

“Eat and be gone,” Kathleen told the men when they came in for dinner. She put a pitcher of buttermilk and four loaves of soda bread and a bowl of butter on the table. They were as meek as lambs, ate more quickly than Scarlett had known a person could eat, and left, bending to go through the low door, without a word.

“Now we start,” Kathleen announced when they were gone. “Scarlett, I’ll need lots of water from the well. The buckets are there by the door.” Scarlett, like the O’Hara men, never thought of arguing.

After dinner all the village women came to the house, with their children, to help with the work. Everything was noisy, the work was sweaty, Scarlett got blisters on the ridge of soft flesh at the base of her fingers. And she enjoyed herself more than she could credit. Barefoot like the others, with her skirts tucked up, a big apron around her waist, her sleeves rolled to the elbow, she felt as if she were a child again, playing in the kitchen yard, infuriating Mammy because she was dirtying her pinafore and had taken off her shoes and stockings. Only now she had playmates who were fun, instead of whiny Suellen and baby Carreen who was too young to enter in.

How long ago that was… not when you think about something as old as the tower, I guess. Roots that go deep… Colum was frightening this morning… that awful story about the ships… Those were my uncles, Pa’s own brothers drowning. Damn that English lord. I’m glad they hung him.

There had never been a party the likes of Old Katie Scarlett’s birthday celebration. O’Haras from all over County Meath and beyond came in donkey carts and wagons, on horseback, on foot. Half the population of Trim was there, and every soul that lived in Adamstown. They brought gifts and stories and food made especially for the feast, although Scarlett had thought that there was already food enough for an army. Mahoney’s wagon from Trim rolled up with kegs of ale, and so did Jim Daly’s from Mullingar. Seamus, Daniel’s eldest son, rode the plow horse into Trim and returned with a box of clay pipes strapped on his back like a huge angular hump, tobacco in two sacks hung like saddlebags. For every man—and many women, too—must be given a new pipe on such a momentous occasion.

Scarlett’s grandmother received the stream of guests and gifts like a queen, sitting in her high-backed chair, wearing her new lace collar on her good black silk, dozing when it pleased her and drinking whiskey in her tea.

When the evening Angelus bell rang, there were over three hundred people standing in and outside the tiny cottage, come to do honor to Katie Scarlett O’Hara on her one hundredth birthday.

She’d asked for “the old ways,” and there was an elderly man in the place of honor by the fire opposite hers. With loving gnarled fingers he turned back linen wrappings to reveal a harp; three hundred and more voices sighed with joy. This was MacCormac, the only true inheritor of the music of the bards now that the great O’Carolan was dead. He spoke, and his voice was like music already. “I tell you the words of the master Turlough O’Carolan: ‘I spend my time in Ireland happy and contented, drinking with every strong man who is a real lover of music.’ And I add these words of my own making: I drink with every strong man and every strong woman such as Katie Scarlett O’Hara.” He bowed to her. “That is to say, when drink is offered.” Two dozen hands filled glasses. He carefully chose the largest, which he raised to Old Katie Scarlett, then drained. “Now I will sing you the tale of the coming of Finn MacCool,” he said. His worn bent fingers touched the strings of the harp and magic filled the air.

And forever after there was music. Two pipers had come with their
pibs willeann
, there were fiddlers beyond counting, and penny-whistles by the dozens, and concertinas, and hands leaping with clacking bones, and the stirring, inciting beat of
bodhrans
following the strong lead of Colum O’Hara.

Women filled plates with food, Daniel O’Hara presided over the small barrels of poteen, dancing filled the center of the farmyard, and no one slept at all, save Old Katie Scarlett whenever she had a mind to.

“I didn’t know there could ever be such a party,” Scarlett said. She was breathing in short gasps, catching up before rejoining the pink-washed dancing in the sunrise.

“You mean you’ve never celebrated May Day?” exclaimed shocked cousins from she knew not where.

“You’ll have to stay for May Day, Young Katie Scarlett,” Timothy O’Hara said. A chorus of urging echoed him.

“I can’t. We’ve got to catch the ship.”

“There’ll be other ships, surely?”

Scarlett jumped up from the bench. She’d had enough rest, and the fiddlers were starting a new reel. While she danced herself breathless again, the question sang in her head with the rollicking tune. There must be other ships. Why not stay and have fun dancing the reel in her striped stockings a little longer? Charleston would still be there when she arrived—with the same tea parties in the same crumbling houses behind the same high, unfriendly walls.

Rhett would still be there, too. Let him wait. She’d waited for him long enough in Atlanta, but things were different now. The baby in her womb made Rhett hers any time she wanted to claim him.

Yes, she decided, she might just stay for May Day. She was having such a good time.

The next day she asked Colum if he knew about another sailing, after May Day.

There was indeed another sailing. A fine ship, that stopped first at Boston, where he had to go while he was in America. She and Bridie would do very well on their own for the balance of the journey to Savannah. “She sails the evening of the ninth. You’ll only have a half day to do your shopping in Galway.”