Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind by Ripley Alexandra

Author:Ripley, Alexandra [Ripley, Alexandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446502979
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2011-11-24T07:00:00+00:00

The O’Hara houses were three tall brick houses in a row, with windows front and rear and shared interior walls. Inside, the layouts were identical. Each floor had two rooms: kitchen and dining room on the street level, double parlors on the first floor, and two bedrooms on each of the top two floors. A narrow hall with a handsome staircase ran the length of each house, and behind each one was an ample yard and a carriage house.

Scarlett’s bedroom was on the third floor of Jamie’s house. It had two single beds in it—Daniel and Brian had shared it until Brian moved to Patricia’s—and it was very plain, as befitted two young men, with only a wardrobe and a writing table and chair for furniture in addition to the beds. But there were brightly colored patchwork quilts on the beds and a big red and white rag rug on the polished floor. Maureen had hung a mirror over the writing table and covered it with a lace cloth, so Scarlett had a dressing table. Kathleen was surprisingly good with her hair, and she was eager to learn how to please, and she was right at hand. She slept with Mary Kate and Helen in the other third-floor bedroom.

The only little child in Jamie’s house was four-year-old Jacky, and he was usually over at one of the other houses, playing with cousins near his age.

During the day, with the men at work and the older children in school, the row of houses was a world of women. Scarlett expected to hate it. But nothing in Scarlett’s life had prepared her for the O’Hara women.

There were no secrets among them, and no reticences. They said whatever they thought, confided intimacies that made her blush, quarrelled when they disagreed, and hugged one another, weeping, when they made up. They treated all the houses as one, were in and out of the others’ kitchens at any hour for a cup of tea, shared the duties of shopping and baking and tending the animals in the yard and the carriage houses that had been converted into sheds.

Most of all they enjoyed themselves, with laughter and gossip and confidences and harmless intricate conspiracies against their men. They included Scarlett from the moment she arrived, assuming that she was one of them. Within days she felt she was. She went to the City Market with Maureen or Katie every day to search for the best foods at the best prices, and she giggled with young Polly and Kathleen about tricks with curling iron and ribbons, and she looked through swatches of upholstery fabric with house-proud Patricia long after Maureen and Katie threw up their hands at her finickiness. She drank innumerable cups of tea and listened to accounts of triumphs and worries; and, although she shared none of her own secrets, no one pressured her or held back the frank confession of their own. “I never knew that so many interesting things happened to people,” Scarlett told Maureen with genuine surprise.

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