PART I

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

(Robert Frost, Mending Wall)

"My sincerest congratulations, Scarlett. It seems you are with child again."

The woman in front of him didn't look happy, worried or faintly annoyed, as she had on the previous occasions he had imparted such news to her. She seemed surprised, genuinely surprised, as if, of all the news she could have received, this was what she had least expected.

She stood motionless for a long while, staring at the porcelain inkwell on his desk as though it was the first time she had seen one, and then, as Dr. Meade was about to lose his patience, she fixed her eyes on him, with the briefest of flames in them.

"Are you sure? Absolutely, completely sure?"

The doctor shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He remembered the businesslike tone she had assumed after the war, before leaving Atlanta, but hadn't expected to find it extended to such delicate matters. She didn't even blush as she asked the question, and her gaze didn't waver for an instant.

"Taking into account all of the manifestations, this seems to be the case. So yes, as far as my medical knowledge is concerned, I'm positive. But then again, women, especially if they already have children, have their own way of knowing such things."

He had hinted at her previous four pregnancies and regretted it as soon as the words left his mouth. It was unnecessarily cruel to remind a woman who had lost both her daughter and an unborn child of her pregnancies, even if that woman happened to be Scarlett Butler. He meant to apologize, but the moment of awkwardness had already passed, and she didn't look offended. In fact, once the embarrassing silence had been broken, Scarlett seemed to remember herself, and the look of almost painful concentration of before was replaced by a sweet smile.

"Yes, it's truly a wonder that I didn't it see it myself. But I guess I needed a doctor's confirmation. I couldn't possibly trust myself to hope after all these years. Thank you, Doctor."

Some fifteen minutes later, after walking Scarlett to her carriage, Dr. Meade reclined in his chair with a sigh of relief. Like many of his neighbors, at some point he'd had an acute interest in the inner workings of the Butler marriage, though he would have died rather than admit it. Idle speculation on the petty battles inherent to each and every marriage in this world was a topic to occupy the minds of women and servants, who, in his experience, were generally limited in higher intellectual pursuits. It certainly wasn't a subject worthy of a man's contemplation, and especially not of a man's of Dr. Meade's standing and authority. He had known all that, and yet he had wondered.

But what his sense of his own consequence—otherwise perfectly acute—had been unable to accomplish in terms of diminishing that interest, had been achieved by the Butlers' removal from Atlanta some years before, and now the doctor found himself unwilling to return to his previous state. Whatever had happened to turn the news of her pregnancy into a shock for Scarlett and cause her feeble attempt at feigning joy, he didn't know and, more importantly, didn't care to know.

~~o~~

No, it wasn't joy, or happiness, or even worry, though there should have been; it was astonishment that paralyzed Scarlett's mind as the carriage drove her to the National. And out of that astonishment rose fear, a fear she couldn't analyze, but that settled heavily in her throat and made her heart increase its rhythm.

She tried to focus, to drive away some of the tension by counting the houses she was passing by, but their familiar lines—lines she had not realized she missed—brought a different kind of unease to her mind and she had to give up. What was there to fear, she reasoned. She was a married woman carrying her husband's child, not some silly green girl defiled by one of her beaux. But the soothing argument was a weak dam against the fear that kept rising from the deepest layers of her mind, trying to reach her conscience, until it finally formed a coherent thought. She stood to lose everything she had won, marriage and all, everything she had built with so much effort during the last years.

For she had indeed won. It was 1878 and, on a suffocating Charleston night almost three years before, Rhett had given in, stating in a flat voice that it had proven more tiresome to fight against her than it had been to fight for her. It was far from the declaration she had expected, but it didn't matter. Her long fight had been rewarded. As long as he was willing to give her a chance, remain her husband and share a bed with her, she was confident she could make him love her. It had never occurred to her he hadn't meant their marriage was worth saving, but that it was unworthy of the effort dissolving it would imply. And if it had, she would have just added it to the list of things time would surely change. Time and her determination to be a good wife.

And she had been a good wife, for the most part. True, her temper flared from time to time, yet on the whole that had only led to minor quarrels. She had decided the best way of winning Rhett's heart would be by abiding his every wish, a system plagued by inevitable failures, for she was still poor at figuring what it was that he wanted. Rhett could have told her from his experience that no amount of pampering brings love, but he never commented on her attempts. He was seemingly content with their life, which in turn made that life comfortable. And after some time it became easier for her. She no longer had to fight the urge to check impatiently every other hour for some sign of love. The waiting turned into a habit, and then, with the same shortsighted energy that made her regard money as a value in itself, she forgot it had been Rhett's love, and not his mere presence in their marriage, what she had been after.

When Rhett had asked her where she wanted them to live, she had quickly said Charleston. He looked at her incuriously and shrugged, but in truth she could not have said anything else. She was not well received in Atlanta, had never been again after Melanie's death. She would have crawled on her belly to mend those ties if she thought it would have meant something to her husband, but she remembered all too well his words from that terrible night when he'd left her. Atlanta was too raw for him, too new. And so they sold their Peachtree house and settled in Charleston, in a white stucco house with delicate wrought-iron work that Scarlett herself had selected.

They spent most of their year there and travelled quite frequently, though never to places that held any significance for their past lives. They had been to Europe on a few occasions and Rhett had taken her and the children to New York and Washington one year. She'd hung on his arm, just marginally less wide eyed than Ella, and she had been happy, because she felt he was sharing something of his old life with her. But when it came to meeting an old business partner in New Orleans, he had not offered to take her with him. And when, after a few months in Charleston, Scarlett was desperately homesick and mentioned going to Tara, he had promptly made the arrangements for her to go alone.

They wouldn't have returned to Atlanta for years to come, had it not been for the misfortune of one Miss Jane Fannigan, who had been raped on Atlanta's outskirts a mere month ago. The incident set the town afire with rage, threatening to unleash the ugly violence that was never far from its surface. It all came to an end when Jane, a girl of rare spirit, was well enough to say the two men were not only white, but also Georgian by accent. Atlanta shuddered, closed its eyes and resigned to the fact the incident must now amount to nothing, outside the sad fate of a girl who, at twenty-four, was already past her bloom, and most likely never to marry.

But then a knight came to rescue both the girl and the pride of all Southern men—a knight in the shape of a short, white-haired, pot-bellied lawyer. His armor was a bit tarnished, and his pants obviously mended, but the fair lady accepted his proposal nonetheless. And order in the universe was restored by the engagement of Jane Fannigan to Henry Hamilton. Their nuptials were to be discreet, as discreet as the presence of a large number of the groom's relatives and acquaintances, including the Butlers of Charleston, would allow them to be.

Scarlett had read Pittypat's letter disclosing the details of her brother's engagement to Rhett, thinking it would amuse him. Never an energetic soul to begin with, Pittypat was now too old and frail to leave her house at all and lived, together with Ashley and Beau, under the stern, autocratic regime of India Wilkes. She consequently spent most of her time writing plaintively to all of her acquaintances. When such monthly missives first began to arrive in Charleston, Scarlett had been reluctant to share them with Rhett, for Atlanta was their past and past was always best left dead. But, just as they had silently agreed upon an abridged history of their marriage, they soon adopted their own map of Atlanta, a map with convenient blank spots for the Peachtree mansion and a series of other places, so that they could talk freely of the rest. And it became custom for her to read aloud Pittypat's letters and for Rhett to employ his old tone in mocking the old lady's antics.

That day, however, Rhett had not been amused. Raising her eyes from the piece of paper, Scarlett had mistaken his dark expression for one of silent expectation and charged in.

"Isn't it the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard? Great balls of fire, he must be eighty by now, and he's always been opposed to marriage. For him to marry someone out of pity like that—"

"If he'd felt pity for the girl, he would have talked Ashley or any other malleable gentleman into marrying her," Rhett had replied quietly. "There's one reason only for a man who's been a bachelor all his life and happy with it to rush into wedlock. He loves her, pathetic fool that he is."

"Nonsense. It says right here that he—"

"My dear, both you and your Aunt Pitty should just give up your reading of the masculine mind. And I daresay the world would be a better, though far less amusing, place."

He had lightly patted her hand and left of the room, and Scarlett had felt a painful lump rising in her throat. His gently mocking remarks were much harder to stand than the old biting sarcasm, because she couldn't hurl heated insults at him now. She tried to please Rhett harder than she had tried to please anyone in her entire life, Ellen included, but sometimes she couldn't help but feel that she was butting her head against a stonewall.

~~o~~

And pregnancy was the last of a series of stonewalls that seemed to rise around each corner, mocking her efforts. But out of all the obstacles, it was also by far the most unexpected. How could it have happened? Since their reconciliation, they had been using preventatives. Rhett had put it quite bluntly as a condition for them to share a bed again, and she had acquiesced, biting her tongue till she could feel a hint of blood in her mouth not to burst into angry remarks or, even worse, cry. It shouldn't have come as a surprise. She had long known Rhett was on familiar terms with the shadowy world of brothels and its wicked devices. She was even more bitterly aware of the fact that he didn't want any more children. Still, the pain had risen as if from newly inflicted wounds, and it took all her willpower to overcome it.

At first she had hoped, despite reason, that it wouldn't work, that they weren't safe, and she would fall pregnant nonetheless. But after a couple of months, it became clear it wasn't going to happen and she gave up the thought, or rather pushed it at the back of her mind, like she did with everything of its sort. Still the longing stole over her sometimes, unexpectedly, like a subterranean water fighting its way to the surface in broken, painful rushes. It was one of the reasons she had only been to Tara twice since her reconciliation with Rhett. Suellen's never-ending series of pregnancies and her constant complaining on the subject had been nearly unbearable and had hastened Scarlett's departure each time. Her sister's complaints could not follow her to Charleston, for Suellen was far from a faithful correspondent and Will—whether guided by thoughtfulness or by his own inclination—accounted of his family's state in the same succinct terms he did of Tara's yearly crops.

So when Scarlett had started to feel nauseated in the mornings, this had been the last thing on her mind. Actually, the very first thing was a mild annoyance at having to see Dr. Meade. Why did she have to fall ill while visiting Atlanta, of all times? They lived in Charleston and spent at least a couple of months each year in London, and she had her doctors in both locations. Over the years she had suffered from a variety of small pains, some dating from her fall and subsequent miscarriage, others less easily traceable. She had first gone to see a doctor in London and left slamming the door when he suggested hysteria. She had heard enough tales to know that this was the diagnosis doctors usually applied to rich and handsome ladies, since the treatment involved an expensive and energetic massage, merely a doctor's way of getting under a woman's skirts. The next doctor had been far more sympathetic to her pains, ascribed it to some minor condition and recommended Vin Mariani, a treatment Scarlett found very much to her taste. She would have gladly picked that doctor over old Dr. Meade at any time.

It was Dr. Meade that had witnessed her displeasure at finding she was carrying Ella, and later Bonnie. He had seen her blush remembering the details of the night Rhett had carried her upstairs. God only knows what he must have assumed that day, she thought bitterly. He even knew that she and her husband hadn't been sharing a bed for some time. And now it had to be Dr. Meade to break this last piece of news, and watch with barely disguised disdain as she failed once again to act like a lady under the circumstances. But how could she have behaved properly when her mind reeled with the implications of this information?

Her head began to ache as she tried to imagine Rhett's reaction. It wasn't likely for him to be happy with the news. How nice that would have been though! To have this child as an ally, as the most powerful weapon for maintaining their marriage. But as it was, she knew Rhett wouldn't be happy with the news. He might even blame her for it, though it was clearly not her fault. Suppose he accused her of being unfaithful. Oh, she couldn't face that, not again!

As the carriage halted outside the National Hotel, Scarlett squared her shoulders. This was one of the small gestures she had lost through the years. She had been so preoccupied with getting Rhett back, had fought so long and so hard that, by the time the battle was over, a large part of her old self was gone, though there was no one to tell her that. But now she needed that old strain of energy, and a simple gesture seemed to bring some of it back. She had to face Rhett and find the best way to tell him. She had to face things she had thought long buried. And, with a sigh of dejection, she realized she had been wrong in assuming she had won the battle. She had been wrong and she was in for a new struggle.

Historical note: Vin Mariani is a brand of cocawine. It contains alcohol and cocaine (extracted from coca leaves). It was a popular tonic at the time, used as a cure-all.