Chapter Text
Scarlett wakes just as the first rays of grey dawn are breaking over Tara’s fields. The damned rooster is crowing fit to wake the dead, she thinks sleepily.
Dead! The thought jolts her fully awake and she remembers in an instant that she is not in her own bed but rather keeping vigil over Wade.
She leaps out of the chair and presses a hand to his forehead. It is blessedly cool.
Rhett is still asleep next to her in his chair. It feels strangely intimate to see him like this- a reminder of the old days at the Atlanta house when she, accustomed to the early rising of country planters, would be eating breakfast in bed long before he awoke. It had became almost a little joke between them, once.
Now she shakes his shoulder gently, half afraid to touch him.
“Rhett! I think Wade’s fever is gone.”
He, too, feels Wade’s forehead and gives a jubilant shout. “By Jove, honey , he’s made it!”
The room is filling with people - nurses and the doctor, Katie and Prissy screaming an old hymn Mammy and Pork used to hum. “There is a happy land, Far far away, Where saints in glory stand, Bright, bright as day. Oh, to hear the angels sing, Glory to the Lord, our King.”
The doctor is having to shout over them to ask Wade if he can tell him where he is and what day it is.
It is so disorienting after the sacred stillness of the terrible night that Scarlett can only focus on Rhett. He looks exhausted and she remembers suddenly what he went through to bring Wade here.
“Rhett, why don’t you rest now that the danger has passed. I shall ring for you for a late lunch.”
She half-expects him to have a tart reply about where this kindness has come from but he only says gallantly “Thank you, Scarlett. I await our dejeuner.”
He leaves and memories of yesterday come flooding back slowly. “My way to know if you’d turned tail…”
So she is still legally tied to Rhett. She imagines him in Dublin, or Casablanca, or Marseille, wiring his Charleston lawyer to to ask if she’s filed for marriage yet. She can’t help an arch smile - that the thought of her has perhaps followed him through all of his journeys.
For how long did she dream of devising the perfect plan to get him back- the right way, to win not just his purse-strings but him, body and soul- to force herself to remain steely and cool next to him while inside she longed to run to him for comfort-
And here he has been neatly delivered to her, as if by an unseen hand, and Wade will recover, surely he will. Dare she hope that her hasty promises and often-forgotten-to-say prayers are being heard? All her work these past years , her endeavors to rebuild Tara to what it once was, her connections she’s eked out with Northern mill-owners, the fathers of boys Wade was at West Point with- her efforts to ignore Rhett, knowing that running to him will send him away but ignoring him will drive him mad- she has been so good and so patient for so long, atoning for the sins of her war-ruined girlhood -
Now - Tara flourishing , Rhett here, and Wade will pull through. It is more perfect than any scheme she could have imagined. She has been good and “strong and courageous and done the work” and she has come into her earthly reward. She nearly laughs at her good fortune.
Someone is calling for her.
“Miss Scarlett? Mr. Wilkes and his son to see you.”
Her hand finds the bottle of brandy Rhett has left on the windowsill and she gulps greedily.