Thanks to all of you who have reviewed; your kind words mean a lot. Here's the next installment, though it's not a very romantic Valentine's Day gift for you:D

Part Three

Rhett was sober, though just barely, on the morning of the funeral; he had loved his child, and would not disgrace her memory. Atlantan tongues would always find reasons to wag where the Butlers were concerned, but he could at least deny them that one. He stood stiff and remote beneath the leaden sky, his immaculately tailored black suit hanging untidily on a body whose contours had changed since the suit's purchase in happier days, and reddish clay from the damp and churned ground stained his shining black shoes. Nearby, but not touching, unacknowledged and unacknowledging, stood Scarlett, all white skin and black crepe and wide stricken eyes. Melanie, who looked as though she ought to be in bed rather than outdoors in the rain, stood at her side, a steadying arm around her waist.

Life, it seemed, could be unbearably cruel. Surely only a twist of capricious fate could raise two people to such heights and then dash them so fiercely to the ground; surely a just and merciful God would have no hand in it! Melanie could scarce conceive such a thought (which surely bordered on blasphemy), but Scarlett, her mind awash in darkness, had no similar difficulties. Faith had never gone much more than skin deep with her, but the events of the past few weeks had obliterated it entirely. The somber droning words of the hired minister fell upon her ears and meant nothing; the man had not known Bonnie, and all his pious assurances that the child had gone to eternal bliss with the Lord meant less than nothing to Scarlett, who wanted her here with her family. The Lord could have His own children or do without. A world governed by a loving Creator would be a world in which Bonnie lived a long and happy life; that she was being lowered into the ground on an ugly rainy morning before her fifth birthday was proof to Scarlett that no such Creator existed.

At the close of the service, Rhett wordlessly handed Scarlett and Melanie back into the elegant Butler carriage, closing the door gently and instructing the driver to take both women home. It would be nearly another week before Scarlett saw her husband again, and a goodly while thereafter before she next saw him sober.

...---...---...---...

By the time Rhett reappeared at the Peachtree Street mansion, worry had replaced the icy hatred that had gripped Scarlett's heart for so long. During the week of his absence she did not seek him openly; despite the extremity of their circumstances, she still could not bear to let it be known to the outside world that she, Scarlett Butler, had no inkling of her spouse's whereabouts. She found herself unable to do much of anything beyond waiting and worrying, hoping that wherever he was, he was safe, hoping that the black thoughts she'd harbored hadn't in some arcane way hastened his demise.

After he returned, she never asked him where he'd been, nor did he ever volunteer that information. Truth be told he scarcely remembered a moment of his extended lost weekend, days spent in an alcoholic stupor at times so profound as to border on coma; at one time face-down in an alley behind a rough anonymous saloon from which he'd been unceremoniously ejected; at another, collapsed in a filthy cell upstairs in a vile and nameless brothel; still others, mere blurs, jumbles of half-recalled sounds and colours and faces, meaning nothing. He never knew how he got back home, only that he roused to semi-consciousness to find himself draped over the steps outside one of the rear entrance doors. When he pounded on it, scarcely able to hold himself upright, the door was opened by a horrified-looking kitchen maid, the one who dozed by the bell-pull at night lest the lady of the house need something in the wee hours. Leaving him sprawled there, half in and half out, she scrambled up the back stairs and rapped frantically upon the door of the room shared by Rhett's valet, Pork, and his wife.

The manservant was well-schooled in such matters and hastened down to assist his employer. A pallet was made up in the butler's pantry and Rhett placed thereon; and Pork remained by his side for the remainder of that night, and many nights to come, reminded of similar nights spent keeping vigil over Mist' Gerald. In the days to come Pork would find himself struck, for the first time, by how much Miss Scarlett had come to remind him of her mother--though not in any way that Scarlett might ever have hoped to resemble her. The shuttered eyes, the stiff posture, the utter absence of vitality in a face far too youthful to be so empty; these were Ellen O'Hara's traits now reflected in her eldest daughter. Pork mourned the change in his Miss Scarlett as fiercely as he mourned the ruin of Mist' Rhett, as deeply as he mourned the loss of little Miss Bonnie. He wondered what was to become of them all.