Comeback/Scarlett, The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind/The Deceiver [antikvár]

CHAPTER 1I'm Peter Darwin.Everyone asks, so I may as well say at once that no, I'm not related to Charles.I was in fact born Peter Perry, but John Darwin, marrying my widowed mother when I was twelve, gave me, among many other things, a new life, a new name, and a new identity. Twenty years rolled like mist over the memories of my distant childhood in Gloucestershire, and now I, Peter Darwin, was thirty-two, adopted son of a diplomat, in the diplomatic service myself.As my stepfather's postings and later my own were all at the whimjaf the Foreign Office, I'd mostly lived those twenty years abroad, from Caracas to Lima, from Moscow to Cairo to Madrid, housed in Foreign Office lodgings, counting nowhere home.Friendships were transitory. Locals, left behind. Other diplomats and their children came and went. I was rootless and nomadic, well used to it and content."Look us up if you're ever in Florida," Fred Hutchings said casually, leaving Tokyo to be consul in Miami. "Stay for a day or so if you're passing through.""Thanks," I said. We'd worked together for months in Tokyo without friction. He half meant the invitation. He was trained in politeness, as we all were.My own new gostin^when it came through nearly a year later,