Fletcher's Woman Read online

  When the clatter ceased and the carriage lurched to a stop, he rose from the seat and opened the door. With a soft, half-smile on his face, he lifted Rachel McKinnon into his arms and carried her, like a child, across the sweeping, marble-pillared porch and through the great double doors the driver had opened.

  Rachel awakened just as they crossed the threshhold, her marvelous orchid eyes wide and dazed and sleepy. After a moment, the realization of improper intimacy struck her with a visible impact. She stiffened in Jonas’s arms and cried, “Put me down!”

  Jonas did not want to release her, ever. Just holding her in that innocent, awkward fashion had stirred depths of need and desire in him far beyond what he had feared. It was all he could do to keep from carrying her up the sweeping staircase to his bedroom and losing himself, without regard for the consequences, in her sweetness and fire.

  And there was fire inside her, all right. Jonas could feel it searing the edges of his soul even as he set her back on her feet and executed a courtly half-bow.

  She was more than dangerous. She was deadly.

  “As you wish,” he said, in a voice he didn’t even recognize.

  Rachel looked like an exotic bird, half-drowned, feathers ruffled. “Just because I came here to take a bath, Mr. Wilkes,” she sputtered, “Well—t-that doesn’t mean that I’m—that I—”

  Jonas was still struggling against the wild, agonizing desire that possessed him, but he smiled. “Of course,” he said.

  She relaxed a little, did not clutch his coat so tightly around herself. Slowly, her eyes darkened by awe, she began to take in her surroundings—the entry hall, with its black-and-white marble floor, cathedral ceilings, and carved teakwood walls. The dancing pastel colors cast by the crystal chandelier flashed, like sparks, in the dark purple depths of her gaze.

  Jonas was entirely bewitched, and might have remained frozen in the spell if his housekeeper, Mrs. Hammond, hadn’t appeared in the parlor doorway and stared at Rachel in surprise.

  With a flourish, Jonas gestured toward his rain-soaked guest. “As you can see, the young lady is in desperate need of a bath. See that she has one, please.”

  The housekeeper’s mouth tightened, grew white around the lips. “Jonas Wilkes—”

  But Jonas was already striding out of the house again. He sprinted across the wide porch and stepped out into the roaring deluge.

  Then, laughing, he thrust his arms out wide and lifted his face to the rain.

  Chapter Three

  Fanny Harper writhed wildly on the bed, tossing her head back and forth, pleading incoherently for the mercy of God.

  Griffin Fletcher sighed and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt as Fanny’s terrified husband brought scalding water to pour from a tin bucket into the china basin on the washstand.

  Fanny screamed again, once more begged the intercession of heaven.

  Purposely, Griffin dismissed the most recent confrontation with Jonas from his mind, turning his concentration to the task at hand.

  “Can’t you make her quit hurtin’ like that, Doc?” Sam Harper whispered hoarsely, paling beneath the patchy brown and white stubble of his beard. Sam was a young man, by rights—maybe thirty-five at most—but he looked old, stooped. It was the grueling work in the woods and the lack of proper food; together, they robbed men of their youth and stamina.

  Griffin shook his head and began to scrub his hands and forearms with the harsh lye soap he carried in his bag.

  Harper drew nearer, his eyes reflecting the same savage pain that tore at his wife. “You could give her laudanum!” he challenged, in a raspy undertone.

  Griffin stopped scouring his hands and glared at the man beside him. He was careful to keep his voice low and even, so Fanny wouldn’t hear. “If I do that, the baby could fall asleep in the birth canal and smother. Besides, you know damned well I wouldn’t let her suffer like that if I had a choice!”

  Fanny shrieked again, and doom thundered in the sound. Overhead, the endless rain hammered at the roof.

  Subdued now to a state of mute horror, Sam Harper fled the room, pulling the door shut behind him. A moment later, another door slammed in the distance.

  Griffin approached the bed and tossed back the gnarled, sweat-dampened blankets that covered Fanny. Gently, by the flickering light of a kerosene lantern burning on the bedside table, he examined her.

  Tears coursed down the woman’s face, but she did her best to lie still, to endure. But the dignity was gone from her bearing and, with it, the delicate, flowerlike beauty that had probably gotten her into this situation in the first place.

  “Soon?” she pleaded, biting back another scream.

  “Soon,” Griffin promised, in a soft voice.

  The pain seized Fanny again; this time, Griffin guided her groping hands to the iron bedstead over her head. She gripped it, knuckles white, as the twisting, protruding knot that was her stomach convulsed violently.

  Griffin waited with her, breathed in rhythm with her, wishing there were some way to ease the pain.

  “I wisht I could die,” she said. Her pale blue eyes were wild, glazed with effort and agony.

  Under other circumstances, Griffin would have been insulted by the statement, even outraged. To him, death was a relentless enemy, a monster to be battled tirelessly but never courted. “No,” he said, gently.

  The baby boy was born five minutes later, and like all the Harper infants before it, the child was dead before it slipped from Fanny’s exhausted body into Griffin’s hands. The breath he forced into its tiny lungs did not revive it.

  Still, he washed the child gently and wrapped it in a blanket. Rage hammered at the back of his throat as he set the small body aside, and he struggled against a primitive need to overturn furniture and hurl books and bric-a-brac in every direction.

  “This one?” asked Fanny, with a sort of hopeless desperation rattling in her voice.

  Griffin ached in every tissue and fiber of his being. The rage had passed, leaving helpless, unspeakable grief in its wake. “I’m sorry, Fanny,” he answered.

  “The babe weren’t Sam’s,” the woman confessed, her feverish eyes fixed sightlessly on the ceiling. Her thick, reddish brown hair lay in twisted strands on the pillow, and damp tendrils clung to her waxen cheeks.

  Griffin again washed his hands in the small supply of fresh, lukewarm water that remained and dried them on a thin, scratchy towel. Then he poured laudanum into a tablespoon and held it to Fanny’s taut lips.

  She swallowed the medicine gratefully, in several doses, and then turned her head away, toward the wall. Above, the incessant rain beat out a melancholy refrain on the shingled roof. “It’s God’s vengeance,” she mourned. “God made my baby die because I’m bad.”

  Griffin examined Fanny again, frowning distractedly. There was too much bleeding. “You’re not ‘bad,’ Fanny, and I doubt that God had anything to do with this, one way or the other.”

  Fanny became calm—frighteningly calm. “It’s my sin what made Him wrathful.”

  Griffin took a steel needle from his bag and held it to the dancing flame in the lamp. When it had cooled, he threaded it with catgut and began to repair the tear in Fanny’s flesh.

  God. They always talked about God, lauding Him when things went right, bemoaning their own human nature when things went wrong. If there was a God—and, secretly, because of the order and symmetry apparent in the universe itself, Griffin suspected that there was—He was totally disinterested in mankind. He’d long since gone on to more promising enterprises, probably tossing a benevolent. “You’re on your own!” over His shoulder as He went.

  “Just rest, Fanny,” Griffin said.

  But Fanny began to weep softly, even though she could not feel the bite of the steel needle. “The baby weren’t Sam’s!” she insisted.

  Griffin glanced at the pitiable bundle lying on the chest at the foot of the bed. His heart twisted for the undersized infant boy who would never play tag with a sparkling tide or feel the s
un on his face.

  “I’m a doctor, Fanny,” he snapped. “Not a priest.”

  “T-that man—he’s a devil. We all think that he’s a man, but he ain’t! He’s the devil’s own.”

  Griffin had even less interest in the devil than he did in God. “Jonas?” he sighed, as he tied off the stitches and permitted himself to recall the resemblance in the child’s still little face.

  Fanny nodded, and her sniffling became a soft, hideous wail. “Damn him—damn that man!”

  Griffin, keeping his peace, felt profound relief as his patient slipped into a fitful, restless sleep. Even that, he thought, was preferable to her reality.

  Griffin half-stumbled from the room to find hot water steaming on the cookstove in the kitchen and once again washed his hands. The flesh between his fingers and on his palms was raw from the biting strength of the special soap, and the water stung.

  He helped himself to a mug of coffee from the blue enamel pot brewing at the rear of the stove and went back to the small, neat parlor, where a hopeful little fire blazed, crimson and orange, on the stone hearth.

  Jonas. Always Jonas.

  One shoulder braced against the sturdy mantle, Griffin sipped the strong, stale coffee thoughtfully. He wondered whether the warning he’d given Jonas—to stay away from Becky’s daughter—had found its mark.

  With Jonas, it was always hard to tell.

  Fanny’s labor had demanded all his attention then, and there had been no time to impress Jonas with his sincerity in the matter. There was never enough time.

  Griffin drank the last of his coffee and took the cup back to the kitchen. There, he set it in the cast iron sink and pumped clear water into it until it overflowed.

  All the conveniences, he thought. Jonas provided his women with all the conveniences.

  His mind, snagged on the child in the other room, thrust him into a swirling current of hatred and frustration. He swore under his breath.

  The cottage door opened as Griffin was reaching for his coat.

  Sam Harper stood just inside the house, rainwater pooling silver around his worn boots. He stared at Griffin, trying to read his face. Beside him, the Reverend Winfield Hollister waited in calm silence, a tall, spare man with gentle eyes and an even, unblemished complexion.

  Griffin’s voice sounded hoarse and unsteady in his own ears. He’d seen death so many times; why couldn’t he learn to accept it?

  “The baby died,” he said.

  Field Hollister laid one hand on Harper’s shoulder, but he didn’t speak. That was one of the things Griffin liked best about his friend, that he knew when to talk and when to keep still. Usually.

  “And Fanny?” pleaded Harper. “What about Fanny?”

  Griffin searched the ceiling for a moment, wishing that he could lie or even just evade the truth somehow. “She’s alive,” he said, at last. “But she’s lost too much blood, and she’s weak.”

  The lumberman stumbled blindly across the room and into the small bedroom. The place of his betrayal.

  “You did your best,” ventured Field.

  Griffin’s sigh was ragged. “Yeah.”

  The minister folded his hands. “Fanny isn’t going to survive this, is she?”

  Griffin shook his head, and tension clasped the nape of his neck in a steel grip. Because he needed something to do, he consulted the watch he carried in his vest pocket. It seemed incredible that it was only nine o’clock in the morning.

  Field cleared his throat diplomatically. “Well, she’s in the hands of the Lord,” he said, as though that settled every question, made everything all right.

  The look Griffin turned to his best friend was scathing and fierce. “Damn it, Field, save that for your sheep, will you?”

  Hollister slipped out of his shabby overcoat and drew a worn, much-used Bible from its pocket. Griffin could see some inner preparation taking place; it was a familiar look that never failed to nettle him.

  An awkward silence fell, broken only by the pounding of the rain overhead and the soft sound of Sam Harper’s grief.

  Griffin folded his arms, lowered his dark head. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  There was compassion in Field’s face, and more understanding than Griffin was prepared to encounter just then. “Nonsense,” he said, somewhat gruffly. Then a wariness came into Field’s features, a remembering. Again, he cleared his throat.

  Griffin knew the look. “Out with it, Field,” he prodded impatiently.

  “Just promise you’ll stay calm.”

  Griffin felt everything within him tense. “What is it, Field? Is Becky dying?”

  Field was moving toward Fanny’s room, where he was needed. “No. But Fawn Nighthorse just told me that Jonas has the girl. She saw Rachel get into the carriage and leave about half an hour ago.”

  Griffin felt something terrible erupting inside him. “Rachel? She was sure it was Rachel?”

  “She said it was the girl with purple eyes.”

  Griffin grasped his coat and bag in two savage motions and bolted toward the door. “I’ll be back,” he growled. And then he bounded out into the rain.

  • • •

  Rachel felt warm color pound in her cheeks as the plump, matronly housekeeper studied her.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” the woman asked, after an agonizing moment. “It will take awhile to heat your bathwater.”

  Tea. Rachel couldn’t remember the last time she’d enjoyed such a luxury. She nodded, trying not to seem too eager. “Please.”

  “This way, then,” sighed the housekeeper, with noble resignation.

  Rachel followed her through a great, arched doorway and across a magnificent dining room. Here, there were costly, colorful rugs on the floors and real paintings on the tastefully papered walls. A massive chandelier hung, its many prisms gleaming like bits of a shattered rainbow, over a polished oak table. Six floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on a garden of budding roses and a three-tiered marble fountain.

  She thought of the tent where she’d taken her breakfast, and a small, rueful smile curved her lips.

  “I’m Mrs. Hammond,” the housekeeper announced brusquely, as she led the way through a swinging door and into the largest, cleanest kitchen Rachel had ever seen.

  She stared at the gleaming copper kettles hanging on the yellow walls, at the glass-fronted cupboards filled with exquisite china. “My name is Rachel. Rachel McKinnon.”

  Mrs. Hammond turned. There was a quickening in her expression, and her thick hands tugged at the full-length apron protecting her dark, rustling dress. “McKinnon,” she mused, seeming to taste the name. “McKinnon. Now that name is right familiar to me.”

  Rachel shrugged offhandedly. “It’s common enough, I suppose.”

  “McKinnon?” Mrs. Hammond shook her neatly groomed gray head. “You don’t hear that often, like you do ‘Smith’ or ‘Jones.’ ”

  Rachel was intimidated—by her surroundings, by Mr. Jonas Wilkes, and by this stern-faced, disapproving housekeeper. Nervously, she ran her hands down the skirts of her ruined, icy dress. “Y-You’re very kind—to go to all this trouble, I mean.”

  Mrs. Hammond took a steaming teakettle from the cookstove, poured water into a bright yellow china pot, and measured in several generous scoops of tea. Her expression softened slightly as she looked at Rachel, and there was a note of unexpected kindness in her voice when she spoke again. “No trouble. Here—come and stand by the stove while I find you something warm and dry to wear.”

  Rachel approached the great, gleaming monster of a stove. It’s nickel scrollwork glinted and shone, even in the dim light of a stormy day, and the warmth was wonderful. “Thank you.”

  “And don’t be worrying about your poor, spoiled dress,” the woman called, as she marched off toward the swinging door leading back to the dining room. “We’ve got a thing or two around here that will probably fit you.”

  Rachel trembled, huddled close to the stove. Her eyes fell with longing on the yellow teapot,
and the curling steam from its spout brought a tantalizing scent to her nostrils.

  She drew a deep breath and waited.

  After perhaps five minutes, Mrs. Hammond returned, bustling and pink-cheeked, a long, flannel nightgown clutched to her rounded bosom. “There’s a little dressing room right around the corner,” she said. “Why don’t you get out of those wet clothes while I pour us some tea?”

  Rachel took the soft gown in eager fingers, her eyes downcast, and obeyed.

  The dressing room sported a huge enamel bathtub, soft chairs, and an exquisite painted silk screen to disrobe behind. Awed, Rachel stepped around it and peeled off the hateful calico dress and the sodden cotton drawers and camisole beneath it. The flannel gown felt wonderfully smooth and warm as it fell against her skin.

  What would it be like to wear such things as a matter of course and take baths in a room apparently reserved exclusively for the purpose? Did her mother live this way?

  Rachel smiled to herself. At Miss Cunningham’s, in Seattle, she’d taken her baths in the middle of the kitchen floor, scrubbing furtively, ever fearing that one of the other tenants might wander in.

  She drew a deep breath and hurried back to the kitchen, where Mrs. Hammond graciously poured tea.

  It was almost like being a lady.

  Rachel drank one cup of strong, fragrant tea and longed for another, but demurred when Mrs. Hammond offered it. She’d behaved scandalously enough, arriving as she had, sopping wet and in the carriage of a relative stranger. It wouldn’t do to add gluttony to her sins.

  Half an hour later, she sank, awe-stricken and delighted, into the hot, scented water she and Mrs. Hammond had heated and carried into the dressing room, to the bathtub. She soaked for a few glorious minutes, and then began to scrub her pinkened flesh and disheveled hair with soap that smelled of wild flowers.

  Clean at last, and truly warm for the first time in weeks, Rachel wrapped her hair in a towel, turban style, and sank to her chin in liquid luxury. Beneath the scented water, she could just barely see the small, diamond-shaped birthmark beside the nipple of her left breast.

  It was then that she first heard the quarreling voices. She could not make out the words, but two men were shouting at each other, and Mrs. Hammond put in an occasional shrill remark.