Fletcher's Woman (2 page)

“Dead,” Rebecca said aloud, in answer. She tossed back the glass of brandy in a jerky, painful motion. “Dead, dead, dead.”

The muscles in her shoulders and in the nape of her neck relaxed with a suddenness that was almost convulsive as the brandy burned its way into her system. A sob rose in her throat, lodging there and hurting more than the vicious disease that gnawed at her vitals and tore at her bones and muscles.

The door of the bedroom opened with a cautious creak—
when would that impossible Mamie see that the hinges were oiled?

“Becky,” challenged a gentle, masculine voice. “What in the hell are you doing?”

Rebecca turned, inclining her head toward the man entering her room. Soft relief whispered through her, like a summer breeze rustling the leaves of an elm tree.

“Griffin.”

The young man took her arm in a firm, almost imperious, grasp and ushered her back to the bed, where he tucked her under the covers with the quick, impatient motions of a disapproving father. His dark hair caught what light the gray skies outside would permit, and the strong, aristocratic lines of his face were taut with affectionate annoyance. His eyes, like his hair, were almost black, and they avoided her face for a moment, while he subdued the pity Rebecca suspected was there.

She admired the supple, animal grace of his body and wished fervently to be young and well again. With a veined hand, she reached up and touched the smooth gray silk of his vest. “Where is your suit coat, Dr. Fletcher?”

A smile twisted one corner of the firm, impatient lips. “Downstairs, behind the bar. I trust your worthy employees will keep their fingers out of my wallet?”

Rebecca settled back, soothed momentarily by the brandy and the presence of her taciturn, intolerant friend. “Anybody steals from you, and I'll have them horsewhipped. Besides, I run an honest house, Griffin Fletcher.”

Griffin laughed softly, and the sound warmed the chilly,
lavender-scented room. “The good citizens of Providence might find that debatable, Becky.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and folded his skilled, strong hands around one knee. “Now. Why did you send for me? Is the pain getting worse?”

Rebecca fixed weary eyes on the gilded woodwork edging the ceiling of her room and spoke cautiously. “You said you owed me, Griff, after I helped out in Tent Town last winter. Did you mean it?”

“I meant it.”

Rebecca drew a burning breath and dared to meet the doctor's eyes. “It's about my kid, Griffin. It's about Rachel.”

No reaction showed in Griffin's face. “What about her?”

Tears glimmered on Rebecca's lashes now, and she made no effort to hide them. It was too late for that. “Ezra's bringing her here, to Providence,” she managed, fumbling once again for the crumpled letter on the nightstand.

Dr. Fletcher accepted the offered missive, unfolded it, and scanned its message quickly. Still, there was no change in his expression, nothing to indicate whether or not he would be an ally. “According to this, they'll be here sometime tonight,” he said.

Rebecca nodded. When she spoke again, her words were tinged with hysteria, and it was hard to make them come out in proper and sensible order. “Griff, she'll be living in Tent Town—and there's Jonas—good God, there's Jonas. . . .”

Griffin sighed, but no recognizable emotion flickered in the dark eyes. Rebecca knew he understood the singular threat Jonas Wilkes represented, knew he hated the man fiercely. If anyone had reason, he did.

“Calm down,” he ordered sharply.

Rebecca forced herself to remain still, though she wanted, even needed, to clamor out of that bed and do something—
anything—to
stop Ezra from bringing Rachel to Providence. “Rachel is a pretty girl, Griffin,” she said finally, measuring the words cautiously, so that they could not escape her control and stream out in a river of shame and panic. “I know she is. She was a beautiful child. And if she catches Jonas's eye—”

A muscle knotted in Griffin's jaw, then relaxed again. “You're afraid he'll add her to his collection.”

Rebecca could only nod, and a tense, thundering silence fell. At last, she went on. “That's happened to more than one young girl, hasn't it, Griff?”

Griffin bolted to his feet, and stood with his back to Rebecca,
his hands on his hips. Something violent and primitive seemed to enclose him; Rebecca could sense his inward struggle even though it was being waged in the darkest recesses of his mind and heart.

She smoothed the velvet comforter. “I'm sorry.”

Griffin's shoulders were taut under his white linen shirt. He lowered his head, and Rebecca heard a deep, raspy breath enter his lungs, come out again. Finally, he turned around to face her. “What is it that you want me to do?” he asked, in a voice that was barely more than a labored whisper.

Rebecca's throat worked painfully, and a small eternity passed before she could make herself say, “Marry her. Griffin, will you marry Rachel?”

The request struck him with a visible and unsettling impact.
“What?”

A desperate momentum carried Rebecca forward. “I'll pay you! I have a thousand dollars saved, Griffin, and there's the deed to my business—”

A humorless laugh erupted from his throat, and he flung his arms outward, in some kind of outraged mockery. “You're asking me to marry a woman I've never even seen? And in return, I get a thousand dollars and a whorehouse?”

Rebecca bounded out of the bed now, to face him. The pain and weakness were forgotten, blown away by the winds of fear raging within her. “Griffin Fletcher, you listen to me, you arrogant bastard! I might be a whore—by God, I
am
a whore—but my daughter—
my daughter—
is a lady! Do you hear me? A lady!”

Cool respect glimmered in the dark eyes, and Griffin's face softened a little. “I'm sure Rachel is everything any man could want,” he said evenly. “But I have no intention of marrying anybody—not your daughter or anyone else.”

Grim finality echoed in the words, and Rebecca sighed and lowered her head. “All right,” she said. “All right.”

Griffin took a new hold on Rebecca's thin shoulders now, and guided her back to the bed.

She made no protest as he took a syringe from his battered black bag, filled it with morphine, and inspected it for deadly bubbles of air.

“I don't want my little girl to know I run a whorehouse,” she whispered, in ragged tones.

“I know,” replied Griffin, as he administered the injection and drew the needle gently from Rebecca's arm.

The pain hammered and raged inside her, in a savage crescendo. It was always like this after an injection, the pain would grow suddenly and immeasurably worse, as though it somehow knew it would be forced into submission for a little while. “Dear God,” she muttered. “Oh, Dear God. Griffin—what am I going to do?”

“For the time being, relax,” Griffin suggested. He lifted the painted china globe from a kerosene lamp on Rebecca's bedtable and struck a wooden match to light the wick. The brave, flickering light, unhampered by the decorative globe, pushed back a little of the gathering darkness.

It was harder—so much harder—to stay awake. But the terrible pain was ebbing, just like the tide flowing two hundred yards beyond Rebecca's window, on the shores of Puget Sound.

“We helped you,” she pressed, single-mindedly. “When there was so much pneumonia and grippe in Tent Town last winter, me and my girls helped you. You owe me, Griffin Fletcher. You owe me.”

Griffin drew a long, slender cigar from the pocket of his shirt, gripped it between his white, even teeth, and bent to light it from the flame dancing on the wick of Rebecca's lamp. The end of the cheroot glowed red-gold in the dim, trembling light, and the china globe made a clinking sound as he replaced it. “I know that,” he said.

“Will you talk to Ezra? Will you tell him what could happen to Rachel if Jonas fancies her?”

Grimly, Griffin nodded. There was a weary, faraway look in his eyes.

Rebecca struggled to go on, before the blessed, soothing respite of sleep overtook her completely. “And if Ezra won't listen to you, Griffin, you give Rachel that thousand dollars—Mamie will show you where it is—you give her that money and you put her on board the first steamboat that ties up in Providence—”

“What if she doesn't want to go, Becky? What do I do then? Bind her wrists and throw her on board?”

“If necessary. You're my friend, aren't you?”

Griffin's chuckle sounded hoarse. “That isn't friendship, Becky. It's kidnapping.”

Rebecca's eyelids seemed to be weighted, and her vision blurred. She felt like a small, smooth stone, gliding soundlessly
to the bottom of a dark pond and resting there. Settling into the silt. “You owe me, Griffin Fletcher,” she called, toward the rippling surface of consciousness. “You owe me.”

Rachel McKinnon lay very still in the small island of warmth her body had created and kept her eyes closed.

For several wild, insensible moments, she actually made herself believe that she didn't live in this wretched, rain-sodden place at all, but in a fine house in Seattle, a house overlooking Elliott Bay.

Yes. Yes, she could stand at the gleaming windows of her own spacious parlor, with its delicate lace curtains and its polished oaken floors, and she could look out and see the big steamboats and clipper ships moving in and out of the harbor. Dapples of sunlight would dance, like flames of silver, on the blue, blue water. . . .

It was the stench that brought Rachel plummeting back to reality—the dreadful, piercing stench.

It forced her to remember everything.

A groan escaped her, and she squeezed her eyes even more tightly shut. Still, the grim images remained.

An acre of tents, standing like a shabby regiment of gray ghosts in the night. Rats, their eyes gleaming scarlet, darting between rivulets of rainwater. Children, whimpering and fretting behind walls of canvas.

Tent Town.

Rachel shuddered, tried to fight off the despairing panic that came with wakefulness and with knowing. She tried to summon the fantasy house back into her mind, but it would not come. She opened her eyes, and then closed them again.

But the truth was there, behind her lids, painted in sad colors on the walls of her mind. She was going to have to live in this dreadful place for as long as there was work for her father to do in Mr. Wilkes's lumber camps.

A hand clasped her shoulder, gave it a gentle, reluctant shake. “Daughter?”

Anger burned in Rachel's throat and hammered through her veins, but only briefly. She loved her father, and she knew that the suffering and the poverty pained him far more deeply than they did her. His dreams and hopes for his only child were great indeed.

“I'm awake,” she said softly, smiling up at the dim outline etched against the dank roof of the tent.

A soft rain tapped out a mournful cadence on the worn canvas tent top, and Rachel could hear people talking in hushed, sleepy voices. The two sounds made her feel wretchedly lonely, for some reason.

Ezra McKinnon turned his broad back, so that his daughter could rise from her cot in relative privacy. A short, stocky man with unruly gray hair, a full beard, and mischievous blue eyes, he stooped to take up his bedroll and said, “There's a dining hall, Rachel. You go there, and have some breakfast.”

Trying to ignore the numbing cold, Rachel straightened her rumpled calico dress and rummaged through the wicker satchel that contained most of her personal belongings. Finding her hairbrush, she began grooming her sable brown hair with fierce energy.

“I don't have any money, Pa. Suppose I get to this dining hall and they expect me to have money?”

Ezra cleared his throat, pulled back the tent flap, and spat into the rainy dawn. Damp, frigid air rushed into the tent. “I asked Mr. Wilkes about meals when I signed on,” he replied, with gentle impatience. “He told me that mine is included, and yours will be drawn from my wages.”

Deftly Rachel braided her glossy hair, wound it into a chignon, and secured it with tiny tortoiseshell combs. “You'll be in the woods until next Sunday?” she asked, already knowing that he would. She was seventeen years old, and a woman grown, but she felt like a frightened little girl just then—a little girl about to be abandoned, with no friends or money, in a town where it never seemed to stop raining.

“Yes, Daughter. Until Sunday.”

Even as Rachel searched her mind for a dignified way to beg him not to go, she heard a wagon and horses splashing through the rain and mud outside, heard the snorts of the team and the creak of leather harnesses.

Ezra kissed her forehead gently, and then he said something strange. “Things will be different here, Rachel. Better.”

Before she could ask what he meant, her father went off to join the other workers. There were shouts and bursts of laughter and profanity as the men of that humble canvas community met at the crew wagon and found their places inside.

Soon, they would be high on the mountain, these husbands and fathers and sons, cutting and felling timber for Mr. Jonas Wilkes. To Rachel, arriving in the night, by wagon, that mountain had seemed a looming and monstrous thing, set apart somehow from the other mountains of her experience.

She pulled her blue woolen shawl from the satchel and wrapped it around her head and shoulders. As she stepped outside the tent, into the incessant drizzle and the half light of a struggling dawn, the stench sharpened. Human waste, probably in open trenches dug too near the camp.

Rachel's revulsion was like acid in her throat and nostrils; she longed to run back to the tent—as crude as it was, it was the only refuge she had—and hide.

But there was no hiding from the desperate hunger that gnawed at her even as she tried not to retch. She raised her chin, silently defying the tears that pressed behind her eyes and ached in her throat.