Fletcher's Woman (31 page)

It seemed incredible that any man, constructed of bone and sinew and all the attending human failings, could love such a woman and then stop caring about her entirely. Rachel sighed.

Griffin
hadn't
stopped caring—if he had, he wouldn't have reacted so passionately, for good or ill, to that rose taffeta dress. What memories had the sight of it stirred in him?

On Pike Street, Joanna left the carriage momentarily to rush inside a shop and speak with her dressmaker. Rachel was more than content to remain behind in the shadowy insulation of the phaeton.

Three days before, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, there had been a terrible, sweeping flood when a dam gave way. Rachel kept herself from wondering about Griffin and Athena by reviewing the tragedy in her mind.

When Joanna came back, and the driver had helped her into her seat, she smiled. “You look so sad, Dear. You're not still thinking about my daughter, are you? She's safely married, to a French banker named André Bordeau.”

Rachel shook her head and said, in all honesty, that she had been considering the hideous destruction in that faraway Pennsylvania town, the loss of life and property, and the suddenness with which disaster can strike.

Joanna nodded sadly, and Rachel knew that her concern
went far deeper than a display of sympathy. She and her friends had been collecting food, money, and clothing for the victims ever since word of the Johnstown calamity had reached Seattle.

Both women were lost in thought when the carriage lurched to a jarring, unexpected stop. The vehicle shifted slightly as the driver jumped from the box and appeared at the window.

His voice could barely be heard over the mournful strains of a brass band. “There's a Chinese funeral procession coming, Mrs. O'Riley,” he said to Joanna. “Do you want me to try and go around them?”

“Mercy, no,” whispered Joanna, impatiently. “The only decent thing to do is wait.”

The driver grumbled, but went back to his post in the carriage box and held the nervous horses in check.

“Come here,” Joanna ordered, “And watch.”

Rachel couldn't imagine how such a grim spectacle could hold appeal for anyone besides the mourners, but she slid across the seat and looked out the window, as she was told.

Sure enough, a marching band led the sad group. Behind it rolled a grimly decorous hearse, bedecked in bobbing feather plumes. A Chinaman sat beside the impervious driver of the death carriage, flinging bits of white paper into the breeze. It billowed like snow against the bright blue sky and wafted down to earth again in slow motion.

“Why is he doing that?” Rachel whispered, frowning.

Joanna smiled sadly. “It looks odd, doesn't it—-all those thousands of papers flying in the air? He is trying to deceive the devil, Rachel; the idea is that the Evil One will be so busy picking up the mess that he will lose sight of the deceased and be unable to find him or her before that person is safe in the Celestial Home.”

Behind the hearse carriage came an assortment of carts and buckboards, brimming with wailing mourners in dark pajamalike clothes and pointed coolie hats.

“As they progress up Pike Street, toward Lakeview Cemetery,” Joanna explained, “they will turn many corners—another tactic to confuse the devil.”

Rachel was grimly amused. “It is assumed, then, that the devil is both neat and poor at directions,” she commented.

“Yes,” said Joanna, as the end of the odd procession came into sight.

The last vehicle was a wagon, overflowing with food of every sort; Rachel could see crates of live chickens, a whole roasted pig, and huge bags that probably contained rice.

“The food is for the spirits?”

“Yes,” confirmed Joanna. “Like the Indians, the Chinese believe that gifts should be left for those ancestors who will come to meet the departed and guide him homeward.”

“I think it's beautiful that they care so much,” said Rachel, as the driver shifted impatiently in the box, shaking the whole carriage.

Joanna nodded. “It is beautiful, Rachel. I find the Chinese fascinating. They've been sadly mistreated in this country, though. They were the darlings of labor for a long time, because they would work for such low wages. But when the railroads were completed, dearest ‘John' suddenly became a fiend. To this day, there is a law that he cannot own land or a house.”

Rachel clearly remembered the riots that had taken place in and around the lumber camps during the heat of the controversy. When she was twelve, and passing through Tacoma with her father, she had seen the Chinese being loaded into boxcars, like animals, to be taken away. In other places, like Seattle, Chinese people had been beaten and driven from their homes. No one seemed to know where these placid outcasts were supposed to go.

Once again, Rachel felt sad empathy for those who lived on the edges of acceptability, never really belonging anywhere, for those who tore papers and turned corners all their lives, trying to deceive the devil.

The carriage was moving again, but it soon came to another stop—a market where Joanna wanted to buy the items on a list Cook had given her.

Again, Rachel remained behind, but this time, she could not keep Griffin so easily from her mind.

He had said he loved her and had given her a token of that love to wear on her wrist. He might, by some miracle, even mean to marry her. And if he did, would she have his complete devotion, or would she merely be a replacement for the lost Athena?

In that event, Rachel would be as displaced as Chang or Fawn Nighthorse—even though she would live out the rest of her life under a sturdy roof, lacking nothing, she would have no home.

Rachel closed her eyes, suddenly missing her father more than ever.
Oh, Pa, where are you?
she thought.

Joanna closed gloved hands over Rachel's trembling ones, startling her. “I think today has been too much for you, Dear. I've got to get you home and into bed; if you suffer a relapse, John will have me shot!”

In spite of the tangle of painful feelings within her, Rachel looked upon her friend and smiled. “Why are you so good to me? Because Griffin brought me to you?”

Joanna shook her head and returned Rachel's smile. “I'll admit that John and I would probably never have known you if Griffin hadn't carried you to our door the other night, but we do, and we're beginning to love you very much.”

Rachel blushed slightly and lowered her head.

Joanna's voice was stern. “Do you find that so difficult to believe, Rachel? That someone would care about you without being forced to?”

Rachel did not know how to answer, so she remained silent.

Joanna laughed warmly. “Well, I'm not going to tell you all the reasons why John and Griffin and I think you're splendid. They might turn your head, and we can't have that, now, can we?”

But Rachel made no answer. Again, her fingers sought and found the significant little charm on her bracelet. Somehow its magic had waned; she couldn't help comparing herself with the resplendent Athena.

Athena was beautiful, almost certainly educated in fine schools, and, surely, sophisticated, too. And she must be adventurous, as well, to live so far from her family and her country.

Rachel knew that she, herself, was a pretty woman, but in no way could her looks be put into the same Olympian category as Athena's.

Despair swirled inside her like a numbing blizzard, there in the warmth of that third day of June. The other comparisons Rachel made were woefully like the first; she had virtually educated herself, and there were a great many gaps in the result.

Rather than being sophisticated, Rachel was, she felt sure, a bumpkin, completely ignorant of such graces as dancing and proper table manners and speech befitting a lady. And as for being adventurous—well, Rachel had had her share of that during all the years of traveling from one camp to another with
her father. She wanted nothing so badly as a home and a family of her very own.

She felt this last need more keenly than ever when the carriage came to a stop in front of the O'Riley's big, lovely house. They were kind—so very kind—but she did not belong here with them, any more than she had belonged in Miss Cunningham's boardinghouse, Tent Town, or the book-lined study in Griffin's home.

Indeed, she didn't really belong anywhere.

Alone, in the sunny, pleasant bedroom allotted to her, Rachel undressed. There was a fresh nightgown lying on the bed, a splendid creation of ivory silk edged in delicate lace, but Rachel could not bear the thought of wearing it. Surely, it belonged to Athena.

Suddenly, Rachel sank to the edge of her bed, rocking back and forth as a new realization washed over her in shattering waves. As the rose taffeta dress Jonas had given her was Athena's, so, undoubtedly, were all the other garments still stored at Miss Cunningham's.

Why would Jonas have Athena's clothes at his house when she had been Griffin's intended?

Rachel could not deal with the obvious answer to that question, so she thrust it aside. It was bad enough that she was Griffin's second choice, and that every stitch of clothing she owned had belonged to Athena first—as had Griffin.

Douglas Frazier felt as though he'd been submersed in something black and pounding and thick as paste. He heard few sounds, and those that drifted down to him were distorted, one indecipherable from another. For an indeterminate length of time, he thought he was dead.

But there was pain. Dreadful, ceaseless pain.

Douglas clung to that anguish and exalted in its meaning. He was alive.

Sounds were becoming clearer—voices, he heard voices,
and the occasional clang of metal against metal. And the dark fog surrounding him was not so pervasive now; it was losing its unbearable density, becoming something of a mist. Calmly, deliberately, Douglas Frazier began to struggle through that strange, shifting twilight, toward the real world.

•   •   •

Rachel McKinnon awakened that bright morning with the certainty that something dreadful was about to happen. June fourth. She considered the date and etched it on a wall of her mind.

The weather was wonderfully warm and sunny, though, and Rachel felt the returning tide of her strength in the muscles of her arms and legs, in the rising power of her spirit. Even though she missed the undemanding refuge of her illness in some ways, there was something inside her that would not turn away from the eternal scraps and skirmishes that were life.

With a certain alacrity, she took the bath that Joanna and Cook had prepared for her in a small room downstairs, and when she sat down to breakfast in the sunny kitchen, her damp, fragrant hair toweled and combed, she found that she had her usual impressive appetite.

Of course, she had no choice but to go on wearing Athena's clothes until she could have some made for herself, but she took that in stride. Rachel was a young woman skilled in making the best of things and going on—always going on.

When she had eaten, she borrowed one of Joanna's many books and ventured out into the garden, where the sun could dry her hair.

For a time, Rachel mused over the strange undercurrent of dread flowing beneath all her ordinary, practical actions. Surely, the recent upheavals in her heretofore unremarkable life would be enough to upset anyone, she reasoned.

But there was something more, though the gentle weather and the blue skies and the sweet, fragrant unfolding of Joanna's garden belied it. Something much more.

With a sigh, Rachel opened her book and began to read a scholarly account of life in ninth-century England. Between the turning of the pages, her fingers moved often to the miniature crosscut saw suspended from her bracelet.

•   •   •

Athena O'Riley Bordeau left the train, bag and baggage, in Tacoma. It was a rough, clamoring town, and she hated it, but,
somehow, she felt she needed the twenty mile steamboat ride to prepare herself for the inevitable unpleasantries awaiting her in Seattle. Besides, she'd been rattling along in that insufferable train for well over a week, ever since she'd gotten off the ship in New York, and she didn't think she could bear the jostling lurch of it another minute.

Long accustomed to the gaping stares of workingmen and the subtle glances of coolies, Athena ignored both as she arranged for her trunks to be carried aboard the sidewheel steamer,
Olympia
, and walked up the boarding ramp.

Within herself, Athena was no longer so sure of her charms, however, no longer given to the old assumption that she was infinitely superior to almost everyone she met.

At the starboard railing edging the deck, she stood very still, chin raised, and waited. The great wheel began to revolve, flinging a glistening, prismlike spray of water upward as it turned.

Seattle. Athena could not bring herself to look toward it, even though the
Olympia
was bearing her closer and closer with every passing minute.

What would Mama and Papa say when she appeared, unannounced, at their front door? Would they turn her away?

Athena closed her dark blue eyes against the thought They simply must welcome her; she had no money left and nowhere else to turn.

And what of Griffin? Her mother's rare letters left no doubt that he was still a friend of the family, still a frequent visitor to the gracious brick house high on the hill.

Athena sighed. That was Griffin. In this shifting, changeable world, he was that rare element, a constant. His behavior was as predictable as the course of the stars and planets in the heavens.

At one time, Athena had found this characteristic maddeningly dull. His stubborn refusal to obey his father's will and dispense with those eternal, sniveling patients of his had enraged her. Much that was Jonas's might have been his, and he had forsaken it all to battle the ills of people who simply did not matter.

Lately, however, this very quality, this implacable determination of Griffin's, had haunted her. She had felt drawn to him ever since the first humiliating evidences of André's infidelities had begun to surface.