Fletcher's Woman

by Linda Lael Miller

  “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.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  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 f
or 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.

  Athena closed her eyes and gripped the steamboat’s railing desperately. Griffin would never forgive her, never. And yet, somehow she must find a way to win him back.

  Perhaps because she could not function without it, some of Athena’s native self-confidence began to return. She was still one of the most beautiful women this miserable territory on the outskirts of nowhere had ever seen, she reminded herself. And Griffin’s need of her had been a consuming, fathomless one.

  Surely, by making an intelligent effort to stir those feelings in him again, she could win out over his fierce, boundless pride.

  Athena drew a deep breath and opened her eyes. Believing that all beauty centered in her, she took no notice of the primitive, indomitable splendor of the land and water and trees and mountains all around her. Instead, she saw the party she would persuade her mother to give, the fine new clothes she would buy, the renewed passion she would somehow ignite in Griffin Fletcher.

  The morning was almost gone when the Olympia docked in Seattle, and though Athena felt gritty and rumpled from the long journey, she felt hopeful, too. A bath, a change of clothes, maybe something to eat, and she would be her unconquerable self again.

  On the waterfront, as they had in New York and Paris, London and Rome, Athena’s silver blond hair and soul-jarring smile stood her in good stead. It was easy to secure a carriage, even in the modest rush, and to persuade the driver to hurry.

  Certain now of a warm welcome, Athena was anxious for the care and comfort of her mother, the grumbling devotion of her father. Like Griffin, they were constants, and while they were probably still vastly annoyed, their love for her was fundamental to their natures, unchangeable by even the most flagrant of scandals.

  Settled into the carriage seat, Athena smiled. They would be the same; Mama and Papa were always the same. Joanna, heiress to a vast fortune, would be busy with her eternal, boring charity work, unconcerned with the fact that life in San Francisco or New York was infinitely more exciting. John, the sweet, plodding darling, would still be treating his ungrateful, half-educated patients, never minding that his efforts seldom brought in anything tangible.

  Constants. Again, Athena smiled. Hadn’t she said it often herself, that Griffin Fletcher was so inflexible that he might as well have been carved out of granite? If he was, then the love he’d born her, the sweeping passion, was still there, inside him, in spite of his outrage and his wounded pride.

  After all, the love had been there first.

  In front of the stately brick house—only a cottage in comparison to the Parisian villa she had shared with André Bordeau—Athena paid the driver and then stood on the street for a moment, savoring the sturdy, practical beauty of her parents’ house.

  As the carriage rumbled away, its driver bent on securing her many trunks and satchels from the steamboat landing, Athena opened the gate and started up the walk.

  She was never certain what drew her attention to the garden lining the eastern wall of the house. Certainly, she heard no sound beyond the buzzing of bees and the early summer songs of the birds.

  No, it was a mystical pull of some sort—a feeling that tugged her off course and made her round the corner of the house and pass beneath the arbor of pink primroses to enter the sunny sanction of the garden.

  Athena’s first sight of the girl was alarming on some fundamental level, and worse, it was unaccountably painful.

  Head bent over an open book, the girl sat on a stone bench, her feet tucked beneath her. Her sable ebony hair streamed down, gleaming, over her back and shoulders, and curled in fetching little tendrils around her face. Her eyes, Athena noted with strange apprehension, were wide and thickly lashed and just the color of wild violets. There was a look of innocent wonder about her that undoubtedly enthralled unwary men, and her skin was as perfect as Athena’s own, if a little pallorous.

  Athena cleared her throat in a ladylike fashion and felt oddly reassured as the nymph looked up from her book, lavender eyes widening with unmistakable horror.

  “Athena?”

  Athena felt a sort of sweeping triumph, as though she had been challenged to some vital struggle and then emerged the winner. “You have me at a disadvantage,” she smiled, taking a seat on the stone bench facing the girl’s.

  “Rachel,” the snippet whispered miserably. “My name is Rachel McKinnon.”

  With a theatrical sigh, Athena removed her bonnet to reveal the full glory of her soft, platinum hair. Jonas had always said it was like moonlight trapped in a silver dish, her hair, not meant for the look or touch of ordinary men. Griffin, on the other hand, had not been so poetic; Athena doubted, even now, that he had ever really appreciated the distinctive shade of her hair.

  But this girl had. Her violet eyes were taking it in, and she looked stricken.

  Again, without knowing why, Athena felt a delicious sense of hard-won victory. “Do you work for Mama and Papa?” she asked, idly, even though her curiosity was a deep and wary one.

  A bright peach tint glowed suddenly in the too-pale, too-thin cheeks. “I am a guest,” Rachel said, with tremulous dignity.

  “I see,” replied Athena, settling back on the bench with another sigh, drawing her eyes over the girl’s soft amethyst morning gown. “That is, I believe, my dress.”

  The orchid eyes were steadfast and fierce upon Athena’s face. “Is it? Would you like me to take it off?”

  Athena smiled a patronizing, wounding little smile. “Of course I wouldn’t want to wear it—now.”

  Tears of outrage and pride glistened in the devastatingly beautiful eyes, gathered in the thick, dark lashes. But before Rachel could frame a retort, a third voice broke in with dry disapproval.

  “Athena, that was an unconscionable thing to say. You will apologize immediately.”

  Athena looked up, surprised, to see her mother standing at the back gate, watching her with eyes that had, since the beginning, s
een to much. “Mother!” she cried, a nervous little smile rising to her lips. She sprang from the bench, flung her arms around her mother, and babbled, “Oh, Mama, André was so terrible to me! He was so heartless and selfish.”

  Athena felt the usual cold distance between herself and this woman, even as they held each other.

  “Heartless and selfish,” Joanna repeated, thoughtfully. “Perhaps there is, after all, some justice in this wicked world.”

  Truly stunned, Athena drew back in her mother’s stiff embrace. “I know I was terrible, Mama,” she said, in a small, pleading voice that was not wholly false. “But you won’t turn me away, will you? André has divorced me, and I haven’t any money left, or any friends… .”

  But her mother’s weary blue eyes had moved to Rachel, and softened. “We’ll talk in private, Athena. And the dress Rachel is wearing is her own, not yours.”

  Athena had no choice but to nod apologetically.

  • • •

  Rachel remained in the garden for a long time after Athena and her mother had gone into the house, arm in arm. Even the premonition she’d had hadn’t prepared her for a disaster so sweeping as this one.

  Unable to continue reading, she thrust the book aside, pulled her knees up under her chin, and let the full scope of the situation come cascading down on her in a crushing torrent.

  She had seen the portrait and known that Athena was beautiful, but now she knew that the painter had not even begun to capture the splendor and grace of her. He had not caught the glow of her skin, the softness of her eyes, the incredible impact of her personality.

  Rachel thought of Griffin’s impending return to Seattle with almost unbearable dread, rather than the delight she had felt before her encounter with the woman who had almost become his wife.

  While it was possible that Athena had no lingering interest in him, it seemed improbable. He was, for all his shortcomings, not the kind of man a woman loved and then forgot about.