Read Fletcher's Woman for Free Online

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.
    â€œCan’t you make her quit hurtin’ like that, Doc?” Sam Harper whispered hoarsely, paling beneath the patchy brownand 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.
    â€œSoon?” she pleaded, biting back another scream.
    â€œSoon,” 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.
    â€œI 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 slippedfrom 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.
    â€œThis 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.
    â€œThe babe weren’t Sam’s,” the woman confessed, her feverish eyes fixed sightlessly on the ceiling. Her