Cheryl Reavis

by The Bartered Bride

  “Do it, John!” he called back.

  “You be careful!”

  Frederich began to run, waving his hand to show that hehad heard the admonishment, and he kept running, deep into the woods toward the Holt farm. He stayed off the path, cutting through the underbrush and the brambles to keep out of sight. The briars caught his hands and face as he rushed headlong into the thickets. He had to get to her. He had to tell her—

  Tell her what? he thought. He could hear his heart pounding in his ears and his chest began to burn with the exertion.

  I believe you?

  No. He couldn’t tell her that, because he didn’t believe her. He knew what Eli was capable of doing and he had seen the letter.

  I don’t believe you, Caroline.

  I don’t believe you!

  And God help me, I want you anyway…

  As he reached the edge of the woods, he stopped running, creeping forward, tree to tree to stay out of sight. There was no one about the Holt place that he could see. He moved farther to the right. The house had small-paned nine-over-nine windows. It was difficult to see inside. He couldn’t detect any movement at any of them.

  He started violently at a noise behind him, but it was only one of the pigs Caroline had set loose to graze on the hickory nuts that were plentiful on Avery’s land.

  He stood for a moment, impatient and desperate. He had no more time. None. With a faint curse, he stepped forward, walking quickly across the rough ground and into the yard. He felt no sense of alarm until he had nearly reached the porch. The back door was ajar and through it he could just see Caroline sitting on a kitchen chair. When he was about to call out to her, she abruptly stood up, only to sit down again—hard. Too late, he realized that she hadn’t done so by choice. The first soldier stepped out from the side of the house to his left, pistol drawn. Then two more from the barn. And finally, the officer came out onto the porch, dragging Caroline with him. She was afraid, and Frederich instinctively took a step forward.

  “Stay where you are!” the officer said, his revolver aimed at Frederich’s head.

  “Don’t hurt her,” he said. “She has done nothing—”

  “Except perjure herself on your behalf. Such loyalty is to be admired, I suppose, even if it is wasted. Keep your hands where I can see them—Toby, you know what to do!”

  The soldier, Toby, rushed forward, eager to show that he did indeed understand his duty. He emptied Frederich’s pockets on the ground, then brought his hands behind his back and tied them skillfully. He left a long end and pulled Frederich over to the porch with it, making him sit down on the edge while he secured him to the porch post. Frederich’s eyes met Caroline’s briefly; she was visibly trembling.

  “Take her inside,” Frederich said. “She’s cold—”

  “You don’t give orders here, Dutchman!” the officer said, but he thrust her aside and back into the kitchen. She didn’t stay, hovering just behind the officer, coming as close as she dared.

  “What’s going to happen—?” she tried to ask.

  “She has nothing to do with this,” Frederich said again.

  “Then she has no need to worry,” the officer said. “You, on the other hand, have a great deal to answer for.”

  “What are you going to do with him?” Caroline cried.

  “Go back inside!” the officer said loudly. “Now! Toby— get her out of the way!”

  Toby stepped forward, but he was not nearly so certain of his ability to handle a distraught woman. And she was that, Frederich realized. But was she worried for herself or for him? His eyes met hers again. She didn’t look away. He was overwhelmed suddenly by the memory of last night. He remembered the taste of her and the feel of her around him. How could she have lain with him, loved him with such abandon if she hadn’t meant it?

  He abruptly looked away.

  “I have the authority to hang deserters.” the officer said.

  “Then you’d better be sure that is what I am,” Frederich answered.

  They stared at each other.

  “You watch him,” the officer said to this men. He turned and went back inside, taking Caroline and Toby with him. Frederich could hear her say something as the door closed, but he couldn’t understand the words. In frustration he abruptly pulled hard against the porch post.

  “Hey!” one of the nearest soldiers yelled. “You behave yourself now, Fritz! You ain’t getting loose and you ain’t going nowhere—except maybe the prison in town, so you might as well situate yourself right where you are and save yourself some trouble.”

  Frederich “situated” himself, but it took all his self-control to do it. Every now and then he could see Caroline walk past the window, but he couldn’t tell what she was doing.

  Toby came back outside, standing at several different places on the porch until he found one to his liking. He’s just a boy, Frederich thought. Like William. Like thousands of others. He glanced up at him several times; each time the boy was staring at him.

  “That your wife in there?” Toby asked finally.

  Frederich didn’t answer him.

  “She’s…pretty, ain’t she? I think she’s real pretty,” he offered next. “And she sure is worried about you. How long you been married?”

  “Not…long,” Frederich said after a time, because the boy was so earnest and so like William when he needed to talk.

  Toby grinned. “That right? I reckoned that you was still a bridegroom—ain’t nobody else would do something this crazy. I’m wanting to get married myself—soon as I can find somebody that’ll have me.”

  Frederich smiled at this irrepressible boy in spite of himself, in spite of the predicament he was in. But his amusement died quickly, fading into a grim desperation he couldn’t hide.

  “You had anything to eat?” Toby asked him.

  Once again, Frederich didn’t answer him, but the boy was undeterred.

  “Well, it won’t hurt to ask if I can feed you,” he said, opening the back door and stepping inside.

  Toby was gone a long time. Frederich sat there, his hands numb from the cold and the too tight rope around his wrists. He kept trying to form some plan, but his mind fretted over his not having cut enough wood and not having celebrated Lise’s birthday. He was caught, and he should be regretting his impulse to see Caroline one last time.

  No, he decided. Whatever happened, he regretted nothing, not the marriage, not last night. Nothing.

  Caroline.

  The door abruptly opened, and she came out. She carried a red-checked cloth with something in it—potatoes, hot potatoes that steamed in the cold air. She came quickly down the steps and stood on the ground beside him.

  “He said I can give you these—they’re too hot,” she said, glancing at the door.

  Too hot and his hands were tied.

  She opened the cloth more to let the potatoes cool faster.

  “He wants me to ask him to untie you,” she whispered. “I’m not going to do it.” She let her eyes meet his.

  He nodded his understanding. It would give this officer great pleasure to deny her such a favor.

  She began to break apart one of the potatoes. The steam rose. He could smell it and his stomach rumbled with hunger. He could smell the soft woman scent that was her.

  My wife, he thought. Mine.

  “He’s going through your gear,” she said, feeding him a piece of potato and then another. Her fingers touched his lips and quickly withdrew. “He’s read the letter of commendation—from the Sharpsburg battle. You didn’t tell anyone—”

  “There was nothing to tell. I was trained for the military. The training will take a soldier where he needs to go without his effort. There is nothing to commend in that.”

  “William said you kept him alive—and Avery.”

  He didn’t comment. “More…” he said, nodding toward the potatoes, because he was hungrier than he realized and because he might never be this close to her again.

  She fed him another portio
n, and another, and she kept glancing at the door and at Toby who paced around the porch, obviously trying to hear.

  “What’s going to happen?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know. Caroline, listen to me—”

  She looked at him.

  “If I’ve given you a child—”

  “No,” she said sharply. “I’ve been trapped by that once. We both have. I won’t let it happen again.”

  “What do you mean?” he said too loudly, causing Toby to step closer. “You wouldn’t try to…” He stopped because she looked so stricken—as if he had physically hurt her.

  “I mean it’s over,” she said. “I’m giving this dying marriage its coup de grace, and whatever comes of last night is no concern of yours.”

  “You would go to Eli anyway? Even if—”

  “There is no going to Eli!” she whispered fiercely. “How can I make you understand? There is no going to Eli!” She bowed her head for a moment, then looked up at him and gave a heavy sigh. “It doesn’t matter. I just want you to answer me one thing. Why did you marry me in the first place? Tell me that. Why?”

  Her eyes searched his. He waited a long time to answer.

  “I don’t know,” he said truthfully, because there was no one reason he could name but a thousand he couldn’t. He had married her because at the time he had needed to. It was as simple as that and as complex.

  “I married you because I thought I was supposed to suffer for my sin,” she said bluntly. “And how well you have provided that.”

  “Mein Gott, you are a sharp-tongued woman!”

  “If I am, it’s because men like you and Avery have made me so.”

  “I don’t know what you expect from me!”

  “I expect you to believe me!”

  “How can I?” he said. “How-can I?”

  “Because you have enough trust in me to do it. For no other reason than that, Frederich.”

  He stared at her, and she shook her head.

  “I thought we had come so far, you and I—from that terrible wedding ceremony to last night when we were—" She broke off and looked away. “I was wrong,” she said, looking at him. “Nothing has changed. You still look at me in that way and I finally understand what it means. You don’t see me. You only see Ann. If it was revenge on her you wanted, you have it—only she can’t feel it. I feel the hurt, not her—”

  He hadn’t realized she was about to cry, but the tears suddenly spilled down her cheeks. She stood there, her face completely impassive in spite of the tears, and she folded the rest of the potatoes inside the red-checked cloth and stuffed it into his coat pocket. Then she stepped away from him.

  “Caroline…” he said, forgetting that he was tied. The rope brought him up sharply. “You ask too much of me!" he said, still straining against his bonds.

  She turned to face him. “I ask nothing. I’m worth having, Frederich. Sinful as I have been, I’m worth having! And I don’t want the kind of marriage we’ve made.”

  He looked around at the sound of horses—five or six Confederate soldiers coming up the road that led to the house. A foraging wagon followed along behind them. Toby immediately summoned the officer, then came to untie Frederich from the post.

  “You never should have come home!” Caroline whispered, her mouth trembling.

  No, he thought. I shouldn’t have. Then he might have lived for a time ignorant of yet another betrayal at the hands of a Holt.

  He looked at her, trying to take in everything about her. If he had not come, he would have been ignorant of what it meant to finally be her husband.

  Toby was dragging him off the porch and pushing him along toward the wagon. Caroline stood nearby, her arms folded over her breasts.

  “Whatever happens—if they kill me or not—if the war kills me or not—you are done with us?” he managed to ask her in passing.

  “Yes,” she said, her eyes locked with his, her beautiful, still crying eyes. “There is no ‘us’ Frederich. I have no place—I want no place—in this thing between you and Eli and Ann.”

  Toby gave him no time to say anything else and shoved him on. He looked over his shoulder to see her one last time.

  Yes, he thought. He was foolish enough to love her, but how fortunate he was to have never said so.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Please…

  She began and ended every day with that one-word prayer, but if she had had to say exactly what she was petitioning for, she would have been hard-pressed to do so.

  Please keep Frederich safe?

  Please don’t let me be pregnant?

  Please let me have Frederich’s child?

  She stayed in the Holt house, desperate for some word of what had happened to him. Johann Rial had been to the garrison in town several times and had learned nothing. If Frederich had been imprisoned there, his name was not on any roster. If he had been sent to Castle Thunder in Richmond, no one would say. Whatever the trouble between her and Frederich, she wanted no harm to come to him. She even tried to convince herself that imprisonment might be safer for him than the battlefield. But she kept remembering the small notice in the newspaper about the execution of a deserter from the 18th Virginia Battalion in Richmond. She even remembered his name—Daniel Kennedy.

  She constantly looked for some task to do to keep from worrying, because the reminders of Frederich here were far more disturbing than they would have been in the Graeber house. There was no place she could turn without reliving some painful event, and sleeping in the bed they had shared offered its own exquisite torture. Sometimes she dreamed of lying in his arms again, with no anger between them and all the time in the world. Sometimes she woke in a terrible nightmare, afraid and lost and unable to find him. She dreaded the arrival of any letters from William or Avery. They would soon learn of her estrangement from Frederich—either from the other men in the company or from Beata. She didn’t worry about Avery’s reaction—his only concern would be whether she had jeopardized his ownership of the acre of land with the spring. It was William she worried about. William loved her and believed the best of her, regardless of whether she deserved it. She couldn’t bear for him to be told this terrible thing about her and Eli. And if she was thankful for anything it was that he didn’t know about Ann.

  She harbored no illusions about the reality of her situation. It was no wonder that she had nightmares. She was utterly alone. Beata had cut her off completely from the children, sending her belongings to the Holt house via Johann almost immediately. And the worst of it was the certain knowledge that she, the proud, town-educated and once proper Caroline Holt, had meant even less to Frederich Graeber than she had to the indifferent, lecherous schoolmaster. The confederate officer had threatened her with arrest for aiding an army deserter, husband or no. Perhaps she would have been better off it he had done so and locked her away in a place that had no painful memories.

  In spite of Johann’s reassurances that he spoke to the children regularly, she missed them both terribly. One afternoon she walked in the cold air almost to the edge of Graeber land, close enough to see the house through the bare trees, hoping for some glimpse of them, however brief. But she saw no one, and as she turned to go, she heard the C scale being diligently practiced on the parlor piano, over and over, interrupted for a time by some equally diligent banging.

  Mary Louise and Lise, she thought, giving a half smile. What Ann’s children lacked in expertise they made up for in enthusiasm. She missed them so! But at least Beata was carrying on some kind of normal routine for them. Caroline had no idea what the girls might have been told about their father, and what they had been told about their Aunt Caroline, she didn’t even want to consider. It was better that she hadn’t seen them, she thought as she walked home. Better that than to provoke Beata into another one of her self-righteous fits. There was still enough of the Holt pride left, however, to let her imagine herself knocking on the Graeber back door and challenging Beata to do her worst.

  But B
eata had already done her worst and there was no help for it. None. Caroline kept thinking about Eli’s letter as she walked along. She had read it again and again without enlightenment. She accepted that the promise Eli mentioned must have been to Ann—but why had the letter come now? That, she didn’t understand.

  Johann Rial was waiting for her when she finally reached the house, and once again, his surprise arrival made her expect the worse. Johann had no guile, and she had only to look into his eyes to know if the news he brought was bad, but she was walking into the afternoon sun and she could barely see him.

  “Have you found him, Johann?” she asked, immediately asking the question that haunted her night and day to keep from prolonging her anxiety.

  “Not Frederich, no,” he said. “But I have found Eli.”

  She stepped up on the porch, but she made no comment.

  “I have been sent word that he’s with his—and Frederich’s—Pennsylvania relatives.”

  “Word from whom?”

  “From a German clergyman in the area.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “Eli wants to come back here, Caroline,” Johann added quietly, and she looked at him in alarm.

  “I have answered that that would be most unwise—because of the conscription—as a landowner he’s bound to be taken. And because of the position he has put you in.”

  She gave a quiet sigh and looked out across the fields toward the Graeber place.

  “You have nothing to say about this, Caroline,” he said after a time.

  “Beata could use his help,” she said, still looking away.

  “She wouldn’t have his help for long—just until the next conscription detail—if indeed she’d allow him to return. He is a sinner in Beata’s eyes.”

  “A sinner who owns half the land,” Caroline said simply.

  “Yes,” Johann agreed. “There is that.”

  “Now that you know where he is, I want you to send his money back to him.”

  “You may have need of it.”

  “I don’t want to ever have to use Eli Graeber’s money. And I won’t—if it’s not here.”

  “I was thinking that you might need it for Frederich. If it turns out that he is in prison—here—or elsewhere. You may need a bribe to see him.”