It was a woman’s voice they heard. “Sister Blum, may I come in?”
Retha handed Abbigail the paddle and opened the door. “Of course, Catharina, we don’t stand on formality in this family. And call me Retha. Mother Retha, if you must.”
Nicholas’s Catharina. Abbigail’s heart pounded with feelings she could not exactly name. She wanted to hide, to gawk, to glare. But she couldn’t bring herself to look at the woman Nicholas had overturned his life for. She paddled furiously.
Tentative footsteps neared. “I fear I cannot find my… husband.”
The shy catch in Catharina’s voice softened Abbigail, and she said, turning, “He was last in the Square with his father and-”
But she broke off at the sight of the tall, slim, ethereal woman, a fresh blue ribbon under her chin proclaiming her newly married state. Her creamy dress, crisp clean apron, and starched white Haube; taken altogether, made her almost glow. On one arm she carried a basket overflowing with greens. “For you, Mother Retha,” she offered sweetly.
Retha took mounded greens, then smoothly introduced Catharina as the newest member of the family. “Our son Matthias’s lovely bride.”
Lovely? The woman was a vision. Abbigail’s heart pinched with jealousy. No wonder Nicholas had hurried home. Every Brother in Salem must be in love with such a celestial being. Worn out from her sleep less night and a tumultuous morning, Abbigail felt small and plain. Short and dull. Insignificant. Anything but feminine, lovable, desirable, all of which Catharina so splendidly was. Abbigail would never have hoped for Nicholas to notice her if she had seen his Catharina.
But Abbigail would not be rude, no matter how unwelcome this unexpected visitor. With practiced courtesy, she steeled herself for pleasantries.
Catharina’s mild gray eyes shone approval down on her. “Oh, I am so very pleased to meet you, Sister Till. And thank you, it sets my mind at ease that you saw him there. I must have missed him, coming from helping my mother.” Then she slipped into a chair at the table and joined Retha in front of the basket of autumn dock and cress and spinach. “They need to be picked over, and I will help.”
The woman Nicholas held dear was pure sunshine. They all fell to work, Retha’s and Catharina’s fingers flying as they picked over the fresh fall greens, Abbigail’s paddle slurping and sucking through the thickening butter. And they chatted, a cozy female confabulation that Abbigail so acutely missed at home. The swiftly passing hour bore out Catharina’s naturally sweet temperament, which expressed itself in a disarming enthusiasm for pumpkins and a dozen ways to cook or dry and store them.
After days of hateful thoughts about her, Abbigail felt petty and mean.
Then Catharina said, “I worried so about that dreadful hearing, my … husband’s first duty as an Elder. On such a topic. Twas so-I beg your pardon, Sister Till, for your father brought the charges, but to all who know Nicholas-’twas so outrageous.”
Abbigail could only nod, accepting Catharina’s mild rebuke of Georg Till. “Some ideas set like mortar in my father’s mind.”
“How did poor Nicholas fare?”
Poor Nicholas! Abbigail couldn’t like that word applied to a man she thought so singularly rich in strengths and virtues, and yet … surely a woman wouldn’t speak of a lover in such a condescending way. An ordinary Single Brother perhaps, one with whom she had a mere acquaintance.
Hope spiraled and then sank. Despite her denial of her betrothal at the hearing’s end, the world must now think her betrothed. Or so outrageously outspoken-so ungovemable-as to be unmarriageable. With those sobering thoughts in mind, she miserably recounted the hearing.
“You can trust Sister Catharina with the whole story, Sister Abbigail,” Retha prodded, a note of teasing in her voice.
“Do not ask that of me!” Abbigail had purposely skipped her scandalous proposal and her father’s false claim.
Retha smiled encouragement. “’Twas very noble of you.”
Catharina’s mild gray eyes glimmered with schoolgirl interest. “Pray tell, Sister Till. I am very good at keeping secrets.”
Abbigail could not tell her. But Retha did, omitting the complication of Abbigail’s supposed betrothal but touting her courageous stand in Nicholas’s defense. Embarrassment skittered down Abbigail’s neck.
Catharina pressed her hands together like a prayer. “Oh, bless you! What a fine sentiment! To say that you would marry Brother Nicholas and never count the cost. I could not have put it more persuasively myself. Not that I could … not that I would want to…” She bit her perfectly shaped lips in confusion. “I am already married. Now.”
Retha rescued her. “’Twas a generous avowal, Catharina, was it not?”
“Very much so. Very kind,” Catharina said promptly. “Of course, Brother Nicholas is innocent, but who ever stands up for him?”
“Who, indeed?” Nicholas’s voice resonated from the door into the parlor.
Abbigail’s stomach coiled with yearning. He was leaning casually against the doorjamb, a great hon surveying his pride as if he had a particular claim to each and every creature in the room. Not smiling, Abbigail noted, but not downcast. And yet inscrutable: Was he hiding hurt? Rejecting her? Or did he disapprove of her words at the hearing?
The wooden paddle slipped from her hand, clanging against the copper kettle’s rim. His presence flustered Catharina too. She stood, then sat and fidgeted.
“Have you eavesdropped long?” Retha chided indulgently.
“Long enough to agree with Sister Catharina that Sister Till’s defense of me was brave.”
No mere kitchen fire, Abbigail thought, would explain the blush that seared her cheeks when she heard his words of praise. She felt hopelessly exposed. Hopelessly compromised by her father’s lie. He had been obsessed with proving Nicholas’s guilt. Her illtimed defense had only undermined his character further.
Catharina stood again, nervously wiping her long elegant hands on her apron. Facing Nicholas, she looked slim as a widow and brittle as straw. came to seek my … to seek Brother … Matthias,” she said to her avowed admirer. “He is not here.”
Nicholas descended the half dozen stone stairs to the kitchen. His bearing bespoke the public demeanor Abbigail had admired so often in the store: a man at ease with himself who put others at their ease. But she could not read the strained, sober smile he gave Catharina.
“He went home to meet you, Sister, complaining I had made him late.”
“Oh!” Catharina said. From her, the simple expletive seemed almost a curse. “And now I am the late one. Oh!” And she fled the room.
Gone. Danke Himmel, Nicholas thought. He had not come here for Catharina. He had searched the town for Abbigail, reeling from her sacrifice of reputation, stunned by her belief in him. Marry him tomorrow, by the Lot or not. Without a moment’s hesitation. He had heard her words with a boy’s quick pride, a man’s gratitude, a lover’s awakening.
She wanted him. Perhaps she always had.
What did that say for him? Who had thought of her as a sister, treated her as nothing more than a friend. Who had trampled her feelings in the road like dirt. Then mere moments after she had said it, her father had announced her betrothal. His heart had not believed the man, but his head doubted. She had not actually denied it to him last night in her room. Had her father prevailed? Had she hid it to spare him? Abbigail betrothed, her special friendship lost-the very notions shook him to his core. This morning it had sounded briefly as if she loved him. He met her at the copper kettle, barely noticing the flames that licked around it or his stepmother’s discreet retreat from the room.
Even with Retha gone, he lowered his voice. “Your father still presses you to many …” he began, unsure how to express his doubt. His hope for her that she was free.
She drew herself up, offended. “Really, Nicholas! Do you think I have so little self-respect to marry a man I cannot abide?”
The blood that had pooled in his gut pumped through his veins again, and he stoo
d there grinning like an idiot.
Abbigail still glared. “Remind me not to save your skin the next time I have a chance to do so!”
“Ach, and as to that…” His thoughts returned to the loyal, reckless measure she had taken to defend him. In her place he would have done the same, but for her to take the risk appalled him. “You defied my wishes. ‘Twas needless to try to clear my wretched name.”
“Wretched, indeed. Have you no sense of your indebtedness?” In a little fury, she turned and poked the paddle’s handle in his chest. Brown butter sheeted down the paddle, landing in the simmering sauce in little plops. “You could at least be grateful.”
He was. She had been splendid on his behalf. She was splendid now. His voice, to his surprise, came from a deep new place inside his chest. “I am profoundly grateful, Abbigail,” he said, dropping all propriety. “But you gave me your word.”
“I said naught about our kisses,” she countered, still stubborn.
He could not help but be amused, struck by her stalwart nature. “Or your tears. But some would say you cheated on your promise.” Engaging her gaze, he took the handle in his fist, lifted it off his chest, and plunged the paddle back into the copper kettle, unable to repress a smile.
Slowly the corners of her mouth crooked up. “I never cheat, Brother Blum. Any more than you steal,” she said briskly, her large brown eyes bright with the frankness that had impressed him from the first.
She stirred the sauce, bubbles bursting as it thickened. He expelled a pent-up breath, distracted by the thought of the only thing he wanted: her sweet taste captured in an endless kiss. Which he had wanted since the day he saw her perched on the stool in her father’s store, dusting shelves.
There, he had admitted it to himself. This lust had been a long time simmering.
But it had not been lust. Except in so far as a man could count it lust when he yearned for the woman who fulfilled his dreams. A helpmeet, minds attuned, his heart’s desire. The revelation rocked him.
He loved Abbigail. He braced against the table’s edge, astounded by the sweep of his sudden, belated vision.
How blind he had been, chasing after gentie Catharina, rushing back to save her, when he had needed saving. When he had simply needed Abbigail: the pretty precision of her fine features in evening lantern light, the deceptive fragility of her fine-boned hand tucked under his arm, the trim waist his hands had only once encircled.
But more, her smart retorts, her quick understanding, her unflinching courage.
Irony of ironies, he had lost the woman he did not want and abandoned the one he loved-to a father and an erstwhile suitor heedless of her virtues and her needs. But who controlled her. Gott im Himmel he had well and truly lost her. Still he wanted to seal his new awareness with one of her sweet kisses. He felt her gaze upon him, looked, and saw her quizzing brow.
“Are you still with us, Brother Blum?” she teased, shopkeeper to indolent apprentice. “’Tis widely rumored Retha Blum puts all idle hands to useful tasks.”
Caught daydreaming. His face burned. As if Abbigail could read his thoughts. He gently freed her fingers from the paddle and brought them to his mouth.
“Not idle now,” he said, his voice husky beyond control as his hps brushed her sticky knuckles, apple sweet and warm from work. For an instant her hand resisted his, then surrendered. The memory of every kiss they’d shared exploded in him, ricocheting through him, wanton as firecrackers shot off all at once. Into his limbs, into his extremities, deep into his lonely loins.
Reality doused him. He could not ask that the Lot be drawn for them. He stood accused, his innocence unproved, unproveable. He was indebted, his debts outstanding. His life was unsettled, his only work a trade that bored him to tears. No right-thinking man would come to a woman in such a state.
“I can never repay you.” The words thickened in his throat. He kissed her knuckles one last time and freed her hand.
Her brows knotted as if she did not understand his words-or his retreat. “You owe me naught, Nicholas,” she whispered.
A masculine cough, carefully loud, sounded from the doorway to the dining room. Nicholas rose and saw his father, joining the family for the midday meal. His stepmother, returning, broke the awkward silence.
“Yes, tell us, Nicky, what the Elders decided this morning.”
Buoyed by Abbigail’s touch, Nicholas tried for lightness. “They concluded that I am neither innocent nor guilty, consigning me to limbo.”
“Don’t joke, Nicky!” Retha said.
His father propped against the hearth, his hand worrying the back of his neck. “We are to wait for word from one more witness.”
Abbigail’s pretty eyebrows drew down into a puzzled scowl. She had left before the Board decided. “But there is no other witness. Especially as there was no crime.”
“Brother Huber might shed some light, they think,” Nicholas said, his deep distaste for the man sticking in his throat.
“Brother Huber!” Abbigail said. “Exchanging letters takes a month, at least.”
“Not letters,” Nicholas corrected. “They want him here.”
Abbigail made an inarticulate sound of disgust.
“’Tis good news,” Nicholas insisted. “They had slim evidence to begin with, and he will bring no more.”
“He twists things, Nicholas.”
He purely loved it when she forgot form and called him by his given name. For that and other reasons, his sanguine nature told him his case with her, if no one else, was not hopeless. “He cannot succeed where your father failed.”
“Who is Brother Huber?” Retha asked, setting out redware plates for the midday meal.
“My father’s shop assistant, the one who wants to marry me,” Abbigail answered. “He knows worse than nothing. He has practically avowed an enmity for Brother Nicholas.”
“On what grounds, if I may ask?” Jacob Blum inquired, his tone respectful, Nicholas noted thankfully.
Abbigail lifted her hands. “On the grounds that Nicholas is better than he with stock and trade and customers and travel.”
And with you, Nicholas realized. Nothing must have vexed the dapper store clerk more than the easy converse he and Abbigail had found so quickly.
“He and Brother Schopp could make a damning case against you, Nicholas,” his father added.
Nicholas shrugged. “They may well try.”
Abbigail looked to his father. “I know the cause of Brother Huber’s spite. But why is Brother Schopp so prejudiced against your son?”
Jacob Blum regarded her steadily. “’Twas on his watch that Nicholas ran away to join the Continental Army. He almost lost his position as schoolmaster, though not at our behest. He let his guard down lecturing, I believe, on … what was it, son?”
“History,” Nicholas supplied. “Brother Schopp at his most pedantic. The brilliant Greeks and noble Romans. ‘Twas child’s play to slip away that day.” Yet Nicholas felt he had to set the record straight. “I tormented him with boyish pranks.”
His father rolled his eyes. “No doubt you did! I shall not ask what.”
Retha finished setting the table, then came to claim her husband’s hand. “What do we do now, my dear?”
“We wait,” his father said. “Two weeks for him to receive our letter, two weeks for him to come.”
Waiting would be torture, Nicholas knew. Scandal always sparked the Brethren’s interest. His guilt or innocence would be argued in the fields, the shops, the Saal, their homes. With the cloud of suspicion hanging over him, he couldn’t relish the wait for Huber to arrive. But he would handle it with such grace as he could muster. Abbigad would not see him dinch.
The twins arrived, and everyone sat and partook of the midday meal without another word of the morning’s events or the ordeal to come.
Before leaving, he managed another smile for Abbigail. “I return to my shop to work off those pesky debts.”
“Are they so very heavy, then, Nicholas?” she as
ked.
“Less heavy than the risk you took for me.”
She shook her head, turning away his compliment, turning him away.
“’Twill take hard work to clear them,” he continued, thinking that it would take months-years-for him to undo the mess he’d made. For him to pursue the Lot. For him to have a family of his own. For him to claim the tiny tyrant who had won his heart. Years.
If he had not already lost her.
24
Crossing the Square that afternoon with a light meal for her father, Abbigail ran an alarming gauntlet to the Tavern. Curious women gawked and gaped, and disconcerted men averted their gazes, thinking, she imagined, That scandalous Single Sister, her good name ruined!
She squared her shoulders and walked on, her reputation falling in pieces around her, the worst of her old fears realized. She had made herself an object of muffled chatter and callous curiosity. What was Nicholas Blum to her? they must wonder.
What, indeed? she wondered herself. After the midday meal he had led his sisters in a round of raucous, rollicking play before returning them to school, one on either hand. Now more than ever, she despaired of such a family, of such a father for the children she longed for. For even though her skin had sizzled when he kissed her hand, he had shown her only kindness.
At the Tavern, she tightened her neckerchief around her throat and braved the public scene. Outsiders here seemed cruder than at home. Back-country rabble, who used to be much worse! Retha had said cheerfully, urging her to go in unafraid. Abbigad hurried up a sturdy flight of stairs to her father’s room. It faced the street, so he could look out. Under any other circumstances, he had told her, he would feel at home in Salem. It reminded him of a smaller, sleepier Bethlehem, when her mother was still alive.
Abbigail paused outside his door, checking her litde pail of food, thinking she had brought too much. Inside, Sister Benigna scolded, “Think what you’re doing to your only daughter, Georg! Insisting she marry that wretched man! You did not used to be an imbecile.”
His Stolen Bride Page 25