If only she knew how.
Matthias sat down at the table and waited civilly to be served, allowing her this wifely office, if not her duty in his bed. She put out stew and ale, then sat across from him, marshaling her spirits. She yearned for the shy and gentle Single Brother, the ardent, thoughtful suitor who had brought her flowers in the barn the day before their wedding.
She saw precious few signs of him.
Finishing, he aligned his spoon beside his bowl and said gravely, “I cannot touch the woman my brother loves.”
Well. She caught her breath. He hadn’t spoken of their union since their wedding night. Should she be dismayed or heartened by his introducing the topic now?
“Not loves. Loved, if that. I am your wife, Matthias.”
Matthias grunted. She studied his face, handsome despite the trouble that shadowed his eyes and crimped the comers of his mouth. A sensuous mouth that had kissed her, once, with passion. His long hands lay on the table, elegant and sensitive, tinted brown today.
Now he would not even touch her, no matter what she tried.
A week of mortification made her bold. She reached across. “Your wife,” she repeated softry.
He pulled away. “But you love—loved-each other.”
He sounded more defeated than angry, she noted with a ray of hope. “Your brother never loved me as I truly weis.”
He looked at her without emotion and spoke with studied neutrality. “And who were you then, Sister Catharina?”
“A girl, Brother Matthias. An impressionable, innocent girl,” she repeated. Perhaps hope had been precipitate, but she clung to her purpose and stood up for herself. A lifetime of nothing shared but quiet meals and polite words was intolerable, no matter how handsome and courteous he was or how perfectly she carried out her duties.
Duties which included tossing out the scraps before sitting down to knit into the night while he read his books.
With relief she stepped out into the damp evening and crossed her small dirt yard to the edge of the abandoned garden. This past year the cabin had been untenanted and its garden untilled. Such women’s work was hard and unrewarding, and spring would bring much labor to ready the fallow ground for planting. Labor she had foolishly imagined with new life in her.
She flung the peelings wildly before noticing that her little plot had changed. Through the gathering darkness she peered at it, confused. From the neighbors’ windows, lamplight usually reflected on skeletal cornstalks never cleared.
Usually. All that was gone. She sank to her knees and patted the soil with her hands. Freshly dug, loamy soil, settling in for winter, ready for the spring.
Matthias must have tilled her garden, yesterday, before the rain, while she was helping at her mother’s. Hiding there from him and their sad little cabin, if she told herself the truth. And he, her tad silent husband, had given her this gift, taken on her chores, a pledge-despite his anger and his doubt-that he too looked toward their future.
27
Jacob Blum stalked back into the spacious parlor, his massive presence shrinking the room. Looking up, Abbigail dropped the doll she was repairing in her lap.
No Nicholas.
Misery lashed her. He had never seemed to be a man to run, but he had left in a white heat of anger. Cunningly, convincingly framed. But how to prove it when she could not accurately remember where he or she or anyone had been that night? She had been in and out, directing Nicholas to put the stock in its proper places, her mind on the glory of their kiss and the pain of his devastating revelation. Huber had been … on the wagon, in the cellar, in the office, alone scarcely a moment as best she could recall.
Pious, plotting ferret. The thought of him sitting in the Blums’ parlor accusing Nicholas clumped in her stomach like cold porridge. But she had to admit that, given how the hearing had gone against Nicholas, Huber might appear to all but her to be a righteous man.
Grim-faced, Jacob Blum acknowledged her briefly then strode across the room to his wife. He muttered a few private words to her and led her to the kitchen. Plainly he felt this setback was none of Abbigail’s affair. Or, despite her championship of Nicholas last week, they now lumped her with her father.
But it was her affair. Her hands shook over the abandoned doll. Nicholas had her heart, and what happened to him as good as happened to her. She would stand by him unto Judgment, but she had no say, no proper connection to him. Only her defense of him linked them in any public forum. They were not one in legal fact. She resumed her mending with a purpose, hiding concern behind industry.
And discovering in a new and terrible way the isolation of a Single Sister far from home, unattached and unacknowledged. She had to leave the Blums, her position now untenable. They could not want her in their private sanctum after she and her father had brought such trouble to it. She finished the doll, set it on a chair with its companion, then marched into the kitchen to face the parents of the man she loved.
Apparently unaware of her, Retha and her massive husband sat talking in hushed tones, holding hands across a comer of the table. Trust and confidence flowed between them, even more evident in troubled than in tranquil times. What consolation they afforded one another. Husband to honored wife, wife to constant husband. The intimate sight moved Abbigail almost to tears of admiration and of envy. She felt so alone.
Jacob Blum saw her and gestured her to join them. “My apologies, Sister Till. I scarce knew what to say with the watches found.”
His admission thawed a little of her icy isolation. “I feared we would find them.” She walked closer but could not bring herself to sit.
He gave her a quizzing look. “You suspected him?”
“No, never,” she said emphatically. “The Nicholas I know would not have taken them.”
“No, he would not.” Then Jacob Blum gave a heavy sign. “But his capers have taken us to the very gallows more than once. I cannot see our way past this.”
Retha moved her hand over his. “Jacob, he denies it.”
“’Tis one thing to deny he did it. ‘Twill be another altogether to prove that he did not.” Sadness marked the lines of Jacob Blum’s handsome face, a face so like the son he worried over that Abbigail had to tum away.
In the parlor after dinner, Abbigail sought Retha’s soft, troubled gaze. “I can stay with you no longer.”
“The fault is not yours, Sister Till,” Jacob Blum said.
“The fault is Brother Huber’s … and my father’s.” She turned again to Retha, Jacob’s pain too sharp to watch. “Grateful as I am for your hospitality, I cannot stay here in the face of this. ‘Tis a gross imposition to ask you to extend that hospitality any longer.”
“No need to go tonight, dear,” Retha said kindly. “Everyone is exhausted. Even on the morrow, I know of no household with an empty bed.”
“But…” Abbigail wanted to protest. Nicholas needed their support, not her. They should not worry if her pillow were a rock. “As you wish,” she conceded.
Bone-tired, she trudged up the stairs to her room and lit her little lantern off a low tallow lamp. A week ago, Nicholas had come and left before dawn, but she still felt him here, charging the room with his vitality, bringing to life her spinsterish heart, her celibate flesh. Jacob and Retha Blum’s intimate whispers floated down the hall as they retired. Her heart ached for like intimacy with Nicholas. She longed to talk with him, comfort him, plan a way to clear him of the deed he had not done.
Abbigail sank onto the edge of her bed, her arms clamped tight around her frustration. Her lack. Without Nicholas, she felt partial, unfinished, unfulfilled. He had cracked the shell she’d formed around her heart and made her laugh. He had broken down her dutiful defenses and brought her a taste of joy He had given her wings, a chance for a fledgling’s flight.
If she did nothing to exonerate him, she would return to Bethlehem disgraced in her own conscience. Somehow she and Nicholas must prove Huber’s guilt. Merely to accuse him would not be enough. They needed
evidence.
Huber had presented testimonials from other Brethren, so her father had not delved into his past. But perhaps there was some deeper, darker side to him, some sin committed before he joined the Brethren. Who would know? The Brethren proceeded largely on trust and relied on intuition. Christian Huber had learned their liturgies and embraced their catechism with pious and convincing zeal.
She could do nothing here tonight, she thought, too tired to undress. The damp autumn chill seeped into her lonely bones. She pulled a small quilt over her shoulders, chafing over Nicholas’s troubles. Downstairs the clock chimed three times-three quarters of an hour past something-but she had lost track of the hour. Gradually her plan formed.
She would go to him now while the whole town lay asleep. She padded softly to the window and peered out. Nicholas had gotten in this way. Could she get out? The gentle slope of the roof was not so daunting. She opened the window slowly in order not to risk betraying squeaks or creaks. Shedding the quilt, she slipped over the sill and tiptoed across the roof, pulse pounding in her throat. Outside, the rain had stopped and winds had blown the clouds away. A full moon lit her way.
One foot in front of the other, one step at a time, carefully crossing the roof s tiles, feeling her way with her toes to its very edge. She looked down. The tops of her thighs cringed with a primitive fear of heights, and her stomach heaved. Could she leave the slippery security of the roof to … climb a tree? She had never done such a thing in her sheltered life.
She steadied herself against the rough bark of an overreaching limb. The great oak’s dark and dying leaves still clung to it, slapping each other wetly in an idle evening breeze. She tested her weight against the limb but couldn’t bend it low enough to mount. The trunk was too great to scale. Nicholas had done it, but his great bulk misled her. The tree fit him, not her.
Chicken-hearted coward! she upbraided herself. What use was she to him?
She slunk back across the heavy tiles, regained her room, and closed the window, shivering more from defeat than from her unaccustomed daring.
But she had to see him. She waited in her rocker, thinking what to do. A tomblike silence filled the house. Then a child cried out, one of the twins. Footsteps padded down the hall, and a feminine voice murmured comfort. After a while footsteps began again, a latch snicked softly, and then silence.
Abbigail could simply take the safer route, she realized now, down the steps and out the parlor door onto the street. She smiled wryly. She had just enough courage to do that. Gathering the quilt about her shoulders, she stole down the hall, seeing her way by moonlight.
In the street, the shadows of the trees were as clear as afternoon. The sky was high and black, the stars dimmed by the brilliant disk half risen in the sky.
Never in her life had she risked such an escapade. The freedom of the night thrilled her even as she kept a watchful eye. To get to Nicholas’s shop, she would be traveling toward Samuel Ernst. A few minutes earlier, the night watchman had sounded the hour from the other side of town. Ten o’clock? Eleven? She hurried ahead, clutching the quilt tightly over her bosom, darting into alleyways between the houses to avoid being seen.
Down the street, moonlight glinted off a tin coffeepot, the sign of Nicholas’s shop. She paused, her hand on the latch to his door. Hearing an almost human grunt, she stiffened. A cat, she told herself, or raccoon. Next she heard a ping and then a thunk. More of the endless fall of acorns and hickory nuts that had bombarded roofs for weeks.
Now, coward! She thought, prodding herself to dip the latch. Nicholas needed her. He deserved the selfsame comfort Retha brought his father.
And more. Abbigail yearned to bring Nicholas her love, her touch-her body, if he’d have it. And just that simply, she sloughed off the remnants of her reputation, cherished and preserved at the expense of some true inner self. She no longer needed it, or the regard it earned her. It bound her to endless, thankless duty: to hard-boiled eggs, hot compresses, bland apple butter. To piles of invoices and endless scrip.
No longer. No more praying for forbearance, fortitude, restraint. She dipped the latch-mentally molting the worn-out feathers of righteousness and respect-and cast her lot in with the man she loved.
Whether or not he was ready for her.
Inside, she was inundated with strange smells and shadowed sights, unnoticed in the afternoon. Nicholas’s shop smelled of the unfamiliar places where men worked-of metal, cheap spermaceti oil, spent embers. Utensds, his stock in trade, ranged along the opposite wad in lumpy disarray. She scanned the rest of the room, looking for Nicholas. He was nowhere to be seen. Worry knotted her stomach. She had thought him here. Hadn’t someone said he slept here at night? Retha, perhaps, or Nicholas himself?
Remembering the path that she had taken in her hasty exit, she stepped across the door, filings crunching under the soles of her shoes. An archway led to the small back room.
She went in. Nicholas’s large shape lay prostrate on the door. On a humble pallet, she surmised, deeply touched to think that he had come home to nothing more than this and yet had not complained. Had not even seemed to suffer in his pride.
She smiled to herself. Ah, Nicholas, who valued naught but kisses.
With wonder she knelt beside him, rocking back on her heels, and surveyed his form in the silvery light, her heart throbbing in her chest at such a rare and intimate sight. So new to her, a risk, a marvel. Unclad, he lay on his back, one brawny arm under his head, the other resting lightly on his tautly muscled stomach. From there down a woolen blanket covered him, tented over a leg drawn up casually as if he were about to turn. Even asleep his body seemed unable to contain its resless energy. But his massive torso was bare. Breathless but not shy, she studied the beauty, the sheer male power, of those bunched muscles, limned in silver light.
A dense thatch of tawny hair covered his chest. It barely rose and fell, he was so deep in sleep and so at peace with who he was—the discovered watches notwithstanding. He expelled a puff of breath, then inhaled silently, his chest scarcely expanding. She listened and she watched-in and out, the even rise and fall, perfect strength, perfect conscience, the perfect miracle of all that vitality at rest.
A great sense of loss swept over her. Long ago she had subdued a naturally loving nature and bound herself to her father and his work, never suspecting the cost.
She would waste no more of her life guarding reputation and discharging duty.
“Nicky,” she whispered, laying one hand on his stomach and placing the other along his cheek, the scratch of stubble astonishingly masculine. He flinched and moaned softly.
“Nicky.”
His lids lifted slowly, widened in surprise, and a beautiful smile of welcome spread across his face.
“Ach, Liebling,” he muttered, his voice thick with sleep. “You should not be here. I am in disgrace.”
He said so as a certainty. Tears sprang to her eyes. “I still believe in you,” she said.
She saw his struggle not to look too pleased. “But the watches are found.”
“Yes. How did Brother Huber do it?”
He propped up on an elbow. Fascinated, she studied the muscles of his abdomen and chest and shoulders as they bunched and flexed and eased—a much more sensuous sight than when he’d merely worked for her, shirted, vested, in public. He moved beneath the blanket, adjusting it without revealing himself below. She wasn’t sure how she would respond to the sight of him, but she was ready to find out.
He saw her looking and trying not to look, and gave a lopsided grin, but answered the question. “In a very great hurry, that’s for sure and certain.”
“That… that…” Foul epithets she scarcely knew came to mind for Huber. But she was not yet so abandoned to impropriety that she could use them.
Nicholas’s free hand wrapped around hers, entwining her slender fingers in his large thick ones. Then he pressed the back of her hand to the rasp of his beard, reflecting. “’Twas his villainy brought you to Salem. I
cannot fault him for that,” he drawled, teasing.
“Be serious,” she chided.
“I am very serious.” But amusement broke through his low earnest voice, and his eyes, dark and colorless in the moonlight, watched her with warm affection. He carried her hand to his mouth and kissed her knuckles one by one, lips clinging moistiy and releasing them, then leaving them exposed. The cold air kissed them in his stead. She drew in a sharp breath of pleasure.
Then his gaze shuttered. “But I am condemned.”
“Not yet. Not formally,” she insisted. “We will find our way out.”
He was silent, and then his breathing and her breathing were the only sounds. She felt the beauty of the moment, intimacy she had missed, privacy she had sought, and a knife-sharp edge of yearning she could not quell. Desire flooded her body, tickling the back of her throat, banding her lungs, and coiling into her core. His presence had affected her so before, but never everywhere at once. Her very veins began to pulse with love. So she bent forward at the waist and found his mouth and kissed him from her heart. His generous lips and warm mouth were inviting, and Abbigail sipped at them like a hummingbird at her favorite blossom.
He tolerated her inquiry with what she recognized as restraint.
She leaned back, not satisfied. “Kiss me, Nicholas,” she entreated, “like before.”
“Jesu, Abbigail!” He sat up abruptly, and the blanket slipped away. She glimpsed his manhood, thick and dark with desire, jutting from its denser thatch of dusky hair. It frightened but also amazed her and intrigued her. Then he yanked the blanket back, crossing his legs beneath it and salvaging his privacy. His gaze raked her face. “You do not understand. We are all alone,” he explained tenderly. “There is naught to stop us.”
Her breath caught on the hope: Nothing would stop them now. “For a man who kisses all the girls, you are being maddeningly righteous.”
She fingered the ribbons of her Haube, the symbol of her virginity.
His eyes widened with alarm. “Abbigail, we cannot.”
His Stolen Bride Page 29