But with a bride, he amended to himself, after he rescued Catharina.
Till lurched up, his chair clattering to the floor. “No young whippersnapper walks out on me. You’re finished, Blum. Finished here and-if my reputation stands for aught-there, as well.”
Nicholas stood to help, but Abbigail beat him to it, righting the chair and taking her father’s arm in her accommodating way. “Papa, don’t upset yourself. Perhaps Brother Blum has reasons he cannot explain.”
A wave of gratitude washed over him. Forgiven. Danke Gott.
“’Tis not your affair, daughter.”
She patted Till’s hand and led him toward the parlor. “’Twas my affair to train him. He proved himself in that.”
Her father huffed and limped along.
“You would allow it if his father were dying,” she added.
“Jacob Blum is well,” he said to her, then waved a hand, dismissing Nicholas. “Go, Brother Blum. I no longer need you.”
Abbigail’s large brown eyes gave Nicholas one quick glance. Too quick to interpret. And she and her father retired.
Nicholas packed his few belongings at the Brothers House. He tried to be quick, but Christian Huber buzzed about, plaguing him with questions and complaining of all the extra work he’d have with all the extra inventory. As recompense, he suggested Nicholas sell his accumulated personal stock for profit to him. That decision took about a minute. Nicholas had to travel fast, and money was fighter than tools and toys and stationery. He sold it all to Huber, everything but the dolls. Now they would make presents for the twins, the one good to come of this disaster.
Shouldering his battered portmanteau, Nicholas extracted himself and went to unload the wagon at the store. Huber followed him there, too, slowing him down with endless inquiries about his new stock and finally commandeering the tiny office to take an inventory of it. Nicholas moved the last case from the wagon to the store.
He was fired. Fired, but free. Christian Huber could take inventory till his fingers cramped. And Georg Till could take his contrariness to the devil. Nicholas would rescue Catharina. He had not saved the weeping ten-year-old from that blasted cow only to leave her stranded now, loving him, depending on him, and facing marriage to a man she did not love. He had his loyalties.
And one last loyalty here, to Abbigail.
He entered the back way softly and wound through the hall to the shop to return his keys. She sat at the counter over a blotted ledger and started up at the sound of his stride.
“Abbigail,” he said gently. “I never wanted to alarm you.”
She wrapped her arms across her bosom, looking drained. “I’m just tired.”
“Here are my keys.”
He dropped them in her open hand, wanting to touch but careful not to.
She looked at them blankly and tossed them in a drawer. “You are leaving then.”
He nodded, surprised it was so hard, facing her, to say so.
So hard, facing her, to go.
She stood and swept past him to the kitchen, once more her efficient self. “You need food.”
“Don’t go to any trouble for me,” he said, striding to catch up.
But she had already opened the larder and taken out a loaf of bread. “No trouble.” Her unguarded smile turned rueful. “I know how much you eat.”
He smiled back. Friends. His heart thumped with relief. He reached for the loaf.
“Wait.” She rummaged in a pocket, took out a crisp handkerchief finely edged with tatting, and wrapped the loaf in it. “’Twill have to do,” she added, knotting the ends into four crisp points.
He took it soberly. “Be safe, Abbigail,” he murmured, unsure what more a Single Brother could say to a Single Sister he would likely never see again.
She reached out a hand as if to touch him but withdrew iL “You be careful.”
Gratitude for her friendship flooded him, and he bent to kiss her forehead.
“Don’t,” she said, pulling away. Her pained voice quicked his senses.
“Bless you, then,” he whispered harshly. And left her there, an unaccustomed emptiness hollowing his heart.
Six days later, he galloped, exhausted, into the yard at the White Horse Inn, ravenous for supper but not even tempted by the thought of Mary Clark. He had crossed the Virginia border into North Carolina and could make it home to Salem before dawn.
Home-if they would take him in.
“Nicholas! So soon?” Mary Clark’s voice broke into his thoughts, and she looked at him as if he were a succulent roast.
“Mistress Clark,” he acknowledged kindly, without a flare of interest. He dismounted, one hand on the saddle lest his legs buckle. “I could use some food. And a change of mount”
“Gaunt becomes you, Nicholas.” She playfully took his arm and tested it as if for weight or strength.
“Food, Mistress Clark,” he said tiredly.
She gave him her sauciest come-hither look. “There’s more than one kind of sustenance to perk up a weary man.”
He had to smile at her persistence. “I want the kind you eat.”
She cocked a knowing brow.
“Off platters,” he amended, feeling a hot blush rise at her easy bawdiness.
Laughing, she led him to a table in the large, open public room. He wolfed his food in silence, barely aware of her managing the rowdy crowd of back-country men.
For images of two other women plagued him. Every inn, every change of horse brought him closer to the luminous girl he had idealized since she was ten … and carried him farther from the tiny woman whose spirit had entangled his heart.
What was it about Abbigail? he wondered. Six days, five nights he had ridden, stopping to sleep on roadsides before he nodded off and fell out of the saddle. Long days and nights of knowing, fearing, he never would see her again. She had been …
Sharp-tongued, bossy, adamant that he toe the line, work hard, behave himself, stay true. He grinned. She knew what he meant to say almost before he said it. Unlike Catharina, her keen brown eyes never went soft with puzzlement. Abbigail was …
In his past. She had nothing to do with his perfect brother’s theft of his intended bride.
She could do nothing, say nothing, advise nothing on his current quest.
When he finished his meal, his mount was ready, and Mary Clark met him at the lean-to. “Come back, Brother Blum,” she teased, unruffled by rejection.
Never, he thought.
But he grinned and thanked her, heaved himself onto his fresh mount, and kicked it into the gathering darkness toward home.
Anger over Nicholas’s abrupt departure reduced Georg Till to broth and bed rest for a day. Abbigail left Christian Huber to mind the store while she nursed her father hand and foot.
“Deserted! Abandoned!” he railed for the fifth time since noon, she calculated. “By the son of my old friend.”
She hid a smile at his twisting of the facts. “Papa, you bade him go.”
“After he disregarded my injunction to stay.”
“’Twas an urgent family matter, he said. You cannot fault him for that.”
“Urgent? His brother’s betrothal urgent?”
“He feared the Elders erred in proposing that match,” she said.
“Nonsense. The Lot is cast and the Savior says ja or nein. The Savior makes no errors. No error with regard to Brother Blum, and none, daughter”-he punched the counterpane with knobby fingers-“with regard to you and Brother Huber.”
She held her tongue in order to avert another, worse outburst. She would never accept Huber’s proposal. But up till now her father had blocked all talk of her refusing it. “We are too far from Salem, Papa, to know the truth of his brother’s situation.”
“Towels, daughter,” her father ordered, sticking a swollen foot out from beneath the cover, a distraction he was wont to offer when her reasoning thwarted him.
She hurried to the basin of water and wrung out cool cloths.
“The proble
m is that you young people do not bow to the Savior’s will. The error is in young Brother Blum. In you.”
She bit back her protest and pressed the damp towel around his gouty limb. “There, now.”
He looked disapprovingly at his poor appendage. “The rascal owes me for lodging, food, patience.”
“Patience, Papa?”
“I loathe instructing young bucks.”
“He did rather well under your tutelage.” Never mind, she thought, that the tutelage had been hers. Never mind that she had lost her heart that way.
Her father grunted with displeasure. “I saw no evidence of his success.”
“You must have overlooked the ledgers from his last two trips.” She patted his hand. “We will do that after supper. Which you will take downstairs tonight.”
He glared his refusal.
“Supper, Papa. Downstairs tonight,” she said firmly, and left him to his complaints.
For she could not bear another hour cooped up in his airless room this late-summer afternoon. Nicholas’s departure had tangled her in extra work and obligations. It had tied her up in knots. Her world, which he’d expanded, shrank to her father’s concerns again. Without Nicholas’s contagious energy, the very rooms of the house and store were as inviting as a tomb.
A few hours later, she set out supper for herself and Christian Huber. His scrutiny tracked her from hearth to table, a final insult to her day.
Her father could not bear his upstairs exile either. Just in time to eat, he appeared in the kitchen doorway, a slight smile of improved temper wrinkling the corners of his mouth. “Perhaps I am a little hungry.”
She had added vegetables to his noon broth and boiled them to mush. He ate a bowl full, then another, and shortly the three retired to the parlor to check the ledger.
“You see the profit,” Abbigail said, after he had checked bills of lading and invoices against the entries in the book.
Her father frowned, a knobby finger marking his place. “All but here. What is this extravagance?”
She set aside her needlework and knelt beside his chair to read the ledger on his lap. “Watches, Papa. Brother Blum purchased five French enameled watches and brought them back for us to sell.”
“I haven’t seen them.”
“Nor I,” said Brother Huber, eyes glittering with something very like greed, Abbigail thought.
“That’s because he left them in the safe,” she snapped, more at him than at her father. “And we spent the day upstairs.”
“Show me, daughter.” He rose, steadied himself on her arm, and shuffled to the office, Huber attending. Taking her keys from her pocket, Abbigail opened the safe, withdrew the fine walnut case, and put it in her father’s hands.
He opened it and scowled in disapproval.
Irritation ripped her. She had exercised a saint’s patience with his bad humor all day long. “They’re beautiful, Father. Even you must admit iL Exactly the sort of expensive bauble outsiders empty their purses for.”
His scowl darkening, he snapped the case shut and handed it to her. Christian Huber stepped up to see.
“Really, Papa, you are too severe. I approved his purchase and his enterprise.”
“Open it,” he commanded.
She did. A chill slid down her spine.
“No watches!” Huber exclaimed, his face reddening.
“Stolen, I’ll warrant it,” her father said brutally. “I will have Blum’s head.”
“Father!” she gasped, appalled at his assumption and his instant ill will. Long moments passed before she could find the words to counter either. “Missing is not stolen.”
But the plush blue velvet where the watches had lain looked abandoned, like a bird’s nest empty in the fall. Conflicting images of Nicholas assailed her: the tireless tease, the earnest man, her comforter. But then there was the distracted man who had rushed off last night, his few possessions stuffed in a battered portmanteau.
With stolen watches? It was unthinkable.
“Misplaced, perhaps,” she argued. “He left in such a hurry.”
“We can always search, Sister Till,” Huber said helpfully.
“I would not have thought a son of Jacob Blum capable of such an act,” her father said, his mouth setting with disapproval.
Huber pulled at his chin, reasoning. “Perhaps he moved them to a safer place.”
“Safer than the safe?” her father asked. “Abbigail, you saw him put them there, did you not?”
“I told you so. But then there was the frenzy of his leaving.”
Her father shuffled painstakingly through stock and papers on his desk, sorting, stacking, straightening. “’Twas a ruse to hide the theft,” he concluded.
“Not the Nicholas Blum I know!” she said.
“Indeed,” said Huber. “I found him rather rash and reckless.”
“Unlike you, Brother Huber,” her father said. “Him I can easily suspect. You have served us faithfully these twenty-two months, running the shop without a hint of scandal.”
Indignation flooded Abbigail. She ran the shop. Brother Huber was an obsequious, self-aggrandizing toady. “My only complaint is that my daughter scorns you,” her father added.
She had no choice but to correct her father in front of her suitor. “I do not scorn you, Brother Huber.”
“You scorn his offer, daughter.”
“I merely do not want to marry, Father.”
“All good things in good time, Sister Till,” Brother Huber said, fawning shamelessly.
But she would not let him or her father sway her from Nicholas’s defense. “You cannot blame Nicholas Blum, Father. We have proof of nothing.”
Her father rummaged through the desk drawers, riffled though shelves that lined the office walls, and then checked under the cushion on the chair. “Aha!” he said, and shook it in her face. “Here’s your proof.”
Puzzled, Abbigail studied its worn cording. “What, Papa?”
“Look at the seat,” he said as if she were a ninny. “No key! Someone took the key we hide here.”
“Someone entering the shop,” she argued.
“Indeed,” Huber said guiltily. “I stepped out twice today.”
Till frowned. “You left the counter untended!”
“Custom was extremely slow,” Huber offered, abashed.
But Abbigail felt a weight lift. “Then someone slipped in and found the key.”
“Bah!” her father said. “Who would know where to look?”
Huber agreed with her, it seemed. “A thief might, Brother Till. We make no great secret of where we keep things.”
Her father grew animated, shaking a finger in the air. “No thief but Blum. This is how I see it. He left in haste, stealing the watches for his own profit.”
Nicholas had forgotten to leave the safe’s key when he put the watches in it. Abbigail saw that plain as day. Her father saw the opposite. On such differences of opinion, whole continents went to war.
“You are leaping to conclusions, Papa.”
Huber frowned gravely. “I must agree with your daughter, Brother Till. I cannot say I liked Brother Blum, but surely he is not your man.”
But her father was swelling with renewed vigor, with returning health. He took her hand with almost youthful energy. “I’ll have his head for this, daughter. If not his head, his livelihood, his reputation. We are off to Salem.”
A night’s sleep only strengthened Georg Till’s resolve.
“You cannot possibly manage three hundred miles in two weeks, the pace the coaches keep,” Abbigail argued over boded eggs and buttered bread.
His face firmed with rebellion. “I can and will. And you will accompany me.”
“Who will care for the store?”
“Christian Huber, of course.”
“Alone?”
Her father waved an impatient hand. “That gravedigger can help out. He knows the store from when he assisted us. I will go, daughter.”
“You must not th
ink of this, Father,” she urged, growing desperate. “I cannot manage you, keep us in clean clothes, and find you proper food at inns. Suppose you have a spell like yesterday’s.”
His lower lip poked out. “Bah! Spells. Insubordination, not travel, brings on spells. I traveled but last month.”
Merciful heaven. Her heart contracted with dread. But heaven had no argument against his will. Oh, where was her mother when they both needed her?
“That was to Philadelphia, Papa. In our wagon, at your speed. You stayed with kind and caring friends. Travelers by coach are rousted out at three o’clock in the morning.”
He stabbed the bald head of his peeled egg. “A mere two hours before I usually wake.”
“To lie in bed,” she chided. “You require hot cloths to ease your aches before you break your fast at half past six. I doubt that inns supply hot cloths at dawn.”
“I will forgo them, Abbigail, as always when I travel,” he said with Teutonic pride.
She cracked and split her own soft-boiled egg and watched the gleaming yellow yolk spread across her plate. “Think, Papa! On the road from three o’clock every morning until ten at night for two long, hard weeks. The ruts alone will torment your affliction. To say nothing of hard beds and restless sleep and”-she had to make him see-“and fleas!”
He patted her hand. “I did not think you chickenhearted, daughter.”
His rare good humor melted her defenses. She almost wept. She could not bear to see Nicholas Blum again, not when it would take all her resolution, staying here alone, to close the book on her pathetic onesided romance. “It will be the death of you.”
“Rubbish, daughter. I am too mean to die.”
She gaped at him, astonished. She had had that thought herself. In mute apology, she covered his knobby hand with her own. “You will suffer so.”
He smiled as if grateful for her concern. “Then we shall bring Sister Rothrock. She will take your mind off me and teach you to laugh at bedbugs.”
Abbigail covered her face with her hands. She could not prevent the trip. Sister Benigna would grab at the chance to go. She had dear missionary friends in the Salem congregation, and Georg Till’s most maddening quirks amused her. Once again, her father would have his way.
His Stolen Bride Page 14
