His Stolen Bride

by Judith Stanton

  One Brother down.

  Two hundred forty-five caring, nosy Brethren yet to face, starting here today.

  Beside him, Harmon made a face. “A coup for you, Nicky. If even Brother Schopp has heard, news must be all over town.”

  In spite of himself, Nicholas grinned. “If you truly wish to make your mark in town, always do your utmost.”

  Harmon smothered a giggle. Nicholas’s father rolled his eyes, almost indulging him. “Don’t try to corrupt this brother, too!”

  Nicholas sobered. “Matthias was incorruptible.”

  And unwavering. There had been no hint of hesitation that the wedding would go forward as ordained by Lot Not on his brother’s part, nor, so far as he’d been told, on Catharina’s. Now they stood before the altar, before man and God and all creation, a handsome couple, tall and elegant and stiffly apart.

  Harmon elbowed Nicholas. “Matty looks angry.”

  “Shhh,” their father said, for the minister was starting. Then very quietly, “Not angry, Harmon, serious. He’s getting married in a minute.”

  Nicholas’s heart stopped at the very thought. Gut Gott, what had he done? He was losing Catharina and all that she had meant to him. And he had made his brother a miserable groom. For Matthias looked grimly resolved, showing nothing of the joy Nicholas felt sure he would display had he been the man standing up on this soft September afternoon with … Oddly, unasked, the precise porcelain image of Abbigail came to his mind.

  Abbigail? He almost groaned aloud. It wasn’t enough for him to lose the woman he had so long loved. In coming here, he had lost his only friend.

  Golden sunlight streamed in on oiled oak floors and lit the throng of celebrants, softly mocking Nicholas’s dark mood. The small brass band ended its festive wedding anthem with a flourish, retired their instruments, and took seats in the choir’s stall.

  He bowed his head and closed his eyes but could not shut out the vows. His brother’s firmly spoken words mingled uneasily with bittersweet memories of Catharina. He invoked them as penance, memories of kissing her to dry her girl’s tears after he rescued her from the cow. Of kissing her amidst the blossoming peach trees before he left for Bethlehem, with no promise to return. Of kissing her in desperation yesterday and failing to persuade her of the error of her vow. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Lost to him forever.

  He summoned these, only to be besieged with images of a smaller, darker, tougher woman he had left behind. Abbigail, his tiny tyrant, gave him something more important than Catharina’s sweet compliance, something more substantial than doe-eyed adoration. Miserable as he was, he almost grinned.

  Abbigail had given him … no quarter.

  She had managed him, teased him, bested him, he thought fondly, almost relaxing in the reassuringly familiar Saal. Burning beeswax candles sweetened the air. For a moment, the rich aroma of boiling coffee and the scent of just baked buns for the congregation’s love feasts comforted him. He had escorted Abbigail to one such gathering before he had left.

  But not a wedding. Not his brother’s wedding to a stolen bride. He looked back to the altar. The sight of Catharina with Matthias knotted his gut.

  Nicholas was jealous. Today he admitted it as he could not have only yesterday. He had been certain of Catharina, certain of himself. Certain that her mar riage to his once cherished brother would be disastrous for them both.

  He almost doubled over with the ache of envy. It crawled through his veins, stifled his breathing, stuck in his throat. His brother was the better man, and he had lost her to him. That was the crux of it. Matthias had never stumbled; his path had been clear. Nicholas coveted his brother’s good fortune, his perfect life. A talent for hard work had earned Matthias singular successes, from apprentice to journeyman to master dyer-without a visible hitch. Now Matthias, piety incarnate, would soon be a respected Elder in the church.

  Whereas Nicholas’s path had been marked by fits and starts, hairpin turns, blind alleys. Catharina had been his dream, his plan, when all the Elders’ other plans for him had gone awry. He had imagined respect and success crowned by a virtuous and adoring bride.

  With the help, he conceded, of Abbigad, his smart, sharp, bossy little mentor in the complexities of trade, his best friend. Under her unstinting instruction, the dream had even seemed within his grasp.

  Again the image of her precise porcelain face rose up to … scold him. His reckless departure must have destroyed her good opinion of him. Would she think him a knucklehead? He was that. A scapegrace, a bounder? Probably.

  Still, warmed by the mockingly bright light that streamed in through the windows, he was confident that, told all sides of the story, his faraway friend would badger him.

  A fine fix you’ve gotten into this time, Brother Blum, Abbigad Till would chide in her fine soprano. You left the woman you loved behind for your brother to claim. Then her brown gaze would narrow in on him.

  What do you propose to do now?

  The minister intoned the closing prayer, and the brass band began to play a celebratory anthem.

  Stand up at my brother’s wedding like a man, Nicholas silendy answered his distant friend. And put my miserable, misspent life in order.

  Easier said than done, he realized, a quarter of an hour later as he prowled the edges of the Saal, no asylum to be found.

  “We need help moving benches. And beer kegs,” Brother Samuel Ernst called out, to Nicholas’s relief.

  He put his broad shoulders to both tasks, glad of any work that would forestall his mingling with the curious or, worse, taking up his place beside his family.

  Beside his brother and his stolen bride.

  Not that he could get to them. His father, stepmother, and the Widow Baumgarten formed a beaming phalanx around the newlyweds. His two older sisters, Anna Johanna and Elizabeth, were merrily–obliviously–attempting to retie the new blue Married Sister’s ribbon on Catharina’s Haube. Catharina’s brothers John and Thomas crowded around her.

  Like sentinels, he thought, guarding her.

  Guarding them. From him.

  The Baumgarten brothers had been his schoolboy partners in damming streams, stealing pies, and tying toads to cows’ tails. Partners-friends-no more. He imagined warning in their stance, and he hated his exclusion.

  Well-wishers besieged the other couples, a widow and widower whose wedding united two families already large, and a farmer he barely knew, whose bride came from a community nearby. Backs were slapped, brides bussed, toasts raised without his help.

  Too soon the tasks he’d taken refuge in were done. Nicholas stood beside the tables, feeling ungainly large and prominent, his usually advantageous height a detriment.

  Everyone could see him. Many paused to look, and some stopped to speak. Doggedly, he smiled, shook hands, and spoke to anyone who dared endorse a reprobate.

  No one said a word of yesterday’s fiasco.

  “There he is!” a girl’s voice cried out from behind him. Two pairs of sticky hands grabbed his and tugged. He looked down. Matching amber curls tumbled out from under a pair of crisp white Little Girls’ Haubes on the heads of Margaretha and Christina, his twin half-sisters, dragging their precious new dolls along. The ten-year-olds had been sneaking bites of Strudel, too, he deduced, from the state of their hands and syrupy smudges about their mouths.

  “Come on, Nicky!”

  “Nicky, join us,” they said, their words spilling out on top of each other and their bodies leaning toward the wedding party.

  No! he thought, panicking. He was as close to them as he could bear to be without someone getting hurt.

  Not a sentiment to share with his little sisters.

  He bent down and whispered with an air of mystery, “I can’t. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m holding up the wall.”

  Margaretha sniggered at the absurdity.

  Stubbornly, Christina shook her head and tugged again. “Papa sent us to fetch you.”

  “Does too.” Margaretha grinned. She loved argument.
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  “He does need you,” Christina agreed. “He said”- she deepened her girl’s voice and puffed up her chest to ape her father-“‘Go get Nicky.’”

  “’Because he … ‘” Margaret waited for her sister.

  “’Belongs with us,‘” they concluded in unison.

  Nicholas pulled a face, but his stomach churned. To join them! It was too much to ask.

  Margaretha gleefully raised a warning finger. “Papa said so”-she enunciated every word-“so you better.”

  Did he really have a choice? Resolving again to stand up at his brother’s wedding like a man, Nicholas surrendered his hands to sticky fingers. The twins hauled him across the room, a matched pair of pure-blood fillies dragging a cumbersome wagon, instead of the light trap that would match their pluck.

  “Here, Nicholas.” Smiling his welcome, his stepmother gestured him to take her side, two people over from them.

  He reminded himself to breathe.

  In a moment, his father put his arm around Nicholas’s shoulder, drawing him away from the tightknit, celebratory group. Nicholas tensed. He did not want to talk, not even with his father, the revered diplomat.

  “’Tis all done up now, right and tight,” Jacob Blum said quietly. “Whatever happened-or did not happen, son-between you and Matthias’s bride … you must put it behind you. You must forget. Their union is the Savior’s will, and it is their will.”

  “I know that, sir,” he said, bridling. He had been facing that fact since yesterday’s fight. Perhaps he had been facing it since he got Matthias’s letter. It was just hard to admit he had been so wrong. So stupid. That Catharina had wanted this marriage. That she could turn her back on what they had.

  “I know you do, Nicholas,” his father said gently. “But like me when I was young, knowing the right of a matter never swayed you from the wrong.”

  Though it was kindly put, Nicholas felt admonished, like a boy. “Not fair, sir.”

  “Perhaps not.” His father cleared his throat “Tis only that marital … adjustments can be so difficult Your brother and his bride deserve every chance to … make their way alone.”

  Nicholas respected his father, loved his clumsy attempt at tact. But saw red anyway. “You think I … would interfere … with that!”

  “I think you should return to Bethlehem tomorrow,” he said in a sad voice so quiet that no one in the joyful, humming crowd could overhear him.

  All of yesterday’s leftover grievances boiled up in Nicholas’s blood. “What kind of man do you take me for?”

  Jacob Blum did not waver. “I take you for a brilliant bold, impulsive man who does not always count the cost of acting on his convictions.”

  “I’m counting the cost now.”

  “So you are, son.” His father’s arm tightened around his shoulders, as if to press the pain from his predicament. “I understand that about you, Nicholas. I see myself in you. Your road, my road-they are not easy. Perhaps we are not best suited to our faith. But your brother and his bride need time. Time without you here reminding them of the awkward beginning they have made.”

  As a boy, Nicholas had plagued his stalwart father, had fought his gentle, iron rule tooth and nail. As a man, Nicholas had come to realize that his father was held in high respect. This was why. He could tell a man to his face that he had blundered-badly-and set him on a noble path to right his errors.

  If that man had not burned all his bridges behind him.

  “I cannot return,” he said flatly.

  The arm on his shoulders dropped away. “Cannot?”

  “I was fired.”

  “Fired?” Jacob Blum’s hand worried his neck. But he said evenly, “I’ve done business with Georg Till for years. I know he’s a difficult man. But you were there on my recommendation. In my name. For what possible offense could he fire you?”

  “He would not give me leave,” Nicholas explained. “I… took exception to it.”

  “You were his new assistant,” his father said. “He took you on because he needed you. His health is poor, you know.”

  “I thought I was needed more here,” Nicholas said.

  His father’s gaze saw too much. “And the day’s events have proven you wrong,” he said, not unkindly.

  Well. Yes. Put in that light, he was a worthless pile of butcher’s offal. His father would not welcome the self-aggrandizing justifications that sprang to his mind-that Catharina loved him, that he had planned to fix his life for her.

  Nor should a man give them. He had his own and Catharina’s honor to protect. He gritted his teeth. All his teeth, less one. His tongue worried the gaping hole where Matthias had claimed the first fraction of his pound of flesh. Yesterday Nicholas had taken the lost tooth for a badge of honor. He had fought hard and gone down fighting. Today the hole only reminded him of irreversible losses-not just Catharina, but, equally as bad, his new life as a tradesman, and worse, Abbigail Till’s regard.

  Nicholas squared his shoulders. Brother Till had given up on him. And his father had new doubts. But he refused to give up on himself.

  “I have my tin shop.”

  A poor refuge, he reflected, but all he had left.

  “So you do,” Jacob Blum said. “See that you make it work, son. You well know you are flirting with disassociation.”

  18

  If she had to endure one more shabby, rodentridden inn, Abbigail thought she would go stark raving mad. It wasn’t her father who had suffered on the trip. Not him. Sister Benigna waited on him hand and foot, bolstering his spirits, flattering his fancy, laughing him out of his practiced peevishness.

  Abbigail felt useless and obscurely wronged. For years, her father’s moods and illnesses had ruled her life. Sister Benigna now ruled him, bringing back glimpses of the man he’d been before they lost her mother. And the Widowed Sister made it look so simple. “Oh, Georg,” she would say. “You must try this.” Forcemeat, pickled mushrooms, stuffed fowl.

  His gout had not acted up one single day.

  The coach lumbered to a halt and rocked on its heavy braces.

  “White Horse Inn!” the coachman announced.

  “The last inn-our last night on the road!” Sister Benigna sang out, and peered out the coach windows. “How charming!”

  Abbigail leaned forward and saw unexampled squalor. A rude log inn with a lean-to for a livery, the most abject establishment of their journey. Summer hay lay outside, unracked, left to spoil in the weather. A broken oak bucket sat abandoned by the hitching post. A couple of tired horses stood. The lean-to really leaned. Rough posts propped up a stoop over the tavern’s door. She moaned, thinking of the fleas and bedbugs awaiting them inside. But the alluring aroma of roasting game wafted toward the coach.

  Sister Benigna breathed in deeply. “Just in time for supper, Georg,” she said cheerfully.

  Abbigail’s rejuvenated father opened the door, turned down the steps, and stepped down deliberately to help “his women.” Sister Benigna took his hand-as if the intrepid Widow needed help, Abbigail thought. Then he gallantly handed down his daughter, too, showing off his new vigor for the Widow, no doubt.

  On the ground, Sister Benigna fluffed her skirts, stretched her arms over her head, then surveyed the scene. “’Twill do nicely,” she pronounced.

  Abbigail smiled. “You must have been the most formidable missionary.”

  The Widow’s gaze went dreamy. “My time in the Caribbean with Johann were the best years of my life. ‘Twas wild and dangerous.”

  “And this backcountry wasteland is not?” Abbigad asked in disbelief.

  A buxom, blowzy woman strode across the littered yard.

  Sister Benigna’s eyes twinkled. “Ach, Sister, I believe it affords men all the comforts of civilization.”

  Another tavern wench. Abbigail felt a blush rise. The trip had not inured her to meeting openly disreputable women. Carelessly yet cleanly dressed, the woman stopped in front of Georg Till and tossed her coppery curls.

  “I have
rooms, sir. Will ye be taking meals?” She looked him up and down. “Or aught else?”

  Such brazen cheek crumpled her father’s crusty authority, and Abbigail was touched to hear him stammer.

  Sister Benigna spoke for him, gently tolerant of the trollop. “A room for Brother Till, and one for his daughter and myself. And a hearty meal for all of us, madam, if you can supply it.”

  The woman gave a saucy smile, clearly not caring where it landed. “I can supply your every need.”

  “Food and rooms will do nicely, thank you,” Sister Benigna said.

  The woman led them into her tavern with a flouncing step and laid out their table with ale and breads and a joint of venison. The food far surpassed the shabby tavern’s promise, and they ate heartily.

  The woman returned with sweets. “Ye will make Salem by early afternoon,” she noted, perhaps predicting their destination by their plain dress. “Or so my Brethren tell me. My latest Brother wouldn’t even stay the night this time,” she added with a pout.

  Abbigail’s face heated, heart jolted, and she almost bolted from the table. Hadn’t stayed the night this time. Nicholas? It couldn’t be. But the woman spoke as if she’d had him. A plague on him, dallying with strumpets! Abbigail should have guessed. Oh, the shame of having kissed such a … a womanizer.

  Oh, the delight.

  No wonder he had aroused her desire with such exquisite attention to her needs.

  But they had only shared a kiss, she reassured herself, and Nicholas himself admitted kissing other women.

  Her father scowled. “That would have been that scoundrel, Brother Blum.”

  “Now, don’t go jumping to conclusions, Georg,” Sister Benigna advised.

  The wench just grinned. “Nicholas Blum, yes. But I would hardly call such a fine specimen a scoundrel.”

  Her father’s scowl darkened. “We call him a thief.”