His Stolen Bride

by Judith Stanton

  He looked the fastidious Brother up and down. “I should pummel you to powder for distressing her. But I will not fight you here in front of her.”

  Huber brisded like a boar, very unlike a godly Brother. “I will meet you any time, on any terms.”

  Nicholas clenched his fists. He wanted to bludgeon the toady.

  Abbigail squeezed his elbow. “No, Nicholas, not for me,” she whispered for him alone, her almost inaudible words a balm.

  He nodded assent. For once, for her sake, he would not be reckless, careless Nicholas. He would be his father’s son, calm, even-handed, reasonable. “I can arrange that,” he said to Huber. “I will call a meeting of the Elders, and we will setde everything-the watches, the money, Sister Till’s affections.”

  Huber twitched with frustration, apparently craving a brawl as much as Nicholas did.

  Sister Rothrock intervened, speaking too softly for onlookers to hear. “It needn’t come to that, Brother Blum. Let us sit here and discuss it now. The sooner this matter is cleared up, the better.”

  “The Elders should be …” Abbigail’s father began.

  “Georg, I insist,” Sister Rothrock said.

  Uneasily the five of them sat flanking the fire, Till and Huber on one side and Sister Rothrock between Abbigail and Nicholas.

  “Now, Brother Huber,” the Widow said, “our first concern is your account of the night Brother Blum left.”

  Huber made a obsequious gesture of consent. “Anything I can do to help.”

  With difficulty Nicholas sat and listened to Huber’s numbingly exact account. The shop assistant remembered everything correctly, exactly as they had unloaded it: casks and crates and barrels as wed as the more expensive dolls and watches already in the store. Nicholas listened stonily for omissions or inconsistencies. There were none he recognized.

  Then why did Huber’s frank, factual recital seem to implicate him?

  “In short,” Huber concluded, “I never saw the watches. I merely listed them on the inventory, assuming that they were locked in the safe as Brother Blum reported.”

  Abbigail’s father cleared his throat. “Not proof enough, Brother Huber. Surely you saw some irregularity-”

  Abbigail flushed with indignation. “Father! Leave off! Brother Blum took nothing!”

  Staying her protest with a hand, Nicholas added, “’Tis God’s truth, sir. Nothing but my horse, my saddle, my battered portmanteau, and presents for my litde sisters.”

  Huber looked down his aquiline nose. “Presents? Did we inventory presents, Brother Blum?”

  Till arched a brow. “What sort of presents?”

  Abbigail flared. “Just a pair of dolls! You cannot find anything suspicious in that.”

  “Or in them?” Huber murmured.

  Till’s eyes narrowed. “Explain your meaning.”

  Sister Rothrock looked shocked. But Huber, looking down, said almost apologetically, “It simply occurred to me-an idle thought, provoked by all the speculation-if perhaps something could be hidden on the dolls. Or in them?”

  A reckless pride lashed Nicholas. He’d be damned d he would stand still while Huber insinuated and Till accused him. “Search the dolls, then.”

  Abbigail, with a caution born of years of Huber’s stratagems, protested involuntarily, “Nicky, no!”

  Across from them, Christian Huber stared at the floor, his face carefully blank.

  26

  Yourself, Nicky. You are all I want, Abbigail had whispered while he held her in his arms. And this was what she got, Nicholas thought savagely: a man of blighted reputation, some of it deserved, the rest of it believed. The rain had stopped, and Nicholas paced ahead to warn his parents, hoping to separate the twins from their beloved dolls with the least amount of fuss. Behind him, like a small and righteous army, came the Tills, Sister Rothrock, and Christian Huber. Georg Till’s limp slowed their hard march to a crawl.

  A few Brethren on their way to vespers intently watched him and his little procession. More fodder, their transfixed expressions said, for the endless chains of gossip that would loop around the town. This latest complication would make a spectacular finish.

  He and Abbigad had had no privacy to speak. But they had traded warning glances. He had nothing to hide, he repeated to himself, and her smile promised her trust. But her eyes were wide with doubt. What did she fear … or suspect?

  Georg Till had agreed that this second inquiry need not be formal. No Elders need attend, not even Nicholas’s brother. That afforded some slight relief. After Matthias’s anger earlier this afternoon, Nicholas could not want him for a witness.

  Supper simmered on the hearth in Retha Blum’s warm kitchen when Nicholas walked in. But the aroma did not whet his appetite. He hadn’t been home since the hearing because Abbigail was still a guest there. His parents had insisted: They had no quarrel with her; they would not turn her out.

  Inside, Margaretha and Christina shinnied up his legs like happy kittens. He hoisted Christina up to ride him piggyback, then lifted Margaretha to the rafters. Little girl shrieks were sweet music on this lowering day. They must not know the cloud that hung over him.

  “You’re off to vespers, aren’t you, pumpkins?” he said casually, but gave Retha a pointed look.

  She glared back, teasing. “Only if their favorite brother doesn’t wind them up so tight they can’t sit stdl.”

  He swung Margaretha to the floor and knelt for Christina to clamber off him. “I know how it is on rainy days, but you will sit still for me, won’t you?”

  He extracted a promise of best behavior, mouthing to Retha to take them away just as Till’s party knocked at the front door. She shooed the twins to the basin to wash up, then peered into the parlor and recognized the visitors.

  Her brow furrowed with concern. “What is this, Nicky?”

  “We never searched the dolls.”

  She threw her hands up in disgust. “Ridiculous.”

  Her immediate faith bolstered his. “So I said. But take the twins. They must not see their gifts cut up like Sunday chickens.”

  “Jacob and I were going anyway.”

  “I need him to stay.”

  She nodded and left with the girls before the army had set up camp in Nicholas’s childhood home. Nicholas took his father aside and explained what had transpired. Jacob Blum listened gravely, then headed upstairs to retrieve the dolls.

  In the comfortable parlor, Nicholas’s accusers sat in brittle sdence, warring armies stalemated, Abbigail on his side, Huber and Till against him. Strangely, Sister Rothrock sat to herself as d torn between the daughter and the father. Nicholas couldn’t fathom the Widow’s turnabout. In Bethlehem, she had supported Abbigail, disapproving of Till’s pursuit of Nicholas as well as his allegiance to Huber. But since the hearing, she had been Till’s most loyal visitor.

  Jacob Blum clumped down the stairs, a great bear carrying two large dolls, their leather arms and legs flopping against his chest. He offered the dolls in his large, blunt hands. “I fear I would mangle my daughters’ treasures.”

  “I won’t harm them.” Abbigail accepted them from his father and sat with them on her lap. Their combed wool hair and delicate china heads were pretty, innocent. Their muslin pinafores, once crisp, showed signs of loving, if not care. Abbigail inspected one, and the room held its breath.

  Nicholas held his, too, not for fear of finding the watches. He was watching Abbigad’s slender fingers press into the straw-stuffed body, regretting she had to play this part and see him under such duress. He moved closer to her, to the inevitable.

  She gave a genteel shrug. “I can ted nothing. ‘Tis well packed with sawdust or batting.” She flipped it over, lifted its little pinafore, and made a small sound of consternation.

  Even to a man who couldn’t thread a needle, the alteration was obvious. Its back seam had been stitched crudely, hastily. He passed Abbigad the sewing basket, and she rummaged in it, drawing out the tiny silver scissors women used for fine work
.

  It took her a few minutes to snip the thread, pull it through, spill out pale blond sawdust stuffing. A few minutes to unravel his fife.

  Deep inside sat a boldly colored enameled watch, quietly ticking.

  Cockeyed optimist that he was, he’d truly believed their search would prove his innocence. But now … How could Huber have guessed … or known?

  Unless he planted them there himself.

  A scald of indignation caped Nicholas’s back. He had been cunningly, damningly framed by the upstanding, righteous Brother Christian Huber. But when? And where? The other doll was simdarly undone, and it, too, under Abbigail’s careful undoing, coughed up another watch.

  Abbigad looked up, her eyes blazing, and displayed the two handsome enameled watches in the flat of her palm.

  Huber flicked lint off a lapel. “’Twas a very clever stratagem, don’t you think, Brother Till, to let his little sisters cover for his sins?”

  Nicholas grabbed the pompous Brother’s neckcloth, lifted him out of his seat, and roared in his face. “I do not have stratagems. I do not steal. I do not involve my little sisters. You’re the one who knows the when and where of it.”

  Huber tdted back his head to look down his narrow nose and answered as coolly as he dared. “I am not the one who raced off in a stew, fuming over a woman betrothed to his own brother, leaving debts unpaid and agreements broken.”

  Nicholas stifled the urge to shove him back down. But he let him go, then turned on Till. “You are in league with the devil.”

  His father shouldered him out of the parlor. “Anger is not our way, son.”

  It was an order and a plea but a goad to an angry man. “Reason and charity only go so far,” Nicholas protested. “To date, they have not helped me.”

  “Nicky,” Jacob Blum said sadly, softly. “Nicky. We help each other. We will get to the bottom of this calmly, reasonably.”

  He didn’t want calm and reasonable. He wanted muskets and cannons. The boy in him who’d run off to war, desperate to protect his family, wanted to see bodies strewn, fields trampled, towns burned.

  “He framed me,” Nicholas said hoarsely. But in the face of the bare facts, his assertion felt flimsy, juvenile.

  “So it would seem, son,” his father said, returning to their guests.

  Nicholas headed for his own chair, braced for inquisition.

  “’Tis odd that there are only two,” Sister Rothrock was saying neutrally to Till. Or was she suspicious? Even her!

  “Don’t forget, the thief sold off the other three watches to pay his debts,” Nicholas said bitterly. He could take no more. There would be another hearing. He would have to relive every humiliating error of his life. Pivoting, he left them, seeking the wider streets of town, the clearer air to stanch his knife-fresh wounds.

  Let them come and apprehend him, criminal that they made him out to be.

  His father caught up to him and laid a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “We stand behind you, son.”

  “No one outside our family will.” Nicholas had seen condemnation forecast in Sister Rothrock’s face.

  “What do you know of Christian Huber?” his father asked abruptly, as they walked on.

  A slanderous epithet on the tip of his tongue, Nicholas forced himself to explain instead that Till valued the man. “As Brother Till said, he has been almost two years a loyal clerk, entrusted with the business, and never a complaint. In fact, he is Till’s choice to wed his only daughter.”

  “Cause enough to make the man your enemy,” Jacob Blum said. “Jealousy is a dangerous thing.”

  Nicholas’s head whipped up. His father knew? They had hosted Abbigail to honor him? His face heated. “So I have discovered,” he mumbled.

  They stopped outside the tin shop. Till and Huber, heading down the street to the Tavern, stopped too. Huber facing Nicholas, Nicholas glaring Huber down.

  His father rubbed his neck, as he always did when troubled. “The Board of Elders will want to review this new evidence. We will have to set another date.”

  Till said, “Sooner, I would hope, Brother Blum, than later. I have been a long time from my store.”

  Jacob Blum gave him a withering look. “Given the gravity of our discovery, Georg, the Board will take its time.”

  Brother Huber put in gravely, “I fear I had to leave the store attended by men with other obligations.”

  Nicholas set on him, rage returning. “You got here quickly enough. I am sure you could go back as fast.”

  Huber brisded, then said sanctimoniously, “Not without my bride, Brother Blum.”

  Nicholas lunged. His father caught him before he could ram into the dapper Single Brother. “Nicky, Nicky,” Jacob Blum whispered hoarsely. “Things look bad enough.”

  Nicholas struggled against his father’s strength to spend his anger. But d he did not let go until morning, Nicholas still would tear the man apart.

  Watching, Till quivered with indignation. “Until this matter is settled, Brother Blum, I expect you to keep your son under control,” he said. “And in town.”

  Nicholas slumped, his fight drained away. He had lost the little credit he’d brought home. He was well and truly framed. “Where would I go?” he asked bleakly.

  Abbigail was here. He may have lost her by his debt and carelessness and rotten luck, but he would never leave her again.

  Catharina wanted to be happy, she truly did. A week ago, walking to vespers on her husband’s arm would have been a thrill beyond compare. But all was not well in her new life. Her crusade to be a perfect bride had not won Matthias’s affection, and her hope of winning it was waning. Since fighting Nicholas, Matthias had been somber in public, and since their wedding, remote from her at home.

  And now he was late as well. Estranged though they were, her solemn husband faithfully came home well before vespers each afternoon. Until today. She put a stew on the fire to warm for his return, set out simple dishes, and looked around for something else to do. Her cabin was spodess. Her clothes, his clothes were clean and mended. She didn’t have the heart to start on his new shirt.

  And so she waited. Waited while the conch sounded time for vespers, while the faint, distant sounds of voices raised in closing song, while the few neighbors at the end of her street strolled by, going home. Finally she stepped out to look for him, wild, unnamable fears rising that he was hurt or dl or never coming back.

  He was striding up the street. Her heart tripped in relief and then in alarm. A storm of anger marred his handsome face. But she hurried to meet him anyway and fell in with his long-legged gait.

  “What happened?” She didn’t say Matthias. He wouldn’t let her get that close. He waved her off. He didn’t want to tell-or he wanted her to press him into talking.

  “Something obviously is wrong,” she insisted breathlessly.

  His well-cut mouth thinned in disapproval. “If you must know, it’s my brother.”

  “Harmon?” She hoped it was not the other, older brother.

  “No, Nicholas,” he bit off.

  “Ah,” she said. Nicholas. Of course. She studied Matthias’s glowering face. “You haven’t fought again.”

  He stopped, then claimed her gaze. “No. Worse. I caught him kissing Sister Till,” he said acidly, his Blum-blue eyes daring her to react.

  But she reacted inside with a twinge of regret, a nibble of jealousy, then a glow of hope. Nicholas was already kissing other women. How odd. It did not hurt as much as she would have thought. She, who had adored him, even worshipped him! What a milksop she had always been, to let a few sweet kisses tum her head.

  In her short week of marriage to Matthias, his constant company was winning her over to his quiet, steadfast manliness. Except for the fact that he hated her, she admired his serious, hardworking nature. Nicholas was too rash, too bold, too … much for her. She truly preferred her husband’s quieter company, somber though it WEIS. He was considerate of her in their home. Neat in his habits, courteous in his app
reciation. She took unexpected satisfaction from his compliments on her housewifery, rather than on the beauty she did not see and could take no credit for.

  Besides, if Nicholas had found another, didn’t that release her from her girlish devotion?

  “Where exactly did you catch them?” she asked, intrigued.

  “In his shop.” His disapproving look discouraged further vulgar questions.

  But curiosity spurred her on. “You went there today, in the rain?”

  “I thought to find him alone on such a dreary day,” he muttered.

  “So you could fight again?”

  He cleared his throat. “So we could make amends. Our rift, it is not right.”

  “But minding who he kisses is?”

  He let out an exasperated sigh. “Sister Till is hardly a suitable object for his ill-considered attentions.”

  “I know he admires her,” she said carefully. The town buzzed with rumors of that “admiration.”

  “Admires her!” he exploded. “He lacks ad restraint. Kissing her where anyone could come upon them. Kissing her at all. One week ago, you remember, Sister Catharina, he admired you the exact same way.”

  “Perhaps not the exact same way,” she said gently, aware of the power of words to wound. Aware too of a pinch of jealousy behind his angry memory.

  Now that was promising.

  “After all, Sister Till spoke for him at the hearing,” she added.

  But her husband walked, nursing his anger. “The problem with Nicholas always was-”

  It rubbed her wrong. “Nicholas is not our problem, Brother Matthias. You are,” she interrupted bluntly.

  “My brother casts a long shadow over this union.”

  “Only because you let him.”

  He opened the low door of their smad log home, and she went in. Only a short time with her tad husband, and she already watched for him to duck his head to enter. Their quarters were too cramped for a couple barely speaking. Low ceilings and log wads crowded them together. For all his courtesy, she believed he wanted to be shed of her. She longed to make him want her.