His Stolen Bride

by Judith Stanton

  28

  In the black of night, Abbigail woke slowly. The moon had set, she thought idly. How would she get home? She didn’t want to leave. She was stiff and sore inside and out, and wonderfully besotted. The musky scent of Nicholas was all around her, on her, a scent of earth and wool and man with the faintest hint of cloves and rum. She nuzzled her face into his crisp chest hair, swept by a tenderness she had never known. Soft, sweet tears of joy welled up. To touch him while he lay at rest, at peace, to know that he was sated with her, to have pleased him-Nicholas who pleased and charmed so many others…

  To be his. For him to be hers, in this utter intimacy.

  That was what love was. Not words.

  The words he had not said. But he had given her all he could, ad a woman could ask, she told herself. The act, if not the words, of love. Or the words of utter commitment. She sat up cautiously, not wanting to arouse him. She grinned. She should not awaken him, but she very much wanted to arouse him, confident he would be ready and willing for her if she did.

  But it was past time for her to go.

  Neither of them needed for this night to become public knowledge. She shuddered to think of the furor that would erupt. Her father would have fits. With outstretched fingers and flat palms, she searched the floor for her clothes, shoes, and quilt. Finding them, she quickly dressed, then turned back and kissed him softly on his lips. He murmured and reached for her, never waking. She waited until his breath was deep and even, sleeping still, then stole out the back door into the dark silence of the alley.

  Fingers of fog licked down it, and anxiety nipped her. How would she see to get back to the Blums? One building at a time, she supposed. She touched the wall of Nicholas’s tin shop and gathered up her nerve. It wasn’t as though she didn’t know the way after days of walking past it to visit her father.

  She took a few bold steps.

  An arm crushed across her breasts, and a scented hand clamped down on her mouth. She screamed beneath it and kicked back with her heels.

  The man grunted, then said silkily in her ear, “Scream again, Sister Till, and we’d be caught and I’ll tell everyone who you have been with.”

  She pulled his hand down.

  “Brother Huber!” she gasped. “What in God’s name are you doing?”

  “Saving you from yourself, dearest,” he said smoothly, his breath at her neck.

  She flailed against him. “I am not your dearest, and I do not need saving!”

  “Indeed?” he asked coolly, absorbing her punches as if they were the wingbeats of tiny birds. In a dash, he wrapped a soft, thick cloth-one of his own stocks-around her mouth and knotted it tight at the nape of her neck. “You must be saved. Now trust yourself to me.”

  She couldn’t even scream.

  He half dragged her behind the tin shop, then plunged down the back street of town. Beyond the alley it was not pitch black. But a heavy fog shrouded everything, concealing her from rescue and her captor from arrest. He swung her up in his arms, his oft-lamented, temperamental back miraculously healed. Even his disability had always been a lie, she realized with alarm. How much deeper did his deception run?

  She struck out repeatedly, desperately, sdendy, but he only pinned her arms and held her to his chest, forcing her face into the fine wool of his coat. It was meticulously clean, scented with cedar, all of it much more of him than she wished to know. Choking on the sickening sweetness, she tinned her head away and struggled harder, fighting his arms and kicking his shins. He grunted, clutching her tighter with a cruel, crazy strength, dragging her down streets, past houses, past the graveyard.

  On the outskirts of town his great ungainly roan stood tied to a leafless tree. The fool was abducting her! He set her down. She yanked down her gag, but it was too late to scream. “You will never get away with this,” she hissed.

  “Remember, dearest,” Huber threatened sweetly. “With what I know of you and Blum last night, I can ruin him with his family and the town.”

  He could, and so she yielded, biding her time and plotting furiously. She was more than a match for the fastidious, self-indulgent store clerk, she reassured herself. If she played it right, she could ruin him instead. If he were crazy enough to abduct her, wouldn’t that prove he stole the watches? With surprising strength, he placed her in the saddle and mounted behind her, and they headed north.

  Nicholas woke and the moonlight was gone and Abbigad was gone. Gone home, he realized, to his parents’. Sensible of her to leave in the darkest hour before dawn, to take precautions against discovery. No need to pour more oil onto the conflagration of his current scandal. Still, she should have wakened him.

  He curled around the empty space where her precise, lush little body had lain and rubbed his face in wonder. She had fit just so. He might have dreamt her, but for a sore and happy lassitude in his loins that assured him he had taken her more than once in their first night together.

  No, he thought, he had not taken her. In the darkness of his shop, he laced his fingers behind his neck and grinned broadly for the benefit of no one but himself.

  Abbigail had sought him out, freely giving herself to him, pledging herself to be his bride. In this world and the next. By the Lot or not. In this community or … wherever they might end up. She had suggested asking his father as an Elder to protect their status here. But Nicholas did not want to wait for his parents to approve. Instead, he wanted them to be married by a magistrate and return to town, come what may. The Elders couldn’t unmarry them. No one could part them now.

  “No one will,” Abbigail had promised.

  Her trust had sharpened his resolve to clear himself of theft and pay off his remaining debt, half settled already with his personal earnings from the summer’s trade. Abbigail had attacked the debt with the same brisk competence she showed running her father’s store. Days ago, on a walk with Retha, she had seen his swamp. Somewhere in the darkness between kisses, laughter, and embraces, talking of their future, she had suggested he build there.

  “Build what?” he had murmured, idly threading his fingers through the weight of her dark hair.

  “Something larger than this.” She had suggested-she had already thought of this for him, for them, he marveled-that it be drained to erect a paper mdl like the one at Bethlehem. Didn’t Salem need one too?

  His hand had stopped. The idea appealed. “How large?”

  “Large enough to occupy your talents and energy. Three stories, a dozen men. A modest ouday, to keep you out of trouble,” she had added saucily.

  “What oulay? I’ll have no more debt!” he had protested.

  “Do you suppose, Brother Blum, that a shopkeeper’s smart daughter balanced books for all those years and failed to set aside a little nest egg?” she had asked, ad her brisk self-confidence snuggled up to him.

  “I could not ask you for money.” The thought had mortified him.

  She had silenced his lips with her fingertips. “Nicky, you would not have to ask your wife.”

  Alone now, he lay back on his pallet, his manhood lifting as he recalled their joyous joinings. What a surprise his little wren had been, what a marvel of passion and invention. What a match for that questing, reckless side of him that no one in the world had ever understood.

  He should sleep. He should be exhausted. He should be wallowing in despair over the blasted watches. Instead he felt inspired, renewed, eager for daylight, for morning prayers, for meeting friends, for industry. Last night had been the most important of his Ufe. Too bad he could not shout his love to the world or share it with his family. Not yet.

  He waited in his room, listening to the old familiar sounds of the town waking as he planned his precarious future with Abbigail. Just at dawn the last conch of the night had blown, its haunting blast as comforting as sunrise. Some women had lit their ovens hours earlier, and the scent of baking breads wafted through the streets and permeated his little shop. He was ravenous! A wagon trundled down the street, some travelers northbound
from the Tavern. After a while townsmen murmuring softly passed on their way to early worship.

  Nicholas rose, sponged hastily, and dressed, anxious to see Abbigail, to make sure she was wed. To make sure, he realized, suddenly edgy and uncertain, that she was truly his. He regretted he had not fully wakened when she left. He would see her at morning worship, he told himself. Besides, he had never been such a reprobate as to forget prayers of gratitude. Shrugging into his better coat, he headed for morning prayers, determined to be impervious to glances, hints, and whispers.

  He stepped outside into a fog-cloaked morning, cool and quiet and mystical. He peered into the wall of white, barely able to distinguish the main street’s older half-timbered houses from the newer ones made wholly of brick. Through the mist, the forms of Brothers and Sisters clarified eerily like lumps of butter in thick cream.

  But not a sign of the one Sister he had come to see.

  Retha and the twins materialized, ambling up the shrouded street. His heart squeezed, disappointed by Abbigail’s absence. Since coming to town, she had been as reliable as a clock about services. Then he remembered her sinking swiftly into sleep after they made love. Of course, he thought, excusing her delinquency with a rush of masculine pride. He was not the only one exhausted from their night of passion.

  The woman he pledged to marry was sleeping late.

  Inside Gemeinhaus, his father and Matthias soberly flanked him, claiming a back bench in the Saal. Brother Till walked in alone and looked right through him.

  So be it! Nicholas thought, with a twinge of regret that Abbigad’s father-soon to be his father-in-law-was so severe and unforgiving. Till may have wrongly accused him of stealing watches. But soon Nicholas would rob the man for real, stealing something he held far more dear.

  Other Brethren drifted in, some acknowledging him with their eyes, others already in an attitude of prayer. No overt censure or blame. It didn’t matter. It was torture to sit here delirious with joy from his stolen night with Abbigail. He wanted to shout about his newfound, new-claimed love.

  Instead, he bowed his head and blessed his sleeping bride.

  By midmorning the fog lifted, and Abbigail was furious, hungry, and sore. And, she admitted at last, more than a little scared. The wagon road to Bethlehem stretched before her and her abductor, the bright sunlight marking every rut and glinting off every puddle. A miserable road, but public. Surely help would come along. Surely Nicholas would come.

  Huber’s horse balked again. His twitchy and id-tempered mount cultivated a growing terror of the glistening puddles, perhaps in protest over its double load. An inept horseman, Huber had long since ruined the cantankerous roan. Now he sawed the reins at the poor thing’s mouth to make it move.

  “You’ll not force me into marriage this way either!” she harangued Huber, seizing the moment of his distraction to launch another verbal assault.

  “’Tis neither the time nor place to discuss our marriage, dearest Sister.” His tone was doggedly civil.

  Less civil than before, she noted, with growing worry. So far, he had been maddeningly considerate, as if courting her. She had been simply maddening, harassing and harrying him any way she could. Perched precariously in front of him, she clung to the saddle for safety. He kept one arm around her waist and pressed his belly to her back, revolting her ad the more after a night spent in her lover’s arms.

  Huber must have chosen to go by horse instead of wagon to humiliate her. He wanted to hold her like this. He had given up on wooing her, but he meant to marry her no matter what. Nausea bubbled in her throat. Not even if he ravished her would she take his hand when she belonged to Nicholas.

  Which left her more vulnerable than ever.

  For she knew now in her heart and in her tender inner flesh what she had only sensed about the holy state of matrimony.

  What was bliss with Nicholas, with Huber would destroy her.

  Huber flapped the reins, scolding and clucking at the balking roan. Finally, it picked a detour around the puddle and resumed its rolling amble. Thank the Savior for small favors, Abbigail thought. Her poor exhausted body could not have borne an all-out trot. How degrading to be sitting here, her aching legs splayed around some beast at the insistence of a man she loathed. In a nauseating parody of last night’s …

  Oh, Nicholas! The thought, the taste, the feel of him. Her heart clutched. What would he do if he caught up to them? If he found her in Huber’s clutches, she could not prevent murder.

  “There is no marriage to discuss,” she told Huber, once the horse moved on.

  “I beg to differ,” he said in an unnervingly conciliating tone. “Nothing-neither fire nor brimstone-would have driven me to this extreme, but the sight of you emerging ad alone from Brother Blum’s shop at half past four in the morning.”

  “Abductors of Single Sisters are subject to disassociation, too,” she countered.

  “An abductor would be, dearest, but I am rescuing you.”

  “Rescuing me?”

  “From fading into the pit of Brother Blum’s attractions.”

  Too late for that, she thought. She had faden, she had soared.

  She forced a change of subject. “Why were you linking there?”

  “I was watching your precious Brother Blum, if you must know. There are three watches unaccounted for.”

  “No doubt the Board of Elders solicited your aid,” she bit off. As the long day wore on, his effort to maintain the guise of tender admirer exasperated her. But she was grateful for it. He had not yet ravished her. His sham respect might yet preserve her.

  “No, they did not, and that is why I acted. I sought to prevent his escape and uncover more stolen goods.”

  “Bah! Nicholas is no thief. No one knows that more than you.”

  Ignoring her insinuation, he tried placating her again. “’Twas ad for you, dear Sister.”

  “’Twas all for yourself,” she snapped, sick of his piety. “Make no mistake about iL I am not, nor ever will be, your dear anything.”

  “My dearest Sister Till, you have no choice. Utterly ruined as you are in the eyes of God and all mankind, none but I will have you now.”

  “Nicholas would never abandon-”

  “Blum can go to the devil,” Huber snarled, ill will overcoming his unctuous civility for the first time since they had left Salem. The malice in his voice, she feared, was but a shadow of what lay ahead. The tall pines that lined the road slid by, and she plotted. She could not hope to overpower him. But she had always had a sharper tongue, the stronger mind. She would trick her way to freedom, swapping Scripture for pieties.

  “’Thou shalt not envy,’ dearest Brother,” she exhorted sweetly, changing tactics. “The handsome Brother Blum is much admired by ad the Sisters. But surely ‘tis a sin in you to envy him.”

  His body stiffened in anger, driving the roan into a nervous jig. A painful gait, but she would bear it if it upset her captor. Down a hid and up another as the terrain grew more mountainous, the roan calmed and slowed, blowing hard. The way was becoming harder, harder on them ad.

  Huber spoke at last, his voice unnaturally gentle. “Your father will never permit your marriage to Blum, dear Sister, despite your sinful hope. The Lot decreed our union. Brother Till wants it for you, and I want it for us. A virtuous woman could not ask for more. Tis a sign and a blessing. Moreover, after what you did last night, redemption.”

  “Just what do you suppose I did?” she asked sharply.

  “I heard what you did.”

  “You … listened?” Perverted wretch! Her heart thudded with humiliation.

  “But do not fear,” he added smoothly. “I will still take you.”

  “Never!” she burst out, stunned by his pious depravity. Impulsively, she grabbed the saddle’s pommel and drove a heel into the roan’s right dank. It sidled left; the bulky Brother swayed precariously right.

  Swearing by ad the saints and the blood of the Precious Lamb, he righted himself clumsily, then salvaged
his control. “One more stunt like that, dearest Sister Till, and you will walk,” he said ominously but evenly. As if it pleased him to upbraid her. “Now I commend your precious self to silence.”

  “I won’t walk, and I won’t stop talking.”

  But she would worry. His taut control and surprising strength betrayed a deeper lunacy than she ever had imagined.

  Vespers. He would see Abbigail at vespers. Patience thinning, Nicholas returned to his shop after a midday meal and took up a piece of tin to make another lantern. Every fiat of tin he fired and bent and hammered into shape was a promise of their future.

  Today she was safe in the protection of his parents’ home, resting, he told himself, with a new, acute pride in their love. He had not called on her there ad week, and she could not want to risk their meeting now. One look would betray all. And so, obedient to her desire and careful of her reputation, he waited for vespers.

  But it was damned hard.

  In the middle of the afternoon the bell above his door jangled. He finished squaring off an edge of tin to make a comer and looked up to see his father. Nicholas braced for the worst: The Elders would meet tomorrow, the Elders needed a month.

  “Ah … Nicholas,” his father began, turning his tri-com in his hands. “We are looking for Sister Till.”

  “We who?” Nicholas forced himself to ask calmly.

  “Retha and I. Her father, Sister Rothrock. No one has seen her since last night.”

  Alarm threaded through Nicholas. “She was not at morning prayers.”

  “Retha noticed that. But when Sister Till missed our midday meal, we thought her with her father, who thought her with Sister Rothrock. I’ve sent Matthias to inquire of Christian Huber.”

  “She would not go to him,” Nicholas stated positively.

  “No. Unless she felt compelled to by your father’s case against you.”

  “Not even then.”

  “Then …” His father cleared his throat. “Perhaps she came to … you?”