His Stolen Bride Read online

  HIS STOLEN

  Bride

  Judith Stanton

  To my cousins, Moravian and otherwise, for enthusiasm, love, and support: Joellyn Arends, Penny Cota, Barbara Giles, Winona Masten, Winoka Plummer, Sue Reeves, Janice Reich, Elaine Thacker, Carolyn Thomason, Delores Vogt, Sylvia White

  “And happy was the bride,

  And glad the bridegroom’s heart…”

  —Moravian wedding hymn

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  Praise for Judith Stanton and Wild Indigo

  ALSO BY JUDITH STANTON

  Afterword

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  SALEM, NORTH CAROLINA, APRIL 1796

  He would not give her up yet, Single Brother Nicholas Blum vowed to himself. But the Elders had not even asked her name before denying his request to marry. Then, with his father’s blessing and support, they had assigned him to yet another trade. With another master.

  In another state.

  Three hundred miles away.

  His hand reached for the latch to his brother’s dye shop. Matthias might help. Might not. Nicholas would tell him just enough to enlist his sympathy. He need not confess his plan to marry Catharina Baumgarten.

  Nicholas would not, could not give her up at all.

  The latch creaked downward suddenly, and the door sprang open.

  “Nicky?” Taller than he, darker, thinner, better, his brother was already hard at work. He peered at Nicholas in the soft dawn light. “Early for you, is it not?”

  Nicholas walked in. Steam from a vat of boiling scarlet liquid shrouded them. “I, um, I leave this morning.” Asking anything would be harder than he thought.

  “Ah, yes,” Matthias said tactfully. “Your latest adventure.”

  “My banishment. You can say it.”

  But Matthias wouldn’t. He never misspoke, never took a misstep. Piety, natural modesty, and an endless capacity to stick to one dull task had made him a model Single Brother. A success among Salem’s community of tradesmen. And a bit of a prig, Nicholas assured himself. For there was no denying that his younger brother threw a harsh light on the fits and starts and stops on his own path.

  Matthias cuffed his shoulder. Red from the dye baths stained his fist, a curiously diabolical sight on such a paragon. “’Tis a fresh start, brother, and well you know it This time, you will find your true vocation, I am certain of it. Would that I…” he trailed off. His blue eyes went dreamy, then he sighed. “But I have bolts of linen destined for the scarlet baths today.”

  “You love your work,” Nicholas said, taken aback by a note that smacked of envy in his pious brother’s voice.

  Matthias strode over to the vat, grasped a giant paddle with both hands, and stirred the steaming brew. “Idle hands are the devil’s–”

  “Dieu, Matty. The devil has no more a handhold on you than he would on a saint. You never needed work to save yourself from sin.”

  He sloshed the sinister red mixture to the vat’s rim. “We work because we must. I here amidst the colors, and you … wherever. In adventures.”

  As a boy of twelve, Nicholas had run off to fight with the Continentals, contrary to the Brethen’s pacifist faith. Someone had to defend the town, he had fervently believed. He had never lived it down.

  “Hah. My bid at butchery was no adventure. I retched for days on end.”

  Matthias almost grinned. “I never said ‘twas all adventure.”

  “No, indeed,” Nicholas grumbled. Apprenticing had been his hell.

  The paddle swished and slurped in the dye bath.

  For twelve years, Matthias had been the town’s dyer, never deviating from the trade chosen for him at fourteen years of age. Whereas Nicholas, after his wartime misadventure, had been turned out by a severe master gunsmith at fifteen. By seventeen, he had conclusively established that brawn alone did not a blacksmith make. His hands were too large for delicate clockworks, and he had no stomach for butchering. Now twenty-eight, he made a humble living as the town’s lone tinsmith, making tinware for his fellow communicants in the church and the outsiders who came on Market Day.

  He was years from being established enough that the Elders would let him marry.

  Catharina.

  He forged ahead to the purpose of his visit “Matty, while I’m gone, I want you to watch out for my …” He stopped. It was damned awkward. Officially, Catharina was nothing to him. Courtship was forbidden. Even flirting was frowned upon. In their community, Brethren Single Brothers and Single Sisters lived, worked, prayed, and played strictly apart Naming her in any terms that smacked of familiarity would tarnish her in his family’s eyes and soil her reputation.

  Matthias looked up guardedly. “Watch out for your affairs? Father says Brother Issen will mind your shop. Do you not trust him?”

  Nicholas grasped the topic like a drowning man. If clever, he could steer it back to Catharina. “’Tis not a matter of trust Nils lacks your business sense,” he confided. “He’s apt to fashion naught but lanterns for a year. Engage him in conversation and steer him toward variety.”

  “I can do that.”

  “And our family. Harmon, Elizabeth, and the twins–they sometimes need an older brother’s hand.”

  Matthias’s dark brows knotted guiltily. “Ach, I’m too steeped in work. Besides, Harmon and Elizabeth will soon be grown, and I will barely know them.”

  Nicholas was not displeased to prick his brother’s conscience. Matthias had stinted family for work, never giving their younger brother and four sisters their due, things he himself took to be the older brothers’ duty. Frolics, presents, and advice–whether they wanted it or not.

  “It’s the twins mostly. I–well, perhaps I should not say how often I bail them out of trouble.”

  Matthias’s mouth crooked. “Rapscallions. I can guess.”

  “And Anna Johanna. She’s old enough to marry the next time it’s proposed. You should talk to her.”

  “Or to some fence post! Truly, Nicky, she won’t listen. She’s a grown woman.”

  “I will worry about our parents, too.”

  Matthias’s sideways look said he must be mad. Their father and stepmother were able, respected leaders in the town, healthy, vigorous. Almost embarrassingly still in love. “They cannot need aught from us.”

  Nicholas pushed his point. “They are getting on, Matty,” he said gravely. “And so must I. The sun’s up.”

  Matthias lay the paddle down and clasped his shoulders. Red dye lined the creases of his knuckles. “God be with you, Nicky.”

  Nicholas turned toward the door, then looked back casually. “Oh, and keep an eye out for Catharina Baumgarten, will you?”

  “Sister Baumgarten?”

  “You know, the beauty,” Nicholas said lightly, with a confiding wink thrown in for good measure.

  Shy to a fault with women, Matthias stuttered, evidently overcome. “All right, Nicky. Thank you. Yes, I will.”

  Nicholas left, not sure he had gained his point. Had he asked enough? Too much? Matthias had almost smiled, look
ed eager to help out. He must have understood.

  He had to. Everything depended on it.

  Nicholas angled across the Square to the Baumgartens’ barn and found Catharina milking her cow.

  Rising from the stool when she finished, she saw him and gasped in surprise. “Brother Nicholas! The sun is barely up.”

  But it was light enough to see perfection in the willowy blonde he planned to wed. He collected his customary, considerable charm and directed it her way. “I leave today, Sister Catharina, but not without a word of goodbye.”

  The ethereal Single Sister blushed becomingly.

  “Come,” he said. He took her brimful pail of milk and led her to the peach orchard behind her mother’s barn, where they sometimes met. Well, if truth be told, where he sometimes waylaid her, unable to follow his strict conscience and stay away.

  The sun’s edge nudged above the trees.

  “Horen Sie mir zu, listen.” He set the milk pail safely down. “We will be bent and gray before the Elders hear my request to wed.”

  She dipped her white-capped head beneath a branch of a peach tree frothed with blossoms. “’Tis no great matter, Brother Nicholas,” she answered in German, her native tongue. Like most women in the community, she dealt with no outsiders and so needed little English. “Brothers often marry older, in their thirties. You are yet young.”

  “I am full twenty-eight years, old enough to know my mind.”

  Catharina smiled a very proper and indulgent smile. A pretty smile. A smile he’d done his best to cultivate in public and on the sly at every turn since she was ten years old and he was seventeen and he’d untangled her from the ropes of her mother’s meanest cow.

  “But you cannot know the Elders’ will,” she said sweetly.

  He cast his eyes aloft for patience. Sheep-shaped clouds scudded across the brightening spring morning, mimicking the blooming peach trees’ wind-tossed limbs. “They have made their will plain. They refuse to consider my proposal to marry.”

  She lifted a hand in consolation but would not touch him. She was modest and chaste and so delectable. “I am truly sorry, Nicholas. And for your father too. How very painful it must be for him, to turn down his oldest son’s request.”

  “Sorry for him?” Nicholas bit back a demand for her sympathy. She should side with him, the son, the one wronged. But how like his kind, beautiful Catharina to defend a champion as equally as an underdog. “My father has a family. Why should he stand in the way of mine?”

  “Surely he did not.” She ducked behind a branch.

  Nicholas tweaked off an intervening blossom and crushed it between his fingers, releasing its delicate scent No, his father hadn’t thwarted him single-handedly. Not his honest, stalwart father who had never gone astray, picked a fight, ricocheted from trade to trade, or piled up debt.

  “Nicholas?” She coaxed him from his glowering silence. “There must have been a reason.”

  “My tinsmith shop has not turned a decent profit these five years.”

  Catharina’s pink lips pursed. “We are not supposed to profit unduly by our work. It distracts us from our Christian path. Besides, wealth is not required for men to marry.”

  “Wealth is required of me.”

  She inclined her head. The slender arc of her neck made his blood rush to his skin and to more private places. “Why you?”

  “They won’t permit a man to marry under such a debt as mine.”

  “You carry debt? Whatever on?”

  Nicholas was not a man to buckle under pressure, but chagrin twinged him. “My two parcels of land,” he mumbled.

  “Ah, land.” She waved a demure hand. “I know nothing of land. My mother leases her house from the town, and I earn my bed in the Sisters House by needlework and cooking.”

  “Well, I purchased a backcountry tract that no one wants. Then I took a lease on the swamp.”

  “At Peters Creek? Why the swamp?”

  “I thought to dam it, then to … I have not decided. ‘Twas a fool’s idea, they say.” Yet if he took no risk, he had no hope of gain. What they called irresponsible debt, he considered reasonable investment.

  But nothing had convinced the Elders that his risk was anything but another escapade by feckless, reckless Nicholas Blum, the thorn in their thumbs, the spur in their sides since he’d run off to war.

  “My indebtedness is not the only point.” He looked out over the squat peach trees. Severely pruned back by the Brothers, the treetops met his shoulders. “Their ways don’t permit a man to be a man and choose his own path.”

  Her soft hand touched his forearm, earnest and daring. “Nicholas, you have tried many paths. Too many, surely …”

  “They say I must setde down. But I am setded–on whom to marry and on when to do so.”

  He fingered another hapless blossom. He hadn’t yet succeeded in a trade to the Elders’ satisfaction–or his own. At least the predictable tedium of his tin shop freed his restless mind to dream of more adventurous, more consequential work.

  He turned to Catharina, his boyhood sweetheart, his manhood’s desire, and searched her mild gray eyes. “I’m settled on …

  You, he thought He had been for years. Her gentle acceptance had comforted him when all his other plans went wrong. But in honor, he would not burden her with his heart’s claim, not when the Elders were sending him away.

  “… on going to Bethlehem. My father has arranged for me to work with a friend who runs their store. I am to become a trader.”

  Her approving smile took his breath away. “You will do that wonderfully well. Traveling will suit you. And you will have such a way with the customers.”

  A flush heated his face as he shrugged off her compliments. No one praised great hulking brutes like him, no doubt thinking them too strong to need encouragement or support.

  “Why, you could sell bark to beavers!” she assured him.

  But what if he couldn’t sell himself to her?

  Exasperated, he swept off his tricom and raked a hand through his hair. He could not ask her to wait. The Elders arranged all marriages and frowned on courting without their consent. Defiant as he felt today, he drew the line at compromising sweet proper Catharina-his intended bride-by seeking her hand despite the Elders’ prohibition.

  “Will you be gone long?”

  A longing in her melodious soprano heightened his frustration. He would have to wait so long to claim her.

  “Months,” he said earnestly. “Years perhaps.”

  “Oh, Nicholas, what will I do without you?”

  Her sweet concern was more than he could bear. “Think of me. You can think of me,” he said. His voice a growl and his heart in a twist, he bent his head to steal a kiss.

  Her lips were cool and dry and pure, an innocent pledge of the married delights that had spurred his impulsive request. She followed his lead, moving beneath his mouth only after he moved, her willowy body a careful fist’s breadth apart from his. He deepened the kiss, seeking the clink of her teeth and the taste of her tongue, cupping the back of her head to keep her from slipping away.

  For she was virginally shy, from the top of her starched white Haube to the toes of her plain Sunday shoes.

  He was a virgin, too, by faith and practice and enormous power of will, but not shy. He pulled her body to his and felt himself harden against her belly. She was of a height to fit him perfectly.

  Her body stiffened.

  “Catharina…” Hunger aroused, he let out her name in a hiss of desire. “Think of me.”

  She pulled away.

  “We mustn’t,” she said, the puff of her breath lost in a tug of April wind. But when she put a light hand to the plane of his jaw, he felt her urging him to stay.

  Catharina hurried up the steep rise to town as fast as a young woman could, worrying that Nicholas Blum’s stolen kiss had reddened her mouth. He was always irresistible, and she, immensely flattered each and every time he sought her out. But his careless indulgences worried her.
Her mother had an eagle’s eye for daughterly transgression. Worse, Single Sister Rosina Krause, to whom Catharina answered, pounced on her charges’ misconduct faster than cats on mice in a moonlit field.

  Nicholas’s long strides easily kept pace with Catharina’s. The milk pail slowed him not at all. She quickened her steps, trying to keep ahead of him, trusting exertion to explain the flush that heated her face.

  She shouldn’t keep letting him kiss her. What if his kisses meant nothing?

  Beside her, he made light of her haste, of her quickening breath, of the dust he claimed her skirts were kicking up to choke him. This morning, his usual charm did not amuse her.

  “Slow down, Sister Catharina, bitte,” he pled, resorting to the more formal address he had used before he kissed her. He blocked her way, his massive body argument enough to stop a runaway horse. She halted on a ha’pence to evade his embrace.

  “I meant no harm.” His cobalt eyes glimmered with amusement, and she detected no apology in his voice.

  “Oh, Nicholas, you never do.”

  Abruptly, chagrin furrowed his brow. “You don’t care that I am leaving.”

  “Of course I care. But surely your new position is for the best.”

  “You’re no help. You want me gone.”

  “I want you happy. Besides, how could I help?”

  “How could you help?”

  He sounded so exasperated then, so unlike charming, carefree Nicholas, that her heart squeezed inside her chest. How could she help him in his troubles? She was an ordinary girl, never good at books, admired by one and all for a beauty her own silvered glass did not reveal to her. So far as she understood herself, her only virtues lay with thread and thimble and a deft twist of dough.

  She raised her eyes to his insistent, probing gaze. “Will it help if I miss you?” She had already had two good cries over his coming departure, but she could hardly tell him so.

  A sharp sigh whistled past his well-shaped lips. He was so much more beautiful than she, she thought objectively, and for the hundredth time. The biggest, strongest man in town with broad-browed, squarejawed, fresh good looks that melted women’s bones–any woman’s, any girl’s, to hear the Single Sisters talk.