His Stolen Bride Page 3

  This clever, bossy little wren, he amended, bending his back to his work and jabbing the shovel into the pile.

  The next morning, Nicholas knocked on the back door of Till’s store, his muscles aching from yesterday’s ill use and from a resless night. He had tossed for hours on his strange and narrow bed, thinking of his hopes for Catharina and his awkward start with his new partner’s daughter.

  Shrugging the kinks from his shoulders, he took in the unfamiliar landscape. Bethlehem was beautiful in a different way from the world he knew. Not so very far away, a ridge of low indigo hills nestled the waking town like new stuffed pillows strewn across a morning bed. The spring air was even softer than he remembered it in Salem, three hundred miles south. A bounty of blooming vines curled up and over the back door’s stoop. He breathed in their too-sweet perfume and waited.

  His summons went unanswered. But his tiny taskmaster had stipulated the crack of dawn, he was certain of it. We are up with the roosters, Sister Till had explained. He offered to break fast at the Brothers’ tables, but she had insisted he come here.

  Very well, he had thought. Food at the Brothers House would no doubt satisfy, but after weeks of tavern fare, he wanted mounds of hearth-cooked food from home like his stepmother always made.

  Nicholas knocked again, rapping his knuckles on the fresh green paint of the kitchen door. Its opened top half told him she was up.

  “Guten Morgen. I’m coming.” The words sang out from the store’s front rooms. He squinted into the darkness, then heard the delicate slide of Sister Till’s tiny feet heading toward him. A whiff of baking bread and fresh-ground coffee stirred his hunger.

  Briskly, she entered the shadowed kitchen, a sagebrush broom and a dripping mop askew in her arms. The glare on her face when she saw him belied the cheerful greeting she had called out

  “Late again, Brother Blum,” she said, struggling to set down a heavy oaken bucket filled with suds and yet not drop her cleaning tools. Before he could reach in to help her, she plunked it on the floor, wastewater splashing the hem of her dove gray dress.

  “And you needn’t knock. We don’t stand on ceremony with our ew–”

  “New trading partners?” He offered obligingly.

  “Our help,” she amended crisply. A quick frown produced three even, vertical lines between her nononsense straight brows. Plainly she took his courtesy for brash presumption. With a huff, she ranged the broom and mop like firearms by the door. Straining, she thrust the bucket up and over the door into his not-quite-waiting arms.

  “Take this,” she ordered, “and dump it over the fence.”

  He strolled easily with his burden toward the garden’s edge and hoisted the bucket from his side.

  “Not that fence,” she called out. “The other one, beyond the privy.”

  He shrugged, not minding her tone but noting her morning dishevelment rather more than an all-but-betrothed man should. It set his pulse to racing. What would she be like, bedded at first light and bidding him to touch her here, not there? He shook his head at his relentless new fixation, so wildly unbefitting his new position. And so unfair to Catharina.

  “Danke,” Sister Till said hastily, once he was back inside. Then she pointed toward the broom. “You may sweep the front rooms while I set out your breakfast.”

  He hesitated to take it up, unexpectedly provoked by the ignominious assignment. Spreading muck and emptying buckets were men’s chores in a pinch, but sweeping! A man did not move three hundred miles to learn to sweep a shop.

  She tapped her little foot and handed him the broom. “Can you sweep, Brother Blum? Or must I teach you?”

  He filled his chest with air. “I can sweep, Sister Till. But I came all this way to learn trade, not sweeping.”

  “Ah.” She smiled, though not with humor, he thought. “But a well-swept shop promotes good trade.”

  He shrugged in reluctant acquiescence and tracked through the dawn-dark rooms to the front of the shop, resolving to carry out his task with a good will. After all, at home he swept his tin shop.

  So what was bothering him?

  She was.

  He, a man with the experience of four sisters and the admiration of every other female who crossed his path, had never met a woman so impervious to his usual charm, so sure of herself, so smart. The little wren had an answer for everything. He suspected she was testing him. Though why, he couldn’t guess.

  Nevertheless, he reminded himself, not even she, prim and trim and self-contained, could be immune to him forever. He would sweeten her up. Women of all ages couldn’t resist an honest compliment an admiring glance, an offered arm or confidence. If she persisted in resisting him, he would find a way to smooth her feathers. He would not let her ruffle his.

  “Your meal is ready.”

  Her soft words, sudden and right behind him, made him jump like a lad caught loafing. Unthinking, he pivoted. And found himself eye to eye–nose to nose–with Abbigail, two steps above him. A confection of female beauty. In the early sun’s slant rays, she was startlingly pretty. Chocolate brown eyes, a determined nose, a porcelain complexion.

  He tried to blank his face of unsummoned appreciation. It wasn’t right to notice her in such intimate detail. He lowered his sights and, for his trouble, got an eyeful of generous bosom.

  Under which her arms were sternly folded.

  The clock chimed three melodic notes, a quarter till the hour, and he looked up, the focus of his thoughts mercifully broken.

  “Breakfast now or not at all, Brother Blum. We open at seven sharp.”

  As if his gaze had never strayed to her endowments, she turned and led him through the front room past an open office into the kitchen. Silenced, he kept pace, wondering if women ever considered what occupied men’s minds when they tagged along.

  Their bodies, he admitted, with a grateful nod to Mary Clark’s instructive intervention. Even he, neophyte to corporeal pleasure, could see that Sister Abbigail Till’s figure was a miniature of perfection, her posture proud, her waist a size his hands could span, and those hips, that unconsciously inviting sway …

  But he would not indulge such thoughts of any but Catharina. Who was not here. He told himself to concentrate on other appetites. A hearty slab of ham and pile of hominy would do him nicely.

  The table was sparsely set. The strong dark smell of fresh-boiled coffee teased his nostrils. On tinware of a quality with his own rested two peeled boiled eggs. Calling on manners, he dispatched the meager offering in two bites each and politely folded his hands in his lap, hoping the rest would soon be ready.

  Sister Till whisked away his plate.

  “Wait,” he said, reaching to stop her and grasping air.

  She turned and frowned, real puzzlement deepening the little lines between her brows. “Wait?”

  She must think his fast broken. He laughed that he had expected more. “Sister Till, I could have eaten with the Brothers.”

  The corners of her mouth turned down. “The eggs were fresh.”

  “With respect, two eggs are no meal for a man my size.”

  She marched stiffly to her larder and came back with half a quartern loaf of bread and a fist-sized hunk of cheese. “One egg apiece is what we eat. But there, by all means eat your fill.”

  The bread was dry and the cheese was hard, but he ate his fill under her widening gaze, invoking patience to help him through this day and his vaunted charm to get him past her armor.

  “So much?” Abbigail asked weakly a few moments later. Her best cheese had disappeared, and a full pound of her original four-pound loaf was gone.

  Brother Blum pushed his chair back from the table, visibly relaxing. She stood, claiming what little advantage she could over a man more than twice her size. She had been off balance since surprising him on the steps and nearly thrusting her face into his leonine mane of unhatted, unbound hair.

  He swallowed the mug of coffee and flashed her a grin. “Twill stave off the hounds of hunger till midda
y. Danker

  She poured him another cup. Perhaps it would earn her another such grin, she thought recklessly. Bah! She censured herself with her next breath. She should be switched, a spinster Single Sister with responsibili ties and a hard-earned, impeccable reputation, entertaining the forward notion of flirting with a Single Brother.

  Or worse, a trollop’s hope of a Single Brother flirting back.

  Behind his back, she adjusted her Haube with nervous fingers. Her insides had been in a girlish dither since the irresistible blond giant had set her feather duster to trembling yesterday. Today it seemed anything she said or did showed her up to be a simpleton-or an ogre. She had endured Brother Huber too long, grown used to fending off his sly attentions with sterner and sterner edicts.

  Now she no longer knew how to make the most innocuous conversation with a reasonable man. Who drank his second mug of coffee down and smiled disarmingly again. “I think, Sister Till, we have not begun aright.”

  “’Twas our usual breakfast,” she said defensively.

  “Breakfast was fine,” he reassured her. “’Tis my fault. I came here, you see, with certain assumptions about my father’s friend and his store. I assumed, for one, that he worked alone. Evidently he does not.”

  His polite pause invited the civil explanation that Abbigail longed to give. “I have been his main assistant for fourteen years.”

  He smiled approvingly, and his approval made her insides move. “You must be his right-hand … daughter. None of my sisters would be so devoted.”

  She had a friendly urge to inquire about his sisters. But from long-cultivated caution, she would not show a personal interest in any man’s life. Their acquaintance was yet young, and they might have hours all alone in the store. Best to attend to business.

  “I keep the books and inventory. I don’t work behind the counter except when my father must be away. Then I mind the store.”

  His slow nod implied a gentlemanly bow of apology. “My fault again, entirely.”

  “He is not well, ‘tis true. Travel is a hardship for him.”

  “But there is this … Brother Huber to assist him?”

  “Christian Huber, yes.” She spoke evenly, not wanting to betray her distaste for the man before Brother Blum could form his own opinion. “After he joined our community, he came directly to work for us.”

  “And he is your father’s trading partner,” Brother Blum said neutrally.

  Too neutrally. In an instant, Abbigail was on her guard. A weasel was a weasel in any guise, she knew from dealing with the pious Brother Huber. She had spent nineteen long months evading his veiled but probing remarks about the store’s value, prospects, profits, and her own single state.

  Brother Blum might pry with charm, but he could not manipulate her into telling him more about her father’s business than he deserved to know. It was for her father to say, and indeed, she was not certain what her father planned for his new help.

  “My father has no trading partners, Brother Blum. Brother Huber minds the inventory and tends shop. You will learn the business. And I oversee you both.”

  She cleared the table in a flash and wrapped the remnants of the bread, avoiding his solemn silence. Her dismissal of his interest must have struck home with him. They both started when the bell over the store’s front door jangled.

  Exasperation riddled her. “A customer, Brother Blum. Our idle conversation and your appetite have made us late in opening the store.” She tossed the bread on a shelf in the larder and hurried to her work, leaving him to follow.

  4

  The prickly Sister set him to sorting women’s things. By afternoon, despite his appreciation of the quite hearty noon meal she had provided of smoked ham and sauerkraut and steaming hot rhubarb pie, Nicholas was fit to be tied. For he had smiled and catered to her, agreed and acquiesced until his true rash, reckless self longed to laugh and shout and run about in large open spaces.

  Never mind that he knew all the torments to which masters subjected young apprentices. In his youth, he had been unwilling fodder for the inventive corrections of four good men. He had no idea that mistresses were better at dispensing indignity.

  For what had a man of his stature—his strength—his bulk-to do with thread and thimbles and papers of pins? With shoe buckles and knee buckles, or bone buttons as opposed to brass ones? Surely you tossed them into drawers and let the women who wanted them sort them out.

  He was made for larger, more weighty matters, for travel, trade and barter. Even Catharina had seen that.

  But no, his too-cheerful overseer wanted all her trivia counted, for a start, then sorted into drawers with compartments made of wooden dividers. And she kept finding more baubles and trinkets for him to count-ribands and feathers and several deadly ornamental pins.

  “Surely, Sister Till, I did not come to Bethlehem for this.”

  She lifted a brow. “You came to learn trade, did you not? Have you not yet committed the prices I have named to memory?”

  He glared at his tiny interrogator. The small and precise had always been his nemesis. “I cannot remember everything.”

  Not that she had helped him. But he would not complain at the way she rattled off the items’ names and prices at a pace to rival an auctioneer. He suspected she did so to confound him. But to what purpose? He had merely arrived late. What else had he done wrong? Walked? Talked? Breathed? He didn’t know whether to dread her father’s return or look forward to it.

  For what could Nicholas expect from the man if his daughter already resented his very presence? Smiles she dismissed. Courtesy had not worked. Soft answers had not won her trust or her approval. Despite his most agreeable, obliging nods, she still saw him unfit to speak to customers.

  “Perhaps, Brother Blum, you are not so suited for this work as my father hoped. How can I help you to remember?”

  “If I had a slate, notes … to study in the evenings.”

  She whisked into a cramped office and returned with sheets of paper, their edges perfectly aligned. “Try these”

  Bills of lading, vendors’ notes, receipts, requests. He scanned them eagerly. His annoyance lifted, and he almost rubbed his hands in greed. The quantity of goods, their prices, list and mark-up, dates of purchase, and the amount of coin or scrip tendered.

  “Danke, Sister. ‘Tis exactly what I need … except for experience with customers.”

  She pokered up. “You think I have been remiss.”

  Yes, he thought, and bossy besides. But he carefully did not say so. Upright, successful Brothers of the sort he sought to become did not quibble with Sisters, gloat over their discomfiture, or exult when they conceded a point. He began untangling the ribands.

  The clock chimed half-past four when a plump matron entered-a Married Sister with her daughter clinging to her hand. A bright red riband anchored her Little Girl’s simple starched cap.

  Nicholas’s taskmaster greeted these new customers in softer tones. “Guten Tag, Sister Grube. And little Juliana. What brings you to our shop today?”

  The mother’s gaze roved the wares, noted Nicholas, then modestly moved away. “Ribands for my daughter, Sister Till.”

  Nicholas had the briefest moment to register a mischievous challenge in Sister Till’s dark eyes.

  “Brother Blum, my father’s new assistant, can help you with those.”

  She was giving him a customer who wanted ribands? Nicholas breathed in relief. Ribands he could handle. Sister Grube rolled toward his counter and looked up trustingly.

  “I need two coclico ribands, two blossoms, and a crimson one for Juliana.”

  Sister Till, arranging bolts of cloth, turned her head as if to hide a smile. Annoyance pricked Nicholas. He had never heard of coclico or blossom. He laid every riband he had seen since morning on the counter for Sister Grube to choose.

  The good Sister ran blunt chubby fingers over them and selected a narrow one of deepest red. “Hier, dumpling, das ist deiner crimson one,” she said in mostl
y German to her daughter. The child beamed at her treasure.

  It was purple. Nicholas grimaced at his ignorance. He might have known if he’d ever paid attention to his four sisters’ fabrics or to his brother, the dyer. But shades of anything other than a Sister’s blushing cheeks were a matter of indifference to Nicholas.

  Besides, blossoms came in every color under the sun, and what the devil was coclico?

  He straightened the remaining ribands for Sister Grube to choose.

  “Have you no coclico ones?” she asked.

  He didn’t know. Across the room, Sister Till hunched her shoulders with barely repressed laughter. Straightening, she pointed to a drawer he’d not yet opened. “Brother Blum, we have ribands in more colors here. Perhaps you haven’t mastered all the stock.”

  Six siblings and four masters had taught him fortitude in defeat. His face a mask, he hoped, of cheerful compliance, he strode across the worn board floor, retrieved a writhing mound of even more varied ribands, and spread them out before his client.

  Sister Grube’s round face sparked with pleasure. “Splendid!” She ruffled through them rabidly, plucking out two red ones lighter than the crimson. Then she held up two more that even he could tell were a dainty shade of pink, a Single Sisters’ riband like Sister Till’s.

  But did they call it blossom? Or coclico? Idly he cursed a youth misspent in stealing kisses when he could have purloined ribands and learned their names instead.

  “These will do nicely,” Sister Grube said, then paid and left.

  The instant the latch snicked shut, Sister Till chorded with laughter.

  Indignation rising, Nicholas stalked over to her.

  She covered a shamefaced grin with her hand. “I do apologize, Brother Blum. You wanted a customer.”

  He held his voice to a low roar. “You contrived to make me play the fool.”

  “You insisted.”

  “So I did. Whereas you … you have bullied me all day.”

  Stepping back, Sister Till took him in at his full length, pointedly pausing to study his wide shoulders. “I would not have thought it possible for one of my modest stature to bully so large a man.”