His Stolen Bride Page 7

  But did her father have to be at his worst for Nicholas Blum? Nicholas, who was so newly arrived and willing to please.

  Did he have to humiliate her in front of him?

  Near tears, she heard the courteous rumble of Nicholas’s voice. “But such a spread is surely suitable, sir, for a guest like Sister Rothrock. No doubt Sister Till thought only of her duty as the hostess of your table.”

  Bested, her father stabbed his cabbage.

  Abbigail bowed her head, blushing with gratitude. Brother Blum had defended her, silenced her father on her behalf, and charmed her closest friend. But why? He couldn’t possibly be interested in her. Not Nicholas Blum, who treated every woman so. Didn’t that very charm imply deception? How could she be sure he was sincere?

  He and Sister Benigna filled the awkward silence with more talk, Nicholas asking about Bethlehem and the Widowed Sister promising to show it to him.

  “In fact, we could take a stroll on Sunday afternoon. I will show you the waterworks and the fulling mill, and you can tell me about my friends who moved to Salem thirty years ago.”

  The dimple in Nicholas’s cheek deepened. “Besides, fresh air would do Sister Till good. She looks wan, don’t you think?”

  Instantly a conspirator, Sister Rothrock agreed. “Wan, indeed. Tired and listless. A stroll would be just the thing.”

  Abbigail blushed yet again, unaccustomed to notice and secretly pleased that they included her.

  Her father cleared his throat. “Strolls with Single Brothers require a chaperone, Sister Rothrock.”

  Sister Benigna dismissed his edict with a cheering laugh. “A Widowed Sister of two score and fourteen years, Brother Georg, is chaperone enough for any couple.”

  “I need my daughter here.”

  The older Sister clucked her tongue, spirits undampened by her father’s steam. “No more than Brother Blum and I will need her on our stroll. Abbigail understands what he needs to know for trade. He will be a better trader, Georg, for a knowledge of our town.”

  “What he needs is a knowledge of our stock,” her father said.

  Abbigail felt it safe to interrupt. “Which is what I have planned for him, Father, for this afternoon.”

  “And tomorrow and the next day,” her father insisted.

  “You are so severe, Georg,” Sister Benigna chided lightly, passing him the sugarcake.

  He turned up his nose at it. “The store won’t run itself, Sister.”

  Her father’s contrary objection set Abbigail’s teeth on edge. Today not even Sister Benigna’s indulgent humor could sugarcoat his mood. He offered the cake to Brother Huber, who took a pinch and handed it to Nicholas.

  Nicholas broke off a generous slab of the dessert, proving the justice of her father’s complaint about his appetite. But he spoke respectfully to the older man. “I have made strides, sir. In your absence, I studied all the prices.”

  Her father’s eyes narrowed. “How so?”

  “From receipts. Sister Till said you would expect it of me and thoughtfully gave me a stack to memorize. Which I did.”

  Nicholas’s generosity warmed Abbigail again. Save for Sister Benigna, no one credited her for anything she did. Certainly not for being thoughtful. Brother Huber always obscured any contribution that she made lest his own be eclipsed.

  Georg Till’s brow arched with doubt. “Memorized, you say? All the prices?”

  Beneath the table, Abbigail wrung her hands. Her father knew the price of every item in the store and every change of price for the last ten years. If Nicholas could not measure up, he wouldn’t hesitate to pillory him.

  Nicholas went on alert, sensing the old man’s challenge. Sister Benigna tilted her head with quiet interest, and Abbigail looked down as if embarrassed. Across the table, Brother Huber smiled smugly. Nicholas had had quite enough of the old man’s carping. He wanted to get down to business and on with his new life. To that end, two nights ago he had memorized everything, poring over receipts, sleepless until dawn. He was proud of his success.

  Still, a show of modesty would not demean him. “I believe so. All on the current receipts, that is.”

  “The price of a tea pot then,” Till said.

  An easy answer. “One shilling, eight pence.”

  Till’s eyes narrowed with doubt. “Figure twenty-three yards of bath coating at eight shillings per yard.”

  Nicholas held back a grin. His brother Matthias might be the Latin scholar, but his own best skill was mathematics, else his father would not have backed his quest to set up in trade. He had the total in a snap. “Nine pounds, four shillings.”

  Till harumphed and paused. To mentally doublecheck his figure, Nicholas thought. He did not venture a look at Abbigail but felt her stiffen with displeasure beside him. Displeasure with her harsh, demanding father, he hoped, not with him.

  “Very well,” Till said finally, almost grudgingly. “A hogshead of tobacco.”

  Nicholas tensed against his straight-backed chair. Tobacco prices fluctuated wildly throughout the season and throughout the states. Till was determined to trip him up!

  “That would depend on the quality and the source, less the weight of the hogshead, less inspection, and sometimes the cooperage fee.”

  Till scowled. “Don’t dance around the point, Brother Blum. The traders you meet won’t suffer it. How much would you reckon that to be?”

  A shoe scuffed under the table, but no one moved that Nicholas could see. “Around ten pounds, the price per hundredweight ranging from sixteen to twenty-five shillings. Than inspections average around seven shillings.”

  Nicholas knew his response was sound. Till waved a hand, dismissing it. “Explain the fluctuations in sugar prices,” he said grimly.

  Beside him, Abbigail almost lifted out of her chair with impatience. “Father! Don’t torment the man. Can you not see that he has learnt all the prices?”

  “Silence, daughter.”

  Her anger barely moderated. “Father, he knows the prices. And they cannot possibly interest our guest.”

  Sister Benigna, keenly watching the exchange, tried to dampen tempers with a soft response. “I keep up with sugar prices, Abbigail, but not tobacco. I never dipped snuff, you know, Georg.”

  Till went on gracelessly. “You must see to inventory, daughter. If he doesn’t know what we have in stock, he will be unfit for the docks.”

  He didn’t plan to be unfit for anything, Nicholas thought, but he was grateful for Abbigail’s intervention. He finished his sugarcake and washed it down with sweet warm coffee, the last pleasures, he suspected, of his day. Serious and determined, he turned to Abbigail.

  “Then I am more than ready, Sister Till, for you to lead me to the cellar and force-feed me inventory.”

  8

  Halfway through the afternoon, the obliging, pretty woman Nicholas had thought to be his ally had turned enemy. Abbigail worked him rapidly through all the cellar stores and then quizzed him relendessly: Where had each item been bought and when? How rapidly might it sell out? Who was the vendor, and was he new and untried, or old and trusted? Which customer in town requested it? Would outsiders ask for it? Over and over, until he got it right. All of it right. Which, distracted by her speed and the contradictory soft smell of roses that drifted up from between her ample breasts, he could not consistendy do.

  “Again, Brother Blum,” she said.

  His mind was mush. The lantern dimly lit the cold damp cellar, and he was making stupid mistakes. He lay down his jottings and sat heavily on a crate. Frustration put out his resolve to be patient with her.

  “Just how rapidly do you expect me to master this?”

  “Yesterday, Brother Blum,” she said sharply, her face shadowed in the dim light. “Your paper knowledge of the prices notwithstanding, my father expects you to know where everything came from and where it might go.”

  Her tone stymied him. She hadn’t been this caustic on the afternoon they met. Was it her father’s influence? Or had Nichola
s done something unawares? Whatever had turned her against him, her attention to detail seemed pointless. Punishing. But who was punishing him? The father or the daughter? And how was he to know?

  “Surely all I require for trading trips is a list of items needed,” he said tightly.

  “You could take a list. But it would slow you down,” she said deliberately, as if he might have trouble grasping her point. “And it would look as though you didn’t know your stock.”

  That was not the answer he wanted. “I came here to learn. I am prepared to do that. I am ready for the road.”

  “Not until you know exactly what we keep in stock at home. As I know. As Brother Huber knows.”

  The comparison caught him by surprise and laid him low. An unwholesome petulance of a sort not felt since boyhood made his stomach chum. If even Huber knew it, he must too. But it was proving harder than he had imagined at the outset

  “’Twill take me days at this rate.”

  “I should hope not,” she said tersely. “I don’t think you stupid, Brother Blum.”

  But he felt stupid. His frustration with her, with his lessons, spilled out. “You have obviously had years to master all this.”

  She frowned. “Fourteen years. I have worked for my father since I was seventeen.”

  “But that would make you …” he trailed off, biting his tongue against his gaffe.

  Her face reddened, and he was instantly sorry. Her age was no concern of his. She squared her slim shoulders and answered him without rancor.

  “Thirty-one, Brother Blum. A spinster Single Sister.”

  He wished for a cellar beneath the cellar, a hole to crawl into. He would not have guessed. She did not look her age. A woman ten years older than Catharina-three years older than himself-half a dozen years past hoping that the Elders would find her a match.

  But they hadn’t. Was that the source of her sharp tongue? Did she wish to remain a Single Sister, unwed, unwanted, subject to her father’s beck and call?

  What woman would? he thought. He could not help that. But it troubled him to think that she suffered day by day and that his insensitive remark had made that suffering worse.

  He stood up and walked over to the box of T-hinges where he had lost his way. Miserably, he counted them out loud, then recited their cost, their vendor, their probable buyers. Mechanically, she approved his answers and tossed the hinges in their wooden box.

  The woman who had sweetly tended his wounds, the woman he had tenderly kissed, had disappeared like swallows in the fall. And he was sorry for it. Still, she was close and smelled of roses. He inhaled her scent and wished for yesterday, when she had been his friend.

  Before the Sunday morning service started, Sister Benigna intercepted Abbigail at the door of Gemeinhaus and gently took her arm.

  Abbigail pressed her hand in sweet relief. “Still spying on me, Sister?” she teased, mustering a slight, tired smile. It had been a grueling week of training Brother Blum. Of placating her father. Of reining in her emotions.

  “Perhaps,” Benigna Rothrock said mysteriously, directing her to the crowded women’s side of the Saal. She found them seats on the center aisle right across from the men—across from Nicholas Blum. “I didn’t want you or Brother Blum to slip home after worship and miss our afternoon stroll.”

  “Not that.” Abbigail withdrew her hand from her friend’s clasp. The thought of escaping for the stroll had sorely tempted her all week. Her father’s certain disapproval stripped pleasure from the anticipation. “Father will-”

  “Object?” Sister Benigna inspected Abbigail’s face. “Hmm. Still pale. Georg will accede to my recommendation for your health.”

  Abbigail wished she had her friend’s confident control over her father’s disposition, a confidence borne of her missionary years in strenuous climes among difficult people, Abbigail believed. Alas, she did not.

  Settling on the bench, Abbigail listened to the brass band warming up. She enjoyed the pleasing cacophony of instruments before services. The Sunday morning ritual always offered wisdom, leading her to forgiveness and lifting her sagging spirits when life with her father dragged her down. It always had, but never more than now, when his iron hand ruled. She wasn’t sure she had the will to disobey his wishes today.

  “Perhaps I am too run down to traipse about town all afternoon with you and Brother Blum.”

  Sister Benigna gave a dignified snort. “You have the constitution of a horse.”

  The ministers, band, and choir were settling in. Abbigail lowered her voice. “A broken-down, swaybacked nag.”

  Her friend clucked her tongue and whispered, “You will be if you devote every minute of your life to your father and that store. Besides, your Brother Blum is counting on our little walk.”

  Her Brother Blum! Surely Sister Benigna wasn’t playing matchmaker. Abbigail was too old, too settled, too resigned to her single state. Besides, the only recognized matches that the Brethren were those sanctioned by the drawing of the Lot. She would not knowingly subject herself to that disappointment a third time.

  Even so, Abbigail followed her friend’s gaze to the men’s side of the Saal. To Nicholas, who must have arrived early. He sat, quiet and attentive, just across the aisle, his broad shoulders barely restrained in his crisp dark Sunday best. She had not seen him quite like this before, so at ease and reverent.

  Reverent? This was a new side of the charmer. Yet nothing she had seen of him gave her reason to doubt that his faith was sincere.

  He turned and saw her watching and gave her his kind smile

  Her heart flipped, then fluttered out of control. The flutters ran down to her stomach and spread lower and deeper, and she blushed hot with mortification. She had been fighting those sensations all week long, every time he brushed against her and when he touched her purposefully–whether to help her or torment her. Whatever those sensations meant-and she feared she knew-her conscience told her she should not be sitting here in church, her body thrumming with thoughts of… Or with wishes …

  She hugged her arms to her waist. Did Nicholas know the tumult he inspired in her? The tumbling, falling out of the sky, breathless descent into pure sensation? And shouldn’t she stamp out such feelings here? During worship, surrounded by the congregation? Thank the Savior no one could guess anything of what she felt inside. Nicholas included, she hoped. Nicholas most of all.

  She smoothed the heavy linen skirts of her best dress and shifted uncomfortably on the hard bench seat. Of all the Sunday mornings she had fled to Gemeinhaus for sustenance, she had never needed it more. Why? Because she had become too attached to worldly concerns.

  To the fate of her pupil. To his habits and his ways.

  She stared at the starched white Haube in front of her, trying to put Nicholas’s presence out of her mind.

  And failing. Perhaps her senses were overloaded from a week of working with him constantly. Her reserves were spent, her carefully marshaled emotions stretched tight. Not that he hadn’t been courteous and quick to learn and even tolerant when her patience wore thin. He was all that and more.

  He was far smarter than the other three assistants she had trained for her father. Nicholas’s quick assimilation of prices was astounding. His dogged mastery of the hated inventory was proof positive of his will to learn. His sufferance of her relentless badgering was … touching. But she must not dwell on that

  For she hated every minute of playing the taskmaster and the shrew. If she read Nicholas’s desires aright, she had no choice but to press him. He wanted nothing less. Whether by his father’s will or his own, Nicholas Blum was determined to be a trader. Since he had agreed to learn that enterprise from her exacting father, she must harden herself to prepare him properly.

  Without being frankly disloyal to her father, she could not warn Nicholas of what he faced. Her father’s painful gout had sharpened a temper already shortened by her mother’s death. These days he tolerated nothing short of perfection. From her, from Brother Hub
er, or from the previous three assistants, each of whom had failed to measure up. Her father had humiliated them. One had left the Brethren. One now dug graves, God’s work and respected by the community, but well below his abilities. The third, the one who had presumed to court her, did menial tasks at the new fulling mill.

  What could a devoted daughter say without impugning her father’s character? That his tyranny had broken the spirits of men younger, abler, healthier than he? That Brother Huber, the only one to pass her father’s tests, had done so with an obsequious spinelessness that turned her stomach? She couldn’t bear to see Nicholas’s bold, energetic nature reduced to that.

  Worse was in store. Before her father would let Nicholas represent Bethlehem’s most public business, he would subject him to the severest grilling of his life. With a view, she hated to admit, to humiliating him in front of her and Brother Huber. To spare Nicholas that, she could only drill him hard and make sure he succeeded.

  This morning, the reading of the Scripture droned to an end, but she had not absorbed a word of comfort. The sermon commenced, and it was not likely to yield more relief. Across the aisle, Nicholas’s commanding presence continued to draw every particle of her attention like a magnet attracted filaments of iron. She couldn’t shut it off. She couldn’t shut him out.

  Even when she sang–and she loved to join her light soprano with the women’s voices in the old chorales–it was his deep, pure baritone she heard above all others in the Saal. No man here was so substantial or so strong, stood with such manly pride, or sat with such restrained energy.

  Could she be the only one to notice that? Had he gotten so deep beneath her skin?

  Blast her untimely attraction to the man, which left her fighting those feelings in the sacred shadows of the Saal.

  Blast Sister Benigna’s meddling, too, to make her sit so close to him. To insist on the stroll, which Abbigail could not avoid without blatant discourtesy to her best friend.