Buch lesen: «The Bartered Bride»

Chapter One

March 1862

Caroline Holt had been waiting all afternoon for her brother Avery to return. She kept walking to the window to look out across the fields toward the Graeber farm. That Avery would drop everything to answer a summons from Frederich Graeber was incredible to her. The ground had to be readied for the spring planting, and Avery despised their German brother-in-law.

It was nearly dark when he finally rode into the yard. She went hurriedly back to the churning, a task she’d let take far too long while he’d been gone. She worked the churn hard, determined not to give him the satisfaction of knowing she’d been so curious about his absence that she’d neglected the butter making. He came into the kitchen immediately, leaving the door ajar much longer than was necessary and tracking in mud with no concern at all for the backbreaking effort it took to keep the rough oak floor scrubbed clean. She shivered in the draft of cold air, but she made no comment.

“Frederich Graeber wants to marry you,” he said without prelude.

She looked up from the butter churn, but she didn’t break the rhythm of the churning. The statement was so ridiculous that her first inclination was to laugh. Her brother was not a humorous man, but still she thought he must be joking. Even if he had somehow guessed how badly she needed marrying, he wouldn’t have suggested Frederich Graeber— except as some kind of cruel joke.

“I want you to marry him. I’ve already answered for you,” he said. “They’re going to announce it in the German church Sunday—Frederich will make his formal pledge to you then.”

She continued to stare at him, realizing now that he was entirely serious and that this marriage plan must account for Frederich’s summons and for his willingness of late to bring her nieces here to the house to see her.

Poor Avery, she thought. He had no inkling of the impossibility of his arrangement. For the first time in her life she felt a little sorry for him.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he said in annoyance. “Did you hear what I said?”

“I heard you, Avery. And I can only suppose that you’ve lost your mind.”

He gave a little smile. “Now why would you suppose that?”

“You know I can’t marry Frederich Graeber.”

“Can’t?” he said, coming closer. His hair was sweated to his forehead. Before he had departed for the Graeber farm, he and Frederich’s nephew, Eli, had been shoveling horse manure into newly plowed ground all morning. Avery still stank of it, and somewhere along the way he must have lifted a keg of beer—to celebrate the bargain he and Frederich thought they had made.

“It’s done, Caroline,” he said, his voice still calm because he was used to having his way. Indeed, who ever said no to him? And who else refused to tolerate his arrogance but her? Certainly not their mother when she was alive. And certainly not the women here. Caroline couldn’t account for the fact that so many of them preferred the civilian Avery and his finagled farmer’s exemption to the boys who’d gone for soldiers and were fighting in Virginia—except for the fact that Avery was here, of course. And he was handsome. But his handsomeness was far surpassed by his fickle nature. The list of widows and maidens who’d aspired and failed to marry Avery Holt grew longer every day.

“I’ve already told Frederich you want it,” he said, and she abruptly looked away from him. She felt light-headed again and she concentrated hard on keeping the rhythm of the churning by fervently whispering the work poem that went with the task.

Come-butter-come

Come-butter-come

It was only at the last moment that she allowed herself to acknowledge her anger.

You-marry-the-German

This-time-Avery!

But Avery had no use for Germans—unless he needed manure shoveled or his man’s nature satisfied. She had happened upon how deftly he accomplished the latter at John Steigermann’s corn husking. The drinking and the dancing and the games on that cold October night had been incidental to the stripping of a roof-high pile of corn and John Steigermann’s daughter. Avery had bloodied a few noses to find and keep the first red ear, and Leah Steigermann was supposed to kiss him for it. She lifted her skirts to him as well—beautiful wine velvet skirts held high for Avery Holt in a cow stall, and Caroline a witness to it all because she’d thought to keep her other, too-young brother from hiding in the barn and sampling Frederich Graeber’s famous plum brandy.

Avery slammed his hand down hard on the kitchen table, making her jump. “I’m talking to you, Caroline! I don’t know why you think you can pick and choose here. I said you’re going to marry Frederich—you owe me, Caroline. You and Ann both owe me!”

“Ann is dead. Whatever you think her debt is, surely you can count it paid now. Just how is it I owe you?”

“I sent you to school in town. I stayed here working my tail off and I did without to keep you in ribbons and bread—”

“That was a long time ago. Mother’s inheritance paid for most of my schooling and you know it.”

“What about the nieces?” he asked, obviously trying a different approach. “What about Ann’s girls—you want them raised German?”

“What’s wrong with that—if German is good enough for both your sisters to marry?”

Avery swore and flung open the pie safe, looking for the fried apple pies left over from breakfast. He had married Ann to Frederich first—more than eight years ago when their mother was still alive but too addled to notice his machinations. He’d gotten the use of an acre of land with a spring out of that arrangement—when he should have been the one providing the property for Ann to bring to her marriage. At fourteen, Ann had been too young to marry—a fact that Frederich in his lust and Avery in his greed failed to notice. She endured one pregnancy after another in the effort to get Frederich Graeber a male heir until it killed her. People here pitied Frederich—not because his beautiful young wife had died, but because he had no sons. Caroline gave a wavering sigh. If the announcement was to be made in the German church this Sunday, then they must all know by now where he planned to get those.

She abruptly remembered a time last spring when she and Ann had taken the girls on a too-early picnic. The sun had been so bright that day, pinching their eyes shut and warming their faces while their backs stayed winter cold. The robins ran across the ground and the violets poked out from under the dead leaves, and Ann had told her that she was pregnant again.

And Caroline hadn’t been able to make her worry.

“Everything will be fine,” Ann kept saying.

“But the doctor in town—I thought you weren’t supposed to—”

“Life is short, Caroline,” she said with a laugh, as if she were the older and wiser sister. “If you ever came out of those books of yours sometime, you’d know that.”

Doesn’t Frederich care about you at all? Caroline had nearly asked, She had believed even then that he was a cold, indifferent man, their marriage never progressing beyond Avery’s mercenary arrangement between two strangers. Ann had never seemed to be anything Frederich considered significant to his well-being—except for that.

Don’t worry, Caroline. I’m so happy!

But she had worried—and with good reason. Ann had died of the pregnancy that gave her such joy.

Another memory surfaced. Avery had appeared then with his many complaints, disgruntled because she and Ann had picnicked too long and delayed his supper. Ann had done her best to annoy him—she was an old married woman and beyond his command, refusing to speak to him in anything but the German she was suddenly learning, provoking him to swear because he couldn’t find out anything about Frederich’s latest agricultural successes.

Remembering now, Caroline gave a slight smile, but the smile abruptly faded. She had held Ann’s hand while she bled to death from another miscarriage. Nothing the midwife tried and nothing written in the herb book had stopped the flow. Ann was twenty-two years old. She hadn’t known where she was, hadn’t known her children or Caroline, hadn’t asked for Frederich even once.

“I don’t understand,” she said in those last minutes and nothing more.

Caroline had had to go hunt for Frederich to tell him.

“My sister is dead,” she said to him, and he kept chopping wood and never looked at her. Ann had borne him two daughters, died trying to give him his precious son, and Frederich hadn’t even looked at her. It was little Lise, who was barely seven, who found the things Caroline needed to ready Ann for burial, not Beata, Frederich’s own sister, who should have done it. And it was Eli who lifted Ann into her coffin—Frederich hadn’t stopped chopping.

Work. Order. Discipline. The Germans believed in nothing else—except perhaps their medieval superstitions. The mirrors had to be covered so that Ann’s soul couldn’t escape into one. She had to be taken out feetfirst so that she couldn’t give the room a “last look.” She had to be buried with a lemon under her chin. And what a good thing it was that her baby hadn’t lived, Beata said—because Ann’s ghost would have come at midnight to suckle it.

And Avery expected her to marry into that.

“You’re past your prime, Caroline,” he said, startling her because in her reverie she hadn’t realized that he had come so close. He suddenly reached out and grabbed the plunger in the churn, stopping it and holding it fast. She tried unsuccessfully to peel his big fingers away. After a moment, he abruptly let go.

“What do you get out of this, Avery?” she asked, picking up the rhythm of the churning again, holding on to it for dear life. Perhaps there had been a reason for Frederich’s woodchopping on the day that Ann died after all, she thought. Work could be an anchor, a place to hide, a way to not think.

Ah, but to do that, Frederich would have had to be a man capable of feeling in the first place, and she knew better than that.

“I’m the head of the family,” Avery said. “It’s my duty to see you married.”

“What do you get out of this, Avery?” she asked again.

“Nothing I don’t already have,” he answered obscurely.

“Does William know what you’ve done?”

“I haven’t done anything, Caroline, that isn’t for your own good—and yes, our little brother knows. He was there when Frederich asked for you.”

She abruptly stopped churning; Avery looked up from the pie he was eating and smiled.

“You see?” he said with his mouth full. “You thought it was all my doing. It wasn’t, Caroline. The marriage is Frederich’s idea, not mine. To tell you the truth, it never even occurred to me.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Then ask William.”

“Beata Graeber won’t stand for her brother marrying another Holt, Avery. She despised Ann.”

“Since when do you think a man makes his plans according to the whims of some old maid relative?”

“Frederich never went against anything Beata said for Ann’s sake. Never. Ann had to live in his house like some kind of poor relation.”

“Frederich asked for you. I said yes. So there you are. You’re past your prime, Caroline,” he said again. “If he wants you, you should be grateful—God knows, I am.”

“I won’t marry my dead sister’s husband—”

“Let’s see if I’ve got this right, Caroline. First you ‘can’t.’ Now you ‘won’t.’ You’re the one who said it—Ann is dead. And, by God, you will marry him. He’s got no heir and he’s not likely to get one out of you.”

She understood then. If Frederich had no sons, then who would be his closest male heir after Eli? Frederich might leave a portion of his land to his inept, non-farmer nephew, but he wouldn’t leave the rest of it in the care of his daughters—no man here did if there was any other alternative. His daughters’ uncles might be another matter. Avery would be right there waiting, and if not him, then William—which would be the same thing. William was too timid to go against whatever Avery wanted, even if it were to take over an inherited Graeber farm.

But she didn’t understand Frederich. He was rich enough to send to Germany for a bride if none of the women here appealed to him. The German men and his sister Beata would have surely pointed out how foolish he was being. The young Holt couldn’t breed—nothing but females and dropped litters. And the old one? Why do you want a thirty-year-old wife when you’ve got no sons? they’d ask him.

Why?

She had no accord with Frederich Graeber. She had hardly spoken a dozen words to him in all the time he and Ann had been married. He’d never made her feel welcome at the Graeber house, never seemed to notice Beata’s rudeness to her and Ann both. It couldn’t be because she was aunt to Mary Louise and Lise, she thought. Frederich Graeber didn’t care in the least for his female children. Or if he did, not enough to marry a woman “past her prime.”

Except that she wasn’t past her prime, and before long everyone would know it. She had had no monthly bleeding since November; a horrible and unpredictable nausea had taken its place. She couldn’t control it, and she’d been frantic that Avery would notice. Clearly, he hadn’t.

Oh, God, she thought. What am I going to do?

The back door abruptly opened—her younger brother William bringing the cold March wind in with him. She saw immediately that Avery had been telling the truth about him at least. William knew all about her proposed marriage, because he studiously avoided her eyes. He, too, went to the pie safe in a quest for food.

“Is Eli still out there?” Avery asked him.

“He went home,” William said, looking again at the bare shelf in the pie safe as if he expected something to just magically appear. He was big for his age, taller than Avery, and he was always hungry.

“You got the horses settled?”

“Eli did it—”

“Damn it, boy, you get back out there and make sure those animals are put up right. Eli doesn’t know a damn thing about horses—”

“He does, too,” William interrupted in a rare contradiction of one of Avery’s pronouncements. “It’s farming he don’t know nothing about. He can take care of a horse good.” He glanced at Caroline, but he wouldn’t hold her gaze. He stood awkwardly for a moment. “I…reckon Frederich’s got in the habit of marrying Holt women,” he offered, still avoiding her eyes.

Why am I arguing with Avery about this? she thought.

It was only out of her habit that she sought to defy him. She had no choice about whether a marriage to Frederich Graeber took place, and neither did Avery. It was too late for a deception, even if she’d wanted one, too late for anything but the relentless unraveling of the truth. She was nearly four months pregnant, and no matter how badly she wanted it the secret could not be kept much longer.

“—he don’t think much of Kader Gerhardt,” William was saying.

“What?” she said, startled by the German schoolmaster’s name. Kader Gerhardt was the one man here she had truly respected. He was refined and educated, and she had thought him to be honorable as well. She had earnestly believed that he was somehow different from the rest of the men here. And she had loved him. She had even dared to think that her feelings might be returned, and she had never once perceived what he was really about—when she of all people should have. How could she have Avery for a brother and not have known?

My fault, she thought again. Mine.

There was something in her, something she had said or done that had made him think she wanted—

“—the nieces,” William said for the second time over his shoulder. And he was still looking for something to eat. He made do with a cold biscuit he found in a pan on the kitchen table. “Maybe Frederich wants you so you can teach them. You got enough schooling to do it as good as Kader Gerhardt. Frederich don’t think much of Kader. I heard him tell John Steigermann Kader Gerhardt wasn’t fit to teach German children.”

“William, you haven’t heard a damn thing,” Avery said. “Since when can you talk German?”

“I can’t talk it—but I know what I hear sometimes. You got to if you’re going to live around here, Avery. You should know that.”

“You watch that mouth, boy,” Avery said, choosing to take offense.

“None of this matters!” Caroline suddenly cried. This inane discussion had gone on long enough. There was nothing to be done now except to stop the marriage. “I won’t marry Frederich Graeber, and you can tell him, Avery, or I will.”

“It’s done, Caroline! Weren’t you listening? There’s no backing out now!”

She stepped away from the churn and moved to the pegs by the back door, taking down her wool shawl and flinging it over her shoulders.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“You know where I’m going, Avery!”

“Do you think you can just trot yourself over to the Graebers and tell Frederich the wedding is off?” he said incredulously.

“Yes.”

“Well, the hell you are. What reason are you going to give him? You’re not stupid enough to think you can find somebody with more money and more land than he’s got, I hope? I don’t see anybody else standing in line for the privilege of marrying you, Caroline!”

She sidestepped him, but he blocked the doorway, grabbing her when she tried to get through. His fingers dug into her shoulders; his eyes held hers. She knew the exact moment he realized that there had to be some reason for her determination. Given his own history, his mind did not have to make a great leap to decide what that reason might be.

“What have you been doing?” he said, giving her a shake. “Who have you been sneaking around with?” He roughly turned her around and put his hands on her belly. “By God, you’re already carrying, aren’t you? Aren’t you! Whose is it!”

“What?” she said, because everything was moving too fast and she was terribly afraid now.

He slapped her hard.

“You’re not paying attention, little sister. It’s not what. It’s who. Whose is it!”

“Avery, don’t!” William cried, bouncing from one foot to the other, but not daring to intervene. “Avery!”

“You stay out of this, William!”

“Don’t, Avery—what are you hurting her for?”

“Did you hear that, Caroline?” Avery said, grabbing her by the arm and jerking her around to face him. When she tried to get away, her shawl came off in his hand. He slung it aside and grabbed her arm again, squeezing hard. “William wants to know what I’m hurting you for? Tell him!”

“Avery, please!” she cried, because he was hurting her.

“Avery, please? Who else have you been saying please to?”

“I won’t tell you,” she said, forcing herself to stay on her feet, trying not to cry. She had thought herself prepared for the day Avery would know about her condition, but she wasn’t prepared for the look in his eyes now or for his bellow of rage.

He hit her with his fist, and he would have hit her again if William hadn’t grabbed his arm. William tried vainly to hang on, but Avery yanked free of his grasp. He shoved her hard, and she fell backward. She tried to roll away from him, but Avery came after her in spite of all William could do. She could hear someone gasping, and she realized that the sound must be coming from her. She stayed in a tight ball on the floor, covering her head with her hands, trying to ward off the blows, knowing Avery wouldn’t stop.

But he was jerked away from her suddenly, his feet coming up off the floor.

“Mein Gott! You kill the girl!” someone cried.

William knelt beside her, weeping loudly. “Caroline. Caroline!”

Don’t cry, William.

She wanted to say it, but no words came. He kept trying to make her sit up, as if he thought that her being upright would somehow negate everything that had gone on before. She tried hard to do what he wanted—he was crying so—but she sagged against him, her fingers digging into his shirt to keep herself from falling. Her hands shook. Her whole body shook.

Another pair of hands reached for her, and she cowered away from them, expecting to be hit again.

“Nein, Fraulein,” John Steigermann said gently, wrapping her shawl around her. “Kommen Sie—come with me. Es ist Zeit.”

It’s time? she thought, recognizing the German phrase. For what, John Steigermann?

“Avery…” she whispered, trying to see where he’d gone.

“You don’t worry about your brother. He don’t bother you now. Come.” He was a big man and he lifted her easily in spite of her protest, carrying her across the kitchen toward the back door.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she heard Avery say.

“She goes to my house, Avery Holt,” John Steigermann said. “Leah and Frau Steigermann will take care of her. You keep yourself and your bad temper here until I send for you.”

“This is none of your damn business!”

“I am a Christian man, Avery Holt. It is my business.”

They were outside in the cold wind, and she hid her face against John Steigermann’s coat, the movement causing her to cry out in pain. He lifted her carefully into the buggy. She closed her eyes tightly as the horse lunged forward, and she let herself be held fast in one of John Steigermann’s big arms.