The Bartered Bride

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?