The Bartered Bride. Cheryl Reavis

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СКАЧАТЬ you’ll just have to cry. Life is full of crying. I can’t fix everything.” He was very careful not to look into her upturned face, into those begging Holt-brown eyes.

      “Can’t you please just fix this, Papa?” Lise asked. “Don’t let Uncle Avery hurt her again. Please, Papa! All you have to do is just stand there while she talks to him—he wouldn’t hurt her if you stood by. I know he wouldn’t!”

      Her mouth trembled, but she worked hard not to give in to it. Clearly, Lise expected him to stand guard indefinitely.

      “Your Aunt Caroline left by her own choice—”

      “No, she didn’t, Papa! She left because Beata is going to be mean to everybody if she stays. Papa—”

      He held up his hand to stop her.

      “You don’t worry about your Aunt Caroline. You don’t worry about any of those people over there.”

      Caroline heard the back door slam, and Frederich caught up with her before she reached the edge of the Graeber land.

      “I have something to say to you, Caroline Holt. This is—”

      “What do you want, Frederich?” she interrupted. She stopped walking, and she forced herself to look him in the eye.

      “What do I want? I want to keep you from making the scandal any bigger than it already is.”

      They stared at each other. She abruptly looked away.

      “What is wrong with you?” he said angrily. “You behave as if you have some choice about what you will do! You don’t. You are pregnant. Avery doesn’t want you or your brat. It falls to me to keep my family from becoming any more of a laughingstock than it already is. I am going to keep the family’s honor—the honor you drag through the mud as if there is nobody to suffer the consequences but you. There is only one thing to be done. You don’t start everybody talking all over again about the marriage. Do you understand?”

      “No,” she said. “I don’t!”

      “My daughters are crying—Beata is starving us to death hiding everything she can get her hands on—Eli has disappeared! All this is your fault. Do you understand that? Going to Avery—begging Avery—will only make our trouble worse. Worse for you—worse for—”

      She looked away from his penetrating gaze. She did understand after all. She understood perfectly. How terrible for Frederich to have to keep her when he wanted so desperately to be rid of her.

      “Frederich, I—” she began, looking back at him. But he was staring at her clothes. “Come,” he interrupted. “We go see Avery now.”

      “Go see—Frederich, you just said you didn’t—”

      “You are beginning to stink. You need your clothes. We’ll go and get them, and you don’t say anything to your brother about this notion you have of coming home. You can manage that, surely.”

      He took her by the arm to start her walking, letting go almost immediately as if he found touching her distasteful. And he kept giving her wary glances as they crossed the field.

      “Say nothing!” he admonished her as they neared the house, and she had to bite her lip to suppress an angry reply. She wasn’t stupid about everything. Just her choices of lovers and husbands.

      She could see John Steigermann standing in the yard-perhaps advising William of her marriage as she’d asked. Under better circumstances and with a different companion, the walk here would have been pleasant enough. It was cold still, but without the biting wind of yesterday. Spring always came quickly in this part of the country; winter one week and budding leaves the next. She noted with some surprise that she was looking forward to the dogwoods and jonquils just as she always did. And she noted, too, that she was actually going to try to have a civil conversation with Avery after what he had done.

      Better to ask for her clothes than for sanctuary, she thought.

      John Steigermann and William and Avery were all staring at her as she and Frederich approached. They would, of course, be surprised to see her out today. She was newly married and should be attending to her wifely duties.

      “Ah!” John Steigermann said immediately, waving her closer. “Frederich! Caroline! Come hear this. You will want to know the news.”

      “What news?” she asked, glancing at Avery as he swallowed whatever unpleasant thing he would have said to her if both John Steigermann and Frederich hadn’t been there.

      “The army has gone through again foraging supplies,” Steigermann said. “Penn Palmer says they took every decent horse he had. Steal is what they do. Paying with pieces of paper no one wants to honor. I say we go to the garrison in town—we see what they will do about paying real money for what they take. And look at this, Caroline,” he said taking a folded newspaper from his coat pocket. “You will read what this says, yes? I can’t read the English so good.”

      She took the paper he handed her. “New call for troops,” she read aloud. “The following is under proclamation of the President, extending the call under the Conscript Act, to embrace all residents of the Confederacy between the ages of eighteen and forty-five years, not legally exempt—”

      John Steigermann frowned and motioned for Caroline to keep reading.

      “Foreigners,” she went on, “who are actual residents, will be called upon to do military service in defense of the country in which they reside.”

      “Let me see that,” Avery said, snatching the newspaper out of her band and reading it himself. “That’s what it says. I’ve got my farmer’s exemption—but this is going to get a lot of you Germans if you aren’t careful.”

      “And how can we Germans be careful, Avery?” Frederich asked. “Do we go hide in the woods and leave the women and children to work the farms?”

      “You can go into town and see about a farmer’s exemption the same as I did,” Avery said.

      “That is not so easy when the man who takes the bribe changes every week.”

      “It isn’t a bribe, Frederich. It’s a fee.“

      “Call it what name you will, Avery Holt. It is what it is.”

      Caroline stepped away as the discussion became more heated. She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. She was tired from the walk. And from arguing with Frederich, and before him, Beata.

       Isn’t there someplace where I can just live in peace?

      “Caroline,” William said.

      She looked around at him. He was standing awkwardly, clearly embarrassed by her new status and not knowing what to say.

      “Hello, William,” she said, forcing a smile she didn’t begin to feel.

      “I got something for you,” he said, motioning her toward the house.

      Avery glanced at him but didn’t intervene.

      “What is it?” СКАЧАТЬ