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
