The Amish Bride of Ice Mountain (2 page)

He felt her tighten her grip in his, her hand small and trusting, and realized that she’d caught hold of her skirts. She bent her knees and he did the same, hoping that Joseph and Edward wouldn’t raise the broom. And then they were jumping over the long stick in fluid unison to land in the moss on the other side. He let her warm hand go.

“An excellent jump.” The bishop clapped. “There—see, Abner, things are bound to be right now.”

Jude’s new father-in-law grunted while Joseph and Edward rose from holding the broom.

“We’ll leave.” Bishop Umble spoke with authority and Jude ducked his head away from the solemnity in the man’s wise eyes. It was almost as if the
Amisch
leader could see his less-than-honorable plans, and Jude had the passing thought that he might have felt better if Joseph had taken a swing at him.

“I’ll stay on a bit and take care of his head,” Mary said.

“That, and nothing else, Mary. You’ll be home in time to fix supper,” Abner warned.

The bishop laughed and clapped Abner on his broad shoulder. “I’m afraid that you can’t have it both ways, Abner. The girl’s his wife now. She takes care of him and gets his supper now. And ‘anything else’ is up to them.”

His new father-in-law blustered, then seemed to realize that he’d forced himself out of a cook, and Jude had to suppress a smile. He knew how hard Mary worked and he’d be glad to give her a break from it all for awhile. He slung his arm around her shoulders and grinned at his new brothers-in-law.

“Well, boys, it looks like you two will be taking up Mary’s place and chores.”

“
Ach
, but maybe I should . . .” Mary began and Jude tightened his hold on her with deliberation.

“You should care for our cabin, sweetheart. At least for the next two weeks—until we leave the mountain.”

Then everyone looked sober and he regretted his loose tongue, though he’d spoken the truth.

“Be well, daughter,” Abner mumbled and started off. Her two brothers followed and Bishop Umble paused to gaze up at Jude.

“You’ll be good to the girl?”

“Yes, sir. I give my word.” Jude felt the other man weighing his words. Then he nodded and also turned to go, and the men disappeared into the tree line once more.

Jude would have moved his arm but Mary turned in to the line of his body, pressing against his hip and burying her face in his white shirt.

“Mary . . . Mary,” he whispered, thinking she might be sad, but then she lifted her head to smile at him with her beautiful mouth.

“What would you like for supper, Professor?”

You . . .
Jude’s mind recoiled from the unbidden thought as if he’d held his hand to white-hot coals. He cleared his throat. “Anything will be fine.”

“All right, Professor.”

He stepped away from her. “Call me Jude.”

Her smile grew and he blinked.

“All right. Jude.”

Chapter Two

She had been inside his cabin before, but now she felt an intimacy about the ordered stacks of books and papers that lined his makeshift desk of plywood on two sawhorses. She stared at his neat handwriting until the letters and words made a blend of twining thread, swirling out into a lifetime of possibility. She jumped when he touched her arm.

“Well, little friend, we seem to have gotten ourselves into quite a situation.” His deep voice sounded tired.

“Is your head still hurting?” Her eyes swept the simple single bunk made up with white sheets and a green sleeping bag he must have somehow gotten past the bishop. She knew that his coming to Ice Mountain was conditional upon his living with strict adherence to all the ways of the people. He’d told her how warm the strange fabric of the sleeping bag was at night, and more than once during a summer storm, she had longed for the covering as she shivered in her own bed under threadbare quilts.

He must have seen her staring at the bed because he cleared his throat and stepped away from her.

“I need more sugar.”

She watched him unwrap some candies and pop them into his mouth. He turned to hold one out to her but she shook her head. He sighed. “I have the type of hypoglycemia that is not diabetes—it’s rare.” He must have known she didn’t understand, and he shook his head. “Yesterday, Mary . . . Look, I want to talk about it.”

She fingered a knot on the bedpost and thought of the warmth of the tanned skin of his throat beneath her fingertips. He’d smelled like summer and pine and something strange and wonderful in its unfamiliarity and she’d . . . “What is there to talk about?”

He dropped down onto the stool in front of his makeshift desk and sighed. “I shouldn’t have touched you—kissed you like that.”

She swallowed. “So why did you, then?”

His eyes swept her body from head to toe and he half smiled. “You’re beautiful—inside and out. You deserve a lot more than a selfish writer who doesn’t share your ways.”

“You want to take it back, then—the kissing?”

“I’m not going to lie to you, Mary. I’ve tried to be honest with you all summer. You’ve been my friend, taught me so much about your people—you deserve the truth now. I know how curious you are about the outside world. I could give you a chance to see it, experience it. And then that wedding we had . . .”

Something was wrong, she could tell from the way his blue eyes dropped to the rough hardwood floor. “All right.” She felt she should speak with caution, having the same instinct that she did when a bear was along the path ahead when she went herb picking.

“Well, you could come to Atlanta—Metro Atlanta—with me, as my wife, of course—but we wouldn’t . . . we couldn’t . . .” He paused, struggling, and awareness dawned in her mind.

“We wouldn’t lie together?”

“Right,” he exhaled with a quick smile. “Then we could get an annulment in a few months, an end to the marriage, and you could come back here afterward and . . .”

“Wait . . .
sei se gut
.” Her voice shook a bit and she paused to steady herself. “We . . . we jumped the broom.”

He stood up and came to bend close to her face. She could see the heavy fall of his lashes and smell the butterscotch-candy sweetness of his breath. She wanted to sob aloud.

“Mary, come on. We can’t . . . you can’t leave this mountain, these people, forever. What about Isaac Mast? Hmm?”

She felt her face flame in embarrassment at the thought of the pimply faced youth who dogged her footsteps. “Isaac is a boy.”

He smiled and brushed a finger down her hot cheek. “All right. But, Mary, think about it. Freedom . . . excitement, a taste of what you want and then home again.”

“Why?” she managed to say. “Why not leave me here in the first place? This is not right, a lie before
Gott
.” She bit her lip, knowing she’d said the wrong thing when he stiffened and pulled away.

“I forget your Amish roots, don’t I?” he asked with a wry twist of his handsome lips.

“And I can never forget,” she whispered. She clutched her hands in her apron, then jumped at a scratching sound on the door.

She met her husband’s eyes and he shrugged. She hoped her
dat
hadn’t decided to come back, then moved to open the door.

 

 

Jude rubbed at the lump on the back of his head and wanted to crawl under the desk when Mary opened the door to reveal
Grossmuder
May. The
Amisch
woman was older than time, had a toothless grin, and knew far too much gossip about the mountain community she helped take care of with her herbs and remedies. Mary’s questions tore at him. Why couldn’t he simply leave her here? Gather his notes and be gone during the night? But some sense of twisted honor held him, and now here was one of the eldest in the small mountain community—come to watch the debacle of his entrapment.

No doubt news of the impromptu wedding had spread, and May wanted to chat. He rose in deference to the old woman, who was revered as a healer, and waited for her to speak.

“Married, are ye?” she rasped, hobbling farther into the small space.

“Jah, Grossmuder,”
Mary said shyly.

Jude felt the weight of the raisin-dark eyes in the wrinkled face and stood his ground. May brushed past him to pull a small pouch from her apron pocket. “I’ve come to bless the marriage bed.”

“What?” Jude was nonplussed and felt his cheeks grow hot in spite of himself when he glanced at Mary. His new wife looked distinctly uncomfortable
. My wife
. . .

“It’s a custom . . . you can write it down,” Mary said.

But for once, Jude had no desire to write as he watched
Grossmuder
May open her pouch. The air in the small cabin became permeated with the smells of lavender, rose petals, and other entrancing scents he couldn’t identify as the old woman lavishly sprinkled his bunk with the contents of the dried herbal mixture.

“Now the
kinner
will come quick enough.”

The old woman turned and Jude felt a chill go down his back—the children. He reminded himself that none of this was real—not the wedding nor the bed.

“I think I’ll walk up to the meadow for a bit—clear my head.” Jude gave Mary an awkward pat on the shoulder and nodded to May. He left, intent on the grass beneath his feet and the stretch of sky above him—blue and framing the tops of other mountains that were far, far from weddings and children.

 

 

Mary sank miserably down on the bunk despite the herbs beneath her skirt.

The old woman leaned on her cane and shook her head. “What is it, child?”

It didn’t occur to Mary to do anything but tell the truth.
Grossmuder
May was as close to a
mamm
as she’d ever had. “Everything’s wrong,” Mary choked.

“Everything, hmm? You mean to say that Abner got his dander up and now you’re married to a man who’s leaving the mountain in two weeks?”

Mary lifted her tear-stained face. “The professor—Jude—he wants an anull . . . annulment.”

Grossmuder
May laughed. “So he plans not to touch ye, does he? Well, then, I say your job is to turn this wedding into a marriage . . . and I don’t mean only the bedding; that’s the least of it in some ways. A marriage is about the physical body, eh? But also the spirit, the mind, and the heart.”

“It’s not that easy, though.”

Grossmuder
grunted and lowered herself onto the bunk. “
Nee
, it won’t be. He’s afar off, I think, from loving that way—anyone, not only you. But if you keep to what you know to be true, true of the Lord and true to the mountain, you’ll be all right, child, no matter where you go.”

Mary nodded and leaned into the firm embrace of the older woman, feeling the seeds of hope begin to burgeon in her heart.

Grossmuder
stroked Mary’s warm cheek. “And don’t forget, child, to make the rounds of the mountain before you leave. There’ll be wedding presents for you aplenty.”

Mary smiled, wondering what the professor would think of the coming gifts.

Jude flung himself down in the grassy meadow and drew an arm over his eyes. He realized that he probably had a minor concussion when the back of his neck throbbed without ceasing.

He drifted in and out of thought and decided that Mary might be more than a help to him if he was straightforward with her, maybe if he told her about Carol . . . He remembered the day he’d left home to come to Ice Mountain and almost had to laugh when the scene played across his mind . . .

“I hate that you’re going,” Carol said for the fourth time, and Jude resisted the urge to grit his teeth at the blonde lounging on his old bed.
Yeah, you hate me going because there’s nothing you want more than to have me trussed up for a wedding that I am in no way prepared for . . .
He’d come back to his parents’ mansion to pick up a few books he’d left behind when he’d moved, and Carol obviously couldn’t resist another opportunity to hound him.

“It’s three months, Caro—you can shop with my mother, go to the spa, all that. I’ll be back.” He waved a hand in dismissal and tried to concentrate on filling a hiking bag with some of the books. The rest could always be sent.

He was doing his doctorate work in Amish studies, and he knew that Carol Sutherfield had been waiting a long time to see him properly brought to the altar. He’d been drinking one night three months before and had, on impulse, gone to the family safe and provided Caro with his grandmother’s engagement ring and a proposal he could barely recall.
Stupid idiot
. . . But it had made both families more than happy because Carol and he had grown up together and were expected to marry as soon as age permitted. Still, this was his doing, and she sat on his old bed, both confident and petulant, her long legs curled catlike around the side of his bag as if she might keep him from going somehow.

“But, Jude, all I’ve listened to forever, it seems, is your ongoing, single-minded preaching about the Amish . . . the Amish in Lancaster, in Ohio, and now
Mountain Amish
in a place called Ice Mountain—I doubt they’ll even have shoes.”

“I don’t preach,” he said, reaching behind her knee to find the zip for the bag.
And you know it, Caro . . . I don’t preach and I don’t believe in God. It’s simple. But you’ll probably want the wedding in a church, where you can wear virginal white over your so-impure self . . .

“You know what I mean.” She rose off the bed on high black heels, still not tall enough to reach his mouth unless she balanced on tiptoe. He stepped away before she could wind her arms around his neck, and she teetered for a moment before regaining her footing.

“Jude, please.”

“Three months. And you’ve got me, right, sweetheart?” He bent and swiped his lips across her carefully made-up cheek, then grabbed his bag.

“But we won’t even be able to text or talk on the phone,” she wailed as he started out of the room.

He’d turned around for a brief moment, giving her a wry smile. “Then write me letters, Caro. There’s an
Amischer
who comes down off the mountain to pick up the mail every few days.”

“I haven’t written a letter in ages. Jude! You simply cannot go.”

But I’m gone, Caro. Three months. No mansion, no money, no you
. . . He started to grin as he jogged down the broad staircase.

He’d turned into the sunlit library and looked with affection at the old man in the wheelchair seated near the large windows.

“So, you’re ready then, Jude?”

His grandfather’s voice always reminded him of the gravelly sound of rocks in rough seas. Jude had put his hand on the frail shoulder and nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Ice Mountain, eh? I remember you begging for tales of the place when you were young . . . always drawn there for some reason.”

He’d laughed. “It sounds mysterious, I guess . . . and the university believes that there is a lot to be learned about the Mountain Amish.”

The old man coughed once and Jude patted his back with concern. “Grandfather . . . this three months . . . I’ll miss you.”

“Don’t worry, boy. I’ll not go far while you’re gone and that Carol creature won’t either, I wager. Can’t understand why you don’t wriggle out of that mess.”

“Have to keep up with my duties, right?”

“Duties, bah! You should marry for love and love only, like I did with your grandmother . . . Amelia . . . she was so beautiful.”

Jude saw the old blue eyes start to cloud and gave his grandfather a brief hug, then adjusted the lap robe around the front of the wheelchair. “I’ll be back,” he whispered.