The Bridegroom. Linda Lael Miller

      “WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU can’t find the aunts?” Lydia demanded, at one-fifty-five that afternoon, again seated at her vanity table. Helga had helped her into the gown, and was now tucking tiny rosebuds into her hair, since there was no veil. “Where could they possibly have gone?”

      Helga tried to look innocent as she shrugged. “Today was correspondence day,” she said, avoiding Lydia’s mirrored gaze. “Perhaps they went to the post office.”

      Lydia whirled and stood in one fluid motion, causing the skirts of the dress to rustle around her. “Today is my wedding day,” she said. “Guests have been arriving for the last hour, Mr. Fitch and his mother are waiting downstairs, with the justice of the peace, and the aunts—who never leave this house except to go to church—have gone to the post office?”

      “I’m sure they’ll be back in plenty of time for the ceremony,” Helga said, backing up a step or two.

      Lydia set her hands on her hips and advanced. “What is going on here?” she demanded.

      “A wedding,” Helga answered, with just the faintest snip in her tone. “More’s the pity.”

      “You’ve spirited them off somewhere,” Lydia accused, almost beside herself now. The aunts were virtually recluses—that was why she’d insisted that the ceremony be held in the parlor, over Jacob’s mother’s objections, instead of in the church. “Helga Riley, you’d better tell me where they are—this instant!”

      “They left with Gideon,” Helga admitted, though her eyes snapped with a sort of smug defiance. “Packed up their old love letters and their best jewelry and walked right out of this house without even looking back.”

      “What?” A thrill of anger went through Lydia—anger and something else that wasn’t so easy to define. “They wouldn’t have gone willingly—he must have—have abducted them!”

      “Oh, they were quite willing,” Helga insisted, stiffly triumphant. “And it’s you Gideon Yarbro means to abduct. Assuming he can get past the toughs Jacob Fitch has stationed at both the doors, that is.”

      “I’ll have the law on him!” Lydia raged. “This is outrageous!”

      Helga arched one eyebrow, and a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “Don’t be a ninny—it’s wonderful and you know it. Get out of that dress and into something fit to travel in, and climb down the oak tree outside that window, like you used to do when you were a little girl. Fitch’s men will be too shocked to try and stop you and—”

      “Helga,” Lydia broke in, still barely able to credit that her aunts, of all people, had lit out with Gideon. “Have you gone mad? Has everyone gone mad?”

      Helga ignored the question of sanity and marched over to the wardrobe, rifled through it until she found the divided riding skirt Lydia hadn’t worn since she used to range over the desert on horseback with Nell.

      “Put this on,” Helga commanded, thrusting the garment at Lydia, along with the matching jacket and a long-sleeved white shirtwaist with a ruffled collar. “Hurry! If you won’t climb out the window, then I’ll see what I can do to keep that criminal watching the back door busy for a few minutes—”

      “Helga, listen to me,” Lydia blurted. “I don’t know what’s come over the aunts, but they’re bound to come to their senses by nightfall, if not before, and when they do, they’re going to be inconsolable—”

      “You’ll be the one who’s inconsolable by nightfall if you go through with this wedding, Lydia Fairmont,” Helga said, thrusting the garments into Lydia’s hands.

      Downstairs, the enormous longcase clock tripped through a ponderous sequence of chimes, then bonged loudly, once. Twice. Before Lydia had fully accepted that the hour of her doom had arrived, she heard shouting, some sort of scuffle below, on the ground floor.

      Alarmed, she rushed out of her room and down the corridor to the top of the stairs, and looked down to see Gideon standing halfway up. His hair was mussed, and his lower lip was bleeding. Seeing Lydia, he blinked once, shook his head, and then extended a hand to her, a broad grin spreading across his face.

      Lydia could barely tear her gaze from him, she was so stricken by the mere fact of his presence, but when Jacob stumbled out of the parlor, even more mussed and bloody than Gideon, she gasped.

      “You will lose everything,” Jacob vowed, very slowly and precisely, glaring at her. The look of fury in his eyes was terrifying. “Everything.”

      Lydia looked back at Gideon again. He was still holding his hand out to her.

      She took a step toward him, and then another.

      “Everything!” Jacob roared. “This house, your good name, everything!”

      By then, she was only a step or two above Gideon. “You’re hurt,” she said, dazed, reaching out to touch his lip.

      “Not as hurt as I’m going to be if we don’t get out of here before the guards come to,” Gideon said easily, still grinning. With that, he suddenly hoisted Lydia off her feet, flung her over his right shoulder and bolted down the stairs.

      Lydia was too stunned to protest; in truth, she was certain she must be dreaming; such a thing simply could not be happening.

      But it was.

      Jacob’s mother appeared behind her son in the parlor doorway, her long, narrow face pinched with disapproval. Even lying over Gideon’s shoulder like a sack of chicken feed, Lydia caught a glimpse of something else in the woman’s eyes as they passed.

      It was a sort of triumphant relief.

      Jacob shouted invective and started forward, surely intending to block Gideon’s way, but Mrs. Fitch restrained him simply by laying a hand on his arm.

      “Let her go, Jacob,” she said. “Let the trollop go.”

      The trollop? Suddenly furious, Lydia began to kick and struggle, not because she didn’t want, with all her heart and soul, to escape this curse of a marriage, but because she did want to tear into that vicious old woman like a she-cat with its claws out.

      Gideon, swinging around in an arch toward the kitchen, gave Lydia a swat on her upended, lace-covered bottom, not hard enough to hurt, but no light tap, either.

      If Lydia had been furious before, she was enraged now. “Put—me—down!” she sputtered.

      Gideon didn’t even slow his pace, much less do as he’d been told. “If I do,” he said, sounding slightly breathless now, “we’re both going to be in a lot more trouble than we are now.” They’d reached the kitchen, and Lydia tried in vain to grab at the doorframe as they went out.

      A man lay sprawled on the back porch, raising himself to his hands and knees as they passed, shaking his head as if befogged. Helga, carrying a handbag and a small reticule and wearing a hat, waited at the bottom of the steps.

      Looking down at the man on the porch, Helga put a foot to the middle of his back and flattened him again.

      Gideon’s strides lengthened, increasing Lydia’s discomfort and her ire. Helga, keeping pace, gave her a look of reprimand.

      “I can’t believe you’re doing this!” Lydia cried.

      Gideon all but flung her into the back of a buckboard. “Believe it,” he said, helping Helga up into the wagon with considerably more courtesy and then scrambling up in the box to take the reins.