Wild Indigo (19 page)

But not too tired to notice her. Serene as a swan, she arched her slender neck over her work. Ah, she was a treat to come home to. She was making this her home. She looked domesticated, calm, transformed from the wild creature who had attacked him on the stairs last night.

The children were transformed, too. To his astonishment, Anna Johanna had touched him. His strictly proper Matthias had voiced a worry. Even Nicholas had said, “Yes, ma'am.”

A small hand tugged at his shirtsleeve.

“
Hilf mir
, Papa.” But his daughter didn't need help. Before he could figure out what she wanted,
she had clambered onto his lap and snuggled against his chest.

He scarcely dared to breathe.

For the first time since her mother's death, Anna Johanna wanted him to cuddle her.

So he wrapped his arms around her, throat clotted with feeling. He held her little body as if it might break. She giggled, wiggled, and settled in with a sweet sigh. Tentatively he lowered his head to plant a fatherly kiss on the
Haube
that hid a froth of blond curls. Beyond the smell of starch, he detected the scent of rosewater.

Even her hair was clean!

With gentle hands, he steadied her shoulders and held her away a little to inspect her face. Scrubbed clean! Before dinner he had been too occupied with her touch to look this close. It was just as well. He would probably have said the wrong thing.

He looked to Retha for an explanation, but she stayed maddeningly engrossed in her work.

Then he examined Anna Johanna's ragged dress. Up close, it was brighter than usual. Up close, it didn't smell.

She didn't smell.

“Pumpkin,” he croaked. “I think you had a bath.”

Vigorous nods rocked her whole frame and dug her little seat bones into his thighs. His heart expanded. His emotionally fragile daughter was sturdy as a cart horse.

“When and where did this wonder come to pass?” he teased.

Suddenly shy, she ducked her head and mumbled. “In the creek.”

Taken by surprise, he laughed. “You fell in!”

“Oh, no.” She shook her head earnestly. “I waded in.”

He raised a paternal brow. The creek had been off-limits since well before her mother died. Could that be why she'd shunned all water? To keep a promise to her mother?

“I got 'mission,” Anna Johanna said hastily.

“Permission,” he said absently, resting his face against her starched cap.

“Right. 'Mission. To wash beans. From Mama Retha.”

Mama Retha? Washing beans? In the creek? He hadn't felt so emotional since he last wept for his wife at the end of a long Christmas day. He was close to crying now. But these would be tears of joy, of relief. He couldn't shed them here. He had to make sense of what had happened.

In the creek!
What if…He remembered now. Not long before the epidemic that carried Christina away, she had scolded Anna Johanna royally for wading unattended. During her mother's illness, he too had found her in the creek again and scolded her himself. What if, in her child's mind, she somehow twisted her wading in the water into guilt over her mother's death?

“You smell like roses,” he whispered to Anna Johanna, sure now he understood and hopeful that his daughter's ban on bathing was ended.

“Rose
water
,” she pronounced proudly, dragging out the word as if it felt good on her tongue. “Mama Retha said you'd like that.”

“I like it, pumpkin.” He took the liberty of tweaking her cheek, but she slid off his lap like a
boneless kitten and started rummaging in Retha's sewing basket.

Again he looked to Retha for some clue. Diligent, she bent her head to her work. But he thought a corner of her mouth crooked up. Was she pleased? Amused? Proud of herself? And what had really happened? he wanted to ask for the second time that evening. The creek! The creek?

Anna Johanna came back with a nondescript scrap of material and scuttled onto his lap, this time more confident.

“Look, Papa. Mama Retha's making me a deer dress.”

Nicholas sniggered. “That's
deerskin
, you numb—”

“That's enough, Nicholas.” Retha's firm order cut him off as effectively as Jacob could have done himself.

“Yes, ma'am,” he grumbled.

Jacob's mind whirled. Nicholas obedient and Anna Johanna clean! If Retha had another week, Matthias might start gaining weight.

Perhaps he should return to the battlefield.

 

“You have to explain these miracles to me, Retha,” Jacob said quietly a quarter-hour later as Retha shyly took her husband's arm.

He was escorting her down the street to attend the final song service of the day—limping slightly, although only she could tell. The boys ran on ahead. Anna Johanna skipped up to her and Jacob, and inserted herself between them.

“Later,” Retha promised, tongue-tied with pride
that each child's behavior had so greatly exceeded her expectations on this, her husband's first evening home. But she could not explain Anna Johanna's transformation. She would not if she could. In truth, she feared speaking. She was afraid to break the spell. It was their first outing as a family, and she relished it.

From Sister Marshall to Brother Bagge, people greeted them as Brother Blum and Sister Blum. Even Rosina Krause, who always called her Sister Retha, dignified her new status by calling her Sister Blum. Retha smiled with secret pleasure, too, that she had acquired a surname after years of having none.

Eva Ernst fluttered up, giddy with inconsequentials, until she knelt to Anna Johanna and saw her holding her parents' hands. “Retha! Anna Johanna's hold—”

“Anna Johanna's glad her father's home,” Retha blurted, meaning to keep Eva from saying something silly.

Eva seemed to fluff up her feathers, but instead of being affronted, said, in her dithering way, the perfect thing. “Why, Anna Johanna, aren't you grown up tonight?”

Anna Johanna danced in place. “Mama Retha's making me a deer dress,” she boasted.

“Isn't that nice?” Eva gushed, although she looked confused.

Retha felt a moment of panic over Eva's response to the dress, but Anna Johanna beamed and Jacob was smiling, too. Retha squared her shoulders and tried to savor both her accomplishments and her
new status. She would just have to get used to being seen in public as a mother and a wife.

Especially wife. Unfortunately, she felt more natural being with Jacob's children than with him. With Jacob, she still felt like gawking. His manly bearing was beautiful to her, and paternal pride sat well on his broad shoulders. She wondered whether he would have the same pride if they had children, given that they had now done what married people do.

She felt a flush heat her face. Such thoughts, she chastised herself as she entered the
Saal
for
Singstunde
. Such thoughts, when it was time to resume her duty as mother. With her free hand, she straightened her apron.

“I will keep the children while you sing.” She hoped she struck a note of maternal competence.

“Ah, but I planned not to sing tonight.” Jacob nodded tellingly down at Anna Johanna whose death grip on their fingers had not slackened.

Retha looked up questioningly.

“She's the reason. I don't think she'll allow it.”

He called the boys, who joined them as they took their places on the bench. Nicholas, Matthias, Jacob, Anna Johanna, and herself. The boys to Jacob's left and his daughter to his right, separating Retha from him. But surely, when he sat with the family for services, her place was beside him. She squashed a blossoming disappointment. Or was it resentment? For four solid days she had done nothing but tend his children's needs—and a great many needs they had. Except for a few stolen minutes at dawn, her husband had given her no more attention.

Suddenly she recognized her churning emotion for what it was. Childish jealousy. She sank her chin to her chest and laughed at herself. The children would always come first with him. Had to come first. She married him knowing that. She had to accept that. And she couldn't allow childish emotions to turn her into a child.

Without his powerful voice, the choir sounded thin, but she still tried to lose herself in its song. The congregation sat, then stood, and Anna Johanna released Retha's hand. When everyone sat down again, a new chorale began and Anna Johanna claimed her father's lap.

Jacob gave Retha a glance of blinding gratitude. Thank you, his lips said. Then he patted the empty space between them on the bench.

Her heart skipped a beat. Manly and beautiful and mine.

Self-conscious now that she was getting what she wanted, she edged nearer to him. As at dawn, she could feel his heat. She did not mistake this radiating warmth for summer weather. It was his man's heat, a physical power, a pull he had over her that she did not understand.

When the choir paused before its next chorale, he whispered in her ear. “You're the other reason.”

His breath spiraled a warm shiver down the side of her neck, and she completely missed his meaning. “Pardon me?”

The choir's song swelling to fill the room, he whispered again. “I wanted you beside me.”

Her face flushed, and then her stomach twisted with those scary, pleasurable feelings from the night,
from the morning when she had lingered beside his half-naked body. Not here! She bit into her pressed lips, but the feeling spread below, to the depths of her stomach, and deeper, to the parting of her thighs. Mortified, she wanted to wrap her arms around herself and crawl under the bench.

How could she have such unworthy feelings while hymns were being sung? There must be some renegade Cherokee part of her heart that the Moravians had never touched.

She dared a glance at Jacob. He looked steadily ahead, his strong profile undisturbed, except for a slight strained downturning at the corner of his mouth. She had an uncanny sense he was reining in runaway mirth. At her? Had he seen her flush? Could he know about her predicament?

What if he could feel her heat? As she felt his.

Heaven help her.

Her husband, it seemed, would not.

Jacob shifted his wriggling daughter on his lap. Now that he had shocked his innocent wife to her bones, it was all he could do to honor the solemnity of evening service. He couldn't say when such a wicked playfulness had overcome him.

On second thought, he could. He had probably been about seventeen, and Christina, already his best friend, had been his willing partner in irreverence. Unlike her, poor Retha had had the most irregular upbringing, her white parents of unknown background lost, savage Indians schooling her for untold years, and the Moravian way of life. As a Single Sister, she had conformed to proprieties her parents might not have approved of and the Cherokee
would not understand. Proprieties no longer appropriate to a Married Sister. Surely more than her upbringing lay behind the fear she'd shown him. Jacob muted a clarion of worry and determined to take heart. Whatever her fears were, she had made great strides with his children.

He resettled himself on the plain bench seat and felt her shift of attention.

In the coming days, if need be in the coming weeks, he thought, it would be his pleasure to teach her all the ways, all the delights between a man and a woman. If this interminable service ever ended. No wonder he had spent every night for years singing in the choir. Without that sanctified discipline, his attention strayed.

 

By dark the children were in bed, and Jacob waited in the parlor to talk with his wife. She whisked about in the kitchen, plunking washed supper dishes into the cupboard and then readying breakfast. Something pinged into the iron kettle. Hominy, he guessed, for morning. She splashed some water in. Yes, she was soaking hominy.

Wondering what excuses she would drum up for tonight, he closed his eyes and hummed a complicated bass line from his favorite hymn. It helped him bear the wait. It helped him bear her clattering pokiness.

But he could not rush her, he reminded himself. He had had days to think about her bizarre behavior on their wedding night and after. Last night, except when nursing him, she had again been nervous, strange.

He had arrived at no conclusion, a place where he, as a man of reason, did not like to be. Her deft handling of his children had scotched his theory that she suffered from an excess of fancy.

Beside him, Retha's skirts rustled. He looked up, ready with compliments, ready to cajole her, if need be, into his arms.

Tight-lipped and pale, she stood before him. “I'm going to bed.”

I
n the morning light, Retha lay across Jacob's bed, abandoned to sleep. She had flung off her sheets to the cool of the night and lay on her side facing him. One arm cradled her head, and the other reached across the bed toward where he should have been. Like an Indian runner at the top of his stride, Jacob thought, she had drawn up one leg.

She looked wild. And free. Without her
Haube
, she reminded him of the untamed child he had caught and saved, of the woman seen dancing in the moonlight, unfettered by fear.

He couldn't ignore the weight of desire that pulled at his groin. Last night, on seeing her distress, he had let her go, compliments unspoken, questions unasked. He was too tired. She was too—too repelled by him. Frustrated, he had thought of storming that bed, her citadel of resistance, her fortress of rejection. But her pallor argued stronger than his need. He willed himself to sleep, into a shallow, restless sleep. By morning, when he woke with his desire in his hands, he retreated to the chair, watching her as if he were her sentinel.

If only he could free her from whatever haunted
her, free both of them from the torment he had seen on their wedding night. But he would not free her from himself. He stepped up to the bed. A slight breeze stirred through the open window as first light flickered over her sensuous curves, playing along the long line to her waist, her generous hips, her shapely legs. But the gown and her position concealed her intimate charms.

He longed to see more but thought better of making so much as a gesture. Last night, she dove under the cover's protection.

Retha made a high, anxious sound in her throat and twisted uneasily onto her back. Her high breasts pressed into the thin cambric of her gown. He took a slow admiring breath. Her nipples were taut, tempting. He let his gaze travel down. Beneath the fabric, at the juncture of her thighs, he could make out a sweet shadow of pleasure. Her legs were slightly ajar, as if some lover had entered her and left her so.

He should be that lover.

For long moments, he let longing fuel desire, a wrenching but delicious torment that overrode the weariness of his body, the lingering pain in his feet.

Battling need, he left the bedroom, bare feet slapping the planked floor, and set his mind to other matters. He had to finish repairs on the mill. Armstrong was breathing down his neck. Using an ember from the kitchen hearth, he lit a tallow lamp, set it on a shelf above his drafting table, and took out a set of plans.

For more than a week, the important work he undertook as planner for the town had gone
untended. But then, if he had been less obsessed with improvements, repairs on the mill-race could have been finished days ago. The heavy drafting paper crackled as he unrolled it. Rubbing morning stiffness from the back of his neck, Jacob reviewed the dam's design. While searching for Andreas, he had reworked it in his mind.

His new plan would withstand any deluge short of the one that had sent Noah to the ark. Not only that, the mill could grind grain all the faster for Armstrong's needy troops. In half the time it usually took him, Jacob marked his changes, rolled up the scroll, and tapped it impatiently against the slanted desk. So much for conquering desire with work.

He thought of his reluctant bride in his bed. Her rejection struck at his pride. Her resistance forced him to smother his growing attraction. Her fear went against everything he knew the union of a man and a woman could be. He wanted her trust, her love, her passion.

He wanted her to come to him.

He snuffed the lamp and left the house. Down the street, Dr. Bonn, an early riser, might have a new remedy for Matthias.

 

The children woke Retha, the two younger ones tumbling onto her bed like a litter of pups.

“Where's Papa?” Anna Johanna burrowed worriedly under the sheets.

At work, Retha guessed, groping for consciousness. She didn't know for certain where he was, so she did not say.

A fuzz of early light haloed Matthias hugging a stray pillow beside her. “He didn't have to go away again, did he?”

“He'd better not.” Nicholas hung back at the foot of the bed.

“He didn't.” The resonance of their father's voice made the children whirl to greet him.

Retha scrambled up to see Jacob duck his head under the door. Caught sleeping late. Caught half-dressed. She thought of joining her stepdaughter under the sheets. “I'll have breakfast for us in a minute,” she stammered.

Jacob's amused look acknowledged her confusion. Then he clamped a hand on each boy's shoulder. “Time to dress for school,” he said indulgently, pushing them out of the room.

“Wait for me.” Anna Johanna leapt from under her covers and grabbed for his breeches at his knee.

“You too, pumpkin. You can't say morning prayers in your shift.” His hands reached to lift her, then closed to fists as if unwilling to trust the change in her he had witnessed last night. “We'll be back,” he said over his shoulder.

Retha felt left out but had no time to dwell on that. Dazed by her new family's energy and demands, she hastily pinned her bodice and buttoned on her skirt before the thunk of children's feet had reached the top of the stairs. There was always so much to do and so little time to do it.

Last night she had had time aplenty. For hours she had lain in bed, anxiously awaiting Jacob, fearing he would join her and fearing he would not. Any minute he could have touched her. Or left her alone.
But throughout her vigil, her body kept on betraying her, sheer shaking nerves alternating with warm, unexplained pulsings that brought on the nerves again.

She felt doomed to this incessant cycle of sensation, without knowing what caused it or when it might end. She wanted to end it today, if only she knew how, if only someone would tell her what was wrong. If only she had someone to turn to.

Preoccupied, she went to the kitchen and set the table with tinware plates, cups, and utensils.

Alice! She could go to Alice. Her married Chero-kee friend would know what was happening to her, would tell the truth and not scorn her or giggle. In one morning, Retha could trek to the Voglers' cabin and back. Soldiers would be on the roads, but they didn't frequent the woods, and no one knew Indian trails or deer paths as well as she. Still, she didn't have the pass that the Continental Army required of travelers of late, and she would be going behind her husband's back. All in all, she would be taking a terrible chance.

But, she told herself, gathering her resolve, she was going for his sake, for the sake of their marriage.

She put out milk, bread, and cold green-apple pie. One quick trip was well worth the risk. Eva could keep Anna Johanna for a few short hours. Retha needed dyestuffs anyway and would be sure to find some. She would be back by noon when the boys came home for hominy.

Four hungry, dressed Blums noisily descended the stairs. Their racket made a comforting domestic clatter, Retha realized, relaxing for a moment. She
was starting like having a family. She almost liked being a mother.

But Jacob caught her eye and cocked his head toward the table, amused and questioning. She followed his gaze, staring blankly for a moment at everything she had set out, feeling stupid. Wasn't it enough? After all, there were only five people….

And four plates! In mock distress, she hit her forehead with the heel of her hand.

He laughed. “Is someone not welcome here?”

“Someone is not awake.” With a hot blush, she retrieved a fifth plate from the cupboard and set it out with a flourish. “Everyone's welcome.”

After prayers and breakfast, they shuttled the boys off to school. Jacob picked up a large scroll of parchment from his desk in the parlor, headed for the door, but turned to Retha, speaking so low that Anna Johanna could not hear. “Ah. I talked with Dr. Bonn. He suspects consumption.”

“But Matthias has no cough.”

“So I reminded him. He offers to examine the boy, but he has made up his mind. Consumption.” Jacob's eyes glinted. “I will not have my son frightened into thinking he has a deadly disease.”

She agreed. “Because he doesn't. There's no cough. He's thin, but he is not sickly.”

“He merely will not eat. 'Tis not the same at all.”

“Perhaps some concoction to stimulate the appetite.”

“I asked the good doctor for one. Matthias, the man said in all his pomposity, is too young to lose his appetite. ‘We must seek the underlying disorder.'” Jacob imitated Dr. Bonn's droning voice, but Retha
heard a note of disgust in his tone. “That means
we
must find the cure ourselves.”

Jacob's
we
heartened Retha. “We will. We'll find it.”

“I know. Somehow. But naught I've tried has worked so far…” He paused at the door, looking defeated.

Unsure of what wives did when dejected husbands left for work, Retha stepped nearer, reaching out to soothe him.

Apparently not this.

He wielded his scroll like a weapon. “I have to go,” he said briskly.

 

Alice sat under a giant oak that arched over her small cabin, a waist-length fall of jet-black hair obscuring her face and the work in her lap.

Having walked for an hour through morning dews, Retha untied the skirts she had knotted up to keep dry. Her shoes,
Haube
, and neckerchief dangled in her hands. She decided not to put them back on. Even in the deep forest, it had been sweltering. Her Cherokee friend would understand her effort to be free of white women's hot, confining clothes.

“Alice,” she called softly.

Alice didn't respond. Retha walked closer. Her friend's attention was given over to beading a very large moccasin, at odds with her simple gingham shift.

Retha called again.

Alice jumped up, spilling beads onto the hide spread over the weedy ground.

“I am come,” Retha said in German, the tradi
tional Cherokee greeting of a guest sure of being accepted.

“You are. It is well,” Alice said, welcome in her words and in the smile that flashed across her still pretty, pockmarked face. But her hands moved nervously to recover the scattered beads.

Retha dropped to her knees to help. “I didn't mean to alarm you.”

Alice's gaze skimmed the large clearing. Retha could see nothing but crops, planted on land that Indians had burned for hunting years before. In the distance, Gottlieb rhythmically swung a great scythe, single-handedly harvesting wheat in a parched field.

“We have so many…intruders,” Alice finally explained, searching her hard-earned German for the right word.

“I didn't see a soul all the way here.”

Alice scooped the last of the beads into a small pouch and surveyed Retha's state of undress. “Militia,” Alice explained. “You should not come here. Redcoats march from the south, Gottlieb says. And many others.”

“They aren't here yet.”

Smiling cautiously, Alice gestured to her to sit on the hide blanket. “Why do you come?”

“To see you, of course.” Retha sat down, folding her neckerchief and beribboned
Haube
on her lap.

“You travel with pass?”

Retha shook her head, her loose hair sticking to her bared shoulders. “No pass. I didn't come by the roads.”

“Woods are not safe.”

“I avoided clearings, too, until yours.”

Alice scowled ever so slightly, the reproof a severe reprimand from her. “The Sisters would not like. They take good care of you.”

“They try.”

Retha saw the moment Alice's eyes widened at the sight of the new blue ribbon on her
Haube
. A blush of self-consciousness warmed her face.

“Your ribbon. It is blue.” Alice touched it and grinned. “Married?”

Retha nodded.

Alice's limited German seemed to fail her, and she burst into her loud native tongue. “But when? And who? When I saw you at the market, you said naught of marriage!”

Retha eked out her story in rusty Cherokee, hoping the earthy tongue would make her intimate questions less embarrassing. “I knew naught. But even then, I believe Brother Blum had conspired with the Elders to cast the lot for me. Imagine that. Imagine a man like Brother Blum asking for me.”

“But he's the one—isn't he Gottlieb's friend, the one with all the children?”

“Only three.” Retha giggled, then bit her lip. She had to be serious. She needed to know about men and women, and even more—if she could bring herself to ask—about these strange new feelings. Suddenly feeling terribly naïve, Retha retreated to safer ground. “In truth, I've scarcely thought of children.”

“Tell me about them,” Alice entreated. She and Gottlieb still had none. “Is it difficult to be a mother?”

“Yes. And no.” Sometimes switching to German to explain a nuance, Retha unburdened herself of all she had come to feel in her first week with Jacob's family—confusion, commitment, and pride. Alice
ahhed
over Anna's dirty dress, commiserated over tales of Nicholas's intransigence, wondered aloud why Matthias was so thin.

“You should feed him good Indian food,” she said.

“Perhaps I will.”

“But you never spoke to me of marriage.”

Retha ran the blue ribbons through her fingers, thinking what to say. “I wondered why no one ever asked,” she confessed. “To them, I was an orphan and an outsider. So I never spoke of it. I thought perhaps my past repelled them.”

“It could not have. They never would have kept you. Besides, you are not born Cherokee.” Alice patted her hand, then took up her work. “Well, well. A bride of a week. And so, my friend, is he a gentle man?”

A gentle man. Retha sat back on her heels. What a peculiar notion. Jacob was a large man. A strong man. A busy man. And a good father. What was Alice asking? “I think he is a good man. He loves his children. He works so hard for everyone.”