Wild Indigo (24 page)

No one but her husband had ever tried to stem the flow of gossip that pursued her. “Tongues always wag about me. Since the night you caught me.”

He grinned as if remembering that night, and then his blue eyes darkened. “They cannot hurt my wife.”

Retha felt old scars begin to soften, and she squeezed her husband's hand in heartfelt thanks.

“I won't let it hurt, Jacob. I want to be at your side.”

“Good. That's where I want you to be.” Securing her hand in the crook of his arm, he led the family out the door.

Outside, the thunderstorm had cooled the day and wet the dust. In the Square, Nicholas marched off to reconnoiter his troops for a few moments before services, with Matthias thoughtfully behind him. Anna Johanna resumed her former handhold at her father's knee, ignoring Retha with a swish of her skirts. Retha was so focused on her stepdaughter's anger that everyone was seated before she noticed any untoward looks in her direction or suspected that any of the usual hushed whispers were about her.

“Pink ribbons,” she heard from the bench behind her.

“That Scaife,” from a bench in front.

“All day?” a woman walking up the aisle was saying. “Not all day!”

It was worse than Retha had anticipated from the safety of her home. For years as the orphan whom Indians had raised, she had borne curiosity and even censure alone. But tonight they were talking about Jacob Blum's wife. Mortification heated her cheeks. The buzz of disapproval absolutely proved that she had let her husband down. That she had let his children down. She couldn't sing a note. Not even Jacob's resonant baritone recalled her mind to worship.

At last the service ended. Nearby, the band members put their instruments away. Beyond them, the three Brothers from the mill clustered, the ones who had witnessed her humiliation.

She stood up, the better to face them if they turned her way. She was sure they would.

The men summoned the head Elder, Frederick Marshall, and all four bent their heads in conference. Looking up, Brother Steiner pointed to her. Looking down, Brother Marshall's brow furrowed. She was indeed their subject. Squaring her shoulders, she left the
Saal
with Jacob and the children. Retha did not want to look at her husband just yet. She did not want him to look at her. Not until she composed her thoughts.

Outside
Gemein Haus
, the boys scooted off, but Anna Johanna clung to her father when Samuel Ernst cornered him. Retha hid her eagerness to go
home, her anger mounting as she surveyed the crowd. She met people's looks even as they tried to look away. It was not fair. She had done no real wrong. If she had, Sim Scaife would not have let her go. Retha stood alone as men chatted with men and women with women, but she was in no mood to join her friends among the Single Sisters. They sought her out instead. Rosina Krause and Sarah Holder took her aside.

“Are you quite all right, my dear?” Sister Sarah asked with sweet concern, taking Retha's hand in knobby, trembly fingers. “Those militia men can be so fearsome.”

Retha winced. Now that she was married, she had assumed she would put misadventures behind her. Her actions had worried poor Sister Sarah, too. And not for the first time.

“They were not so bad,” she tried to assure her. “They brought me home.”

With a
harrumph
, Rosina Krause rejected Retha's version of the event. “Word is out, Sister Retha, that they were bad,” she said firmly, wagging her head. “You could have been ravished. Such an incident has long been my fear for you.”

Retha gritted her teeth but humbled herself as befitted Jacob's wife. “I know. You always warned me.”

“But my dear, what happened to your new blue ribbons?” the older woman asked.

Retha's pink ribbons suddenly seemed to strangle her. At home, the missing
Haube
had been an inconvenience. Here, faced with the Sisters' concern and the Brothers' impromptu meeting on her account, Retha forcefully felt how far she had com
promised her spotless status as Jacob Blum's bride. How far she had compromised him. The pink ribbons proclaimed her indiscretion.

“I lost my cap, Sister Sarah.”

“Lost it?” Sarah inquired gently.

“Lost it!” Rosina demanded.

Retha squelched her pride. “It was my best one. I do not yet have blue ribbons for this old one.”

“Oh, dear,” Sister Sarah said. “Ribbons, with the war, are in such short supply.” A sympathetic frown crinkled Sarah's face.

Impatience lined Rosina's as she turned to the old woman. “No doubt the soldiers had a hand in that. Come now, Sister Sarah, 'tis time to go home. As for you, Sister Blum, this small reminder of your folly”—she touched the offending pink strands—“is better than the injury they no doubt contemplated.”

And she led her aging Sister away.

Unable to allay the sting of Rosina Krause's censure, Retha waited by herself. Across the Square, she could see that Jacob, shackled by a cranky daughter, had rounded up his sons. Retha wanted to join her family, to help with Anna Johanna, but thought any aid from her might well provoke a tantrum. She smothered an outburst of self-recrimination. Leaving home this morning had been her decision, and her stepdaughter's relapse was her fault. With each of her new stepchildren, she would simply have to start all over.

They hiked across the green, Matthias leading, Anna Johanna dragging, and Nicholas under his father's affectionate arm. When they neared, Retha realized that all was not well. Jacob, tight-lipped,
had his hand on his son's neck, and a defiant Nicholas, one eye swelling shut, was being firmly marched toward home. Quelling curiosity, she fell in, aware that the dwindling crowd made way for them to pass.

Then Frederick Marshall, stern in black, stepped into their path.

“Brother Blum,” he said, without a glance at Retha or the children, “the Elders meet tomorrow to discuss your offense. These are serious charges.” And he marched off.

Nicholas whistled in admiration but winced as Jacob pulled him closer.

“What offense, Papa?” Matthias asked.

Jacob did not answer his earnest, legalistic younger son. Retha's mouth went dry. She turned to him, taken aback by his stony demeanor as much as by the Elder's severity.

“Charges?” she said. “Against you?”

A
t home in the kitchen, Jacob smeared lard onto his militant son's cheek, already turning purple. “Hold still,” he said impatiently to the very large and still very angry boy on the stool in front of him. For once Jacob wished himself anywhere but here in the sanctuary of his home. It was too much—Marshall's injunction, his wife's worried question, and his older son's fight all at once.

“But it wasn't my fault!” Nicholas protested. “Thomas Baumgarten started it. He called her a spy!”

Jacob glanced over his son's battered head to see how his wife was taking this. Badly. The tallow lamp she held illumined her set features. Beside her, his daughter lingered to catch her brother's scolding, but Retha nudged her forward. Anna Johanna snatched up her doll and swished her ragged skirts upstairs to bed.

“I would hit him again,” Nicholas insisted.

“Hit him again, son, and you will be in more trouble than you are in now.”

“She's the one who's bringing trouble to our family.”

“You're the one bringing trouble to it now, son.
It's not your place to judge what your elders do, especially not your stepmother and especially not in front of her.”

“I was fighting for our name.”

Jacob gritted his teeth. For a moment he wished he believed in corporal punishment. But the one time he had lost his temper and spanked the boy, it hadn't helped either of them. Physical chastisement was the worst possible recourse to take with a born pugilist. Reason, he reassured himself, would turn a hotheaded boy into a reasonable man. Only reason.

“You were fighting with one of our Brethren. That's the worst thing you can do.”

“Spying's the worst,” Nicholas muttered doggedly.

Jacob laughed and turned his son's face to the light for a final view of the damage. “Recalcitrant sons are the worst.” He dabbed more lard onto a smaller bruise above the boy's left eyebrow.

“Ouch!” Nicholas wrenched away. “What's recalcitrant?”

“Stubborn and disobedient.”

Jacob returned the crock of lard to the cupboard. He had brought Nicholas around before. “Now, about your fight, son.”

His older son thrust out a mutinous chin. “You fought.”

“Not since I was a lad like you. And I paid for it.”

“Today. You fought.”

If Brothers grinding his face in the dirt constituted fighting, Jacob had to concede he had fought. And more, he had wanted to land a volley of punches in that Liberty Man's gut.

“Who told you that?”

“William Steiner, the miller's son. He said you fought the Liberty Men. He said they captured
her—
”

“They brought her home, son.”

“—and when they brought her home, you had to fight for her. What I want to know is, did you win?”

Jacob sunk his aching body into his railback chair and told both boys to pull up stools.

“No one wins, Nicholas, when a disagreement comes to blows. I was working on the dam when Captain Scaife brought your mother home. I never struck a soul, and she was safe.” Technically, Jacob amended to himself, if not fighting meant never landing a blow, and safe meant the nervous silence she had displayed since they had come home.

“Why did William lie?” Matthias asked.

Jacob regarded his pious middle child with amused exasperation. Matthias the theologian would know how many angels fit on the head of a pin.

“There are many ways to tell a story, son, especially when so many saw the event. Captain Scaife made me very angry. I wanted to fight him, I admit. But I was wrong.”

“I can see that,” Nicholas said. “The captain's a Whig. He's on our side.”

“We don't have a side, Nicholas, hard as that is for you to accept right now. Moravians have always supported whatever government is in power, and Captain Scaife supports it too. But unlike him, we don't bear arms for it.”

“I don't understand why they had to bring her home,” Matthias said.

Jacob sighed heavily. Retha's brief absence had
disturbed his sons as much as his daughter.

“They
brought
her home because she
left us
,” Nicholas spelled out.

“Our real mother would not have left,” Matthias said.

“That is not true, Matthias. They brought her home because she belongs here.”

“Our real mother was always home to feed us,” Matthias said reprovingly.

Jacob saw Retha before he heard her, entering the kitchen behind the boys, her face set.

Before he could intervene, she stepped forward to touch his son's shoulder. “And I will always be home now, Matthias.”

Startled, Matthias jerked away, then craned his head to see her. Tight-lipped silence told Jacob that the boy had doubts.

“I'm sorry I was not here when you came home,” she said softly.

Matthias's chin jutted out another notch. “We had to go to Brother and Sister Ernsts' house for our dinner.”

“I know you did,” she said with sympathy. “Sister Eva is a good cook. What did she feed you?”

Matthias shrugged uncomfortably. “Just food.”

Retha smiled gently. “What did you eat?”

“Not much,” he mumbled. Then he brightened, as if struck by a means of diverting Retha from her questioning. “What I wanted to know was, did you see any Indians?”

Retha looked at Jacob.

He nodded. If Indian stories would placate one son, or both of them, Jacob could think of no harm in telling of her visit.

“I saw my friend Mistress Vogler.”

Matthias snorted. “Mistress Vogler is not an Indian name.”

“That's Cherokee Alice. The spy,” Nicholas said with authority.

Jacob bit off a caustic reprimand. There would be no placating the boys tonight. “Nicholas, you must not pass on wild schoolboy rumors. Alice Vogler is no spy, and neither is your stepmother. It's been a long day, and it's time for bed.”

“I want to hear more about the Liberty Men,” Nicholas persisted, his larded cheek shining in the candlelight.

“To bed, son. By the time this war is over, we will have soldier stories enough for a lifetime.”

Nicholas shuffled up the stairs, defiance muted by defeat, Matthias behind him. Jacob went up to tuck them in. When he came back downstairs, his wife had moved to the parlor and taken up her sewing, but it lay rumpled in her lap. It hardly seemed the time for conversation. Jacob needed to settle down himself The day's wild swings of worry, anger, lust, and tenderness had him on edge. Her too, obviously.

He turned to the basket of plans at his drafting table and spent some time in silence reorganizing them by weight and length and timeliness, reminding himself what work was urgent and what he could postpone. Very little. His rolls of parchment crackled, and Retha's thread squeaked through the seams of Anna Johanna's dress.

“I didn't mean to cause us so much trouble. I didn't know I could.” She dumped a deerskin sleeve into a shallow willow basket, stood, and slung the
basket to her hip. “I—we—should go to bed, too.”

He searched her face for a clue: Her shift from
I
to
we
was unexpected but welcome. “Yes,” he agreed, snuffing out every light but a tallow lamp and trailing her to the bedroom. Her back was straight and stiff, her shoulder blades pinched. In spite of the pleasure they had shared, they both had had a wretched day, hers even worse than his. On which part of the miserable day were her thoughts trained now?

She set the basket down beside the idle spinning wheel that dominated the center of the room. Then she made her stand beside the hinged press bed, which he had not let down yet for the night.

“I have not been a wife to you, Jacob Blum,” she said, her throaty voice lower than usual, her words clipped.

A bolt of pure lust, latent since afternoon, streaked from his heart to his manhood. Her thoughts were on him, not misery. He offered her an encouraging smile although it felt as toothy as the smile of a retriever unleashed on a covey of quail. Then a dozen questions assailed him. Why now? Why this sudden change of heart? How much change truly was it? What wonder had wrought it? And how far was she prepared to go?

Mentally he leashed himself. It would not do to speculate. It did not serve to inspect gift horses. “You made a fair start this afternoon.”

“I did?” She turned a becoming, alluring shade of red. “But we didn't finish. I know that. I want to.” She reached down to her waist to untie the tapes of her skirt—her clean skirt, the one he had promised
to remove. The tape knotted. She tugged at it, carefully at first, then roughly, knotting it worse. She held it up and gave a nervous laugh. He took it as a sign of her excitement. He reined in his. He would take it slow.

“It's tangled. I can't…”

“You can,” he murmured, bringing her hands to his mouth and trailing kisses across cold knuckles. “But your hands are cold. Warm them here.” He slipped them inside his shirt against the skin that covered his ribs.

She let him guide them there.

“Besides, I promised I would do your clothes.”

Once he had untangled the tedious knot, he meant for her disrobing to be a torturous seduction, but pieces of fabric fell as fast as autumn leaves. Hands warmed, arms circled, mouths met, and she clung to him as she had done in the afternoon—evidence, he was sure, that she was ready. He held her at arms' length to survey his handiwork, his wife revealed.

“
Schöne Frau
,” he marveled. “Beautiful.”

Loosed from her
Haube
, a nimbus of wild hair framed her face, half hiding bare, proud shoulders. In the flickering light of the tallow lamp he had set upon the windowsill, her round breasts gleamed. Her arms and legs were long, long enough to pair with his own great body, their womanly muscling sleek with health and vigor. His rapt gaze rested on a fiery triangle of fleece at the base of her belly and then rose to meet her golden eyes. They looked slightly wild, a little hunted. He would soothe that look away.

“I promised I would make you happy. I have not forgotten. 'Twas my solemn oath.”

He urged her hands to help him shed the burden of his clothes. She did so almost efficiently this second time. Or was it the third? Had she not helped him before when he was half-asleep? Tonight her task of divesting him of his garments absorbed her. With a slowness that pained him, she seemed to strive to meet some exacting standard of housewifely care.

“Don't fold them,” he muttered.

She hesitated one shy moment before flinging his breeches over a chair. They landed, falling as if some broken soldier had sprawled over a stump. And then, slightly ahead of his own intent, she gave him her virgin's version of a kiss. She pressed her lips against his, too hard and too still. He waited, knowing she was learning, hoping she would remember, growing aware of her quickening breath. Her hands found the sides of his face and angled his head a little to the left and then a little more. She seemed to have a plan, and he would indulge her. She moved her mouth against his, slightly, slowly, as if seeking some perfect alignment.

Then he felt her lips part. He stifled an urge to direct her kiss, for he wanted her to come to him. On any terms. At any speed. From any angle. Whatever he had to endure. She couldn't know her nipples brushing his chest burned him like hot coals. She couldn't feel the rush of heat in his groin.

“Would you open for me?” she whispered, the words almost too soft for him to hear.

He obliged, relaxing his jaw, and her tongue
entered his mouth. She seemed curious and reticent at once. She explored the biting edge of his teeth, the tip of his tongue, before she ventured deeper. Never deep enough. He felt that he would shatter right in front of her, that he would spill his seed into the narrow, empty space where she held her body away from his, that he would die and be forever happy.

She pulled back, a secretive smile playing across her rosy lips. “Was that right?”

He could barely speak. “I want you over here.”

Putting his arm around her waist, he led her to their marriage bed. She waited as he lowered the hinged press bed and pulled back the coverlet. Suddenly stiff as starch, she sat beside him.

Ah, he thought tenderly, she was more frightened of this than she wanted him to know. Kissing was the easy, the familiar part. In the most chaste terms he knew, he spoke to her of every move that he would make. She nodded faintly, her head against his chest as if she needed reassurance.

As if her sweet desire for exploration had simply withered in her limbs.

“We don't have to finish this time,
Liebling
, if you're scared of being hurt,” he assured her, contrary to the impulse behind his pounding pulse. “Not tonight, not all at once.”

“I want to be your wife, Jacob. Wholly your wife.” To him, her pale body glowed an invitation. But her jaw clenched with resolve—or resistance—or fear—or even, perhaps, repugnance. He did not know which. He simply could not tell.

Frustrated, he stood and walked a small circle in
front of her, his hand rubbing the back of his neck, his eyes trained on the narrow black cracks that defined the wide planks of the bedroom floor. “It won't hurt that bad or that long, Retha, and it will only hurt this first time.” He instructed her in a bland, patient voice utterly at odds with the tumult of desire inside him. But he could not, would not, have another evening like their wedding night. “Truly, we can wait,” he said, although the thought was bitter gall. “I can merely hold you.”

He turned to look at her.

She scuttled to the center of the bed and sat, tucking her heels under her buttocks.

“
Mein Gott
, Retha. Don't start that.”

She blinked her eyes. In innocence, defiance, fear. He could not guess which.

“Don't start what?”