Wild Indigo (26 page)

Indiscreet, incontinent scoundrel! Jacob's hands
fisted, knuckles blanching under the tan that bronzed his skin. He launched himself out of his chair, then thrust his fists into his pockets. He should master such emotion.

He had to. Anger, in part, had brought him to this pass.

Stupidity had brought Schopp to it.

Jacob felt the colonel's keen gaze assessing him. Did the man assess Schopp as well? Then Armstrong stood, taking his plumed regimental tricorn from the table and bowing with courtesy to the company—and to Jacob.

“We have needed the grain for weeks. Perhaps, Mr. Blum, you could demonstrate your progress at the mill as I take my leave of your town?”

Jacob acceded readily to the command couched as a question.

But what, in truth, did the man want of him?

“P
apa's not never coming home,” Anna Johanna fretted.

“Not
ever
coming home,” Matthias corrected her.

She burst into tears. Retha held hers back. Jacob was late for lunch, and her hands were full of fussy daughter and rambunctious sons. Sometimes Jacob missed the midday meal altogether, though always with good reason. But half an hour ago, she had glimpsed the Marshalls walking home. The Elders' meeting was over. So where was her husband?

Nicholas snared a hunk of cheese off the half-set table. “No need to carry on, Anna Jo. Matty didn't mean that. Papa's coming home as soon as he finishes talking to the officer.”

“What officer?” Retha asked, masking a stab of alarm.

“The officer I saw him with when we were walking home. General, I think,” Nicholas said, as if proud to link his father with the military.

Anna's cries swelled to fill the small kitchen.

“Talk of soldiers frightens her, Nicholas,” Retha chided. “You'd best not take that tack.”

“You were with the soldiers yesterday,” he said
unabashed. “Did they scare you?”

“No,” she said repressively, not about to indulge him in his favorite subject at his sister's expense.

By the time Retha had set out the meal, Anna Johanna's lament had subsided into hiccups. Brooding, Retha watched her little diners eat. Or rather, she watched Nicholas eat. A dead-on copycat of her starving younger brother, Anna Johanna pushed beans and cabbage into symmetrical piles on her redware plate. For now, the task absorbed her, so Retha tolerated it.

But she saw no easy remedy for the little girl's distress. As soon as the boys left, her stepdaughter would no doubt revert to her weepy worst. Retha's ill-timed foray had provoked a relapse, disarming her surest weapons against childish misery, hugs and kisses. Once again, Anna Johanna would not accept a touch.

Retha decided then and there that she would escort the boys to school herself and take Anna Johanna to see her father in the flesh.

“We shall find your papa,” she told her. “You boys clear the table.”

“Aww,” they grumbled in unison.

She deftly flung Nicholas a damp cloth, her accuracy surprising him enough to set him straight to work.

“Papa's probably just gone to the mill,” Matthias guessed, scraping his and his sister's mangled vegetables into the slop bucket and setting its cover back on.

Anna Johanna's mouth thinned. “No, he hasn't. He's gone where Mama went.”

The despair of certainty rang in the child's pronouncement. Retha's heart compressed in her chest
as she knelt beside her, feeling every inch of her own maternal failures. “He has not gone with your mother, sweet potato. He positively, absolutely has not gone with her. In fact, he's probably waiting for us to bring him his dinner.”

A surprisingly adult skepticism filled Anna Johanna's indigo eyes. No hug would reassure her now, Retha thought. “Let's fix him some food, and then go find him at the mill.”

Woodenly, Anna Johanna slapped fresh bread and slabs of cheese onto the square napkin Retha set before her. Retha knotted it into a bundle, called the boys, and directed her stepdaughter out the door.

In the wake of yesterday's debacle, Retha held her head high as her family walked through town, enduring veiled curiosity and uneasy snubs. Halfway across the Square, Sister Baumgarten prodded her troublesome cow toward home, averting her eyes as Retha and her band approached.

Retha wished the woman good day and stood smiling till she coughed up an answer.

At the door to Brother Schopp's house, Retha spoke cordially to a curt schoolmaster. He rushed his charges inside as if to protect them from her influence. Let him, she thought in disgust. She answered to her husband, not to him.

Crossing the log bridge over Tanner's Run, they ran into Samuel Ernst. Anna Johanna hid behind her. Even from him, Retha felt a distance. Politely he offered to escort them and tried to tease a greeting out of the child. She whimpered and clung to Retha's skirts. Retha clung to dignity, learned as an orphan with the Cherokee, until Brother Ernst
remembered urgent business elsewhere.

There was no sign of Jacob at the millpond. Brother Steiner slogged toward them through stinking mud, one arm in a sling. Scowling with suspicion, he eyed the cloth bundle. “Brother Blum has no need of that, Sister. Colonel Armstrong ordered him to dine with him at the Tavern.”

“The colonel?” she asked softly, evenly, hoping not to spread her sudden alarm to Anna Johanna. But what if Nicholas were right? What if her actions had redounded against Jacob? She had to ask before rushing to him with his daughter at her side. “Is my husband in trouble?”

“I don't know. While they were here, they spoke of naught but how fast we must complete all this.” His arm swept over the disordered millpond scene. The wooden dam was still a skeletal frame awaiting planking, little advanced beyond what she had vaguely noticed yesterday. “We would accomplish more if he weren't taking care of other kinds of business.”

Retha clenched the bundle's knot. No doubt Brother Steiner resented her role in his injury, but she would not apologize for herself or make excuses for her husband.

“They're at the Tavern? Then we shall go there, too,” she said resolutely, reaching for Anna Johanna before recalling the child's state of mind and retracting her hand. Words would have to do. “Let's go, sweet potato. Your papa's waiting for us.”

Anna Johanna whimpered but clutched the skirt again and trudged solemnly along, untouched and uncomforted. All at once, Retha thought her heart
would break over the little girl's obvious pain. For she understood it. Even though Anna's fear for her father's life was groundless, Retha could only sympathize, unwillingly recalling her own misery on a long-ago day like this. She had trekked alongside Singing Stones, a stranger, and stranger still, an Indian, hoping that around the next bend of some narrow woodland trail, beneath the spreading branches of the next mammoth oak, her parents would be there, smiling and holding out their arms to her—instead of sightless, breathless, bathed in blood, the way the men in militia linen had left them in the cabin.

The way she had last seen them.

Gasping at the crisp, stark horror of her long-forgotten memory, Retha took a misstep in the road.

Anna Johanna gave a cry of alarm. Oh, what would the poor child think if she gave in to this old terror that raked her body! Retha determined not to let on to it. She had to protect Anna from her old, secret, fruitless fears. Catching her balance, she sank to her knees as gracefully, as naturally as she could, scanning Anna's startled face for signs of an imminent explosion.

“Tell you what, sweet potato,” Retha said with what felt like transparently false cheer. “When we find your papa, you can give him his meal.” She offered Anna Johanna the bundle.

The girl refused it, wringing her hands.

Retha offered it again. “He'll like that. He'll be proud of you.”

A small hand closed around the knot at the top of the bundle. “He will?”

“Absolutely, positively,” Retha said, smiling
encouragement, trying to hide her own shaking. The memories. She had always hidden from the memories. “Are you ready?” Retha stood.

Anna Johanna nodded cautiously, and they climbed the Tavern's steps.

 

Jacob spooned up another bite of tavern stew, savoring the gamy aroma of fresh-cooked venison before tasting it. Good enough, he thought, but not as good as the simple fare Retha now provided in their home. Mealtime might be calmer here, too, but he should be there, especially after yesterday. Colonel Armstrong had inspected the mill as if he had a stake in its profits and then insisted Jacob join him in the gentlemen's dining room at the Tavern.

In the spacious room, the colonel's dark blue uniform stood out against immaculate white linens on small, round tables set with the best pewter and good stoneware plates. Bright midday light streamed in through tall windows and glinted off the polished brass buttons of Armstrong's uniform. There was no more civilized spot in all the Carolina backcountry. Jacob had to appreciate the officer's condescension in inviting him.

He had to wonder why Armstrong had insisted that he come.

The colonel commandeered the nearest table and a seat facing the door. “You must indulge me. I cannot sit with my back to the door. A military man's superstition.”

Jacob indulged him. Despite his own sometimes
martial inclinations, whole areas of military life were a mystery to him. “I don't mind, but we like to think you safe among us.”

They ate and tried to talk. Given the colonel's professional caution, Jacob could find little common ground with him, beyond the grain and a new and unexpected order for a thousand pairs of shoes. The war interested Jacob mainly as it affected Salem, and one issue interested him more than others at the moment though he did not want to raise it. To his surprise, the colonel brought it up.

“The town's abuzz over your rescue of your wife, the spy.”

The colonel had revealed his true purpose for this shared meal. Jacob smiled guardedly. “Fresh fodder for the gossips.”

“Enlighten me. I would prefer the story from a man I trust.”

Jacob told him in terms as neutral as he could, omitting anger, insult, personal bias. He gave the colonel Retha's explanation: Scaife had long harassed the Voglers and had taken her for a spy simply because he had found her there.

“The captain is, as you may know, our most effective man with spies.”

“I suppose a man who pointed at every bush he passed would flush out an authentic turncoat from time to time,” Jacob said caustically.

“Ah, yes. His enthusiasm for his task. 'Tis well known. He did no harm, I trust, to your wife.”

“She was not injured.”

The colonel's raised brow acknowledged Jacob's careful choice of words. “Why do I not believe you?
No one tracks down more runaway recruits. He broke up the spy ring in Wilkes County. And yet…” The colonel ran a knuckle over his mustache and lowered his voice. “He is dangerous, difficult.”

“Is he?” Jacob replied, surprised by Armstrong's confiding tone, by his admission, and by the promise of more.

“He's been with me since I was a captain in the War of Regulation, and before. More than fifteen years, during the lawlessness that led to it. I keep thinking I have him under control, and then he pulls a caper like this. There was a day back then…a young couple murdered…” Armstrong shook his head with regret. “I could have court-martialed him that day. His lawlessness went beyond the rest. I thought I had reformed him—”

The colonel broke off, his eyes widening. That was Jacob's only warning. With a sob of “Papa!” a froth of blond hair and a raggedy dress catapulted onto Jacob's lap, ending the officer's dark reminiscence.

“Anna Johanna!” Jacob pulled his daughter to him for a welcoming, fatherly kiss, too flabbergasted by her unexpected appearance to worry if her ban on being touched, held, and hugged had been lifted for this public place. “Sweet potato! What in the world are you doing here? Why aren't you at home? And where's Mama Retha?”

Retha appeared at the door frame. “
Hier
, Jacob,” she said in tense German. “We worried when you did not come home.” She nodded toward his daughter, whose cheeks were stained with tears. Retha didn't need to point out her own concern. It was
stamped on her taut face. Jacob's heart warmed: His wife had worried about him.

“We brought your meal,” she said. “Anna Johanna, show him.”

Opening her bundle, she wrinkled her nose at the pungent scent of warm cheese. “
Der Käse, Papa, und das Brot
.”

Armstrong gave Jacob's daughter an amused, avuncular smile. “Bread?” he guessed. “And cheese? That's a good girl.” Turning to Jacob, he added, “One of your three, no doubt?”

Pride warmed Jacob. “The youngest. The only girl.”

Then he saw the colonel train his penetrating gaze on Retha, saw the danger a fraction of a second after he smoothly spoke.

“And are you well, Mrs. Blum, after yesterday's ordeal?”

“Quite well, sir, I thank you,” she said in perfect, if accented, English.

And then she blanched.

Armstrong looked from Retha to Jacob and back. “Ahem. May I congratulate you on your recent and prodigious mastery of English, madam?”

Jacob admired the colonel's clever trap as much as he resented it. It wasn't last night's Tavern gossip or loose talk around the town that had alerted Armstrong to the charge of Retha's spying. He must have seen Scaife. Perhaps they had passed yesterday on the road. And then the colonel came straight here to investigate Scaife's charge.

“Mr. Blum, I must question your wife.”

“In public, sir? In front of the child?” Jacob asked, over his daughter's head. He couldn't gauge
the depth or nature of Armstrong's suspicions. But he didn't like them. “Is this a formal inquiry?”

“No, not formal, no. The child is no obstacle. I have questions only.”

Retha squared her shoulders, feeling not unlike a Single Sister called to account for sneaking out to her beloved wilderness. But facing the elegant, somber colonel demanded a deeper resolution.

“Your command of English is excellent, madam,” he said.

“I never denied it, sir.”

“You misled Captain Scaife.”

“I was merely silent.”

“Would you care to explain why?” he asked with cold, implacable courtesy.

Retha looked at her husband. Yesterday he had honored her ruse. What did he want her to do today?

“Tell him, wife, as you told me,” Jacob said in English, quietly, a confident, loving look in his indigo eyes.

That apparent confidence, that unexpected love, lent her the extra bit of courage that she needed. She let out a breath.