Wild Indigo (3 page)

As they squeezed through the alley, a door slammed shut. Sarah shrieked, Rosina jumped, and Retha's heart pounded.

Caught, and caught again.

“I came to help,” a deep melodic baritone sounded around the corner. Jacob Blum's voice! His large body loomed over Retha and her keepers. Her eyes well adjusted to the night, Retha peered at the massive shape to make sure it was him.

It was. Inspecting the alley, he held up his torch. The older women moved into its light, closing ranks in front of Retha.

“Sisters,” he began, with a note of surprise on seeing women out after dark. “Is aught the matter?” He identified them one by one. “Sister Krause. Sister Holder. And Sister—?”

He lifted his torch higher but obviously couldn't see past them to her. Retha didn't want him to. Lowering her head to hide her face, she saw a waterfall of white. Her shift. It shone in the torch's light. Brother Blum would think her brazen as a nanny goat. This afternoon she had taken a certain delight in embarrassing him. He didn't look embarrassed now.

She was in a fine pickle. Best to own up.

She lifted her eyes to his. “I fear 'tis I, Brother Blum.”

Jacob suppressed a laugh with difficulty. His prospective bride sounded contrite, but her eyes weren't.

“Sister Retha,” he nodded courteously, marshaling his amusement as the Sisters tried to hide her thin summer shift behind their outspread skirts. Too little and too late. He had glimpsed her dancing, and the sight had propelled him into the night. For her safety, he told himself. “I trust that you are quite all right.”

“I am very well, thank you.”

“Ah. I was thinking of the soldiers this afternoon.”

“What soldiers?” the older women asked in unison.

Jacob noticed Retha move from one bare foot to the other. “Two soldiers blocked Sister Retha's way across the Square this afternoon and I—”

“No, they didn't.” Retha cut him off. “I was safe as safe could be. They only brought more laundry—”

“—and I sent them on their way,” Jacob concluded.

The two older women stepped aside with her, and all three whispered violently. Jacob couldn't make out their words, but he knew trouble when he saw it, Retha's—and his.

Lantern light gilded her hair, which flowed unbound over her shoulders and down her back. Lush, beautiful hair. It was a sight for her husband and no one else. He looked away, but not soon enough. How it had fanned in the moonlight as she danced. His insides twisted with longing to touch it.

A man should have a woman. He needed one. This one.

He had no idea why Sister Retha would have crossed the creek, but he had seen it all, wakeful and restless, thinking about the complaints made against his children at his meeting with the Elders. Moonlight washed the night, but they slept soundly. Even Anna Johanna, whose sad little dress he had just hung up to dry.

The three women returned, grimly silent. He hadn't caught a whispered word but recognized the tone. Chastisement. Retha was in trouble. Somehow his presence made it worse.

Of course. Sister Krause knew that he had asked for Retha by the lot. Now she found Retha outside at night, half-dressed.

And he had the great misfortune just then to step out of his house. What was Sister Krause thinking?

For that matter, what should
he
think?

He tried to catch Retha's gaze, but she studied the plank walk. Defiantly, he thought. When the
Sisters nudged her to leave, Jacob offered to escort them all across the Square.

“Thank you,” said Sister Krause, firmly placing herself between him and Retha.

Jacob recognized the tactic. The Single Sisters were formidable in defense of their own. At the low stoop of the Sisters House, Jacob pleasantly said his goodnights in order of seniority. “Good night, Sister Holder. Good night, Sister Krause.” Then he glanced down.

An enticingly slender, outrageously bare foot paused at the threshold.

What
could
he think?

“Good night, Sister Retha,” he mustered.

She looked at him with daring, questioning eyes darkened by the night. Intimate eyes.

His heart leaped. She wanted something from him, but what?

“Good night, Brother Blum,” she whispered, and disappeared from him for the second time that day.

Her unasked question kept him awake till moonset.

R
etha had thought she could bear blood.

Against the hot afternoon light flooding the scullery of
Gemein Haus
, she held up the lieutenant's dripping linen shirt and shuddered. Blood stained one shoulder down to the narrow tucks that marched across its breast. The brown stain reminded her queasily of the blood oozing from her wolf's injured leg.

Shaking her head to dispel a fear she couldn't name, she drenched the shirt in the waist-high wooden washtub. Better to think about her present predicament than allow that nameless fear to gnaw at her. To think about the Single Sisters catching her last night, about facing the consequences this morning in Rosina Krause's immaculate office, about losing freedoms she had worked for all these years.

Sister Sarah Holder had broken the news. “You know we have only your best interests at heart.”

“We need help in the laundry anyway,” Rosina Krause added.

“But my dyes—”

“Your dyes and whatever else you were up to last night have gotten you into a great deal of trouble.”

“Trouble! The town depends on my dyes. I make money for us.” Retha ground her teeth. She knew more about dyes than anyone in Salem. After the town's appointed dyer had been dismissed, she had supplied Traugott Bagge's store.

“That's not the trouble I meant,” Sister Rosina said.

Her tone sparked rebellion in Retha's heart. For a moment she considered the stoic forbearance she had learned from the Cherokee. She had done no wrong.

“Besides, there really is a lot of laundry since Sister Eva has left us to become Sister Ernst,” old Sarah added cheerfully.

After a childhood wearing practical deerskins, Retha despised doing laundry. Being cooped up in the dank scullery with strangers' sweaty clothes, harsh lye, and dirty water was an unjust punishment.

“I have done no wrong,” she protested.

“Don't mock us, Sister Retha,” Rosina Krause said mildly.

“I'm not mocking you. I wouldn't. But what have I done?”

“We don't know what you do, where you go, or why. But we know it is not safe. You're safe here, and needed here.”

“Besides, Sister, everyone knows you're of an age—” Sarah's wrinkled face turned crimson.

“Of an age!”

“Of an age where we've found it wise to help the younger of our Single Sisters stay on the path,” Sarah had concluded decorously.

Water from the washtub slopping around her,
Retha realized at last what they suspected. An offense so serious they hadn't even named it in the dark. They thought that she had gone out to meet a man. She hadn't. She wouldn't. No man would ask her. Samuel Ernst hadn't, nor had a host of Single Brothers before him.

Not that she had wanted the men who hadn't asked. If it hadn't been for Brother Blum's celestial singing, she would hardly have noticed a man in the town. No, she wanted freedom to do her work. And now for the first time, she wanted urgently to escape the crowded
Gemein Haus
into a house of her own.

And she wanted what her friend Eva had found—love.

Plunging the lieutenant's shirt under soapy water, she scrubbed its stains against the built-in washboard. Let its ridges bark her knuckles raw. How she loathed the rusty sight, the coppery smell of blood. She closed her eyes on an older, darker memory of a blood-stiffened deerskin dress. But only for a moment would she let that memory drag her spirits down.

She ran the soppy mess through creaking wooden wringers, dunked it, scrubbed it, wrung it out. Over and over. Laundry had been one of Eva Reuter's chores. Now she was Married Sister Eva Ernst. Last month the lot had permitted stocky Samuel Ernst to seek Eva's hand in marriage. Pink-cheeked, plump, and fluttering, she accepted. After that Sunday service, they were formally betrothed, and the next week, married.

Samuel had wanted Eva, and Eva had wanted him, Retha thought dreamily, escaping for a moment
the burden of her chore. For the hundredth time, she wondered if romance would ever come her way. Not likely, not among these Moravians. They had taken her in and raised her. But then, they baptized slaves. Like the slaves they bought, baptized, and ultimately freed, she would stay an outsider, tainted by her years among the Cherokee.

She held the white shirt up to the window. It was clean, almost as good as new, but the work left her unsatisfied. She preferred messy dyebaths and all those beautiful colors—rose, amber, indigo. She hated laundry. A sense of futility swamped her. But she would not give in to it. She never had. She lifted her chin, hung the shirt out to dry, and washed for supper.

By the time Retha slipped into the
Saal
for
Singstunde
, a low red sun still parched the streets of town. Not even the room's thick brick and timber walls warded off the long day's heat.

Fanning herself with her hand, Rosina Krause scowled as Retha squeezed beside her on the bench. “You are late.”

“I had to put my wash back on the line.”

Rosina's lips made a small O of disapproval in her round face. “You should have pegged it properly.”

Behind a cupped hand, Retha whispered, “I did. But Sister Baumgarten's cow didn't notice that when she charged through.”

Rosina shushed her as the choir burst into song, flute and oboe voices weaving melody around the day's concerns. Heat rose from the benches, from the floor. Retha bowed her head.

What a day. What a couple of days. Sister Rosina
would think she prayed. Perhaps, Retha thought, she did. Perhaps these songs were prayers, as Cherokee chants had once seemed to her. Tonight Brother Blum's perfect baritone grounded the choir's evening offering. Song sharpened the angles of his jaw, lightened his wide, serious brow, softened his generous mouth. She had heard him a thousand, thousand times, his voice rich and full as water under rocks, as powerful and secret.

Surely he would help her.

 

Jacob joined the singers at the front of the
Saal
. He welcomed
Singstunde
, the hour of song before time for bed, would have welcomed it more if the close, hot room hadn't been crowded with Redcoats. These latest troops would no doubt lodge in Salem for a time before marching on. Far from repelling either these British or the Continentals, the Moravians' neutrality seemed to draw troops to the town—as an oasis, as a trading center, almost as a place to rest. Inevitably, they brought rumor and suspicion.

He was sick of intrigue, wariness, news of battle, and he would rather have no reminders of them during services. Although, on second thought, better the soldiers come here than occupy the town or plunder its stores. Only recently they had done both in Bethabara, the nearest Moravian village, making the threat implicit in their uniforms seem ever more imminent.

Gladly he turned a well-trained ear to the band as its members tuned their instruments. Music was his mainstay. When the small band began a familiar
Bach chorale, he felt its winding richness freeing his soul from daily cares.

He had plenty, too many. Three of them sat along the front bench between Brother and Sister Ernst: Nicholas and Anna Johanna red-faced and restless in the heat, Matthias with his head lowered in his perpetual pious reflection.

Jacob's fourth, newest care had not arrived. For a moment he scanned the room, trying not to think of Retha's daring or her silent dance. The Single Sisters had in all likelihood confined her to
Gemein Haus
.

Halfway through the choir's first piece, movement caught his eye. Retha tried to sneak along the back wall, but she was too strikingly tall to go unnoticed. The bodice of her rose dress tapered to a plain flounce that danced about her trim waist. It was not so modest a dress as he had thought. He searched for his place in the songbook.

The chorale ended, and he looked up. Retha had taken a seat on Sister Krause's bench. The older Single Sister appeared to be scolding her, but he couldn't hear a word. Retha whispered something back and lowered her head, her starched white
Haube
rigorously taming what he remembered as a mass of amber hair.

Such restraint was more than he could manage. Suddenly, acutely, he wanted to see Retha's glorious hair as it had been the night before. He wanted to free it himself, comb his fingers through it, drape it over the backs of his hands. For a moment he lost all sense of the service, of the close, hot room. He was imagining a waterfall of golden hair over creamy
shoulders when the choir started its next chorale.

Without him.

Discreetly, tenor Brother Schopp poked his ribs. Feeling chastised, Jacob picked up his part. Surely the man couldn't read his thoughts. He fixed his mind on the bass line. At his solo, his concentration lapsed again. She hadn't moved except to raise her head. Midnote, he caught her gaze and held it.

Amber eyes, golden smile. He almost lost his way.

Mercifully, the song service ended, and Brother Marshall said a final prayer. Jacob joined the worshipers spilling onto the main street. Outside it was barely cooler, but he was thankful for any respite from the heat. From his own heat.

What had come over him tonight?

“A word with you, Brother Blum.” Philip Schopp tapped his shoulder.

Jacob looked up, puzzled to see Schopp frowning, until he followed his line of sight.

“Nicholas does not appear to have learned his lesson,” Schopp added.

Jacob's twelve-year-old son streaked into the open lot, gathering schoolmates around him. Jacob sighed heavily and started to pursue his son across the Square. But he thought better of his paternal impulse. After he had rated Nicholas in private, man to man, the boy had asked for another chance. Jacob fully intended to allow him that.

“I talked to him about not inciting trouble,” Jacob said stiffly. “He understands.”

“He had better,” the stern schoolmaster answered. “We have little enough room for the boys
at my house, and none for agitators.”

Jacob raised a brow at the young schoolmaster's indictment of his son.

“Now, that one is another story.” Schopp pointed to Matthias, hands clasped behind his back as he slowly tracked his brother. “Would that more boys were so serious.”

“
Ach
,” Jacob said, “that one is too serious.”

Schopp gave him an incredulous look and stalked off.

Jacob hadn't addressed this son's problems, and scarcely knew which he dreaded more—his older son's sins or his younger one's relentless piety. Both had worsened since their mother's death. Or did piety improve? Not when interlaced with zeal. Thin and solemn, Matthias would be quick to tell tales against his brother—as well as his sister.

Jacob looked up. From across the dusty street, Sister Ernst came up, almost clucking, her skirts ruffling around his daughter like a plump guinea hen's. As soon as Anna Johanna arrived, she grabbed a fistful of his breeches at the knee—the one touch she would tolerate, the one that she initiated. He dropped his hand instinctively to comfort her but snapped it back.

His heart knotted. He couldn't touch her. No one could. He had racked his brain for an explanation. She had been a bold, happy child up until the day her mother died. Deep down, he knew Anna Johanna's aversion to touch was no simple, physical matter. His somber little girl had not recovered from her loss. She needed…he no longer knew what. Not attention or love or distraction. He had
exhausted himself on all counts.

She navigated from front to side to back, shrinking from the milling crowd, his friends, her brothers.

“You must be Anna Johanna.” A throaty feminine voice came from behind him.

Jacob twisted his head around to see the white-capped head of a woman kneeling. Retha addressed his daughter.

But why? And why so close to him? He clamped his teeth against a renegade wave of desire.

“How d'you know that?” His daughter sounded mystified.

He was too, for reasons of his own. To date, the child had repulsed the nearest neighbors. Her speaking to anyone outside their family was a bold step.

“Because you're with your father, and I want to talk to him in a minute,” Retha said matter-of-factly.

“Me first?” Anna Johanna asked tremulously.

“You first.”

Cautiously Jacob turned his body. Retha was smiling warmly at Anna Johanna, who reclaimed her hold on him. She started plucking at the knot that tied his breeches below his left knee. He had a worrisome vision of his wool-threaded stockings, freed by her nimble fingers, sagging down to buckled shoes and exposing his calves to all the congregation.

“Who are you?” Anna Johanna asked.

“I'm Retha, and I like your pretty red ribbons.”

Anna Johanna let go of his breeches to touch the simple ribbons tied under her chin. All Little Girls wore red ones, Married Sisters blue ones, and Widows white.

“Yours are pink,” his daughter said.

“Yours will be too when you're older,” Retha assured her.

“How older?” Anna Johanna asked intensely.

Jacob forgot the threat to his socks.

“Oh, old enough to be a Single Sister. When you turn seventeen.”

“My mama's were blue,” Anna Johanna volunteered. Jacob marveled. His grim little daughter was talking with a virtual stranger. And of her own accord, she had introduced her mother into the conversation.

“That's because she was a Married Sister,” Retha said gently, then glanced up at Jacob, as if to ask whether he objected.

Not in the least. He gestured for her to go on.

“My mama's dead,” Anna Johanna said, blunt as only a child could be.

“I know that,” Retha said soothingly. “I'm sorry. You must miss her very much.”

Anna Johanna took a step back, onto Jacob's buckled shoes. She teetered. He frowned. Retha had gone too far. He reached for Anna Johanna's shoulders but stopped. Never touch her. A screaming fit was bad enough behind the thick walls of their home.