Wild Indigo Read online

  What blood? There was no blood.

  She closed her eyes.

  That blood. Blood on the sheets, and splattered on the wall. Stumbling to a stool beside the bed, she curled into a small ball of misery.

  Make it go away, she used to say to Singing Stones.

  Close your eyes, Singing Stones would answer, until you see only gray, and rock yourself to sleep. Don’t let fear rule. It’s only memory. No harm will come of it.

  No harm had come. Silent this morning, Retha hugged her knees. This time, it was not so bad that she needed to rock, but she must have done so last night. She had tried so hard to keep her secret. At least there was no blood. The wild beating of her heart slowed as she summoned birdsong to ease her fear. She concentrated, not on the doves’ sad music but on the bold blast of little wrens.

  After a time there was nothing but song, and she opened her eyes to her husband’s stony gaze. Embarrassed to be caught hugging her knees like a little child, she quickly stood and smoothed her skirts.

  “Guten Morgen,” she said sunnily. He need not know how shaken she was. “I dressed. Should I not wear this to the Marshalls’ breakfast?”

  In her wedding dress, she turned for him.

  Jacob glared at his fully dressed wife. He couldn’t help it. So that was how it was going to be with her. But did she not remember? And what was this new performance, or was she truly mad? He rubbed his hands over his aching face. During the night, each and every tiny muscle had contracted into a grimace of disbelief. He could not scrub it out. A grown man would not, should not give in to adversity, yet at the sight of his wife’s determined cheer, he felt a moment of despair so profound he wanted to weep.

  His wild, sunny wife was mad, or beyond redemption. And he had committed the gravest error of his life.

  “You look like a sullen bear who spent all night in a chair, which I hope you did not,” she said brightly.

  He jerked his head up at the cruel remark, but her cheerful expression showed no intent to wound. Determined not to let her see that she had any power over him, he forced a light laugh. “It won’t happen again. You’ll not turn me out of my bed again.”

  “Oh! I never intended that.” She flushed deeply, her cheeks like peaches. “I—we must have fallen asleep.” Doubt flashed across her face, but that damnable cheer soon subsumed the doubt.

  “Determined to make the best of it,” he muttered, more to himself than to her. Certain that fatigue lent a sarcastic edge to his words, he pivoted and stalked into the kitchen. Let her follow if she wished.

  “Yes, of course,” she said after him, on a questioning note.

  He had questions, too. Behind him, she trod lightly, as if she were an Indian. But she smiled like a conniving virgin. Or an innocent one. Which was she?

  To slake his thirst, he filled a dipper with water, but checked himself when she looked at it longingly. She was his wife, his care. Wordlessly he offered her the dipper, watching closely as she drank deeply, wiped a drop of water from her mouth, and cleared her throat to speak. He couldn’t guess what she might have to say.

  “This is a fine home, Jacob, and I am proud to be its mistress. And the children…I promise I will work hard…”

  Dry-mouthed, stiff-necked, and disbelieving, he dropped the gourd onto the table with a solid thump.

  She jumped.

  “Why don’t you tell me what was going on last night?” he said evenly, but with a faint hope of startling the truth out of her.

  A tremor in her chin betrayed her confusion. “I’m sorry about the glass.”

  He had thought he couldn’t bear her all-denying cheer, but he didn’t want tears. He softened his voice. “The glass is not important.”

  “Oh.” To his amazement, she fixed him with a sincere amber gaze and touched his hand. “I forgot to thank you for a beautiful wedding day.” She blushed. “And night. I hope I didn’t drink too much.”

  Speechless, he ground his teeth against that oath he hadn’t used in years before last night. He was, he had always thought, a man of exact measurements. He knew things of the material world by weight and size and substance. He could bend them to his will, shape them to his imaginings. He could dam rivers, turn the course of streams, supply a town at the frontier’s edge with precious running water.

  Retha left him at an utter loss. What could a man do? Wait, and watch her actions, and try to gauge her intent, he told himself. Protect his children. Protect himself. And keep his hands off the only part of her he had not yet taken a measure of—that delectable body.

  “I…um…have to dress,” he said, and retreated to their bedroom. Knotting his stock at his throat, he thought about what lay ahead, not in the distant future, but today and tomorrow. Shortly he would take her to the Marshalls’ breakfast. There he would reveal nothing. Then tomorrow, at the Ernsts’, he would introduce her to his children as their mother as if all were well, regardless of the miserable truth.

  “The Ernsts are ready for us. Past ready by now.” Retha heard the exasperation in her husband’s voice the next day as he urged her to dress to go with him to fetch the children home.

  But she didn’t answer him. Her mouth was full of pins. As her fingers struggled to fasten the bodice of her best work dress, another pin dropped to the floor.

  At least he had left her alone to dress. She would hate for him to see her shaking at the prospect of being formally presented to his children as their new mother.

  Perhaps she should wear her wedding dress, as she had done yesterday for breakfast with the Marshalls. No, she had decided to put it away for fall Sundays when she would need something heavy and warm. Besides, wearing such a fine new dress on an ordinary Tuesday morning might be prideful.

  She was proud, though, proud to be married, even if Jacob seemed not to share her feeling.

  “Children don’t wait!”

  “Ouch!” she cried out as a straight pin lanced her thumb. She stuck it in her mouth and sucked the coppery blood.

  Jacob thundered in. Off and on since their wedding night, he had been a dark cloud. He had tried for fair weather at the Marshalls’, but she could tell he was feigning good humor. She had not the slightest idea why. Something had happened on their wedding night.

  Or had not. She pushed the thought away.

  “You may as well learn this now as later. The children’s needs can’t wait on our—” He studied her, scowling. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I was hurrying,” she said through pins, and held up her thumb, hoping it still bled.

  A fat drop of bright red blood welled up.

  “I think you will survive this.” He examined her thumb thoroughly, as if she were a child.

  “’Tis only a pinprick,” she said, irritated by his unexpected condescension.

  “Do you usually mistake your appendages for pincushions?”

  She looked up doubtfully. Was he mocking her, or teasing? His tone was Sunday sober, but a corner of his mouth crooked up.

  Squeezing the edges of her bodice together and inserting two final pins without mishap, she tried to sound casual. “Perhaps I’m not prepared to become a mother.”

  His dark demeanor lightened. “Some days I’m still not used to being a father. ’Twill come to you soon enough.”

  She sighed and shook out her skirts. “I’m ready.”

  “Wait…” With a quick movement, he tucked a loop of hair under her Haube.

  She shrank from him when the brush of his fingers tickled her neck. Since Sunday night, he had avoided touching her, sensibly acknowledging, she assumed, that now was not the time to engage in those married matters that led to children.

  Part of her feared he did think it was time. Last night he had insisted on sharing the bed, stripping down to his crisp body linen in full candlelight. Sitting on the bed’s edge, she had not been able to watch. But she had listened. He told her this was how it would be between them every night with the children home. They would go to bed together, strip to t
heir body linen, and sleep side by side. She need neither fear his touch nor worry that he would hurt her.

  But he had lain so close beside her, she could feel his heat. His massive body hemmed her in. She could not steady her breathing to match the slow, even exhalations that came from the depths of his thick chest. Once, in sleep, he rolled toward her, stretching out a heavy arm that pinned her in place. A fear had washed over her like floodwaters engulfing the ark.

  This hand at her neck in daylight was only a touch, she reminded herself.

  His gaze lingering on the very spot that he had touched, he spoke softly. “Although I liked it as it was.” He hadn’t used that tone since their wedding night.

  “Thank you,” she mumbled politely, uncertain what to say.

  Self-consciously she checked the nape of her neck where his fingers had rested. No more hair astray. No explanation for the tingling.

  “We had better go then,” she added, and hastened for the door.

  The day was sunny, the heat rising. The dusty street slanted uphill to the Ernsts’ small cabin at the edge of town. Retha stretched to match Jacob’s long-legged stride. In the morning’s relative coolness, more people were out than usual, several acknowledging her who never had before. An elderly Single Brother tipped his hat. Abraham, the newly baptized slave who worked at the Tavern, nodded before lowering his head.

  Brother Meyer too, scurrying back to his busy tavern, gave her a smile. “We miss your good work on our linens.”

  “I will not miss the laundry!”

  “You will have laundry aplenty, Sister Blum,” he laughed, rushing on. But Jacob stopped him, engaging him in business. She caught snippets—that Hessian…a danger to us—but dismissed them and savored her new last name.

  Sister Blum. Her throat caught, her eyes misted, but she wouldn’t let on. Overnight, she marveled, her status had changed—had become his, of that she had no doubt. At last, she had a name. It felt so right, she even allowed herself, for once, to ponder who she had been. The Cherokee she remembered vividly. But from the time before them, she recalled only a faint tableau: There had been a tall, brusque, bearded man, a woman with hair the color of her own, a piercing scream, and blood…

  Enough of that. She monitored herself as she had always done. She had survived by forgetting. Long ago, Singing Stones had encouraged her to believe that wondering where she came from did no good, that hoping to find out did even less. She persuaded herself that that was so. If those terrifying dreams had anything to do with where she had come from, she was better off not knowing.

  “…have to insist that the Redcoats bury their own,” Jacob was saying with finality.

  “All the more if the soldier were a Hessian.” Brother Meyer sighed heavily. “The man would have to be German.”

  Jacob shrugged. “They will link us to him nonetheless. Germans caring for a wounded German mercenary cannot but look suspicious—”

  “Brother Blum!” plump Eva Ernst cried out, flapping her way down the street. “I found you not a moment too soon. Hurry, hurry!”

  Jacob had already broken into a run. “Anna Johanna! What’s wrong with her?” Retha heard him shout as he sped past her friend.

  “’Tis not her! ’Tis the boys!” Eva yelled, puffing as she bent over, hands on her knees, to catch her breath. “Fighting—the boys are having a terrible fight.”

  “Where’s Brother Ernst?” Retha cried out.

  “At the store—I go to fetch him. You—help Jacob—”

  Waiting not a second longer, Retha hiked up her skirts and dashed after Jacob. She would not have thought so large a man could run so fast. Far ahead of her, he leaped the steps and disappeared through the open door of the Ernsts’ tiny cabin.

  She sped up, dismissing a thought about the unseemliness of running through town, past the Square, the Brothers House, the public cistern, and Dr. Bonn’s apothecary. Gasping, she arrived, and hung on the doorjamb while she caught her breath.

  A ruckus of grunts and clatter assailed her. She peered inside. Nicholas, red with anger, pounded his flailing brother, pinning him to the floor with superior weight and skill.

  “Enough of that!” Jacob lifted his large older son as if he were no more than a sapling, gave the thin boy a hand up, and reprimanded both of them. Retha strained to make out Jacob’s harsh whisper but could not.

  What was she to do? The boys had made a mess, scattering bright new pewter utensils and wedding-gift redware on the table and onto the floor. At least one platter had been smashed.

  She felt useless, extra. Then she heard smothered sobbing. Searching the room, she spied Anna Johanna under the table, clinging to one of its legs, weeping.

  Had the boys hurt her? A need to protect this fragile child, fiercer than anything she had felt for her wolf, flooded Retha. Scrunching under the table, she crawled over to sit cross-legged beside Anna Johanna. She reached for the girl but checked her hand. Jacob had given fair warning. Touch could set his daughter off like a torch to a dried-out haystack.

  “Anna Johanna,” Retha whispered, feeling the awkwardness of offering comfort without touch. “’Tis all right. You will be all right.”

  Anna Johanna sobbed away. There were no signs of injury, but her knobby spine heaved beneath the thin fabric of her cherished old dress.

  “I’m here, sweet potato. Are you hurt?”

  “Not hurt,” she cried.

  She sounded hurt. Retha pressed her. “Do you want to tell me what’s the matter?”

  “No-oo,” she wailed.

  “Very well, then…” Retha paused, casting about for the right words. She had reached an impasse with her new stepdaughter at their first crisis, and felt perfectly useless. “I shall just keep you company.” She folded her hands in her lap, and waited.

  Gradually the tide of sobs ebbed. “Anna Slow-hanna…is not my…name,” she sputtered.

  “Of course it’s not. No one says it is.”

  “M-Matthias s-says so. ’Cause I’m slow.”

  “You’re not slow. They’re just bigger and faster. You’re Anna Johanna. Everyone knows that.”

  “M-Matthias doesn’t. He calls me Anna Slow.” She ran the offending words together in a rhyming, nasal voice.

  Retha recognized her imitation of Matthias’s voice and understood the impact his teasing would have. Her seven years with the Single Sisters had taught her how effective youthful tormentors could be. How hard to be youngest and slowest and always last. The memory of taunts that used to come her way still raised her hackles. That boys might be as cruel as girls had never occurred to her.

  She glanced at her husband and his sons. He was dressing them down in words so soft they almost frightened her.

  “Matthias isn’t going to say that anymore, Anna Johanna.” Carefully, Retha used the child’s full and proper name. It worked.

  Still crouched under the table, the girl turned on her hands and knees, and looked at Retha with blue eyes trusting as a pup’s. “Not ever?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Anna Johanna gave a little smile. It faded quickly. “How ’bout Nich’las?”

  “He said that, too?” Retha tried to hide her sudden annoyance, but it was hard to keep it down. She might be new to the family, but in her opinion both boys should be looking out for their younger sister, not driving her to tears. Especially not the elder, and especially not in company.

  “No,” Anna Johanna said, but her chin trembled.

  “Did he say something?”

  Retha couldn’t catch her breathy mumble and leaned forward.

  “He said what?”

  Anna Johanna hung her head. “Told me I’m a baby.”

  “Sweet potato, you’re the youngest. That doesn’t make you a baby.”

  She looked up hopefully, tears spangling pale lashes.

  “In fact, I would say you’re a big girl now,” Retha said. When she got her hands on those boys, she wouldn’t let them off with a soft-talking.

  Suddenly, o
f her own free will, Anna Johanna surrendered herself to Retha’s arms. Retha, her heart swelling with tenderness, folded her new stepdaughter to her breast and rocked her for comfort.

  Wild as they were, Jacob had never had occasion to be ashamed of his boys until now. In less than five minutes, he had wrung confessions from them.

  After Sister Ernst had sent her husband down to Traugott Bagge’s store, Matthias had teased Anna Johanna, calling her by her baby name. Only one time, he protested. It made her cry.

  Nicholas claimed he took up for his sister. He corrected Matthias by telling him he would be the one to help tend the new babies, just as he, Nicholas, had once helped with smelly Anna Slow.

  “You called her that?” Jacob simmered.

  Nicholas had fueled the flames in both directions. He was expert at riling his brother and his sister. He always whetted his militant spirit at their expense. Not for the first time, Jacob ruefully acknowledged his older son’s fire without perfectly understanding it. Nicholas had been born for soldiering, striking out at any opposition from his cradle days. Of late he followed the ceaseless tide of troops from both armies, paying little regard to which side was in the right and much attention to the fit of uniforms to young men and bayonets to rifles.

  Or had his interest in things military coincided with his mother’s death? It was yet another puzzle Jacob had not had the time to piece together. Until he did, Nicholas would be Moravian under his father’s roof, and Jacob would take the same careful steps to snuff out his son’s warlike nature that he had long taken to control his own.

  He consigned both boys to a month of mucking out Brother Meyer’s stables with no remuneration.

  “For free?” Nicholas protested.

  Jacob silenced him with a look.

  Matthias tugged at his coatsleeve. “What about the new babies, Papa?”

  “Babies?” Jacob puzzled.

  “Nicholas says there’s going to be new babies.”

  Nicholas, still resentful, cut Retha a hostile look. “New wives mean new babies, stup—”

  “One more word, son,” Jacob warned. “I can find hotter, smellier work for you.”