Wild Indigo Page 11

In silent protest, Nicholas pursed his mouth. His split lip made him wince. Jacob buried a smile. Pious Matthias, although overpowered, had landed one solid hit. A further thought consoled Jacob: This time, he need not lecture his firebrand son on the theoretical consequences of fighting.

  He ushered the boys to the table, planning to seat them on opposite sides, opposite ends, as he would do at home. Their brotherly brawls had intensified since they had lost their mother and he had been away from home so often. But this brawl he attributed to the marriage, and to the change it was bringing to their lives. As if they—or Anna Johanna—needed more change.

  Although his daughter was taking this rather well.

  Where had she gone, anyway? He looked around, unable at first to make out where she was. Then, there, he saw her, on the other side of the table. Underneath it, on the floor, and not alone. For a moment, he could not believe his eyes.

  Then he could. His heart thudded in his chest. Retha, sitting on her heels, her cap askew, held his daughter in her arms.

  And she was rocking her.

  Alarm and anger fighting for command of his senses, Jacob strode across the room. He would not let Retha drag his daughter into her…what if it were madness?

  “That’s intolerable.”

  To his surprise, Retha gave him a look of pain. Or was it innocence? He didn’t know her well enough to read her face. He didn’t think her in a trance, as she had seemed to be on their wedding night. Yet whatever strangeness she was perpetrating on his daughter, it comforted Anna Johanna. His daughter was quiet.

  Perhaps he had overreacted, and hurt Retha to boot. The thought that he had done so cut through his anger to a feeling of consternation that he didn’t want to examine.

  He searched Retha’s face for a clue. All he could see in her amber eyes was warm concern for his daughter.

  Nevertheless, the image of her haunting behavior on their wedding night was burned into his brain. When she had rocked then, she had not been herself. And now she was rocking again. With his daughter. To him it seemed purposeful, even mad. He could not trust her with his child. Not yet.

  “Let her go, Retha,” he heard himself say tautly.

  Clutching her burden, she lurched to her feet.

  “Here.” She offered him his daughter.

  He knew not to accept. “Put her down.”

  Retha hesitated. “She was crying over what the boys—”

  “I know what the boys said. Put her down.”

  She did, whispering first in Anna Johanna’s ear. Anna Johanna nodded solemnly, plopped her feet on the floor, and happily took her usual handhold where his breeches knotted at the knee.

  “What in God’s name did you say to her?” he said, too sharply. He meant to be calmer, for everyone’s sake.

  At his tone, Retha looked as if he had betrayed her.

  He had lost all control—of his children, his temper, of Retha and her pain. But he didn’t think she had been in a trance. This morning, unlike their wedding night, he believed she knew what she was doing when she rocked his daughter.

  He would not allow her to do that. “Tell me.”

  She lifted her chin a trace and straightened her cap. “I told her she’s such a big girl she doesn’t need me.”

  Retha’s quiet dignity struck him like a splash of cold water in his face.

  Raking his fingers across the back of his neck, Jacob said a quick prayer for wisdom to deal with his unfathomable wife.

  He picked up a shard of redware and turned it in his hand. The boys had gone well beyond making a shambles of the Ernsts’ small home. He would have to apologize, make reparations. He could only hope that Brother Samuel had been spared this awkward family altercation.

  Sister Eva poked her head inside the door, Samuel close behind. Their timing—and the deliberate smile on Eva’s plump face—said they had been waiting just outside.

  “We are back from the store with utensils enough to cook for an army. I mean, a crowd,” Eva chattered self-consciously. “We had only enough for ourselves.”

  Samuel stepped past his wife and warmly took Jacob’s hands in his. “Our heartiest congratulations, Brother Jacob.”

  “We wanted you to have a moment alone,” Eva added. “For the introductions.”

  Jacob cleared his throat. His kind friends were prepared to overlook his children’s bad behavior. He could not. But so far, negotiating trades and sales with Redcoats and Continentals was proving to be a simpler task than keeping his family in line. He apologized for the fight, paid for the damage, and then gestured to his sons to face their hosts.

  “You have words for Brother and Sister Ernst.”

  Nicholas almost rolled his eyes, but Matthias modestly clasped his hands in front of himself. “I was wrong to fight in your house,” he said promptly.

  “I’m sorry,” Nicholas jerked out, a moment after his brother and with a good bit less sincerity. Jacob let the apology lie. A good soldier, Nicholas had said what he ought whether his heart was in it or not.

  And he would be wearing that split lip for a week.

  Jacob gathered the children to him. “You have met Sister Retha, but now you can greet her as your mother.”

  Retha felt all eyes turn on her and almost bolted. Not since the night that Jacob had captured her in the Square had she felt so much the focus of attention, or so much out of place. Without a word to her just now, he had settled the boys’ fight. But when he found her comforting Anna Johanna, he turned on her for no reason she could see. Mercifully, he made short work of this formal presentation.

  Nicholas, who stretched up toward his father’s height, intimidated her with a slightly challenging formal bow. Matthias, paler and thinner than she had noticed before, shifted his feet and blushed. Her stepsons, her new responsibilities. Her new problems. One could not admit that he needed a mother, and one could not hide it. But little Anna Johanna grinned.

  Jacob seated them randomly, Retha thought at first. Then she discerned a pattern. Child, father, child, stepmother, child.

  She could not like his arrangement. He had placed the boys as far apart as could be and seated his daughter to separate the two of them, husband and wife. While her friend Eva, piling plates with waffles and hefty slabs of bacon, sat snug up to her own new husband.

  As I should be to mine, Retha thought. Instead, Anna Johanna and Matthias flanked her. With pretend cheer to mask her chagrin at being shunted aside, she buttered her stepdaughter’s waffles. When she passed Matthias honey, he refused. Apart from his finicky eating, Retha reflected, two men and two hungry children made the midmorning meal an entirely different affair from the Single Sisters’ simple breaking fast at Gemein Haus. Heaps of food were decimated.

  Whatever troubled her husband, his appetite was unaffected by the squabble.

  “My family still needs your help, Brother Samuel,” Jacob said after a while of talk and clatter. Retha wondered what the family could possibly need—apart from miracles for the three children. Miracles were hardly the night watchman’s line of work.

  He casually took a long swallow of the steaming sweet coffee that even the children drank. “Help? Whatever for?”

  “For watching after them. When I’m away.”

  “Why, Nicholas is near grown,” Samuel said. “And now that Retha’s in charge—”

  Jacob wouldn’t let him finish. “They are not that safe, not with me away and so many troops about.”

  With him away? Retha gaped at him over Anna Johanna’s Haube-capped head, then filled her mouth with waffles to hide her embarrassment. What did he mean, he would be away?

  And what kind of help did he think she needed?

  He had married her to help him with the children. Surely, he wouldn’t take away her duties before giving her a chance to show she could fulfill them.

  Across the table from her, Nicholas manfully sawed off a hunk of bacon. “I’m big enough—”

  “But not old enough,” his father answered.

  Sa
muel winked at Nicholas. “The two of us will make it doubly safe.”

  Retha, on being excluded yet again, felt the first seed of anger planted.

  “It needs to be you,” Jacob insisted.

  “I will do it. I am out every night anyway.”

  “Day is scarcely safer.”

  Retha bridled. Day or night, Jacob was planning not to entrust her with his children.

  “I will be here, Jacob. If any troops are near, my wife and I will come straightaway,” Samuel assured him, then narrowed his eyes. “Nevertheless, I fail to see why you must take all the missions.”

  Jacob gave his friend a wry smile. “Are you volunteering to master English?”

  Samuel deflected the idea with upraised hands. “Not I. The night watchman needs little English beyond halt.”

  “I wouldn’t let him anyway,” Eva said firmly. “What you do, Brother Jacob, is far too dangerous.”

  Retha had not considered Jacob’s work dangerous. Then she remembered how he had fought the redheaded man and realized that it must be.

  Jacob lifted a shoulder, dismissing everyone’s concern. “The actual missions have not been, despite everyone’s fears.”

  So he was not in danger, Retha thought. If he was not, neither was she. She chafed. Jacob had ignored her during all the friendly breakfast conversation. She hated being left out. Worse, he flatly denied that she could handle her new responsibilities. Why had he even bothered to marry her?

  “The night watch is more than enough risk for my Samuel,” Eva continued, placing a plump hand on her husband’s arm.

  Retha noticed Eva’s secure, possessive touch, and felt Jacob’s exclusion of her all the more. Samuel smiled at his new wife, and Retha longed for Jacob’s smile. She wondered what had gone so suddenly, inexplicably wrong between her husband and herself. If she touched him as Eva touched her husband, Jacob would likely push her hand away.

  If he would let her close enough to touch him.

  She slumped against her chair. Samuel Ernst doted on his bride as Retha had fondly hoped Jacob would dote on her, want her, cherish her. Premature hope and her own indomitable optimism had filled her with romantic notions. For Eva Ernst, such hope had been well placed. Her optimism had been rewarded with a besotted husband.

  For herself, Retha sighed, she had acquired an inexplicably distant mate who had forgotten overnight his sweet promise to make her happy in his home.

  At her side, Anna Johanna merrily chased a run of honey across her plate and smeared some last crumbs of waffle onto the table and into her lap. Swabbing off the sticky mess while the little girl giggled, Retha consoled herself that one member of Jacob’s family liked her.

  Matthias pushed food around on his plate. “When will you go this time, Papa?” he said, dejected.

  When indeed! Retha disguised her alarm by taking another forkful of waffle. Up till now, Jacob’s departure on any mission had seemed a distant future event. Matthias was asking his father to name the day he would go and leave them in her charge.

  Or rather, leave Brother and Sister Ernst in charge of her, Retha silently corrected. The bite of fluffy waffle turned dry and fibrous in her mouth.

  Jacob intently carved a piece of pork. “Not this week, son. Perhaps next.”

  Nicholas’s eyes lit with avid interest. “What’s this mission about, Father?”

  “The army wants the grain we promised. I’m to let them know at their garrison as soon as the mill-race is repaired and the new wheel working.”

  Nicholas set his coffee mug down with a decisive thump. “I’d like to see the garrison.”

  Eva Ernst gave a horrified gasp. “They would snap you up for a recruit before you passed the gate.”

  “You’re big enough to get away with it, too,” Samuel teased, clearly thinking the danger less.

  Jacob set down his fork and glared at his friend. “Don’t encourage the boy, Brother Samuel. He’s hardheaded enough about joining the army.”

  “Well, I do want to be a soldier,” Nicholas said.

  Jacob huffed. “Last month ’twas a gunsmith.”

  “Soldier too,” Nicholas insisted.

  Eva Ernst stood up to pass around a tin plate of blackberry pie. Offering a wedge to Nicholas, she reminded him sweetly, “Moravians don’t go for soldiers, Nicholas.”

  Taking the pie, he looked up stubbornly. “Some boys from Friedland did.”

  “Those men were drafted,” Jacob said. “Some of them illegally. Their families paid the threefold tax, but the army reneged on them, and we had to arrange for their release.”

  “What’s ‘reneged’?” Matthias asked. He had left two-thirds of the food on his plate and turned down the berry pie.

  “’Tis when you strike a bargain and turn your back on it,” Retha said quietly, reminded of the promise Jacob made her at the altar and then so fast abandoned.

  All heads whipped around to look at her.

  She had been purposefully silent, collecting her thoughts. Now she purposefully spoke, seeking her husband’s gaze and holding it. “Imagine a man consulted the lot about where to build a house. The lot said to build it here, but he built it there. Then he had reneged on his promise to the Lord to abide by the lot. The same way you can renege on a promise to a person. You give your word you’ll do something, then you don’t. Do you understand?”

  Jacob’s gaze didn’t waver. Retha thought he ought to be ashamed, familiar as he was with reneging on promises. She saw his jaw clench. Perhaps he was.

  “I suppose,” Matthias answered.

  “Here’s another example, Matthias,” Eva said in her cheerful way. “Imagine that a man consulted the lot about proposing to a particular woman, and it said he could. Then he would have to ask her, or he would be going against his solemn promise to obey the Savior’s will.”

  Retha watched Jacob’s expression harden. Perhaps he wasn’t ashamed. More likely, he regretted marrying her.

  But the deed was done.

  “Is that how you married Sister Retha, Father?” Nicholas asked. “Because the lot said you had to?

  “Nicholas!” Jacob said sharply.

  “Well, it did, didn’t it?”

  Suddenly determined not to be left out, Retha caught her new stepson’s gaze. “It doesn’t work that way, Nicholas.” She thought his father misunderstood his intent. At the wedding, Nicholas had asked for particulars, too, not rudely, but because he wanted to know. “A man seeking a wife asks the Elders to cast the lot. They can suggest the woman or he can. If the lot says yes, then they ask her if she’s interested. Then she can say yes—or no.”

  Nicholas turned to the Ernsts. “Is that how you did it?”

  Samuel shoveled another forkful of pie to his mouth. “’Tis the way we all do it.”

  Thank you, Samuel, Retha thought.

  “Because you wanted to?” Nicholas probed.

  Eva smiled happily. “Because we wanted to, Nicholas. And then we abide by it.”

  Thank you, Eva, Retha thought again. Then she studied her plate, unwilling to see Jacob ignoring her again. Purple syrup oozed from the edges of her pie. She liked that shade of purple and could produce it, but not from blackberries. It took pokeberries to make it fast.

  But Jacob should be pondering what had been said, she thought angrily. Because he was not abiding by the vow he had made to her. Happy in his home, indeed.

  The Ernsts’ words, if not hers, ought to remind him where his duty lay.

  She toyed with her pie. Matthias’s abstemious habits must be catching.

  Someone rapped decorously at the front door.

  Liebe Gott, Jacob muttered.

  They had left Brother and Sister Ernst an hour ago, and Jacob had yet to settle his family in. He felt the way Sister Ernst had always looked to him—like a fussy mother hen whose chicks were scooting out from under her in all directions.

  When the knock came, Matthias was up in his room, rummaging loudly for a precious book. In the parlor, Nicholas noisily
searched for a chalkboard. From the kitchen, Jacob overheard his daughter complaining that she had left her “redacool,” her little purse, at Sister Ernst’s.

  “Little girls don’t carry reticules,” Retha said patiently. Against his will, he admired her throaty voice.

  “’Twas my real mama’s,” Anna Johanna answered.

  Cringing at his daughter’s unkind words, Jacob jerked open the door, prepared to welcome almost any distraction from his flock.

  A disheveled Brother Marshall held a tattered missive in his hand. Dispensing with formalities, he pushed his way in and lowered his voice. “’Tis your cousin Andreas, Brother Blum.”

  Matthias shouted down that he couldn’t find his book, and Nicholas yelled back where to look.

  “If we might speak in private,” Marshall added.

  Half attending to his boys and half to his fellow Elder, Jacob motioned the latter to take a parlor chair.

  Marshall remained standing, peering out from under drooping eyebrows. “You would prefer privacy.”

  Jacob shrugged. Save for his bedroom, every room was full. “This is all I have. What has my cousin done this time?” he asked, resigned to yet another lengthy recitation of his cousin’s thoughtless transgressions.

  New to Wachovia, Andreas Blum lived in Friedland, one of the Moravians’ outlying settlements. There he had interpreted their trading practices to his own advantage, disregarding one of the Moravians’ key tenets, that most property was held in common. Communal property was a source of their strength and an article of their faith. His cousin’s transgressions had been brought to Jacob’s Supervisory Committee, and thus to his attention.

  So far, he had barely managed to keep Andreas in line.

  Marshall sat down and handed Jacob the missive. “This time, it might not be his own doing.”

  With a sinking feeling, Jacob read the note. “Drafted.” He slapped it against his thigh. “Who brought this?”

  “His neighbor, Jonas Reed.”

  “Did he say which regiment?”

  “’Twas not the regular army.” Marshall grimaced. “’Twas Liberty Men.”

  “I hope not Scaife’s detachment.”

  “I fear so. They bound him up tight and hauled him off in the night.” Intent on persuasion, Marshall leaned forward. “You must go. As with those others, he paid the tax. We have records. You can redeem him. You must.”