Wild Indigo Read online

  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.”

  “H
e 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.

  “How d’you know that?” Anna’s searching whisper hurt his heart.

  “My mama died, too. I miss her.”

  “Oh.” In the long silence that followed, Jacob could hear men’s and women’s voices in the crowd around them, and a wood thrush from far away. He could almost hear his daughter thinking.

  “But you’re a big girl.”

  “I was little then. Just about your size.”

  Anna Johanna began to wring her skirt, always a bad sign. Jacob readied himself to run her home, kicking and screaming, if he had to, before she got to the worst.

  But Retha continued. “I was sad for a very long time.”

  “Me too,” Anna Johanna said softly.

  Jacob held his breath, hardly daring to move. What wild magic was Retha using on his little girl? Then he saw Retha reach for Anna Johanna’s hand. Stop, he thought. She couldn’t know the danger. He had a powerful urge to scoop his daughter up and run, to protect them both, protect them all from another fit.

  Too late. Retha squeezed the small hand, and he waited for the scream. It never came.

  “Now,” Retha said, releasing Anna Johanna’s hand and shaking out her skirt as she stood up, “I need to speak to your father.”

  “All right,” Anna Johanna said solemnly, grabbing at his knees.

  Retha’s eyes came to his chin. “She’s a sweet girl.”

  He didn’t know whether to nod agreement or shake his head. What was this encounter about? Retha couldn’t know he planned to ask for her in the lot. But what was he supposed to say? He knew he couldn’t put together two words in a row to thank her for the miracle she had wrought.

  She tilted her head at him. By tonight’s abundant torchlight, she was even more temptingly pretty than his lone flare had revealed last night. Her face was wide and open, her gaze direct, every last wisp of her hair properly tucked away. A knot of desire tightened his groin.

  “Can you keep a secret?” she asked.

  He wondered which one. The soldiers, her dancing, her shift—or the way he was looking at her lush lips?

  “Of course,” he said, remembering his position. People confided in Elders about all sorts of things. Single Sisters, however, did not confide in any man, Single, Married, or Widowed. Sister Krause was Retha’s proper channel.

  “I need your help.”

  She must really be in trouble.

  “I do regret last night,” he offered promptly. “My untimely—the Sisters must have thought that I…that we…”

  How awkward, he thought, kneading the back of his neck.

  But Retha laughed. “They did! Of course they did. But you and I know better. I hope you’re not in trouble over me.”

  “Not at all.”

  “I am. But not because of you. Because they found me outside in the first place.”

  She paused, and her bright demeanor dimmed.

  At last a sign of doubt. “Which was why?” he prodded.

  “I was feeding my wolf,” she said in a rush.

  “Ah. Your wolf,” he echoed, taken aback by her unexpected statement and struck by a flash of insight. Mary Margaretha must suffer from an excess of fancy. He had heard of that in women. Perhaps that was why Sister Krause hadn’t named her as a marriage prospect. After all, half a childhood spent with Indians had to have affected her in some strange ways.

  “So you need help,” he prompted.

  “No, not me, my wolf,” she whispered.

  Jacob knotted his brow, suddenly understanding last night’s misadventure. “You were in the meadow feeding an animal?”

  She nodded gravely. “Twice a day since I found her by the stream. She’s hurt. She’s improving, but she can’t hunt. So I need your help. I can’t get away in the day for a while.” Her hand made an impatient gesture. “Because of my new work in the laundry and new—” she pa
used “—restrictions.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Jacob said. He was not sorry about the injured animal but about her punishment. He stepped back to reflect on her revelations.

  Her moonlight dance had been no aberration. Knowing she shouldn’t, she had gone out after dark. From the start, she had been a wild child, but such a deviation from proper conduct was serious. Unfortunately, he had already proposed to the Elders that he take her to wife. Women could change their minds, but men didn’t. For him to step down would spoil her reputation. Now Sister Krause’s silence made more sense.

  His own impulse made less.

  “Will you feed her for a few days? She’s out past the Red Tannery, beyond the creek. She hides in a hollow log. But she needs meat, day and night.”

  “You want me to feed a wolf—day and night?”

  “Oh, no.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “I can still slip out at night. I’ll just go nearer to morning.”

  Dismayed, Jacob searched her face. It was guileless. Her plea was not. She disregarded the community’s standards as readily as she dismissed the danger of being out alone. He cleared his throat. “I cannot allow that,” he said, as Elder, as example to his children, as her groom to be.

  Her eyes blazed briefly. “You’re the only one I can ask.”

  “Sister Retha,” he said patiently, feeling the weight of his position. “I am an Elder. I cannot let you do this. ’Tis neither safe nor right.”

  “It cannot be wrong.” She lifted her chin, as once before, he noted, irresistibly. But this was a sensitive negotiation. He had to answer with reason and deliberation.

  “Perhaps it is,” he said. “Back home, in Germany, we controlled the wolves. We trapped—”

  “The Cherokee taught me to honor the wolf,” she interrupted eagerly. “Not to help her would have been a sin.”

  A sin, he thought. Her conviction touched him. She would not want to hear the whole truth. In Germany they had slaughtered all the wolves long before his time. He dragged his hand across his face, buying time to shape a responsible answer.

  He should turn her down. He was a builder, a planner, an Elder, not this. Conspirator. Wolf tamer.