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  “So you do,” she said, his confession reminding her of his troublesome daughter. “But I never cry.”

  “Anna Johanna says much the same.” A corner of his mouth crooked up, but he controlled it.

  “Never,” she repeated, even as she felt the tears herself. Tears were only tears, she told herself, scrubbing away evidence with a corner of her apron. It wasn’t crying until you sobbed.

  “So.” He drew away from her, his countenance turning decidedly sober. “Tell me what you were doing in Gottlieb Vogler’s arms.”

  “Because of the fight,” she offered, loosening her grip on her apron and letting it fall back down.

  His eyes followed her gesture, but his voice softened dangerously. “In his arms,” he repeated slowly.

  “The Voglers were protecting me.” She carefully cited the couple, not the man. In fact, she had flung herself away from Jacob’s fight, a scream lodged in her throat, heedless of impropriety.

  Jacob arched an eyebrow.

  “Alice and Gottlieb are my friends,” she explained.

  “Your friends.” Jacob’s eyes narrowed. “Sister Retha, what am I supposed to think—what is the town supposed to think—to see you in the arms of a man like that?”

  She didn’t like his commanding tone and almost said so. “You should think naught of it. I was scared.”

  “A man who, apparently without regret, disassociated from us by his own choice.”

  “He has regrets,” she said impulsively, and bit her tongue. Jacob Blum wouldn’t like knowing the Voglers confided in her about such private matters.

  “How would you know of his regrets?” He guided her by the arm farther from the edge of the crowd and stopped in the middle of the Square. “Tell me the truth, Sister Retha.”

  He probably ordered his children around like this. By all reports, it hadn’t worked with them either. Her irritation rose.

  “The truth? The Voglers are my friends. I needed them, and they comforted me. ’Tis none of your affair.”

  “Perhaps not,” he said flatly. “Not yet.” But the muscle in his square jaw rippled with tension.

  “Not at all.”

  An odd look crossed his face, and he shifted his weight from one large leg to the other. “Surely Sister Krause has spoken to you.” Exasperation laced his voice.

  And suddenly she understood everything, his touch, his concern, his anger, every word he’d said since he stomped over. He was thinking of her as his betrothed before he’d even asked.

  Her heart raged. She was fairly sure that Brother Ernst hadn’t prefaced his proposal to her friend Sister Eva in this blunt, unfeeling way. “Oh. Your proposal. ’Tis hardly the time or place.”

  A rueful smile creased his face. “At least we agree on that. So she spoke to you.”

  “She did.” And it hadn’t been pleasant. Retha gave him as frank a look as she could manage. “Sister Rosina told me to think long and hard about marrying you and your children.”

  He dropped her arm and stalked off, describing a tight circle before returning to loom over her. He was so big, so rugged, racked with anger, and yet, as his flushed face told her, so embarrassed.

  “She said that?” He paced a slightly larger circle and loomed before her again. “That doesn’t leave me with much to say then,” he added darkly.

  She couldn’t guess what that meant.

  Yes, she could. He was going to turn her down. She had just squashed any chance of having a home of her own.

  Instead, he ran his hand over his blond hair and kneaded the back of his neck. “Um. Sister Retha.” With his words, his anger seemed to dissipate, and for the first time he looked awkward, boyish. Retha’s stomach took a wild and unaccustomed dip. “My proposal…’tis not as I intended.”

  He made a clumsy gesture toward her. “Walk with me. Away from this.”

  He led her to the far side of the Square and leaned against the split-rail fence, burly arms folded across his chest. “Let me put it to you this way. I know Gottlieb Vogler. For trading, he’s as reliable as an oak. But I was an Elder when we disassociated him. He flaunted the lot. He put what he called love for that Cherokee woman over its clear direction not to marry her. And never looked back.”

  Retha thought Jacob sounded somewhat sorry about his role in the dismissal, but knew he couldn’t understand the whole of it. She would give her life for devotion as strong and true as that which she had seen between Gottlieb and Alice.

  “He does love her,” Retha said.

  “That may be. Nevertheless, because he’s no longer one of us, ’tis not seemly for a Single Sister to associate with him. With them. Even if they have been your friends.”

  His tone grew milder, and he was almost relaxed leaning against the split-rail fence. She would give him the truth he asked for: she wasn’t ashamed of knowing them and had nothing to hide. “Gottlieb Vogler rescued me one winter. Out past the waterfall. I was looking for dyes and found their cabin after it started to rain. He brought me home.”

  Glancing up, she saw Jacob scowling, and quickly corrected herself. “He and Alice brought me home. They said they needed supplies from Traugott Bagge’s store.”

  “You were fortunate, then,” he said noncommittally. “Nevertheless, ’tis not safe for you to associate with Gottlieb Vogler. The country is at war. And his wife is Cherokee.”

  This was going too far. She cut him a look. “His wife is my friend too. My only Cherokee friend. Cherokees found me and adopted me into their tribe. I passed my childhood years with them. Or have you forgotten?”

  “No one has forgotten, Sister Retha. Which is why you need take especial care.”

  “Take care! About Alice?” Puzzled, Retha had an urge to pace out a circle of her own. Then she recalled Gottlieb’s words about Alice’s danger. “You too believe her to be a spy.”

  Jacob nodded with slow, infuriating certainty. “More to the point, Scaife does.”

  “That man? That redheaded Liberty Man? Perhaps she should spy against him. It was Liberty Men—locals—that wiped out her clan. If she hadn’t had a ravaging case of the smallpox, they would have killed her too.”

  “Small wonder she would want to spy against—”

  “Brother Blum,” Retha interrupted, defending herself as well as her friend, “do you think I would knowingly consort with a British spy?”

  “I think you might unknowingly consort with a British spy, someone you admired for some other reason.”

  She bridled at his calm, patronizing voice. “I do admire the Cherokee. They saved my life.”

  Jacob made a noise of frustration and muttered, mostly in English, “Ach, stubborn woman, in the name of all that’s good and merciful!”

  Retha understood every word. “Perhaps we don’t always know who the good and merciful are,” she replied in her own halting but unaccented English.

  His eyebrows snapped together, then recognition dawned. “Of course. I had forgotten. You speak English.”

  “Not often anymore.”

  “All the more reason for you to choose your friends with care.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  With an impatient grumble, he drew himself up to his full, formidable height. “Sister Mary Margaretha, are you altogether unaware of the war that is going on around us?”

  She shrugged irritably. “Of course, I’m aware of—”

  “That each side suspects us of spying for the other? Scaife plagues me because I, a German, speak English. He thinks I’m our town’s liaison to the British. And now you speak English, too. Suppose he found you outside town with your friend.”

  “I would never let myself fall into that man’s hands.” Retha wrapped her arms around herself to hide a shudder at the thought. No one, no one could track her in the woods. Singing Stones had taught her well to bend but not break twigs, to conceal her tracks in streams, to step carefully around the greenery that lined the forest floor.

  “Listen to me. If he caught you out there, you
would have to explain yourself in English. You couldn’t defend yourself otherwise. One sentence of your good English, and he would clap you in the garrison brigade before you could blink.”

  “He would not catch me,” she insisted.

  Jacob gave no weight to her remark. “I want you to stay away from Alice Vogler.”

  Retha merely nodded, unable to promise that, but telling herself her nod was not a lie. She didn’t see her friend that often.

  “And don’t speak English. Coming from a Moravian Sister, people will mistake you—as they have mistaken me.”

  He had a point. Even the Moravians had mistaken her, and she’d been wrong for them. She always would be. She propped herself against the fence, thoroughly out of sorts. A young linden tree screened them from the bustle of the market. He leaned against the fence next to her, his shadowed face inscrutable as she searched it, unsure what to say until the words left her lips.

  “Everything is wrong between us now, isn’t it?” she muttered. Jacob Blum had briefly offered her a precious dream, and she had planned to say yes. Now all her difference would drive him away.

  “I hope not, Sister Retha. I only want to keep you safe until you are fully under my protection.”

  He cupped her small hands in his large ones as though protecting her already. An unaccustomed feeling of belonging stole into her guarded heart.

  “I am bound to the lot,” he went on, “and we drew an affirmative. I cannot back down. Nor do I wish to. We need you, every one of us.”

  He wanted her for his children.

  Her brief sense of belonging skidded away. Her face burned with mortification. Upright, stalwart, handsome Jacob Blum needed her to tend his children, and nothing more. She thought with longing of Brother Ernst’s obvious pride in his new bride and of Gottlieb Vogler’s deep, abiding love for his wife.

  Neither, it seemed, was to be her fate. Marrying Jacob Blum’s whole family was a high price to pay to escape life as a Single Sister and gain a home of her own. And for her, that home would come without the tender love that she envied in her friend’s match.

  “Sister Retha?” His hands clasped hers warmly. “My home will be yours. Our home. There is no higher calling than to be a Married Sister.”

  She could not bring herself to look at him. She looked across the Square at his neat half-timbered house. A home, which she had always wanted. She looked beyond the Square, beyond carts, wagons, settlers, and townspeople, to her meadow. It shimmered in the searing afternoon sun. She knew its every rock and stone and tree and twist of creek, day or night, heat or frost. The meadow called to her, and beyond it, the forest, the freedom of the wilderness beckoned to the part of her heart that would always be Cherokee.

  When her gaze returned to him, doubt clouded his lake-blue eyes.

  “What more can I offer you?” he asked.

  Love, she thought.

  “Your offer is a good one,” she said, her heart thudding dully against the inevitable. Marriage by the drawing of the lot. The groom requested. The Elders advised. The lot gave permission, sanction. At least Jacob would abide by the lot that he had sought. Who else would ever ask for her—the way Samuel had asked for Eva, the way Gottlieb had given up his world for Alice? And who was she, a foundling, to hope for love?

  “And so yes, Brother Blum. I will marry you.”

  “Jacob. In private, I want you to call me Jacob,” he said, giving her a quick smile as he squeezed her hand. She allowed herself to savor his sure touch.

  “I will be a good husband to you,” he added.

  Because he needed her, she reminded herself. Still, she’d heard nothing but good of Jacob Blum. His tone held so much modest pride and yet entreaty that she had an urge to touch him. She stifled that urge. He said he needed her. It occurred to her that need was a kind of wanting. She wondered if it could become a kind of love.

  Jacob led his tavern hack to the town’s large barn, heart thumping in his chest. It wasn’t from the fight. He sloughed off the concerns of Brothers Samuel Ernst and Frederick Marshall, both of whom had seen the altercation. The watchman approved, the Elder did not. Jacob didn’t care what either thought. As always, he had done his part for his town. No, what plagued him was something else.

  He had bungled it with Sister Retha. Rosina Krause hadn’t helped, of course, by introducing his proposal to his elected bride in such crass terms. He couldn’t control what his fellow Elder said. He clenched his jaw in sudden anger. Between the war and his wife’s death, he had little enough control over his life anyway. On top of that, he had lost his sense of humor.

  Scaife had riled him. Perhaps if the fight hadn’t sent Jacob’s blood boiling with the sheer joy of action, he would have kept his wits about him and proposed to Sister Retha like a man. She had accepted his half-witted offer with a look of resignation. It cut him to the quick. He never wanted a reluctant bride.

  Inside the barn, he mopped his brow. Compared to the stifling heat, the barn was cool. He welcomed its dark recesses. She was beautiful, yes, but he liked everything about her, even the way she had stood up to him. She had countered every one of his meddling questions.

  No, he told himself, he wasn’t meddling. He was exercising his rights as her Elder and her bridegroom.

  He smiled a little at the thought of Retha’s determined but ill-advised loyalty to the Voglers. He admired that in her, actually. Not that her loyalty was altogether misplaced. When Vogler had stood up against the community to marry the woman he loved, he had lost all but her. Jacob had loved his own wife in a quieter, easier way. Part of him envied Vogler such conviction, such passion, even while Jacob had exacted Retha’s pledge to stay far, far away from the man and his Cherokee wife.

  Despite the hounding possessiveness that made Jacob bristle to see his bride in another man’s arms, Jacob believed her innocent. Her tremors and her tearstained face convinced him that the fight had terrified her. The fight, or something about it.

  He wished she had been willing to say what. He could not brush away his nagging feeling that she had secrets.

  For it seemed that she did. And those unacknowledged secrets—not the likelihood that her friend was a spy nor the danger Retha could face if caught speaking English—disturbed him now.

  The horse gave itself a hard shake when Jacob lifted the saddle from its back. In fact, he thought Gottlieb as fortunate in Alice’s devotion as he himself had been in Christina’s. Sadness nudged him strangely. What would she think, his original bride, the adoring mother of his children? Would she wish only for Retha to be good to those children? Or would she also wish Jacob happiness, affection such as they had known together? A brief image of her quiet smile flickered in his memory and vanished. Was it approval, or portent?

  He sighed heavily. Few enough people found true affection in marriage, whether by lot or by random human choice that some would ascribe to love. With Christina, he had been fortunate that circumstance, proximity, and childhood ties had combined to bring together two like-minded, companionable people. Jacob was not without hope for himself, even this second time.

  If he could but clear up one bothersome question. He handed the horse to the tavern’s slave and prepared for an assault on the Single Sisters’ silence about one of their own.

  “What is the matter with Sister Retha? Surely there was a reason you never proposed her for the lot,” Jacob said impatiently to Rosina Krause an hour later in her office at the Gemein Haus. At eye level, a rack of lightweight leather buckets, essential for the fire protection brigade, hung along the wall. He sat ignominiously under them, kindling a conflagration of his own.

  Sister Krause’s chin dimpled in hesitation. “There is naught the matter with her. Naught that could prevent her from being a suitable—”

  “Then why did you not recommend her in the first place? You said there was no one suitable.” He couldn’t keep an accusing tone out of his voice.

  Sister Krause shot a question back at him. “Are you the reason she was ou
t that night we found her in the meadow?”

  “Of course not,” he said, indignant. What kind of Elder did she think he was? But then, he could understand why she might ask. What if he had stepped out that night for a rendezvous with Retha? Illicit trysts were not unheard of among courting couples, and his fellow Moravians were not intolerant of ordinary human passions. If he had been with her, the Sisters might well have dealt with her more lightly, not virtually locked her up.

  “But you were there,” Rosina observed dryly, giving him his first view of how she held sway over a bevy of older girls and women.

  “At the end, yes.”

  Sister Krause leaned forward, a commanding movement he recognized from Elders’ meetings. “Do you know what she was doing there?”

  Jacob wouldn’t lie, but he wouldn’t betray Retha’s confidence either. “I do now,” he said carefully.

  Instead of questioning him further, his fellow Elder pushed her ample body away from her desk and stood gazing out the window. Jacob knew the Square was virtually empty, the market done for the day, and anyone left driven inside by the blaze of heat. He had to admire the way the Sister dangled him, puppetlike, for her own purposes. He was a negotiator himself.

  After a long moment, she closed the shutter with a snap. “Then perhaps you know why Sister Retha has slipped out of the house night after night since the day we took her in.”

  “Every night?” Jacob was dumbfounded. He had no idea.

  “We don’t know if she went out every night.”

  Her simple answer couched a bleak confession of failure. Jacob understood at once. One of the first women to arrive in Salem, Sister Krause had a keen sense of duty and responsibility. She would not take failure lightly.

  “Surely Samuel Ernst would have detected her,” Jacob said, struggling to sound calm and logical as new and sharper doubts assailed him.

  “No, not Brother Ernst. He never did. She has always been elusive. We tried to keep her…absences to ourselves, but Sister Holder and I could never be sure—”