Wild Indigo (12 page)

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.

Samuel 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.”

Jacob crumpled the note in his hand. “Scaife will be difficult to persuade, whether we have records or not.”

“Then go to his superior. Scaife is but a captain. He would answer, I think, to that regular army man, Colonel Armstrong. He has sided with us before.”

Upstairs, boys' boots scuffled across the floor. Jacob lifted his gaze to the ceiling. “'Tis too soon for me to leave them. They cannot be ready.”

I'm
not ready, he thought.

Marshall must have caught the reluctance in his look. “Ah. You have come from Brother and Sister
Ernst, have you not? How do the children take to their new mother?”

“Very well. We are all doing very well.” Jacob covered his emotion hastily, wondering at the magnitude of that white lie on a scale of venial sin.

“If another man could go, Brother Blum, I would send him.”

“I know you would.”

“However, Brother Bagge has but returned from Pennsylvania, and I—”

“I'll go. Andreas is my cousin, and I know what to do.”

“I will gather his proof and write the colonel a letter.”

Jacob nodded, already organizing the trip in his mind. “I can leave in an hour. I have to take the boys back to school for the afternoon and then instruct…”

Instruct my wife, he thought, in her duties, in a thousand and one things she would need to know about each child, each task, each meal.

Brother Marshall gave him a look of kind sympathy. “Now, at least, your children can stay home. Sister Mary Margaretha will care for them. You can rely on her.”

Jacob masked his doubt and led Marshall to the door.

Sister Mary Margaretha, indeed. At the Ernsts', Retha had had the nerve to upbraid him over breakfast. He had scarcely had the time during this chaotic morning to digest her pointed looks, her deliberate explanation of the word
reneged
, her disturbing kindness to his daughter.

He stalked to the kitchen. “I need to talk to your
new mama, pumpkin,” he said, starting to tug at Anna Johanna's fine blond hair and remembering not to. “Would you go upstairs and take these tallow lamps for tonight?”

Anna Johanna trotted upstairs, proud to have a mission of her own.

He turned to his bride. Her amber eyes shining in the bright sun of early afternoon, she sat expectantly at the kitchen table. Unwanted, unwelcome warmth pooled in his groin.