Wild Indigo (18 page)

Stretching out her hand, she brought it barely close enough to feel the fire of his flesh. And slowly, insidiously, again, the warmth spread downward into the private center of her self, but sharper, wider, lower than before. Wrapping her arms around herself, she hunched over, alarmed.

She had never felt this way, ever. Unnerved, she slipped to the open window and leaned out, gulping in cool morning air. A heavy dew damped the dirt yard, and she breathed in the rich humus of earth, the rich freedom of the world outside, the strength and consolation left her from her wilderness life.

Gradually a sense of well-being seeped into her soul. She rested her head against the window jamb. At last she noticed the first birdsong of morning, the bobwhite chanting his monotonous dawn lament. Poor bobwhite, it shrilled. Poor bobwhite. It must have been singing since first light, and she had been too occupied to notice. She, who noticed, who longed to be a part of everything that happened in the world outside.

Oh, how her world was changing—from twig
pallets in bark lodges to a cot in the Single Sisters' dormitory to her husband's bed. But she would listen now while breakfast warmed, the sky brightened, and the children slept.

Inside her, the pleasurable, alarming ache ebbed.

In its place, worry flowed.

What was happening to her? Again she thought of confiding in Sister Eva. But her friend would not do. She was in such a ridiculous flutter over Samuel, she would probably blush or giggle or tease. Retha didn't think she could bear that.

Then who? Sister Rosina's words from Retha's wedding day came back. We leave you in your husband's capable hands, she had said. He was capable, yes. But capable of what? Leaving her to him had not worked. What was it that she did not remember of her wedding night? Not only had something gone wrong then, but something was wrong with her now. Something dark as sickness, sharp as fever. Something powerful as sin.

Wringing her hands with frustration, she knew it was up to her to find out what, and soon, before too many days had passed.

Sleepy footsteps scuffed down the stairs. She hurried from Jacob's side to meet the boys, relieved to be distracted by practical matters. A drowsy Nicholas had tousled hair. A worried Matthias had slicked his back and tied it.

She held a finger to her mouth. “Your father's home—but sleeping!” she hastened to add as both boys neared the narrow landing by the front door. Like a cattle drover, she held out her arms to stop them.

Nicholas cut her a dark look, and Matthias's sleep-creased face produced a pout.

She stood her ground. She didn't have to understand her sleeping husband, she thought with wifely satisfaction, to defend him.

F
aint harmonies drifted through the window, softly humming Jacob's body awake. He opened one eye. Dust motes danced in the slant of late afternoon sun. The blend of voices and brass horns in the afternoon meant vespers underway in the Brothers House a few doors down the street. Groggy and drenched in sweat, he propped up on one elbow. He had been in bed all day, alone.

But not alone for long, he thought. After his wife's soothing attentions last night, he couldn't help hoping she would soon willingly share his bed.

He flung back the sheet and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, scattering bandages and vegetation.

Vegetation? He raised a battered-looking foot to his knee, picked a crumpled leaf off it, and sniffed. The melony smell of crushed comfrey. Forbidden comfrey, which Retha had collected in the night. He tried to rouse up the indignation he had felt earlier, but the memory of her expert ministrations prevailed instead, swamping his sleep-clogged senses.

She had been tender, determined, tantalizingly close.

Smiling, he hobbled to the washstand. He had liked coming home to her touch, her earnest concern, her brisk bossiness. More than liked it. He wet a rag and mopped sweat off his face, neck, and body, coming fully awake as the aroma of ham and cabbage cooking triggered the onslaught of ravenous hunger.

The music trailed off, marking the end of early service. As predictably as a clock's chime, children's whoops punctuated the quiet conversation of adults passing beneath his window. Whoops contributed by his boys, no doubt. He had about two minutes to dress before they hit the house, Jacob realized, hastily pulling on his breeches and tying his stock. He had to be up and dressed. The children must not see him injured, however mundane and humbling his wounds. It was enough that they had lost their mother. He rummaged through the clothes cupboard for his outer coat and a pair of clean stockings.

The front door slammed, and his chattering children were home. Home. His heart twinged with sadness and relief. Since Christina's death, they had had to stay elsewhere whenever he was called away. Now, with Retha, they stayed here. It pleased him.

“Hush, hush.” Retha's whisper squeezed through the cracks of their bedroom door. “He's sleeping.”

“I waited all day,” Matthias complained.

“Everyone waited all day,” she answered mildly.

“You said he would be up at noon.”

“It's almost time for supper!” Anna Johanna added.

Jacob scowled at no one. His daughter's remark
was beside the point, as she so often was, and Nicholas was testing Retha. Jacob almost rushed to her defense, coat and stockings in hand.

“I let you look in on him, Nicholas,” Retha said, perfectly calm. “But he was sleeping.”

Retha held sway. With relief, Jacob shrugged on his waistcoat, then looked down at his battered feet. He had no plasters to protect the wounds. Very carefully, he eased one stocking on and winced at the sharp pain. At least his everyday shoes were better broken in than his riding boots. On the other side of the door, the children clamored.

“He must really be hurt.” Identifying worry in his younger son's words, Jacob felt a twinge of remorse. He was not hurt, not compared to how he was hurting his son by this allegiance to duty that took him from home and placed him in constant danger.

“No, Matthias, he wasn't so much injured as exhausted,” Retha assured him. “He said he hardly slept.”

“Bah!” said Nicholas. “I'll bet he had a terrible fight.”

Jacob bit down on the pain as he stuffed his feet into his shoes. What would it take to sway Nicholas from his determined, contrary fascination with war? He had been embattled since his cradle days, taking on his mother, his father, even his brother from the day he was born. Yet somehow after Christina's death, the boy's interest had intensified. But why? Jacob understood this son's passion no better than his other son's affliction.

No matter what Jacob said, Nicholas's enthusiasm for gore never flagged. Indeed, the sight of lads
little older than himself trooping through town in British red regalia or Continental blue whetted his appetite for battle. Jacob knew he wouldn't be admitted to the ranks of his son's heroes without bashing in the brains of some unfortunate Redcoat.

“There wasn't any fighting.” Retha laughed, denying his older son's fondest hopes. “He blistered his feet from walking all night long to get back home.”

“Blisters?” Nicholas sounded crushed. Jacob's worry lifted. With dispatch, his clever wife squelched his son's fantasies of heroism.

“Yes, blisters. Now you boys wash up for supper.”

“What about Hanna—” Nicholas started to complain.

“Anna Johanna is clean,” Retha interrupted briskly.

Clean? Anna Johanna was never clean. The words propelled Jacob through the door to face his family. Matthias eyed him keenly while Nicholas glared at Retha, but Anna Johanna's face pinked with pleasure at the sight of her father.

“Papa!” she squealed, charging him. “You woked up!”

Suppressing a fierce urge to crush her to his chest, he knelt to greet her. “I surely did, pumpkin, just for you.”

He winked at his sons to remind them he had come home for them, too. Nicholas snorted, and Matthias shrugged rudely.

He started to correct them, but Retha cleared her throat. Both boys lowered their heads as if she had scolded them. Jacob observed, confounded, amazed.

“You were gone way too long, Papa.”

He turned to his insistent daughter. Her round face scrunched up severely.

Her
clean
round face. He let the surprise seep in. In the past, he had managed to make a swipe or two at that face himself. But for Retha to succeed where he had so often failed?

“I know, pumpkin,” he said, trying for normalcy.

“You were gone for days and days.”

“Only four.”

Her eyebrows contracted into a practiced scowl. “Even Nich'las thought it was too long, and he wanted you to have a 'venture.”

Jacob's heart swelled with pride. His daughter had never made such a complicated speech, and he didn't care a fig if she made it while scolding him.

“'Twas no adventure,” he said solemnly. “And I am very glad to be home with you.”

Anna Johanna's scowl widened into a grin. “Me too,” she said, and grabbed one of his fingers.

Jacob's throat caught, and his gaze fell. A plump white hand circled one of his large, sun-bronzed fingers. A clean hand. He felt as dislocated as if he had been gone a year.

“Come
on
.” She tugged him toward the dining table in the parlor.

Rising carefully so as not to dislodge her grip, Jacob shot Retha a questioning look. She stood in the doorway to the kitchen, smiling benignly.

What happened? he mouthed at her from his high post above his daughter.

Retha shrugged, avoiding his question. “Supper's ready,” she sang out, and crossed the floor to the table carrying a platter piled with bacon and a host of other food.

He didn't have time to identify any of it before
the boys crowded him with questions. He put them off, promising to tell all after grace. Anna Johanna clung to his finger until the boys were noisily seated and silenced and they had finished grace. At last she released him, giving in to the temptations of a full meal at suppertime.

Retha dished food onto his plate, then spoke to him directly. “I thought you would be hungry.”

Surveying ham, dumplings, lima beans, and the usual evening mush piled on his plate, he smiled. “Ravenous,” he said, unable to overlook a mild lift in his other center of hunger as he gazed into her amber eyes.

She must have caught his meaning, for she blushed. The sight of her rosy cheeks filled him with unexpected pleasure. And expected anticipation. This too was what he had come home to. But his fantasy was brief.

“What did it look like, Father?” Nicholas asked eagerly. “Was it a big encampment?”

For a moment, Jacob shut his eyes. He saw tents stretched out before him, white flags of tranquillity that belied the wretchedness of battle. He saw youthful faces reviling him, one reckless with bravado, another haunted, another drawn with fear.

Jacob studied Nicholas, a premonition of disaster banding his chest with dread. His son's summer blue eyes burned with envy for a chance at the heroic deeds that fueled his imagination. Choosing words to squelch his fervor, Jacob said flatly, “An encampment is a miserable place, rain or shine.”

“Oh, Father. You always say something like that. What was it like?”

“Choked with dust. Vile with stench. The lanes between the tents were so rutted you could hardly walk.”

“Tents? How many tents?” Undaunted by the thought of military hardships, Nicholas wolfed a forkful of beans. He didn't eat beans, Jacob recalled.

“Didn't take the time to count, son.”

“What about the men? Were there Lighthorse? Was it just infantry? How many?”

“Mostly infantry. Hot, stinking, hungry infantry, nervous as jackrabbits about the British coming up from Camden.”

Nicholas smashed a fist into the tabletop. “We'll lick them this time, not like Camden.”

Matthias rolled his eyes.
Danke Gott
, Jacob thought, he was not on his brother's path. One warrior offspring was tribulation enough. Jacob cast about for words that might douse Nicholas's fire. For wisdom. Wisdom, if he could yet lay claim to any, had come slowly.

“There's no ‘we' to it, son,” Jacob said quietly. “They're the army. We're Moravians. Our allegiance is to this land, yes, and to the Continental government, but more to our community. Colonel Armstrong understands this. He respects our decision not to fight.”

Even if Sim Scaife did not, Jacob amended to himself. But he refrained from further explanation. He remembered only too well that his response to parental logic at Nicholas's age had been rank rebellion. And he was loath to mar his homecoming with a pitched battle.

“But did you see any Lighthorse?”

Jacob repressed an oath of dissatisfaction. Wisdom was lost on Nicholas. “One division passed me on the way home,” he said, answering again as if the matter were of no importance.

“British?”

Retha intervened. “'Twas probably those Continentals that rode through yesterday. Nothing to be excited about. Nothing to worry about either.”

“Who's worried?” Nicholas said with adolescent bravado.

Retha raised an eyebrow, and Nicholas subsided.

Jacob looked at his wife in mild surprise, wondering what he had missed while he was away. Had Retha spoken to Nicholas about his attitude toward war? Jacob had had no success in dampening his son's interest. He had explained the community's neutrality. To that, he had regularly added discouraging tales of the misery and injustice of war. Nothing had worked. But Nicholas seemed to respond to Retha.

For the present, Jacob accepted his son's silence and addressed the food piled high on his plate. Good food. Hearty food. Retha could also cook.

“But Papa—” Matthias pushed back his nearly full trencher and steepled his fingers. “We thought you were wounded.”

“Not wounded, son.” Jacob speared a fat dumpling. Nicholas's rebellion quelled, he really was hungry.

“Then why did you sleep the whole day?” he asked in a small worried voice.

“Because I was bone tired.”

“Not wounded?”

“Wounded? No!” Jacob bit into the salty, tender fruit of Retha's labors, half attending to his son's innocuous question.

Eyes glimmering, Matthias stammered. “But you—you always say we're not supposed to lie.”

Jacob set his utensils on his plate. From his younger, milder son, such a statement was tantamount to revolt. “That's right, son.”

“But I saw your bloody socks,” Matthias accused.

“My socks…” Jacob repeated.

“When she—” He sounded out the word awkwardly, as if unsure what to call his stepmother to his father's face. “When she let us look in on you.”

“Blisters,” Jacob answered, taking care to be very serious. “You saw blisters.”

Matthias jutted his chin out. “They bled.”

“That's not the same thing as being wounded, son. I wasn't attacked and I didn't fight.”

“You were hurt.”

“But safe, son. I'm home safe, and you're safe, too,” he said, reaching out to reassure his most serious child with a hand around his shoulder.

He could hardly bear to keep it there. His once vibrant, healthy son had wasted away to skin and bone. Rail thin.

A pox on Dr. Bonn's easy assurances. Jacob promised to plant himself on the good doctor's doorstep in the morning.

Jacob glanced up at Retha. Concern was printed across her features like a map. She knew Matthias was starving, and cared. Squeezing his son's shoulder, he gave her a look of gratitude.

“And so,” he said, aiming for lighter conversation
than wounds and war, “what did everyone do while I was gone?”

A smile broke through her concern. “We picked lima beans. And then we hoed the garden. And the boys went to school every day, and we went to vespers once, and to
Singstunde
every night.”

She stopped and smiled mysteriously.

What else? he wanted to ask, but the children chimed in about games and blackberries and school. Retha brought out a fruit pie, served up thick runny wedges, and everyone feasted, save Matthias.

In the parlor for the short wait until
Singstunde
, Jacob watched the boys play at spillikins while Anna Johanna dressed and redressed her little doll with its porcelain face, wishing he could spare each child the pains and trials of growing up. He sighed contentedly, cherishing this quiet moment. By the dwindling light, Retha worked a small, shapeless piece of material. He was too tired to notice what.