Wild Indigo (6 page)

At the market, Retha chatted as Alice listened, wrapping two marrow bones in pillowslips and stuffing them between dirty sheets. It took a while to explain why the Single Sisters had grounded her to
Gemein Haus
. She was about to tell her friend about Jacob Blum's amazing proposal when the buzz of the market died out.

“Redcoats!” a voice cried out.

Retha heard horses pounding up the road.

“Continentals!” another shouted.

A churning cloud of dust brought neither. Five local militia, wearing a hodgepodge of buckskin and scavenged uniforms, slowed their horses to a trot on the dusty street. Retha tensed. Unruly, half-regulated Liberty Men, who sought out Tories, Redcoats, and Cherokees with unremitting fervor in so-called support of the efforts of the Continental Army.

Alice ducked under the wagon.

“I thought they left her alone these days,” Retha muttered to Gottlieb, who stood on alert.

“Now they think she's a spy,” he grated softly.

“A spy? For whom?”

He wagged his great head in disgust but did not answer.

Slowly Retha comprehended. After Colonials had slaughtered them, the Cherokee were allied with the British. “Alice a spy for the Redcoats? But you're Moravian. You're neutral. We all are.”

“No longer, Sister Retha.” She heard regret in his voice for a faith he still honored. “I went against the lot, marrying outside our faith. And a Cherokee woman to boot. Perhaps you were too young to note the scandal.”

Retha patted his hand sympathetically and smiled. “Oh, no. Your romantic sacrifice was all the talk among the Single Sisters.”

The huge man actually blushed.

“But what can we do for Alice now?”

“Let her hide. 'Tis best if they don't see her. Until I see who it is.” His big hands clenched and his gentle eyes blazed as the small band drew up in front of the market.

Retha had a shock herself.

Jacob Blum rode into the Square with the small band of Liberty Men. Sliding off his mount, the troop's red-haired captain barked orders at his men. Jacob swung off his overworked tavern hack and confronted the captain. He answered angrily, chopping the air with the blade of his hand. With a final gesture, the captain stalked over to the spotted cow.

Jacob marched after him, plunging into the argument as the captain haggled with the poor settler and his wife. Retha steadied herself on her friend's strong arm, listening to the worn woman defend her price.

Jacob resolutely took up the woman's cause.

Retha gawked. Neutral, she reminded herself without being reassured. Jacob was supposed to be neutral.

But he looked militant. She studied the object of
his anger. She couldn't see the captain's face, but red hair bristled under the battered brim of his tricorn. A chill crept over her. She hated redheaded men.

 

Jacob jerked off his hat and swatted road dust from his breeches. Sim Scaife had wrecked his day. As usual. The thick-skulled, rabble-rousing Liberty Man had hounded Jacob for years, convinced that any Moravian who spoke English was a British spy. As if Jacob didn't have enough problems balancing the Moravians' precarious relations with both the British and the Continentals.

“Don't dicker with the woman, Baker,” Scaife was shouting to his sergeant who'd gone to purchase the spotted cow.

Hearing the woman's feeble protest, Jacob plowed toward the fray. And checked himself. A flag of red-gold hair captured his attention. Amongst the shoppers in the crowded Square stood his intended bride—with Gottlieb Vogler. It only needed this. He had been but a day away, and she was compromised again. But he could not well put her in a box.

“We can take the blamed cow outright,” Scaife threatened.

Alerted, Jacob bit down on frustration. At this moment he couldn't even notice Retha. Not when Scaife's malice demanded his attention.

With a yellow grin, Scaife dug into a shoulder pouch, pulled out a handful of Continental bills, and shoved them in the husband's face. “But we got money.”

The farmer snorted. “That paper ain't worth a
hoot. I come here for barter.”

Jacob wedged in between captain and sergeant. The farmer was right. Paper was worthless, a hundred bills on any given day worth what one had been the day before.

“The town will trade you in salt, Finney,” he said in his formal English. Most of his fellow Moravians would not understand a word he said.

The woman furtively shook her head at her husband. “We need wheat.”

“We have only salt,” Jacob went on, “unless you can take something from the store.” He knew the woman needed staples. Everyone did. The summer was already hot and dry. The wheat crop had suffered, and corn was looking bad.

The woman shook her head.

Scaife's lips thinned into a mocking grin. “You've naught to bargain with, woman. But we'll be glad to take it off yer hands for free.”

Jacob turned on him, aware of the crowd clearing a circle around them. “You can have what you came for, free food and rooms at the Tavern. Let the woman trade her cow.” Then he spoke to the woman. “But we cannot trade wheat, Mrs. Finney.”

“We ain't got any—” she began.

“We have no wheat either, not to sell or trade,” he explained. “The army requisitioned it. 'Tis theirs as soon as they round up wagons to transport it.”

“So you say,” Scaife growled back in Jacob's face.

“I showed you the papers,” Jacob answered edgily. Scaife's men tried to break through the circle of townsmen and settlers, but Scaife waved them back.

Jacob prepared for the worst. The hotheaded
captain was unpredictable. This morning, holding a pistol to his head, Scaife had read Jacob's requisitions from the Continental Army for grain, but had still taken him for a spy. Then he ordered Jacob to translate his German documents, minutes of church business for the Bethabara settlement, dull with convincing detail. Scaife chose not to believe him.

“I ain't a fool, Blum.” The man's face flushed to match his carroty hair. “Your tavernkeeper let that English lieutenant stay five days, and the day he left heading east, we catch you going south with a packet of sealed documents.”

“I translated them for you.”

“They were in German.”

“All church business is in German.”

“They could have said aught. I may not know German, but some Englishman would.” He spit on the ground. “Everybody knows you're a bunch of Tories.”

Jacob hid his annoyance behind a shrug. Whigs thought Moravians were Tories, and Tories thought they were Whigs. They were neither. When the British ruled, Moravians paid them their due. Now that the Colonies had independence, Moravians paid taxes to the government in power. Threefold taxes, so they wouldn't have to bear arms for the state. Some were drafted anyway.

Some even fought. Jacob was sorely tempted to. Partly because he knew he would do a better job than Sim Scaife and his ilk, and the brutal war would end sooner. But more because of how he had come to love the promised freedom of this land.

His blood raged to fight for it. Nicholas was not
unlike him in that. Guilt trickled through him. What if his own secret relish for battle had somehow found expression in his older son's intemperate nature. He dared not by word or deed set an example that would feed his son's belligerent leanings.

Besides, Jacob reminded himself, he did not have the choice of bearing arms. Every ounce of duty, faith, and honor in his soul bound him to stand by his community. The best that he could do was keep men like Scaife from destroying it.

And Scaife would try. Jacob wished the man had stuck with his hardscrabble life of hunting and trapping on that precious property he had finagled out of some poor settler. The wilderness life took the edge off his spite. War honed it.

“I will trade for Finney's cow, Scaife.”

“I'm here to say you won't,” Scaife said, bracing his legs to fight, three of his men outside the circle.

Jacob assessed him. He outweighed the Liberty Man by a good three stones, but Scaife's meanness could make up the difference. Scaife hoisted his musket off his shoulder and feigned a move to hand it to his sergeant. Instead, he tossed it in the air, grabbed it by the bore, and swung it low like a scythe.

Jacob saw the blow coming and stepped over the weapon. With a growl, he tackled the man, toppling him over into the dust. Scaife's bony hands scrabbled up, his dirty broken fingernails digging into Jacob's throat. Jacob wrestled the man's hands to the ground and pinned them over Scaife's head.

“'Twould not be a fair fight, Captain.” He shifted, letting the thin man beneath him feel his weight. Around them, the circle tightened, a wall of
Moravian men cutting off Scaife's men from rescue or reprisal.

Scaife's narrow gaze darted up to the pressing crowd, as if noticing it for the first time. Jacob knew what he would see alongside his townsmen. A few Whig farmers and trappers who depended on the town for trade. A couple of suspected Loyalists, driven by need, who had taken a chance on coming to market. Whig or Tory, they had all dodged fire from every side. No one would go out of his way for Sim Scaife.

“Yeah. You got reinforcements.” His accusation was loud enough to provoke the crowd. No doubt, he hoped to stir them up.

“I fight my own fights. Save yours for the British.”

“You gave them rooms.”

“They took the rooms. Your army gets all our wheat.”

“You gave them horses.”

“They took our horses. They took everyone's.” Jacob lowered his voice, striving to come up with something to convince Scaife that Salem was truly neutral. “They didn't find the best ones.”

Scaife barked a nasty laugh. “Well, I'll be,” he said, as if he would never have thought the neutral Moravians had wits enough to hide a horse. He squirmed under Jacob's weight. “I give.”

“Give what?” Jacob blinked, uncomprehending.

“Give up!” Scaife snarled impatiently.

“What is ‘give up'?”

“Yield, man. I yield, Blum, I'll let you be. Let me up.”

Shaking his head, Jacob released the man's hands and raised himself off his body. The circle of townsmen melted, but Jacob watched cautiously. Scaife shrugged inside his sweat-stained buckskins, grabbed his musket from the sergeant, then looked up.

“If I catch you out spying…” Scaife bared his yellow teeth in a half-hearted attempt to placate the man who had defeated him.

“We are not enemies,” Jacob said to him quietly. “Go. Brother Meyer will serve your supper.”

Scaife collected his men, who followed him down the street with their ragged horses. Breathing a sigh that mingled anger and relief, Jacob surveyed the crowd milling in the Square. A disgusted hunter packed up pelts and deerskins to leave. A farmer spread out meats and vegetables hastily stowed from harm. In this lean summer, trading his stores meant he was desperate. Mrs. Finney took her baby out from under her wagon's seat.

All was well, Jacob thought. He had forestalled another ugly incident. Relieved, he looked around for Retha.

She was standing in the circle of Gottlieb Vogler's arms.

What else would the woman dare to do? he wondered angrily. His gut filled with an unfamiliar, powerful emotion.

She was his. His. He clenched his jaw. He could not be jealous. Not of Gottlieb Vogler, of all men. Still, she looked far too secure in Vogler's arms, too trusting of him.

She should have come to Jacob. Marching up to them, he could see her pale face damp with tears.

“Are you hurt?” he rasped, not in enough control to ask what he needed most to know.

Are you safe? Are you mine?

Breaking away from Gottlieb awkwardly, she lifted her eyes to Jacob's. Then her gaze traveled nervously down his soiled shirtfront, down his dusty breeches. Impatient, unsettled, he endured her inspection, then gently touched a hand under her chin.

“Who hurt you?”

She averted her eyes. “No one. 'Twas naught.”

“D
o you understand my question?” Retha felt Jacob Blum's massive presence, his breathing still ragged from his fight. “Are you hurt?”

Yes. No. She shook her head. She wasn't hurt. She wanted him to go away. If he hadn't come after her looking like a thundercloud, she might have stilled her trembling. She might have ignored the bile that had risen in her throat while he grappled with the redheaded captain.

Whoever that man was. He was vile, she knew it without knowing how she knew. When he had raised his hand, gesturing rudely in the air, then swung his musket at Brother Blum, she had flown into Vogler's arms, her wits as scrambled as if the captain had swung at her.

Now Jacob took her elbow protectively, as he had that day with the soldiers, and drew her to the edge of the crowd onto a crackling span of drought-dried grass.

“Can you answer me? Are you hurt?” Jacob repeated huskily. Though he sounded riled, to her his soft German had the silkiness of song.

“No, not hurt.” She shook her head, eyes closed
against a confusing sweep of tenderness. The man who wanted to marry her was safe, he was holding her elbow tight. She had decided to accept his proposal the minute she had seen him ride into town, tall and stalwart and in charge. Yet as the argument escalated, fear overwhelmed her until he took his quarry down. It was as if he had been fighting for her, as if she had thrown her heart into the fight with him. She would have died if he'd been hurt.

“Look at me, Sister Retha.” His voice sounded gentle, but she opened her eyes to a darkly troubled gaze. “Something troubles you.”

“I…” What could she say? That the sight of the redheaded man had made her skin crawl? That the prospect of Jacob being hurt had torn at her heart? “Fighting upsets me.”

“Humph,” he grunted. He didn't sound convinced. “Fighting upsets a lot of people, but no one else cried.”

She felt her cheek and found it wet. “'Tis only perspiration, Brother Blum. From the heat.”

He leaned in to inspect her face, possessively, as if he had a right. He smelled of dirt and horse and manly endeavor, and she felt her face flush. “Heat doesn't damp your lashes,” he said firmly, trailing a finger just beneath her eye for proof. Her breath caught at his tender touch. “I know a dirty, tearstained face when I see one. I have a great deal of experience.”

“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.