Wild Indigo (11 page)

“…have to insist that the Redcoats bury their own,” Jacob was saying with finality.

“All the more if the soldier were a Hessian.” Brother Meyer sighed heavily. “The man would have to be German.”

Jacob shrugged. “They will link us to him nonetheless. Germans caring for a wounded German mercenary cannot but look suspicious—”

“Brother Blum!” plump Eva Ernst cried out, flapping her way down the street. “I found you not a moment too soon. Hurry, hurry!”

Jacob had already broken into a run. “Anna Johanna! What's wrong with her?” Retha heard him shout as he sped past her friend.

“'Tis not her! 'Tis the boys!” Eva yelled, puffing as she bent over, hands on her knees, to catch her breath. “Fighting—the boys are having a terrible fight.”

“Where's Brother Ernst?” Retha cried out.

“At the store—I go to fetch him. You—help Jacob—”

Waiting not a second longer, Retha hiked up her skirts and dashed after Jacob. She would not have thought so large a man could run so fast. Far ahead of her, he leaped the steps and disappeared through the open door of the Ernsts' tiny cabin.

She sped up, dismissing a thought about the unseemliness of running through town, past the Square, the Brothers House, the public cistern, and Dr. Bonn's apothecary. Gasping, she arrived, and hung on the doorjamb while she caught her breath.

A ruckus of grunts and clatter assailed her. She peered inside. Nicholas, red with anger, pounded his
flailing brother, pinning him to the floor with superior weight and skill.

“Enough of that!” Jacob lifted his large older son as if he were no more than a sapling, gave the thin boy a hand up, and reprimanded both of them. Retha strained to make out Jacob's harsh whisper but could not.

What was she to do? The boys had made a mess, scattering bright new pewter utensils and wedding-gift redware on the table and onto the floor. At least one platter had been smashed.

She felt useless, extra. Then she heard smothered sobbing. Searching the room, she spied Anna Johanna under the table, clinging to one of its legs, weeping.

Had the boys hurt her? A need to protect this fragile child, fiercer than anything she had felt for her wolf, flooded Retha. Scrunching under the table, she crawled over to sit cross-legged beside Anna Johanna. She reached for the girl but checked her hand. Jacob had given fair warning. Touch could set his daughter off like a torch to a dried-out haystack.

“Anna Johanna,” Retha whispered, feeling the awkwardness of offering comfort without touch. “'Tis all right. You will be all right.”

Anna Johanna sobbed away. There were no signs of injury, but her knobby spine heaved beneath the thin fabric of her cherished old dress.

“I'm here, sweet potato. Are you hurt?”

“Not hurt,” she cried.

She sounded hurt. Retha pressed her. “Do you want to tell me what's the matter?”

“No-oo,” she wailed.

“Very well, then…” Retha paused, casting about for the right words. She had reached an impasse with her new stepdaughter at their first crisis, and felt perfectly useless. “I shall just keep you company.” She folded her hands in her lap, and waited.

Gradually the tide of sobs ebbed. “Anna Slow-hanna…is not my…name,” she sputtered.

“Of course it's not. No one says it is.”

“M-Matthias s-says so. 'Cause I'm slow.”

“You're not slow. They're just bigger and faster. You're Anna Johanna. Everyone knows that.”

“M-Matthias doesn't. He calls me Anna Slow.” She ran the offending words together in a rhyming, nasal voice.

Retha recognized her imitation of Matthias's voice and understood the impact his teasing would have. Her seven years with the Single Sisters had taught her how effective youthful tormentors could be. How hard to be youngest and slowest and always last. The memory of taunts that used to come her way still raised her hackles. That boys might be as cruel as girls had never occurred to her.

She glanced at her husband and his sons. He was dressing them down in words so soft they almost frightened her.

“Matthias isn't going to say that anymore, Anna Johanna.” Carefully, Retha used the child's full and proper name. It worked.

Still crouched under the table, the girl turned on her hands and knees, and looked at Retha with blue eyes trusting as a pup's. “Not ever?”

“I don't think so.”

Anna Johanna gave a little smile. It faded quickly. “How 'bout Nich'las?”

“He said that, too?” Retha tried to hide her sudden annoyance, but it was hard to keep it down. She might be new to the family, but in her opinion both boys should be looking out for their younger sister, not driving her to tears. Especially not the elder, and especially not in company.

“No,” Anna Johanna said, but her chin trembled.

“Did he say something?”

Retha couldn't catch her breathy mumble and leaned forward.

“He said what?”

Anna Johanna hung her head. “Told me I'm a baby.”

“Sweet potato, you're the youngest. That doesn't make you a baby.”

She looked up hopefully, tears spangling pale lashes.

“In fact, I would say you're a big girl now,” Retha said. When she got her hands on those boys, she wouldn't let them off with a soft-talking.

Suddenly, of her own free will, Anna Johanna surrendered herself to Retha's arms. Retha, her heart swelling with tenderness, folded her new stepdaughter to her breast and rocked her for comfort.

 

Wild as they were, Jacob had never had occasion to be ashamed of his boys until now. In less than five minutes, he had wrung confessions from them.

After Sister Ernst had sent her husband down to Traugott Bagge's store, Matthias had teased Anna
Johanna, calling her by her baby name. Only one time, he protested. It made her cry.

Nicholas claimed he took up for his sister. He corrected Matthias by telling him he would be the one to help tend the new babies, just as he, Nicholas, had once helped with smelly Anna Slow.

“You called her that?” Jacob simmered.

Nicholas had fueled the flames in both directions. He was expert at riling his brother and his sister. He always whetted his militant spirit at their expense. Not for the first time, Jacob ruefully acknowledged his older son's fire without perfectly understanding it. Nicholas had been born for soldiering, striking out at any opposition from his cradle days. Of late he followed the ceaseless tide of troops from both armies, paying little regard to which side was in the right and much attention to the fit of uniforms to young men and bayonets to rifles.

Or had his interest in things military coincided with his mother's death? It was yet another puzzle Jacob had not had the time to piece together. Until he did, Nicholas would be Moravian under his father's roof, and Jacob would take the same careful steps to snuff out his son's warlike nature that he had long taken to control his own.

He consigned both boys to a month of mucking out Brother Meyer's stables with no remuneration.

“For free?” Nicholas protested.

Jacob silenced him with a look.

Matthias tugged at his coatsleeve. “What about the new babies, Papa?”

“Babies?” Jacob puzzled.

“Nicholas says there's going to be new babies.”

Nicholas, still resentful, cut Retha a hostile look. “New wives mean new babies, stup—”

“One more word, son,” Jacob warned. “I can find hotter, smellier work for you.”

In silent protest, Nicholas pursed his mouth. His split lip made him wince. Jacob buried a smile. Pious Matthias, although overpowered, had landed one solid hit. A further thought consoled Jacob: This time, he need not lecture his firebrand son on the theoretical consequences of fighting.

He ushered the boys to the table, planning to seat them on opposite sides, opposite ends, as he would do at home. Their brotherly brawls had intensified since they had lost their mother and he had been away from home so often. But this brawl he attributed to the marriage, and to the change it was bringing to their lives. As if they—or Anna Johanna—needed more change.

Although his daughter was taking this rather well.

Where had she gone, anyway? He looked around, unable at first to make out where she was. Then, there, he saw her, on the other side of the table. Underneath it, on the floor, and not alone. For a moment, he could not believe his eyes.

Then he could. His heart thudded in his chest. Retha, sitting on her heels, her cap askew, held his daughter in her arms.

And she was rocking her.

Alarm and anger fighting for command of his senses, Jacob strode across the room. He would not let Retha drag his daughter into her…what if it were madness?

“That's intolerable.”

To his surprise, Retha gave him a look of pain. Or was it innocence? He didn't know her well enough to read her face. He didn't think her in a trance, as she had seemed to be on their wedding night. Yet whatever strangeness she was perpetrating on his daughter, it comforted Anna Johanna. His daughter was quiet.

Perhaps he had overreacted, and hurt Retha to boot. The thought that he had done so cut through his anger to a feeling of consternation that he didn't want to examine.

He searched Retha's face for a clue. All he could see in her amber eyes was warm concern for his daughter.

Nevertheless, the image of her haunting behavior on their wedding night was burned into his brain. When she had rocked then, she had not been herself. And now she was rocking again. With his daughter. To him it seemed purposeful, even mad. He could not trust her with his child. Not yet.

“Let her go, Retha,” he heard himself say tautly.

Clutching her burden, she lurched to her feet.

“Here.” She offered him his daughter.

He knew not to accept. “Put her down.”

Retha hesitated. “She was crying over what the boys—”

“I know what the boys said. Put her down.”

She did, whispering first in Anna Johanna's ear. Anna Johanna nodded solemnly, plopped her feet on the floor, and happily took her usual handhold where his breeches knotted at the knee.

“What in God's name did you say to her?” he
said, too sharply. He meant to be calmer, for everyone's sake.

At his tone, Retha looked as if he had betrayed her.

He had lost all control—of his children, his temper, of Retha and her pain. But he didn't think she had been in a trance. This morning, unlike their wedding night, he believed she knew what she was doing when she rocked his daughter.

He would not allow her to do that. “Tell me.”

She lifted her chin a trace and straightened her cap. “I told her she's such a big girl she doesn't need me.”

Retha's quiet dignity struck him like a splash of cold water in his face.

Raking his fingers across the back of his neck, Jacob said a quick prayer for wisdom to deal with his unfathomable wife.

He picked up a shard of redware and turned it in his hand. The boys had gone well beyond making a shambles of the Ernsts' small home. He would have to apologize, make reparations. He could only hope that Brother Samuel had been spared this awkward family altercation.

Sister Eva poked her head inside the door, Samuel close behind. Their timing—and the deliberate smile on Eva's plump face—said they had been waiting just outside.

“We are back from the store with utensils enough to cook for an army. I mean, a crowd,” Eva chattered self-consciously. “We had only enough for ourselves.”

Samuel stepped past his wife and warmly took
Jacob's hands in his. “Our heartiest congratulations, Brother Jacob.”

“We wanted you to have a moment alone,” Eva added. “For the introductions.”

Jacob cleared his throat. His kind friends were prepared to overlook his children's bad behavior. He could not. But so far, negotiating trades and sales with Redcoats and Continentals was proving to be a simpler task than keeping his family in line. He apologized for the fight, paid for the damage, and then gestured to his sons to face their hosts.

“You have words for Brother and Sister Ernst.”

Nicholas almost rolled his eyes, but Matthias modestly clasped his hands in front of himself. “I was wrong to fight in your house,” he said promptly.

“I'm sorry,” Nicholas jerked out, a moment after his brother and with a good bit less sincerity. Jacob let the apology lie. A good soldier, Nicholas had said what he ought whether his heart was in it or not.

And he would be wearing that split lip for a week.

Jacob gathered the children to him. “You have met Sister Retha, but now you can greet her as your mother.”

Retha felt all eyes turn on her and almost bolted. Not since the night that Jacob had captured her in the Square had she felt so much the focus of attention, or so much out of place. Without a word to her just now, he had settled the boys' fight. But when he found her comforting Anna Johanna, he turned on her for no reason she could see. Mercifully, he made short work of this formal presentation.

Nicholas, who stretched up toward his father's
height, intimidated her with a slightly challenging formal bow. Matthias, paler and thinner than she had noticed before, shifted his feet and blushed. Her stepsons, her new responsibilities. Her new problems. One could not admit that he needed a mother, and one could not hide it. But little Anna Johanna grinned.

Jacob seated them randomly, Retha thought at first. Then she discerned a pattern. Child, father, child, stepmother, child.

She could not like his arrangement. He had placed the boys as far apart as could be and seated his daughter to separate the two of them, husband and wife. While her friend Eva, piling plates with waffles and hefty slabs of bacon, sat snug up to her own new husband.

As I should be to mine, Retha thought. Instead, Anna Johanna and Matthias flanked her. With pretend cheer to mask her chagrin at being shunted aside, she buttered her stepdaughter's waffles. When she passed Matthias honey, he refused. Apart from his finicky eating, Retha reflected, two men and two hungry children made the midmorning meal an entirely different affair from the Single Sisters' simple breaking fast at
Gemein Haus
. Heaps of food were decimated.