Wild Indigo (4 page)

“How d'you know that?” Anna's searching whisper hurt his heart.

“My mama died, too. I miss her.”

“Oh.” In the long silence that followed, Jacob could hear men's and women's voices in the crowd around them, and a wood thrush from far away. He could almost hear his daughter thinking.

“But you're a big girl.”

“I was little then. Just about your size.”

Anna Johanna began to wring her skirt, always a bad sign. Jacob readied himself to run her home, kicking and screaming, if he had to, before she got to the worst.

But Retha continued. “I was sad for a very long time.”

“Me too,” Anna Johanna said softly.

Jacob held his breath, hardly daring to move. What wild magic was Retha using on his little girl? Then he saw Retha reach for Anna Johanna's hand. Stop, he thought. She couldn't know the danger. He had a powerful urge to scoop his daughter up and run, to protect them both, protect them all from another fit.

Too late. Retha squeezed the small hand, and he waited for the scream. It never came.

“Now,” Retha said, releasing Anna Johanna's hand and shaking out her skirt as she stood up, “I need to speak to your father.”

“All right,” Anna Johanna said solemnly, grabbing at his knees.

Retha's eyes came to his chin. “She's a sweet girl.”

He didn't know whether to nod agreement or shake his head. What was this encounter about? Retha couldn't know he planned to ask for her in the lot. But what was he supposed to say? He knew he couldn't put together two words in a row to thank her for the miracle she had wrought.

She tilted her head at him. By tonight's abundant torchlight, she was even more temptingly
pretty than his lone flare had revealed last night. Her face was wide and open, her gaze direct, every last wisp of her hair properly tucked away. A knot of desire tightened his groin.

“Can you keep a secret?” she asked.

He wondered which one. The soldiers, her dancing, her shift—or the way he was looking at her lush lips?

“Of course,” he said, remembering his position. People confided in Elders about all sorts of things. Single Sisters, however, did not confide in any man, Single, Married, or Widowed. Sister Krause was Retha's proper channel.

“I need your help.”

She must really be in trouble.

“I do regret last night,” he offered promptly. “My untimely—the Sisters must have thought that I…that we…”

How awkward, he thought, kneading the back of his neck.

But Retha laughed. “They did! Of course they did. But you and I know better. I hope you're not in trouble over me.”

“Not at all.”

“I am. But not because of you. Because they found me outside in the first place.”

She paused, and her bright demeanor dimmed.

At last a sign of doubt. “Which was why?” he prodded.

“I was feeding my wolf,” she said in a rush.

“Ah. Your wolf,” he echoed, taken aback by her unexpected statement and struck by a flash of insight. Mary Margaretha must suffer from an excess
of fancy. He had heard of that in women. Perhaps that was why Sister Krause hadn't named her as a marriage prospect. After all, half a childhood spent with Indians had to have affected her in some strange ways.

“So you need help,” he prompted.

“No, not me, my wolf,” she whispered.

Jacob knotted his brow, suddenly understanding last night's misadventure. “You were in the meadow feeding an animal?”

She nodded gravely. “Twice a day since I found her by the stream. She's hurt. She's improving, but she can't hunt. So I need your help. I can't get away in the day for a while.” Her hand made an impatient gesture. “Because of my new work in the laundry and new—” she paused “—restrictions.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” Jacob said. He was not sorry about the injured animal but about her punishment. He stepped back to reflect on her revelations.

Her moonlight dance had been no aberration. Knowing she shouldn't, she had gone out after dark. From the start, she had been a wild child, but such a deviation from proper conduct was serious. Unfortunately, he had already proposed to the Elders that he take her to wife. Women could change their minds, but men didn't. For him to step down would spoil her reputation. Now Sister Krause's silence made more sense.

His own impulse made less.

“Will you feed her for a few days? She's out past the Red Tannery, beyond the creek. She hides in a hollow log. But she needs meat, day and night.”

“You want me to feed a wolf—day and night?”

“Oh, no.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “I can still slip out at night. I'll just go nearer to morning.”

Dismayed, Jacob searched her face. It was guileless. Her plea was not. She disregarded the community's standards as readily as she dismissed the danger of being out alone. He cleared his throat. “I cannot allow that,” he said, as Elder, as example to his children, as her groom to be.

Her eyes blazed briefly. “You're the only one I can ask.”

“Sister Retha,” he said patiently, feeling the weight of his position. “I am an Elder. I cannot let you do this. 'Tis neither safe nor right.”

“It cannot be wrong.” She lifted her chin, as once before, he noted, irresistibly. But this was a sensitive negotiation. He had to answer with reason and deliberation.

“Perhaps it is,” he said. “Back home, in Germany, we controlled the wolves. We trapped—”

“The Cherokee taught me to honor the wolf,” she interrupted eagerly. “Not to help her would have been a sin.”

A sin, he thought. Her conviction touched him. She would not want to hear the whole truth. In Germany they had slaughtered all the wolves long before his time. He dragged his hand across his face, buying time to shape a responsible answer.

He should turn her down. He was a builder, a planner, an Elder, not
this
. Conspirator. Wolf tamer.

Still, the beast had not hurt her. Wolves, though rumored to be about, had never attacked this community or raided its stores. He let his eyes range over her determined, pretty face.

“I need your help.”

Her sweet plea cascaded over him. He rubbed his neck and reconsidered. It mattered to her enough to risk her reputation. “Very well, then. I will care for it.”

“In the day?” she asked cautiously.

“Day and night.” He gave her a stern look. “You're not to go out. What does it need?”

“Food, scraps, meat. But don't try to touch her. Not until she's eaten. She's very shy.” Her gaze strayed toward his daughter. “Like someone else we know.” Retha whirled to go, then whipped back. Clasping his forearm with surprisingly strong fingers, she whispered, “You'll go, you'll really do it?”

He shook his head even as he said yes, even as the imprint of her hand burned through his linen work shirt, through the coat he wore to the service. He swallowed hard.

Her amber eyes were lively again. “The larder's out of marrow bones, but she loves marrow bones.”

And Retha was gone. Jacob felt as he had one day with a team of runaway horses, graceless and exhilarated. As effortlessly as she had touched his little girl, Retha had spun him off his ordered path. A man in his position had no business meeting a woman in the moonlight and then pledging to undertake wild missions for her by day and by night.

It was madness on his part. On hers, simple need.

No, trust. She had turned to him, he realized. She had selected him as the only man that she could trust.

A band of hope squeezed his heart.

She was wilder, bolder, and, strangely, kinder than he had imagined. For months the town's wives and mothers and teachers had struggled to help his children, to no avail. Kneeling, she made friends with his daughter in a trice. Just as, no doubt, she befriended that beast of hers.

Intrigued in spite of himself and feeling not a little reckless, he hoped some earnest prayers would turn his luck with the lot.

 

Rushed, dusty, and late, Jacob came to the Elders' weekly meeting straight from his work at Steiner's Mill. He knew he and his fellow Elders had a full agenda, for with the war, worldly matters had spilled over into the group's spiritual concerns. He also knew that Brother Marshall eschewed delay.

“You have had a busy week, Brother Blum.” Marshall neither rose nor looked up from his notes. “Our meeting has commenced without you. We have confirmed the addition of three townsmen to the night watch in response to rumors of a raid. If you have no objection.”

Brother Marshall would not countenance objection, but Jacob had one. He crossed the room, raising a cloud of dust as he swatted his breeches.

“Three is excessive. Our community has barely seventy brothers. With both armies demanding our trade, our duties have stretched every man to his limit.”

Marshall held his stern expression, and Brother Schopp mirrored it. Sisters Elisabeth Marshall and Rosina Krause looked on with mild concern.

Taking a moment to formulate a more diplomatic answer, Jacob stroked the back of his chair, its beeswax finish soft as skin. Woman's skin. He curled his fingers into a fist. He had to get to the business at hand.

But a woman, he thought wryly, was the business at hand.

“The four of you have voted on this, I take it.”

“We have.” Marshall raised one drooped eyebrow, as if Jacob's comment constituted a rebellion.

“I support the Board's decision,” Jacob said at last. “So long as every man consents to the burden he will incur.”

“They do,” Marshall said brusquely, referring again to his notes. “Before you arrived, Brother Schopp reported on the raid on Bethabara. Colonel Williams's regular army took a wagon, supplies, and one hundred twenty gallons of their good brandy.”

Some in Salem were in spasms of fear that they too would be raided, Jacob knew, despite his negotiations in these last difficult months to forestall such a raid by either army.

“They were in retreat. They could have done more harm than that,” Jacob said flatly, finally seating himself.

His fellow Elders, men and women alike, seemed tense. They could not be so tense as he, waiting for this meeting to address the subject that mattered most to him.

“I fear they will do worse, Brother Blum, and closer to home,” Sister Marshall said anxiously.

“I have not found Continental leaders averse to
reason,” Jacob reassured her, his gaze falling on the wooden lot bowl at her elbow. His stomach knotted.

He wanted this drawing of the lot to be over and done.

At the same time, he did not. All week he had seen Retha only during evening service. There he had not been able to penetrate her bright resolve. It kept her sitting, arrow-straight and primly regulated, amidst the Single Sisters, through the singing of chorales.

All week too, the task of feeding her wolf filled him with ever greater misgivings. Was he keeping her from going astray or leading her into deeper disobedience? Soon, however, the beast would be well, making her disobedience as well as his contribution to it moot. He had tried to see her disregard for rules as a one-time, well-meant effort to rescue a poor suffering beast. He held to a hope that she would transfer her concern for one wild thing to his unruly children.

Brother Marshall tapped his quill pen. Its feather fluttered like a nervous bird. “We await your reports on the Friedlanders, the watch house, and Steiner's Mill.”

Jacob fixed his gaze on his packet of reports and tried to think. His vision blurred. One reed in that lot bowl could change his life, his family's life. Almost objectively, he noted that his heartbeat sped up at the thought.

He wanted this bride with a desire he had not felt when the three previous lots were drawn.

“Report, Brother Blum,” Marshall said.

Jacob lifted his gaze from the lot bowl.

Marshall smiled slightly. “We shall not forget your solemnities.”

Blood heated Jacob's face. He paged through his ledger to conceal his thoughts and prepare for the rest of the meeting. He had only to report decisions that his committee had already made.

“The, um, watch house…” He found a sheet of calculations. “'Tis complete, but the balance is not yet paid to Gottlieb Vogler.”

“How much is owing still?” Philip Schopp asked officiously. He always opposed dealing with Vogler, a disassociated Moravian but a respectable man.

“Half the cost of Vogler's logs. But the amount is not the question,” Jacob said firmly. “Rather, the manner of payment.”

“He scorned currency?”

Jacob prayed for patience. With the war, the new Continental government's currency was unstable. “Vogler should not accept currency, nor should we expect him to. We should pay in hides, salt, or harvest stores—”

Marshall and Schopp fell to a heated discussion of which would be less burdensome to the town and more fair to its vendor. Hides were everywhere in good supply, but salt was hard to come by, and harvest was some weeks away.

Jacob halted their discussion. “He is willing to take payment after harvest.”

“I presume you did not promise that,” Marshall said.

“We discussed it.”

“Why bring the matter before us?” Schopp asked.

Jacob slowed his answer. “As head of the Supervisory Committee, negotiating price is my prerogative. But the Board of Elders approves the manner of payment. Hides or salt or after harvest. Which one we accept is up to us.”

“Not if you have given him expectations,” Schopp said.

“If the drought does not destroy our crops, I should think Brother Vogler and his bride would prefer the food,” Rosina Krause interrupted mildly.

“He is no longer Brother Vogler,” Schopp argued.

“To some of us he is,” she said.

“'Tis settled then,” Jacob said. “Food, after harvest. As to the Continental Army's drafting of the Friedlanders, I have urged them to apply to Bishop Graff for certificates of exemption.”