Adelsverein

by Celia Hayes

  “And the child?” Magda asked, forcing her voice past the pain in her throat when she recalled Rosalie pulling her nightgown tight against herself to show off the slight bulge of her stomach. “It has just quickened.” But no, that was a slight and useless hope, swiftly destroyed by a shake of the doctor’s head.

  “Alas, Mrs. Hunter’s infant cannot be rescued by performing the caesarian operation. The child is nowhere near term. And in any case,” he added with difficulty, “it is most likely, because of the injuries she has sustained, that she will miscarry. The human body is very like to a damaged ship in a heavy sea, Madame Becker. When in danger of sinking, a desperate crew will throw overboard everything extraneous to immediate survival, even valuable cargo and precious possessions. The body overrules our emotions, even a mother’s love for a child-to-be.”

  Anna spoke first. “Thank you, Doctor, for being honest with us.” Her face and her voice were perfectly controlled, but her eyes reflected Magda’s own anguish.

  To face the imminent death of a dearly loved sister, to know of the destruction of the happy life that Rosalie had begun with Robert, after such trials of separation and war—this was bitter, bitter. Magda thought on how she had dressed Rosalie for her wedding, seen her drive away with Robert, and pondered her own married life. She had recalled with grief how hers had been cut so cruelly short, hoping that Rosalie and Robert’s would be longer, but now it seemed she had been the more fortunate after all.

  “She was given to us as a gift—and now she is to be taken away!” she exclaimed in anguish and dropped her head to her own hands. She wept, tears trickling through her fingers and splotching the skirts of her black dress. Rosalie, the beloved and beautiful, cherished instantly by everyone who saw her! Magda had loved Rosalie unreservedly from the day Vati found her, a nameless orphan left with the bodies of her parents in the hellhole of the Verein landing-camp. Vati had brought her to their own camp, wrapped in his coat, and calmly announced that he would adopt her—that he and Mutti had always wanted another daughter.

  “Auntie,” Magda raised her head at Anna’s calm voice. Her niece pressed a handkerchief into her hand. Doctor Keidel was gone. She and Anna were alone in the shop office. Anna’s face looked deliberately calm, as if she had forced all expression clear from her countenance. She appeared as composed as a perfect porcelain doll. On that long-ago day when the fates gave Rosalie to them, Anna had been a child of three and some; already solemn, the apple of Hansi’s eye, and in the manner of children, inclined to be self-centered. Dear wise Helene—Mrs. Pastor Altmueller had been so very clever—she had taken Anna by the hand and said, “This is Rosalie. She is your baby and you must take care of her.” And so Anna had. She had taken Mrs. Helene’s ivory comb and combed out Rosalie’s red-gold curls. Magda wept anew, to think of the pulpy red mess of Rosalie’s head, so Anna put the handkerchief to her eyes and dabbed at the tears. “Auntie,” she said again, “they are left to us to care for—I will see to Rosalie and you to Vati. Are we agreed?”

  “Yes, Anna-love.” Magda sniffed and blew her nose. “Yes— since there is none left but us to see to things.”

  “Honestly,” said Anna. “Do these men think of such matters when they leap onto their horse and ride away, leaving us with such a burden to deal with?”

  Caught halfway between sobbing and laughter, Magda answered “They do. When they come home and wish for good bread and a hot meal, or to have their wounds tended and bandaged.” Making a sour face, Anna spoke one of Hansi’s favorite epithets, and Magda laughed again to hear that coarse expression coming from the dainty and porcelain-skinned Anna.

  “Well, it’s all left to you and me now, Auntie,” she added. “Mama is sick and Marie is a silly goose. Of course, Auntie Elizabeth will be a stout aide and so will all of our friends, but this is not their house.”

  Magda wiped her face one last time and straightened her shoulders. “So to our duties then, Anna—with as brave a face as we can put on.”

  “Yes, Auntie.” Anna hugged her briefly and Magda thought again what a comfort Anna was, a brave and stout ally in the days to come. Really, she seemed more like a sister, a woman of her own age rather than twenty years younger.

  “It seemed to us like an endless waking bad dream,” Magda said reflectively to Lottie. They were sitting together in the darkened parlor of Lottie’s grand mansion on Turner Street, in the year of the great epidemic, the year that the Great War ended. “As if we struggled through quicksand or mud and never quite reached safe ground. Your uncle Hansi, your brother, and Cousin Peter; they were gone for many days, all throughout the very worst of it. I am surprised you recall much at all, Lottie—you were so very small. I was glad of that, at the time, thinking that you would be spared such memories.”

  “Oh, no,” Lottie shook her still-fair head, “I only knew that something horrible had happened, but for some reason also, everyone was making much of me and giving me small treats and indulgences. But no one could tell me when Grete was coming home, or make me understand what had happened to her and Willi. I had the silly notion that it was only a kind of prank that would be sorted out as soon as Uncle Hansi spoke firmly to the Indians.”

  Magda laughed, a little ruefully. “I felt so badly, having to leave you to the care of Marie and Hannah. I do not think I slept for more than two or three hours at a time. We closed the shop for days. Mrs. Schmidt and Pastor Altmueller were so constant in their attendance, they practically moved into the house as well. No,” she shook her head, “we were never alone—our friends were ever with us, especially as word spread throughout the district.”

  “How long was it?” Lottie asked, and Magda gently tousled Mouse’s silken ears as he lay on the footstool and watched her every move adoringly. The dog grunted with contentment.

  “They buried Robert Hunter three days later,” she mused. “Or perhaps four; it was Sunday, for I remember the church bells tolling. The church was full. That was the only day, save for one other, that I left the house until it was all over. I wondered, sometimes, if God would judge me harshly for wishing sometimes that he would hasten the end, for I was so tired, so sick at heart. Vati did not suffer; he seemed to fade, to become insubstantial. It was a wholly natural thing and we would mourn him even as we accepted this. He had lived a long and wonderful life, full of experience. He had seen his children grow and make their way in the world. He had lived to see the same of his grandchildren, too. But Rosalie—our dear little sister! That was so cruel, such promise cut short! Her suffering would have been unendurable, but for Doctor Keidel coming every day, sometimes twice a day to administer morphia.”

  “How long?” Lottie hesitated, for her mother stared unseeing into the grate, and the clear flames dancing over the coals.

  “Almost a week,” Magda answered. “Six days.”

  Chapter Nine: Gone Like a Shadow

  They pressed the horses hard and themselves even harder. They chased after ghosts, phantoms, elusive traces left printed on broken branches and sun-bleached stones turned weather-side down along the banks of streams. Hansi, his nephew, his brother-in-law, and his friends were driven on by twin scourges of hope and fury; hope that they could recover Willi and his small sister, fury over the murder of friend and kin. And within each one of them was the cold fear that they would be too late, that the raiding party had at least half a day’s lead. And that lead would only be improved upon, unless they urged the company on, farther and faster and into evening.

  Half a dozen volunteers from the scattered Pedernales farms had followed the war party across the few miles between the river and Friedrichsburg, searching for the children and for Rosalie Hunter. In addition to sending a messenger to John Hunter, they had also sent one north to Captain Inman’s camp on Ranger Creek. Late in the afternoon, Hansi, Friedrich and the others caught up to the messenger. By nightfall they had joined with half a company of Rangers, led by a lean and brown and silent young man, who seemed to be familiar to both Dolph and Fredi. A lateco
mer brought with him a rumor that Mrs. Hunter and been found; grievously injured, but alive. It was about the only good news they had, throughout that punishing long day.

  Peter Vining ached in every bone, for all that he had spent four months in and out of a saddle pretty constantly. He was pretty sure that Hansi felt worse, being older and more often driving a wagon than riding a horse.

  “Captain Inman was a neighbor of ours before the war,” Dolph explained at a hasty campfire that night. “His older brother married one of Brown’s daughters. They moved to Castell, after the old folks went to Missouri during the war, but he was in one of the frontier companies. I dunno what else he did during the war. I don’t want to ask.”

  “Why not?” Peter inquired.

  Dolph grinned. “’Cause he might have spent some time searching for draft dodgers and bush-men, like Uncle Hansi! Remind me sometime, I’ll tell you the story of how the provost came to Vati’s house searching for Uncle Hansi, and he was in the parlor dressed up as Father Christmas the whole time.”

  “Don’t seem like you all took the war all that serious,” Peter said.

  His cousin answered bleakly, “’Fraid we cared more about the Comanche raiders than we ever did ‘bout states rights, Cuz, and maybe today proves we had it more right than most.”

  Captain Inman’s party included a skilled tracker, a Lipan Apache they called Guillermo. He was older than all the rest, stringy and weather-scarred. Alone among Inman’s riders he wore no hat, only a band of red cloth around his brow, and his hair hung down to his shoulders. He and Dolph rode well ahead, while Captain Inman and his men stayed a little behind and to one side or the other, so as not to muddle the trail should they have to re-trace it. This did not surprise Peter very much; he had known that his cousin was trail-wise. That he was nearly as good as Guillermo proved an eye-opener, though.

  “It’s an easy trail,” his cousin said mildly, when Peter made mention of it. They had stopped to water the horses and refill their canteens in one of the clear creeks that ran into the Pedernales. “They’re not making any effort to hide it. They’re just pushing hard, racing to outdistance us. Until they reach the Llano.”

  “What will they do then?”

  “Scatter,” Dolph answered. “Like milkweed seeds in a stiff breeze.”

  He did not have to say anything more. This would be their best chance to overtake the war party while they were still in the settled lands; ambush them and rescue Willi and Grete. Once the Indians passed into the empty wind-haunted lands of the Staked Plain and scattered, every one to his lodge or village—wherever it might be— then the search would become something more than this pell mell rush. They must catch them soon; catch them with Robert Hunter’s blood still wet on their hands, the scalps taken from him and his wife still fresh and raw and the horses stolen from those small farmers along the Pedernales and its tributary creeks still fractious and wary. Catch them with their captives still alive and unscarred, before it became a matter of long and patient search and ransom.

  Dolph sat on his heels by the campfire, his hands cradled around a cup of coffee. At sundown when Guillermo and Dolph could no longer see enough to follow a trail with any certainty of keeping to it, Captain Inman had reluctantly ordered them to set up camp and rest until sunrise. “In one way, they’ve made it easy for us,” Dolph mused. “And hard at the same time; taking so many horses, they’ve left a trail a blind man could follow. But it means they have remounts.”

  Captain Inman nodded in agreement. “They will keep going during the night, once they know they’re being trailed.” He was an oddly soft-spoken and courteous man for a captain of Rangers, hardly ever seeming to raise his voice. Now he looked across the campfire to where Hansi was lying on a bedroll and rubbing his thighs, groaning all the while. “It might come to that, and he ain’t holding up too well. You might be thinking on how to ask him to stay behind, less’n he slow up all of us.”

  “Uncle Hansi won’t slow us,” Dolph answered in mild rebuke, “It’s his son and daughter they have.”

  Captain Inman sighed, “When we catch up to them, we’re gonna need every man-jack we have, and that’s the only reason I haven’t told him to go home and wait.”

  “He won’t slow us down,” Dolph repeated. “He promised his wife he’d get Willi and Grete back. Uncle Hansi never goes back on a promise like that.”

  “If you say so.” Captain Inman sighed again. In the morning he looked even bleaker, because Hansi was so stiff that he could barely move. He needed help from Fredi and Dolph to even climb into the saddle, but once there he refused to even consider turning back. At mid-morning, they came up on the place where the raiding party had camped.

  “Walk careful,” Dolph said. “Guillermo thinks he found something. They were here two nights ago, for sure.”

  “My children?” Uncle Hansi looked as if every move of his horse was a racking torment for him. “What of my children?” Guillermo silently pointed to a small oak tree, twice the height of a man, with a circle of disturbed earth around its trunk. About two feet up from ground level, the bark was a little broken-in all the way around, as if a rope had been tightly knotted around the trunk.

  “One of them was here,” Dolph said, “Look at the footprints.”

  Peter looked closer at the earth around the tree, seeing for the first time the little bare footprints in the dirt, as if a small child had been tethered there for hours, walking hopelessly in a circle, around and around the tree. All he could think about was how cold it had been at night and how desperately frightened the child must have been. Guillermo spoke, a question in Spanish which Dolph answered in the same language before switching into English, “He was asking how old Grete and Willi are. I told him, the girl’s almost four and the boy six and a half years. He says this was the smaller child, then.”

  “What of the boy?” asked Peter.

  Captain Inman answered, “No sign, but we haven’t found a body either. Consider that a hopeful sign, if you like.”

  “Might they have already split apart?” Peter asked.

  Captain Inman shook his head. “We wouldn’t have missed that, not with all the horses they took. No way would they have split up without dividing the loot first.”

  Guillermo spoke then, one of the few times that Peter heard him volunteer a remark.

  “What did he say, Cuz?” Peter asked.

  Reluctantly Dolph answered, “He said—the boy is of a good age. They will be testing him. If he is weak, they will likely kill him. If he is strong, they will make him one of them—a warrior.”

  Peter thought of Willi, his innocent friendliness and hero worship, of how he trailed after them to the blacksmith on the day when they went to have irons made with the new brand. To think of him being wrenched away from his family, to know that he would likely be killed—that was enough to turn Peter sick at heart. They must catch up to the Comanche raiders; they must find them, the tiny and deadly needle in this vast empty haystack of a land.

  Pressing on, they followed the trail with ever more determined energy. It cut west along the valley of the Llano River, towards the dry and harsh uplands. No more the gentle curving hills; these hills were as flat as a table top, and the scrub trees along the sides were gnarled and knotted, dark green in color. This was not country to farm; and yet there were folk living here, wresting a living out of the earth. They came upon a small settlement in the afternoon, a scattering of cabins, some with a palisade of sharpened cedar stakes around them. Captain Inman detoured from the trail, to warn the folk there—as if they needed any additional reminders of their peril, living so far out on the frontier—and to ask if any might have seen the war party and their captives.

  “They herd sheep out here,” Dolph explained. “Cattle too, but mostly sheep. The herders are out and about during the day and likely to keep a sharp eye open.”

  Captain Inman returned, reporting that one of the sheep-herders had indeed noted a party of Indians at some distance the day befo
re. “They had many horses,” he said, “and raised a trail of dust for a good way. He told his wife he watched from the hillside—didn’t dare go any closer than that. He thought some of them might be riding double. The children, parceled out to different riders, I guess.”

  “They’re heading northerly now,” Dolph noted quietly. “We’re about a day behind. We’ve got to catch them before they cross the San Saba.”

  Another night, another day of headlong pursuit. In the middle of the second day they saw scavenger birds circling in the empty sky.

  “Something dead,” Captain Inman said quietly only to Fredi and Peter. “Dead and fresh, and left along the trail. Keep Mister Richter well back, ‘til we’re certain of what it is.”