Wild Indigo

by Judith Stanton

  Jacob almost choked on his anger. It would have to be that man, mocking his good German name, giving him a thorough once-over, spoiling for another fight.

  Scaife sneered at Jacob’s sledgehammer. “That weapon ain’t no match for muskets.”

  But my fists are more than a match for yours, Jacob thought, priming himself to sink his knuckles into that grinning jaw. Slowly he became aware of his warlike posture, legs apart, arms braced with the shaft of his hammer held straight across his hips. Answering Scaife’s derision with hostilities could not help his wife. He let the hammer down at the road’s edge.

  Behind him, Brothers Hine and Rausch came dripping up. To help defend his wife? No. A restraining hand landed on his shoulder. “We must have no fighting, Brother Jacob,” one said.

  No fighting? To the devil with that. He was ready for a fight. He was wet and hot and nearly naked, stripped to nothing but body linen and breeches, barefoot from slogging in the mud.

  And that troublemaking Liberty Man had dared to touch his wife. Scaife had no right. Not to be dragging innocent Moravian women about the countryside with a rowdy detail of militia.

  Jacob’s empty hands curled into fists. “I’m not aware of any military orders to take our women into custody, Captain Scaife.”

  “Seems like your bride is Cherokee Alice’s best friend, Brooder Blum,” Scaife said silkily.

  Jacob clamped down on the anger that caped his shoulders and stood up for his wife. “Yes, we know Alice Vogler. Gottlieb Vogler belonged to our community.”

  Scaife grinned thinly. “Just like I thought. I found me a Tory spy ring. Your wife and the squaw.”

  “We have no spies among us, Captain. No matter how hard you try to make it so.” Jacob repeated his usual message to the hard-headed Liberty Man.

  Colonel Armstrong might rely on Scaife to flush out recalcitrant recruits and even think the captain beyond reproach in fulfilling his duties. But Jacob had always sensed meanness in the zeal with which Scaife caromed about the countryside, seeking spies under every cornhusk mattress.

  Scaife ignored Jacob’s answer. “And Mr. Vogler says that Mrs. Blum, ‘she speak nik English.’ I think he’s lying, but I brought her home for a little translation.”

  Translation? Jacob ground his teeth. Small likelihood that he had come for that. He knew in his gut why Scaife had brought her home. To humiliate him. Ever since their fistfight in the Square, Scaife had been his undeclared enemy. Now he had declared his enmity.

  Well, Scaife could try to embarrass him, but he couldn’t shame his wife. “I can translate—” Jacob gritted.

  “Then, let’s get her down—” Scaife stretched long arms up toward her.

  Through a purple blur of fury, Jacob lunged.

  Laughing, Scaife sidled out of range, and Jacob hit the ground, tackled by his own men from behind. Flattened under the Brothers Hine and Rausch, he rolled and rocked and bucked, struggling to his knees and winning until a third man joined the fray. Jacob’s face scraped the graveled roadbed before their grunts and protests registered. They were spewing platitudes about bending swords into plowshares and the meek inheriting the earth.

  “’Tis not our way, Brother Jacob.”

  “You are an Elder, Brother Blum.”

  Jacob couldn’t sort out one man’s voice from the other. Someone pinned his left arm, someone twisted his right wrist up to his shoulder blade. He spit dirt out of his mouth. “Let me up,” he growled.

  “Very well.” Heaving for breath, Brother Steiner eased the grip he had on Jacob’s arm. “But you cannot fight the militia.”

  Jacob knew he couldn’t. He only wanted Scaife. But he was outnumbered. By Liberty Men—and a militia of righteous Brethren.

  “I quit,” he grunted, resting his cheek against the road. “Let me up.”

  Someone gave him a brisk, understanding pat on the back, and someone else tried to help him stand. He shook off aid and sympathy, and rose.

  Scaife shoved his face close to Jacob’s. “I’m just helping her down, Blum. For our little translation exercise.”

  Jacob ignored the derision in his words and looked up into his wife’s golden eyes. Are you all right?

  Her gaze met his. “I can get down myself, Jacob,” she said in impeccable, reassuring German.

  He honored her ruse and translated. “If you’re letting her go, she wants to dismount by herself.”

  Scaife nodded permission. Lightly, gracefully, Retha slipped off the horse, bundling her skirts with such skill that no man got a glimpse of ankle.

  But on the ground, she wobbled toward Jacob. He caught her and pressed her to him, her breasts so soft, her hair so like a cloud that he fought an absurd fear that she might vanish. He buried his face in her runaway mane. “Liebling, are you hurt?” he whispered in German, but quietly so not even the Brothers, hovering protectively near, could hear. “Did they hurt you?”

  “Nein,” she muttered. “My pride only.” But she shuddered against his body, her heartbeat aflutter against the dirty wet shirt that clung to his ribs. “I am terribly, terribly sorry.”

  “Never mind that,” he rasped into the shell of her ear, holding her tighter, longer, despite the men surrounding them. Profound relief thudded through him: She was safe, she was home, she was in his arms. He would do what was needed to set her free.

  “Now, about her friend Cherokee Alice…” Scaife began.

  Jacob moved one arm to surround her shoulders, composing his expression as he turned with her to face her accuser. The zealous Liberty Man would pick at a weakness like a crow at a carcass.

  “I can translate,” Jacob said evenly. “What do you need to know?” His three townsmen bracketed them, crowded him. He needed no more help from them.

  Scaife cleared his throat officiously, playing to a captive audience. “What she was doing with that spy. That’s all.”

  Jacob weighed his answer, ripped by an angry conviction that Scaife cared not a jot if his wife and her friend were spies. No, his real purpose was to discredit Jacob in front of the community. “I take it you think Alice Vogler is a spy.”

  “Know so, Blum.”

  “Do you have proof?”

  “Your wife may be my proof. Ask her what she was doing there. She won’t tell me.”

  He didn’t need to ask. Thank God for Sister Ernst’s busybody ways. “She was seeking stock for dyes.”

  Scaife growled a blasphemous oath, unknown to Jacob but graphic and immediately clear. Good. A ready explanation for Retha’s trip from home had to weaken Scaife’s trumped-up charge that she was a spy.

  “Why not use her garden? Like any other woman?”

  “She dyes cloth for the town. She is the town’s dyer.”

  “Then where’s her plants? I never saw naught. And I searched her.”

  Jacob bristled. Scaife meant to taunt him with the fact that he had touched his wife. Jacob forced calm words for her in German. “Retha, I told him you do the town’s dyeing—”

  She lifted her face to his. It was pale. Scaife must have had at her with his insulting touch for hours. In Jacob’s chest, rising anger threatened to explode.

  “I understood you, everything,” she said.

  A quiver in her voice pierced his heart. For her sake, he softened his tone. He would not add hurt to hurt. “I know you went out for dye stock. Eva told me,” he said tenderly. “Where is it?”

  “I’d not collected any yet.”

  Retha’s excuse sounded lame, even in her own ears. When she had left this morning, she hadn’t given dyes a thought, nor danger, nor capture. Inside, she withered like a picked plant at the thought of how much trouble she had brought onto herself. To say nothing of the trouble she had made for Jacob. She had almost collapsed in relief when she had stumbled into his strong arms, safe from Scaife’s meandering fingers.

  “She had not yet gathered them,” her husband said stoutly.

  Scaife’s eyes narrowed. “Ask her why not.”

  Jacob as
ked.

  “I hadn’t gotten there yet. I was going to the waterfall for indigo.” She did not want to lie, but how could she tell him the embarrassing purpose of her visit? She couldn’t, not even in private. Surely not in front of these men.

  Luckily, Jacob didn’t doubt her. He explained to Scaife.

  Scaife made a honking noise of disbelief. “All I know’s I found her with that Cherokee woman, tight as clams.”

  “But you found naught on either one of them.”

  “Your female spy knows the secret of hiding things. In her house. In her person.”

  Retha felt Jacob stiffen at Scaife’s crude insinuation, but to her surprise, he spoke as before, with calm authority. “My wife and Alice Vogler are not spies, Captain Scaife. The Voglers’ cabin was on the way to her destination.”

  Scaife pounced on that idea. “You tell me then, how come a carefully brought up Moravian girl knows where a pair of outcasts like them lives?”

  “Vogler is no outcast. He was a Moravian, and he comes to market still. We trade with him. The army trades with him. You know that, Captain Scaife.”

  “His squaw’s the outcast, then. She’s Cherokee,” the Liberty Man scoffed. “They hate whites.”

  Retha bit off an indignant protest. With reason, the Cherokee hated backcountry oafs like him, who had raided and ravaged them. Scaife distorted everything.

  “She married a white man,” Jacob reminded him.

  Scaife scowled. “I’ll get her yet.”

  “You say yourself you found naught on her. You never will. You have never seen her with a Redcoat, either. You should leave her alone, Captain Scaife. There’s enough for you to worry about with the Redcoats marching from the south.”

  Scaife snorted, but had no rejoinder.

  “As to my wife, I suggest you let me handle her.”

  Outtalked but far from daunted, Scaife smiled thinly and ogled Retha, secure by dint of superior force from even Jacob’s wrath. “That one needs handling, Blum.”

  It was too much for Jacob. From his place at Retha’s side, he lunged forward with a roar, filling his fists with the militia linen of Scaife’s collar. A heartbeat behind Jacob’s angry impulse, Brothers Steiner, Rausch, and Hine tore him off.

  Doubt furrowing their faces, the three Brothers released Jacob while Scaife spun off, hand to his bruised throat.

  “Him too, good Brooders,” he jeered over his shoulder. “You handle him, too. I done had her.”

  He hadn’t, she thought, revulsion rising in her throat. But his words mocked her, and the Brothers’ looks accused her. She had been handled. Scaife’s hands had been all over her dress, her body. In a vulgar mockery of the sacred intimacies Alice had just explained to her. It made it worse to know exactly what insults he intended. Or perhaps it made it better. For, at the very least, she understood the taboos Scaife had broken.

  Inside, she quaked with outrage at the thought of his invasions. She wanted to wash her hands, arms, breasts, belly, everywhere he had touched. She wanted to bathe herself in a racing, cleansing stream. Her body belonged to Jacob, but that snake had defiled it. She closed her eyes, wishing, wishing she could rip out his viperous heart. She tried to steady her breath. In her own heart, she knew for sure he had done nothing to her past remedy. She could forget hands touching her, body pressing into her. He had not stripped her clothes. He had not raped her.

  Still, his rude hands had pawed her breasts and poked her belly. On top of that had come the talk. Coarse, intimidating talk. His men had laughed, likening what they proposed to do to her to sows and boars in breeding season.

  But Jacob had rescued her. Rising out of the mud and muck like a massive, maddened bear from a rain-soaked winter den, he had mastered rage and talked Sim Scaife to a standstill. Jacob held her now. She burrowed under his sheltering arm, against his powerful torso, taking comfort in his body’s solid differences from the bony, punishing angles of Scaife’s sour invasions. Taking relief, claiming redemption.

  On Jacob, the clean smell of a recent bath mingled with the sharper scent of honest labor, and the damp of his worn body linen soaked through her sleeve to her skin. They were all but flesh to flesh. His massive arm, his humid heat, enveloped her like a thundercloud.

  Across the road, under darkening skies, Scaife mounted, then sidled his jigging horse over to her. Tilting back her head, she saw his filmy yellow teeth and matted, carroty hair.

  “Just remember”—he smiled thinly at her—“I know about you.”

  She clenched a fistful of soiled skirt in apprehension. He knew about her? Knew what? What was there to know? He couldn’t know she was a spy because she was not. He couldn’t know that she spoke English because he had not heard her say one word. His parting salvo puzzled her, weighted her. Frightened her. He was not through with her.

  Then Scaife rode off, he and his small gang spewing up a billowing dust that rose to meet the lowering black sky. We need rain, Retha thought, absurdly, randomly, grasping at anything ordinary and obvious and certain. She was losing control. All afternoon she had fought panic, a distant yet familiar nightmare she somehow knew would make her mind spiral into a bleak gray numbness. She wanted that, not thoughts of Scaife, his repellent touch, his leering words.

  Just remember, he had said. Remember what? His accusations? Or his touch?

  Just remember. She spoke English. He had figured it out on the ride. She hadn’t been able to hide it from him. She hadn’t been able to hide…

  Jacob felt her slim shoulder pitch into his ribs, and he hefted her into his arms before she could slide down his body to the ground. “I am taking my wife home,” he called out.

  “You need help,” Steiner offered, but not kindly. All through the confrontation, Steiner, Rausch, and Hine had stood there, useless. Or perhaps not. He would never know if their presence had saved him from doing worse.

  “Finish the pilings,” Jacob snapped.

  Steiner’s mouth dropped.

  Jacob was never harsh, but this time he didn’t care. He would countenance no more public scrutiny of his and Retha’s private troubles. “Before the storm hits,” he punched out over his shoulder. Clouds had thickened, darkened, and the air had gone very still.

  He strode up the road toward the tannery, toward town, one arm circling his wife’s back, the other cradling her knees. He felt careless, enraged, all the control he had mustered to deal with Scaife spilling out of him with each lengthening step.

  What had his wife been thinking, to go out on her own?

  And what had those men done to her in one short day?

  His burden was not heavy. An angry man has all the strength in the world. He crossed the log bridge over Tanner’s Run and came out behind the barking sheds, away from the men who worked in them, on the far side of town.

  “I can walk, Jacob.”

  “You only just now fainted.” He wasn’t about to let her go again.

  “I swayed. They gave me no time to eat. Let me walk,” she insisted, writhing to be free.

  But he was much the stronger. “I want you home safe.”

  “I am not hurt. Set me down.”

  Every taut, sweet curve of her demanded that he set her down. He bent his knees, lowered her legs, and her feet patted lightly on the ground.

  “Not hurt?” He reined in rage, rage born of fear of what he did not know. “You could have been lost or shot or ravaged. You could have been killed.”

  “They didn’t really hurt me,” she asserted, her face set.

  In the lee of the tanning yard, without a soul in sight, he pulled her to him. She felt so slim. So stubborn.

  “Never, never, never go where I cannot protect you.” He ground out the words from the depth of his heart into the froth of her hair.

  She pulled away as if to read his face. “You’re angry with me.” Her golden eyes brimmed with tears.

  “I was terrified for you. I didn’t even know which direction to go looking for your body.”

  “I see
that now.”

  She ducked her head, her chin dimpling. He lifted it, brushed her lips with his. Hers were unresisting, yet they trembled.

  “Ah, Leibling, what did they put you through? You were so, so brave.” She had looked like some flame-haired Indian woman warrior. He didn’t think he should tell her that.

  She cleared her throat and straightened against him. “They talked. They said rude things. In English.” She gave a small, brave laugh. “Much of which I didn’t understand.”

  He stifled a snarl. “What else? What did Scaife do to you?”

  She dropped her head again.

  He lifted it, saw her distress, and lowered his voice. “You can tell me. I will not hurt you over this. He’s the one I want to throttle.”

  “No, Jacob! No!” She clutched at his shoulders with sudden alarm. Precious alarm. His heart lurched with gratification at the gift of her concern. “You are already hurt because of me.”

  “I will do naught,” he promised. But his promise went against the grain. He had a new, knife-sharp understanding of homicidal purpose. “This time. Some day, some way, one of us must stop that man from plaguing innocents. I pray God ’tis me.”

  “Jacob,” she said earnestly. “Don’t do it for me.”

  “Then tell me what he did.”

  She shook her head and lowered her hands, withdrawing. He thought she would not speak.

  “You can tell me,” he urged. A few fat drops of rain splattered in the dust.

  “Touched me,” she whispered finally.

  “God, Retha,” he whispered back. “Touched you? Not only while he was riding behind you?”

  Her head bobbled a faint negative. He could not bear her pain, her determined, embarrassed isolation. He wanted to share it. With care, he drew her back into his arms.

  “Where then? Where did he touch you?”

  “Mouth.” Her voice went small, childlike. “Fingers in my mouth.”

  “Liebling,” Jacob consoled her, rubbing circles of comfort into her rigid spine. Anger streaked down his. “I would have done aught to spare—”