But she didn’t feel balanced. She felt dizzy, restless, too high above him as he knelt at her feet. His head was at the level of her belly, yet he did not seem aware of the strangeness of his position. Of her strangeness teetering above him, nothing but empty space in front of her face, her arms, her body. He lifted her plain petticoat, its hem limp with mud, and slid it down from her waist.
“Step out,” his voice rumbled up.
She did, catching a toe in the folds of cloth and gripping his shoulder all the harder. When she was clear of the fabric, he stood and bent his head over her breasts, concentrating on them or on the bodice that covered them. She couldn’t tell.
“And this.” He slipped his hand beneath the bodice, knowingly sought the pins that fastened it, and took them out.
She stifled a shower of impulses: to help him, to stop him, to face him. She didn’t want her body to change, the way Alice said it would. Yet she wanted that change fiercely. She wanted to know the ultimate pleasure that even now tugged at her womb.
With a will not hers, her freed breasts sprang toward his waiting hands. He covered them, released them, and his knuckles gently rubbed her nipples taut. A pull of yearning took her breath away.
He gave her a broad, pleased smile. “I heard that. Tell me, wife. Tell me you feel it, too.”
She nodded, unable to say the words: I want you too.
Retha’s silent, bashful nod satisfied Jacob. For now. He was a planner, a builder, and would construct her desire by degrees. It was enough that she did not retreat, that she acknowledged feeling.
With detached dispatch, he stripped her down to her simple shift and then dressed her again in her clothes, a fresh petticoat, pockets, dry skirt, clean bodice. She almost raced to pin her dress before he could touch her there.
He loved her virgin awkwardness. He hadn’t expected her to charm him when all he wanted to do was ravish her.
“I can do that,” he said. “Let me. I want to finish dressing you.”
She raised a doubtful brow.
“Then I will undress you. Later on. Tonight—” he began, hoping to woo her with words. But the front door banged open.
Retha’s eyes widened. “They’re home.”
They were. Jacob sighed, reluctant to return to his children’s demands. This time he had come so close. They had come so close.
Footsteps trudged into the kitchen. Slates clacked onto the table. Matthias’s voice rose in complaint.
“Brother Ernst said Papa would be home.”
“He is home, stupid,” Nicholas said.
“Where? I don’t see him.”
“In there,” Nicholas hissed, loud enough for them to hear him.
Behind the closed door, Jacob watched his wife press the edges of her bodice together.
“The door’s locked,” he reassured her, and commenced to pin her dress, one pin at her trim waist, another at the hollow between her delectable breasts. He clenched his jaw. This was why a man should never woo his wife in the middle of the afternoon.
Through the door, he heard Nicholas continue.
“With her.”
“What for? He’s not hurt again! Brother Ernst did not tell us that he’s hurt.”
“What do you think for, then?”
“It’s too early to go to bed,” Matthias reasoned.
“Not for married people, you dunce,” Nicholas taunted.
“Only babies sleep in the afternoon,” Matthias snapped back, innocent but petulant.
Nicholas went for the kill. “What would you know? You’re still a baby yourself.”
The closed door muffled a blow, a grunt, a boy’s high cry of pain. Jacob rolled his eyes, parental duty warring with a state of arousal only slightly impaired by his sons’ spat.
“I have to stop them,” he said reluctantly, setting the pins on the windowsill and hastily kissing her hand. “We are not finished.”
Breathless with haste, embarrassment, and desire, Retha turned her back to the door while Jacob plunged through it. Stern baritone murmurs engaged the boys’ soprano excuses, but she didn’t try to follow Jacob’s soft admonitions. She wasn’t fully dressed. And the boys’ brief squabble told her that young Nicholas had a fairly clear idea of what she and his father had been doing. Being a mother to boys that age—there was so much she hadn’t thought of. What exactly did Nicholas think parents did in the afternoon? And how did he know? And what did Matthias have yet to learn?
Her dress pinned, she braved the domestic scene and entered the small kitchen. Jacob sat with the boys at the work table, his back to her. Two miniatures of him looked up at her, although without his tender acceptance.
She smiled. Tried to smile.
Matthias frowned back. “Where’s her Haube?”
“Matthias…” Jacob’s tone sounded a warning.
Retha touched her hand to her throat. No ribbon, no cap. She had forgotten. She wasn’t sure she had another here.
“She’s not wearing her Haube, Papa,” Matthias stated in a grown-up, censorious way.
Retha sat beside Jacob, facing her accuser across the table. Since the Younger Sisters slyly used to mock her going barefoot and braiding her hair, she hated being talked about. Or scolded. “We were caught in the rain, Matthias.”
Jacob nodded, apparently approving of her simple version of the day’s events.
But Matthias slid his eyes away from her quiet rebuke. “Don’t women have to wear Haubes?” he asked his father stubbornly.
“As men have to wear hats,” Jacob confirmed. “But not all the time. And not when their hair is dripping with rain.”
Nicholas butted in. “It wasn’t rain that kept her away from lunch.”
“No, your stepmother had to be out. Sister Ernst brought you your lunch,” Jacob said evenly.
Retha blinked in gratitude at Jacob’s defense of her. She admired his way with the boys. He didn’t punish; he reasoned, answering their questions yet telling them no more than they needed to know. Nor did he blame her or allow them to. Even though he could have. A heavy burden of remorse lifted from her heart. He had protected her from the militia in front of the Brothers, and now he was upholding her in front of the children.
But she had lost the precious ground gained with them while he was away. There was no help for it but to get to the end of the day. She started up from her seat. “Perhaps I should fetch Anna Johanna. Sister Ernst should have brought her home by now.”
“Ah…” Meaningfully, Jacob scratched his head, reminding her that hers was bare. “Let’s send the boys for her.”
They crowded out the door, bumping each other in an excess of youthful energy. In a moment, they were back.
“She’s here,” Nicholas said, dejected.
A woeful Sister Ernst followed them inside. Anna Johanna trailed behind her ample skirts. “She refuses my touch,” Eva confided.
Dismayed, Retha closed her eyes. She could not shut out recrimination. The old Anna Johanna was back, and Retha blamed herself for disappearing, just as the child’s mother had.
Jacob approached his daughter, speaking softly. She glared and wrung the hem of her worn dress. Hoping to appease her, Retha retrieved the porcelain-faced doll from the parlor and offered it. Anna Johanna snatched it away and marched off, shutting everyone out as she curled up in a chair.
Not quite the same old Anna Johanna, Retha amended her thought.
This one was angry.
For supper, Retha cobbled together a modest meal of stale bread and breakfast hominy. Jacob ate heartily, but it was a poor supper by anyone’s standards. The children poked at the warmed-over mush, Nicholas and Anna Johanna as finicky as Matthias at his worst.
After Retha’s thick hair had dried, she riffled through her few clothes for a spare Haube to wear to the evening service. She had only one, worn but clean. She folded her still-damp hair up under it, tied its frayed ribbons in a modest bow, and returned to the parlor.
“Pink ribbons! Married Sisters wear blue
ones,” Matthias, the keeper of rules and regulations, pointed out.
Retha firmly squashed a teary flood of exasperation. She didn’t want to wear her old Haube, but she had neither new ribbons for it nor the time to sew them on. And she didn’t want Jacob defending her again.
“Sometimes Married Sisters haven’t put new blue ribbons on all their old Haubes yet. They have to wear the ones with pink ribbons until they do,” she told Matthias firmly.
Bested, Matthias picked up a small puzzle and jammed its wooden pieces into place.
Retha took refuge in the supper dishes, swabbing them furiously. Jacob sneaked up behind her, feathering a kiss at the nape of her neck.
“I have dreamed of taking liberties with a Single Sister,” he whispered.
She couldn’t suppress a giggle at his playfulness—or stop the tiny thrill that ran up her neck to her ear. She grabbed for a cup to dry. “That’s a wicked thought, Brother Blum.”
“I have others…” he said, planting another kiss, evoking another giggle, teasing another thrill up her neck.
But any other wicked thoughts her husband had would have to wait until after evening services. The bell sounded for Singstunde. Retha flinched, and the mug she was drying clattered to the floor.
Soberly Jacob picked it up and carefully returned it to her hands. “Perhaps you would rather not go. ’Twas a hard day for you. Perhaps you’re not ready.”
“Not ready for services? Of course I am. I’m not that tired.”
“No, I mean that you may not be ready for this. Everyone will know what happened. You don’t have to go.”
She studied the dull pewter of the mug. Surely he understood that she had to. But perhaps he wished she wouldn’t.
“I have to go, Jacob.”
“Some will talk,” he warned gently.
“They can’t talk about your wife if she’s there. I won’t let them,” she said, suddenly savage, thinking of every insult and outright lie she had ever endured. But she had endured them. She would again.
“You cannot stop their talking.” Cupping his hand at her ear, he mimicked a gossiping Sister in a high whisper. “Did you hear about Sister Blum? She ran away today.”
“I most certainly did not run away,” Retha said, laughing aloud at Jacob’s apt banter. “Of course, if I am present, they will point at us as well.”
“Let them.” He raked his fingers through his hair as if the thought, once spoken, irked him. “Let them. Retha, this is not about you. You made a small error in judgment in leaving town today. Sim Scaife turned it into a large mistake. He’s after me. Through you, through them. I won’t let it bother me.”
“But it will, it must. I never should have gone. It seemed so simple, ’twas but a walk. I had been cooped up so long. But he seemed almost to have been looking for me.”
“I know, Liebling. Perhaps he was, but we cannot control that now.”
“We can’t even control Anna Johanna.” Retha returned to her dishes, stacking them in exceedingly neat piles. “I blame myself, Jacob. She’s so upset, just as she was before.”
“Not quite as before. At least this time, she is merely angry. That marks an improvement over her fits.”
“But she was so much better. We had done so well.”
“You had done so well. You could not have known how she would react. You came home as soon as you could.”
“Perhaps I should stay home with her.”
Jacob rubbed the back of his neck. “No,” he said thoughtfully. “No, she should go. She already let me touch her, even if she’s still upset with you.” He took Retha’s hand, holding it fast. “And you should go. Although I can’t stop tongues wagging, however much I want to.”
No one but her husband had ever tried to stem the flow of gossip that pursued her. “Tongues always wag about me. Since the night you caught me.”
He grinned as if remembering that night, and then his blue eyes darkened. “They cannot hurt my wife.”
Retha felt old scars begin to soften, and she squeezed her husband’s hand in heartfelt thanks.
“I won’t let it hurt, Jacob. I want to be at your side.”
“Good. That’s where I want you to be.” Securing her hand in the crook of his arm, he led the family out the door.
Outside, the thunderstorm had cooled the day and wet the dust. In the Square, Nicholas marched off to reconnoiter his troops for a few moments before services, with Matthias thoughtfully behind him. Anna Johanna resumed her former handhold at her father’s knee, ignoring Retha with a swish of her skirts. Retha was so focused on her stepdaughter’s anger that everyone was seated before she noticed any untoward looks in her direction or suspected that any of the usual hushed whispers were about her.
“Pink ribbons,” she heard from the bench behind her.
“That Scaife,” from a bench in front.
“All day?” a woman walking up the aisle was saying. “Not all day!”
It was worse than Retha had anticipated from the safety of her home. For years as the orphan whom Indians had raised, she had borne curiosity and even censure alone. But tonight they were talking about Jacob Blum’s wife. Mortification heated her cheeks. The buzz of disapproval absolutely proved that she had let her husband down. That she had let his children down. She couldn’t sing a note. Not even Jacob’s resonant baritone recalled her mind to worship.
At last the service ended. Nearby, the band members put their instruments away. Beyond them, the three Brothers from the mill clustered, the ones who had witnessed her humiliation.
She stood up, the better to face them if they turned her way. She was sure they would.
The men summoned the head Elder, Frederick Marshall, and all four bent their heads in conference. Looking up, Brother Steiner pointed to her. Looking down, Brother Marshall’s brow furrowed. She was indeed their subject. Squaring her shoulders, she left the Saal with Jacob and the children. Retha did not want to look at her husband just yet. She did not want him to look at her. Not until she composed her thoughts.
Outside Gemein Haus, the boys scooted off, but Anna Johanna clung to her father when Samuel Ernst cornered him. Retha hid her eagerness to go home, her anger mounting as she surveyed the crowd. She met people’s looks even as they tried to look away. It was not fair. She had done no real wrong. If she had, Sim Scaife would not have let her go. Retha stood alone as men chatted with men and women with women, but she was in no mood to join her friends among the Single Sisters. They sought her out instead. Rosina Krause and Sarah Holder took her aside.
“Are you quite all right, my dear?” Sister Sarah asked with sweet concern, taking Retha’s hand in knobby, trembly fingers. “Those militia men can be so fearsome.”
Retha winced. Now that she was married, she had assumed she would put misadventures behind her. Her actions had worried poor Sister Sarah, too. And not for the first time.
“They were not so bad,” she tried to assure her. “They brought me home.”
With a harrumph, Rosina Krause rejected Retha’s version of the event. “Word is out, Sister Retha, that they were bad,” she said firmly, wagging her head. “You could have been ravished. Such an incident has long been my fear for you.”
Retha gritted her teeth but humbled herself as befitted Jacob’s wife. “I know. You always warned me.”
“But my dear, what happened to your new blue ribbons?” the older woman asked.
Retha’s pink ribbons suddenly seemed to strangle her. At home, the missing Haube had been an inconvenience. Here, faced with the Sisters’ concern and the Brothers’ impromptu meeting on her account, Retha forcefully felt how far she had compromised her spotless status as Jacob Blum’s bride. How far she had compromised him. The pink ribbons proclaimed her indiscretion.
“I lost my cap, Sister Sarah.”
“Lost it?” Sarah inquired gently.
“Lost it!” Rosina demanded.
Retha squelched her pride. “It was my best one. I do not yet have blue ribbons for thi
s old one.”
“Oh, dear,” Sister Sarah said. “Ribbons, with the war, are in such short supply.” A sympathetic frown crinkled Sarah’s face.
Impatience lined Rosina’s as she turned to the old woman. “No doubt the soldiers had a hand in that. Come now, Sister Sarah, ’tis time to go home. As for you, Sister Blum, this small reminder of your folly”—she touched the offending pink strands—“is better than the injury they no doubt contemplated.”
And she led her aging Sister away.
Unable to allay the sting of Rosina Krause’s censure, Retha waited by herself. Across the Square, she could see that Jacob, shackled by a cranky daughter, had rounded up his sons. Retha wanted to join her family, to help with Anna Johanna, but thought any aid from her might well provoke a tantrum. She smothered an outburst of self-recrimination. Leaving home this morning had been her decision, and her stepdaughter’s relapse was her fault. With each of her new stepchildren, she would simply have to start all over.
They hiked across the green, Matthias leading, Anna Johanna dragging, and Nicholas under his father’s affectionate arm. When they neared, Retha realized that all was not well. Jacob, tight-lipped, had his hand on his son’s neck, and a defiant Nicholas, one eye swelling shut, was being firmly marched toward home. Quelling curiosity, she fell in, aware that the dwindling crowd made way for them to pass.
Then Frederick Marshall, stern in black, stepped into their path.
“Brother Blum,” he said, without a glance at Retha or the children, “the Elders meet tomorrow to discuss your offense. These are serious charges.” And he marched off.
Nicholas whistled in admiration but winced as Jacob pulled him closer.
“What offense, Papa?” Matthias asked.
Jacob did not answer his earnest, legalistic younger son. Retha’s mouth went dry. She turned to him, taken aback by his stony demeanor as much as by the Elder’s severity.
“Charges?” she said. “Against you?”
CHAPTER 12
Wild Indigo Page 22