Wild Indigo

by Judith Stanton

  Again Calloway shrugged. “Long’s he says so, ma’am.”

  His deference made her feel older, established, but his presence jarred her confidence. Now that Scaife must know Jacob had left her alone with her husband’s younger children, could she care for them?

  Her children now, she thought fiercely, clasping Anna Johanna’s hand while nudging Matthias along. Given Nicholas’s disappearance, she would not let these two have a moment unattended.

  Except for a midday trek to bring Matthias home for lunch—which he wolfed down—and return him to his lessons, Retha spent the day with her stepdaughter, putting the finishing touches on the deerskin dress.

  She should have mended the boys’ ever-raveling clothes, Retha thought. Or tended the dwindling garden. Instead, she sought old Indian comforts of satiny leather and soft suede, and hid her growing uneasiness.

  In spite of Calloway’s presence, Retha refused to take Anna Johanna and go to Gemein Haus with the Single Sisters. She and her stepdaughter could stay there together, but Matthias would have been alone with the Single Brothers, safe but not secure. Retha could not abide leaving him alone. She planned to oversee every bite of food he took for the next month.

  A rumble of rude voices cut into her thoughts. Armed with only the heavy needle she was using, she hurried to the door.

  Sim Scaife eyed it with mock wariness. “Not a very friendly greeting, Frau Blum.”

  “My husband is not here,” she explained, then bit her tongue for admitting to her vulnerability.

  “The more room for us, then,” he grinned, indicating the four men around him.

  “The Virginians left yesterday. Surely there is space at the Tavern.”

  He shook his head in affected sympathy. “New detachment of higher-ups. Bumped us right out on our—behinds.” He tipped his sweat-stained hat as if his choice of a less crude word made him a gentleman.

  Unimpressed, Retha stood by, heart thudding with dread. The men invaded her parlor, piling up bedrolls but not yet shedding their weapons. She could not stay here. Her children could not be put in such jeopardy.

  The men left, but Scaife lingered. She pretended to ignore his presence as she finished the last seam of the deerskin dress. Anna Johanna played amidst the scattered clothing she had taken off her porcelain doll.

  Scaife nodded at her. “Pretty little girl.”

  Retha clenched her teeth. A needle was no defense.

  Without warning, he reached down and swung the child off the floor into his spidery grasp. Too stunned to pitch a fit, Anna Johanna whimpered.

  “I still don’t know your name, honey,” he said, his mouth too close to the child’s sweet face.

  Flaming to action, Retha stripped her stepdaughter from the man’s arms and clasped her to her bosom.

  “You never will,” she hissed at their tormentor, praying her stepdaughter would not erupt. “You will never, ever know her name.”

  Remorseless, Sim Scaife showed his teeth. “I always knew yours.” Then he sauntered out the door.

  He knew her name, she thought with numbing dread. And he still preyed on little girls.

  Escape, she resolved, was her only choice. Shaking all over, she packed a bundle. Food, flint, candles, cloth, and one good hunting knife. She rolled up a quilt off the boys’ bed. Retreating to the Single Sisters House would not assure Anna Johanna’s safety from a determined Sim Scaife. They had to disappear, not as Nicholas had done. They had to vanish.

  She would take the children to the cave. In her memory, the shelter by the waterfall had hidden her, had kept her safe.

  Anna Johanna’s face crumpled when Retha pulled off her shift, but Retha ignored her protest and jammed the deerskin dress on over her head. Teamed with her sturdy buckled shoes, the Indian dress looked odd, but the combination should protect her over rocks and through the briars and brambles they would face.

  “Look at your dress, sweet potato. ’Tis all finished,” Retha whispered, fluffing the dress around her, pleased. It fit the girl but gave her room to grow.

  Anna Johanna wriggled under the sueded inside of the dress and tested its satiny outer finish. “Feels…soft.”

  “You can wear it to the woods.”

  A reluctant smile teased the corner of Anna Johanna’s mouth. “Can I wear it in the creek?”

  “Only for wading, sweet potato, and then you have to take your shoes off.”

  Calloway was still posted at the front door. With her stepdaughter, Retha gathered the bedroll and the bundle of supplies and started out the back door.

  But how would Jacob find them? she thought suddenly. She couldn’t leave a note. Scaife’s crew would doubtless spot it and attempt to track her. There had to be some way to leave a message. She paced a troubled circle around the kitchen table, a worrying habit she had learned from him.

  A clue. She needed to leave a clue, one so obvious that Jacob couldn’t mistake it, but no one else could comprehend it. Her hand went to her hair where she had worn the indigo sprig.

  “It matches your eyes,” she had said that day, offering it to him beside the waterfall.

  Playfully he had hooked it over her ear. “Wear it for me,” he had whispered. “I’ll be watching over you.”

  She had worn the sprig until it wilted. But its blue petals had not faded. Today she laid it on Anna Johanna’s bed, certain Jacob would search the house when he came back and found them gone.

  A nearby alley gave them a shortcut to Brother Schopp’s house where Matthias had just been let out. A thundering herd of boys chased a ball across the Square. Retha stood by the rail fence, waiting for Matthias to notice her, afraid to draw the other boys’ attention.

  Finally he glanced her way. She lifted her bundle shoulder high, and he frowned. Then his gaze took in Anna’s dress, and he trotted over.

  “We have to leave the town for a while,” Retha told him.

  Awed, he whistled. “Are we going after Nicholas, too?”

  “Better than that. We are going to stay in a cave until Nicholas and your father are safely home.”

  He gave her a doubtful look. “An Indian cave?”

  “Could be,” she said mysteriously.

  CHAPTER 18

  “I’ll carry it,” Matthias insisted. With a poignant manliness, he took over Retha’s bundle. “It ought to be my burden if you’ve got to carry her.”

  Gratefully Retha relinquished their supplies. They were halfway to the waterfall and the cave above it. She had miscalculated the hardships of a trek with a skittery five-year-old girl and a sober ten-year-old boy. With them and without Jacob, the woods were fraught with dangers she hadn’t noticed as a girl, difficulties she hadn’t experienced as a woman: hills too steep, branches too low, briars and vines too abundant. Distances too far. Too far from the joy and pleasures she had shared with Jacob such a short time ago.

  But up against those pleasures were the terrible memories she had also shared with him. She had had no time to absorb the awful truth: Sim Scaife, the man she fled with her children, had murdered her parents and tried to murder her.

  Deliberately, she blocked that memory. She had no time to linger on old hurts. She had escaped him then. She would escape him now. But they had to hurry. The cave was not so very far, she reassured herself. And it would be safe. It had hidden her before. She hitched Anna Johanna a little higher on her back.

  “Mama Retha, did you see that?” Her voice trembled.

  “See what?” Matthias called from behind them.

  “It looked like a deer to me, sweet potato,” Retha lied, loudly.

  She, too, had seen something as the children crashed through the underbrush. For the third time, it had flashed alongside them. Her wolf, she hoped, but it had been too quick to say for sure. It could be something else, but her entourage of children would scare off almost anything. Besides, deer were noisier than that flashing shadow, chuffing to alert their herd and crashing through the brambles. Raccoons slept in the daytime, and rabbits were too
shy. A turkey would fly up. A bear, unless they disturbed it, would not pursue. A panther would not stalk. Would it?

  Just in case, she stopped and shredded her neckerchief and apron, remembering Singing Stone’s training. A few pieces left behind would give predators something to attack, and no harm done to her.

  An hour of daylight remained when they reached the waterfall. The children oohed and aahed with wonder, their itches, scratches, and fatigue allayed all at once. Retha kept a watchful eye on them while settling their belongings in the cave. Even in its cooler space, the night would be too warm to need a fire. In the lazy, shallow stream above the waterfall, Matthias hopped from stone to stone. Obediently shucking her shoes, Anna Johanna waded in the water, squealing with faked fear when she got close enough to see the pool below.

  For supper, Retha summoned them to sit under the mouth of the cave and handed out dried pumpkin, cheese, a hunk of bread.

  “There it is!” Anna Johanna whispered, panicked.

  Retha scanned the forest at the stream’s edge, opposite.

  “What? Is it a bear?” Matthias asked eagerly.

  “Panther,” Anna Johanna choked out.

  In the dusk through the brambles, a dark shape flashed.

  “Shhh. Be very still,” Retha said, now certain she had seen her wolf. “’Tis neither. She won’t come if we are noisy.”

  “She?” Anna Johanna asked.

  Retha dug into the bundle for a scrap of meat and held it in her hand. “My wolf.”

  “Your wolf?” Matthias asked.

  “She was hurt, and let me nurse her. Now she’s better,” Retha assured them. “She likes bacon.”

  “I like bacon.” Anna Johanna giggled.

  “Shhh…” Matthias hissed, attention riveted on the tangles. “I want to see her. Will she really come for bacon?”

  “Perhaps,” Retha said. “Just wait.” She steered them back with her hand. “Now, you stand well behind me.”

  A wood thrush’s evening song fluted over the low, incessant roar of the falls. Finally Anna Johanna stood up and dusted off her hands.

  “Well, I don’t think she’s coming.”

  But the wolf did come. Retha sensed its presence. She looked upstream, then down. It skirted the falls, crossed the stream, and climbed the bank to stand at the edge of the cave.

  “There,” she pointed, holding her palm out flat for both the children and the wolf to see. “Don’t move. She doesn’t know you yet.” She glanced back over her shoulder.

  The children stood stock-still. Slowly the wolf came forward, one cautious, curious step at a time. It snatched the bacon from Retha’s palm and retreated to the lip of the cave.

  “Is she going to hurt us?” Anna Johanna asked, worried.

  “Is she going to stay?” Matthias asked, hopeful.

  “She might not stay, but she won’t hurt us.”

  The wolf stayed through the night. In the morning, it lurked behind them as they explored the cave. They could not go far. It was but a few child-sized paces to the back wall, and the slanted morning light penetrated just that far. Later, after they gathered at the cave’s mouth to eat, the wolf again edged nearer, waiting for another handout.

  It wasn’t as if it needed any, Retha thought, amused by the wolf’s tenacity. She checked her bundle to see what she could spare.

  Another bit of bacon. She offered it. The wolf gave a low, menacing growl. Alarmed, she tossed the bacon over, aiming at the wolf’s large paws. It gulped down the handout.

  And growled again. Unasked, the children huddled behind Retha. With a sinking feeling, she brought out her knife from its sheath in her bottomless pocket. The wolf had never threatened her, but she hardened herself for an attack.

  Hackles bristling, it snarled across the creek.

  Over the roar of the falls, Retha soon made out men’s voices. Jacob! She thought with relief. And Nicholas.

  Men crashed through the underbrush. Too many to be Jacob and his son. Curses floated across the stream.

  “Hide, children!” she whispered, pushing them into the cave. “Hide everything! Hurry! Go back as far as you can.”

  Quilt and all, they sunk into shadows, silent as little Indians. Grim and determined, Retha clenched her knife behind her back. Scaife splashed across the stream, Calloway and Pickens following him.

  Scaife called out to her. “You left us a clear trail.”

  Her free hand went to her throat. Her neckerchief and apron were gone, left behind to assuage some predatory beast. Instead, her offerings to guard against wild predators had been an open invitation to this human brute.

  “You won’t escape me this time, Lillibet.” He was but an arm’s length away from her.

  “My name is not Lillibet,” Retha gritted out, perplexed and certain all at once.

  He took a step closer. “Oh, pardon. We’re all grown up and formal now, are we? You were a pretty little thing, Elisabeth Harmon.”

  Her throat tightened. The name tickled her mind with an odd familiarity. “You know my name.”

  He fingered one of her braids. She smacked his hand away.

  His eyes widened mockingly. “That hair was a clue. But them yellow eyes was a dead giveaway. Just like your mother’s.”

  Anger raked her. He knew her parents. “Who were they, Captain Scaife? Tell me what you knew of them. Before you murdered them.”

  “We never call it murder when it’s Tories, do we, men?”

  His men guffawed in agreement. Pickens seemed almost as crude and dangerous as Scaife. Calloway looked on with a panting fascination. Retha would not acknowledge them.

  She glowered, however, at Scaife. “Unarmed Tories. That’s murder.”

  “Thieving, lying Tories,” he said with dark condemnation.

  “You’re the thief. You stole their lives.”

  “They stole my property. Mine by rights. Our father gave it to her for marrying that Tory.”

  Our father? Confusion crashed in Retha’s head, louder than the roaring of the falls below. Did he mean his father? Could he mean her mother’s father? Merciful God, could they be the same?

  Like a skinny orange cat teasing its victim, Sim Scaife watched her. She would not flinch.

  “What are you talking about?” she rasped.

  His pale, watery brown eyes glinted with triumph. “I’m talking about my father. Your mother’s father. Your grandfather, Lillibet.”

  Retha’s stomach knotted. Brother and sister. Her mother’s faintly remembered, flame-colored tresses almost matched Sim Scaife’s neglected, brassier hair. And his eyes…her eyes, her own unusual pale brown eyes. She almost retched.

  “I am no kin to you.”

  “Yes, you are. My own sweet little niece. Your mother, Eleanor Scaife, married that Tory father of yours and finagled our father, Simon Scaife, out of half my inheritance.”

  “My parents had property?”

  He waved his hand upstream, downstream. “They thought they did. They thought they owned this nice little tract of land, all five thousand acres of it, including this waterfall. And I still want it back.”

  “This is Moravian land.” She was sure of it.

  “That, dear niece, is in dispute. It should have come to me. And I will have it. After you and me take care of some other unfinished business.”

  Absorbing his lurid gaze, she had no doubt what that other business was. She steadied her breathing, buying time. She wasn’t raped yet. She wasn’t dead. And she would not betray the children. She had fought him once before. This time she would fight him to the death.

  Her hand tightened on her knife. He was close enough, but too alert.

  “You’ll like to do it in the water, Lillibet.” He chuckled grotesquely. “I like to do it there. Better than I would have in your parents’ bloody bed.”

  She remembered cowering under it, and suddenly the rest of that horrible day flooded Retha’s mind.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” came a shout from outside the c
abin.

  Under the bed, the cruel bony hand scrabbled after her. She curled herself into a ball, the bed’s slats digging into the bones of her back. “Not a peep, missy.” Eyes widening with fear, she watched the hand slap on the floor in defeat and retreat.

  “Tories, sir.” The purring voice was loud now. “Murdering Tories. Tried to kill me.”

  Shivering at the touch of spider webs, she looked out. Polished black boots strode up to ragged leggings. There was an oath, words she didn’t comprehend.

  “Not the woman too, private.”

  “She come at me with a poker.”

  “Not bloody likely.”

  The boots and leggings scrambled. She heard blows struck, grunts, curses. Then they left. And she was all alone.

  “Who stopped you, Uncle? That day you murdered my parents?”

  He spit into the flowing stream. “Martin Armstrong, the dog. And he’s dogged me ever since. But he’ll not show up to rescue you this time. Or the little one. I saw the trail. I know she’s here.”

  Snarling with outrage, she lunged with her knife. Grabbing her wrist to save himself, he jumped back, chuckling as if her spirit pleased him. As if he wanted her resistance.

  “You will touch her with your last breath,” Retha warned.

  “’Course, a grown woman like this one’ll fight you, Calloway,” he called over his shoulder.

  Both men waded to his aid. He waved them off. With one hand on her wrist and an arm snaked around her waist, he dipped her toward the stream. “When I’m done with you,” he breathed into Retha’s face, “I’ll find the little girl.”

  Fifteen years of anger wrested her knife hand free of his control. She slashed at his face. Connected. Watched as the blade etched a clean, straight line across his forehead, the bridge of his nose, and down his cheek. His blood spurted in her face, blinding her, disgusting her.

  He howled, thrusting her away but still gripping her wrists. She tumbled backwards into the stream, onto its rocks, and he stumbled with her. Her wrist struck a boulder, dislodging the knife from her hand. A sharp pain pierced her side, and she gasped for breath. She managed to free a hand and swipe the blood from her eyes.