Wild Indigo

by Judith Stanton

  “It had a water wheel the last time I went by,” she said smartly.

  “A wooden one. Ours has to be improved if we’re to meet the army’s demand for grain.”

  She smiled vaguely, uncomprehending, unimpressed. He felt his loss. Christina had been his friend when he had discovered his knack for invention. Scarcely a one of his plans had escaped her helpful emendations.

  With Retha, he realized with an inward groan, such a point of commonality might be far to seek. For weeks, months, he had steeled himself to the notion that his new wife would be a different woman from the one he still privately grieved. But he hadn’t steeled himself for this absence of familiar ground. He had to give Retha time, to learn, to adjust. To him. And himself to her.

  His last sense of the afternoon’s lively celebration waned like a setting moon. He determined to recover it.

  Restless, he escorted her to the kitchen and poured another mug of cider. Gamely she came along, inspecting a rack of dried herbs hung along a wall.

  He mounted a workstool and listened, amused, as she proceeded to talk about each and every one. To chatter. Any mature man would recognize a nervous bride. Stretching his legs in front of him, he relaxed as she rambled.

  Thyme, she insisted, was the easiest to grow. He couldn’t agree or disagree. He was watching her pretty chin.

  “That’s an annual”—she pointed to the marjoram—“but the Sisters have little success with it.”

  It overran his garden, but he couldn’t say so. His gaze had moved to her slender neck. Which invited his caress.

  She touched a sprig of horehound. “Isn’t this medicinal? Have the children had sore throats?”

  “Not lately,” he muttered. Her shapely fingers deftly sorted through the rack.

  Jacob was on a rack of his own. Those fingers ought to be on him, deftly sorting through layers of hot, heavy clothing, through to where his body burned. He quaffed the last of his cider and touched her shoulder.

  “Retha, ’tis time.”

  She spun around, wide-eyed. He thought she swayed—a little away, a little toward him, he couldn’t tell.

  “You’ve had a long day.” In the candle’s glow, her breasts lifted as she drew a quick breath. He shut his eyes against a stab of desire, then acknowledged what her quick breath must mean. A bride’s nerves, not arousal. Nothing more. Even Christina…

  Nein! Not again! To himself, he vowed the end of all comparison. Christina had been dear friend, beloved wife, the mother of his children, but he had to let her rest in peace. He squeezed his eyes shut against the lingering hollow of her absence, and loosened the stock that tightened around his neck.

  Retha was not merely another woman. She was his sanctioned bride. And simply scared of what would come. An understandable trepidation in a woman, any woman, he told himself, but the more so in a young one taking on a family nearer her age than his. His arm circling her slim waist, he aimed her toward the large room behind the parlor where he had stashed the gown.

  Alarmed, Retha felt her body throb. She sensed possession in Jacob’s guiding touch.

  “Lead the way” he said.

  She couldn’t. Already exhausted from the effort of forestalling his next intimacy, her mind raced to seek another delay. She didn’t know why she had to, only that she did.

  Hot candlewax dripped onto her forefinger. She let it burn, grasping for a way to postpone the inevitable. None came to mind. She was going to have to sleep in his bed. The honeyed scent of beeswax filled her nostrils.

  Acutely aware of his wife standing woodenly at his side, Jacob lowered the hinged press bed, retrieved its mattress from the floor, and tossed it onto the bedropes with a single sure motion. He snapped out freshly laundered sheets. He had become expert at this maneuver these last months. They puffed with air and settled with a sigh. He smiled. He doubted that the Sisters had meant to add that touch.

  Beside him, his bride gripped her candle like a cudgel.

  He took it back and secured it in the chamber candlestick. Wax had dribbled onto her forefinger. He peeled off the wax and drew her finger to his mouth, watching her expression as he tenderly kissed the mild burn. She trembled like a trapped fawn. But her amber eyes had the look of a wolf too smart to run, too wise to trust.

  He did not understand. He was taking every care.

  “Allow me only to free your hair…” he said. He released a breath, anticipating a fall of red-gold riches. She neither consented nor turned away. A light tug undid the new blue ribbon under her chin.

  When he eased the starched Haube off, she lowered her eyes, sunk her chin to her chest. He didn’t have to wonder why. His limited experience told him to ease her past this dawdling, this reluctance. His fingers strayed into her tightly bound hair, scavenged for pins, and extracted them one by one, as if he—as if she—had all the time in the world.

  They did not. In his mind, the children galloped back into the house, filling day and night with needs. He summoned his powers to make the most of this rare and private evening.

  At last the silken mass tumbled down around her shoulders. In minutes it would cover his face, his arms, his chest.

  “I have wanted to see you thus since that night.” His fingers combed thick tendrils, arranging them across the snowy collar of her dress, over her shoulders, down her back.

  Truth be told, he wanted to feel it against his skin.

  He unlaced the ribbon that threaded the length of her bodice, careful not to startle her with an inadvertent touch. Released, the stiff new linen stood out from her bosom. Memory led his fingers to the pins that fastened her neckerchief. He removed them carefully. Only when he tried to slip her bodice off did he realize how stiff she was.

  “Helfen mir, Liebling,” he coaxed in his native tongue.

  She helped, lifting one shoulder forward, then the other, absently, as if she were not actually there. She let her tan, striped bodice drop to the floor, revealing the top of her white shift. His eyes fell to her thinly covered breasts. High and firm, they barely moved. She barely breathed.

  Concern deepening, he studied her face. With its arched brows, high cheekbones, fine nose, it was the prettiest face that he had ever seen. Her expression, however, was painfully blank. Not scared or nervous, but blank. Like a sleepwalker’s.

  “Retha.” He waited. He had a sense that she was far, far away.

  Her coming back was slow. She focused her gaze on him, and a little light returned to her eyes. He took that to be a response.

  “Let me,” he coaxed again. “You are my wife. I am your husband. This is what comes next. Look.” He shucked his waistcoat and untied the stock that bound his shirt’s damp collar to his neck.

  Her eyes went glassy again.

  Bewilderment and a terrible desire to chastise her besieged him in equal parts. Trying to keep both out of his voice, he ended on a tone of impatience. “This is what married people do. Kiss. And undress. And kiss some more.”

  She stood as rigid as a stone.

  He swallowed a black Teutonic oath that he had forgotten he knew and forced a gentler word. “Your new gown’s on that chair. Why don’t I leave you alone to change?”

  He left the room, safely feeling his way on the blessedly dark, blessedly short walk to the kitchen, only to stub his toe on the table’s thick leg. He gave a caustic laugh of pain. He had already used the blackest oath he knew.

  What could he do? Something told him he had more than a reluctant bride on his hands—or rather slipping through his fingers. And only these two nights to get her past the difficult part.

  A drink would help. His fingers searched the table, skipping over the cider in its squat jug and going for a more serious kick. He took a burning swig from the uncorked brandy bottle.

  Leaning his torso’s considerable weight against the table’s edge, he covered his face and sucked in air through his teeth. He had been in a state of rut for a month, and his ever-so-promising bride thought him an ogre. Sudden, deep fatigue wallope
d him. Sorrow and loss and loneliness, three impossible children, war raging around him—he had come through all his trials. Surely he could manage a resisting bride.

  Humid night blanketed the room, almost too thick for love. They had seen too many weeks of heat and no rain, and this night afforded no respite. But he would love her. He tore open his shirt, rubbed a hand over his chest.

  As she would learn to do. She was so near.

  A room away, fabric rustled and landed on the floor with a thump. Her skirt. He imagined her next removing her shift, then gliding to the chair that held her wedding present. He heard her shuffling around. Under candlelight, her skin would glow, her form would be perfection. His manhood hardened against his dark Sunday breeches, and he let out a groan of hot desire.

  Damn his unruly body. For months he had been without release. He had ached for Retha since the day he saw her. He would have to ache a little longer. He downed a draught of brandy.

  From a distance, the bed creaked as it always did when he crawled into it at night. She had taken the first step. Relief mixed with anticipation.

  He wanted her. But he would have to be careful, he would have to take it step by step. He gulped a last swallow of brandy and headed toward the light, treading a fine line between uncertainty and bounding hope. He even smiled. She would be under the scented sheet, coverlet pulled up to her nose, he’d wager.

  And he would teach her why she wanted them pulled down.

  But Jacob walked in on a startling sight.

  Against the far post of the bed, eyes closed tight, his bride sat on her heels, naked as the day she was born, her body rocking from side to side.

  “Retha?” Disbelief careened down his spine.

  She rocked.

  Trying to make sense of what made no sense at all, he scanned a room in disarray. Only her prim white gown lay untouched where he had left it. She had folded the bodice and skirt of her amber wedding dress and laid them in the cupboard, leaving its door ajar. Her crumpled shift lay abandoned on the floor, midway between cupboard and bed. One threaded stocking dangled across the nearest chair.

  He tugged hard at the ribbon that tied his hair and looked around for other garments. After a moment he spied the second stocking flung across the spinning wheel that sat in the room for daytime use. And her Haube—she had tossed it into a basket of flax.

  Gott im Himmel, he prayed. She had gone mad. Never in his wildest dreams. Darkest nightmares. Desperate, he tried to recall what Sister Krause had said about Retha’s aberrations. She went out at night, sleepwalked. This was not sleepwalking. This was worse, weirder.

  What had Rosina Krause failed to tell him?

  For moments that seemed like hours, Jacob watched his bride. The steady rhythm of her rocking sank into his body like an ax hacking green wood, hacking into hope, hacking down desire.

  At a loss for what to do, he collected all her clothes and mechanically stacked them in order on a spare chair. Then he sat with great care on the edge of the bed. She paid him no notice. He wanted to make her stop, but hesitated to touch or speak to her. Sleepwalkers, he had heard, could be startled into harming themselves. Yet what could she do?

  She was in no danger here. They were alone, bride and groom, in a safe room in the quiet night. Besides, he was sworn to protect her. And he had to find out. Her slow, steady rocking would fast drive him to an asylum. To Bedlam, he remembered, dredging up the English word for it.

  Gently, gingerly, he laid one hand on her nearest, slender shoulder.

  She didn’t miss a beat.

  He brought up the other hand, touched it to her opposite shoulder.

  “Retha.” He paused, then spoke purposefully. “You have to stop now.”

  She rocked.

  He firmed his grasp, but she didn’t react.

  “Retha, ’tis Jacob. Open your eyes.”

  Under delicate veined eyelids, her eyes moved in a restless, troubled way. Her lush lashes fluttered, eyes opening to reveal white edges. And nothing more.

  If only he could remember everything Sister Krause had said. Had she known anything of this peculiar madness? Had Retha always had such spells, such fits? Or given such performances? He prayed not, for they were beyond his ken.

  Even so, however she acted tonight, he tried to console himself that her conduct was an aberration. She had been sane enough, able enough to establish herself in the community. He knew of nothing that had actually interfered with her work. Under the Sisters’ care yet ultimately on her own, she had been schooled, mastered the art of dyeing, taken on laundry, and even made friends, however ill-advised.

  He was unconsoled. She could not go on like this. Nor could he let her. But he knew so little of her. Earlier, in the kitchen, she had responded to tenderness, he remembered. A kiss might rouse her where a touch had not.

  Leaning forward, he brushed his lips across hers.

  The rocking stopped.

  Encouraged, he kissed her again, watching her even as he lengthened the kiss, aware of thick fringed eyelids, sweet breath, silken skin beneath his fingertips…and a resisting mouth.

  Her eyes flew open, filled with that terror he had seen before, and she wrenched herself away.

  “No, no. No, no,” she chanted in a singsong, childlike voice. “No, no. Don’t hurt. No, no.”

  And she resumed rocking.

  He jerked the string that bound his hair and freed it with a savage shake. She was beautiful—fawn fragile, snake sinister, wolf mad. She could be having a fit, staging a performance, or going insane: He could not tell the difference.

  With such a woman, he feared for his children’s safety.

  He feared for himself.

  Her nakedness displayed a healthy, luminous body that would tempt any man. It tempted him. Against all reason, ungovernable desire swept him like a hot wind. He did his best to tamp it down, but it assaulted him in unholy gusts, buffeting his chest, lashing his skin, burning his loins. He had waited so long, and her body was perfection.

  And it was his. He clenched his fists against a primal urge to take her. He had the right but would not stoop to do it. He would never, ever force a woman in such a state, real or imagined, acted or felt.

  In an agony of frustration, he stripped the coverlet from the bed and wrapped her in it despite the heat. Later, when his mind cleared enough for him to ponder what he had done, he would know that he acted from a sense of decency, all he had to offer.

  Concealing her sweet body muted none of his desire. He sat down heavily on the chair where she had flung one threaded stocking. And waited for morning to come, and burned.

  CHAPTER 5

  Sun warmed Retha’s face, the mild heat of early morning. She let it, taking another moment to enjoy the clamor of summer birds—the surprising blast of tiny wrens, the haunting coo of mourning doves, the caw of crows. Perhaps they thought this day would not be hot, she mused lazily, lying on her side and stretching like the cat that guarded the grain from rats at Steiner’s Mill. How well she’d slept. How lovely to wake up to the sun.

  She never woke in sun.

  Cautiously she opened her eyes and studied the unfamiliar room. Jacob Blum’s bedroom. Uncurtained windows admitted morning light. It brightened whitewashed walls. Last night there had been but one candle, a valuable beeswax one Jacob had considerately provided for their wedding night. She remembered sipping cider, touring the rooms, being burned by candlewax, undressing hastily to get into the bed—but nothing clearly after that.

  Surely, she hadn’t fallen asleep on her own wedding night. Worried to think she might have done precisely that, she raised up on an elbow. Coarse sheets abraded her skin. She stiffened, realizing with a small shock that she was naked.

  Naked in Jacob Blum’s bed. How had that come to be?

  And where was he? Nearby. Propped up so she could see him, he sat in a chair at the foot of the bed, wearing his shirt and breeches from the day before, dozing. He could not be comfortable, she thought, though his shirt was op
en at the neck, its untied stock dangling. Curious beyond measure, she stared with unaccustomed freedom at her first sight of a sleeping, half-dressed man. Under his summer body linen, she could see the strength of his wide shoulders. And under the breeches he must have slept in, the awesome power of his heavy thighs.

  She sank under the sheets, not sure that gawking was within her rights. His bed was wider and longer than her dormitory cot. It was big, of course, because he was so large. The mattress was thick with new cornhusks. They were for her, she realized.

  He had prepared his bed for her.

  And he must have taken off her clothes. So that’s the way married couples did it. Whatever it was that they did. That duty must have been a lot simpler and quicker than she had dared to hope. Or perhaps in the end, he had agreed with her. It was much too soon for children. Even so, she had expected some shock, some pain, some embarrassing exposure. There was nothing but this bird-bright morning, and a man she barely knew sitting in a chair beyond the foot of her bed. She looked at him more boldly. His open shirt revealed a thatch of sandy hair at his throat. His deep chest rose and fell evenly, peacefully.

  A shiver of appreciation coursed down her neck, followed quickly by a quiver of fear. Drawing the coverlet to her neck, she apprehensively studied this private, intimate side of Jacob Blum, her husband. Her husband.

  Suddenly, urgently, she wanted to be dressed when he awoke, and she scooted out of the bed. On another, smaller chair beside the bed, her wedding clothes lay stacked and folded, but neater than the laundry she used to fold for the tavern. It was not her work at all. She thought she remembered what she had done last night, but what had Jacob done?

  Surely nothing…harmful. Shaking off that doubt, she hastily pulled on her shift and secured her stockings with linen garters. She felt better already. Safer. When she had tied on her skirt and laced her bodice tight, she smoothed the wrinkles out with a sigh. Ready for the Marshalls’ breakfast, she turned to straighten the tumbled bedding. And gasped.

  No blood this time.

  She reeled at the thought.