“Tell us, Brother Blum. Is your bride a spy or is she not?”
Jacob pressed his steepled fingers to the bridge of his nose. “She is not.” He would not explode over the distortions and innuendoes of the tirade that Brother Steiner had just leveled against him over the unpleasantness at his mill. Nor would he submit to Brother Schopp’s terrier-like attempt to sniff out a scandal.
“Evidently Captain Scaife thought her one, or he would not have taken her into custody.”
“He never formally took her into custody. He escorted her home,” Jacob said. Scaife had set out to embarrass Retha and flaunt his power in front of Jacob. How well he had succeeded. By now everyone in town knew what had happened. After months of grim reports about the encroaching war, such fresh, delicious local gossip would entertain those good Moravians who frowned on backbiting.
“Escorted her home…” Schopp repeated silkily.
With simmering impatience, Jacob retold the story. His version was not the one that Brother Steiner had just reported to the Elders. Jacob’s wife had not run away to confer with the Cherokee informer. She had not arrived, circled by a soldier’s arms, immodestly astride a horse, wanton without her neckerchief and Haube. She had spit in no one’s eye, not even in the dirt. And he, Jacob, had not attempted to tear an admittedly rough but entirely reputable captain limb from limb. Not quite.
“Perhaps,” Elisabeth Marshall said, frowning, “you could explain the sling around poor Brother Steiner’s arm.”
“And Brother Hine’s black eye,” her husband Frederick Marshall added, not bothering to conceal a note of reproach.
“Captain Scaife was going to put his hands on the body of my wife.”
Schopp bared his teeth. “A gentleman is always in the right to assist a lady from her horse.”
“Captain Scaife meant no help. He intended further insult.”
“But you charged into him,” Schopp said. “Attacked him.”
“I rushed at him. I admit it.” Jacob looked to Frederick Marshall for understanding. “You, sir, would have protected Sister Marshall. ’Tis allowed to protect your wife. You too keep a club at home. We can defend our wives, our children, and ourselves if need be from direct assault.”
Marshall lifted his drooping brow. “No one has confirmed that she needed actual protection. Was not Captain Scaife returning her to you?”
“Her honor, then,” Jacob growled.
Marshall gave Jacob a reproving look. “Brother Blum, you endangered everyone. You wrestled our own men. You fought Brethren.”
Jacob met the Elder’s gaze. He was not sorry. But he would offer no defense and no excuses.
Marshall straightened on a deep breath. “We have no choice but to admonish you for your rash and hasty action.”
“Although we are thankful Sister Blum is safe,” Rosina Krause added. Sister Marshall nodded in agreement.
But a punctilious Schopp spoke up. “Should we not take a vote?”
“There is no need,” Jacob said, roiling. They could not understand, but he was outnumbered. “I accept the judgment of this body.”
He also accepted that he would take the exact same course again to ensure his wife’s safety. Whether to protect her from mere rude insult or from more grievous harm, to him it mattered not one whit.
“Brother Blum,” Marshall continued gravely, “you realize that another incident will force us to consider your disassociation. The more so as you are an Elder. You of all men lost your temper. You to whom we entrust our dealings with both armies. Not only do you set the worst example for our hot—blooded young men, you jeopardize your credibility as a negotiator and thus your most essential contribution to our community.”
“I recognize that.”
“Perhaps now you can make an effort to ensure that your older son understands this as well,” Schopp added, with ill-concealed triumph.
Jacob bridled.
“Not to the point, Brother Schopp,” Marshall said crisply, and turned to Jacob. “The upshot of it, I fear, will be further repercussions, Brother Blum. Nevertheless, this committee has other pressing matters.” Marshall smoothed out a small, hand-carried note, piecing together a tear at its official military seal. “I received this missive this morning. Colonel Armstrong is in town and requests an interview before he returns to camp.”
“Demands one is more likely,” Schopp said.
Rosina Krause shushed him as if he were a smart-mouthed schoolboy. He had the grace to blush—while Jacob had the grace not to gloat that someone had thwarted the man. Some time ago Jacob had decided that God had put Philip Schopp in his path in order to measure his progress in forbearance of his fellow man.
Marshall slid the note across the long, narrow table to Jacob. He trailed his finger down its center, silently translating the demand from English into German and then addressing his fellow Elders.
“The colonel asks if the mill is ready for the grain, and has a new order for us. This is more a matter for my Supervisory Committee than for the Elders. It needs little notice to meet.”
Marshall took the note back. “As we are gathered here, I see no reason to assemble your group. Any serious request the colonel makes will come to us next. He awaits word at the Tavern.”
It was a short walk. Jacob volunteered to go. The room weighted on him, and he could use a private moment with a man to whom he still owed thanks. He crossed the Square, passed Bagge’s store, two neat houses, and Samuel Ernst’s leather shop, and mounted the steps to the Tavern. Martin Armstrong’s elegant form, bedecked in full dress regalia and bewigged and powdered for official travel, stood at attention on the porch. He had been less imposing in his field tent.
Jacob made a formal bow, and the colonel bowed and smiled.
“The Elders await you, Colonel.”
“And it is good to see you,” he jested as the two of them made their way down the dusty street and across the quiet Square, matching stride for stride.
“I owe you a great deal of thanks for releasing my cousin. He has run us a merry race before although this one was his most harrowing to date.”
“You made it home in good time, I trust.”
Jacob smiled wryly. “Indeed. If two men sharing a horse for thirty-odd miles can be said to make good time after one man goes lame—”
The colonel’s mouth crooked up. “You walked.”
Jacob laughed aloud. His miserable trek amused him now. “I limped. Crawled. Succumbed to blisters long before we arrived in Salem. Then I dragged myself upstairs, kissed the children, and stumbled into bed.”
“You have…how many children?”
“Three.”
“And a new wife, I understand.”
“Yes. One,” Jacob said as soberly as he could muster.
A hearty laugh erupted from the dignified colonel’s throat. “I thank you, Mr. Blum,” he said, becoming serious with an effort. “War affords us few amusements. I do not fully understand how your cousin came to be pressed into service. Captain Scaife is…” The colonel seemed to search for a word.
Jacob supplied it. “Zealous.”
“Um. Thorough.”
“Yet not always careful.”
The colonel ran a knuckle through his powdered mustache, considering. “Perhaps not. None of the militia officers, however, has a better record of tracking down reluctant recruits. Legitimate ones, I might add. He has a keen eye for Tory spies as well.”
Jacob went on alert. But they were at the steps to Gemein Haus, and they went in.
Inside, the colonel dwarfed the staid Elders, a fact Jacob found curious. He thought of them as his equals, but they were not, not in size. He and the colonel were of a height, although the colonel’s war-lean physique made Jacob feel the lumbering bear. Shoving the brief mention of spies to the back of his mind, Jacob addressed Armstrong’s stated business, the opening of the mill.
“Barring rain or invasion, Colonel, you can bring grain no later than the beginning of next week.”
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bsp; Armstrong nodded, apparently satisfied. “Very well. We have commandeered but half the wagons we need. Many can be, I regret to say, pressed in a week.”
Although Marshall and Schopp were less fluent than Jacob, they understood the colonel’s spoken English. Jacob swiftly translated his reply for the women who, like all Moravian women save Retha, had yet to learn their new homeland’s tongue.
“Your orders bring severe hardship to poor backcountry folk,” Marshall said, not a man to mince even unfamiliar words.
“Less so, it is to be hoped, than British rule,” the colonel observed, unperturbed.
Schopp colored, but said nothing. Dared nothing, the milksop, Jacob thought uncharitably. At heart, Schopp had all the inclinations of a Tory.
In the silence, the tall colonel raised a brow. “You would not turn rebellious on this matter?”
Half smirking, Philip Schopp regained his facility with words. “Rebellion, my dear Colonel, has been taken care of.”
The officer’s brows snapped together. “Explain yourself, sir.”
“There was a scare of Tory spies amongst us.”
Anger flooded Jacob’s chest, cloaked his back, raced the length of his legs. The man was not a Tory, merely a fool.
Evidently, Marshall thought so too. “’Twas naught, Colonel. ’Twas but a rumor, less than a scare.”
“Captain Scaife did not think so,” Schopp insisted.
Indiscreet, incontinent scoundrel! Jacob’s hands fisted, knuckles blanching under the tan that bronzed his skin. He launched himself out of his chair, then thrust his fists into his pockets. He should master such emotion.
He had to. Anger, in part, had brought him to this pass.
Stupidity had brought Schopp to it.
Jacob felt the colonel’s keen gaze assessing him. Did the man assess Schopp as well? Then Armstrong stood, taking his plumed regimental tricorn from the table and bowing with courtesy to the company—and to Jacob.
“We have needed the grain for weeks. Perhaps, Mr. Blum, you could demonstrate your progress at the mill as I take my leave of your town?”
Jacob acceded readily to the command couched as a question.
But what, in truth, did the man want of him?
CHAPTER 13
“Papa’s not never coming home,” Anna Johanna fretted.
“Not ever coming home,” Matthias corrected her.
She burst into tears. Retha held hers back. Jacob was late for lunch, and her hands were full of fussy daughter and rambunctious sons. Sometimes Jacob missed the midday meal altogether, though always with good reason. But half an hour ago, she had glimpsed the Marshalls walking home. The Elders’ meeting was over. So where was her husband?
Nicholas snared a hunk of cheese off the half-set table. “No need to carry on, Anna Jo. Matty didn’t mean that. Papa’s coming home as soon as he finishes talking to the officer.”
“What officer?” Retha asked, masking a stab of alarm.
“The officer I saw him with when we were walking home. General, I think,” Nicholas said, as if proud to link his father with the military.
Anna’s cries swelled to fill the small kitchen.
“Talk of soldiers frightens her, Nicholas,” Retha chided. “You’d best not take that tack.”
“You were with the soldiers yesterday,” he said unabashed. “Did they scare you?”
“No,” she said repressively, not about to indulge him in his favorite subject at his sister’s expense.
By the time Retha had set out the meal, Anna Johanna’s lament had subsided into hiccups. Brooding, Retha watched her little diners eat. Or rather, she watched Nicholas eat. A dead-on copycat of her starving younger brother, Anna Johanna pushed beans and cabbage into symmetrical piles on her redware plate. For now, the task absorbed her, so Retha tolerated it.
But she saw no easy remedy for the little girl’s distress. As soon as the boys left, her stepdaughter would no doubt revert to her weepy worst. Retha’s ill-timed foray had provoked a relapse, disarming her surest weapons against childish misery, hugs and kisses. Once again, Anna Johanna would not accept a touch.
Retha decided then and there that she would escort the boys to school herself and take Anna Johanna to see her father in the flesh.
“We shall find your papa,” she told her. “You boys clear the table.”
“Aww,” they grumbled in unison.
She deftly flung Nicholas a damp cloth, her accuracy surprising him enough to set him straight to work.
“Papa’s probably just gone to the mill,” Matthias guessed, scraping his and his sister’s mangled vegetables into the slop bucket and setting its cover back on.
Anna Johanna’s mouth thinned. “No, he hasn’t. He’s gone where Mama went.”
The despair of certainty rang in the child’s pronouncement. Retha’s heart compressed in her chest as she knelt beside her, feeling every inch of her own maternal failures. “He has not gone with your mother, sweet potato. He positively, absolutely has not gone with her. In fact, he’s probably waiting for us to bring him his dinner.”
A surprisingly adult skepticism filled Anna Johanna’s indigo eyes. No hug would reassure her now, Retha thought. “Let’s fix him some food, and then go find him at the mill.”
Woodenly, Anna Johanna slapped fresh bread and slabs of cheese onto the square napkin Retha set before her. Retha knotted it into a bundle, called the boys, and directed her stepdaughter out the door.
In the wake of yesterday’s debacle, Retha held her head high as her family walked through town, enduring veiled curiosity and uneasy snubs. Halfway across the Square, Sister Baumgarten prodded her troublesome cow toward home, averting her eyes as Retha and her band approached.
Retha wished the woman good day and stood smiling till she coughed up an answer.
At the door to Brother Schopp’s house, Retha spoke cordially to a curt schoolmaster. He rushed his charges inside as if to protect them from her influence. Let him, she thought in disgust. She answered to her husband, not to him.
Crossing the log bridge over Tanner’s Run, they ran into Samuel Ernst. Anna Johanna hid behind her. Even from him, Retha felt a distance. Politely he offered to escort them and tried to tease a greeting out of the child. She whimpered and clung to Retha’s skirts. Retha clung to dignity, learned as an orphan with the Cherokee, until Brother Ernst remembered urgent business elsewhere.
There was no sign of Jacob at the millpond. Brother Steiner slogged toward them through stinking mud, one arm in a sling. Scowling with suspicion, he eyed the cloth bundle. “Brother Blum has no need of that, Sister. Colonel Armstrong ordered him to dine with him at the Tavern.”
“The colonel?” she asked softly, evenly, hoping not to spread her sudden alarm to Anna Johanna. But what if Nicholas were right? What if her actions had redounded against Jacob? She had to ask before rushing to him with his daughter at her side. “Is my husband in trouble?”
“I don’t know. While they were here, they spoke of naught but how fast we must complete all this.” His arm swept over the disordered millpond scene. The wooden dam was still a skeletal frame awaiting planking, little advanced beyond what she had vaguely noticed yesterday. “We would accomplish more if he weren’t taking care of other kinds of business.”
Retha clenched the bundle’s knot. No doubt Brother Steiner resented her role in his injury, but she would not apologize for herself or make excuses for her husband.
“They’re at the Tavern? Then we shall go there, too,” she said resolutely, reaching for Anna Johanna before recalling the child’s state of mind and retracting her hand. Words would have to do. “Let’s go, sweet potato. Your papa’s waiting for us.”
Anna Johanna whimpered but clutched the skirt again and trudged solemnly along, untouched and uncomforted. All at once, Retha thought her heart would break over the little girl’s obvious pain. For she understood it. Even though Anna’s fear for her father’s life was groundless, Retha could only sympathize, unwillingly recalli
ng her own misery on a long-ago day like this. She had trekked alongside Singing Stones, a stranger, and stranger still, an Indian, hoping that around the next bend of some narrow woodland trail, beneath the spreading branches of the next mammoth oak, her parents would be there, smiling and holding out their arms to her—instead of sightless, breathless, bathed in blood, the way the men in militia linen had left them in the cabin.
The way she had last seen them.
Gasping at the crisp, stark horror of her long-forgotten memory, Retha took a misstep in the road.
Anna Johanna gave a cry of alarm. Oh, what would the poor child think if she gave in to this old terror that raked her body! Retha determined not to let on to it. She had to protect Anna from her old, secret, fruitless fears. Catching her balance, she sank to her knees as gracefully, as naturally as she could, scanning Anna’s startled face for signs of an imminent explosion.
“Tell you what, sweet potato,” Retha said with what felt like transparently false cheer. “When we find your papa, you can give him his meal.” She offered Anna Johanna the bundle.
The girl refused it, wringing her hands.
Retha offered it again. “He’ll like that. He’ll be proud of you.”
A small hand closed around the knot at the top of the bundle. “He will?”
“Absolutely, positively,” Retha said, smiling encouragement, trying to hide her own shaking. The memories. She had always hidden from the memories. “Are you ready?” Retha stood.
Anna Johanna nodded cautiously, and they climbed the Tavern’s steps.
Jacob spooned up another bite of tavern stew, savoring the gamy aroma of fresh-cooked venison before tasting it. Good enough, he thought, but not as good as the simple fare Retha now provided in their home. Mealtime might be calmer here, too, but he should be there, especially after yesterday. Colonel Armstrong had inspected the mill as if he had a stake in its profits and then insisted Jacob join him in the gentlemen’s dining room at the Tavern.
In the spacious room, the colonel’s dark blue uniform stood out against immaculate white linens on small, round tables set with the best pewter and good stoneware plates. Bright midday light streamed in through tall windows and glinted off the polished brass buttons of Armstrong’s uniform. There was no more civilized spot in all the Carolina backcountry. Jacob had to appreciate the officer’s condescension in inviting him.
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