Halfway up the hill to Brother and Sister Ernsts’ small cabin, he stopped her in her tracks. “I hope for more children, of course. God willing, we have started one today.”
Astonishment lit her face.
“You didn’t think of that,” he realized.
“I dreamed of it,” she whispered. “But the boys don’t want us to have a baby. Nicholas practically said so.”
“They didn’t want a sister either, but look at them with Anna Johanna.”
“They tease and torment her!”
“Exactly. They adore her. You should have seen their care of her after they lost their mother.”
Jacob tucked Retha’s hand under his arm, the hand of his possibly pregnant wife, and smiled to himself. Anna Johanna waited for them. He wondered how fussy she had been today.
On the outskirts of town, Jacob rapped on the Ernsts’ door. Eva Ernst poked her head just far enough outside to glance nervously up and down the street, and hurried them inside. Anna Johanna sat by the hearth, arranging saucers of something into rows. Retha rushed to her, leaving Jacob to deal with Eva’s fluttering distress.
“What’s the matter, Sister Ernst?” Jacob asked with concern.
“This morning they found Brother Bonner,” she whispered breathlessly. “Beaten half to death.”
“Slow down and tell me,” Jacob said through gritted teeth, enraged at such a senseless, random attack. Brother Bonner was seventy-seven years old, living quietly outside Salem on his small farm, no threat to anyone. “Who found him? Samuel?”
“One of the other men on night watch, making his last round.”
“Who beat him?”
“Soldiers. English soldiers. Over some cows. They marched off before the new regiment of Continentals arrived from Virginia. Dr. Bonn is caring for him. Then this new regiment billeted some officers with Sister Baumgarten, and she took her family to Gemein Haus and the safety of the Sisters. She has no protection now that her husband has gone on. If any officers claimed our cabin, we would have to go there, too. We have no second story to live in.”
Sister Ernst was babbling.
“We passed the encampment in the meadow. They look quite settled to me,” Jacob said, risking the reassuring touch that only a friend could give. “If need be, you can stay with us.”
“Oh, thank you, Brother Blum, I have been so scared since Brother Bonner’s terrible…misfortune.”
“I understand,” he soothed her. “But surely that was an isolated occurrence. If those troops presented a real danger, we would all already be clapped in the garrison brig.”
She whitened. Jacob’s hand went to the back of his tense neck. The day, the week, the summer needed only these extra burdens. When the town had needed him, he had been gone. Or perhaps not, he thought, remembering that he had been admonished, and wondering exactly what was expected of him now. His present, pressing task was to protect his own.
“I had best take Anna Johanna home, then.”
“She had a quiet day—until lunch, that is,” Sister Ernst stammered. “No, actually, before that, she became a little cranky. Then we ate. Afterwards she started to fuss and I never could get her to nap, and I thought of pies.”
Jacob walked over to the hearth where Retha sat, helping his preoccupied daughter put the finishing touches on her culinary creations. Green leafy crusts on—
“Mud pies?” he asked bleakly. Red mud caked her hands and arms, and orange-brown splatters decorated her grimy dress. His touch-me-not daughter had doubtless tested Sister Ernst’s nerves. He could hardly scold his friend’s well-meaning wife, but how ever would they bathe Anna Johanna?
He bent down. “Time to go home, pumpkin.”
She grinned up proudly. “Want some pie?”
He didn’t, but when Anna Johanna’s chubby, muddy fists slid around his neck, he would almost have taken a bite to please her.
It felt good to be home, Retha thought, unlatching the door for her husband whose arms were full of dirty daughter. Home felt safe. Outside, too many soldiers from Virginia lounged and strolled about the town, and a sense of foreboding nicked at her.
“This is going to take a lot of w-a-t-e-r,” Jacob said with surprising cheer as he carried Anna Johanna through the narrow entry to the kitchen.
“And p-a-t-i-e-n-c-e.”
“To say naught of brute strength. I will be back shortly.” Chuckling, Jacob took up a wooden bucket, leaving Retha with her stepdaughter. The nearest cistern was one he had built a good way down the street. Town planners like himself, he said when she had remarked upon the distance, had to avoid the appearance of favoring themselves.
After settling Anna Johanna down to play with her doll, Retha checked the nearly spent hearth fire and thought about a simple supper. Beans and bread and cheese for all with fresh coffee for her husband. Husband now in the fullest sense. And she herself a real wife at last. A welcome tremor of remembrance gripped her, a mystery no longer but all the more a miracle. Jacob wanted children. Her hand stole to where the gathers of her skirt covered her stomach. To where he might already have planted a child.
Shaking her head at her own dreamy state of mind, she picked up a poker to stoke the fire.
A chair scraped in the parlor. Lifting her head, she listened. She was alone, she and Anna Johanna. Except for the footsteps. Boots, she heard boots. Jacob was always noisy. But he always banged the door open.
A new, raw fear clamped her shoulders and ran down her back. Then a familiar voice shattered her newfound peace.
“We’ll be needing supper soon, Frau Blum.”
CHAPTER 16
The menace in the voice was familiar, too. Her pulse beating in her throat, Retha lifted the latch on the parlor door. The little girl in her—the child who had fled other soldiers, other homes—wanted desperately to run. But the woman, newly a wife and newly a mother, braced to face intruders. For the sake of her stepdaughter, muddy and oblivious, who played with her doll by the fire. For the sake of the boys, who would soon be home. For the sake of her husband, who had entrusted her with his offspring and his home.
Holding the poker high, Retha opened the door.
Captain Sim Scaife, Liberty Man and her tormentor, leered as he pulled up Jacob’s good chair, univited. “We got all the pokers around here you’re going to need, Frau Blum.”
“I was stoking the fire for my family’s supper,” she snapped, ignoring his innuendo as she scanned her disordered parlor.
With a cackle, he reared back in the chair. “You can stoke mine, if you want to.”
Then he plunked his scuffed boots on the dining table, one at a time. Against the far wall, his men leaned their chairtops against the whitewashed plaster, marking it and the wainscoting. They had racked muskets against the parlor’s tiled stove and tossed powder horns and ammunition pouches on top of it. Three muskets. Three powder horns. Three pouches. Three bedrolls. In hers and Jacob’s home.
Anger snuffed out any lingering alarm. Of all the soldiers in North Carolina, Sim Scaife and his disgusting minions would have to be the ones to land on her doorstep. Their presence violated the sanctity of her home. Knowing what they were capable of, Retha steeled herself.
“You remember Calloway, Frau Blum,” Scaife said in a silky approximation of courtesy.
The fuzzy-cheeked militia youth smirked self-consciously.
“I remember.”
“And Pickens.”
The wiry man dribbled a brown stream of tobacco into Jacob’s best pewter mug, but she did not look away. She would not give him the satisfaction.
“We’ll be needing more of this.” Scaife shoved a cider jug toward her, scratching the table.
With a glare of anger at his insolence, she set the poker down and took the jug. It was empty. They must have already made a trip to the cellar, she realized, and they were getting drunk. She retrieved a fresh jug from the cellar stores and guardedly set it on the table.
Soldiers had never billeted with her, but after her
experience at Alice’s, she knew enough to give in to their demands. Serving them here alone was even worse. They were closer, more insulting. And a threat to Anna Johanna, who played quietly in the kitchen. She prayed the child would stay quiet. Her safety could depend on her compliance.
In moments, the back door banged, signaling Jacob’s return. Retha shivered, fearing a confrontation. He had no use for the captain. The captain despised him. She reclaimed the poker and hid it in the folds of her skirt.
“Captain Scaife. What a surprise,” Jacob drawled over her head.
Scaife took his feet off the table, setting the front legs of Jacob’s chair down with a crack. Spite shone in the captain’s yellow eyes.
“We’re billeting soldiers all over town, Blum, and you got me.”
“Luck of the draw, no doubt,” Jacob said ironically.
“Could be. Could be your lucky day.”
Splashing cider from the fresh jug onto the polished table, Scaife poured his mug to the brim and winked at Retha. “This your best cider?”
With a move too swift, too graceful for a man so large, Jacob closed the space and towered over the captain.
Retha clenched the poker. Don’t push him, Jacob, she wanted to cry out.
Didn’t he know the hazard of soldiers in the house?
She knew, she realized suddenly, with a certainty that spread through her body like the grippe.
She knew all about them! And knew they could not be stopped. Whatever had once given her this knowledge, had happened like this. To her father, her mother, to her as a child. Coming home on a quiet, hot summer afternoon to soldiers in the house.
“’Tis our best,” Jacob said, leaning one inch closer to the captain. “As is the table. As is the mug.”
Scaife scraped a spur into the smooth oiled floor, a deliberate, provocative act.
“The floor too,” Jacob growled.
The captain’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat, but he flashed his long stained teeth. “You can’t stop me, Blum. I got the right. The army pays to billet me wherever I need to stay. They pay for food and damages.”
“Harm aught of mine, and it won’t be the army that pays.”
“Papa?”
Jacob turned. Alarmed, unthinking, Retha fiercely wrapped her wide-eyed stepdaughter in her skirts, the poker in front of them both, although it offered them scant protection.
Anna Johanna, clutching her doll, allowed Retha’s touch. “Who’s that man?”
“Just a soldier, sweet potato—” Retha began.
“Never knew you had such a pretty little girl, Blum.”
“Get her out of here,” Jacob ordered quietly, grimly.
Retha moved toward the door, but not fast enough. Leaning forward in his chair, Scaife lowered himself to Anna Johanna’s level, a kindly gesture in a decent man. Coming from him, as far as Retha was concerned, kindness sickened.
“What’s your name, honey?” he purred.
Jacob grabbed him by the throat and hoisted him to his feet. “Out. Get out.”
Belatedly Scaife’s men lurched up in defense. In confusion. Having bullied Retha, they expected to bully her husband. She swept Anna Johanna into the kitchen just as Jacob shoved Scaife into his men.
“Take him,” Jacob barked to the stunned soldiers. “Unless you want cold hominy, we have no food for you tonight. Take your supper at the Tavern.”
In the kitchen, Retha mechanically set her stepdaughter by the fire to play supper with her best set of miniature tin dishes. Then Retha slumped against the wall, resting her forehead on the hearth’s mantel while she collected her frazzled thoughts. Anna Johanna hadn’t pitched a fit or panicked; she had accepted Retha’s touch, her grasp, unconditionally. Somehow their urgency must have penetrated beyond the child’s usual obsession. Retha understood the impact of such urgency on a little one.
And suddenly, memory assaulted her like lightning strikes. She was a little girl again. Their cabin had been small, sheltered by deep woods. Dirt-streaked, smelly soldiers filled it. Her father defended her. Her mother shielded her.
But nothing protected her.
Retha swayed against the mantel. The room around her shimmered, blurred, shrank. She bit the inside of her cheek. She would not faint. Would not retreat. Hot blood spurted onto her tongue. It tasted thick, metallic.
Familiar. Bile rose in her throat.
Not again. Not now. Not here.
Through her veil of memories, she heard boots scuff the floor. The men were leaving.
“Mama Retha?” Anna Johanna asked, apparently confused that Retha kept standing by the hearth.
“It’s all right, sweet potato. Your papa will be right back.”
But she heard Scaife snarl. “I’m sleeping here. You can’t stop us, Blum.”
“You can make your bed on the parlor floor. Tonight. After services, after my children are sound asleep,” Jacob answered firmly.
Then they were gone, and Jacob was at her side, his hand trailing over her shoulder, his voice still gruff with anger, yet thick with concern. “Are you all right?”
She started at his touch, then covered her moment of weakness with a flare of anger and a controlled barrage of English so that upset Anna Johanna could not understand.
It didn’t work. By the hearth, the child stirred. “Papa?” she asked worriedly.
“’Twill be all right, pumpkin.” He took a crock from the mantel and handed over precious coffee beans. “Here. Do you want to play with these?”
Anna Johanna smiled slightly. Counting out beans was a special treat. After she settled down to play with them, Jacob pointed Retha into the parlor.
There she wheeled on him in anger. “What were you trying to prove, Jacob Blum? He’s dangerous anytime. But worse humiliated.”
“Anna Johanna is safe, is she not?” Jacob strode around the disordered room, taking a gratuitous kick at the bedrolls the militia men had not bothered to stack.
Retha blazed. “At what price? I was leaving the room. He comes here with two experienced fighting men—”
“Do you think I would not defend my daughter?” He shoved the bedrolls into a corner, out of the way. Out of sight.
“I know you would. You would stand up to the three of them—and die. He would welcome naught more than killing you. Then the rest of us. And we would all die—bloody, senseless…”
Blood on the walls. Blood on the sheet.
Nausea rose in her throat. She covered her mouth and clutched her stomach.
Jacob’s anger softened to worry. “Liebe Gott, Retha. What did that man do before I came? Are you sick? Did he hurt you?”
For Jacob’s sake, she had to deny everything. However righteous, however right, his temper could mean their ruin. “He did naught. I am fine.”
Doubt filled his eyes. His fingers searched her face as if for fever or for injury. She pushed them away. He had to know that she was strong.
“You don’t sound fine. What about my daughter?”
“She’s…”
Frightened for you. Terrified. Dying inside.
And how did she know that? Retha hid her face behind her hands, wondering.
Blood everywhere. She could not tell Jacob that.
“She needs us to be strong,” Retha managed to say.
Jacob removed her hands from her face and held them to his chest. “Liebling, are you unharmed? Truly. Tell me.”
“I am not hurt,” she said hoarsely. She had to be well, strong. For all of them.
“We should take them to the Brothers House, for safety. And Anna Johanna, to the Single Sisters—” she added, trying for facts, control.
“We cannot. Both houses are full. The widows, the elderly, those who cannot retreat to a second floor, as we can. We have to stay upstairs. Us in her room and her in with the boys.”
It made sense, Retha realized. Nearer to the stairs, Anna Johanna’s room opened into the boys’ bedroom. For tonight, the inner room could shelter the three children, and she
and Jacob would guard the outer one. Surely they would be safe that way. Scaife might be poison, but he wouldn’t dare harm them. Not over nothing. Not with an entire Virginia regiment of regular Continental troops in town and on their best behavior.
Jacob watched the window restlessly, then jacked open the back door. “Their lessons are surely over now. I will bring the boys straight home.”
Despite the security his strength had lent her, Retha was relieved when he left. Perhaps he would cool down. She assembled their meager supper and decided to chance giving Anna Johanna a bath during their brief lull alone together. She made the brisk sponging a game, drawing on an old memory of an English lullaby, hoping its novelty would distract Anna Johanna. It worked well enough. It even soothed Retha a bit. By the time the boys were home, the Carolina clay that had caked her stepdaughter’s hands and arms had stained the fresh water in the bucket brick red.
“Been making mud pies, Anna Slow—” Nicholas greeted her, but Jacob cut him off with a quick tweak of his upper arm. “—Anna Jo?”
But his father’s discipline did not deter Nicholas. Eyes shining, he vilified the evil English for beating Brother Bonner, glorified the heroic regiment sweeping down from Virginia to ensure Cornwallis’s defeat, and celebrated it that real militia men had occupied his home and would be back to spend the night.
Finally, tensely, Jacob lost patience. “There will be no more talk of soldiers in this house.”
Nicholas flared. “I’d go for a soldier if I could!”
“You could not. You are but a lad,” Jacob said brutally.
Retha looked up, shocked. Her husband had just thrown over months of careful progress in counseling his son.
Nicholas opened his mouth to reply, but no words came out. Hurt, angry tears rimmed the eyes of the boy who wanted to be a man. He pressed his lips together and savagely, silently, wiped the tears away. Jacob might be right, she thought, but he had lost this battle.
Matthias slunk into the parlor. When Retha went to call him to supper, she found him perched dejectedly on a parlor chair, thumbing through the family Bible, lips moving as he pored over it. Nor did the slapdash supper whet his appetite. The old Matthias returned with a vengeance, pushing food around on his plate.
Wild Indigo Page 29
