Free Wild Indigo by Judith Stanton

course. I had forgotten. You speak English.”
    â€œNot often anymore.”
    â€œAll the more reason for you to choose your friends with care.”
    â€œWhat do you mean by that?”
    With an impatient grumble, he drew himself up to his full, formidable height. “Sister Mary Margaretha, are you altogether unaware of the war that is going on around us?”
    She shrugged irritably. “Of course, I’m aware of—”
    â€œThat each side suspects us of spying for the other? Scaife plagues me because I, a German, speak English. He thinks I’m our town’s liaison to the British. And now you speak English, too. Suppose he found you outside town with your friend.”
    â€œI would never let myself fall into that man’s hands.” Retha wrapped her arms around herself tohide a shudder at the thought. No one, no one could track her in the woods. Singing Stones had taught her well to bend but not break twigs, to conceal her tracks in streams, to step carefully around the greenery that lined the forest floor.
    â€œListen to me. If he caught you out there, you would have to explain yourself in English. You couldn’t defend yourself otherwise. One sentence of your good English, and he would clap you in the garrison brigade before you could blink.”
    â€œHe would not catch me,” she insisted.
    Jacob gave no weight to her remark. “I want you to stay away from Alice Vogler.”
    Retha merely nodded, unable to promise that, but telling herself her nod was not a lie. She didn’t see her friend that often.
    â€œAnd don’t speak English. Coming from a Moravian Sister, people will mistake you—as they have mistaken me.”
    He had a point. Even the Moravians had mistaken her, and she’d been wrong for them. She always would be. She propped herself against the fence, thoroughly out of sorts. A young linden tree screened them from the bustle of the market. He leaned against the fence next to her, his shadowed face inscrutable as she searched it, unsure what to say until the words left her lips.
    â€œEverything is wrong between us now, isn’t it?” she muttered. Jacob Blum had briefly offered her a precious dream, and she had planned to say yes. Now all her difference would drive him away.
    â€œI hope not, Sister Retha. I only want to keep you safe until you are fully under my protection.”
    He cupped her small hands in his large ones as though protecting her already. An unaccustomed feeling of belonging stole into her guarded heart.
    â€œI am bound to the lot,” he went on, “and we drew an affirmative. I cannot back down. Nor do I wish to. We need you, every one of us.”
    He wanted her for his children.
    Her brief sense of belonging skidded away. Her face burned with mortification. Upright, stalwart, handsome Jacob Blum needed her to tend his children, and nothing more. She thought with longing of Brother Ernst’s obvious pride in his new bride and of Gottlieb Vogler’s deep, abiding love for his wife.
    Neither, it seemed, was to be her fate. Marrying Jacob Blum’s whole family was a high price to pay to escape life as a Single Sister and gain a home of her own. And for her, that home would come without the tender love that she envied in her friend’s match.
    â€œSister Retha?” His hands clasped hers warmly. “My home will be yours. Our home. There is no higher calling than to be a Married Sister.”
    She could not bring herself to look at him. She looked across the Square at his neat half-timbered house. A home, which she had always wanted. She looked beyond the Square, beyond carts, wagons, settlers, and townspeople, to her meadow. It shimmered in the searing afternoon sun. She knew its every rock and stone and tree and twist of creek, day or night, heat or frost. The meadow called to her, and beyond it, the forest, the freedom of the wilderness beckoned to the part of her heart that would always