“Look what I found, Sister Hope,” she said, pointing into the undergrowth.
Hope’s eyes followed her finger.
“It’s a bird’s nest!” said Betsy.
“Oh yes . . . I see . . . so very tiny.”
“And look—a little blue egg broken in half.”
“It’s a hummingbird’s nest, Betsy! The egg must have just hatched and the baby flown off with its mother.”
“Do you think it will come back?” said Betsy, a little disappointed.
“Probably not until next year,” replied Hope. “But if the nest is still here, perhaps the mother hummingbird will use it again.”
They turned and made their way hand in hand back out of the wood. It was quiet for a minute; then Hope spoke as they went.
“I have to leave and go to London,” she said.
“May I go with you, Sister Hope?” asked Betsy.
“I’m afraid I must go alone,” replied Hope.
“Please . . . please let me go with you.”
Hope looked away. How she loved this girl!
“I have a great deal to do, Betsy.”
“But you are coming back?”
Hope had not planned to return to Devon. Before she had time to consider it further, however, the words were out of her mouth.
“I will come back before returning to Switzerland,” she said. “I promise you will see me again. From now on, we will always be the best of friends.”
————
The following morning they all rode into Milverscombe together, taking the car and one buggy, to see Timothy and Hope off for London.
As the train pulled into the station and slowed to a steamy, noisy stop, Hector and Timothy began loading the bags.
Betsy began to cry. Hope took her a little way aside, then stretched her arms around her.
“We will be friends forever, remember, Betsy?” she whispered in her ear.
“But I am afraid you will never come back.”
“I will come back, Betsy. You may trust me.”
They returned to the others. More good-byes followed, not nearly so tearful as otherwise might have been the case, since Hope had shared her promise to Betsy with the others. This was only a temporary parting, not a final farewell one.
As the train pulled out five minutes later, both Timothy and Hope sat beside one another quietly absorbed in their own thoughts. Both had expected to leave Heathersleigh alone, but they had been given the unexpected blessing of sharing the departure with a new friend. Yet both felt the breaking of bonds deeply with those they were leaving behind on the platform, especially Hope for the girl whose eyes were red as she stared after the departing train. For the first thirty or forty minutes it remained silent between them. It was the first time their dialog had not been free flowing and energetic since their meeting.
“A remarkable family,” commented Timothy at length.
“Indeed,” nodded Hope. “I can hardly imagine that a week ago I did not know them—except for Amanda, that is. Now it seems I have known Jocelyn all my life.”
Gradually they again began to talk, and soon were laughing and conversing freely. Eventually the discussion came round again to Timothy’s church difficulties.
“Hope, will you answer me a simple question?” said Timothy.
“I don’t know—I can try.”
“Why are some Christians afraid to think? Why are they threatened by ideas outside the comfortable boundaries of what they have been taught?”
“That sounds like two questions,” laughed Hope.
“All right, then, two questions. And I will add a third—Why is orthodoxy, by the standards of their peers, a higher thing to seek than the will of God? What is it with the tightly constricted mindset of the average evangelical? I do not understand it.”
“Is it because people are afraid to think for themselves?” suggested Hope.
“But why?”
“Is it that orthodoxy inbreeds fear in order to perpetuate itself? It is something I have often wondered.”
“Have you noticed how the moment any question is raised, tradition-loving, fear-bound Christians run to their pastor or favorite theologian to ask what they are ‘supposed’ to believe. I face it all the time.”
“What do you say?”
“I tell them to go to the Gospels and seek God’s truth. But most are not capable of such a thing. When they go to the Gospels, they are only capable of seeing their own narrow orthodoxies reflected back to them, and then they wrongly assume those orthodoxies to originate in the Lord’s words rather than in the biases of their own brains.”
“I agree that fear is a deeply rooted component of the ordinary religious mind,” said Hope. “Growth is not viewed as the expansion of spiritual awareness, but the accumulated learning of the correct doctrines in more and more detail.”
“Precisely,” rejoined Timothy. “And what a trial this has been for me as a pastor. The more doctrines one knows by rote, with accompanying proof-texts, the more evangelicals flatter themselves that they are growing. In fact it is just the opposite. This doctrine preoccupation leads not to growth at all, but to spiritual stagnation and the numbing of the spiritual senses.”
“How did you ever wind up in the pastorate in the first place?” asked Hope. “You seem far too free a thinker to be happy in the pulpit.”
“Because I love the Church, I love God’s people, and I love the Bible,” replied Timothy. “I thought that by teaching the Bible and nurturing God’s people, perhaps in my own small way I could help change the Church.”
“And now?”
“I begin to despair, I must admit. I have given my whole life to these ends, and it is difficult to see much fruit.”
“I am sure there is abundant fruit in many individual lives.”
Timothy sighed. “I am sure you are right. But being prone to melancholy, sometimes it is difficult for me to keep my head up in the face of daily discouragements.”
“There are the Rutherfords of Devon,” said Hope, “to come back around to where we started this conversation. Their faith began, as I hear the story, from a tract thrown into the gutter by Jocelyn’s husband . . . a tract which led him to you.”
Timothy smiled.
“Yes . . . you are right,” he said. “Even if there was nothing my ministry had to show for itself than the story of that family, I would have to say God be praised.”
They arrived in the great metropolis two hours later.
Timothy took Hope to her hotel. When time came for them to part in the lobby, they paused, looked at one another for a moment and smiled. Neither could find adequate words.
Timothy opened his arms and Hope went straight into them, returning his embrace affectionately.
“Thank you, Timothy,” she said. “These have been such wonderful days shared with you.”
“I thank God for them too,” he said. “You have helped breathe fresh new winds into this tired soul.”
They stepped back and smiled again.
“I will call on you tomorrow here at the hotel,” said Timothy.
When Hope lay down in her hotel bed that evening, she was thinking about many things, not the least of which was her future, and what she was going to do about a little girl named Elsbet.
52
Embedded Message
The hour was late.
Usually her times of prayer and thought came early. But on this night Amanda had been unable to sleep. She rose, not with a sense of anything momentous at hand, but from simple sleeplessness. By the time she had put on a dressing gown and tiptoed through the dark and silent house and upstairs to the library, however, a feeling began to grow upon her that sleep had been kept from her for a reason.
Indeed something momentous was at hand. A long-hidden secret was about to be revealed. It had been four days since Timothy and Sister Hope departed. With Heathersleigh again quiet and life resuming its routine, Amanda’s thoughts had returned to their former pathways.
&
nbsp; She now sat, an hour later, alone in the library, the great family Bible they had only discovered recently open on a table in front of her, a thin desk lamp illuminating a sheet of paper beside the Bible containing various notes, phrases, and scriptural references jotted down in Amanda’s hand. It was sometime after one in the morning. All was deathly still. If mice inhabited the walls and hidden passages of Heathersleigh Hall, they were not about. This night had been reserved for silence and revelation.
Amanda glanced at her paper. The unplanned investigation had begun as she perused the family record in the opening pages of the large Bible in front of her and saw the odd reference in the margin next to the names Ashby Rutherford and Cynthia Rutherford, the twins born to Henry Rutherford’s wife, Eliza, on February 11, 1829—a tiny handwritten notation, Genesis 25:24–5; 29:16; 25:26.
Why had someone entered these references at the edge of the page of birth records?
She recalled Maggie’s Bible with similar notations. Maggie had explained them in connection with the discovery of the key and secret panel of her secretary.
What were the passages referred to in Maggie’s Bible? It had something to do with the birthright.
Amanda now turned to the three verses indicated and read them in order, first the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth verses of chapter 25: And when her days to be delivered were fulfilled, behold, there were twins in her womb. And the first came out red, all over like an hairy garment; and they called his name Esau.
Then the sixteenth verse of chapter 29: And Laban had two daughters: the name of the elder was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel.
And finally the twenty-sixth verse, again in chapter 25: And after that came his brother out, and his hand took hold on Esau’s heel: and his name was called Jacob: and Isaac was threescore years old when she bare them.
Amanda sat back slowly and thought a moment.
What could be the connection between Leah and Rachel, and Jacob and Esau? What did these three strange passages have to do with each other?
Her eyes perused the lines again. As they did, she seemed to notice something strange.
Amanda bent down close to the page and squinted in the pale light. Were her eyes deceiving her, or did she see a faint line, barely visible, apparently made by a lead pencil, underlining a few of the words of the three texts? Whatever the lines were, they were surely not accidental. Someone had made them . . . but why?
Now she read only the underlined portions.
At first they seemed to make no sense. She read them again, this time jotting down the underlined words as she went.
Suddenly her eyes jolted open and she sat back in her chair stunned. Had she just seen what she thought she had seen!
She read over the verses again.
Could it possibly be! Who made these markings!
She looked at her page and read them over a third time, then remembered Maggie’s Bible.
She would have to go out to Maggie’s tomorrow and look at it again. The notations and clues in the two Bibles must be connected. And perhaps a visit to the church would be in order as well.
She mustn’t let her imagination run away with her, Amanda told herself. She would say nothing until she investigated further.
But the cryptic message hidden in the lines of text could not be coincidental. And she had a feeling she knew what it meant!
With great difficulty, but knowing there was nothing further she could do at present, she rose, turned out the light, and returned to her room to try once again to get to sleep.
53
Deciphering the Clues
When Stuart Coleridge opened the door of the parsonage the following morning, he was as surprised to see Amanda standing before him as he was at her request.
“Good morning, Vicar Coleridge,” she said. “I wondered if I could look at the parish records.”
Again, he thought to himself, reminded of the strange man who had called on him the previous summer. “Of course, Amanda,” he replied. “Which ones?”
“Births,” she answered.
Wondering what this could all be about, but saying nothing for the present, the vicar led Amanda from the parsonage to the church, where he removed the two large books bound in faded red leather from the case where they were kept and set them on a table before her. Amanda flipped through the first two or three pages of the oldest volume until she came to the early years of the nineteenth century, then began following the entries more closely until she arrived at the year she sought.
There were the births noted on February 11, 1829, exactly as in the family Bible at home: Ashby Rutherford, the eldest, followed on the next line by his twin sister, Cynthia Rutherford.
To the right, in the margin, was also noted a Scripture reference similar to that in the Bible back at the Hall—Genesis 25:26, 31; Psalm 27:12—with the tiny initials A.C. and a date beside them, 16–7–55.
What was it with all these marginal references? thought Amanda, first in Maggie’s Bible, then in the family Bible, and now in the parish records!
Had they all been made by the same hand? And yet . . . as she studied this particular note in more detail, it seemed distinctive from that in the Hall Bible, the hand a little shakier and more upright. But both, though slightly different, began with Genesis 25.
“Do you have a Bible I could borrow for a moment, Vicar Coleridge?” asked Amanda.
“Certainly,” he replied. “I will only be a moment.”
He turned and left. While he was gone, Amanda took the time to write down the references of the three verses on a fresh sheet of paper. The vicar returned a minute later with a Bible in hand. Amanda looked up the three passages and read them in order, beginning with the twenty-sixth verse exactly as she had read it last night in the library: And after that came his brother out, and his hand took hold on Esau’s heel; and his name was called Jacob: and Isaac was threescore years when she bare them.
Then the thirty-first: And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birthright.
And finally Psalm 27:12: Deliver me not over unto the will of mine enemies: for false witnesses are risen up against me, and such as breathe out cruelty.
Again, she thought, what was the connection between this odd collection of verses?
Her mind full of many questions, Amanda thanked Vicar Coleridge, and began the same walk from the village to Maggie’s cottage that she had made long ago at age nine. Today, however, she was on a mission and she had no idea where it would lead.
As she went she reflected on what she had discovered thus far. If the wild notion that the clue in the family Bible had sparked was true, it would certainly seem to be confirmed by the reference in the parish birth record. And it would be confirmed by Maggie’s suspicions that Bishop Crompton had indeed been paid off as a false witness.
Amanda quickened her step, the sense growing upon her that Orelia Moylan’s old Bible might hold the remaining clues that would unravel the final threads of this mystery.
Hastily she entered the cottage, gave Maggie a hug and kiss, then asked, “Grandma Maggie, may I borrow your Bible?”
“Certainly, dear. What for?”
“I’ll tell you later,” replied Amanda, picking up the Bible from the open secretary, where it always lay. She kissed Maggie again and was gone as quickly as she had come, leaving Maggie watching after her, wondering what it could all be about.
Amanda hurried back to the library at the Hall, where the family Bible still sat open from the previous night. She placed the two Bibles side by side, then also laid on the table the two sheets of her notes, including the parish record entries she had just written down forty minutes ago.
She turned again to the significant passage in Mark 4 Maggie had shown them months ago where she had found the words about the mystery and the key, and with the tiny reference to Genesis 25:31–33.
Genesis 25 again!
Every clue pointed to the Jacob and Esau passage!
Amanda turned in both Bibles to the n
ow significant passage in Genesis 25 about Esau’s sale of his birthright to Jacob, which was noted in all three marginal additions. She glanced back and forth between them. Maggie had assumed the Jacob and Esau reference had only to do with the sale of the cottage to Bishop Crompton. But now Amanda was sure there was more.
She continued to stare at the pages, now focusing her attention, not on the faint underlinings in the family Bible, but on the page in Maggie’s small Bible. In the center column, among the various references and cross-references of the study portion, had been added in hand a small additional reference beside the thirty-third verse: Proverbs 20:21.
What could Proverbs 20:21 have to do with Jacob and Esau?
Was this a clue meant to be followed?
Quickly Amanda flipped through the pages to the book of Proverbs, then read the indicated twenty-first verse: An inheritance may be gotten hastily at the beginning; but the end thereof shall not be blessed.
The verse was underlined, this time boldly and unmistakably in pen.
What could it mean?
Again, in the center column among the printed references, she saw another handwritten notation, this time leading her to 2 Chronicles 10:16. Hurriedly she turned back toward the front of the book, found 2 Chronicles, and read: And when all Israel saw that the king would not hearken unto them, the people answered the king, saying, What portion have we in David? And we have none inheritance in the son of Jesse: every man to your tents, O Israel: and now, David, see to thine own house. So all Israel went to their tents.
This time only the words “we have none inheritance in the son” were underlined.
And again she noted a verse among the center references beside 2 Chronicles 10:16. This time she found herself led to 2 Kings 9:12: And they said, It is false; tell us now, Amanda read as soon as she located the verse. And he said, Thus and thus spake he to me, saying, Thus saith the Lord, I have anointed thee king over Israel.
Only the words “It is false” were underlined.
By now Amanda’s brain was racing feverishly. She realized she had stumbled onto a circuitous scriptural trail laid down generations before, she suspected by Maggie’s own grandmother Orelia Moylan, the midwife who had delivered the Rutherford twins. Maggie had probably noticed these underlinings at some time in her years of Bible reading, but had no doubt never followed them in order as Amanda was herself doing now, beginning with the first reference beside Genesis 25:33. And when the underlined portions were read in sequence, they told an incredible tale. Was it possible, thought Amanda, that she had at last unearthed the long-hidden secret about what had actually happened that night back in 1829?
A New Dawn Over Devon Page 24