Love Finds You in Nazareth, Pennsylvania

by Melanie Dobson

  Perhaps—her skin tingled at the thought—perhaps it was time to become one in body as well.

  Footsteps echoed up the stairway, and she heard Christian call her name. He was beside her then, the candle dancing between them. He opened his hand. “David gave me the key.”

  Her heart raced at his words, but he didn’t reach to unlock the door. He waited for her.

  “Open it,” she whispered, and he slid the key into the lock and jostled it until it opened.

  The candlelight revealed an array of steamer trunks lined up under the slope of a low ceiling and dried bouquets of herbs hanging suspended from the ceiling. Moonlight stole through a small window on the far side of the room, wandering over the trunks and herbs to the bed on the left side of the room. A bed big enough for two.

  A sharp breath of air rushed into Susanna’s lungs, and in her fear, she felt Christian pull away from her and step back toward the open doorway. “We can leave,” he said.

  He thought he had failed her, but she had failed him. Even after he’d told her the truth about Catharine, she hadn’t been a wife to him.

  “Christian,” she began—and then, not knowing how to explain her feelings or the desire swelling inside her, she reached for the door and closed it behind them. Then she bolted it.

  Christian took the candle from her hands and walked it over to the washstand beside the bed. Then he returned for her, lifting her up onto the bed. She sank into the feathers.

  Sitting up, she searched Christian’s face in the shadows, and then she glanced toward the door, worried that someone would interrupt their stolen time together. “How long do we have?”

  Christian slowly reached up and untied the ribbons that hid her hair from him. He tossed her haube onto the floor. “All night.”

  He removed the pins that held her hair, and it cascaded over her shoulders and down her back. He gently weaved his fingers through it.

  No one would knock on their door. No one would tell them they must return to their separate living places. She and Christian could be together for the entire night.

  “You are beautiful,” he said.

  “Only because it’s dark.”

  “No, Susanna.” He put his fingers to her lips, hushing her nervous protest. “You are beautiful.”

  Fire raced inside her at his words, and more than anything she’d ever wanted in her life, she wanted him to take her in his arms and make her his wife.

  But he didn’t take her in his arms. Instead he stood and moved to the washstand, taking the cloth beside the washbasin. He dipped the cloth into the basin and water pattered softly into the basin as he wrung out the cloth.

  When he returned, he knelt in front of her and slowly unrolled her stockings, over her knees and down her calves and over her toes. With the cloth, warmed in his hands, he washed her legs and her feet.

  The touch of the cloth on her skin, the way her husband watched her in her pleasure, made her feel the desire of his own love. And she reveled in it.

  “Thou hast ravished my heart,” he said, the words from the Song of Solomon.

  “My heart is yours,” she whispered. “I’m not scared anymore.”

  His eyes were intent on her when he slowly moved forward. The heat from his lips shot through her body, warming her breasts, her toes. Then he blew out the candle, and she welcomed him to her.

  Neither the organ music rattling the trunks at first light nor any hunger for breakfast provoked Brother and Sister Boehler to leave their haven. The only longing they had was for each other, and very early on that Christmas morning, they savored the love the Savior had given them, sweeter than Susanna had ever imagined, from a beginning she thought impossible to overcome.

  But Christian Boehler was her husband, and in the sprinkling of morning light, regret no longer filled his eyes.

  She smiled as she rested her head on the fleece of his chest.

  “For the rest of my life,” he whispered as he ran his fingers through her hair, “I want to wake up on Christmas morning with you in my arms.”

  The love of their Savior had replaced his regret and replaced her fears. It forgave them both of their weaknesses and it brought them together as husband and wife.

  Epilogue

  July 1757

  Christian and Nathan slept soundly on each side of Susanna as the summer sun stole around the curtain covering the hut’s doorway. She shooed a gnat off Nathan’s face and then stood before she pulled her short-sleeved buckskin dress over her shift. When she opened the curtain, morning air greeted her like the light flutter of a kiss, and her bare feet padded softly through the grass, toward the river that ran below the village.

  Sitting on a rock, Susanna dipped her hands in the water and rinsed her face and the bare skin on her legs and arms. Her Indian brothers and sisters would awaken soon and eat their morning fare of cittamum and berries as they prepared for today’s harvesting of corn. But before she joined the wonderful busyness of their harvest, she relished her daily ritual of cleansing and quiet minutes alone with the Savior.

  It was hard to believe that almost two years had passed since she and Christian had paddled back up the Lehigh River to Tanochtahe. French and British and many of the Indians continued to war around them, massacring white men and burning houses, but the Christian Indians remained safe in Tanochtahe. Even though months had passed since they’d received news from the Brethren in Bethlehem and Nazareth, the last she had heard they were safe as well, and she quietly thanked the Savior for it.

  Because of the earth’s shaking almost two years ago and because of the awe-filled account of God’s salvation that had rippled through the tribes—many came to know Christ, and their new Brethren flooded this village in the midst of the turmoil. The elders in Bethlehem had sent Christian and Susanna to Tanochtahe indefinitely as messengers, along with the Gnadenhutten Indians who had relocated from Bethlehem to this village after the massacre. She hadn’t seen Howling Wolf or Lily again, but she had heard stories. Howling Wolf’s band of warriors may not have been willing to follow God, but they certainly feared Him.

  She stood on her toes and pulled down a tree limb. Reaching high, she pulled off a reddish fruit that was about as large as a plum. Estachioni, the Indians called it. As far as she knew, there was no English name for the fruit. The tree limb whipped up into the air at her release, and when she took a bite of the fruit, her mouth filled with the tart sweetness of juice. She leaned back against the tree to savor it.

  She and Christian felt at home here in Tanochtahe. He loved his work as messenger of the Gospel and servant to the Indian people. She loved living among the women and children and being constantly delighted by the joys in the wilderness around them. And with Chief Langoma’s blessing, they both were enjoying their role as parent to Nathan.

  The leaves and grass rustled across the river, and she smiled as she took her last bite, waiting for the morning entrance of deer that drank along its shores. But when the heads of the beautiful animals didn’t appear through the trees, her smile fell and her instincts sharpened. She scanned the tall grasses and logs along the bank until the leaves rustled again.

  “Who’s there?” she said in the Delaware language.

  A crown of dark hair slowly appeared through the leaves as an Indian stepped into the sunlight. Startled, Susanna hopped backward and scanned the trees again to see who the Indian was with, but no one else appeared.

  The Indian was a woman not much older than her, and her heart leapt, thinking perhaps it might be Lily coming home. But as the woman drew closer, Susanna realized that this woman was taller than Lily. There was more cream mixed with the tans of her skin, and the slight smile on her lips was one of nervousness, not familiarity.

  The woman slipped off her moccasins and easily stepped across the wide rocks that bridged the river. When she stepped into the water a few feet from Susanna, the gentle rapids lapping over her ankles, Susanna spoke softly to her in the Delaware language.

  “My name is Lasu
win,” she said. Christian wanted her to be known among the Delaware as “Music.” For the songs, he said, that poured out of her mouth.

  The woman’s smile widened. “Lasuwin,” she repeated. She hesitated, glancing up and down the river before she turned back to Susanna. Then in perfect English, she whispered, “I am glad to make your acquaintance.”

  Susanna’s eyes widened. “You speak English?”

  She nodded. “I am searching for the messengers from Bethlehem.”

  Susanna studied the woman for a moment and then directed her up the hill, toward the village. Usually the Indians seeking more information about the Christ Child came to Tanochtahe in groups, but as she trailed the woman up the hill, Susanna knew the Savior had brought her to them. She only wondered why she was alone.

  Small fires were burning around the village huts, both for cooking and to chase the gnats away, and several of her Indian friends looked up with curiosity at the newcomer and nodded at her in greeting. Susanna stopped the woman before her and Christian’s hut, and she whispered for her to wait.

  “Mama!” Nathan exclaimed as she slipped inside. Susanna reached out her arms for the boy who would too quickly pass into manhood.

  As Nathan hugged her, Christian rolled over and edged up onto his elbows, his gaze examining her like he hadn’t seen her hours ago. “You are beautiful,” he whispered.

  She blushed, and for a moment, she forgot about the woman waiting outside and the waking village around them. Back in Nazareth, she had never thought Christian would look upon her as a loving husband did his wife, and now whenever he did, it made her heart flutter. And her cheeks warm with the pleasure of it.

  “Come.” She motioned toward the curtain. “We have company.”

  She fanned her face as she returned to the Indian woman with Christian at her side.

  “This is my husband, Gachtatam.”

  “Leader?” the woman asked.

  “No—” Christian shook his head. He still got embarrassed when someone questioned the meaning of his name, but Chief Langoma had insisted on Gachtatam. And Christian had finally relented.

  Christian stepped closer to the woman, and Susanna watched him squint in the growing light. “I know you,” he said simply.

  The woman’s gaze dropped, and her bare toes slowly made an arch in the dirt.

  “You wanted to follow the Savior,” Christian continued. “You wanted to, but you couldn’t.”

  The woman looked up at Susanna and then at Christian. “I was too afraid.”

  “Mary?” Christian questioned. “Your name is Mary, isn’t it?”

  She nodded.

  “Your people—they were going to harm you if you chose to follow our Savior.”

  Susanna reached out and took Christian’s hand, worried that he would frighten Mary. She squeezed his hand gently to quiet him.

  “I was afraid before,” she whispered. “And still I am afraid, but your Savior—He is a God of love and peace and forgiveness. I want to be baptized.”

  Susanna’s heart thrilled at the honesty of the woman’s words, at her choice to follow Christ in spite of the threat of persecution.

  Sadness crept back onto the woman’s face. “Am I too late?”

  Christian shook his head. “You will never regret this decision. We can baptize you today.”

  The smile returned. “I will go to the river, but first—”

  Mary hesitated again, looking into the trees like she had at the river.

  “Before I am baptized, there is a story I must tell you.”

  Susanna opened the curtain and Nathan raced outside to play among his many friends. Susanna and Christian sat on one side of the small hut while Mary sat on the bench across from them. And she told them the story of the English captive who had shown her the forgiveness of their Savior.

  About the Author

  Melanie Dobson is the award-winning author of nine historical and contemporary novels, including Love Finds You in Amana, Iowa, Love Finds You in Homestead, Iowa, and The Silent Order. Love Finds You in Liberty, Indiana was chosen as the Best Book of Indiana (fiction) in 2010, and her suspense novel The Black Cloister received the Foreword Book of the Year award in 2009 for religious fiction.

  Melanie is the former corporate publicity manager at Focus on the Family, and she worked in public relations for fifteen years before she began writing fiction full-time. She spent her high school years living in Iowa where she became intrigued by the Amana Colonies and Amana people, and she now resides with her family near Portland, Oregon.

  MELANIEDOBSON.COM

  Author’s Note

  The writing of this story was a personal journey for me. My ancestors joined the Unity of the Brethren (later known as the Moravians) in the 1750s, so my travels to Bethlehem and Nazareth were an opportunity for me to research my family’s heritage along with researching this novel. As I read about the custom of marrying by lot, I stumbled upon an entry with the names of my fifth great-grandparents, Johann Beroth and Catharina Neumann. The entry said they married by lot in Bethlehem on July 29, 1758. They were married for fifty-eight years.

  I don’t know if my great-grandparents knew each other before they married, and as I read pieces of their story, I wondered if they were excited to marry or if either of them dreaded their wedding day. I—along with my father and my grandfather and my siblings—are certainly grateful the lot brought them together.

  In my great-grandmother’s short memoir, she writes of counting the cost before joining the Unity. She knew there would be hardships and yet she felt the draw of the Savior to join the Moravian people in Bethlehem and said she was “serene and satisfied” in her decision even as her family sent a cart and men to carry her away. She refused to leave the Brethren and remained as part of the congregation until her death in 1819.

  While Love Finds You in Nazareth, Pennsylvania is fiction, I have tried to record and reflect a small but significant slice of the Moravian’s vast heritage. The General Economy as well as the separate choirs for families lasted for almost twenty years, another decade after the conclusion of this book. After 1764, husband and wives began sharing households and children often lived with their parents, but even today, when a Moravian goes home to the Savior, they can request to be buried with their choir in God’s Acre.

  The Moravians continued to marry by lot until 1818 when a devout Moravian man insisted on marrying a woman the lot refused him. He left the church to marry but later he and his wife rejoined, and after that, marriages began to be arranged by families instead of by the lot.

  The settlement known as Gnadenhutten (Shelters of Grace) grew to five hundred Moravian Indians and sixteen missionaries until hostile Indians attacked this settlement on November 24, 1755, in an attempt to drive the Indian converts back to their native society. Ten Moravian missionaries and a baby lost their lives in this massacre. A Moravian missionary named Susanna Nitschmann was captured by the attackers, and she died several months later in captivity. Susanne Partsch jumped out of a window that night and hid in a hollow tree by the river until soldiers found her. Miraculously, her husband also survived the attack.

  The earth in Pennsylvania shook on November 18, 1755. Beds shook and doors flew open, a foreshadowing, perhaps, of God’s grief at the tragic loss of the Indians and missionaries at Gnadenhutten. After the Gnadenhutten tragedy, the Nursery children were relocated from Nazareth to Bethlehem on the first of December.

  In spite of devastation across the Lehigh Valley during the French and Indian War, the communities of Bethlehem and Nazareth were never attacked. Nazareth became a safe haven for refugees during this war, as the Moravians sheltered hundreds of people every day as these refugees fled hostile Indians. The Disciple’s House, known now as the Manor House, still stands in Nazareth, though both Count Zinzendorf and his wife went home to the Savior before they were able to live in the house.

  Many Moravian women wrote of their reluctance to marry when they received the call to wed through the lot, and
yet many of the same women later described terrible grief over losing their husbands. It seems their love for their spouses blossomed within marriage instead of before.

  Maria Reitzenbach wrote, “I must admit that I found it indescribably hard to take this step…. Only the thought that it was my duty to do everything for the love of my dear Saviour who had forgiven me my sins and had taken me into a state of grace made me give myself up to this.”

  Later, Maria wrote, “I was made a widow by the calling home of my dear husband, after we had lived in marriage for twenty-two years happy and content and had shared joy and pain and had been a comfort and a cheer to each other. For this reason I felt his loss very painfully and no one could comfort me but the Friend to whom I had often told all my troubles and with whom I alone took refuge” (Moravian Women’s Memoirs, translated by Katherine Faull).

  Moravians continued their mission work to the Indians after the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War, but another massacre at a Moravian Indian settlement during the Revolutionary War made the resentment and suspicion of white men and their faith difficult for Native Americans in the late eighteenth-century to overcome.

  Hundreds of Moravian missionaries have died on the mission field since they began sharing the good news in 1732, but the Moravian church continues to grow and thrive around the world today. As a result of their continued mission work, Moravians are spread out across five continents to often-forgotten places like Suriname, on the north shore of South America, and Tanzania in East Africa, where there are more than 400,000 Moravians.

  I have tried to make this novel as factually accurate as possible through interviews and the reading of multiple history books, along with personal journals and town diaries. Some of the facts were changed for the sake of the story, including the date of completion for the Disciple’s House (dedicated in November 1756) and the addition of both a Sisters House and a Gemeinhaus to early Nazareth. In the mid-1750s, the Brethren would have worshipped in the Saal at the Nursery, and until the Sisters House was built, the married women lived on the third floor of the Nursery. Also, the Moravians capitalized names like Laborer, Diener, and Sister on all occasions.