The Betrayal Read online

  The

  Betrayal

  BEVERLY

  LEWIS

  The

  Betrayal

  The Betrayal

  Copyright © 2003

  Beverly Lewis

  Cover design by Dan Thornberg

  Note to Readers: Although Martyrs Mirror is an actual book, the account of Catharina Meylin is a creation of the author.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-0-7642-2331-0

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lewis, Beverly.

  The betrayal / by Beverly Lewis.

  p. cm. — (Abram’s daughters ; 2)

  ISBN 0-7642-2331-3 (pbk.) — ISBN 0-7642-2807-2 (hardcover) — ISBN 0-7642-2806-4 (large print)

  1. Lancaster County (Pa.)—Fiction. 2. Sisters—Fiction.

  3. Amish—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series: Lewis, Beverly. Abram’s daughters ; 2.

  PS3562.E9383B48 2003

  813'.54—dc21

  2002008665

  * * *

  Dedication

  For

  Pamela Ronn,

  my ‘‘shadow twin’’

  and wonderful-good friend.

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Part Two

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Acknowledgments

  By Beverly Lewis

  ABRAM’S DAUGHTERS

  The Covenant · The Betrayal · The Sacrifice

  The Prodigal · The Revelation

  THE HERITAGE OF LANCASTER COUNTY

  The Shunning · The Confession · The Reckoning

  ANNIE’S PEOPLE

  The Preacher’s Daughter · The Englisher · The Brethren

  THE COURTSHIP OF NELLIE FISHER

  The Parting · The Forbidden · The Longing

  The Postcard · The Crossroad

  The Redemption of Sarah Cain

  October Song · Sanctuary* · The Sunroom

  The Beverly Lewis Amish Heritage Cookbook

  www.BeverlyLewis.com

  *with David Lewis

  BEVERLY LEWIS, born in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, fondly recalls her growing-up years. A keen interest in her mother’s Plain family heritage has led Beverly to set many of her popular stories in Lancaster County.

  A former schoolteacher and accomplished pianist, Beverly is a member of the National League of American Pen Women (the Pikes Peak branch), and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. She is the 2003 recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus Award at Evangel University, Springfield, Missouri, and her blockbuster novel, The Shunning, recently won the Gold Book Award. Her bestselling novel October Song won the Silver Seal in the Benjamin Franklin Awards, and The Postcard and Sanctuary, (a collaboration with her husband, David) received Silver Angel Awards, as did her delightful picture book for all ages, Annika’s Secret Wish. Beverly and her husband have three grown children and one grandchild and make their home in the Colorado foothills.

  August 9, 1947

  Dear Jonas,

  Honestly, you spoil me! I’ve saved up a whole handful of your letters, and only a few months have passed since you left for Ohio. It’s all I can do to keep from running to the kitchen calendar yet again to count up the days till your visit for our baptism Sunday next month. How good of your bishop to permit you to join my church district. The Lord above is working all things out for us, ain’t so?

  Your latest letter arrived today in the mail, and I hurried out to the front porch and curled up in Mamma’s wicker chair to read in private. I felt you were right there with me, Jonas. Just the two of us together again.

  It’s easy to see the many things you describe in Millersburg— the clapboard carpenter’s shed where you’re busy with the apprenticeship, the big brick house where you eat and sleep, even the bright faces of the little Mellinger children. How wonderful-good the Lord God has been to give you your heart’s ambition, and I am truly happy for you . . . and for us.

  Here in Gobbler’s Knob (where you are sorely missed!), there isn’t much news, except to say I know of four new babies in a short radius of miles. Even our English neighbors down the road have a new little one. Soon we’re all going to Grasshopper Level to lay eyes on your twin baby sister and brother. I have to admit I don’t know which I like better—feeding chickens and threshing grain, or bathing and playing with my sweet baby sister, almost three months old. Lydiann is so cuddly and cute, cooing and smiling at us. Dat laughs, saying I’m still his right-hand man. ‘‘Let Mamma and your sisters look after our wee one,’’ he goes on. But surely he must know I won’t be called Abram’s Leah for too many more months now, though I haven’t breathed a word. Still, I’m awful sure Mamma and Aunt Lizzie suspect we’re a couple. Dat, too, if he’d but accept the truth of our love. Come autumn, the People will no longer think of me as my father’s replacement for a son. For that I’m truly happy.

  Oh, Jonas, are there other couples like us? In another village or town, hundreds of miles from here or just across the cornfield . . . are there two such close friends who also happen to be this much in love? Honestly, I can’t imagine it.

  I miss you, Jonas! You seem so far away. . . .

  Leah held the letter in her hands, reading what she’d written thus far. Truly, she hesitated to share the one thing that hung most heavily in her mind. Yet Jonas wrote about everything under the sun in his letters, so why shouldn’t she feel free to do the same? She didn’t want to speak out of turn, though.

  Should I tell Jonas about the unexpected visit yesterday from his father? she pondered.

  Truth was, Peter Mast had come rumbling into the barnyard in his market wagon like a house on fire. In short order, he and Dat had gone off to the high meadow for over an hour. Sure did seem awful strange, but when she asked Mamma about it, she was told not to worry her ‘‘little head.’’

  What on earth? she wondered. What business does Cousin Peter have with Dat?

  Part One

  The daisy, by the shadow that it casts,

  Protects the lingering dewdrop from the sun.

  —William Wordsworth

  Never prais
e a sister to a sister,

  in the hope of your compliments

  reaching the proper ears.

  —Rudyard Kipling

  Chapter One

  Dog days. The residents of Gobbler’s Knob had been complaining all summer about the sweltering, brooding sun. Its intensity reduced clear and babbling brooks to a muddy trickle, turning broccoli patches into yellow flower gardens. Meadowlarks scowled at the parched earth void of worms, while variegated red-and-white petunias dropped their ruffled petticoats, waiting for a summertime shower.

  Worse still, evening hours gave only temporary pause, as did the dead of night if a faint breeze found its way through open farmhouse windows, bringing momentary relief to restless sleepers. Afternoons were nearly unbearable and had been now for weeks, June twelfth having hit the record high at ninety-seven degrees.

  Abram and Ida Ebersol’s farmhouse stood at the edge of a great woods as a shelter against the withering heat. The grazing and farmland surrounding the house had a warm and genial scent, heightened by the high temperatures. Abram’s seven acres and the neighboring farmland were an enticing sanctuary for a variety of God’s smaller creatures—squirrels, birds, chipmunks, and field mice, the latter a good enough reason to tolerate a dozen barn cats.

  Not far from the barnyard, hummocks of coarse, panicled grass bordered the mule road near the outhouse, and a wellworn path cut through a high green meadow leading to the log house of Ida’s maidel sister, Lizzie Brenneman.

  Ida, midlife mother to nearly three-month-old Lydiann, along with four teenage girls—Sadie, Leah, and twins Hannah and Mary Ruth—found a welcome reprieve this day in the dampness of the cold cellar beneath the large upstairs kitchen, where Sadie and Hannah were busy sweeping the cement floor, redding up in general. Abram had sent Leah indoors along about three-thirty for a break from the beastly heat. Ida was glad to have plenty of help wiping down the wooden shelves, making ready for a year’s worth of canned goods— eight hundred quarts of fruits and vegetables—once the growing season was past. Working together, they lined up dozens of quarts of strawberry preserves and about the same of green beans and peas, seventeen quarts of peaches thus far, and thirty-six quarts of pickles, sweet and dill. Some of the recent canning had been done with Aunt Lizzie’s help, as well as that of their close neighbors—the smithy’s wife, Miriam Peachey, and daughters, Adah and Dorcas.

  The Ebersol girls took their time organizing the jars, not at all eager to head upstairs before long and make supper in the sultry kitchen.

  ‘‘I daresay this is the hottest summer we’ve had in years,’’ Mamma remarked.

  ‘‘And not only here,’’ Leah added. ‘‘The heat hasn’t let up in Ohio, neither.’’

  Mary Ruth mopped her fair brow. ‘‘Your beau must be keepin’ you well informed of the weather in Millersburg, jah?’’

  To this Hannah grinned. ‘‘We could set the clock by Jonas’s letters. Ain’t so, Leah?’’

  Leah, seventeen in two months, couldn’t help but smile and much too broadly at that. Dear, dear Jonas. What a wonderful-good letter writer he was, sending word nearly three times a week or so. This had surprised her, really . . . but Mamma always said it was most important for the young man to do the wooing, either by letters or in person. So Jonas was well thought of in Mamma’s eyes at least. Not so much Dat’s. No, her father held fast to his enduring hope of Leah’s marrying the blacksmith’s twenty-year-old son, Gideon Peachey— nicknamed Smithy Gid—next farm over.

  Sadie stepped back as if to survey her neat row of quartsized tomato soup jars. ‘‘Writin’ to Cousin Jonas about the weather can’t be all that interesting, now, can it?’’ she said, eyeing Leah.

  ‘‘We write ’bout lots of things. . . .’’ Leah tried to explain, sensing one of Sadie’s moods.

  ‘‘Why’d he have to go all the way out to Ohio for his apprenticeship, anyway?’’ Sadie asked.

  Mamma looked up just then, her earnest blue eyes intent on her eldest. ‘‘Aw, Sadie, you know the reason,’’ she said.

  Sadie’s apologetic smile looked forced, and she turned back to her work.

  The subject of Jonas and his letters was dropped. Mamma’s swift reprimand was followed by silence, and then Leah gave a long, audible sigh.

  Yet Leah felt no animosity, what with Sadie seemingly miserable all the time. Sadie was never-ending blue and seemed as shriveled in her soul as the ground was parched. If only the practice of rumschpringe—the carefree, sometimes wild years before baptism—had been abolished by Bishop Bontrager years ago. A group of angry parents had wished to force his hand to call an end to the foolishness, but to no avail. Unchecked, Sadie had allowed a fancy English boy to steal her virtue. Poor, dear Sadie. If she could, Leah would cradle her sister’s splintered soul and hand it over to the Mender of broken hearts, the Lord Jesus.

  She offered a silent prayer for her sister and continued to work side by side with Mamma. Soon she found herself daydreaming about her wedding, thinking ahead to which sisters she might ask to be in her bridal party and whom she and Mamma would ask to be their kitchen helpers. Selecting the hostlers—the young men who would oversee the parking of buggies and the care of the horses—was the groom’s decision.

  Jonas had written that he wanted to talk over plans for their wedding day when he returned for baptism; he also wanted to spend a good part of that weekend with her, and her alone. But on the following Monday he must return to Ohio to complete his carpentry apprenticeship, ‘‘just till apple-pickin’ time.’’ His father’s orchard was too enormous not to have Jonas’s help, come October. And then it wouldn’t be long after the harvest and they’d be married. Leah knew their wedding would fall on either a Tuesday or Thursday in November or early December, the official wedding season in Lancaster County. She and Mamma would be deciding fairly soon on the actual date, though since Jonas didn’t know precisely when he’d be returning home for good, she had to wait to discuss it with him. Secretly she hoped he would agree to choose an earlier rather than a later date.

  As for missing Jonas, the past months had been nearly unbearable. She drank in his letters and answered them quickly, doing the proper thing and waiting till he wrote to her each time. It was painful for her, knowing she’d rejected his idea to spend the summer in close proximity to him out in Holmes County—a way to avoid the dreaded long-distance courtship. But for Sadie’s sake, Leah had stayed put in Gobbler’s Knob, wanting to offer consolation after the birth and death of her sister’s premature baby. In all truth, she had believed Sadie needed her more than Jonas.

  But Jonas had been disappointed, and she knew it by the unmistakable sadness in his usually shining eyes. She had told him her mother needed help with the new baby, the main excuse she’d given. Dismayed, he pressed her repeatedly to reconsider. The hardest part was not being able to share her real reason with him. Had Jonas known the truth, he would have been soundly stunned. At least he might have understood why she felt she ought to stay behind, which had nothing to do with being too shy to live and work in a strange town, as she assumed he might think. Most of all, she hoped he hadn’t mistakenly believed her father had talked her out of going.

  Today Leah was most eager to continue writing her letter the minute she completed chores, hoping to slip away again to her bedroom for a bit of privacy. When she considered how awful hot the upstairs had been these days, she thought she might take herself off to the coolness of the woods, stationery and pen in hand. If not today, then tomorrow for sure.

  No one knew it, but here lately she’d been writing to Jonas in the forest. Before her beau had left town, she would never have thought of venturing into the deepest part, only going as far as Aunt Lizzie’s house. But she liked being alone with the trees, her pen on the paper, the soft breezes whispering her name . . . and Jonas’s.

  Growing up, she’d heard the tales of folk becoming disoriented in the leafy maze of undergrowth and the dark burrow of trees. Still, she was determined to go, delighting in bein
g surrounded by all of nature. There a place of solitude awaited her away from her sisters’ prying eyes, as well as a place to dream of Jonas. She had sometimes wondered where Sadie and her worldly beau had run off to many times last year before Sadie sadly found herself with child. But when Leah searched the woods, she encountered only tangled brushwood and nearly impassable areas where black tree roots and thick shrubbery caused her bare feet to stumble.

  Both she and Sadie had not forgotten what it felt like as little girls to scamper up to Aunt Lizzie’s for a playful picnic in her secluded backyard. Thanks to her, they were shown dazzling violets amid sward and stone, demanding attention by the mere look on their floral faces . . . and were given a friendly peep into a robin’s comfy nest—‘‘but not too close,’’ Aunt Lizzie would whisper. All this and more during such daytime adventures.

  But never had Lizzie recommended the girls explore the expanse of woods on their own. In fact, she’d turned ashen on at least one occasion when seven-year-old Leah wondered aloud concerning the things so oft repeated. ‘‘Ach, you mustn’t think of wandering in there alone,’’ Lizzie had replied quickly. Sadie, at the innocent age of nine, had trembled a bit, Leah recalled, her older sister’s blue eyes turning a peculiar grayish green. And later Leah had vowed to Sadie she was content never to find out ‘‘what awful frightening things are hiding in them there wicked woods!’’

  Now Leah sometimes wondered if maybe Sadie truly had believed the scary tales and taken them to heart, she might not have ended up the ruined young woman she was. At the tender age of nineteen.

  At the evening meal Dat sat at the head of the long kitchen table, with doting Mamma to his left. Fourteen-year-old Hannah noticed his brown hair was beginning to gray, bangs cropped straight across his forehead and rounded in a bowl shape around the ears and neck. He wore black work pants, a short-sleeved green shirt, and black suspenders, though his summer straw hat likely hung on a wooden peg in the screened-in porch.