Confession (Heritage of Lancaster County Book #2) , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group - Beverly Lewis

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132 pages

English

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Description

Shunned and alone among strangers, Katie sets out to find her birth mother.

Sujets

Historical fiction

Informations

Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 février 2008
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441203441
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0432€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Confession
By Beverly Lewis

The Rose Trilogy
The Thorn • The Judgment • The Mercy
Home to Hickory Hollow
The Fiddler • The Bridesmaid
Seasons of Grace
The Secret • The Missing • The Telling
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 Courtship of Nellie Fisher (3-in-1)

The Redemption of Sarah Cain
October Song • Sanctuary (with David Lewis) • The Sunroom

The Beverly Lewis Amish Heritage Cookbook

Amish Prayers
www.beverlylewis.com

© 1997 by Beverly Lewis

Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55438
Bethany House Publishers is a division of Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
Ebook edition created 2010

Ebook corrections made 6.25.2012

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.

ISBN 978-1-44120-344-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

This story is a work of fiction. With the exception of recognized historical figures, all characters, events, and the setting of Hickory Hollow are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is coincidental.
Scripture quotation is from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION ® . Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved. The “NIV” and “New International Version” trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Cover by Dan Thornberg
Dedication
To Judy Angle Thanks for keeping the secret and for blessing the idea with prayer, shaping it with wings. With gratitude and love.
About the Author
BEVERLY LEWIS, born in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, is The New York Times bestselling author of more than eighty books. Her stories have been published in nine languages worldwide. A keen interest in her mother’s Plain heritage has inspired Beverly to write many Amish-related novels, beginning with The Shunning , which has sold more than one million copies. The Brethren was honored with a 2007 Christy Award. Beverly lives with her husband, David, in Colorado.
Author’s Note
In writing the following pages, my heart was captured by Katie’s emotional pain and her desperate search for truth. Her story now continues, just days after she abandons the Amish community and moves in with Mennonite relatives. And weeks before Daniel Fisher’s shocking letter ever arrives in Hickory Hollow….
Table of Contents
PART I
Prologue: Katherine
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
PART II
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
PART III
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
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
P ART I

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar. Helen Keller
Prologue: Katherine
I remember everything about my first glimpse of Cousin Lydia’s kitchen. It was modern as the day is long and all aglow with electricity.
Being a curious three-year-old, I’d set out to reach the light switch, making determined grunts as I stood on tiptoe, stretching myself up … up while peeking around the wide doorjamb to see if the grown-ups were watching.
At last, my little fingers touched the magic. Off … and on, and off and on again, I made the long white ceiling lights buzz and flicker, splashing fluorescent gleams onto the floor and the wallpaper. I must’ve played that way for a good five minutes or more.
It was Dat who told me to stop. “Ya mustn’t be playin’ with the lights, Katie. Ya might burn ’um out,” he said softly but sternly. Then he scooped me up in his long arms and carried me to the front room with the rest of my Plain relatives.
Nearly twenty years later, I had to smile at my renewed interest in the light switches found in every room of Peter and Lydia Miller’s Mennonite farmhouse. Especially the shiny gold one in the boarding room I now called home.
Being raised Old Order Amish meant I’d never lived around such fancy things, and for all good reason: the Ordnung , an unspoken list of church rules and regulations that had put a damper on my every word, deed, and, ofttimes, my thoughts, too.
I, sadly enough, had gone and broken those laws, several of them hadn’t kept my confession promise to Bishop John, refusing to destroy a forbidden guitar. In return for my wickedness, I was to be shunned all the days of my life.
All my life …
If, and only if, I was willing to go to the bishop and repent bend my knees in earnest contrition, pleading with God and the church membership for mercy only then could a sinner such as I ever be brought back into the fold of the People.
So Katie Lapp, the secretly “adopted” daughter of Amish parents, was as good as dead. Shunning practices were carried out that way in Hickory Hollow the way they’d been seen to for three hundred years.
But what of Katherine Mayfield my real name and the real me? Well, I couldn’t imagine Katherine thinking twice about a kneeling confession for what I’d done. Not for love nor money. There was too much at stake.
Still, the steady ache in my heart persisted, and sometimes on the clearest of days, from high atop the second-floor landing window, I managed to make out the snowy outline of a distant roof and double chimneys the old farmhouse where I was raised.
True, Samuel and Rebecca Lapp’s sandstone house was just one buggy mile away, up Hickory Lane a bit, though it might’ve been a good hundred miles on dark December days like today. ’Cause standing here, staring my past in the face, it seemed my whole world might fade to a deep, dark purple if I let it. Stubborn as I was, though, I refused to give in to the searing pain of rejection. And betrayal. Wouldn’t let the memories of the shunning drape a dark cloud over my future. In a peculiar sort of way, that was my salvation that, and my Mennonite relatives.
If it hadn’t been for Peter and Lydia, I might’ve succumbed to despair. But they had a way of treating me like I was really and truly one of the family. Clear from my first day here.
My eyes had begun to open up in more ways than one. The way they talked to God, for instance. Why, it was downright astonishing at times. Oh, I’d heard them say blessings over the meals off and on through the years, but family devotions and the prayers that followed were brand-new to me. Ever so joyful.
And what singing! Three- and four-part harmonies filled the house every evening after supper. My guitar had found a temporary home, and so had my broken heart.
Answering to “Katherine” instead of “Katie” took some getting used to, for sure and for certain. There was no easy way to change something as comfortable as your own first name just because one day you up and decided you were someone new. Still, I was determined to try.
Sometimes Lydia had to call me two and three times to catch my attention. I suppose it wasn’t so much the sound of “Katherine” that threw me off it was latching on to what the name stood for that was the biggest struggle.
For truth, I belonged to someone who’d never known the Ordnung and its confining practices, someone who understood all about the busy modern world I’d missed out on. My birth mother, Laura Mayfield-Bennett she was my true kin. And if I could trust what I’d been told, the woman was dying of some greislich , dreadful disease. I needed to act quickly, but the fear in my heart was powerful-strong. At first, it held me fast, even kept me from learning to drive a car or from trying out the telephone hanging high on the wall in Lydia’s kitchen.
But there was something I didn’t hesitate on. Something no amount of fear could keep me from doing. Cousin Lydia drove me to town and dropped me off at the prettiest beauty shop I’d ever seen. ’Course, I’d never darkened the door of one before just looked from a distance … and wished. Didn’t have an appointment, but they took me right in and cut and styled my hair just the same.
Glory be! What freedom I felt when the scissors started snippin’ away at my long, uneven locks that’d never been cut my whole life long.
Well, the weight of the world fell right off me, in a heap of auburn hair all over the floor. I shook my head and the air swooshed through it, clear to my scalp, and I asked myself why on earth I’d waited so long for something so awful nice.
The answer was bound up in rules and expectations same as my waist-length locks tied up in a knot under a veiled covering all these years. But there was no need for me to be carrying around a headful of long, too-thick hair anymore. I was free to do whatever I pleased with it … and my face. Clothes, too. A wonderful-good feeling.
Staring in the mirror, I saw Katherine Mayfield’s painted lips smiling back at me. When she whispered, “How do you do?” I heard the refined sound of her “English” voice in my ears. Still, it would take some practice t