A New Dawn Over Devon (16 page)

 20 
Difficult Options

Jocelyn and Amanda sat down on one of benches in the heather garden, ready to make a dash for it if the sky suddenly emptied.

Amanda seemed for the first time to notice the intricate woodwork of the bench's design.

“I don't remember this bench, Mother,” she said. “Has it always been here?”

“Your father built it after you left home,” replied Jocelyn. “He built most of the benches in the heather garden.”

“I don't know why I never noticed them before.”

“He tried to make them all different, and in distinctive woods.”

Amanda pondered her mother's words.

“Why?” she asked. “That seems like a lot of extra work.”

“You know your father's passion to understand things.”

Amanda nodded.

“Whenever variety presented itself, he wanted to grasp every side of it. You know how he was with ideas—always trying to look at issues and situations from different angles. And when it came to objects that fascinated him or that he found useful, he could never be satisfied with just one,” chuckled Jocelyn. “You know his watch collection, all his various tools—”

“And his Bible collection,” interjected Amanda.

“Exactly. He had to have
every
available translation. When we became interested in heather, he had to try to find
every
kind of
heather. When he discovered the Scotsman's writings, he searched high and low until he had
every
book the man had written. Had Charles lived, I don't doubt that eventually we might have had five or six different cars. When he started building benches, he had to make them all unique and use a different kind of wood. That's just how he was. He loved variety. And he always had to investigate everything that crossed his path to the ultimate.”

“He was a very creative man, wasn't he?” smiled Amanda.

“‘Creatively restless' one of his friends once said about him.” Jocelyn now smiled too at the memory. “Charles always laughed at the phrase,” she said, “but it fit him perfectly. He always had some new idea or project to try.”

“What kind of wood is this?” asked Amanda.

“It's called redwood,” Jocelyn answered. “Your father had it shipped from a small, obscure seaport in northern California. It was quite costly, but he found it such a joy to work with.”

Gradually Amanda's thoughts returned to her personal dilemma.

“I don't know, Mother,” said Amanda after a brief silence, “I understand what you say about Vicar Coleridge. But I really want
your
counsel more than anyone's.”

“I have never faced what you are going through.”

“Neither has Vicar Coleridge.”

“I suppose you are right,” replied Jocelyn. “There is also Timothy to think of. He would be glad to talk to you. But you know I will do whatever I can.”

“Then tell me what
you
think I ought to do,” said Amanda. “If someone you didn't know was in my position, and you were the only person she had to turn to, what would you tell her? What if it were Betsy? She has no one else—what would you tell
her
to do? Even if you haven't been in my situation, what do you
think
is right?”

“Well, dear,” answered Jocelyn thoughtfully, “I suppose the first thing would be to look at what options you see before you. What comes to my mind immediately is the most straightforward—stay married but not see Ramsay again.”

“That would be the simplest and easiest possibility,” Amanda nodded, “just to do nothing. I have thought of that, of course. But I do not think I could bear knowing that for the rest of my life my legal name was Mrs. Ramsay Halifax.” Amanda shook her head and sighed at the very sound of the words. “And I suppose, as we are
talking about my options, there is always the possibility of actually going back to Ramsay,” she added, “but I could never do that.”

“Then let me turn the question back on you,” said Jocelyn, “and ask what you asked me a moment ago—what do
you
want to do? What does
your
heart tell you?”

“I don't know,” groaned Amanda, “—I want to do what is
right
. I just don't know what that is.”

“And remarriage?” said Jocelyn.

“Isn't that getting the cart a little ahead of the horse, Mother?”

“I don't see how you can resolve the present without looking ahead to the future, dear. The present and the future are always linked. I think you must look at the entire prospect of what is facing you—present as well as future.”

“I see what you are saying,” nodded Amanda. “To answer you, then, I don't see how I could ever remarry, Mother.”

“Why not?”

“Even if I divorce Ramsay, I must still bear the consequences of what I did. On that point I do agree with Sister Anika.”

 21 
The Secret Room

In the Hall, thirteen-year-old Elsbet Conlin glanced about her with wide eyes of wonder as she followed Catharine through the back of the moveable bookcase in the library, along a tight corridor, and around two turns.

“We are between the walls of the library and main corridor,” said Catharine as they went. To Betsy's ears Catharine's voice sounded so different in here. It seemed they had stepped back in time a hundred years—as in truth they had. “From inside any of those rooms,” Catharine went on, “it is impossible to know all this is here.”

“How can there be space for this walkway?” asked Betsy.

“The walls were constructed with a void or empty space behind them. My brother explained it all to me, and drew me pictures and diagrams, but it took me a long time to make sense of it. That's where we are walking, in the empty spaces behind the walls. Many of them are connected, and you can go almost anywhere in the house through these hidden passageways. But there are only four ways to get into the maze—at least that's all George ever found. You can go all the way down to the basement and outside, or to the tower.”

“What about the secret room?” asked Betsy.

“That's what I will show you now,” replied Catharine. “It is just as George discovered it. You can't get there any other way but this. It's just like a hidden cave right in the middle of the house. It's
so well hidden that no one knew about it for years, until George discovered it.”

Catharine led on, not following the descent and later ascent to the storage room by which George had first discovered the labyrinth under the old chest of records and journals, but instead leading Betsy around various turns paralleling the walls of the rooms, arriving finally at a stairway going straight up above them like a corkscrew. She took it. Betsy followed up into darkness. At the top, Catharine paused, then pushed up on the ceiling above her. A two-foot square panel of wood fastened to invisible hinges swung up and out of sight. The next thing Betsy knew she saw Catharine disappearing into the hole. She scrambled up after her.

“Here we are!” said Catharine, “And, thanks to George, there is even a light.”

She flipped a switch and the room filled with the light of a dim bulb hanging overhead.

Betsy found herself on the floor of a room some eight feet square, with the same open beams of the roof above her as before. The wind was still blowing fiercely outside, and they heard it all the louder the moment they climbed into the secret room from below.

“What's that noise?” said Catharine, glancing about.

“I think it's a roof tile,” said Betsy. The clattering and scraping was now right above them. “I heard it before, in the garret hallway.”

“You were on the other side of this wall,” said Catharine, pointing to her left. “And this one,” she added, indicating the other, “was built to block the passage to the tower. These boards you see are exactly like the ones on the other side. George said this room was built later by blocking off the passage right in the middle. So you can't get all the way through the garret of the north wing now because both corridors end at these two walls.”

“But why?” asked Betsy.

“George didn't know. We had a great-grandfather that George said was more than a little eccentric, and his uncle was lord of the manor before him and was the same way. George said it probably had something to do with one of them.”

“But why would they have built it like this?” persisted Betsy.

“George thought they made it for a hiding place.”

“From what?”

“I don't know. Neither did George.”

 22 
How Far Should Accountability Go?

Wouldn't your grief, and the divorce itself,” Jocelyn had just asked Amanda as Betsy and Catharine sat talking in the secret room, “be bearing the consequences?”

“In a way, perhaps,” answered Amanda. “But I could not simply go on afterward as if nothing had happened.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jocelyn.

“I cannot ignore the Scriptures just for my own convenience merely to escape my accountability.”

“But you have said that you were not yourself, that you were not thinking clearly.”

“Ramsay may have been a cad, and maybe to a degree I was brainwashed, though I certainly did not think so at the time. But I am still accountable. No one
made
me marry Ramsay.”

“I still do not understand why you feel so strongly that you can never marry again.”

“Because of what I just read in Matthew 5:32 this morning. It is a passage Sister Anika told me about.”

“What does it say?”

“That to remarry would be adultery,” answered Amanda.

“Adultery!” repeated Jocelyn, shocked at Amanda's blunt statement.

“There is no other way to look at it. ‘Whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.' There it is, Mother, in Jesus' own words. I would be a divorced woman—”

At the words, Amanda turned away and began to cry. Jocelyn took her in her arms, and they sat quietly for a moment.

“The sound of it is too horrible to think about,” said Amanda after a while, wiping her eyes. “But if a man would be committing adultery to marry me—after a divorce, I mean—then I would just as surely be committing adultery myself.”

“Those are strong words, Amanda. Surely God would not condemn you so harshly for making a mistake.”

“It is not that God will condemn me, it is about my doing what is right. And I was reading several other passages, too, before I came out this morning,” Amanda went on. “Another passage Sister Anika told me about is in Mark 10. It is even clearer than the verse in Matthew.”

“And?”

“It says that if a woman divorces her husband and marries another man, she is an adulteress.”

Again the word jolted Jocelyn's sensitive ears. She was familiar enough with the passage, but to think of Jesus' hard words in relation to her own daughter had taken her by surprise.

“I wish it wasn't there,” continued Amanda. “I hate what those words make me feel like, so dirty and unclean. But even if Ramsay committed adultery and I am free to divorce, the verse still says that I cannot
re
marry without being an adulteress.”

“Dear, please—that is such a terrible word. I just don't think—”

“But the words are clear, Mother, in black and white,” insisted Amanda.

“But surely you don't want to remain unmarried.”

“Of course I don't want to live the rest of my life alone. But can I ignore that passage, and say the words don't
really
apply to me and my situation, just for the sake of my own happiness? What kind of obedience to the Scriptures is that? You and Father taught us that the Bible was to be obeyed. I didn't do very well back then. I resented it every time either of you would say it. But I am trying to take the Bible seriously now.”

“You are convinced that's what it means?”

“I don't know, Mother!” said Amanda in frustration. “I just don't see where Jesus or Paul say that certain men and women
may
remarry
because they later found out things about their husbands and wives they didn't know before. Maybe I am missing something. I haven't studied the Bible very diligently, that's for sure. But it seems to say that remarriage after divorce is adultery and that's it. Oh, it is so confusing!”

A lengthy silence intervened. Finally Amanda spoke again.

“I have spent my whole life resisting authority,” she said, “caring nothing for what was right or for what God wanted, only what I wanted. I didn't learn how to submit to you and Father when I was supposed to. So I must begin to live that way now. How else can I know God fully if I never learn what he wants me to learn? I don't want to add to my troubles now by ignoring what the Bible says just so that I won't be lonely for the rest of my life.”

“In the matter of your future,” remarked Jocelyn, “much will depend on how you feel God leading you inside. I have never thought of these things.”

“If loneliness is the price I must pay for getting myself into a marriage I shouldn't have,” Amanda went on, “then perhaps I have to be willing to pay it. I can no longer make light of morality issues. I know what I did hurt you and Father deeply. It cut against all you stood for as Christians and as a husband and wife. If I am going to turn my life around, I have to start sometime. And I think that time has to be now. I have to start making decisions in a new way than I ever did before, saying not what do I want to do, but what is the
right
thing to do.”

Again Amanda sighed.

“I wish Daddy were here,” she said. “I would just ask him what to do. But since he is not, I must turn to you.”

“I know, dear. But honestly, I don't know what to tell you. Even with your father gone, I would never remarry. He is the only husband I ever want to have. It is different for you. You are much younger and—”

“Uh-oh . . . here comes the rain!” cried Amanda suddenly.

The next instant mother and daughter were on their feet and bolting for the house.