Leaves of Hope (16 page)

Jan pressed her fingertips against her eyes in a vain attempt to prevent the flood. “I’m sorry, Jim.”

“You didn’t do anything to me. I’m glad I was here.” He stood. “But I guess Trixie will be wanting out. She’s always got to have that last walk of the day. I’ll head for home now.”

As he stepped outside, Jan bent over and wept into her hands.

“I
warned you.” Malcolm Wilson shook a finger at Beth, who sat across the table from him. Then he turned to his brother. “Miles, did I not warn Miss Lowell about you? I distinctly recall urging her to be extremely cautious.”

“You did, Malcolm, but as you can see, she succumbed to my charms at last.”

As hard as she might try, Beth could not take offense at the bantering between the two men. Wilson House was grander and much more opulent than she had imagined, and she was put up for the night in a magnificent guest bedroom with an attached bath. After a luxuriating soak, she had fallen deeply asleep for several hours. A shy maid woke her with a tray of tea at four that afternoon, and at six the limo arrived with Miles and Malcolm. Now sharing a booth in a rather seedy-looking restaurant, the three were digging into plates of greasy batter-fried fish and equally greasy wedges of fried potatoes. Delicious, but definitely not on Jan Lowell’s fruit-and-cereal diet.

Beth couldn’t help thinking of her mother as she sat across from Miles Wilson—the man Beth would like to blame for everything but couldn’t. No doubt the phone message she had left at the lake house had been a shock and a huge disappointment to her mom. Beth would give anything to take it back, but it was too late. After dreading the call for days, she had impulsively made it, and now she couldn’t undo anything.

“She is regretting it,” Malcolm said. “I can see the truth clearly written on her face. She knows she was wrong ever to see you again, but the deed is done.”

“I contacted Miles because I need to see my birth father,” Beth told Malcolm, “but you’re right. I am regretting it.”

“What gives you pause?” Miles protested, a look of innocent dismay on his face. “Did I not collect you at the airport? Ensconce you at my ancestral family residence? Arrange for you to have a truly British meal?”

“You have been kind,” Beth conceded. “But I shouldn’t have accepted your invitation to travel to India. First of all, I hardly know you.”

“Too true,” Malcolm pointed out. “Miles is a rogue.”

“Nonsense. I’m a gentleman in every sense of the word. Shut up, Malcolm, before I pinch your ear.” He focused his attention on Beth. “You and I know each other well enough to fly to India in one another’s company. After all, we’ve traveled half the continent of Africa together, haven’t we? When we’re back in England again, we shall declare to my doubting brother that we are great friends, and all his warnings were in vain.”

“Friends,” Malcolm scoffed.

“Yes, friends. Beth does not yoke herself with just anyone.”

“You make the poor lady sound as if she were an ox!”

Beth spoke up. “Miles is referring to a passage from the Bible.”

“Beth is very religious.” Miles bent over and reached into his briefcase. “As am I. Or nearly so, anyway. Look, Malcolm, this is my new Bible, and I must tell you that if you bothered to read it, you would find it enlightening.”

“Religious? You?” Malcolm snickered as his brother set a leather-bound volume on the table. Beth noticed that the Bible was nearly identical to her own. Malcolm ignored it. “Now I know you’ll do anything to steal a lady’s heart, Miles. Pay this man no heed, Beth. He’s wicked. You’d do better to turn your attentions to a steadier, more honorable sort of man.”

Miles barked out a derisive laugh. “Like you, I suppose?”

“And why not?”

“Because you’re boring.”

“I like Malcolm,” Beth declared. “You’re exactly the kind of man my mother would choose for me.”

“I’m not certain that should be taken as a compliment,” he returned.

“But it is. She chose a wonderful husband. My father was as steady and honorable as they come. She was wise to marry him.”

For a moment, both men fell silent, and Beth knew they were thinking of the man she was traveling to meet. Her birth father. So far, no one had broached the topic, and she hoped it would stay off-limits. Miles summoned the waitress for a refill of their soft drinks, while Malcolm suddenly busied himself flipping through his brother’s new Bible.

“Our parents were lovely people, too,” the older man said. “Well matched. Sadly, Mum wasn’t quite as certain of this fact as Miles and I, and she took herself off to live in Australia with the captain of our father’s polo team.”

Beth’s mouth dropped open. “Miles didn’t tell me that.”

“It’s not the sort of thing that makes for charming conversation. Our father was heartbroken, of course.”

“Yes,” Miles concurred. “The dissolution of his polo team was the saddest thing that ever happened to him. He never recovered from it.”

“Oh…” Beth was puzzling over this information when both brothers began chuckling.

“You can’t take such things too seriously,” Malcolm told her. “Their divorce wasn’t amusing to us at the time, but we’ve accepted it.”

“Nothing we could do about it anyway,” Miles said. “But, Malcolm, you’ve made it sound as if Dad died of a broken heart. It was leukemia, actually. He fought it as hard as he could, but he couldn’t win. Dreadful disease.”

“I’m very sorry.” Beth thought of her own father’s battle with ALS, and she wondered why Miles hadn’t mentioned the leukemia to her earlier. It was another experience they had in common, though not a topic as cheerful as their shared interest in globetrotting. Maybe, as Malcolm implied, Miles cared only about impressing and charming her. She was another fly for his spider web.

“If I’m the sort of man your mother would choose for you,” Malcolm asked Beth, “why are you winging off to India with my ne’er-do-well brother?”

“He offered.”

“There you have it,” Miles said. “I offered. On the other hand, I think there’s more to this. I believe Beth is sitting here this evening because schemes greater than either of ours have been at work. You see, I’ve been reading in my Bible—give me that, Mal, you tiresome devil.”

Wresting the book from his brother’s hands, Miles leafed through the pages. “Incredible amount of material to digest here,” he mumbled as he searched through it. “Too much, really. Shocking things. Murders, stonings, adulteries—even a lady who hammered a tent peg through a bloke’s head.”

“No. Can you mean it?” Malcolm said.

“Absolutely. One can hardly think where to begin and end in reading this book. The teachings of Christ are magnificent, and at the same time difficult to comprehend. The scope is vast. It would take a great mind to truly fathom it.”

“That lets you out,” Malcolm muttered.

“Now then, here we are,” Miles continued. “The back part of the book appears to be about Jesus and the beginnings of Christianity. The front part is all Jewish history. Quite confusing—kings and prophets and all that. I can’t make much of it.”

“You never will. You barely passed your A-Levels.”

“Pay him no mind,” Miles advised Beth. “He’s jealous because I was better in football.”

“Well, get on with it,” Malcolm prodded. “If you’re determined to preach at us, go to it.”

“I found this interesting bit in the chapter titled Romans, which I decided to read because it sounded as if Saint Paul were writing a letter to me.”

“Romans is a book, not a chapter,” Beth clarified. She realized she had been clutching the corner of the tablecloth ever since Miles had opened his Bible. He really had bought it—and not just to impress her. He was actually reading it.

“A book within a book,” Malcolm said. “I’ve seen that sort of thing before. I believe Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
is set up that way.”

“No, that’s three separate books,” Miles stated. “Honestly, Malcolm, how did
you
pass A-Levels? At any rate, here in this letter to the Romans, Saint Paul tells the Christians to think of God as a loving father, even when they suffer. He speaks of the Holy Spirit, who assists Christians in various ways, particularly by praying for them when they’re too miserable to pray for themselves.”

“Not a happy lot, I take it,” Malcolm observed.

“They do appear very content, oddly enough. Now listen to this. I found it underlined in Beth’s Bible, and I’ve underlined it in my own, as well. It’s remarkable.” He cleared his throat and began reading. “‘And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to His purpose for their lives.’ There, what do you think of that?”

“Contradictory. First, Saint Paul writes that there will be misery. Then he says that everything will be good.”

“Wrong. Everything will
work together
for good,” Miles clarified. “You see the difference? Suffering will come to each of us. But in a Christian’s life, all events—whether positive or negative—will work for good in the end.”

“That is quite a promise. But I can’t see how it applies to your pursuit of the pure and pious Miss Lowell.”

Miles leaned back and contemplated the question. “It is true that I’m not the ideal gentleman,” he admitted. “Perhaps I did have devious motives in asking Beth to go to India with me. And one might even argue that I purchased this Bible for all the wrong reasons…”

“You’ve utterly condemned yourself, Miles,” his brother said. “Carry on.”

“But that’s it, you see.
We
are condemned, all of us. And yet, those who call themselves Christians are actually free of the fate they deserve. Not only that, but according to Saint Paul, they’ve got God Himself working to put their lives into good order. Even through the struggles. It all comes out right in the end.”

“Lucky us.” Malcolm took the Bible from his brother’s hands and began to reread the underlined words.

“I believe,” Miles said, “that God intended for Beth to meet me in the Nairobi airport. Or if we can’t go quite that far, at least we can predict that God is going to use this trip to India to her benefit. And all because she’s such a religious person.”

Beth relaxed her grip on the tablecloth. “Oh, for pity’s sake, I’m not all that religious. Religion is the outer trappings that go along with a person’s faith—the church or temple or mosque, style of worship, prayer rituals, stuff like that. I have trouble with the religious aspect on a regular basis, and my faith often feels pretty weak.”

“Come on,” Miles said. “You’re better at it than most people. You read your Bible, carry it with you everywhere, run your race.”

“And you never yoke,” Malcolm put in.

“I try to follow Christ,” Beth said. “But look what I’ve done in the past few months. I’ve hurt my mother by flying off to meet my birth father—a man whose name she wants never mentioned again. I’ve argued with her, yelled at her and totally disregarded her wishes. I’m unwisely sitting here with two people I hardly know, and I’m recklessly heading off on a weeklong trip with one of them. Does that sound like a prudent thing to do? My brothers think I’m nuts. When I told them what was going on, they both advised me to drop the issue and accept the family I grew up in as my own. Oh, sure, I’ve prayed about this and read my Bible and talked to Christian friends, but the bottom line is that I’m doing what I want to do. I’m being selfish, and that’s not Christ-like in the least.”

Both brothers stared at her as though she’d been speaking a foreign language.

“Well, that does it then,” Miles said. “I must cancel the trip at once.”

“Absolutely,” Malcolm agreed. “I won’t let my brother go off to India with such a careless, self-centered creature.”

“Indeed, I can’t imagine spending even another minute with someone so egotistical and proud.”

“She’s cruel, she is. Ignoring her brothers’ advice. Disobeying her mother.”

“We’ve never done anything like that, have we, Malcolm?”

“Certainly not. We’ve always been good boys.”

“Personally,” Miles said, “I never make a move without consulting you, Mum, the board of governors, the Queen and God.”

Beth’s shoulders loosened. “All right, that’s enough.”

“I’d never go looking for my missing relations in the face of such familial disapproval,” Malcolm said.

“Nor sit in a restaurant with someone I’d only known for a month.”

“It’s her yelling at her mother that bothers me. We never yell, do we, Miles?”

“Well, there was that awkward time when Mum ran off to Australia with the polo captain. I believe you and I might have done some yelling. A jolt in the family structure does tend to bring out the worst in a person. Do you know what I mean, Beth?”

“Yes,” she said. “Okay, maybe I’ve behaved normally under the circumstances. I just wish I could be sure I was doing the right thing.”

“But you are,” Miles reminded her. “Everything works together for the good of Christians.”

“That doesn’t mean you can blindly go around doing anything you want. Christians are those who ‘love God and are called according to His purpose for their lives,’ remember? But I don’t know what God’s purpose is in all this. I really can’t figure it out.”

“Neither can I,” Miles said. “And I think that’s the beauty in it. In the end, all you’ve got is faith.”

Rain spattered the windshield, droplets flying left and right with the motion of the wipers, as the small black car labored up the steep foothills of the Himalayas. Beth sat in the back, gazing out at emerald-green ridges and distant, mist-shrouded blue mountains. Occasionally, the car passed a person climbing the winding road. A Buddhist monk in a bright orange robe. A woman bent beneath the heavy basket on her back. An old man with a cane, nudging the roadway for rocks that might make him stumble.