Anna Schmidt - Hannah's Journey

“I don’t know,” Hannah admitted.

“I mean, Caleb is what? Eleven, you said?”

“Almost twelve.”

“Then he has some time.”

He saw her peer up at him curiously. “Time?”

“Well, as I understand it, a boy does not make a final decision to follow the ways of the Amish until he’s maybe fourteen?” He had taken this conversation too far and soon she would start to raise questions he wasn’t prepared to answer. Questions like how it was that he knew so much about the Amish life. He had almost opened the door to the past. What was it about this woman that made him want to do that? He’d had dealings with the other Amish before. But he had never had to face the daily reminder of what he had run away from all those years ago. Not until Hannah Goodloe had walked up to his front door and into his life.

is an award-winning author of more than twenty-five works of historical and contemporary fiction. She is a two-time finalist for a coveted RITA ®Award from Romance Writers of America, as well as a four-time finalist for an RT Book Reviews Reviewer’s Choice Award. Her most recent RT Book Reviews Reviewer’s Choice nomination was for her 2008 Love Inspired Historical novel Seaside Cinderella, which is the first of a series of four historical novels set on the romantic island of Nantucket. Critics have called Anna “a natural writer, spinning tales reminiscent of old favorites like Miracle on 34th Street.” Her characters have been called “realistic” and “endearing” and one reviewer raved, “I love Anna Schmidt’s style of writing!”

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For Yahweh has heard the sound of my weeping, Yahweh has heard my pleading. Yahweh will accept my prayer…

—Psalm 6:8–9

(New Jerusalem version)

To those who have dared

follow the beat of the different drummer.

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

Epilogue

Letter to Reader

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

Sarasota, Florida, May 1928

Levi Harmon pushed aside the piles of bills littering his desk and swiveled his high-backed, leather chair toward the series of leaded glass-paned doors that led outside to the front lawn. The room had been designed as a solarium, but Levi had seen little use for such a space and instead had located his Florida office in the room with its tiled terrazzo floor, its arched doors opening to the out-of-doors that he loved so much. After all, what was the use of being rich if not to live as you pleased?

He walked out onto the terrace and leaned against the stone railing. Before him the lawn stretched green and verdant past the swimming pool and rose garden, past the mammoth banyan trees that he’d insisted the builder spare when constructing the mansion and on to the gatehouse that was a miniature version of the mansion itself. He’d worked hard for all of this and had thought that by now he might be sharing it with a wife and children, but work had consumed him and he had never found a woman that he thought suited to the kind of vagabond life he’d chosen.

He’d come outside to think. Perhaps he should take a walk along the azure bay that most of the mansion’s rooms looked out on. That always calmed him whenever business worries piled up. And indeed, they had begun to pile up—not just for him but for many men who had taken the cash flows of their businesses for granted these past several boom years. He had started down the curved stairs to the lawn when he noticed a woman he did not recognize walking up the driveway.

She moved with purpose and determination, her strides even, her tall slender frame erect, her head bent almost as if in prayer. As she came closer, he saw that she wore a dark gray dress with a black apron and the telltale starched white cap that was the uniform of the Amish women. How was it possible that she had not been stopped at the gate, detained there while the gatekeeper made a call to the house?

At that same moment he heard the phone in the foyer jangle. He moved back to the open office doorway and continued watching the woman even as he half listened to his butler, Hans, hold a quiet conversation with the gatekeeper. The woman was even with the pool when Hans came onto the terrace to deliver his report.

“She is Mrs. Hannah Goodloe,” Hans said.

“She’s Amish—probably lives out near the celery fields,” Levi said impatiently. “What business could she possibly have here?”

“She would not say, but insisted on speaking with you personally. Shall I…”

Levi waved him away and went inside, rolling down the sleeves of his white shirt as he retrieved his jacket from the hall tree in his office. “Show her to the Great Hall,” he said as he ran his fingers through his copper brown straight hair.

“Very good, sir,” Hans murmured, but his words came with little approval. “May I remind you, sir, that your train…”

“I know my schedule. This won’t take long.”

“Very good, sir.”

Levi listened to the tap of his butler’s leather heels crossing the marble foyer to take up his post at the massive double front door. By now she should have reached them and yet neither the bell nor the door knocker sounded. Had she changed her mind?

He crossed his office and peered outside. No sign of her retreating. Assuming she was standing on the front steps, perhaps gathering her courage, he could simply walk around to the front of the house and encounter her there. But for reasons he did not take the time to fathom, it seemed important that this woman—this stranger—enter his house, see the proof of all that he had accomplished, marvel at the beauty of his self-made world in spite of her religion’s stand against anything deemed ostentatious.

And even as the chime of the front doorbell resonated throughout the house, Levi thought not so much of the present, but of a time when he was not so different from this plain-living woman who now stood at his door.

Just by coming to the winter home of the circus impresario, Hannah had probably violated several of the unwritten laws of the Ordnung followed by people of her faith. In the first place, the minute the gatekeeper had turned his back to make the call to the mansion, she had slipped past him and started her walk up the long drive. Surely that was wrong. But she had to see the only man capable of finding her son.

All the way up the drive, she kept her eyes on the ground half expecting to hear the gatekeeper running to catch up with her as she followed the pristine, white-shell path until it curved in front of the massive house itself. Only then did she glance up and her breath caught. The house soared three stories into the cloudless blue sky, its roof lined with curved terra-cotta tiles sparkling in the late-morning sun. Curved iron balconies hung from large arched windows on the second and third stories, and everywhere the facade of the house had been festooned with ornate carvings, colorful tiles and stone figures that were as frightening as they were fascinating.