The Wicker Tree Read Online Free

imagination of their hearts
    He has put down the mighty from their seat
    And He has exalted the humble and meek
    He has filled the hungry with good things
    And the rich He has sent empty away.'
     Steve, who had never heard her sing like this before, was dazed by the beauty and wonder that she had created in the church. He applauded along with the congregation, who not only had never heard a sound like hers before, but had never heard a hymn (let alone a canticle) without the backing of guitars, drums, accordions, xylophones and the like. Steve guessed that Brother Kenny, applauding with the rest, was relieved that Beth's magnificent sound was not going to disrupt the church's traditional cowboy music. At least not for another year.
    The bus carrying the Redeemers Choir to the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport stopped to pick them up from the melee of fans and wellwishing members of the congregation. As they emerged from the church, Steve saw his pa being interviewed by Buz Dworkin, a reporter for one of the local TV stations.
    'So it's your boy, Steve, is it, going with Beth?'
    'Sure is,' said his father proudly. 'They been promised since eighth grade. His ma, she found them playin' "I'll show you mine, you show me yours". Made them promise. Wait till they're wed. She's gone now, rest her soul. Still, before she went, she had them make a commitment. They're members of that – they call it the Silver Ring Thing. The ring says they won't have no screwin' around – just no sex no-how – till the day they're wed…'
    Steve was more embarrassed by this revelation of pa's than was Beth. Sitting next to each other on the plane, with the twenty-strong Redeemers Choir all around them, Beth and Steve held hands. Both were lost in their own thoughts as they took off, bound for Great Britain. But both of them were thinking pretty much the same thing. The commitment they had made to avoid sex until marriage had worked pretty well as long as they were both living apart and taken up with their separate busy lives. Now they were going to be together, day in, day out, and all the time they must keep to this commitment. Beth thought it would be very hard. Steve was afraid it would be impossible.
    As for the dangers that Big Bill and many others had warned them about in Europe, they had long since discounted these. In addition to service to God, this was an adventure. And what was adventure without some element of risk? People they knew had been to Europe and returned with nothing worse than astonishment at the price of everything.
    Pretty soon they slept.

Tressock Castle
    SCOTLAND'S SPRING COMES later than England's, but on the Borders between the two nations it is well advanced by mid April. The kitchen gardens in little towns like Kelso, Coldstream and Tressock are already full of fruit blossoms, and the rough winds that blow across the bare, heather strewn countryside do not wait for the darling buds of May but are already scattering a torrent of petals around the sturdy stone houses of these borderland Scots.
    Tressock Castle rises like a cliff face from a rocky promontory where the River Sulis, a tributary of the Tweed, provides it with half its moat. Its towering stone flanks are surmounted by an odd jumble of turrets, mansard roofs, domes and pinnacles. It is a Scottish baronial collage of a building. Somewhere its innards are mediaeval, sometime courtyards long since enclosed as great airy Adam-decorated rooms and everywhere, on the lower floors, huge windows have been punched into the cliff-face walls, to let in the precious light, work done in the seventeenth century when the possession of lots of valuable glass was a mark of conspicuous consumption.
    On the dry side of the castle, as it were, lawns and parterres, reflecting pools and fountains, immaculate glass houses and a wellstocked, walled kitchen garden all attest to this being the home of people who care about their surroundings and can afford to do so. Only the topiary, which