by Amanda Dykes
“Moving between a contemporary setting and the early nineteenth century, Amanda Dykes has written a sweeping split-time novel, in turns mysterious and adventurous, mythical and romantic. Filled with magic, wonder, and gorgeous writing, Set the Stars Alight is a stirring gem from a gifted author.”
—Julie Klassen, bestselling author of The Bridge to Belle Island
“Amanda’s lush tale took me to another time where her subtly crafted scenes left memorable impressions of the mysterious expanse of faith, hope, and especially love. Timeless love. I hope you’ll linger over the pages. Hidden in the carefully crafted words is an invitation to share the rare gift of a sense of wonder.”
—Robin Jones Gunn, bestselling author of the HAVEN MAKERS SERIES and Christy Award winner
“Amanda Dykes has storytelling magic in that pen of hers! Set the Stars Alight is a novel as rich with wonder and delight as the stars themselves. This epic, deeply heartfelt story of puzzles, lost ships, and lost people resonates at the soul level in a way few novels can.”
—Joanna Davidson Politano, author of Lady Jayne Disappears and other historical mysteries
“The stars align beautifully in this latest tale from Amanda Dykes. A split-time search for light both in the past and present brings the reader on a poetic journey to find belonging and hope. Misted with sea water and lit by the moon, the words on every page of Set the Stars Alight become integral to the reader’s own journey, and the ending will resonate long after the last page has been closed.”
—Jaime Jo Wright, author of Echoes among the Stones and Christy Award–winning novel The House on Foster Hill
Books by Amanda Dykes
Set the Stars Alight
Whose Waves These Are
Love at Last: Three Historical Romance Novellas of Love in Days Gone By
Up from the Sea: A Whose Waves These Are Novella
© 2020 by Amanda Dykes
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
www.bakerpublishinggroup.com
Ebook edition created 2020
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—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-2512-9
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture quotations labeled NIV are from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Kathleen Lynch/Black Kat Design
Cover illustration by Paul Higdon
Author is represented by Books & Such Literary Agency
For our kids.
Wonder-filled adventurers,
what a gift you are!
The Maker of the stars is
the Maker of your hearts,
and oh! how He loves you.
May this truth set the stars alight,
all your days and every night.
And for you, dear reader.
Wonder is a mighty thing,
a weighty thing,
a truth-filled thing,
a lifting thing.
Given to buoy our hearts
and hopes and spirits.
Hang on to it, brave ones.
And more—hang on to the Giver of it.
Though darkness may fall and times grow hard,
hold fast to this given light.
Contents
Cover
Endorsements
Half Title Page
Books by Amanda Dykes
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
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25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Ads
Back Cover
Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.
James 1:17 NIV
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Prologue
London, England
May 1987
The smell of cinders permanently etched the abandoned Bessette Match Factory into the minds of all who passed. If asked about the factory, people rarely remembered the details of the brick towers, iron gates, and black-painted sign with carved letters, their gilded edges now gone . . . but they inevitably recalled the general specter of smoke and soot—a vestige of industrial revolutions and factory strikes and all manner of Victorian lore.
The towering roofline dwarfed the homes and shops that, over time, had popped up near the vacant building in old London Town. Yet not so long ago, for over a century, the Bessette Match Factory, Purveyors of Pure Light, had produced the metal hum of industry, issuing a steady stream of wooden sticks from its depths. Those sticks were then sent to the glass house. Not a house of glass, but a brick outbuilding whose walls housed the glass-grinding quarters. There the sticks were treated, their tips dipped in powdered glass, glass born of fire—and to fire they were destined to return.
Once they were cloaked in chemicals, the strike-anywhere matches were bundled and sent off to Market Street and Covent Garden and on to the Lake District and the dales and the seaports circling the green island nation, until parlor fires and hearth fires and cooking fires and fires of camps all owed their warmth to that match factory.
But time swept through, as time does. Two world wars embedded themselves into the souls of the land, and with war came new innovations promised to cast out darkness. Great Britain learned to twist light bulbs into sockets and fill hand torches with batteries, until that steady stream of matches from the factory slowed to a trickle and then . . . to a stop. The Bessette Match Factory, Purveyors of Pure Light, gaped empty for a year . . . then two . . . then t
hree decades.
Until one drizzly May morning in 1987, when Gerald W. Bessette, reluctant inheritor of “The Fossil,” as the family had come to call the factory, visited the place with a land agent to see what could be done about selling.
Blinking into the darkness as they entered, he kicked something that caused him to stumble. He retrieved the culprit: a hand torch, the very thing that had led to the factory’s demise. He flicked it on and by its tired beam saw blankets and boxes spread everywhere—evidence that people had moved into the old factory, set up camp on the lower levels.
Torch in hand, he had what he would later call his “light-bulb moment.” If people were already living here, why not capitalize on that? Gerald W. Bessette left the factory that day with a vision of pounds paving his every step and set to transforming the place with the help of his family’s coffers. A few dozen well-placed walls inside the expansive complex, bricks scrubbed clean of soot until they shone red against the grey sky, and clever wording to make the lofty ceilings sound like echoes of palace living instead of a thoroughfare of chilly drafts, and the Bessette Match Factory became Candlewick Commons: Fine Flats at Fulham.
Toward the end of the project he hired a local watchmaker, one Simon Claremont, to repair the broken tower clock that looked out over the concrete courtyard from above the arched entrance. And finally, on an unremarkable Tuesday afternoon almost a year after Gerald started the reconstruction, the two men stood on the roof, waiting for the clock to strike three and prove itself repaired.
“This marks the end of an era,” Gerald W. Bessette said, clapping the watchmaker on the back as if they were old school chums. “Workers once tuned their ears to this very tower to keep watch over the beginning and end of their toiling each day. And now”—the man spread his arms wide, as if unrolling the horizon of the whole city—“it marks the beginning of a new epoch. A time of . . .” He furrowed his brow, apparently having used up all his words to capture his grandiose swell of feeling. “A time of something really, really good.”
With a nod, Simon walked to the clock, tightened a gear in his pensive way, and stood back, waiting. Seconds ticked on . . . and the clock struck three o’clock right on cue, limping its slightly off-kilter song into the world in between Big Ben’s own declarations pealing down alleys and avenues across the Thames.
“Ha!” Gerald W. Bessette pumped his hands into the air in victory. “New life, my friend.” He surveyed the brick building beneath them, its wings that cloistered three sides of a courtyard, and the small cottage standing squat and humble at the far corner of the land, beneath the property’s lone tree.
“That’ll be the caretaker’s quarters,” he said, pointing. “Glass grinder’s cottage, it was. But now it’ll be hearth and home to some lucky soul who’ll keep this place hale and hearty.”
Simon narrowed his eyes, his gaze landing upon the sleepy cottage with its dripping glass windows, squat brick walls, and arched black door. “A thing of beauty, that is.”
And Gerald, whether swept up in the grandeur of his kingdom or recognizing a visionary and able man all wrapped up in one package, shrewdly offered the position of caretaker to his new friend, insisting that he could still keep his shop on Cecil Court, only a few minutes’ walk away.
And so it happened that Simon Claremont, watchmaker, story keeper, last of a dying breed, came home to Candlewick Commons with his wife, Penny. And a little over a year later, as they each neared forty, they added the surprise and joy of their lives: a wee bundle of a daughter.
“Lucy,” he said, as they stood over her bassinet by the light of the fire on their first night home from hospital. “Her name is Lucy.” He placed her in her cradle in the glass house, naming her light itself. For her life, they were sure, would mean something.
one
Candlewick Commons
London, England
2000
To step inside the watchmaker’s cottage was to step outside of time. Lucy grew there, a waif of a thing and a solitary soul. Her mind was full of wonderings and wanderings. She spent her days at school, and her afternoons circling Candlewick’s round courtyard fountain as she studied maps or read books.
Her evenings, however, were magic. Each day, as the sun began to set over Candlewick’s towers and the stars began to appear, and flats across the courtyard were coming to life with the blue glow of tellies, she returned to the glass house and felt the rush of the city drop away. The cottage was a place where tales spun inside every dusty shaft of golden-hour sunlight. Where each evening, stories and riddles were told around flickering flames—crackling hearth fire in winter months, pirouetting candlelight in the summer.
They had no telly. She sometimes burned with embarrassment when she couldn’t join in the conversations at school, but in the moment, in the warm glow of their cottage home, she did not mind. The mellowed wooden floors creaked with the rush of her feet, racing to turn off the lamps and leap into the embrace of the old stuffed armchair in the corner. Her young fingers wrapped around chipped mugs of chamomile or, on Sundays, sipping chocolate. “Monday is upon us,” her mum would say with a conspiratorial wink. “We must prepare. Chocolate all ’round.”
The watchmaker would invariably dust off his hands after laying the fire, plant a kiss on his wife’s rosy cheek, and look his daughter in the eye. “Make a friend today, Lucy?”
He asked every day. Sometimes it bothered her. She did not mind being alone. “Just wait,” he always said. “The best of friends come in the unlikeliest ways.” He always winked at Mum when he said it, and she’d swat him playfully with whatever she had in her hand—usually a dirt-smudged towel. She always seemed to be loosening the roots of her lilac plants.
They had met when she’d been up a tree—literally—at Kew Gardens, obtaining a sample of lichen for a study. She’d dropped the bit of green moss, and it had landed on Father’s hat below, where he’d been studying a sundial. And the rest, as they said, was history.
But Lucy did not climb trees or study sundials. She did not have a “thing,” as most people seemed to. She kept waiting to find it, looking out over the Thames, or over the sea when they were on rare holiday, wondering who she would be. Sometimes she searched in books, pulling them one at a time from the shelves of Candlewick’s reading room.
One day, after returning from school, Lucy ran into the reading room, pulled out a book, and walked through the tunnel that led to Candlewick Commons’ front doors. She always shivered as she passed through. Not so much from cold, as from the distinct impression that the tunnel was a portal to a dragon’s lair, and its many windows reached story upon story into the sky.
Passing through the massive front doors, she entered the garden courtyard, where she liked to read while circling the fountain. “‘All the world is a stage,’” Lucy read aloud, trying to keep from chucking the book into the fountain. Chopped up in strange lengths of lines, it made no sense to her. Whoever had given a pen to this man Shakespeare had made a massive mistake.
“All the world is not a stage,” she argued right back at the book. And with her nose buried in the offending pages, she collided with something and only had time to think one thing on her way down—that something was tall.
Not having far to fall, she hit the ground before her counterpart, and when a boy landed next to her, all limbs and glasses, they looked at each other wide-eyed for a moment. When her haze lifted, Lucy made to speak, but the boy—dark-haired, brown-eyed, a year or two older than her ten years—beat her to it.
“Sorry,” he said.
American. His Rs dug deep into the word, mouth as wide as his eyes when he spoke it. She attributed it to his accent but would later come to learn it was just him. Wide-eyed, wide-worded, wide-hearted.
“Sorry,” she echoed.
He stood, reaching first for her book, which had fallen near the fountain and was catching stray water droplets on its aged pages. He pushed his black-rimmed glasses up as he read the title. “As You Like It. What’s
that mean?”
Lucy shrugged. “I don’t like it.”
He seemed to remember her presence then, nearly tripping over his lanky legs all over again as he reached a hand to pull her up—the first instance of many times in their lives.
“Why are you reading it if you don’t like it?”
Lucy blinked, embarrassed to admit she had just liked the way the gold words shone against its old blue spine on the shelf. And more than that, it had been on the upper shelf, meaning she had an excuse to climb the rolling ladder. All her schoolmates had swing sets in their gardens or nearby parks. She . . . she had a fountain in place of a merry-go-round and a rolling ladder instead of monkey bars.
But she was full of rebellion against Shakespeare’s words and refused to play a part by giving some more logical excuse as to why she was reading this old play. So out of sheer defiance against the bard, she said to the boy, “I’ll show you.”
He followed her through the “dragon’s lair,” up the corridor to the north wing, and into the tower that had been made into a quiet gathering place for the community, complete with two wingback chairs and an oversized fireplace. She showed him the ladder and the high row of Shakespeare volumes lined up like royal sailors in their navy blue and gold. She climbed dark rungs to replace the book, then came down and gestured for him to take a turn.
Pulling out the fourth volume, he tossed it down to her and pulled out another for himself. Planting themselves in the old wingback chairs facing the cold fireplace, they took turns reading random lines and allowing the other to spout off a retort.
“‘You speak an infinite deal of nothing,’” the boy read.
“Yes, you do, Mr. Shakespeare,” Lucy said. The boy grinned.
Lucy read, “‘What’s past is prologue.’”
“I think you mean anti-log,” the boy said, and they dissolved into snickers over their own cleverness, neither knowing what a prologue was. This continued—one of them vaulting a line into the air, the other taking a crack at it like a cricket player—until the tall windows let in less and less light, the night calling them each home.
“Hey,” the boy said, as he stopped at what she assumed was the long hallway to his flat. “What’s your name?”