Set the Stars Alight

by Amanda Dykes

  But when she knelt to retrieve the watch it would not come. The chain snagged, caught like her heart, stitching itself to this place. With fingers long accustomed to coaxing delicate parts to cooperate, she eased the chain from its splintered captivity . . . and stilled.

  It was no splinter at all. It was a carefully notched pull, spun on its wooden axis as if to point at the darkness beneath. Holding her breath, Lucy lifted it and pulled out a brittle envelope.

  Every riddle has a safeguard. Dad’s writing scrawled upon it from a time when his hand was much steadier.

  Opening the envelope, she found a faded watercolor picture of a stone-clad structure—part of a castle, perhaps. It looked as if it might have been painted from a rooftop, for dark sky pinpricked with starlight served as a canopy to the seascape below. The scene sent a shiver up Lucy’s spine. Five white sea stacks rose from the churning black waves like so many bony fingers, such that any ship would be dashed to pieces if it sailed into them.

  At the bottom of the painting, studied handwriting—perhaps a bit shaky—spelled out three words. At first she thought it to be the name of the building pictured or the harbor in view. But instead the three words read to her narrowed eyes, The Way Home. The right half of the painting was torn clean off, and part of the building with it. And in the bottom corner where an artist might have made his mark, a single initial: J.

  The rumble of the Underground shook right through the floor and straight into Lucy’s veins, thundering with her pulse. She slipped the painting into the envelope, this vestige of life and mystery. It meant something, and she must know what it was. As the shaking walls stilled, in breathless anticipation, Lucy opened her watch and spoke into the room full of memories:

  “Let the story begin.”

  seven

  Edgecliffe Estate

  East Sussex, England

  August 1802

  The wind rose again in the night, and with it, Father’s temper. The two were intertwined. A gale bellowed down the cliffs to the sea below, snatching up its fury in swirls and delivering it back into The Admiral’s soul. Cannon fire in the English Channel beyond rolled in like thunder, echoes of Napoleon’s ongoing war.

  Orange fire glowing from the hearth behind him, The Admiral stood at the window in his study as a man far from home, commanding a battle he could not see. Lamenting his absence from it, and the way the endless searing pain in his leg caused a pain deeper than the physical. It took him from that war, shut him out of it.

  The cannons, and the wind, and the fury of it all would pour out on whomever was around.

  On this night, Frederick Hanford was determined it would not be him this time. He would not wait for his father to summon him for an inquisition.

  He always made demands like, “Boy. Name the sails.” And Frederick, nameless in the angry great man’s presence, would recite them like cogs in a machine. Mizzen. Mizzen topgallant. Main topsail. Fore topsail.

  Sails that infused Frederick with the majesty and adventure of what awaited him out there in the great blue, someday. He knew them all, knew them perfectly.

  But perfection did not satisfy. Father would not even look at him. Never acknowledge his good studying. Onward to the next thing. Name the decks. The guns. Captain of the Victory. The Orient. The Ville de Paris.

  On, and on, and on it went. Glass catching firelight, firelight catching that word. Boy. As if he were just a tool in The Admiral’s arsenal, his one remaining campaign in Great Britain’s war.

  In the past, the hollering had most often been met with another sound—the ivory-keyed piano. Father, in the west wing, poured amber liquid to fuel his tirade. Mother, in the east wing, sat at her instrument and countered the yelling the only way she knew how: Handel’s Messiah.

  She, playing her part alone, had sent her notes down the corridor. An invitation to the man whose heart and hand she had won playing that very piece at a benefit concert for the London Foundling Hospital.

  And not long afterward they’d had a son. But war, injury, and the loss of his place commanding his ship all but killed her husband. The void had run so deep in their home—with these three souls spread to the far corners of Edgecliffe Manor—it felt hopeless. But she’d done what she could—played her notes, always from the refrain: Let us break their bonds asunder.

  She’d played them with passion, conviction, desperation. And perhaps more than anything else, with the effect of a long, flowing garment tossed up in the air like a sheet in the sun, falling over the yelling to dampen it. To breathe beauty back into the night.

  Maria Hanford had not been the sort of mother who would sing Frederick a lullaby or draw him into an embrace, but these late-night concertos, he knew, were sent to do battle on his behalf. Fierce in their beauty, just like her.

  Though Frederick had not known the reason at the time, as her end approached, the notes tumbled down the corridor with more desperation, colliding with Father’s yelling as a force sent to shatter the pummeling words, to wall them away from her son. The two forces had done battle there, right outside his bedroom door, tangling in the night.

  It was thus that he would fall into a fitful sleep and forget, for a spell, the darkness that shook the age-old walls, sometimes turning in his hand the old sixpence his mother had slipped him once to buy a peppermint stick in the village. A peppermint stick would be gone in an instant, he’d known, but a coin, he could keep. Hold. Slip beneath his pillow to run his thumb over and pretend instead it was his mother who ran a thumb over his cheek, as mothers in the fairy stories always did.

  He’d wrapped his thoughts in her notes, let them bury the cannon fire in the distance, and the shadowy someday of his future among those cannons.

  Now that his mother’s notes had fallen silent—consumed forever by the fever—The Admiral’s amber liquid flowed more abundantly, and the wrathful words bellowed freely without any music to fight back.

  So this night, when darkness shook those walls again, Frederick slipped inside them . . . and escaped. The house had been built with priest holes, hidden passageways, and secrets in its very stones. For the first time, he thanked the heavens for his dark suit of mourning, the way it blended him into the night.

  He knew not where he was going as he stumbled past St. Thomas’s chapel and its graveyard with weathered tombstones sticking up into the night like crooked teeth. With wide young eyes and shaking hands and legs, he wandered on in the dark through cliff-side pasture paths and stick-built gates, growing more and more fearful as the harsh night descended.

  But kindness, as it happened, did not reside only in Handel’s Messiah. It also dwelled in the blistered hands of a shepherd who gathered up Frederick’s shivering body from beneath the lone yew tree as if he were a lost lamb. He brought him home to a single-room cottage, laid him on a mattress of straw before the crackling fire.

  In his nine years Frederick had never known such warmth. Not from the fireplaces of all the twenty-seven chimneys that turned his own home’s roofline into that of a fortress. Nor had he ever experienced the odd sort of light that seeped into his soul when woken by the sound of laughter.

  “He looks lost, Father,” a voice sweet and gold as honey said.

  “And well he might be,” the man responded, casting a shadowed look through a small window.

  Frederick rubbed his eyes, sitting up to take in the scene: mottled walls with stonework breaking through plaster. The room was simple and bare, its only adornment two small windows, with light spilling in as if from heaven itself.

  A door creaked open, bringing with it air so fresh it seemed to clean his soul. The sea mists had not yet burned off the pastures. How early was it, here in this other world?

  “Eggs,” a new voice said. A woman. The mother? The ache inside him yawned as Handel’s Messiah tiptoed through his memory. He watched as she cracked an egg into a steaming pot hanging over the crackling fire.

  “We’ve got a double yolk today, we do. Must be the hens knew we had a young guest
with us.”

  Frederick’s still form filled with shame as he watched the family’s flurry of activity. He stood, his unpracticed hands fumbling to pull the blanket over the makeshift straw mattress. Was this how one . . . made a bed? His face burned. Here he was nearly ten years old—a man, according to Father—and a heap of straw made him glow like a hearth fire.

  “Never you mind, dear,” the woman said, placing her hands gently about his shoulders and guiding him to a table of weathered wood. “Time enough for me to do that later.”

  The shepherd stood from the stool at Frederick’s side and strode to the door. “Sheep are callin’. The day’s a-wastin’.”

  In the silence that followed the shepherd’s departure, Frederick swallowed, trying to find words in this new place.

  That honey-filled laugh sounded again. “Cat got your tongue?”

  “Hush, Juliette.” The mother swatted the girl playfully with a rag. “You’d do well to learn a lesson or two from him on how to hold your own tongue.” Her words were strict but her tone was gold, offered with a wink. “Heaven help us, the girl comes into this world with the sea flood, and she takes the force of the sea with her wherever she goes.”

  Frederick tilted his head. “Sea flood?”

  “Aye. Surely you know of the great sea flood?”

  When his silence answered to the contrary, she leaned in as if to impart a great secret. “Every eighteen years, the moon draws closer than any other time. Like a great silver dish in the sky, it draws the sea up higher . . . and higher . . . and higher. All the fisherfolk around clamber to see it. Legend has it that to be touched by the spray of a sea flood wave is to be granted good fortune all the days of your life.”

  “And . . . Juliette was sprayed?”

  She laughed. “Oh my, no. Juliette was born the night of the last sea flood. Folks like to say the moon and the waves delivered her right into our arms.”

  She shook her head. “I know ’twern’t the moon, but I do believe the sea got caught up in that girl’s soul. ’Tis in her, the force and the call of it. She vows she’ll be there to meet that tide, next time it do come ’round.”

  Frederick gulped. A great silver moon . . . What might that look like from his rooftop telescope? “Will it be soon?”

  “Aye, the wink of an eye, and the stretch of an eternity. Another ten years. But mark my word, our Juliette will make good on that vow.”

  “Aye,” Juliette chimed in from where she placed carrots upon a plate. “That I shall.”

  “Now,” her mother said, tugging the girl’s plaited copper hair. “Give the boy a bowl and be on your way. The pigs need feeding and they’ll have it from none but you, you sprite-o’-the-mist.”

  The girl slid a plain brown bowl his way, running her finger around the rim and skipping over its three chips. “Do take care with our fine china,” she said with a wink and skipped out the door, her mother shooing her and whisking the bowl away from Frederick. She moved it to the head of the small table, replacing Frederick’s with one that bore only a single chip on its rim.

  Steam curled from a poached egg within. Double yolk, indeed. It looked for all the world like a king’s feast, his stomach coming alive with a vengeance after last night’s wanderings. He thought of the breakfast that Cook laid out every morning, silver-domed dishes piping with sausages and potatoes and all manner of offerings. Never did he remember wishing to inhale them as he took breakfast alone each morning. But the simple fare before him now summoned a growl from his belly, the likes of which could’ve shaken the earth.

  Frederick watched as the woman pulled a single cob of corn from another pot over the fire and harvested its kernels into a bowl. She heaped at least half into his bowl, dividing the remainder among another three bowls.

  “Please . . . ” His voice broke, muddied from the long night as it scraped past a soreness. He cleared his throat. “Please, don’t trouble yourself for me.”

  The woman paused with a dish she was drying in her apron and looked him full in the face. “Master Frederick.”

  He hung his head. “You know . . . who I am.” He heard the heavy defeat in his own voice. If she knew he was the son of Sir Barnard Hanford, she would know him as the servants did—for he heard them, when they did not know he was near, call him the “sea brat.”

  “Too much salt air’s addled him,” he’d heard a footman say once. “Wanderin’ the cliffs like a banshee, never knowin’ the work it takes to keep the land beneath his feet alive.” The man had spit in disgust, and Frederick had begun letting his wanders take him farther inland, to watch as the tenant farmers toiled over the land. Was it true? Did those who worked on his father’s land break their backs, only to live on a handful of corn kernels for breakfast?

  “Ah, now don’t let the gloom settle over your bones so,” the woman said.

  Gloom in the bones . . . He had never heard the phrase before, and though it was a sad one, it comforted him to think that somebody understood him.

  “To be known is no shame. You eat up, Master Frederick.”

  But the gloom did settle in his bones—the heaviness piling upon him until he felt physically weary. He nudged the bowl away from himself, looking toward the door where the others had disappeared. “Might I . . .” His formal speech sounded sharp here. “Would you mind if I. . .”

  She laughed, an easy sound like the rolling tide, and lowered herself into the chair beside him as it creaked beneath her slight form. “Out with it, then. What’s it you want, child?”

  “To help,” he blurted, the words sounding foolish. What did he have to offer? And yet . . . how could he not?

  Understanding eased the lovely lines around her smile. “Ah,” she said. “Juliette’ll be slopping the pigs, and Tom—that’s my husband—and Elias will be feedin’ the sheep. The porridge’ll keep, but eat that egg before you go. They’ll show you what to do.”

  Frederick made quick work of the egg with a tarnished tin fork and set outdoors, where the mud was gloriously thick and the sun shone bright.

  He watched as Tom filled a trough with straw for the lambs who were nudging their way toward breakfast. Perhaps he imagined it, but the man seemed to slow his work, never saying a word but casting a glance at the spare shovel, then sending a grin Frederick’s way. An invitation.

  Before long he was transferring armloads of pokey straw, doubtless bungling the job at every turn, but something about plunging his strength into the dark earth was a balm to his soul.

  Juliette seemed less than pleased that her shovel had landed in the hands of a spoiled sea brat. “You’re always tellin’ me not to hold the shovel that way,” she said, crossing her arms.

  “Juliette, my girl,” Tom said, a glimmer in his eye. “Come here and I’ll show you how to hold it.”

  “You have before, Father.” She looked offended, but there was a spark in her spirit mirroring her father’s, as if she knew he was up to something. She drew near to him, stepping with caution toward his open hand. Another step, another—and he reached out and smudged her cheek with mud.

  “There, now,” Tom said. “Fit to be mistress o’ the land.”

  She shrieked feigned anger, the smile across her face entirely consuming.

  “Not the likes of me,” she said, and it was with pride, this proclamation that she was unfit to be mistress of the land.

  Somewhere in Frederick’s young mind, her words stung.

  “The day I become mistress of the land is the day I can fly!” She launched a clump of mud at her father, pleased when it landed on his shoulder and splattered his face.

  Frederick could see by the look on the shepherd’s face that he relished their banter. He rested his chin on the shovel, his head feeling heavy and foggy after the work, and laughed quietly as he watched father and daughter splatter each other with mud. They heard, and the two of them turned on him, exchanging a conspiratorial glance.

  “No,” he said, but felt something come alive in him.

  “Aye,�
�� Juliette said, and drawing back her arm, sent a glop of mud flying right at his shoulder, hitting its mark expertly.

  This was foreign to him. Had he ever known larks such as this? With another child, no less? Some instinct overtook him, and he stooped to gather soggy ammunition of his own. But could he truly take aim at a girl? Smear her, most literally, with mud?

  He glanced at her father, as if to ask permission. The shepherd tipped his head as if to say, Only if you dare. All the permission he needed.

  What followed was joy. Pure, wild, unabashed. Mucking about with two people he’d never met, who by rights should despise him, the way Father’s tenants were wont to do with his family.

  And yet here he was, sun splotched, dirt streaked, and happier than he’d ever been.

  A sudden clanging sounded, tin bucket against fence, and Frederick turned to see a boy about his age. He was tossing grain on the ground for the chickens and looking none too pleased at the scene before him—despite the smile pasted on his ruddy face.

  “Who’s this?” He dipped his head toward Frederick, never taking his eyes from him.

  “I’m. . . I’m nobody,” he said, his tongue feeling thick as his thoughts. The boy’s manner made Frederick feel three inches tall, an imposter here in the barnyard.

  And wasn’t he?

  The shepherd, Tom, drew up next to Frederick and put an arm around his shoulder. The effect was that of a protective cloak. The boy’s stare flicked to Tom, whose face showed only welcome to them both.

  “This is our friend,” Tom said simply. “As are you, Elias. Thanks for that.” He pointed toward the bucket, and Elias’s manner was suddenly humbled. Frederick wondered what tale he’d stumbled into here. What was the story behind Elias’s immediately humbled manner? As if he owed his life to the shepherd.