Set the Stars Alight

by Amanda Dykes

  “Look at the lot of you!” Juliette’s mother stood in the door of the cottage, shielding her eyes and shaking her head. “If you think you’re coming back into my house tracking the whole soggy pasture in with you, you’d best think again. Wash up and come get some breakfast.”

  Juliette and Elias—apparently a hired hand, though something about the way he kept his eyes fixed suspiciously on Frederick made him seem more a guardian—rounded to the trough where a pump waited. They each splashed water on their faces and hands, ruddy from its cold. Frederick followed suit, and when he opened his eyes, droplets clung to his lashes and framed the view before him. A daughter. A father. A friend. A corner of the world where all was right, and that picture bolstered him so that he felt perhaps he could go on after all.

  He could face the bellowing at night, even without Mother’s music. This memory would now be his song. He inhaled, trying to affix every bit of it to his mind. And as each detail found its place there in the forever-place inside him, he felt something foreign. A fullness in his lungs, a tingling in his fingers. A buoyant heart. Courage.

  Courage is a hefty thing, he thought, for though foreign strength flowed through him, so did a heaviness. Heavier with every step toward the stone cottage. So heavy he became dizzy with it. So dizzy he became hot with it. So hot he burned, until there on the threshold of the shepherd’s cottage, it pulled him into a sea of black.

  Muddled sounds and patchwork pieces of faces clouded his consciousness. The shepherd, lifting him once again. Juliette, running away from her home and toward his. Light and darkness, and light again, and darkness once more. These were days and nights passing—he felt it more than knew it, somewhere in the middle of it all. Fires crackling and low voices murmuring saying things about “fever” and “like his mother, poor soul.” Vaguely he became aware that the fireplace he lay by was no longer the shepherd’s, but one of gilded ivory. Edgecliffe.

  He felt homesick.

  And yet he was home.

  In his ebbing haze, all he could think of was the darkness of that soil and the white of the sheep. How good God must be, if God be real, to let him know the shepherd’s family, to have spent a night by their fire. To have experienced something true and good before leaving this earth. Somewhere in the distance, a church bell rang haunting and slow. A death knell. Was it his?

  But visions of the soil rolled on, so rich he could almost smell the spice of it. And though it felt like heaven to him, he knew this did not align with what the Scriptures said of heaven.

  The days and nights stewed thick together until slowly, slowly he was drawn out, and morning dawned with a strange clarity. Pale light reached past heavy scarlet curtains. The window was cracked open, letting in the call of the sea beyond, beckoning him back into life.

  Days followed as his body tried to catch up to his spirit, which wanted out of this place. Back to the pastures, the cottage, to the people who had known who he was and gave him the gift of home despite it.

  When at last his legs were strong enough to carry him across the land, he slipped back into the passageways behind the manor walls, escaped back onto the pastures, urged his weakened limbs to carry him swiftly to the yew tree and beyond. Determined to once more set his eyes on a good and true thing—on that family.

  But he slowed as he approached St. Thomas’s chapel and the old graveyard, seeing a tiny clutch of mourners in the distance, gathered around a grave. A cloud of black in human form. A sight he would have retreated from only a month before. But now?

  Cloaked still in his own suit of mourning, and having come so close to death himself, he felt kinship to these people. He watched on as a small form—a girl—dropped to her knees before the grave.

  As the curate retreated from the gathering and people began to disperse, a woman laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder, stooping to say something to her. Slipping a bouquet of white daisies into the girl’s hands, and waiting.

  When the girl did not budge, the woman slowly, sadly stepped toward the fresh grave and laid her own single flower upon it. Turning to go, she stopped to lay a hand upon the girl’s head, to stoop, leaning in until their foreheads touched and the girl’s cheeks were cradled in the woman’s hands. She spoke in a manner gentle and broken and strong all at once, and rose again.

  A hollow pit began to open inside of Frederick, a suspicion that he knew this clutch of people. He did not want that to be true. For that would mean the shepherd . . .

  He gulped. Could not finish the thought.

  A boy lingered near the church. His stare bored into the green grass at his feet as he slowly closed the gap between himself and the girl. His hand reached for hers. She pulled back and he waited, unspeaking. Moments passed until he reached again, and this time the fortress that was the girl eased, ever so slowly, as she laid her head upon the boy’s shoulder.

  Her form did not shake with sobs, as Frederick had seen some do. It held fierceness as an armor, but a fleeting softness, a crack in her armor, reached out, up through the rich green grass of summer on the hill, up its rise, and straight into Frederick. Like calling unto like, a grief he knew too well knocked at his heart as if to say, You are not alone. I am here, too.

  And for the first time since his mother’s music went silent, Frederick was not alone in the world.

  When the girl and the boy climbed the hill arm in arm, she with hollowness in her green eyes, she met his gaze. . . and grief lit into ire.

  Pounding inside him urged him to reach out and speak the words—You are not alone. I am here, too. They pounded the more when he saw, without a doubt, that it was Juliette and Elias.

  He summoned the words. They sat on his tongue like arrows ready to sail into her world, but he stopped. For what if they pierced when they landed, rather than bringing comfort?

  He took a step forward. Swallowed. Opened his mouth to speak.

  “I-I’m sorry,” he said, voice breaking. Heart raw, hanging in those words offered to her into the brittle air between them. He inhaled, summoning courage to offer everything he could. “You are not alone,” he said.

  Elias shot him a look as if to say, What fell on your head, you brute? Of course she’s not alone. I’m here.

  He swallowed. Against all sense, he continued, if only to give her what little he had—understanding. “I—”

  She held up a hand. Silenced him and spoke so low her words could have been cannons dropping slow and solid into the depths of the sea. “It should have been you.”

  Frederick flinched.

  Juliette leaned in, fierceness wrapping her like a serpent around a pole, squeezing vehement words in a shuddering whisper and leaving no room for doubt. “There in the ground. It should never have been Father. And it wouldn’t have been Father if you hadn’t come, bringing the fever with you.”

  The words pummeled him, his foot stepping backward. This was a horror he hadn’t even considered. That good shepherd was in the ground . . . because of him?

  Elias was tugging gently, making to lead Juliette away. A flicker of apology crossed his face, a hint that he, perhaps, did not arrive at the same conclusion as she had. Even so, he would not bring his eyes to meet Frederick’s.

  Juliette turned to go, one end of her russet shawl slipping from a shoulder and dropping to the ground. Unthinking, Frederick lunged, face hot, snatching it up from where it dragged in the dark earth, tucking it back around her.

  She recoiled at his touch and spun to face him. “Be sure of this,” she said. “You and I shall never”—she gritted her teeth—“ever, speak again.” She spat on the ground beside him and left, never once looking back.

  The wind that was always tormenting Father flew up the cliffs and into Frederick. It drove him as he ran numbly, blindly, unheeding that he was headed to the very place that would make that girl despise him all the more.

  And there, kneeling beside the grave of the kind shepherd dark against green earth, with the cannons of the war rolling gunpowder thunder across the sky, Fred
erick buried his own tears.

  “Anything.” His voice choked. “I will do anything you ask of me, God. Undo it. Take me into the earth instead. Bring that girl life once more. Somehow . . . help me make it right.” His chest squeezed around the words as they came out flat, insufficient for the burn inside. “Help me. Make it right.” This, he repeated, willing the words to be enough. Realizing they never would be.

  The prayer was broken and messy and held none of the rhymes or verses that his governess had taught him to pray before bed and meals. And yet, jagged as it was, it was the truest prayer he’d ever known. It mingled with exhaustion as he repeated fragments of it, clutching earth until sleep overtook him right there beside the shepherd’s resting place.

  eight

  Edgecliffe Estate

  East Sussex, England

  August 1805

  Everything changed for Frederick the night of the disappearing light.

  Three years had passed since the day at St. Thomas’s graveyard. And the silence of the corridors of Edgecliffe was nearly as bad as Father’s yelling had been. It drove Frederick, twelve years old, night after night to the stone stairs of the east wing. He climbed and climbed until he burst out into the night upon the roof. Here, tucked behind one of the twenty-seven chimneys, was his secret world.

  It was simple, yet it was everything. A chair with a wobbly leg, rescued from the cobwebbed attic. A stockpot salvaged from Cook’s castoffs, large enough to hold his own small fire, its smoke curling up against that chimney, so none looking on from afar would imagine it belonged to the vagrant fire of a runaway in his own home. And the book. Always the book, with quill and ink kept beneath the chair to inscribe in it.

  Twelfth of August, 1805. The quill scratched its song against the waves that came gently tonight.

  Skies: He squinted at the sky as Reskell, his tutor, had taught him. Constellation Draco in the sky. Constellation Gemini dimly visible.

  Giving his eyes time to adjust, he strained to see the twins within that constellation. Brothers Castor and Pollux, from the stories of yore. Inseparable. He knew they were stars, not people, but the theme of brotherhood drew him deeply. What would it be to have a friend? Much less a brother? The sort to stand fast with you in battle. He knew only solitude in his home. And though he did not mind the quiet . . . the isolation sometimes pierced.

  A look over to the parapet where a lopsided weathervane creaked a slow turn, then stopped. Wind: North.

  He thought back on the day’s lessons regarding angles and equations. What was it Reskell had said? He lifted his quill to record it. Words from Galileo Galilei, whom the tutor was forever quoting.

  “Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.”

  He didn’t know whether he believed that. Pythagoras’s theorem certainly didn’t smack of the divine. Even so, Frederick knew the working of numbers would serve him well once he boarded Admiral Forsythe’s ship, once his father pronounced him ready.

  Still, if Galileo had been correct, he was surely only partially correct. Frederick thought back to what he’d seen in the library today and recorded it:

  Millie the parlormaid makes landscapes with the ashes before she sweeps them from the hearth.

  He only knew this because she’d been called away before she’d swept it up, and he’d happened into the library and found a scene of beach and waves, finger-traced into a canvas of ashes. When she’d returned and seen him studying her work, her face had burned redder than coals. She’d swept it all away quick as a wink before disappearing with only a “Beg pardon, sir,” and a hurried curtsy.

  He could not account for the reason, but that scene in ashes had risen up to challenge him. See, it seemed to say. Open your eyes. There is goodness here, right here, right in the ashes.

  He opened his eyes there on the roof. Above, the night sky spread like a star-flung canvas. Beyond, the sea rolled its waves. And there, across the meadows and headed for the seaside cliff, a light. Bouncing like a lantern-in-hand.

  Which was entirely wrong. None in this village of fishers and farmers would be out this late. Certainly not at the cliffs, which were notoriously perilous to any who did not know their terrain intimately.

  He lifted his spyglass and trained it toward the light.

  But he saw nothing. No light. Had he imagined it?

  He lowered his spyglass and narrowed his eyes, scanning. There—silhouetted black against the dark blue waves and reflected sky, he saw the figure of a boy.

  From such a distance Frederick could not make out much, but he saw the lad stoop near the ground. He was close to the cliff edge. Too close. Frederick nearly hollered out for him to stop but knew his voice would not reach across the expanse, nor be heard above the waves crashing upon cliffs.

  The boy looked over one shoulder, then over the other. And then he clambered over the edge as if it were his homeland. Frederick knew that spot, had been warned away a thousand times. The cliff had long been receding, rocks falling into the ocean below, carrying any soul foolish enough to tread there right along, too.

  Down went Frederick’s stomach, straight into a hard pit, and down went his body, through flights of stairs and dark corridors and out into the night below, racing across land soggy from the day’s rains. He arrived with shoulders heaving at the cliff’s edge.

  He pulled up, slowing at a safe distance.

  “H-hello,” he said, his voice faltering pitifully on the wind. He cleared his throat. “Hello,” he said, this time forcing boldness. “Are you there?” No answer. “Are you hurt?” Still, nothing. “I say, are you hurt!”

  He splayed himself down upon the ground, feeling cold water seep through his nightshirt. He dreaded what he would see. For it could only be a body, broken on the rocks below. Or, if by some miracle, the boy had caught a branch or stronghold on his fall, what then? What would Frederick do?

  When he finally gathered the courage and peered over the cliff, he was met with only a yawning black night. The moon was bright enough to show that no body lay broken, and for that he was awash with gratitude. No boy hung precariously in the balance, awaiting his help, and for that, chagrined though he was to acknowledge it, he was disappointed. He’d thought, perhaps, he might help someone. It would be a nice feeling, he imagined. Something to . . . to matter.

  Eventually, he wandered his way home, but sleep did not come that night. Frederick stood watch on his rooftop, chased by doubts over his own sanity. Had he really seen someone out there?

  The next afternoon, Reskell was in a delighted froth over Pythagoras. It was getting late, and Frederick was losing all hope of leaving Edgecliffe while the daylight lingered.

  He lifted his eyes to the old clock and then transferred his gaze to the looming portraits of Britain’s Triumphant Three, the men who had been touted as the great leaders who would put Bonaparte in his place. First, Admiral Horatio Nelson, his portrait gallant in full navy dress, painted so after the Battle of Nile. Second, Father, illustrious hero of Cadiz. Serious. Pockmarked. Proud of his show of courage and cunning in that battle’s victory—which was also, as it turned out, his last battle. As the nightly tirades at Edgecliffe had attested for so long.

  And last, Admiral Cuthbert Forsythe, who had earned a place in the proud land’s hearts and history with his triumph at Malta. This man had agreed to take Frederick onto his ship, the HMS Avalon.

  “Anyone would be lucky to sail with Forsythe,” Father had said. “Mind, he’s not to be crossed. He once threw a fresh-arrived sailor in with the pigs his first night. Said if he was intent on acting like the prodigal son, he’d sleep with the pigs.”

  Frederick gulped at the thought. And yet it also conjured the heartwarming memory of a certain mud battle he’d been a part of, once upon a time.

  “Do pay attention, Master Frederick,” Reskell beckoned. “I know squares of numbers aren’t as riveting as watching the sails in action, but if you want to keep your wits about you on deck, absorb these equations as
though they are your very lifeblood.”

  Frederick heard his tutor’s voice but the words skipped over his consciousness like gulls upon wind. Pevensey Bay was white-capped and churning, and the frigate beyond the sea stack rocks was being tossed like a plaything. He narrowed his eyes, tracing its structure. He tried to count. Was it a thirty-two gun? The Lively, perhaps? Or no. He squinted. Counted again. Thirty-six guns. The Dryad, he’d wager. It’d been seen in Portsmouth recently, and that wasn’t terribly far. He reached for the telescope lying on the windowsill.

  Reskell put his thin body between Frederick and the telescope. “You’ll not board that ship, nor any of His Majesty’s vessels, if you can’t calculate knots and plot routes. It matters not who your father is, nor how many captains he knows. None of them want a man who doesn’t know his way around the rigging when other boys have been at it since nine and ten years old. If you have any hope of excelling in His Majesty’s Royal Navy, I suggest you make a quick study. As I was saying—”

  “Upend the sand timer at the same moment the chip log is submerged in the water. After the thirty seconds’ sand is up, count the knots that have unraveled in the rope attached to the log. This is the speed at which the ship is traversing the ocean.” Frederick rattled off the answer he’d memorized from Reskell’s manuals late into the night—and thought again of the disappearing light. His foot bounced, awaiting Reskell’s response. Awaiting his freedom.

  The sound of the surf filled the silence, and Frederick felt the man’s astonishment before he looked up and confirmed it in his bespectacled, slack-jawed expression. Father had had the man shipped in from Portsmouth, pilfered from the teachers at the Royal Naval Academy, and he’d arrived at Edgecliffe with low expectations for his lone student.

  Reskell blinked, clearly unable to reconcile how those words had transmitted themselves into his feckless young pupil’s equally feckless brain.