Set the Stars Alight

by Amanda Dykes

  Back inside, the air was warm from the lights shining down on the committee. Lucy and Dash stood side by side, facing the members as if they were a jury.

  Dr. Muller spoke a few words about how highly unusual this request was, and Lucy lifted her chin to keep it from following her sinking spirits.

  Beside her, the back of Dash’s hand brushed hers. For a split second, her fingers ached to lace themselves to his, like they had in the Underground when everything had gone black. As if her fingers sensed home nearby.

  But she straightened those fingers, schooling them into submission.

  “However,” Dr. Pomeroy interjected. “In light of your impressive claims, Mr. Greene—”

  “Highly impressive. Highly impressive.” Dr. Muller wrinkled his forehead, looking again at Dash’s résumé.

  Dr. Pomeroy continued. “We are prepared to offer a one-month extension. If within that time you are able to document convincing evidence that links your two schools of study—”

  “Maritime archaeology and forensic astronomy,” Dr. Finchley clarified.

  “Yes. Then we believe this will be something truly . . .” He let his voice trail upward as he deliberated on the right word. “Remarkable.”

  “And if there is enough evidence to suggest concretely the whereabouts of the Jubilee, we will fund your request in full.”

  Lucy’s heart raced. She bit her lip around her spreading smile.

  “Aw, that’s great,” Dash said, taking his cap from his head. His hair stuck up in the back, every bit the mad scientist. He never had been polished or professional. And apparently degrees from Harvard and roving astronomer positions hadn’t changed that.

  “Yes, thank you. Truly,” Lucy said.

  “You won’t regret it,” Dash said, about to become effusive, if the glimmer in his eye meant what it used to. So before he could bring the whole building down around them in thanks, she nudged him and led the way out, tilting her head for him to follow.

  “We shall see,” Dr. Finchley’s crow-like words followed them out.

  Outside, the evening burst upon them in a baptism of fresh air and hope. It was summer, and that meant evenings stretched long and clear. Greenwich Park was vibrant green, a clash with the state of her mind, which was muddled over what had just happened.

  “There’s your place,” Lucy said, pointing in the direction of the Royal Observatory. After he first introduced her to Greenwich all those years ago, they’d hopped the Tube and come here several times before he’d disappeared—she getting lost for hours in the displays at the Maritime Museum, he scribbling down notes and calculations at the observatory.

  And always, they’d end the day at the prime meridian. She’d stand on one side of the line, he on the other, and they’d high-five one another—Dash’s idea. “Can’t keep us apart,” he’d once said. “Even in different hemispheres. Time starts here, you know. Greenwich mean time and all that. So we’re high-fiving”—he held his hand up with a cheesy smile—“right where time begins.”

  That had been a lifetime ago. And they’d proven the contrary.

  No one said anything more as they now walked to the Underground in the softening light. Standing on the platform, he broke the thick silence. “Come with me, Lucy. Please. A month is so short, and we’ve got a lot of work to do if you want that grant. I’ve got some business at the Royal Observatory tomorrow, and then I’ll show you the way. If you can. If you want to.”

  It was just a train ride. A simple yes would begin the journey. But it felt as impossible to speak as it would to proclaim herself royalty. It wasn’t what she did.

  “Even if I shut down the shop, I have to be out of the cottage in a month’s time. Mr. Bessette has been kind to let me stay there as long as he has, but he’s hired a new groundskeeper, and they’ll be needing to move house soon.”

  In truth, the household furnishings would stay with the cottage, and she’d already packed most of her personal items. Mr. Bessette had offered her a small Candlewick Commons flat at a good rate, but she hadn’t been sure she wanted to stay in the area. She’d made no other plans—but she wasn’t going to admit that to Dash.

  She expected him to protest, to pipe up with his enthusiasm and list all the reasons she could—should—travel to the farm, all the ways it could work.

  But instead she saw understanding in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. And she knew he truly was. It was the house, and the life in it she was leaving behind, and all the loss—especially of the past two years.

  “I’ll bring the packing tape,” he said. “I’m good at moving. Put me to work.”

  Her throat grew tight. She nodded, eyes stinging, his kindness touching a place in her she did not often visit. “Thank you, Dash.”

  “I’m serious. How can I help?”

  She thought of the document he’d sent her. The one he’d created and reached out with, emailing her out of the blue. He couldn’t have known it would reach her just as she was about to toss her phone into the Thames in sorrow and frustration. Had no way of knowing it was what had brought her here, to the committee, dreams in her hands.

  “You already have helped, Dash. More than I can say. Thank you for coming all this way, for doing what you did. I’m sure we can collaborate via email, perhaps phone or video, if we need to. And if you’d like to come back next month, I’ll pay for your train ticket.”

  He narrowed his eyes. This, he did not understand. He looked crestfallen.

  “Okay,” he said, stuffing his hands back in his pockets and turning toward his platform. “I guess . . . if you need anything, you know where to find me.”

  twelve

  That night, Lucy could not sleep. Her dreams, when snatches of sleep came, were those of heavy blackouts beneath ground in the Tube. Dash’s hand reaching for hers, comfort in the dark. One of those moments so deeply etched in her soul, it would be a part of her always, though years upon years had passed.

  But wasn’t that what he’d done again? Showed up, emerging from the shadows . . . and brought hope? And wasn’t that what he’d done two years ago, when she’d been blindly wandering the banks of the Thames?

  The Thames had drawn her when she realized she was now an orphan.

  She closed her eyes around the memory. . . .

  Orphan?

  Was that a word people used anymore? Was it not reserved for the pages of fairy tales and Dickens? Certainly not used to describe a grown woman. Lucy knew it was ridiculous, but the question plagued. So she sat, garbed in a simple black dress upon a bench near the river, and pulled out her phone.

  A man looked up briefly from his book stand beneath the bridge—first at the children playing jacks on the sidewalk, then over at Lucy. Her cheeks burned as if he could see what she’d typed: orphan definition.

  He went back to reading and so did she.

  Orphan: a person whose parents are deceased.

  Doubtless, the term was normally reserved for children, but an orphan, indeed, she was. Lucy Claremont, student of maritime history, proprietor of the family watch shop, and . . . orphan.

  The river flowed on by, whispering assurance that if this was true, she was certainly in the right place for it. Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Little Nell, and a plethora of other Dickensian waifs trod this soil before her, and people loved them still. Never mind that things usually ended tragically for them. Dickens wasn’t around. He wasn’t here to write the end of her story.

  But who was?

  She picked herself up and shuffled along the Thames, watched the evening lights come on, strung between lampposts and flower baskets. Listened past the noise of the buses and traffic, until she could hear the whisper of the water.

  What had Father called this river in his stories? Her mind was a muddle of grief and graduate studies and she couldn’t pin down the right word. Magic . . . magic kingdom. “No, that’s Disney, you fool.”

  A wide-eyed girl looked up from her place at her mother’s side, and her mother held the girl
’s hand tighter.

  “Sorry,” she said with a small wave. “Never mind me.” She hadn’t meant to speak aloud. She was losing her mind.

  The Hidden World?

  No, that wasn’t right, either. She stopped on the riverbank and watched the currents weave to and fro. “What are you?” she asked, careful to whisper this time. “What’s your name?”

  She could not find it. She remembered the stories Father had told of this river—of how people had played cricket on the bottom when it had dried up, and held ice festivals on its surface when it had frozen over. How they’d defeated hopelessness by doing something within their impossible circumstances.

  She remembered how the stories made her feel. Full of longing, like she’d missed the times of yore and wonder and was born instead into a time of plastic and speed. Father’s magic was tucked, always, in the past. Her chest burned and she sniffled. It was ridiculous that she hadn’t cried at the funeral but was sniffling like a baby an hour later over lost fairy tales.

  Grief did that, apparently. Snuck out of hidden exits.

  Fear gripped her deeply. What if she never remembered? And worse, what if this wasn’t the only one of his stories she had lost in the muddle?

  She closed her eyes, a sickening darkness gripping her stomach at the realization: She could not remember the stories. A few of them, perhaps, but . . . there had been so many. They melded together, covered over in an iron blanket of grief that would not let her in.

  It was too much. To lose those, too.

  So she stood there. She and the river and a thousand stories and losses in between—and she wept. She wept for Father. For Mum. For the stories, the world they so longed to give her, and the way it was lost to reality. And for the boy who once sat beside her in that fragile place of hope . . . and who was long gone, too.

  Her phone dinged. She raised her arm in blind instinct, pulled it back as if to throw it out into the dark waters, let it sink to the bottom of the place where people apparently celebrated with picnics and cricket. Happy things for a happy time.

  It dinged again. Incessant. She pulled her hand back farther, but hesitated. And just as she was about to vault that portal to constant connection into a watery grave alongside the impossible picnics and cricket matches—she looked up and back and saw three words on the screen:

  THE HIDDEN KINGDOM

  Her heart thudded. That was it. The name Father had called the dried-up Thames, the words her mind had failed to excavate. And now . . . here they were, shining bright in black letters upon a white ribbon of email notification on her phone?

  Surely not. This was a break with reality, some grief-induced delusion. She clutched the phone against her chest, pressed her eyes closed to give them a fresh start. Opening them, she turned slowly, taking in the signs all about as a litmus test.

  Waterloo Bridge.

  Southbank Book Market.

  These, she knew to be true. So perhaps, just possibly, her imagination wasn’t just conjuring things out of desperation. With some trepidation, she peeked again at her phone, and there were the words, as clear as day in an email notification:

  THE HIDDEN KINGDOM

  “But that’s impossible,” she whispered. Unless Dad had somehow scheduled an email to be sent, before he . . .

  No, he had been a pen-and-graph-paper user for everything from gear schematics to market lists to letters to his friends. He would as soon have known how to schedule an email as to turn back time.

  So it hadn’t been him. And it wasn’t her imagination. That left just one possibility, the only other person in all the universe who knew Dad’s name for the dry bed of the Thames.

  Her heart tripped about in her chest, like a stone skipped upon the rippling river. Swiping her thumb across the screen to unlock it, she opened the full email.

  DEAR LUCY,

  The air went out of her, years falling away. Dash had always typed in all capitals—and she had forever given him a hard time about it. He was such an easygoing soul, it made her laugh that his writing looked like yelling. But some things did change, it seemed, in half a lifetime. She felt as much a stranger to him, apparently, as he did to her. He had never called her Lucy.

  Her eyes devoured the lines as fast as she could skim them, then returned to savor them slowly.

  DEAR LUCY,

  I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY. I WISH I COULD SAY SOMETHING TO MAKE IT BETTER . . . BUT I KNOW THERE AREN’T WORDS. I WISH I COULD BE THERE. THERE’S NOWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE I WOULD RATHER BE THAN AT YOUR SIDE. BUT . . . I KNOW I’M A STRANGER TO YOU NOW, AND THIS ISN’T THE TIME FOR STRANGERS.

  STILL, THERE WAS A TIME WHEN YOU WERE THE ONLY FAMILY I KNEW. WHEN YOUR PARENTS OPENED THEIR DOOR TO A LOST KID WHO DIDN’T KNOW UP FROM DOWN, AND INSTEAD OF TELLING HIM TO PULL HIS HEAD OUT OF THE STARS, THEY GAVE HIM THE FOOTING BENEATH HIS FEET TO SEE THEM CLEARLY, AND THEIR MAKER.

  YOUR DAD TOLD US OF THAT HIDDEN KINGDOM AT THE BOTTOM OF THE RIVER, AND IT ALWAYS SEEMED TO ME TO SPEAK OF A KINGDOM OF HOPE. EVERY TIME I LOOKED AT THOSE MURKY RIVER WATERS IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED, I GRINNED LIKE A FOOL, THINKING I KNEW SOME BIG SECRET THE REST OF LONDON HAD NO IDEA OF.

  YOUR PARENTS GAVE ME A HOME, WHICH I HAD NEVER KNOWN. THEY GAVE ME A HEART, WHICH I HADN’T KNOWN POSSIBLE. AND WHEN I THINK OF THOSE STORIES YOUR DAD TOLD US, I WONDER IF WHAT HE WAS REALLY DOING WAS GIVING US HOPE. OR WONDER. . . . WHICH MAYBE, AFTER ALL, ARE SORT OF THE SAME THING.

  I WON’T PRESUME TO KNOW WHAT YOU ARE FACING, LUCY. I CAN ONLY IMAGINE. BUT BECAUSE OF WHAT HE GAVE ME, WHAT YOU GAVE ME, TOO . . . MY HOPE IS THAT BY RETURNING HIS STORY TO YOU NOW, IT MIGHT OFFER SOME SMALL LIGHT INTO YOUR WORLD.

  YOU WERE LIGHT IN MINE.

  SINCERELY,

  ALWAYS,

  DASHEL GREENE

  She read it again, tracing her finger over his name. How they would have guffawed as kids if they’d imagined him writing her a letter one day and signing it Dashel Greene. How many Dashels did he think she knew? But she sensed it was less about clarity of identity, and more about somber respect, that he signed it so.

  So many questions fought their way from the screen and into her mind. It seemed he had at least visited London after first leaving. Why had he never come to them? Quick anger morphed into sadness. And he wrote of hearing of Dad’s passing. How had he heard? Dad hadn’t wanted to be in the newspapers, so she had never submitted an obituary.

  Beyond her, the river sang, and the children playing jacks had moved on to a game of hopscotch while their mothers chatted away on a bench. Big Ben struck four o’clock across the river.

  On its last strike, with a strange swimming sensation filling her chest, she let her thumb tap the link he’d included. A blue circle spun on the screen while a web page loaded. It was a shared document.

  She laughed—it was fitting, somehow, that the kid with his head in the stars was now meeting her, quite literally, in the cloud.

  She scrolled down, taking in his words, amazed that he’d turned off the caps.

  COMPENDIUM OF WONDER

  A collection of the stunningly impossible to inspire

  TABLE OF CONTENTS:

  1) The Hidden Kingdom

  2) (to come) The City beneath the Earth

  3) (to come) The Stair in the Sky

  4) (to come) The Ever-Rising Tide

  5)

  Number five was untitled. And for a moment, she felt bereft again, for the blank number. It could be so many different stories that Dad had told them. The salt mines that had housed thousands of books. The chimney swifts in America. “Birds that’ll take your breath away, flyin’ into chimneys in swirling swarms like smoke in reverse.” Dad was the one who told her of Hurd’s Deep—the trench that hid remnants of wars away in safety. She recognized the story titles but grieved again that she remembered so few details. When had this happened?

  Just as she began to scroll down, to see if there was more information about number five, a blinking blue cursor popped up—and letters began to appear out
of thin air.

  He was here? Well, not here—but here in this shared document? Right now. This very instant. Remembering her dad on the day of his burial.

  And suddenly she did not feel so alone.

  Looking back to that day, Lucy understood he’d been fighting for light on her behalf, right there in a humble document. She hadn’t responded to his email, didn’t feel ready, but she’d watched that blue cursor write out his memory of her father’s tale, The Hidden Kingdom, and after twenty minutes, the cursor disappeared.

  The rest of the stories had never been filled in, but she had always harbored hope that perhaps, someday, Dash might write the rest.

  The memories, along with Dad’s twenty-four-hour clock marking time on the wall, lulled her to sleep, and she slept peacefully through the few remaining hours of the dark morning.

  When she awoke, and before she could talk herself out of it, she packed a bag, locked her door, and pointed herself toward the Royal Observatory.

  thirteen

  Weldensea

  East Sussex, England

  The village of Weldensea in East Sussex lay nestled at the base of Welden Hill. It was a corridor of brick buildings lining a cobbled street with bunting stretched back and forth above. Hanging from the cheery triangles of colour, a banner announced the annual Smugglers’ Ball. A small breeze tumbled down the way, lifting the banner’s corner in a welcoming wave.

  “Where to next?” Lucy asked. “I assume Stone’s Throw Farm is on the outskirts of the town.” She guessed this from the farm’s name.

  “You might say that.” Was Dash evading her question?

  “Longer, then?”

  “You could say that, too.”

  Fearing the reason for his evasion, Lucy scanned the quiet village for a taxi. A bus. A carthorse. Anything. And found only an older man putting out a sign in front of a building that appeared to be half inn, half pub with arched doors, red geraniums in black window boxes, a pirate flag waving over a blue coat of arms, and a gilded sign that read The Jolly Roger.