Set the Stars Alight

by Amanda Dykes

  “Oy, Greene!” The man’s hunched figure straightened when he spotted Dash. “See ye at the star party, then! Bringin’ a bucket o’ scallops.”

  Dash waved his appreciation.

  “Scallops? You astound me, Dashel Greene,” Lucy said. “Once upon a time, you’d not have touched a bit of seafood if we’d paid you a hundred pounds.”

  He shrugged, giving a good-natured grin. “They’re fried. And they’re fresh. Turns out those two things make a world of difference, and Sussex knows what it’s about when it comes to seafood.”

  They left the village on foot, passing a hand-painted sign that read:

  Stone’s Throw Farm

  Hot Breakfast

  Wireless

  And then, scrunched in at the bottom, added more recently, judging by the unchipped paint:

  Weekly Star Talks given by Dr. Dashel Greene

  A small metal sign hung below, waving in the breeze. It announced—

  “Two miles?” Lucy filled her lungs to appear plucky and energized in a way she did not feel, and asked, “We’ll walk?”

  Dash shrugged. “If it’s all right with you. People around here walk. It’s the pace of things.”

  So they walked. He led the way, filling the silence by whistling a jolly tune with the occasional minor note thrown in. She followed, sometimes walking beside him, sometimes behind, and so very thankful he had insisted on carrying her bag.

  His tune was fitting, in a way. All the sweetness of their youth, tripping now and again over a minor chord. Just like them. For who were they to each other now? A shadow. An outline. A question mark.

  “Dash,” she began, hoping to break the silence, erase a bit of that question mark with some sort of conversation. “What’s the Smugglers’ Ball?”

  “According to the locals, it’s the event of the season. They prepare for it for months beforehand. This whole coast used to be riddled with smugglers’ haunts. One of them lies near the local chapel—St. Thomas’s. It’s an old tunnel that’s since been blocked off and caved in, but the room is so large, they host a ball down there once a year. People dress up, they bring in an orchestra, the whole thing.”

  “In a cave?”

  “Tunnel. Former tunnel. More like a sunken amphitheatre, mostly open to the sky. But before the cave-in, in Victorian times, they used to hold it beneath ground. Some royalty even came.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  He laughed. “Spend five minutes at the farm, and they make it their personal mission to complete your thorough education on all things Weldensea.”

  His lanky stride paired with the downward slope were taking him faster, and she hurried to catch up. She saw they were approaching a building, but the sun broke through the clouds, obscuring a clear view. As they drew closer her nerves ramped up. Who was she to presume upon these strangers?

  Dash stopped in front of a stone wall flanked by two pillars, a white picket gate creaking open to his touch.

  Lucy’s breath caught as she stepped through to hydrangeas in full bloom leading to a Dutch door whose top was flung wide open. Its white paint was chipped and all the more lovely for it. The farmhouse rose up from the ground as if it had grown there, stone by stone, over the course of a thousand lifetimes. Wisps of smoke slipped from the chimney as a cool breeze blew off the distant Channel, and every step ushered her into an unseen veil of cinnamon and allspice.

  She ached so deeply, her feet slowed and finally stopped altogether.

  Dash turned. “You okay?”

  She blinked back the heat in her eyes, willing herself not to cry. “Silly,” she said, shaking her head.

  Dash tipped his head ever so slightly. She’d forgotten that about him, the way he would wait, the way he let silence invite talk.

  She shook her head as if to shoo away the ache growing inside. “It’s just . . . it’s a home,” she said, lifting one shoulder. Of course it was a home. She might as well declare the dirt brown and the buttercups yellow. Such a sparkling conversationalist. But she had not set foot inside a house that felt like a home in . . . well, not since her parents had gone.

  But Dash did not laugh. He did not smile, or continue on. He took a step closer to her and held out his hand. “Yeah,” he said. “And they’re waiting for you.” He said it as if she were a guest of honor, and not the orphaned spinster-waif that she was—in keeping with her Dickensian identity.

  He held out his hand, and finger by finger she unwrapped her clenched fist and slipped it into his. And again, the disconnect hit her. This hand, offered to lend her strength, belonged to a man who knew her both intimately and barely at all. She swallowed and gave his hand a thankful squeeze before releasing it.

  He rapped on the doorframe twice. When no one answered, he called through the open part of the door, “Hello? Anybody home?”

  Hissed whispering sounded from somewhere inside. “Shhh! He’ll hear you! And then what’ll I do?”

  “It’s not him,” a second whisperer sounded, words forceful and final. “It’s Dashel Greene.”

  “Dashel?”

  “Dash. El.” Now the stern one was speaking openly, and the voice was enough to strike fear into a fortress. “Dashel.”

  Clipped footsteps came, and a tall woman swung the lower door open. “Come in,” she said. She was silver, Lucy thought. Cold silver. From the crisp silvery blue of her eyes to the long white waves of her hair pulled into a braid draped over her shoulder, she was aloof and crisp and cold like silver.

  “Dashel Greene!” The first whisperer, Lucy presumed, came into view, all rosy cheeks and softness. Right down to her stature, which bespoke afternoons in a warm kitchen spent cooking up delicious things and tasting them along the way. If the first woman was silver, this lady was copper. Bright and cheery and warm.

  “Clara, Sophie.” Dash tipped his baseball cap at the copper woman, then the silvery one.

  Copper Clara. Silver Sophie. Lucy tucked this trick into her mind, determined not to mix them up.

  “You’ve come back to us at last!” Clara said. Her cheeks glowed, and she spun a plate in her apron as if to dry it, though it had to have been dried at least five rotations back. “Sorry for the whispering. We thought you were Roger, you see.”

  “You thought he was Roger,” Sophie corrected. “And you know he was only gone three days.”

  “Was he, indeed,” Clara marveled. “It felt longer. You mustn’t leave us anymore, Dashel Greene. Far too much change here of late. But this looks like a wonderful change.” She craned to look around Dash, her big hazel eyes blinking expectantly when they landed upon Lucy. “Who’s this? Who’ve you brought to us?”

  Dash cleared his throat. “This is the girl I told you about. Lucy Claremont. Lucy, this is Sophie and Clara Smythe.”

  Clara’s face lit up. “Ah,” she breathed, as if beholding the queen herself. “Lucy.” She pressed a smile closed around her dimples and clasped Lucy’s hand. “So you’ve joined us at last. Come, come, we’ll have a tea.”

  Ushered past the wary gaze of Sophie, Lucy followed Clara inside. The woman’s pleasant chatter faded into a hush as Lucy took in her surroundings. What was it about this place that quickened her soul so? She felt, as she slipped into the cool haven, that she was cocooned inside a place that changed people, harbored hearts, grew stories.

  She drew close to the hearth and took in the way the plaster was cracking away from the stone walls. No attempt had been made to repair it, for to do so would strip the room of its airy charm.

  But she was being silly. Places did not grow stories. Plaster did not make or break a home. She shivered away the notions that belonged more in a fairy tale than a farmhouse. They’d passed dozens of stone farmhouses on the journey down from London, but none of them had put a lump in her throat and made her close her eyes briefly to wonder why she felt like she had been there before, like Stone’s Throw Farm had been waiting for her for a long time.

  “Here we are.” Clara pulled out an old woode
n chair, its legs scraping the floor musically.

  A basset hound in the corner tilted melancholy, vaguely curious eyes toward her.

  “Don’t mind her,” Sophie said from the doorway, looking from the dog to Lucy. “She won’t trouble us for long.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind dogs,” Lucy said.

  “I wasn’t talking about her. I was talking to her. Dear Beatrix.” She knelt to jostle the dog’s droopy black ears lightly and looked pointedly at Lucy, who gulped, taking her meaning.

  “Hush, Sophie. She’ll think you’re serious,” Clara said, bustling about the small kitchen.

  Sophie raised an eyebrow that spoke very clearly. And?

  Lucy’s face flushed, and she folded her hands on the table to keep from fidgeting. It was an interesting table, covered in thick black paint, with gilded carvings etched into its legs. Appearing to have been hand built some time ago, it seemed oddly ornate in the otherwise homey farmhouse.

  Clara slid a chipped red-and-white china plate in front of Lucy. A sailing ship emerged from beneath a crumpet piping steam.

  Clara slid a jar on the table. “Midsummer jam. All our berries, in one jam. You’ll not find that in London, or even Oxford, I’d wager.” She winked. “Lemon curd.” She gave a bright yellow jar a jingling stir with a spoon whose end was slightly bent from culinary misadventure. “And . . . clotted cream,” she said, pulling a crock from a narrow refrigerator with rounded corners and a silver handle. Vintage design, they would call that in London. But Lucy had a hunch that here, it was simply the refrigerator hauled in sometime in the 1960s, awkwardly trying to find its place in a home built before electricity.

  Dash poked his head through the arched stone kitchen doorway. “I’ll just put Lucy’s things upstairs?”

  “Of course.” Clara glowed.

  “No.” Sophie glowered.

  Clara’s wide eyes grew wider, and Sophie’s narrowed. Lucy’s neck grew hot, the currents of their unspoken battle raging right over her head.

  “All the guest quarters are full, sister,” Clara said with contrived cheer. She turned to Lucy. “Business is booming lately. Word of mouth and all that.

  “Barnabas wanted to hook us up to the Intermet, but I put my foot down there. I don’t have many rules, but I draw the line when it comes to invisible meeting places where you never actually see the person you’re speaking to. Hocus pocus, if you ask me.”

  “Internet, sister,” Sophie corrected.

  “Just so. The place people meet online. I said, ‘No Intermet for us, thank you very much! People want to get away from all that! We’ll be completely wireless!’ And was I right?”

  “Wireless, you say?” Lucy tilted her head.

  “Right you are. No wires, no computers, none of it. Completely wireless. I even advertised that in the village, and folks seem excited.”

  “I do not think that means what you think it means,” Sophie muttered. And suddenly the rough-edged woman seemed a little less formidable, quoting lines from The Princess Bride under her breath. Lucy determined to like the woman, whatever she thought of her. And she liked Clara all the more for her perception—or misperception—of what advertising wireless on their sign actually meant.

  The clock ticked. Sophie cleared her throat. “The guest rooms are full,” she repeated. “There’s no room.”

  “Well, there—there is one room,” Clara said, eyes wide with gentle pleading.

  “Please.” Lucy stood too quickly, knocking her chair over. She bent to right it. “So sorry,” she said. “Don’t trouble yourselves. I saw an inn back in the village. I can stay there and catch a train home tomorrow.”

  “No trains tomorrow,” Sophie said.

  “You’ll not stay in that inn,” Clara said. “That’s Roger’s inn.”

  What had she stepped into the middle of?

  “Right,” Lucy said, thinking back to the pirate flag and window boxes. She struggled to keep up, longing to restore the peace. “Who is Roger?” It seemed the most benign question to ask. Better than Why not the empty room upstairs?

  “Roger Falke is the most maddening human being under the good sun,” Clara said, picking up a broom from the corner and sweeping the neat floor in a bustle.

  “He’s also Clara’s beau,” Sophie said.

  “Sister!”

  “Yes, sister?” Sophie lifted a crumpet and bit, unflinchingly deadpan.

  Clara twisted her apron, flustered. “We needn’t bore Miss Claremont with such talk.”

  “Please, it’s just Lucy,” Lucy said.

  Clara nodded, her ruddy cheeks glowing redder after the mention of Roger Falke as her beau. She laid a hand on her sister’s shoulder, her expression morphing, not into one of defense, as Lucy’s would have, but one of tender compassion. “If not the room upstairs, then the spring cellar. Surely she can stay there.”

  Lucy gulped. Visions of a dark hole in the earth set the walls to closing in on her, her head to spinning. She shook free of the vision. You don’t know what the spring cellar is, she told herself. Perhaps it meant spring, as in verdant life, birdsong, and baby ducklings. And . . . small spaces were essentially the same as big spaces. Same air, same molecules, same opportunity to be human and alive. She reminded herself of this, just as she did every time she got on the Tube, or went down to the basement, or found herself in any space that had her feeling fourteen years old again, the world closing in on her.

  Cellar, though, she could not find a happy potential meaning for. Only cold and darkness.

  Yet even as Lucy battled to reconcile this new plot twist, Sophie’s rigid stature eased, almost imperceptibly. With a curt nod, she moved toward a cupboard in the corner. The woman had a way of almost gliding—not in the graceful, practiced way of the ladies of gothic novels, but rather more like an apparition gliding over ice. She glided, procured a bundle of flannel sheets, and stole out a back door, casting a stained-glass confetti of light all about the floor in her wake.

  fourteen

  “Please pardon my sister,” Clara said, cheeks glowing even rosier than before. “She . . . she means well. The room upstairs . . . It’s hard for her that it’s empty. Hard for all of us, really. But harder still to think of someone new occupying it.”

  Lucy nodded, understanding the sentiment if not the story behind the room, wishing for words that might sweep away the awkwardness she’d caused.

  When Clara turned again to the potbelly stove, Dash gave a half-shrug meant for Lucy’s eyes only and followed Sophie with Lucy’s carpetbag. It was endearing to see this astrophysicist, sleuth of the stars, whose mind operated literally in another galaxy, tromping through ancient farm muck to carry her disintegrating carpetbag to, apparently, the larder.

  Clara opened a box of Yorkshire Gold, deposited tea bags in two cups, and poured steaming water from a copper kettle. The woman looked to be in her late forties and gave the impression that she’d been born and raised in a confectioner’s shop and trailed a dusting of sweetness wherever she went. “Tell me, Lucy. What brings you to the farm?”

  Such a simple question . . . without a simple answer. She took a sip of tea to stall, its scorching heat causing her hand to fly to her mouth.

  “Oh, dear. You’ve burnt your tongue, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m so sorry. Here.” She nudged a plate toward Lucy. “Have a scone. It’ll cure anything that ails.”

  “Stone’s Throw Farm scones,” Lucy said. “The stuff of legends.”

  This made Clara hoot with laughter.

  The sweetness of the glaze brought with it a subtle airy sage taste. “Oh, my,” Lucy said. “What is that?”

  “Lavender, dear. Our secret.” She winked. “You were saying?”

  Right. Her reason for being here. “I’ve come to work with Dash on some research,” she said. It was a truth, though perhaps less sensational than explaining about the atlas, the peanut shells, the Jubilee, and the compendium.

  “That boy and his telescope,” Clara said. “He spends far too much time
all alone out there with his head in the stars. It’s good that he has a friend. Or perhaps”—she stirred her tea nonchalantly—“something more than a friend?”

  Lucy nearly choked on her scone. “No,” she said. “Nothing like that.” She hoped her skittering pulse did not give her away, loud as it pounded in her ears.

  “If you say so, dear.”

  A hush settled over the kitchen as Clara finished her tea and settled into sweeping the stone floor, shaking out a braided rug, moving in and out of sunbeams as she hummed a tune. The place had a magic about it, inviting imaginings about lives in other times, other cups of tea sipped in the kitchen, other bodies weaving through its sunbeams, warming by the hearth.

  A cuckoo clock on the wall ticked the moments away, until Lucy became aware that she was being watched. It was an odd sensation. Not that sudden awareness that someone nearby has glanced over at you, but something distant and constant and deep. She looked around. The dog, Beatrix, snoozed. Clara swept. Lucy looked through a window.

  There. On the green hill beyond, surrounded by a swirl of black-faced, white-coated sheep about her, stood a girl . . . or a woman. Her long black hair blew in the wind, her slight form still as she watched.

  Lucy lifted a hand to wave, but the girl just stood there.

  “Who is that?” she asked.

  Clara followed Lucy’s gaze. “Why, that’s our Violette. She’s my niece.”

  “Sophie has a daughter?” Lucy was ashamed at the surprise in her voice. Had she so quickly boxed the woman into a stereotype of a childless spinster?

  “No, not Sophie’s,” Clara said.

  Oh. Perhaps she hadn’t been too far off after all.

  “Sophie never had a daughter. Just a son.”

  Or perhaps she’d been very far off.

  “I see,” said Lucy. “So Violette is your brother’s child, then?” Dash had spoken of their brother, Barnabas, who was away at a sheep show.

  “Aye, she was Jonas’s only child, and a comfort to us all after he passed on so young. My dear eldest brother. She came to us . . . oh, about twenty years ago. Just a wee fifteen years old. So young to be alone like that.”