by Amanda Dykes
“And how do you think I got this head wound? Throwing you out of harm’s way—that’s how.”
“Shut up!” The bellow came from above, the deep and groggy voice of a man dragged from his sleep. “Bickering like a pair o’ green-bellied brothers! Git to sleep!”
Elias was silent. The silence grew thick. And then somewhere between the boy with the black eye as big as a saucer and the boy with the gunpowder sack for a crown, they must have seen themselves as they were.
Truth, as it is wont to do, speared the tensions, and laughter broke through its crack. They collapsed into their hammocks as if they were the beds of kings, for they brought solace to tired bones and souls.
After that night, Elias and Frederick were not exactly fast friends. One did not owe undying allegiance to the other in effusive thanks for saving his life. But two clumsy boys forced into manhood became something more.
Brothers.
seventeen
A week later, Frederick felt Elias watching on as he scratched the day’s entry into his logbook.
“You write,” Elias said after a while.
Frederick paused, shifting his weight, unwilling to answer his obvious statement. He bent his head low, eyes straining to see in the dim light.
Elias lay in his hammock, uncharacteristically quiet. Not humming or being his usual bothersome self.
“You write, Freddy,” he said after a few moments. “What do you write?”
Frederick gripped his book. “Things. And don’t call me Freddy.”
Elias screwed up his face at the evasive reply. “What things, Freddy?”
Frederick blew out his cheeks. He would tell him, if only to be rid of him.
“Just . . . ship’s log type things. Headwinds, following seas, that sort of thing.” He left out the part about the stories written across the skies, the way he carved hope into these pages in the dark. “Letters to Father, sometimes.” Letters that always went unanswered. No doubt The Admiral was of the mind that to speak into his son’s life would be to interfere with the Royal Navy’s further schooling.
“Ha!” Elias swung his legs over the edge off his hammock. “Letters. I thought as much. I have a proposition for you,” he said, putting on an unnaturally proper tone.
Frederick slid a wary gaze his direction. “Do tell,” he said drolly. The quicker it was out, the quicker he could refuse and be done with it.
“Write letters for me.”
“To whom?” The question was out before he thought better of it. The boy had no family other than the band of smugglers who’d all but raised him, at least before Tom Heath had taken him under his wing.
“You’re not the only one in the world with someone to write to,” Elias said. “Don’t forget”—he held out his hand nonchalantly, turning it this way and that as he examined the ragged bandage about his palm—“I can’t grip a pen. Can’t think why that is. This pesky war injury, I s’pose. Got it when a good-for-nothing—”
“Fine.”
“What was that?” Elias stilled his hand, a glimmer in his eye. He was enjoying this far too much.
“I’ll write your letters for you. Until your martyr there”—Frederick nodded toward his hand—“is healed.”
Elias’s face grew red. “Well, that’s the thing, mate. Might need your help a smidge longer than that.”
Frederick studied Elias, whose grim expression was suddenly full of shame. Understanding tugged at Frederick. “You don’t write,” he said, the realization dawning, and with it, remorse. He should’ve thought of that.
Elias’s defenses were up. “What of it,” he spat. “Not all of us are shut up with a four-eyed tutor all day. Some of us have lives to live, you know.”
Touché. Frederick turned a page. “Very well. What should I write?”
“What? Now?”
Frederick nodded. “Unless you want to wait for your other hand to be smashed to smithereens, too.”
The barb worked its magic. Elias took it for the invitation it was and lay back in his hammock. “Write . . . Dear Juliette.”
Frederick’s quill froze as a vision of a girl with cheeks pink from sun and sea air, hair flying behind her wild and free, flashed across his mind. The laughter had gone from her because of him. And she’d once declared they would have nothing to do with each other, ever again.
He gulped. Would this be a violation of her intent?
“Well, go on.” Elias circled his good hand in the air impatiently. “Write Dear Juliette!”
Frederick’s quill touched paper. Long, slow strokes scratched black onto white until her name appeared before him, there in the dark hold. “What’s next?”
“It’s me, Elias.” He said this with far too much pride, but his dirt-smudged face grinned on. “I’m here on board the Avalon. You always said I’d be a great man of the sea, and here I am.”
Frederick snorted. “Great . . . man . . . of . . . the sea,” he repeated as he wrote, eyebrows raised. “Very grand indeed. Shall I tell her of your bunkmate the pig?”
Elias rolled his eyes and gestured for him to continue writing. “I’ll win our fortune yet—you’ll see. We’ll live far away in the Windward Isles, that picture we saw of the green islands in the West Indies. You’ll see. Give your mother my fondest wishes, and . . .”
Frederick’s hand flew to catch up, halting where Elias had stopped.
“And?”
He mumbled something.
“What was that?”
“I said, wait for me.”
The quill grew clammy in Frederick’s hand, and he suddenly felt like an intruder. And worse, a liar. He’d given her one promise—the only thing he’d been permitted to give after her father’s death. And he was not just breaking that promise, but inserting himself into the most private place of her heart. He had to apologize, somehow—to acknowledge he knew he was intruding yet would continue if it meant she might receive word from the one good thing she had left, besides her mother.
He looked over at Elias, who was tracing images into the air with a stockinged foot, his big toe poking through a hole. He . . . was her one good thing. The one reason she smiled. He and his big, fat, clumsy toe.
Well, he would break his promise if it meant giving her that. He thought a moment, scribbling Elias’s closing words onto the page, then adding some of his own.
p.s. The scribe adds his well wishes for your sheep to never fall into thieving hands.
There. She would understand. Having been quick to accuse him of stealing her sheep, she would surely be just as quick to understand his words for the peace offering he hoped they were.
And so it began. The writing of letters that bridged the chasm between Elias and Juliette. Lost between ports for months, sometimes, he prayed they’d always find their way. Elias writing to Juliette—Juliette writing to Elias. News from home. New lambs, and farmers welcoming children, village goings-on, and her mother’s health.
Frederick read Juliette’s missives aloud in the dark hold, wondering betimes—with a hollow inside of him growing wider by turns—what it would have been like to have words written for him by such a hand. But he never let the thought linger, for her words were not for him. Instead he contented himself that the shapes of the letters—the jots and lines and crooked way she quirked her S’s—were for him. For she knew he would read them and Elias would not.
But the meaning beneath the letters, the words with a heartbeat and a soul, was for Elias. Frederick drew strict boundaries around the stubborn thing that beat in his chest when it came to that.
So it went, him on the outside looking on—just as it always had been. Only instead of watching from the windows of Edgecliffe as Juliette and Elias traversed the fields, his panes were her letters as they traversed life.
He recorded whatever Elias dictated, from recounting heroic battle wounds, to the story of how they’d smuggled Salt to safety when Cook had come for her and they’d given their first prize money to purchase her. She’d written back, offerin
g asylum for the hapless pig. She’d met them in Portsmouth when next they were in port and walked away with a rope tied about the squealing creature’s neck, as if walking a pig like a dog down the dock were the most natural thing in all the world.
Frederick watched with amusement and respect at the girl’s endless pluck as she nodded at curious onlookers. Gone was her boy’s cap of yesteryear. Her auburn hair and rust-coloured dress tangled about her in the wind. When she tripped and fell, Elias was quick to leap over boxes and barrels to help her back up. She scolded him, but the look she gave him told Frederick she didn’t mind that arm about hers, not one bit.
Good. This is good. Looking at the pair of them, Frederick felt certain their future was bright, and hoped, perhaps he might have had some small part in that. Please, God.
The hold had been too silent after Salt left, and the young men eventually migrated to the regular sleeping quarters, the days of being powder monkeys long behind them. As the years passed, the happy news from Juliette was mixed with sad news—her mother had succumbed to her long illness. Juliette’s sorrow nearly broke her, but as she shared her heart, it was clear her bravery and faith sustained her.
Frederick watched as Elias took the news, gratefully accepted the heavy cloak of responsibility. But it changed him in a way Frederick couldn’t quite put a finger on.
At eighteen, they were truly men now. Frederick had moved from powder monkey to seaman to petty officer and now midshipman. He was poised to become master one day. Elias, likewise, had risen up through the ranks, distinguishing himself on different fronts. Moving from seaman to petty officer, he’d been sorely disappointed to not yet have been promoted to midshipman. But he was determined, after midshipman, to someday reach the golden land of lieutenant. “You wait and see,” he said. “My ship’ll come in. I’ll get that prize money and purchase a commission. Imagine that, Freddy. You, master, and me, lieutenant. There’ll be none to stop us then, least of all old Bonaparte.”
Frederick had written his father of the promotion to midshipman and—wonder of wonders—had received a letter in return, instructing him to stop when next he was in Portsmouth to see a Mr. Hogarth, with whom he had commissioned a portrait.
A portrait. This, from the man who’d been silent for years, but for his secondhand communications through Admiral Forsythe. From the man who could scarce look at a chess board after Frederick had failed to secure a brilliant strategy. His father desired a portrait . . . of Frederick?
Perhaps it was the shock of it all, but Frederick had obliged, wondering during the entire excruciating sitting if ever he would darken the doors of Edgecliffe again. Would he ever see the man who became more enigmatic with every passing year? He dared to entertain the hope that this portrait was, perhaps, a gesture. An invitation. An approval . . . at last.
But while Frederick allowed himself meager hope of reconciliation with his father, Elias’s sense of responsibility for Juliette—and their separation—weighed heavy on him. One evening, as they headed homeward from the Mediterranean, Elias asked to hold the quill himself and copied, painstakingly, the words Frederick had written for him to use as a pattern:
Dearest Juliette, it said, his letters formed with care, but a quaver here and there. Will you marry me?
He’d saved almost every penny of his prize money, was always, always counting the coin in his rucksack, and always looking grim afterward. But he’d finally done it—saved whatever amount he’d determined was needful to support a wife. And when they’d docked in Dartmouth, Elias had fairly dragged Frederick across the backcountry roads of Devon, until they’d arrived at a church of stone on a hill and he’d taken Juliette to be his, forever.
Good. This was good. Thank you, God. Juliette’s heart was secure with Elias, a man to love her as her father had.
A grey twist of melancholy settled into Frederick’s breathing as he watched the simple wedding. He had thought once that he might marry, start a family. When he was sick with the fever as a boy, had even had a fleeting notion that the girl with freckles on her nose might fill that place in his life. But he had awoken to her hatred, and to the realization that she’d already given her heart to another.
When he’d made a promise at a shepherd’s grave, he had promised himself one other thing: He would give that girl his estate one day. Whomever she was wed to. It was all he had to give, or rather would one day. And it would be hers.
So he had closed his heart away back then to the hope of marriage. For who would want a solitary soul like him who stumbled over his words and, even more so, over his feet on a dance floor? Who would want a man who felt more at home on a rooftop, hidden among chimneys watching the heavens, than at a dinner table among ladies and gentlemen, telling tales of daring? With no estate to recommend him, the answer was simple—nobody.
So he’d settled that truth in his soul, tied it up tight, and moved on. He had purpose. Justice to fight for. And that was enough.
A week after the wedding, he and Elias were back in their hammocks, and Frederick felt, at last, some sense of having done right. Somehow, with those letters flying over the years, he’d managed to help something good along in Juliette Heath’s life. Juliette Flint now, he reminded himself. And, he thought—looking at his boyhood nemesis stretched out with the length of a man, still tracing shapes and images in the air with his big old toe—in a way, he’d gained a brother. Which meant, by marriage, he’d gained a sister, too.
They were his family. In that realization he felt a swelling in the void he had long since resigned himself to.
And in that realization, fierce protection rose up. I will guard him with my life, he vowed. With no one else to hear, he promised solemnly to God above. If it ever came to it—which it very well could, in these times—it would be Frederick’s life for Elias’s. In a heartbeat.
eighteen
Stone’s Throw Farm
East Sussex, England
August 2020
In the four days since arriving at Stone’s Throw Farm, Lucy had cross-referenced local records, visited a museum in Eastbourne that housed old ship’s logs—nothing revealing anything she hadn’t already known—and consulted with a diver based out of Brighton, who attested to having seen remnants of a shipwreck in Hurd’s Deep consistent with a ship of the Jubilee’s era.
How to best retrieve the wreck became the most troublesome bit, however. Hurd’s Deep, the deepest portion of the English Channel, was also the keeper of war waste from the two world wars, whose radioactivity was monitored annually. Obtaining artifacts from this burial ground for weaponry was a matter of national security. In spite of only finding remnants of hope through her research, Lucy was more convinced than ever that the Jubilee lay at the bottom of Hurd’s Deep.
Dash was not as convinced.
“What if it’s not in Hurd’s Deep?” he asked as they walked a footpath to the west pasture. They trailed Sophie—who was going to set the leg of a lamb found hurt earlier that day—and two of the families staying at the farm, who were eager to watch the setting.
Dash was to assist if needed, and he’d pulled Lucy along to discuss the Jubilee as they went.
“Ah, but what if it is?” Lucy asked. “They’ve searched and charted the rest of the Channel, cataloguing wrecks and currents and every other possibility. There is no trace of it. Nothing in over two hundred years. So that leaves only two possibilities—the second having two variations.”
Lucy’s mind raced as she laid out her argument. “A, Frederick Hanford escaped aboard the Jubilee, and somehow, between all the fleets in all the navy, a one-man crew on a sizable ship with little to no rations or weapons made it out of the Channel and set sail to somewhere else in the world.”
Dash shrugged. “Is that so crazy?”
“Nearly impossible. Aside from the improbability of him being able to crew the albeit small Jubilee on his own for any sort of distance, there’s no record of him anywhere ever again. He would’ve at least shown up in folktales as the cap
tain of a ghost ship or something.”
“Okay, so what’s the next possibility?”
“Possibility B is that with only himself to man it, the Jubilee wrecked soon after leaving Portsmouth. It was a distinctive ship, little more than a showpiece gift from Denmark. It was completely unseaworthy. So the authorities docked it in Portsmouth to be used as a prison ship, a holding spot for those facing the gallows. Water all around, leg irons and shackles and every security. A guard on deck every moment keeping vigil. They believed it was inescapable. Un-sailable if someone should attempt that.”
“All right, so if he tried, it would have almost certainly wrecked, is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes, either somewhere in the shallower, excessively explored and charted areas of the English Channel—or, specifically, in Hurd’s Deep. But again, no wreckage has ever been found. Which is why Hurd’s Deep is the only place it could be.”
Lucy felt the excitement of the chase catching up to her. “Do you know how rare it is, in this age of endless information, to have an honest-to-goodness mystery on our hands? And of this proportion! A national traitor.” The excitement bubbled up inside of her, driving her on. “We could be a part of unearthing that story.”
They walked on, through a wooden gate, slowing as they neared the spot where Sophie had stopped.
“Let me ask you this,” Dash said. “What if the stars could help?”
Lucy turned her face up toward him, considering. “If they could . . . that would be amazing. But I don’t see how. What could they tell us about a ship whose whereabouts we know nothing of?”
“You’d be surprised,” he said. “Bear with me. And come to the star party. We’ll take a look in the telescope and see what stories they have to tell.”
They fell quiet as they joined the group forming around Sophie. At the same time, Sophie’s brother, Barnabas, strode up. Barnabas had surprised Lucy—delighted her, really—upon his return from his sheep show the night before. She’d imagined him falling somewhere between Copper Clara and Silver Sophie on the personality spectrum. A steady presence to bring balance to two such extremes. Bronze Barnabas, she had dubbed him, before even meeting him.