by Amanda Dykes
But he’d blown onto the farm like a rogue wind, voice rough and deep with gravel, full of story and lore. Lucy imagined everyone he met was an old friend, whether he knew them or not, and it took some keen tracking to keep up with his runaway tangents. But she had quickly determined that, if people could keep up, they were in for an adventure, traveling alongside Barnabas. And he and Dash, heaven help them all, were thick as thieves.
Barnabas started regaling the family with tales of the landowners of yore, of secret pits where gargantuan dog-like creatures lived and lay in wait. “East Sussex be a place of mystery,” he said. “Every stone and tree and shrub would attest to that if they could.”
“And now,” Sophie said, giving her brother a stern look, “after a few housekeeping items we’ll proceed with the demonstration.” Tall and willowy, beautiful and fierce, the woman was an enigma. Though Lucy guessed her to be in her late fifties, there was something ageless about her in the haunted way she carried herself. Older and youthful, all at the same time. As if searching this land, whose stalwartness grew right up into her. Rugged elegance appeared daily in her varying combinations of pearl earrings and plaid flannel shirts.
Lucy leaned in and whispered to Dash. “I can’t get a handle on her.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know that anyone could get a handle on Sophie,” he said, voice low. “Least of all her. But don’t believe the cold exterior she plays up. There’s more to her than that.”
Sophie gave a few cautionary warnings to those who would be exploring the grounds later: to be wary of the cliffs and keep a safe distance, to take note of the blowhole, a hole in one of the cliff overhangs where high-tide waves could sometimes splash up through and onto the land around.
Lucy rather liked trading in the city warnings to Mind the Gap for Beware the Blowhole at the seashore. There was air and adventure in the warning.
Finished with her admonitions, Sophie knelt and gathered a lamb up into her reedy arms, and something changed. Gentleness entered the woman, like a thing long lost, finding home at last.
“Left on his own, this lamb’s small bone may heal, but never quite right. She’d always be marked. Carrying a limp, perhaps walking akilter. But if we will take the simplest measures”—she picked up a thick, straight twig and pulled a bit of muslin from where it had been slung about her neck like a scarf—“she will mend. Dashel?”
Dash joined Sophie and slipped his arms about the lamb, whose little bleating was snatched into the breeze and carried straight into Lucy’s heart. It did something to her, seeing the boy who had so longed for someone’s arms to encircle him in belonging all his childhood, now encircle his own arms about this helpless creature.
“We wrap it snugly,” Sophie said, winding the white muslin tightly around the lamb, tying it, and tearing off the excess cloth. “And then . . .” She searched the small gathering, skimming over a mother holding a babe and a father barely restraining an exuberant boy, perhaps six years old.
Barnabas knelt and spoke to the boy, whose eyes grew wide at the bearded man’s deep voice. The second family present was a mother and her two teenage daughters, one of them feigning indifference as the other tried to restrain her own excitement about the “adorable sheep” who she wanted to “stuff in her pocket.”
Apparently deciding there was wisdom in leaving each of them in their current roles, Sophie slid her gaze to Lucy. “A moment?” she asked.
Lucy looked over her shoulder. “Me?”
Sophie waited, and Lucy joined her.
“Just hold this leg steady,” she said, making to hand off the lamb’s injured leg.
Lucy took a step back. “What if I hurt her?”
Sophie’s eyes shifted back to Lucy, considering her. Lucy might have been mistaken, but there seemed to be a flash of understanding—or recognition—in the woman’s face.
Barnabas sidled up. “We none of us know quite what to do when something is broken. Might be we’ll make it worse. But if we do nothing, it’ll surely stay broken. Ain’t it worth takin’ a chance on that?”
Lucy shifted her feet. Sophie pursed her mouth grimly. Dash cleared his throat. It appeared the three of them made for three broken souls, caught red-handed.
“Yes!” Barnabas barked past his dark bushy beard. “Answer’s yes. So get the tape, and get to work, and this little thing’ll be right as rain.” He scratched large fingers clumsily over the lamb’s fleece. It bleated in response, and Sophie glided into action. Pulling a roll of silver tape from her supply basket, she tore a length of it with her teeth and passed one end to Lucy.
Together, they worked to pass the tape over, under, and around the lamb’s leg.
“There ye be.” Barnabas clapped and spread his arms wide. “Take a broken thing, gather around, and wrap it. That’s where it begins. And if you want to know what that looks like for us splintery humans who need some repairin’ ourselves, join us two nights hence at dark o’clock for the campfire and star party. Yours truly builds the fire, and that one over there”—he pointed to Dash—“does the star things.”
And with that, he was off. The young boy resumed his general exuberance, the mother knelt to show a flower to the baby, and Dash passed the lamb back into Sophie’s arms.
She looked between the two of them, longer at Dash, and nodded. “Go on, then.” No thank you, no not to worry, the lamb will be on the mend in no time. She’d dismissed them and was already off on her way to place the lamb with its mother.
Dash looked after her, concern carving his face.
“Is she always like that?” Lucy said.
Dash shook his head, then turned to guide them back toward the farm. “It’s hard to know,” he said. “I’ve only been here a little more than six months.”
She knew it shouldn’t, but hearing that socked her in the middle. Six months. He’d been a train ride away for six months, and she’d never known.
“But she’s quieter, lately. And maybe a little less prickly than usual.”
Lucy couldn’t help laughing. “Did you say less prickly?”
Dash grinned. “Well, anyhow. What’s on the docket next, Matchstick Girl? Another museum? We’ve got”—he checked his watch—“five hours until dinner.”
Lucy scanned the horizon. The Channel was frothy today, the sun causing it to dance a thousand watts per wave. “What’s that?” she asked, her gaze pausing on a looming structure that’d been hidden from view by a grove of trees on the way up the path. From this perspective, though, it peeked out from far beyond that grove, as if the green leaves were stitches in its secret hiding cloak.
“Edgecliffe,” he said. “Those are the ruins of the old estate. Barnabas leads a tour on Thursdays. He’s got a whole reel of tales about it that he likes to string out, and the visitors soak it up. You should go.”
She could well imagine that. She stepped to the right, hoping for a better view. Something about the place struck a chord inside her. The way it perched upon a white cliff, its stones keeping watch on the comings and goings of ships. What would it be like, she wondered, to live beside the ocean?
She had studied it in books—knew the difference between neap tide, spring tide, and everything beyond and in between—but on the East Sussex coast, with the village homes tucked into hillsides that seemed to roll straight down into the surf, and the shouts of fishermen below, decades erased and time slowed to a more rightful pace. The lives and the spray of the sea intertwined so intricately it took her breath away.
This was marine archaeology brought to life. The study of life in and around the sea. And Edgecliffe—the way it leaned in its ruined state to get a better view of the village below, as if an outsider looking in, seemed so . . . familiar.
“Can we go there now?”
Dash tipped his head at Edgecliffe. “Go there?”
She nodded, her heart beating quicker, her feet carrying her that way.
“Yeah,” he said, laughing. “Looks like you already are.”
nineteen
He was right. She’d already turned down the path to Edgecliffe. Only a step or two, but it was as if some part of her had been wandering far from home, and this place . . . it was home. She couldn’t explain it.
They arrived surprisingly quickly, passing few landmarks on the way. An old church. The grove of trees, which, it turned out, was actually one large, ancient yew tree, with varying generations sprouting up around it.
And then there they were, standing on the threshold, or on what had once been the threshold, of a veritable castle.
To the right hung a white plaque, carved with letters painted black.
“‘Edgecliffe Manor,’” Lucy read. “‘First built in the year 1400, the estate in ruins before you was built for Earl Radcliffe, around a preexisting priory that became the manor’s ballroom at the heart of the home. Centuries later it was owned by the respected admiral Sir Barnard Hanford. The estate fell to ruin after the disgrace of his son and heir, who many had expected would be the next Hanford to bring further victory to England during her wars with France. A fire broke out months after that son proved himself traitor to the king. . . .”
Lucy knew this tale. As did every British school child, as much as they knew of Horatio Nelson and the HMS Victory.
She surveyed the scene, tried to envision Frederick Hanford, whom everyone knew from the oil painting his father had had commissioned after his promotion. He seemed a solemn fellow, with his dark hair and blue eyes which always seemed, to Lucy, so sad. She’d wondered more than once what the reason for the sadness had been. And whether, perhaps, that sadness had been part of what had driven him to betray his ship. His country.
But he had, and so her compassion was short-lived. She’d seen a depiction of his home, but never in detail. And it had always been shown in its whole state. Never in ruins.
Dash stepped over the threshold and into what would have been the foyer, according to the map on the plaque. It showed where the grand hall had once stood, and each of its twenty-seven chimneys. She looked up to where a blue sky played ceiling where none existed.
She closed her eyes and tried to picture it as it once was. To hear what Frederick Hanford would have fallen asleep to as a boy. The waves beyond his window? Strains of music coming from a quartet in the grand hall? What were the sounds of childhood for an infamous traitor?
She opened her eyes and imagined what the manor had once been. Windows framed in stone. Earth and glass. “Glass is a remarkable thing,” her father had often said.
She shivered. Was that what was making this place feel so . . . so known? Snippets of memory she was pulling from her subconscious?
They poked about, rooks circling on high and gulls joining in chorus. Farther down, an explanation of the fire that took this place was detailed. Starting the night after the master of the house had passed away in his sleep at the age of sixty-eight. It had taken much of the old home, leaving nothing for any heirs.
Which mattered little, as there were none.
“Look at this,” Dash said. “This was home to an admiral from the Napoleonic wars, right?”
“Right,” Lucy said.
“As in . . . wars against France.”
“Right again.”
“But this says when it was built, they used stone and flint imported from France.”
Lucy laughed at the irony. “It was built at a different time,” she said.
“You’re a girl outside time, Lucy Claremont.” And there it was again. Memories from the past—this time her mother’s voice. What she used to tell her when she’d tuck her “old soul” daughter in at night.
“Matchstick Girl, Matchstick Girl, come and see the stars. . . .” That was Dash—well, young Dash—tossing pebbles at her window as if in a fairy tale, waving awkwardly at her from the garden behind the glass house in his gangly stance and thick-rimmed glasses.
This place was peppering her with parts of herself. She felt as if she’d stepped into a swirl of memories, all out of order, all pulling her in. But why here, why now?
“There’s something strange about this place, Dash,” she said.
“You can say that again. A lot of people think so. No one really owns it, for one thing. And that ball is held near here.”
“The Smugglers’ Ball?” She looked around at the rubble. “Here?” Tripping hazards everywhere, even for people less prone to stumbling than she. She thought to Dash’s description of the ball on their two-mile walk from Weldensea. “You said people dress up for it. Did you mean fancy dress?”
He scratched his head, looking very much out of his element. He shrugged. “I guess it’s fancy, from what the sisters say.”
“I mean . . . ” What was the American term for it? “Costumes? Period dress?”
“If you want to name it after punctuation, I’d pick a semicolon. Because it’s semi-crazy.”
This made her laugh. He confirmed that, yes, many people dressed in “olden days” clothes.
She picked her way across the place, imagining its glory days, watching the wind blow the cobwebs free from window openings. She leaned on one, breathing deep, and opened her eyes.
Below her lay a complex and curving bay. The deep harbor beyond the village, quite far beyond hollering distance down the coast. And closer, a sight that froze every bone in her body.
Five white sea stacks. Like so many bony fingers reaching from the deep.
The breath went from her. Visions of the torn painting she’d found hidden beneath the floorboard of the glass house scrubbed over the scene.
It was the same. It had to be.
“Lucy?” Dash said, concern in his gaze.
“What is that?”
“They call those The Towers.”
She shook her head. “This is impossible.” Too much a coincidence. To find this very scene in a painting that had slumbered, perhaps for her whole life, beneath her very feet, now rising to life before her? And to have been brought here by Dash, of all people.
“Dash.” She turned toward him. “Please tell me. How did you come to be here?”
“I told you,” he said, stuffing his hands in his jeans pockets and leaning against the bit of wall behind him. “I asked if I could come, and they said yes.”
“But why Stone’s Throw Farm?” She narrowed her eyes. Not accusing. Just . . . wanting to understand. To put her finger on this missing piece, the thing that tied all of these strings together. Her tides, the Jubilee, his stars, the painting.
He looked for a long while out at the sea, then finally looked at her.
“You know your father was the closest thing to a dad I ever had,” he said.
She nodded. She’d loved their relationship. “He loved you like a son. So did Mum.”
His nod was slow, as if it took work to draw it up the entire length of his tall form. “So . . . what would you do, if you received a message from a long-lost father, years after you had last talked with him?”
“I’d send him a message right back,” she said. That was easy.
Dash shrugged one shoulder. “That’s what happened.”
“Dad wrote you a letter?” He was always writing letters. Scratching them out with fountain pen upon white graph paper, chuckling at his own jokes, sealing them up and whistling as he strode to Cecil Court’s red-and-black mailbox. She didn’t know how he’d tracked down Dash’s address, but she could well picture him reaching out to his “lost boy.”
“He found me in Houston where I was . . .”—he tripped over the right word—“studying.”
“I thought you went to Harvard,” she said, puzzled. Last she’d checked, Harvard was not in Texas.
Dash laughed. “I did. But you never stop learning. And I was working there, too. When I moved again, he wrote me in Canada. Then Russia, the year after that. I kept expecting him to give up on me, but his letters followed wherever I went, no matter how often I could or could not reply. And then, when my next location had no mailing address . . . Now prepare yourself, Lucy.” His grin
dimpled with a mischievous secret. “He wrote me an email.”
Lucy stumbled—caught her balance and laughed. “Dad?”
Dash nodded.
“My dad, who’s never so much as touched a computer in his life?”
Dash tilted his head and pulled his mouth to the side until his cheek dimpled. “Maybe not never, so much as Wednesdays at three o’clock London time.”
Wednesdays. Time waits for no man, but neither does tea. A date with an apple and a friend.
“Clever, Dad.” She laughed softly. “A date with a computer and Dash.”
“He paid a kid five pounds to set up an email account for him, and from then on, he wrote every Wednesday like—”
“Clockwork.”
“Exactly.”
“What did he write about?” The watchmaker was full of surprises.
“What he’d always talked about,” Dash said. “Everything. And everything as if it was the most incredible miracle in the world. He asked about me, my studies. . . . He spoke of you, Lucy.”
Her eyes pricked. She shouldn’t ask, but it had been such a long time since anyone had thought of her, at least in the way of a parent for their child. How she missed them both. “What did he say?”
Dash’s eyes smiled. Mum had always said, “When that boy smiles, it’s his eyes that smile most.”
“He spoke of your studies, your work. He was so proud of you. He spoke of you being as stubborn as ever and refusing any tea but Earl Grey.”
The laughter felt good. “Long live the Earl,” she said.
Then Dash’s face grew more serious. “And he said he never could figure out how we’d drifted apart. He said my head was in the stars, always had been, and always should be. And that you, old soul that you are, are moonlight. Pure light in the darkness. But he insisted that the moon and stars aren’t so different, our worlds weren’t as far apart as we imagined them to be, and that someone needed to knock some sense into us both.