by Amanda Dykes
She looked at Dash, pleading silently for him to take up the cause. Willing him to somehow understand what she had yet to tell him—she had lost the stories.
Her face must have been redder than beets. Throat thick, she silently shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t.” To say more would be to unleash grief she had never given voice to, right here in a sea of strangers.
“Ah, never you mind.” Barnabas waved it off, his voice softer than usual. “You haven’t heard of Mad Kit Bill yet, I’d wager. I’d best be telling you all that tale, or he may be after ye on your way back to your rooms tonight.”
Lucy had no idea who Mad Kit Bill was, but she was thankful for the distraction he provided. She felt Dash’s gaze on her, concerned. Summoning courage to meet his eyes, she whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“I’m the one who’s sorry, Lu.” He hadn’t called her that in so long, and it held such tenderness. “I probably shouldn’t have told your dad’s stories without asking.”
She shook her head. “It’s not that,” she whispered, making sure to keep her voice far below Barnabas’s exuberant storytelling. “I-I lost them. The stories.”
He looked perplexed.
She drew in a breath. “I . . . can’t remember them . . . not in detail. After I lost him, everything sort of melded together into one big memory, and I-I can’t sort them out, Dash.” It felt both awful and freeing to confess it out loud, even in hushed tones.
He studied her, his concern deepening. And then, rather than trying to explain it away or offer a platitude of some kind, he just reached over, right into her aching confession, and took hold of her hand, with no apparent thought of ever letting go.
She looked at this foreign yet familiar sight and breathed in wonder. How was it that this man had stepped back into her life after so long but knew her so very, very well?
She focused, determining to enjoy what she was sure was a jest with the rest of the room. Instead, thick silence met her after Barnabas’s prologue to the Mad Kit Bill story. And of all that did not seem right—the way Roger stopped puffing his pipe, the way the skittering marbles glinted as they rolled, seeming suddenly sinister—it was Violette’s response that made something shiver deep inside Lucy.
Violette’s usual silence was cloaked, suddenly, in fear. Something about this Mad Kit Bill had undone the girl who was all keen intuition and compassion for woodland creatures. She sat stiff as a board now, refusing eye contact with anyone.
So Lucy took the bait. “Oh?” She tried to sound nonchalant. “And who is this”—she forced herself to say his whole name—“Mad Cap Bill?”
“Kit, darling. Mad Kit.” The word darling sounded as incongruous coming from Sophie’s bristly personage as sugar from a pepper shaker.
Lucy felt a quickening inside, one that picked up pace with the howl of the wind outside and the crackle of the fire within. She was at Dad’s hearth again, soaking in his tall tales, searching for ways they might be real, at their very core. “All stories—the very best ones, anyhow—may be full of fairy tales and nonsense and lore, but if they are to be lasting . . . they must have truth at their very core.”
Violette’s unflinching stare at her glinting marbles told Lucy this was to be such a tale.
“Mad Kit Bill was a strange soul, indeed. Neither pirate nor wrecker nor smuggler nor brigadier . . . he blew in from nobody-knows-where and took to the village and the pastures and beyond like a bandit. He turned Weldensea on its head in one single night, and no one saw him after that.”
“What is it he’s supposed to have done?”
“What he did”—Sophie hammered that last word—“is he stole Salt.”
Lucy felt her blinking stare ask the question for her, but when Sophie didn’t elaborate, she asked, “He stole . . . salt?” She took a sip from her tea, hoping it would keep the incredulity from her tone.
“Yes,” Sophie said. “Salt, the beloved pig and former companion of the late Margaret Heath, a shepherd’s widow who may as well have been the entire village’s godmother, the way she doted upon everyone with what little she had in the world. Salt had been her daughter’s pet, you see.”
Lucy nearly spat that tea right back out.
She thought of the peasants she’d read of from the Regency era. People like Harriet Smith, or . . . or Charlotte and Maria Lucas, all ribboned up in their bonnets and corsets and laces. Never would they have been seen with a muddy pig for a companion.
Lizzie Bennet might have, though, and that softened the idea. Just a touch.
“So Mad Kit Bill absconded with a pet pig named Salt.” So far this tale wasn’t sounding very ghostly. Certainly nothing to strike tremors into Violette.
“Aye, but that’s not all.”
“What else?”
“He stole up the rise, you see, right into Edgecliffe Manor, no one the wiser. Likely none would have known, had it not been for the famously meticulous steward who noticed the missing goods just as soon as the sun rose the next morning.”
“He robbed the place, then.”
“If you can call it that. Walked right past the butler’s pantry. Left the silver untouched. Didn’t bat an eye at the family jewels in the late mistress’s chamber, it would seem. But took two dresses—the plainest she had. Robbed the servant’s quarters of trousers and shirts that had gone unused for years, since most of the staff had been dismissed long before. Took a sack of flour from the kitchen, a hen from the hen house, and a potato plant from the garden, along with a satchel of seeds.”
Lucy shook her head. “And that’s why he’s called ‘mad,’ then—for what he stole?”
“Aye, and for what he did with it.”
“Which was . . . ?”
“No one knows! Disappeared without a trace, the only account of him an old woman who’d seen a man on the run across the meadows in the middle of the night, his back strapped with a satchel like a sailor’s kit of belongings. Mad Kit, you see. And Bill . . . well, because someone named him that along the way. Mad is the only explanation if you ask me. If that was all the man intended on stealing, why not sack the village and leave the manor alone? Would’ve been a deal easier. Except perhaps the spirits . . . That might explain it a touch more.”
“The spirits?”
“The Admiral’s spirits. The master of the manor did love the bottle. The more so after his son turned up a traitor and disappeared in shame. When he woke the next morning, every bottle in the house had been emptied.”
Dash let out a low whistle. “That’s a lot of drink for one man.”
Sophie laughed bitterly. “Tell that to the admiral. Tell that to Mad Kit Bill.”
Clara twisted her apron in her hands. “Oof,” she said, cheeks glowing. “’Tisn’t right to speak so of the dead. So long gone, and us with no way of knowin’ what’s true and what’s fabled over time.”
Lucy liked that. “Fabled over time”—as if stories changed and grew, facts and twists sprinkling upon them like sweet white confectioner’s sugar from Clara’s sifter.
“Pardon me, but one knows just what to think. The bottle’s the bottle, a thief’s a thief, a traitor’s a traitor.” And just like that, Sophie was done. Nails in the coffin of this conversation. She rose from her place, stretched, and cracked her knuckles, making Lucy’s spine shiver.
“Well,” Lucy said, infusing lightness into her voice. “If I encounter Mad Kit Bill, I’ll be sure to give him what for.”
“What for?” Barnabas piped up. “It won’t change the past!” He chuckled at his own joke, but the truth of his words followed Lucy into the night after the teacups were cleared and scrubbed, Lucy drying them and slipping them into Sophie’s hands, who spoke nary a word as she put them away.
And that wasn’t all that followed her into the night as Lucy headed for her spring cellar. A shuffling sounded behind her, a light touch on her elbow. She nearly jumped out of her skin, half expecting to see a hunchbacked thief strapped down with his pilfered goods.
But it was Violette, her eyes wide. She gestured with her hand—and the look on her face told Lucy she had better go with her. She stepped into shadows darker even than the night, and Lucy followed.
twenty-one
HMS Avalon
Spring 1811
A shadow descended over Elias Flint in the months that followed his marriage. Frederick saw in Elias both the concern of a man and the old eagerness of the boy determined to sail the world and conquer ships for prize money he would bring home for the girl who held his heart.
The shadow, as Frederick came to think of it, had begun with the letter he received from Juliette when they were in port in Spain. He’d shoved it at Frederick’s chest with a grin, asking him to read the letter “from my wife!” His grin, always wide and infectious, spread to new reaches when he said wife, and he said it every chance he got. Frederick obliged with pleasure, laughing with Elias at her account of the lambs that had gotten loose and how she’d cornered them in the heather and lured them home with a green hat that looked convincingly like hay.
She may have grown into a young woman and left behind her boyish disguises, but she’d never shed her tomboy spunk. Never would, if Frederick were to wager. And the world was the better for it. He and Elias laughed, imagining the scene, but the letter took a serious turn. Or rather, Elias’s reception of it did, when Frederick read aloud:
“‘If you get the chance to steal away home in some six months’ time, there will be someone eager to meet you, Elias. A small someone, and if he’s anything like his father he—or she—shall have toes of prodigious artistic ability.’”
Frederick halted, waiting for Elias to react.
“Toes of prodigious artistic ability . . .” Frederick repeated.
“You said that. I can’t think what she means. Read on,” Elias said.
Frederick flopped the letter in his lap. “Someone who sticks their fat toes in the air to draw pictures while lying in his hammock.”
“But that’s me.” He did so now, lying back on his hammock with arms behind his head, without a care in the world. Waving that toe around drawing who knew what.
“Yes . . .” Frederick said, drawing the word out. Waiting.
“Someone for me to meet who will take after their father who . . .” He pushed his brows together. Sat bolt upright. “Who is me.”
Frederick grinned, applauding slowly.
“But that means . . . what? What?”
Frederick hopped down and crossed over to his friend, clapping him on the back. “Congratulations, old friend. You’re going to be a father.” His grin spread across his face, rejoicing for Elias. For Juliette. For the untainted, pure hope of a life to come.
“I-I’m going to be a father.”
Frederick nodded.
“Freddy! Me? A father?” Elias scrunched his face up as he tried the word on, then shook his head in disbelief. He tumbled out of his hammock and began to pace. “But this changes everything. She’ll need a bigger home, a place to put the baby.”
“I don’t believe babies require much room,” Frederick offered, seeing a cloud descend over Elias. “Their needs are simple. And don’t call me Freddy.”
Elias waved him off. “You’re an expert in babies, of course.” He rolled his eyes.
“They’re small,” Frederick defended himself. “So I hear.”
Elias shook his head. “My child will have a place to call his own.” The way he said it, Frederick would no sooner have wanted to cross a caged lion. He knew Elias had never had such. His own father had left him in a sheep’s pen while running caves to smuggle. Tom Heath had found him—much as he’d found Frederick—gathered him up, and calmed down a drunken smuggler when the man pounded on the shepherd’s cottage, accusing him of kidnapping his son. He’d kept a faithful eye on Elias as he’d grown, offering him honest work when the call of the smugglers—the family trade—was strong.
Yes, Frederick could well understand why providing a good home was important to that boy abandoned in the sheep pen.
“Your child shall have an excellent home.”
“Aye, he will at that. I plan to put enough coin away to take them both to the Windward Isles someday,” he said. “Away from sheep and fish and toiling. You’ll see.”
Frederick thought of the homey fire at Juliette’s farm. The way the simple breakfast had filled his belly so long ago. Juliette knew how to make any place a home. A good thing, he thought, for Elias. God had a way of redeeming wounds with the strengths in others. Elias and his home among rocks and seaweed . . . matched with Juliette, and her home—indeed, her life—of fortitude and sunshine. It had redemption written all over it.
Frederick clapped Elias on the shoulder. “Juliette is already living in the best home for your child.” But in the days that followed, the cloud did not ascend from its place over his friend. In fact, it grew darker with each passing day.
Soon after they docked in Dover, while the others met for a hot meal at the tavern, Elias was nowhere to be found. He could be a stormy fellow, and sometimes it just took some time for the wind to blow that storm back out of his soul. Frederick prayed he had just gone for a climb, or a swim, as he sometimes did when they were in port. Perhaps he would return to the Avalon restored.
When they boarded the ship again, Frederick was pleased to see Elias’s wide grin and the way he ruffled the hair of the powder monkeys. He jigged that night to the sound of Killian Blackaby’s fiddle, roaring in laughter at the impromptu ballads Killian spun to match his music. The balladmonger-turned-sailor was always and ever on the hunt for his one great tale, and every night was an audition to see how the men reacted to his latest work.
But when the balladmonger began his recitation, as he was wont to do whenever the rowdy crew quieted enough, this time something changed.
“Ah, blokes, now gather ’round and hear the ballad of the poor cotton weaver. A sorry tale, if ever there was one.”
He cleared his throat and began to sing. And when he sang, everything ridiculous about Killian Blackaby became suddenly solemn. His baritone voice rose to the beams above as if it had been hewn and mellowed right along with the wood.
He sang of a weaver and his wife who had naught to eat and had worn their clothes to threads, and had not sixpence to their names. They lived on nettles and Waterloo porridge—a thin excuse for a meal. When the bailiffs came to collect payment, they took all they had, including a stool, and left them sick of body and heart.
“Said to our Margrit as we lay upon t’floor:
We shall never be lower in this world, I am sure.
But if we alter, I’m sure we must mend,
For I think in my heart we are both at far end,
For meat we have none, nor looms to weave on,
Egad, they’re as well lost as found . . .
The men jeered about the poor weaver. “He’d as well get to sea, aye? Bring home prize money and buy his Margrit everything she needs!”
A jolly cry arose as the men toasted one another, and the merriment continued. But the yellow lantern light split around beams, cast long shadows whose tips barely touched Elias, who sat statue-like in a corner.
Frederick approached, pulling up a seat. “Chin up, old friend,” he said.
Elias’s jaw twitched.
“Just a ballad, after all. You know Blackaby. Likes to spout a sad tale whenever he can.” Still silent. “I think he imagines it picks up the spirits of the men. Gives them something sorrier than all this”—Frederick swept his arm over the scene—“to compare their lot to.”
Elias bored holes into the table before him with his stare. “You haven’t known hunger,” he said at last. Something of the old wrath was in his eyes when he looked upon Frederick. “You’ve never slept among the rocks and had seaweed as your mattress on the soggy shore with naught to eat for days on end.”
Frederick watched his friend. What torment was this? “True,” he said slowly, respecting what Elias had endured. “But if you worry for yo
ur child—”
“No child of mine will ever know hunger. Not like that.” His voice was so low, so vehement, it could have burned the table before them into ashes.
“Of course not,” Frederick said. Reassuring.
“Of course not,” Elias said. Declaring.
And that was the last Frederick saw of Elias for two nights and three days. He tried not to worry—a day or two of not seeing someone was common on a ship the size of the Avalon, especially when docked in a bustling port like Dover.
So Frederick passed the time like the others—exploring city streets, taking in hot meals fit for kings, in that they were not riddled with maggots.
But it felt incomplete to walk the streets alone when his comrade in arms—who would be spinning horrible puns and matching him step for step—was just . . . gone.
He took to the crow’s nest at nights, fixing his view across the Channel, where he knew the French port of Calais bustled just as Dover did. He searched the skies, spotting a star here or there but falling asleep for long spells of cloud cover and darkness.
He awoke in the middle of the third night to a pit in his stomach. Whether from nightmare or inexplicable premonition, he did not know. But he could not stop thinking of Juliette, of a babe on the way, of her sitting beside that fire he had once awoken beside. And of her love never returning.
Something had happened. He knew it. His spine was hollow with the feeling of it. He pried his eyes open and in his sleep-clouded, fear-shrouded mind, landed his gaze on the clearest view he had ever seen of the constellation Gemini.
The brothers.
He sat up, head throbbing and neck stiff. Narrowing his eyes, he traced the constellations’ frames. Castor, it had always seemed to him, pulling Pollux along. Pollux, whose far leg looked broken. Bent at the star Propus. Leaning on his brother’s shoulder.
There was no story to match this interpretation. Reskell would’ve scolded him, told him to let the Greeks have their myths and leave it be. But tonight—stars so bright they seemed to emanate heaven itself against that canvas of deepest blue—the brothers smote him.