by Amanda Dykes
A brother is born for adversity.
Elias could fend for himself, wherever he was. Frederick knew that. But it wasn’t his physical well-being he feared for. It was his soul.
A gust of chill wind billowed the sails above, blocking his view of the sky. And when they settled back down, like ghosts going still, a blanket of cloud covered his celestial theatre.
The brothers were gone.
He shuddered, gritting his teeth against the cold. Conviction settled like ballast in his belly—all was not well. Perhaps his friend had fallen into a pit. Found himself with feet of clay, as Holy Joe, the ship’s chaplain, would say.
By the third night, knowing the ship would be setting sail to patrol the Channel with or without Elias, Frederick stood staring at his friend’s kit—where all his worldly possessions were stowed. He stared, and stared, willing them to give up some answer—but he knew they would not. Not without him rummaging through. But could he do that?
As if in answer, a shuffling sounded behind him. “Fixing to rob me like the bailiffs did the cotton weaver?”
Frederick turned to face Elias, ready to deny that claim, when he saw Elias’s old smirk, the one that told Frederick he was only kidding, that he was back to his old self again.
The weight of a thousand chains fell away. And that night, watching Elias shovel beans into his face with the hunger of a pride of lions, remorse overtook Frederick.
He kicked himself for thinking his friend could have been tempted into illicit activity. The opportunities were plentiful, especially with Bonaparte opening protected smugglers’ havens across the Channel in Dunkirk and Gravelines—the Ville des Smoglers—but Elias had sworn off all that. Frederick would never forget the conviction with which he’d spoken of his past and future, all wrapped in one statement: “I will never forsake my family for ill-gotten coin.”
Frederick had seen a soul broken in those words—harm done to him by his own father. And now that he had the chance to stand guard against that legacy in the life of his own child, Elias would choose right, a thousand times over. Frederick had been a fool to doubt it.
He glanced around before sliding his meager share of hardtack into the folds of his shirt. Elias was on watch tonight. Frederick planned to steal up to the crow’s nest to spot Canis Minor, with the first entirely clear night in a fortnight. First he stopped in the blanket bay, where Elias’s hammock stood rolled into a narrow size, perfect for storage, while those in use were slung between beams and weighed down by sleeping sailors, three of whom were snoring in varying keys.
He tucked the hardtack atop it for his friend. An offering of secret remorse for his suspicions. It toppled to the boards below, and Frederick knew the first sailor to happen by would snatch it up in two shakes. Food was anything but abundant belowdecks.
He looked around for something to cover it with and spotted the kit once more. Relieved to no longer have the questions urging him to dig through Elias’s entire world, he undid the flap just enough to set the roll inside. Cinching it closed, he took two strides and heard a thud.
The whole thing had toppled like a drunken sailor. He picked it up, and the hardtack tumbled out along with a few other things, spilling into the shadows of the swaying hammocks and the symphony of snoring. Light crisscrossed from flickering lanterns. He moved to right it, plucking up a bundle of shore clothes and the food, and slid his hand farther into the corner to retrieve the last thing. His hand met a packet of paper—Elias was fastidious about keeping his letters from Juliette. He would trace the letters in the dim light and try to sound out the words—his wife teaching him to read, as it were, from across the ocean.
Frederick pulled the packet into the light . . . and froze.
It was not a letter from Juliette.
Newsprint. London Gazette. Oxford Register. Le Courier de L’Egypte. These were papers dated only twenty days prior. Perhaps not much to look at and certainly nothing to worry over, except . . . Cold steel settled in Frederick’s belly.
Elias did not read.
What, then, was he doing in possession of newspapers? Glancing over his shoulder as his heart pounded, he opened one of the papers written in French.
Troubles dans l’armée Français, it read. Frederick scanned the lines that followed. His French was not good—but some words, he was able to pick out. Insurrection. Désertion. Battre en retraite. Uprising. Desertion. Retreat.
His mind flew to Reskell’s lectures about Karl Schulmeister. The man had delivered falsified newspapers to mislead Austria’s army, giving them false confidence. The French paper . . . looked authentic. But what would Elias be doing with it? And Frederick had heard nothing of uprisings and retreats in France’s fleets and forces.
Reskell’s voice was in his head again. “Line up the factors, Master Frederick. Add them up with all logic, and the answer will become clear.”
A board creaked on the steps down to the blanket bay. He slid the papers back into the sack, planting his peace offering atop it. He felt sick, looking at the hardtack. It was intended to celebrate, even if Elias was never privy to the fact, that his fears over his friend were vanquished. The sight of it lying against the backdrop of evidence to the contrary burned.
With each footstep that fell, bringing someone closer on the stairs, another factor in the equation fell into line.
Step. Elias’s joy at the news of his child—and the way that joy was eclipsed in shadowed ferocity.
Step. Elias vanishing for days.
Step. The newspapers.
Step . . .
Elias stood, hands in pockets, looking for all the world as if he’d just had a visit with the king himself. His grin froze, though, as his eyes went from Frederick, to the bag, and back.
“Interrupting something, am I?” Wariness crept into his forcefully easy demeanor.
Frederick gulped. He would not lie to his friend. “Where were you?” he whispered, not wishing for the slumbering sailors to take in this confrontation.
“Above deck. I told you, I’m on watch tonight. Only just popped down to get my hat.” The lightness in his tone was forced.
“No. Where were you.”
Elias knew what he meant. For all his joking and bandying about, Elias was the quickest lad he knew. Cunning and witty, he did not miss so much as a splinter out of place aboard this ship. It was what had made him soar through the ranks alongside Frederick, into the admiral’s trust, and far, so far, from his humble beginnings.
But where else was that cunning taking Elias? Especially when he was gone for days?
Elias crossed over to him, looked from his kit to Frederick. And with teeth gritted and voice so low that none but him would hear, he uttered one word.
“Gravelines.”
The city of smugglers.
twenty-two
For days after any battle at sea, smoke and death hovered in every sinew of every board on every deck of the Avalon. Footsteps, and footsteps, and always more footsteps, as men put the floating battleground to rights. Mending sails and planks, knotting ropes, shoring holes, stemming tides. Stitching wounded bodies of men, and stitching hammocks-turned-coffins about bodies no longer alive. Watery graves. Prayers.
It was hard work, grueling to body and spirit. And yet there was always a gritty goodness beneath the open wound of it all. They were protecting their island nation, their families.
They sold the possessions of the men who died—midshipmen giving their last pennies to purchase things they did not need, at prices much higher than were warranted, all because they knew the proceeds would be given to the fallen sailor’s family.
It was awful. And it was awe-full. It was blood and heart and terrible and good.
That was battle aboard the Avalon. As unnatural as it all was, Frederick knew how to carry on in the wake of death. In many ways, he had been doing it ever since his mother’s music had stopped.
But this? What was he to do about a friend intent on betraying his country?
After
Frederick’s confrontation, and as the Avalon pulled away from the stretch between Dover and Calais, Elias tucked the papers in his shirt, and they went down to the hold, the deepest part of the ship, on the pretext of rat duty. Though the task of hunting down vermin was unpleasant to say the least, and not required of sailors of their ranks, it provided the only private place for confrontation on this entire ship.
“It’s shortsighted,” Frederick argued. “Not to mention foolhardy, dangerous, and . . . oh, yes, treasonous.”
“How am I to know that?” Elias said. “All I will do is transfer papers from one hand to another. I cannot read. For all I know, I’m handing over poetry and plays and laundry lists.”
“You know exactly what you’re doing. But to be clear, I’ll tell you, so that you have no excuse. You are better than this.”
He jabbed a finger into Elias’s chest. Heard the crunch of the offending papers. “You are providing them information that might affect our fleet’s plans. Our fleet. You are taking from them falsified newspapers in their language. Whomever you are transferring them to in England will place it in the hands of trusting men who will take it as truth, who will put stock in printed reports of uprisings within the French army, who will presume that army to therefore be weakened. They will make their plans accordingly, leaving our fleet—and our nation—vulnerable.”
He was out of breath and had half a mind to whack his friend with the stick he’d been given to hunt down rats. Because in this moment, his immovable friend certainly fit the bill.
But that would do no good.
“It puts a target on your child’s back,” Frederick said. It was a low blow, ruthless. But he would do anything to crack through Elias’s blinders.
“And what do you know of targets on backs?” Elias said, his fists furling. “Always looking down on us all from your high tower.” His words were infused with bitterness that must have been buried deep down, festering for years, so sour it tainted the dark air around them.
If Elias would but let his fists fly, let his anger land on Frederick—Please, God—instead of allowing it to steer him into smugglers’ cities and shadowed dealings.
“Do it,” Frederick said. “Hit me.”
For a moment, Elias worked his jaw, looking like he would. As if the darkness were gathering about him, rallying to seep into him, he pulled an arm back.
But then he met Frederick’s eyes . . . and his bitter expression flickered across Frederick’s pleading one. Something snapped inside him—Frederick could see it. Some shackle broke its hold, and he slumped over a heap of barrels, face buried.
Frederick waited. He knew not what more to say, nor what to do. So he waited. Letting this battle play out within his friend, letting battle wage in prayer inside his own soul.
Keep him, Lord. Break him free.
Elias’s shoulders shook.
Frederick drew near. “You do not need to do these things,” he said. “Think, my friend. If you are found out, they’ll put you in the leg irons. You’ll get the cat-o’-nine-tails. The admiral, he . . .”
Frederick winced, thinking of the time he’d seen a man caught signaling another ship of their plans. And that had only been a Dutch ship—an ally. “Enemy might be watching,” the admiral had said. “You cannot signal our plans without permission and expect there to be no consequences.” The man had been made to walk an avenue of men, lined up and whipping him, aboard every single ship in the fleet. He had come back barely recognizable, and had spent weeks festering in a sick bay.
Frederick could not imagine what would happen to a man caught in true treason.
Rather, he could imagine. He knew very well what would happen. And that thought made him physically ill.
“It’ll be the gallows, and you know it. Public disgrace as a traitor. Your family . . . How will they ever live after that?”
Elias raised red-rimmed eyes, bracing himself against a barrel in a wide-shouldered stance, like a dog readying for a fight. “’Tis a fair thing to ask,” he said. “But you go too far in your question. If I do not provide for them, Frederick . . . how will they live?”
Frederick thought of Juliette—dressed to sail a ship, working the land as a child, cooking up a feast out of nothing with her mother.
“You think wrongly,” he said, staring intently at Elias. “They will live very well. And you are providing for them every day you spend on this ship.”
Elias’s fingers fisted, every muscle taut in this battle between temptation and truth.
Frederick thought the man might explode, right here in the hold, that the anger inside would boil up and burst past his last shred of common sense and reason.
But . . . there. His hand relaxed, eerily controlled. His spine unfurled just as slowly. “Very well.”
Frederick nodded, but it wasn’t enough. Flashes of their shipboard youth lined up in his mind: the two of them fighting in battles, saving each other’s lives, coming to blows over it, sleeping with the pigs. Standing side by side at Elias’s wedding.
My brother.
Their bond gave him boldness, gave voice to his demand.
“Promise,” he said.
Elias shifted his eyes to the side, jaw clenched.
Frederick waited. And waited.
“Very well,” Elias said.
“Very well, what?”
“I promise.”
“You promise what?”
Elias thwacked him on the shoulder with the stick meant for scaring out the rats. “Who died and made you king, your royal highness?”
“I’m not royal anything. But you must promise right now that you will do nothing to put your family in danger.”
He could have worded it a thousand ways: That you will not betray your king and country. That you will not convey information between enemies. That you will not be stupid, you big lout. But he knew the one that had the best chance of sticking was the one that kept Juliette in his mind’s eye.
“I promise I will not do anything to put my family in danger.” And then, with a shrug, he was Elias again. Making light of rats and groaning over what they’d find at the mess table.
But just as they were to head up to that mess table, which their growling stomachs were drawing them mightily to, he turned. Face serious, eyes earnest. Looking for all the world like a boy again—the one left among seaweed by his own father, and the one whose rough edges fit so perfectly into Juliette’s fire-lit ways that the two of them softened each other, somehow.
“You’re the best friend a bloke could ask for, Freddy. You know that.”
And with that, he was gone. Swallowed into the dark of the stairwell.
After a little more than a week of patrolling the Channel, the Avalon docked again in Dover. Frederick had seen little of Elias during that time, but they had both been busy and the times they crossed paths, Elias had been friendly, if a little distracted.
But he didn’t come to mess the second night in port. Nor the morning after. Killian Blackaby knew nothing of his whereabouts, and Killian knew everyone’s whereabouts, always. More often than not, he was writing it—and who knew what else—in that book of his.
When Elias was nowhere to be found that day, Frederick knew.
He knew it when Elias finally did return. Knew it when an official-looking boat rowed out to them from shore, when the men in the blue jackets and brass buttons conferred with the admiral. When the men who had been to shore were lined up, questioned.
“One of you deposited these papers into a stone wall, in a place known to us as a receptacle of information to our enemies. We will not leave until we know which of you it was.”
One by one, the men gave their accounts and alibies, corroborated one another’s stories. Until at last, only Elias and one other man remained. Each of them held their chins high in fierce pride. Each of them confident, it seemed, of their innocence.
But Frederick saw a lightning-fast flash of sheer terror in Elias’s eyes when he swallowed and met his friend’s stare
for less than an instant.
And it was then Frederick stepped forward.
For Juliette. For Elias. For the child. For the shepherd, who had given his life so that Frederick could be here today.
He held out his hands, wrists together. Ready to be bound.
“Take me,” he said.
twenty-three
Stone’s Throw Farm
2020
Lucy followed Violette around to the back of the farmhouse, down the moonlit footpath, to what looked to be a former creamery. It was a humble place to behold—the round building settled at the slightest tilt, the lovely stone of ages before, a thatched roof. Two high windows peered at their approach, panes dripping with the sag of time but glinting all the same. The whole place held an air of time-worn curiosity.
Violette slowed as they neared, glancing at Lucy as if unsure. This was her haven, Lucy sensed. A place sacred to Violette. From what Sophie and Clara had said, the girl soaked in privacy and quiet as if it were the air she breathed.
And here she was, on the verge of letting Lucy into her sanctuary.
“I can wait here, if you’d like,” Lucy offered.
Violette pursed her lips, studying Lucy like a book to read. Apparently what she read settled well, for the hesitation eased into a tentative sort of invitation. She tipped her head, gestured with a palm—Come, she was saying—and led the way with her clunky black wellies over the threshold of the old building.
Entering was an exquisite clash of the senses. The stone building cooled Lucy’s warm skin, while moonlight spilled through the two tiny windows like chutes from the sky, landing upon a cozy sitting area near a stone hearth constructed of a different stone than outside. Brown, rather than grey, likely installed long after the place had ceased being used as a creamery. She was cooled and warmed at the same time. Felt at once as if she had stepped into a fairy tale . . . and yet that she had also, stepped into a haven.