by Amanda Dykes
For it was clearly, above all, a home, with all the comforts of a worn green armchair in the corner and a chipped Royal Doulton teacup washed with care and set to dry on the stone windowsill.
Lucy recalled an American book Dash had once loaned her. He had liked it for the mystery and adventure of the four orphaned siblings, but she had most of all loved the way they had turned an old boxcar into a home, furnishing it with treasures found in rubbish piles and cleaned in pure river water. This home of Violette’s had that same air of timeless innocence and lovely resourcefulness, with care given to guard such life-giving pleasures.
A rolltop desk sat in the corner opposite the stove, and Lucy smiled to see it faced the fireplace rather than away from it. As if Violette preferred to let the light and warmth fall upon her as she worked.
It was to this desk Violette went now, looking of another era with her wispy form and calico dress and wool sweater. Wide-eyed, she nodded that same invitation—Come.
Lucy did. Violette rested her hands on the knobs of the rolltop, breathed in deeply, and paused.
The sense of the fairy tale continued, and Lucy’s mind began conjuring imaginings of what might hide in this covered desk. Judging by Violette’s reaction to the tale of Mad Kit Bill, it surely must be related. A relic of his pilfered goods? A map to his would-be treasure? Or perhaps the story was darker, and it was part of Mad Kit Bill’s skeleton.
Lucy chided herself, looking again at the chipped teacup, the bookcase where a potted fern billowed and well-loved volumes of poetry lined its humble wooden planks, which leaned slightly toward the old armchair. This was not the home of a bone collector.
Then again, Lucy herself ran about the countryside chasing down fabled tales of seafaring traitors and ships long lost, so who was she to judge?
Lucy’s pulse quickened as Violette began to roll back the desk, the clack-clack-clack of the old wooden slats mellow with age. The girl paused and looked earnestly at Lucy, eyes pleading. She pressed a finger to her own lips, and Lucy nodded. A promise to keep her secret. Whatever shadowed relics or dastardly evidence or . . .
The desk was up.
Violette slid something into the light . . .
A laptop. She gripped it and grimaced, her pale cheeks flushing pink.
“You . . . have a computer?”
Violette nodded, eyes closed in shame. She opened one eye and peered at Lucy.
Lucy raised her eyebrows in a friendly way, inviting more explanation. “Is it against the rules to have a computer here? I hope not. I brought mine, and I’ve used it often.”
Violette pursed her lips, twirling a finger in a small circle in the empty air.
Clara’s pride at being “completely wireless” flew into Lucy’s mind. “You do have the Internet.”
Violette confirmed this with a sheepish nod and opened the black laptop—small and dated. Rather clunky, and whirring as if it hurt for it to come alive. As the screen lit up, Violette tapped in a password, and what looked like a virtual bulletin board filled the screen. Images of different post-it notes were lined up, each with notes in a typewriter-like font.
Mad Kit Bill—connection to Killian Blackaby?
Killian Blackaby—connection to traitor in Blackaby poem?
Traitor—Mad Kit Bill?
Something quickened inside Lucy. “You have theories of a traitor?”
Violette nodded.
“Do you mean Frederick Hanford?”
A shrug, and she pointed to another “sticky note.” This one said, Killian Blackaby = Traitor? Or Mad Kit Bill = Traitor? Or . . . ?
Lucy nodded. “Theories,” she said. “And you’re chasing down evidence?”
Violette nodded, the first small smile breaking through her apprehension. She pulled out the desk drawer and removed a paper. Tapping it twice, she handed it to Lucy. It was a photocopy, folded thrice as if it had been taken from the post.
Lucy scanned the page. It was some sort of poem . . . or a story told in verse. She flipped through her vague memories of the literature classes she’d had to take at Oxford. An epic, perhaps. But this was short, just a page long. A ballad?
“Son of the House of Hanford.”
She froze. There it was. Hanford. A name she knew as well as her own.
Lucy flipped the paper over. Blank. Flipped it back to the front and looked to Violette for permission. She nodded, her fair face even paler than usual.
Lucy began to read aloud.
“Son of the House of Hanford
A Ballad in Six Parts
By the Most Humble Killian Blackaby”
The scrawl was ink and pen, looped and slanted in the style of yesteryear, difficult to read. Lucy ran her eyes over the words, letting them adjust before continuing.
“1
Cast thee down, and cast thee up,
And cast thee in between,
And there has gone the Traitor-Man,
Ne’er more shall he be seen.
2
Covered is he, from deep to deep,
His sins have brought him there.
And there has gone the Traitor-Man,
His sorrows for to bear.
3
Sisters seven, seven more,
cloistered in their cove.
His secret keep, this Traitor-Man
In death for to betroth.
4
The tides do come, the tides do go,
And with them mark the time.
The Traitor-Man did rise on them,
To depths in dark sublime.
5
And there his story rests, says I,
Beyond in Weldensea.
We lay to rest the Traitor-Man,
His tale, with words, bury.
6 . . .”
Lucy broke off. Flipped the paper over, and back again.
“That’s it,” she said, curving the words into the puzzle that they were. “Where is the sixth part?” The photocopy just stared blankly back at her, speckled where its original was worn with time.
“Mad Kit Bill,” Violette said, her voice somewhat hoarse from disuse.
Lucy recalled the way she’d gone ashen at the earlier mention of Mad Kit Bill. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t see the connection. Frederick Hanford was a traitor . . . Mad Kit Bill was a robber . . . Do you think they knew each other?”
Her eyes flew open wide. “Do you suppose Bill might have broken him free of his shackles?” No one had ever figured out how Frederick had broken loose from his chains aboard the Jubilee. But all the theories had been so confident he’d had no assistance that she’d never even considered the possibility of an accomplice.
Violette went to her Dutch door, opening its top and pointing into the dark. Lucy did not know the area well, but she remembered the distant ruins on the cliff, the only structure for miles in the direction Violette pointed.
“Ah,” she said. “I see. It was Frederick’s home that Bill was supposed to have burgled.”
Now Violette’s look was one of pity, and Lucy felt very much like a schoolgirl who could not, despite the teacher’s best efforts, follow the story that was right in front of her. Violette’s pity morphed into a look of tentative hope as she bit her lip. She looked from Lucy, to the computer, to the dark night outside, as if weighing something.
The computer dinged. Violette’s cheeks flushed bright red, eyes wide.
“You have a message?” Lucy ventured.
Violette nodded and then, as if it cost her everything she held dear, gave a small nod of invitation to follow. “Come,” she said, voice small.
Curious, Lucy did, and watched as Violette opened up a chat box with someone by the screen name of MrWaterWaterEvrywhr.
Violette pulled up a purple chair that had once been painted red, and before that, white, and before that, stained dark wood. The chipped surface revealed these layers here and there, attesting to eras long past. The young woman watched Lucy expectantly, fingers poised over computer keys.
Contraband ke
ys. She suppressed a smile, recalling Clara’s stand against the “Intermet.”
“You have quite the operation here,” Lucy said. She saw Photoshop on the desktop, and shortcuts to vacation rental websites. “You run the reservations, Clara said.”
“Word of mouth.” Violette winked, pointing at the screen. “See?”
And so it was.
Violette paused, gesturing for Lucy to pull up a chair. Accepting Violette’s permission, Lucy surveyed the chat:
MrWaterWaterEvrywhr: Greetings!
VioletteSkye: Hi
“Skye,” Lucy said. “Is that your middle name?”
Violette nodded, smile shy, and fixed her eyes right back on the screen.
“Pretty,” Lucy said. “Like a poem.”
If Violette heard, she did not take time to acknowledge the comment. She was midchat with MrWaterWaterEvrywhr:
VioletteSkye: How are you? Were you able to find out anything about Killian Blackaby?
MrWaterWaterEvrywhr: I’m faring well on this auspicious evening. And how are you, my lady?
Violette glanced at Lucy, as if keenly aware that people did not speak this way, that this fellow was perhaps a little bit . . . singular.
VioletteSkye: I’m fine, thank you.
Her hands hovered over the keys for a moment.
I’m here with a friend.
MrWaterWaterEvrywhr: Ah! Greetings to your friend, as well.
Lucy smiled her acknowledgement and gave a small wave.
VioletteSkye: She says hello. I found an old volume of Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. Over a hundred years old! Just sitting in the old farmhouse, and I never knew. I’ve been paying better attention to bookcases ever since we talked about the way books are history living right in the present.
MrWaterWaterEvrywhr: The Brownings! Now there was a pair for the ages.
A few seconds passed, and then—
MrWaterWaterEvrywhr: I DID find something of your Mr. Blackaby. In addition to the ballad from the village museum I sent.
Violette sat up bolt straight in her chair and perched on its edge. Whatever Lucy had stepped into felt like a conversation between old and dear friends. Perhaps—if she wasn’t mistaken, judging by the smile she had never seen on Violette’s face—more than dear friends? Tonight was proving to be quite the night of revelations.
VioletteSkye: What did you find out?
And then, as if suddenly remembering her manners and the fact that she was apparently speaking to a modern-day embodiment of verbal chivalry:
That is, if you don’t mind sharing.
MrWaterWaterEvrywhr: My dearest Violette, I am at your service. What will my time at Oxford mean, if I cannot better serve those with an interest in excellent maritime poetry? I have discovered a volume of Killian Blackaby’s ballads at the Bodleian Library.
Lucy placed her hands on the desk, leaning in. “Oxford? I was at university there. I wish I could’ve done something to help you out. ,. , ,”
Violette looked at her pityingly again. “This is to help you out, Lucy.” The fullest sentence she’d spoken, and it zinged with spunk.
Lucy watched as she typed out the start of several questions, deleting each one in sequence:
VioletteSky: Is it—[delete]
Have you—[delete]
Could I possibly—[delete]
Is there anything of the unfinished ballad in it?
MrWaterWaterEvrywhr: There appear to be several whose form fits that of the one you identified. But it doesn’t appear definitively. Perhaps there are hints in his other works. I would have checked the book out and mailed it your way . . . but it is a first edition. Indeed, I wonder, looking at it, if it is the ONLY edition. It is part of their special collections and can only be read there, handled with gloves, all of the pomp that the ageless manuscripts have there. No photographs allowed. . . .
VioletteSkye: Oh . . . I see.
Lucy’s heart hurt, watching the way Violette’s shoulders sagged, her crestfallen spirit nearly tangible. And then her heart hurt even more, watching her try so hard to buoy herself right back up, this girl who asked so very little of the world, who stayed close to home, her entire universe here, making safe places for creatures in danger.
VioletteSkye: Well, I’m thrilled that you found it. At least now we know Killian Blackaby was not a phantom writer invented in folklore!
MrWaterWaterEvrywhr: Indeed, he was not. He was a sailor. Pressed into service, it would appear from some of his poetry, and he spent years at sea during the Napoleonic wars. What a change that must have been, going from ballad monger, travelling the country roads and hawking his words at county fairs and open markets, to firing cannons and furling sails and I know not what!
VioletteSkye: Yes, such a change.
The chat went silent for a few minutes, and Lucy wondered if she should slip out, let this conversation resolve without the added pressure of an onlooker. An onlooker who was jumping in her skin to urge Violette to go see this book that apparently meant so much to her. But was that her place? How could she presume to suggest something to someone she knew so little?
MrWaterWaterEvrywhr: You . . . could come see me.
VioletteSkye: [blinking cursor]
MrWaterWaterEvrywhr: I mean . . . come see it. The book. I . . . could show it to you, if you like.
He was suddenly endearingly clunky in his words.
VioletteSkye: I would like that very much. And I would like very much to meet you. But things are . . . complex.
MrWaterWaterEvrywhr: I live for the complex!
The poor man. Lucy wished she could jump through the screen, embrace him for his enthusiasm over Violette, but whisper a few words about the woman he clearly regarded. Of how she barely spoke, did not leave the farm she came to as a youth, not ever. Did not see the world . . . but oh, the worlds that lived in her, as evidenced by her tender spirit, her shelves lined in epics and poems. Her sketchbook filled to the brim with glimpses so deep, the world needed this soul in it.
VioletteSkye: I—[delete]
She looked at Lucy. A collision of desires and abilities. So much depth to her, like the bounding sea was trapped, tide rising, with nowhere to go.
Lucy nodded, encouragingly. “You can go, Violette. I’ll go with you.” Perhaps a day trip might deliver some much-needed perspective to her, too. “If you like, that is.”
Violette’s fingers hovered, her right index moving ever-so-tentatively over the Y key—and then she closed her computer. Placed her head in her hands.
“It’s all right, Violette. There’s no rush.”
Violette raised her head. She opened her mouth. “But”—she spoke so quietly, Lucy thought she might have imagined it—“there is.”
twenty-four
On the way back to what was fast becoming her spring-cellar haven, Lucy met Dash leaving the farmyard, his head once again in the stars. She filled him in on all she had learned during her visit with Violette—and that she had offered to take her to Oxford . . . but the girl wasn’t ready. Dash had plans for the next day, and Lucy hoped to visit a neighboring village for more research, so they agreed they would meet up tomorrow evening before the star party.
Lucy’s sleep came in fitful bursts. Dreams of bandits traversing the moor with eerie bundles interspersed themselves with her spring cellar’s stream song. When morning came, it was an out-of-place sound of scraping that woke her.
Sitting up, she saw someone had slid a crisp white piece of paper beneath her door. Sunlight spilled from the little circle window, beckoning her into the light of day, and whatever awaited her on the paper.
Unfolding it, her breath caught when Dash’s signature stick-straight permanent marker writing met her.
COMPENDIUM OF WONDER
She smiled, running her thumb over the words. She knew, even before reading on, what this was. A continuation of his gift given in that cloud document—an addition to the collection of stories.
Stories he now knew she had
lost. He was gifting one of them back to her. Wiping away quick tears, she read on:
As told in questionably accurate detail by Dashel Greene, who might have not cared a whit for grammar and the like when this was told to him, and therefore might tell it kinda badly now, too.
“The tide keeps the time almost as faithfully as a clock, Dash and Lucy.” The watchmaker had a way of always linking their names together, as if they were one of the inseparable pairs of the universe, like tea and cream, or clouds and sky, or Castor and Pollux in the sky. He tinkered with his pocket watch again—he had that magnifying monocle thing over one eye and grinned when he winked up at them, looking like an absent-minded professor. Or a mad scientist.
Dash took the bait. “Almost?”
“Picture it,” he said. “A coastline studded with treacherous rocks, so tall and fierce no ship would venture near, not even in calm seas. Too many had been destroyed by those very rocks. And yet the sea is a living thing that rises and falls, reaches and pulls—” His screwdriver slipped. Lucy handed him a handkerchief, and he wiped it all clean, as he was in the habit of doing whenever he needed a fresh start.
“Thank you,” he said, handing it back.
Lucy tucked it into her dress pocket. She scrunched her nose up at Dash when she saw he was looking at her as if she herself were the relic from the past, not just the hankie in her hand. “Our family is old-souled and odd,” she’d told him once, “so you’d better get used to it.” He, in fact, liked that about them. They were a constant, in a crazy world.
The watchmaker continued. “What do you think happened when a man decided he must find a way to make those rocks . . . disappear?” He did the thing with his fingers again, waggling them as if performing a magic trick.
Lucy laughed. “He waited,” she said. She was thirteen now, and had not one but three volumes of oceanography stacked on the family bookshelf. “The rising tide would be the only way for every stone to disappear at once.”
The watchmaker straightened and lifted his monocle thing (that’s the technical name for it, by the way) so it pointed straight up like an antenna. He beheld her, dumbfounded. Whether truly dumbfounded or acting for their benefit, Dash and Lucy did not know.
“Now what makes you say that, Matchstick Girl?”