by Amanda Dykes
She blushed, darting her gaze to Dash. She seemed embarrassed by the use of the nickname, but nothing could fit a soul better.
“I must be a genius,” she said, making ready to feign brilliance.
“Yeah, or you must have done your lit homework last week,” Dash said. She gave him a look that told him he was a traitor.
“Mrs. Hamsmith has been assigning stories from The Canterbury Tales,” he told her father. “Your Matchstick Girl here was just griping about the old language last week.”
That much was true. It was Dash who helped her decipher that the man in the story had gone to a “magician” to find a calculation on when the tides would reach high enough to make the rocks disappear, that he might win a lady’s love.
“But it’s just a story, Dad. The tides don’t reach that high. If they did, we would know about it.”
Father crossed his arms over his chest, nodding solemnly. “I see what you mean,” he said, raising a finger. “But consider the source. Your Chaucer was not just a spinner of tales.”
“I know,” Lucy said. “He was a jumbler of language.”
“Yes, and a student of the sciences. Stars, sea, mechanical things. You might like some of his work, Lucy.”
Lucy looked dubious.
“The tides surprise us, sometimes. Remember,” the watchmaker said, “they keep time almost as faithfully as a clock.” He winked. “Almost.” He passed a pin and a watch hand to Dash, and a pair of tweezers to Lucy, picking up some sort of gear and inserting it into the watch’s back, then twisting. “There is none who can stop them. You know the story of King Canute?”
Lucy thought they were still speaking of The Canterbury Tales. “We haven’t gotten to that one yet,” she said.
“Nor will you,” he said. “Canute was a real king. Four hundred years before Chaucer. But I’d venture a guess that Chaucer knew his story well. Canute was a beloved king in this land. And king of Denmark and Norway, too. There were many who were convinced there was nothing he could not do. Some today think him the most effective king in the history of these lands.”
“Did he study the stars, too?” Dash asked.
“Perhaps. He was a keen observer of things. You see, the people were so trusting of him, they let their trust grow to admiration, their admiration to respect, their respect to flattery, and their flattery almost to a point of worship. This troubled the king. One day, he took a walk to the shore. He had a chair brought down and set it right at the place where the waves broke, foaming about his feet. He told everyone there that he would now command the tide to stop.”
A smile spread across the watchmaker’s face, gentle lines of genuine respect. “How did the historian put it? ‘He spoke to the rising tide.’ He commanded it not to encroach upon his land, or wet his feet or clothing. And do you know what happened?”
Canute must be like King Arthur, Lucy thought. If he was about to say the tide stopped, truth and legend had intermingled over time into the magic of myth. She said as much: “The tide stopped.”
Father laughed, and she was sure she’d gotten it right.
“The tide . . . rose and drenched right through the king’s pantaloons.”
“Dad!” Lucy’s cheeks were crimson.
Dash cleared his throat and looked away. “Is that true?” he said. “Why’d he do it, if he knew it would fail?”
Dash, ever the hero (if the recorder of this tale does say so himself), diverted the conversation.
The watchmaker smiled. “The historian wrote that he jumped back and proclaimed, ‘Let all the world know that the power of kings is empty and worthless, and there is no king worthy of the name save Him by whose will heaven, earth, and sea obey eternal laws.’”
Lucy and Dash waited, not understanding.
“He did it to humble himself in their sight,” the watchmaker said. “To show that no matter what the world said of a man, it did not change who the true king is.”
“So what does Canute have to do with Chaucer?”
“Nothing. And everything. Do you know there’s a scientist now, over in America, who is using the stars to pinpoint when in history certain things happened? Forensic Astronomy, they call it. He figured out exactly when Chaucer’s tale could have actually happened. Mega-tides, which can rise up over impossible rocks just as easily as waves can rise up around King Canute’s ankles. Just think! Nothing is impossible, you two. Nothing. Remember that.”
“Just think.” Lucy murmured her father’s favorite words, folding Dash’s page back up and pressing it close to her heart, praying the other stories, in time, might return to her, too.
After her day of research, Lucy returned that evening to list out exactly what she knew of the puzzle so far. She sat outside her spring cellar, scratching notes down on paper:
Frederick Hanford. Traitor and Deserter.
Ballad: Son of the House of Hanford.
Killian Blackaby—balladmonger-turned-sailor. Shipmate of Frederick Hanford.
The last she had learned during some late-night “Intermet” searching the night before, thanks to Violette’s covertly offered password.
Killian Blackaby had sailed aboard the HMS Avalon with Frederick Hanford for seven years. During that time, he had written innumerable ballads, including The Albatross, White Flag, and Wooden Monarch. None of them had reached any acclaim until long after his death. Son of the House of Hanford was one that had fallen into obscurity, and Violette had only come across it because of her correspondence with a Bodleian Visiting Fellow at Oxford, an expert in maritime poetry based out of New England. A quick search of Spencer T. Ripley’s biography page showed him to be perhaps in his early forties, with a boyish enthusiasm about him behind his wire-rimmed spectacles. He would only be there another two weeks, explaining Violette’s urgency to find what answers she could.
Lucy scratched more puzzle pieces onto her list:
Painting—The Way Home
Artist “J.”
Edgecliffe Estate, the Towers. The view matching The Way Home.
Mad Kit Bill
The Jubilee. Hurd’s Deep? Or . . . ? Dash thinks it could be somewhere else. But where?
“This is madness,” she said, sighing. The list looked like a collection of completely unrelated folklore.
And yet, she knew it was more. There was something connecting these pieces. They circled her, spinning about her mind and tangling this way and that, trying different combinations but always falling flat. She, at the center of the puzzle pieces in their chaos, felt as much a question mark as they seemed.
She looked up to see Dash leaving his observatory—a mobile shed he had built to move anywhere on the property. It could have been one of those tiny houses, for all its charm and character. In fact, part of it was his home. He’d built a bunk lofted above a desk, brewed his coffee in a French press, and kept his books on a tall shelf. She would have gone mad living in a space as small as a storage closet.
“But I don’t live here,” Dash had said, when she’d given him a hard time about it. “I just sleep here. I live out there.” He’d gestured at the rolling green pastures. “Know anyone else who measures their living space in acreage instead of square footage? Besides, I’m used to living in small spaces.”
She could well believe it, with all his travels, the sky his only constant.
He approached now, as the coloured sky over the distant Channel slipped from a waltz of pastels into a muted grey.
The moon slipped from behind a cloud on the horizon, a herald of the night sky to come.
“I saw it first!” they said at the same time, their childhood competition for the first to spot the moon resurrecting effortlessly.
“Fine,” Lucy chuckled. “I’ll give you this one. But you know I’ll get you next time,” she said.
“Ready for the star party, Matchstick Girl?”
She rose from her place on the boulder, her legs stiff from sitting so long. She shook out her notebook, her list of puzzle pieces dancing upon t
he page.
“Definitely. But I owe you a thanks first,” she said. “The Compendium. The story you left me.”
He scratched the top of his baseball hat sheepishly.
“I don’t know how to thank you, Dash. It meant the world. Really.”
“It’s the least I could do,” he said. “I wish I could do more—give every story back to you. But I bet they’re going to return to you, Lucy.”
“I hope so,” she said. “But in the meantime, I have a gem of a story to tide me over, thanks to you.”
She looped her arm through his offered one, and they started toward the party. How could it feel so natural? Like no time had passed at all? That, too, was a mystery.
“Let me ask you something,” she said. “Do you think Killian Blackaby could be Mad Kit Bill? Do you think he could have somehow helped Frederick Hanford escape?”
Dash puffed out his cheeks, letting his breath go. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s possible. But since the beginning the authorities were so confident no one could have snuck onto that boat—the possibility has never been considered. And why would Blackaby help a traitor?”
Lucy shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Hmm. What about Oxford? Can’t the professor guy just tell Violette what’s in the poem?”
“He could,” Lucy said. “But I get the feeling . . .” She paused. “I think they want to meet.”
Dash wrinkled his forehead as if she’d just told him the sky was water and the sea was sky. “You really think Violette wants to leave the farm to meet some guy?”
“I think a part of her does.” Lucy thought of her own comfort zone in London, of how it had taken Dash’s urging to break her out. Could she do the same for Violette? “Maybe it would be easier for her if you offered to join us. Plus, we could run up to London after that to get the painting I found.”
“Needing a dose of art in your life?”
Lucy laughed. “More like needing to make sure I haven’t abandoned my senses. I want to be sure.”
“You haven’t ‘abandoned your senses.’” Dash attempted a horrible excuse for a British accent as he quoted her. He’d been away much too long.
“Trust your gut, Lucy. You have better instincts than you give yourself credit for.” He stretched his arms to the sky and then locked his fingers behind his head in his familiar easy manner. Encouragement breathed from Dash like rivers to the sea. She’d forgotten this about him. “In the meantime, did you get any information about that Hanford journal?”
She had told him the day before of Frederick Hanford’s journal, which was housed at the British Library beneath a glass case, for all to see. A few inquiries, and she’d received digital excerpts of it a couple of hours ago.
“I did, in an email this afternoon.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “Did you know about Violette’s secret Internet?”
“Everyone knows. I think even Clara knows, deep down, though she’s convinced that advertising that the farm is wireless—for her meaning without Internet—adds to the draw of this place. So we all pretend it’s not here and only use it when we have to. And life is better without it, honestly. It’s nice not being constantly connected. It makes us . . . more connected, ironically.”
“I can see that,” Lucy said with a smile. “But then again, it was very nice receiving a document in the cloud via email a couple years back.”
“So tell me about the journal,” Dash redirected, looking endearingly embarrassed about his compendium.
“This entry was written right there at Edgecliffe, when Frederick Hanford was just a kid. Twelve years old.” She shook her head. “It’s a shame he took the route he did eventually. I think you’d have been friends, Dash. He made notes of the constellations, the direction of the wind . . . extraordinarily scientific mind.”
“Read it to me?”
“Sure.” She flipped through her notebook, pulled out the printed pages, and began to read, keenly aware of Dash’s intense study of her. Or of the words she spoke. The latter, surely.
“Twelfth of August, 1805
Skies: Constellation Draco in the sky. Constellation Gemini dimly visible.
Wind: North
Observed: Millie the parlormaid makes landscapes with the ashes before she sweeps them from the hearth.”
Lucy paused. “How does a soul like that—who notices parlormaids and literal beauty from ashes—become a traitor?” She shook her head. “So sad. He seems such a soulful person. I do wonder if he was the one to paint The Way Home.”
“But you said it had a J in the corner.”
“Right. So perhaps not. Or maybe it’s J for Jubilee? Though that doesn’t quite add up, either.”
“What else did they send?”
“His last entry. May 13th, 1811. That would have been four days before his trial and disappearance. He says . . .
“Thirteenth of May, 1811
Skies: Constellation Gemini—Castor and Pollux—clouded over.
Moon: Waning crescent. Grows smaller every night.
Wind: North by Northeast
Observed: The admiral’s mourning dove sings from her cage. I hear it on the wind. I remember her story well.
“He sounds . . . sad,” Lucy said. Fading light, mourning doves. She, along with every other maritime scholar, knew the story of Cuthbert Forsythe’s rescue of the sacrificial mourning dove. When the admiral was killed at sea in battle off the coast of San Sebastián nearly two years after this journal entry, it was in coming against a French ship engaged in battle with a much smaller British frigate. The dove had become a legend, symbolizing the man’s life and death. One of courage in the form of sacrifice.
Dash nodded. “He does. But Mr. Melancholy gives us a lot to go off of in those few lines.”
“He does?”
“Crescent moon waning, for one thing. Cloud cover. That could tell us a lot about the tides, a possible storm—both things that could determine where a ship might end up in the days following that entry.”
Hope collided in an overwhelming crash with the immensity of what they were up against, research-wise. They would need multiple ships’ logs to cross-reference, from vessels out in the Channel. Tide charts, if they even existed from that time period. And even then, it could be a wild-goose chase, trying to track down a rogue ship’s whereabouts with just those factors. Still, Dash’s words brought a skitter of anticipation to Lucy’s heart.
“Come on,” Dash said. “Let it simmer for a few hours. We can make a plan after the star party.”
twenty-five
And so they traversed the path to the far pasture, where the star party was to be. “Less ambient light leads to better star viewing,” Dash explained.
“Right,” Lucy said. “I seem to remember a certain kid making me wear sunglasses indoors to make my eyes adjust.”
“Sounds like a smart kid. And I bet you looked pretty cool, too.”
Lucy laughed. “The coolest.”
Dash laughed slow and easy, knocking into her with his elbow. “You put up with a lot from me back then, Lu.”
“I could say the same thing about you,” she said.
They fell into easy silence as they walked on.
The far pasture, as it turned out, was half a mile down the road, in a green field with bobbing buttercups and trees fully lining the perimeter.
“That’s unusual for these parts,” she said, pointing at the thick wall of trees.
“All the better for us. We’re far removed from the village and any lights from neighboring farms. With the wall of trees and the shadow of Welden Hill, it’s the perfect place for stargazing.”
Lucy wasn’t sure what she’d expected—perhaps a few academic types gathered, notebooks and maps in hand, ready to debate astrophysics and theorems—but something in the air defied any expectations she’d had. The lilting sound of an Irish flute piping a reel floated their way on snatches of wind.
“Betty’s here,” Dash said. “She owns the bakery in town and bring
s her tin whistle most weeks.”
Beatrix came trotting down the path to greet them, floppy Basset ears swinging.
“Hi, Beatrix.” Lucy knelt to pet the hound with soulful eyes, and Beatrix leaned into her and followed once she rose to continue.
“Look at that,” Dash said. “She doesn’t take to anyone like that. Good girl, Beatrix.” The dog’s tags jingled as she trotted after them, the perfect percussion to Betty’s tune.
As they approached the gathering, Violette turned from her place near a campfire, her cheeks bright. Her eyes lit up when she saw Dash. And her smile spread when she saw Lucy. She motioned them over.
As Dash approached Violette, it occurred to Lucy that she hadn’t seen Dash and Violette closely interacting before. He was easy in her presence, and she in his. He rambled on about the summer triangle appearing early if they kept watch, and she tilted her head to watch the sky as if it were as much home to her as it was to him.
Something felt bereft inside Lucy as she watched the two of them. Were they a couple? It didn’t entirely seem so, but she didn’t know. She’d been so caught up in all things Jubilee, she hadn’t really asked much about Dash’s life. That fact smote her, as did the bereft feeling. What right did she have to any such reaction? She liked Dash. She liked Violette. They both deserved places to belong, people to belong with, after all they’d been through. They were alike, Lucy realized. Two souls who’d lost parents early on, able to understand each other.
With a fresh wave, it hit her—she was now like them, too.
Dash turned, his gaze landing on her with a quizzical tilt to his head. He scooped the air, motioning her between them. Violette handed her a cup of cider and a pair of sunglasses.
“Ah, so Dash is up to his old tricks,” Lucy said, donning the glasses.
“Hey, if it’s not broke . . .”
Lucy laughed. “So where’s your telescope?”
“Around the back of the cottage.” He pointed to a small stone structure she hadn’t noticed, tucked into the corner of the pasture. “Roger and I keep the telescopes back there to block the firelight.”