by Amanda Dykes
But then she saw him. And stopped cold in her tracks, mouth parted around the unspoken word—Elias?
Her eyes grew wide. She looked beyond Frederick, looked desperately around, searching, not knowing. Thinking, he imagined, that Frederick had been caught up in whatever Elias had been caught up in. That they were both here.
His stomach sank.
That meant he had not gone to her. In all the uncertainty, in all the darkness in all the world, there were a few things Frederick could be certain of. One of them was that nothing could or would keep Elias Flint from Juliette.
Which meant something had happened.
Oh, God, he prayed . . . and knew not what more to say. For his prayer was choked by his own mangled mess. Could words even make it past his web of schemes and on to heaven? Surely they were caught somewhere in the in-between. A ceiling between him and God. Tossed about the ever-flapping sails of the flightless Jubilee, perhaps.
And yet had not Jesus himself marched to a trial, innocent? Taken on a death sentence, that others might live?
Frederick swallowed, willed Juliette to look at him, to see him shaking his head. To understand.
And she did. Those green eyes flashed tragedy. Rage. The smallest flicker of fear. And written on the draw of her mouth . . . deepest sorrow.
She plowed forth, reaching him. Walking beside him, shoving aside the arm of the guard.
“We had word in Weldensea that you . . . you died at Gravelines. That Elias was on trial here today.”
Frederick stopped.
“But you live.” Juliette’s shoulders heaved. “So where . . .” Her voice tripped over her question, over the answer she knew before it even had time to find words. “Where . . .”
Where is Elias?
Frederick’s chest thudded hard, heart slamming against ribs.
In the blink of an eye, Juliette was lost in the crowd. One look back showed an ashen face, a lifeless sorrow so grim and resigned she became as a statue. The crowd flowed around her like water around a rock in a riverbed, until she was swallowed up in it, and he was in the courtroom. His last glimpse of her was as a hooded man approached. Tall, something familiar about his gait. It did not look to be Elias—but he could hope.
His guard marched him in and bade him stand. Frederick was numb. Somehow, beyond the hum of cold realization, the strangeness of this place reached its icy fingers into him. The precipice of life and death, where wigged men looked on in ambivalent business, apparently deaf to the jeering crowd outside, the shrieks of women whose entire universes had just been obliterated, as with cannon fire, in a single-word verdict.
A rustling sounded, and the magistrate entered. He moved with steady slowness that seemed inhuman, as if he were the ship traversing the sea of this room—and it was in his wake that all present would be buoyed or pulled asunder.
Someone pronounced Frederick’s crimes of treason in a monotone that matched the cold, white light of the courtroom. Waves of murmuring stirred the murky waters of those in attendance. Frederick felt their glances like hot darts, spearing him with whispered commentary.
Good. Let them. The faster the better, that he might carry out his purpose swiftly. He could not shake a heavy urgency. As long as he lingered, he held the door open for wrath to come upon Juliette, Elias, and their child. If he could but close that door, nail the coffin, and seal his own name as traitor first . . . they might yet live free of the stigma that could smother even so blazing a soul as Juliette’s.
He dared a glance around, in search of her. Thanks be to God, she was not there.
“I ask once more,” the judge said, impatience in his voice. “Have you anyone to speak on your behalf as to your character?”
“None fit to speak for the likes of ’im but Davy Jones ’imself,” someone said from the gallery rising behind. A chorus of hearty voices rose to a slow boil, and the magistrate employed his gavel.
“No, sir,” Frederick said. He held his chin high. Not a look of defiance but rather an act of facing the crimes before him with clear mind and ready heart. That, at least, was true.
The judge studied him, his pale eyes seeming to hollow Frederick out in an effort to lay him bare, examine his insides. “You might be interested to know what your captain had to say about your character.”
“Admiral,” Frederick said in monotone.
“Pardon?”
“Not captain. Admiral. And I need not know what he said.”
“I see. Well, despite your lack of eagerness to hear his—” his droll voice trailed off as he examined a paper before him—“very clear opinion of your character, it has been submitted as written testimony.” The judge gestured for a barrister—a young man who stood with great importance and cleared his throat to read from the letter.
As he began, the door behind Frederick opened.
“Wait.”
The judge narrowed his eyes against the sun that came in around a figure in the doorway. He could not see clearly who he was dealing with . . . but Frederick knew in the assured voice that sounded.
And he would not put it past her to turn this court on its head. To unmask his charade and undo any chance she had at an untainted future.
He had taken enough from her. He would not now take that, too.
“Your honor,” Frederick said. “I wish to plead guilty.”
“He is not guilty,” Juliette said at the same time.
Ballast dropped in his stomach. The room, which had been so tremorous with murmurings just moments before, was stone silent.
What was she doing? He caught her eye and shook his head. If she spoke again—it could all come tumbling down about her in ruins.
To save her—from herself, from himself, from all of it—he stepped forward, summoned more volume and force than he had ever infused into his voice.
“She does not know of what she speaks,” he said, despising how very cold his voice sounded, when all he wanted to do was offer her the world.
“How very unusual,” the magistrate said, his dull voice piquing with interest for the first time in, Frederick suspected, decades. “And who, pray tell, is she?” He studied her with keen sight, eyes resting a moment at her midsection.
She, not missing a thing, jutted her chin out and turned to better face the judge, to better conceal the protrusion that apparently made her a spectacle.
“Your wife, I presume?”
He bit his tongue.
“I am not,” she said.
The magistrate’s eyes, so light blue they seemed transparent beneath his yellowing wig of horsehair, took in her swollen form.
“I see,” he said.
He did not see. Ire rose in Frederick at the implication.
“I am sympathetic to your plight, miss. And I advise you to leave. This is sure to be distressing.” He gestured to the clerk, who nodded to one of the officers of the court, who made to lead Juliette from the room.
“’Tisn’t a kindness, miss,” the officer said quietly. “Not t’you nor t’him. Come out into the fresh air, and it’ll be better.”
“You do wrong,” she said, chin held high. “He is innocent. I’ve just had word that this man is most assuredly not guilty of the crimes he is charged with.”
The magistrate’s brows puckered, and he leaned to confer with one of the barristers. Their voices were low, but then he nodded gravely and said, “Hysteria. Understandably. Poor woman. Story older than time.”
He nodded again, and the officer guided Juliette gently—and then firmly, when he realized he was dealing with a gale more than a mere human—from the courtroom.
She wrested herself from him at the threshold and stood, shoulders heaving, as the judge ordered the barrister to give account to his character, as detailed by Admiral Forsythe’s letter.
Frederick swallowed, bile in his throat.
“‘The man guilty of these crimes is, if the court will pardon the vulgarity of this sadly necessary account, the lowest vermin to ever infest the bowels of the Ava
lon.’”
The barrister, in all his youth and eagerness to prove himself worthy of this moment, read with great volume. Enunciating every word so that each one was a trumpet blast. Or a death knell.
He continued. “‘He has, since his arrival, shown obstinacy, insubordination, disloyalty leading to desertion, and ultimately, treason.’”
Frederick thought of Elias. The run-ins he had had with the midshipmen when they were boys. With the officers when they were midshipmen. The times he had worked hard, the times he had undone all of that work by going missing for days.
This account was written about Elias. Forsythe had determined to give account of the real traitor, it seemed.
The man continued his reading. “‘It was no great surprise, then, when he was found to have sold information to the enemy. Information that would have thwarted a most important campaign, had his transfer been successful. One which will, if all the delicate details align, free many of England’s captive men from the tyrannical imprisonment of the French. He attempted to involve his deck mate in his schemes. But the deck mate stayed true to his commission to stand guard over the mascot of the ship, a mourning dove.’”
The barrister raised his eyebrows, looking apologetic for the sudden tangential nature of the account.
For someone who detested the transmission of encrypted messages, Admiral Forsythe had written much between the lines. The man was writing directly to Frederick, it seemed.
“‘The man guilty of these crimes is a scourge to His Majesty’s Royal Navy. A scourge to his family. A blight upon history.’”
The room began to spin. Frederick bit his tongue, a molten flow of words rising up in defense of his friend. He hardly knew where the charade began and the truth hid. He wanted to rise up against this testimony of Elias, to declare that this same “scourge” was one who stopped the beginnings of a mutiny belowdecks, who regularly went without to give a scrawny newcomer his hardtack. But he could not defend him, for to do so would forsake his chance at assuming his friend’s place.
Frederick felt an invisible writhing from the direction of Juliette, still standing at the threshold. He struggled to resist the pull to look at her. What did she care of his fate? What did she mind if he was accounted as a scourge, a blight?
But in the end, he could not resist—and a great chasm split open in his chest. She looked shattered, as if she knew these words were spoken of her beloved. But that was not possible.
Unless . . . Who had the hooded man in the street been? And where was he now?
Urgency rose anew. If someone who could undo all of Frederick’s efforts lurked, time was of the essence.
And so, with prayer driving his pounding pulse, he returned to Juliette’s gaze . . . and saw pleading. For it all to be erased. For every word the man had spoken to vanish.
Time slowed as he tore his eyes away, skimmed the dark wood wall panels, the yellowing candles of tallow wax—one of them tilting, oddly akilter, ready to spill wax in its crippled form that its meager light might shine still.
And he lifted his sight once more to the judge, who was grave, his mouth moving around words that came in spats. “Guilty . . . hanged by the neck . . .
“May God have mercy on your soul.”
twenty-seven
Frederick did not sleep that night. Looming execution—scheduled to the minute, no less—turned the world extraordinarily dark and extraordinarily light, all at once. He would be hanged from the neck until dead at nine o’clock the next morning. The eighteenth of May. A day which, until today, had been only one in a string of shapeless days in a calendar reaching afar into the future.
He ached with the heaviness of a friend lost, ached with the hope of life for that friend. He savored the sweetness of night air at sea. How had he never tasted it before? How had he never felt the miracle of it pulsing through him, carrying life to his every limb, feeling to his fingers? He opened those fingers to the night, feeling them crack as the mud slung by the mocking crowds on his march from the tribunal fell away. He lifted those hands to the stars, feeling the emptiness of his palms—the absolute absence of worldly possessions—and watched them fill with distant, miraculous starlight.
He had nothing. Not a thing to call his own. He would be known only as traitor, for all of time. It would break his father’s heart.
But oh, it might give another child a chance to know a father. If Elias would but turn and do right, all could be well.
Struggling to his feet, he stood. Empty palms to the sky, grief and joy twining about him until they cinched his lungs tight. He ached with every beat of his heart, drinking in hope as if it were air. A flood of May air filled him with hints of a summer he would never see. He shivered, gulped that air as tears ran down his face.
He looked mad, he knew. But that knowledge only made him laugh. What did that matter? There was the beautiful irony that here . . . here, in a death sentence, was freedom. He reached farther into the darkness, closing his eyes to those stars, imagining he could rake his fingers through their shimmer, gather up their light. Oh, that he could wrap that light in a parcel of brown paper, tie it with string, and send it to the wee child growing within Juliette. He was desperate to tell him—or her—to look to the skies when things were dark. For there always would be light. Steady and sure.
He had no words, no companion to pass his last hours with. Not even the guard, whose flask had proven companion enough for the man, and who now lay again in drunken slumber.
It mattered not. Frederick would not be going anywhere. Ankles shackled and arms spread wide, he was free in this prison.
He surveyed the heavens. The stars of the Northern Cross barely touched the horizon, steadfast and sure. He was suddenly a young boy, back on the roof of Edgecliffe, flipping through the pages of Uranometria, untangling stars into shapes and feeling so much smaller—and so much better, in his smallness. While floors beneath him, a bellowing father and the reckoning forces of piano fortes collided in a battle worthy of the old myths, up here these beacons shone on, night after night, projecting stories for the ages before him and the ages to follow.
Overcome, Frederick fell to his knees, felt the press of worn-smooth wood on his forehead as he let the cool planks cradle his head.
Broken. Whole. Alive. The three twisted and twisted and summoned his mother’s song, which used to do battle for him, warding off the dark. Setting the stars alight.
He was no musician, had no melody in him. But the words came. Ragged and splintered.
“‘Let us break their bonds asunder . . .’”
It was not melodic in the least. Handel would have cringed, surely. The staccato bright notes and runs and trills of piano keys were nowhere to be heard—but shadows of them lived in his somber declarations.
“Eh?” The guard rustled to a somewhat-conscious stupor.
“‘Let us break their bonds asunder,’” Frederick sang, stronger this time, bass notes anchoring vestiges of a melody to the words.
“They all go mad,” the guard muttered. He rose, teetering, and made his way toward Frederick. Pushed his shoulder hard, as if to tear right through him and save the gallows a victim. “Ye’ll not be breakin’ no bonds here, m’friend.”
Slamming into the mast behind him, Frederick’s head throbbed. He rocked back, dark spots exploding into his vision like pools of ink. Set the stars alight.
“Asunder . . .” he sang, clinging to consciousness. Please, God. Let this break their bonds asunder. He pictured Elias, Juliette. The tiny feet of a babe, swaddled and safe.
He recalled the letter Elias had sent her from Spain, including a ribbon to commemorate the eighteenth anniversary of her arrival in the world, then just a few weeks away. Perhaps Elias had arrived on her doorstep himself, instead. Frederick did not know the precise date of her birth, but he pictured the two of them together. Perhaps she had left the trial, gone home, and found him there—and they’d eaten blackberry pie, her favorite thing, as he had learned in being Elias’s
scribe over the years.
This, then, was what his life would mean. The giving of it.
And it was good.
A swift kick to his gut drew Frederick’s knees up into his stomach. The black pools of ink parted long enough to watch heavy boots walk away unsteadily, carrying the guard to a rope ladder dangling over the side of the ship. The sound of oars and raucous off-key singing faded, and with it, Frederick’s last glimpse of those stars.
When he awoke, the whole world rocked about him, cloaked in night. His head pounded with the force of hammering steel, the more when he attempted to raise it. He looked first to the prison guard’s perch and found it empty. So he was gone, still. Off debauching himself, congratulating himself and the world of purging itself of such a one as Frederick Hanford.
Straining his protesting muscles, he drew up into a barely sitting position, stopping when his shackles reminded him he could not move far.
A dark figure stood at the helm, perhaps five feet away, back to him. The wheel rocked back and forth in his hands. The lights of the port were nowhere to be seen. Only moonlit cliffs of white, off in the distance.
He was at sea.
In the Jubilee.
Clearly, he was dreaming.
“I knew you didn’t steal my sheep,” the figure said, voice quiet, hollowed out—and distinctly feminine.
That proved it. He was asleep. Or delirious.
He watched her, recalling another time he had thought her a boy, another time she’d been out steering a ship.
She turned, and there was no disguising her now. Hair loose and long, tossing in shadows on the wind. Her belly round in silhouette.
“Juliette . . .” he said, trying to reconcile this, trying to prove it a dream.
“Do not speak,” she said. Or hissed, rather. “I shall not be lied to.”
Frederick raised his hand to his mouth, pain smiting him. Dried blood flaked onto his hand. Did blood do that in dreams?
But in case this was not a dream . . .
“You cannot do this,” he said.
“You cannot do this. I am only doing what Elias—the true Elias, the one we both know—would do. Not the one swallowed in some madness. . . .” Her voice broke, its wound deep and fresh. “This is what he would do.” She nodded, chin set. Resolute.