Set the Stars Alight

by Amanda Dykes

  The sight before him had all the markings of a dream. Nonsensical—for Juliette could not be here, and this boat could not be underway. By the way she studied the blackness before her and adjusted the ship’s wheel like a finely choreographed dance, the figure before him was sailing in earnest—or at least believed herself to be. The Jubilee could not sail. All of England knew that.

  No, this was not real. He was imprisoned. He would be dead in a few hours’ time. When morning light came, it would all be over, and Juliette—wherever she really was, in the real world, not in this dream realm—would be free to find Elias.

  And yet . . . it felt different than a dream.

  The scene before him blurred. His vision protested against whatever caged creature was thrashing about his brain.

  “Juliette.” He inhaled, biting hard against a wave of sickness. Dream or no, this would be his only chance to say what needed to be said.

  “I am sorry. For your father. For so many things. Go. Be happy. Live a full life with Elias. He will turn around. He will make it right.”

  Frederick did not know how she had become privy to Elias’s treason and Frederick’s actions—another reason this was surely imagination—but he continued. “I know it to my very bones. He promised.” He flinched against the darkening pain. “He loves you, Juliette.”

  She stood still so long—with waves lapping, and wind whipping, and sails snapping above—he thought she must have turned statue, in this dream.

  But slowly, finger by finger, she released the wheel as if releasing something much, much more precious. As if it killed her to do so.

  “Elias . . .” she said, voice flat, “is dead.”

  The sea lifted up beneath them like a great hand reaching, turning, tossing this ill-begotten ship hard to starboard. Frederick rose to his feet, scrambling against the cloud overtaking his sight again, and saw before him great chalk cliffs reaching white against blackest night. “Like veiled mourners.” Reskell’s voice haunting the sight.

  Up was down and down was up, and the surging waves tossed them to and fro until the cliffs seemed a metronome, moving back and forth, back and forth. With the Northern Cross watching and time swallowed in a blur, the Jubilee rose, and rose, and rose on an unending tide. Fingers reached from the sea—five of them, like the tips of bones from a great hand beneath, a chasm yawning into the cliff beyond. They were familiar. He pressed his eyes closed, opened them again. Were they not the sea stacks he had viewed a thousand times?

  They could not be. They were too short, water churning about them, nearly covering them over.

  And yet . . . perched beyond, a sight appeared that pummeled him.

  Edgecliffe. Dark, but for a single window alight. Twenty-seven chimneys standing watch over the boy, now grown, now a convicted traitor, who had once kept watch behind them.

  These were the waters Juliette knew. The ones she’d navigated since she was a girl. Of course she had brought them here.

  In this dream. For certainly, this was a dark and fevered dream, ushering him into the day of his end.

  A beam broke loose from a mast and swung around. His instincts burst through the haze surrounding his mind, and he flung himself on it, thrusting out his heels to slow it so it would not injure Juliette. It socked the air out of him, slamming pain through his entire being—and yet it was nothing when held against Juliette’s shocking declaration. Elias . . . dead.

  She stood at the wheel, great with child, swiping tears into sea spray, navigating the Jubilee into what he knew would be an impossible forest of sea stacks.

  But . . . the stacks were disappearing. White froth gathered about each one as what little was still visible of them slipped beneath the surface, pulling back like retreating sentries beneath the dark.

  “Fast, then,” Juliette said, more to herself as the wind snatched her words away. And then with eyes narrowed and skimming past Frederick, “’Tis the sea flood. It’ll lock us away in the cave, and there’s none who’ll find you there.”

  “Sea flood,” he muttered, pulling himself up to help but wincing at webbing pain, everywhere. Sea flood. It was . . . real? He recalled Juliette’s mother’s tale of it, a visitor nearly every two decades. ’Twas the stuff of legend. Only lore of the village folk, was it not?

  The ship listed hard to starboard. Juliette gripped the wheel fiercely to stop its spinning, then doubled over, slid to the deck, embracing her belly with a cry of great pain.

  Frederick wrested himself from this fog and in a tangle of instinct, extended his shackles and braced the wheel. Juliette crawled to it, pulling herself up on it.

  Pain cinched him inside at the sight of her anguish. “Rest. Sit back.” His own vision blurred as winds tore between them. “Please.” It was as much a prayer to God above as plea to the woman who held his gaze a fleeting moment. Long enough to nod.

  “Together, then,” she said.

  There was not time to argue, for the cove and its waves had no rhyme nor reason.

  In a thrum of motion, instinct, flurry, and flight, the pair wrestled the Jubilee out of her skidding dance and into the black yawning mouth of the cave.

  All fell quiet about them, the storm behind dissipating into the eerie quiet of pitch-darkness.

  Frederick’s head throbbed. What dream this was, he did not know. But all . . . went . . . black.

  twenty-eight

  Stone’s Throw Farm to Oxford

  2020

  All went black as Lucy closed her eyes to the thrum of the train. Oxford-bound, and with Dash at her side and Violette across the aisle, she felt an inexplicable sense of going home. A pilgrimage to places where she’d left pieces of herself along the way. In the libraries and greens and walking paths of Oxford, and in the heart of the man beside her.

  She opened her eyes and turned to look at him. He was fast asleep, mouth slightly open and head tilting toward her. He looked younger in his sleep and more like the Dash of the past. More like the lost boy who’d come knocking at the glass house, who came knocking at her heart. His hand lay palm up, fingers relaxed, and a shift of the train slid it over to where his small finger touched hers, making it look strong and sure beside her slight one.

  He had held her hand on a train once before. A memory she felt so keenly it hurt. So she closed her eyes, wishing for sleep, wishing to remember and to forget, all at once.

  Sleep blurred the line between past and present, taking her back to her parents’ living room, where her father’s voice unfurled into a dream of recollection.

  “There was an old woman, lived under a hill. If she’s not gone, she lives there still! Pass me the magnet, Lucy my girl.”

  Lucy slapped the tool into the watchmaker’s open palm, and turned her eyes back to her book. Unsolved Mysteries of the Sea and its tales of vanished crews were a touch more captivating to a twelve-year-old than a nursery rhyme.

  “What’s it about?” Dash asked with inquisitive brilliance, flicking her book cover. “You know it’s not polite to ignore charming friends from far-off lands for the sake of dusty old books.” He gave a cheeky grin.

  “The traitor Frederick Hanford and the lost ship Jubilee,” she said. She had a way of sounding like a robot, or so Dash told her teasingly, when she was reading. “And America is not that far off, you know.”

  He shrugged, as if he wasn’t so sure. She felt a pang of remorse, then. Every once in a while, she glimpsed a quiet sort of homesickness in Dash.

  Not sure what to do with her blunder, her eyes darted back over the rows of words. Dash, too, wandered awkwardly from her hasty words, and bent over the watchmaker’s project with him. “That woman under the hill,” he said. “Do you think there ever was such a woman?”

  Lucy breathed easier. Right. Stories. Return to the stories. Safety lay there, for they had nothing of the real world in them. And yet—sometimes they felt like the realest thing she and Dash knew.

  The watchmaker let his laugh roll from deep inside him. “Who can say? Kids since be
fore the dawn of time have been learning that old nursery rhyme. But you never know.” He handed the kid the tool and snapped the watch shut.

  “It’s not likely,” Lucy said. “No more than an old woman who lived in a shoe.”

  Concern wrinkled the watchmaker’s forehead. “Perhaps,” he said. “But one thing I do know. Made-up tales that stand through time . . . they are echoes.”

  “Echoes of what?”

  He thought for a moment. “Truth.”

  It didn’t make sense. But the watchmaker’s demeanor was serious and inviting. His words seemed important to him. Weighty, even.

  “But how? If they’re not true, how can they echo truth?” Dash seemed desperate for an answer.

  “There’s a secret in that. Usually, the true stories are even more fantastical than the made-up ones.”

  Dash folded his arms, half contemplation and half disbelief.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, take that woman under the hill. It’s fanciful and full of imagination and that’s why we’ve told that rhyme to generation after generation for hundreds of years. And we all know there is no such woman. Or at least—that if she’s not gone, she lives there still.” He winked.

  “I never heard it,” Dash said, looking embarrassed. He’d once told Lucy that growing up all over the planet with varying and obscure relatives had made him kind of an oddball, and had left him with all sorts of random gaps in the solid foundation of tradition and tale that most kids seemed to possess.

  “Well,” the watchmaker said, “we’ve fixed that now, haven’t we? But I’d venture you never heard the one about the theatre in the sky, either?”

  This one pulled Lucy’s eyes from the pages of her book. “I’ve never heard that one, either,” she said.

  The watchmaker went on. “The theatre in the sky,” he said, “was a vision to behold. Ladies would wear their finest gowns, gentlemen would top their heads with black hats that looked like chimney pipes, and they would venture out in the dark of night in a cold, cold world, to enter a world of light. A theatre whose curtains draped tall and heavy, like velvet hung from heaven itself. The auditorium could hardly be called that. It should rather have been called an ornament-ium, for it was more ornately appointed than anything in its world. Balcony upon balcony, arches adorning them, rooms that reached and stretched. Its stage was never silent. Even when the theatre was closed and empty, that stage was yawning, preparing, awaiting its next act. You could fairly smell the music there. Shadows of ballets that had filled its expanse. Phantom notes, lingering in the dark from orchestras, operas, operettas . . . its very walls were alive with every performance it had ever held.”

  “But couldn’t that be true of any theatre?”

  He shook his head. “You haven’t heard about the staircase, yet.”

  The kids waited.

  “Forget the theatre for a moment,” he said. “Imagine a house, instead. Imagine a family living within its walls—laughter, tears, joy, fears—all the things that come with living. Imagine them climbing the stairs at night to enter their bedrooms, and laying their heads upon their pillows.” He paused. Blinked, opening his palms. “Well? Go on, imagine it!”

  Lucy and Dash looked at each other, both on the precipice of that place where fairy stories and imaginings seemed not to fit easily in their skin any longer. She shrugged. He shrugged. He closed his eyes, a goofy grin on his face. She laughed when he peeked through one eye, and then did likewise.

  “Good,” the watchmaker said. “Now tuck that family into bed and remember the fine ladies and top-hatted gentlemen of the theatre. Imagine them venturing out, leaving the cares of their own lives behind in order to be amazed, if only for a few hours. Do you know how they got into that theatre in the sky? Ascended to those reaching arched balconies?”

  The two loved a good riddle and were deliciously frustrated at being unable to put these pieces together.

  “How?” Dash said. Lucy peeked, and he was peeking back at her, too, one eye squinty-opened. He slammed it shut. Opened it again slowly and hissed, “no peeking.”

  “They ascended the grand staircase. Wide and sweeping, with its lush carpet and smooth banisters. And that staircase, though they did not know it, lifted their slippered and booted feet right into the very air above the roof of that happy home you imagined.”

  “That’s not possible.” The girl shook her head.

  “Anything is possible, Matchstick Girl. Now, pay very close attention. This theatre—the Boston Theatre—”

  “American!” The kid fisted his hand into the air victoriously.

  “Indeed. They tore it down, fine building that it was.”

  The kid slowly retracted his fist from the air. “American.” He shook his head.

  “And when they did,” the watchmaker continued, “they found something encased within that grand staircase. And it was . . .” He beat his fingers upon the table, shaking the telescope they were building.

  Lucy dipped her head, an invitation for Father to continue. “A house! Just think. An entire two-story house. No one had even known it was there. No one could account for it being there. All those ladies and gentlemen, all those fancy dresses swishing and monocles gleaming and footsteps climbing for decades and decades—right atop the very air where dreams once ascended from sleeping children tucked into beds, none the wiser that one day orchestras and operas and operettas and ballets would carry those dreams onto stage.

  “Just think,” the watchmaker said. “One never knows what ground one is treading upon.” He stopped turning his screwdriver into the tripod, and looked at them expectantly. “Well? Say it!”

  They exchanged a glance and muttered together as they’d been coached to: “Just think.”

  twenty-nine

  “Just think.” Lucy awoke whispering the words. Realizing she’d succumbed to sleep on the train, she looked around, taking in her surroundings and straightening from her slump.

  She felt the warmth of Dash’s gaze beside her. The look on his face was one she recognized so well—of lingered sorrow, longing, joy, and belonging. He used to look from her to her parents with this expression, and it was this look that had earned him the moniker the Lost Boy.

  But now his expression ran deeper. The longing and belonging stirred the ribbon of space between them until her chest ached with an echo of it. Their gazes met, and he lingered a moment longer before closing his eyes.

  A slow smile took over her face as she recalled the dream. “Dash,” she said. “I remembered.” The words soared inside her chest.

  He opened his eyes, her words embodied in his infectious grin. “You did?” he said. “I mean, of course you did! Which one?”

  She loved how he knew she spoke of Dad’s forgotten tales, without her having to explain. She’d forgotten what it felt like to be so much a part of someone, and they a part of her.

  “The Theatre in the Sky,” she said.

  “With the staircase house.”

  She laughed. “Yes, exactly.”

  He looked at her, shaking his head, mouth slightly agape, as if she’d just told him the most astounding thing in history. And just as quickly, he stuck his hand up in the air and waited.

  “High five, Matchstick Girl!”

  She laughed. Dash. Miraculous and down to earth. He did her heart good in so many ways. She slapped his hand and loved the way his smile lingered, holding her victory inside himself like a treasure.

  “Listen,” he said, shifting gears suddenly. “I was thinking while you were sleeping. Is this the right thing?”

  She gulped. “I-I don’t know.” Leave it to Dash to put words to this puzzle of their relationship, right then and there. His mind was always working, always three steps ahead of her. She wasn’t prepared to have this conversation right out of sleep and a dream. She needed to buy herself time to think, to catch up. “What do . . . you think?”

  “Violette hasn’t left that farm in . . .” He shook his head. “A decade, at least.
Is it . . . kind, to take her so far, the first time away?”

  Oh. So this wasn’t that conversation. Relief and regret washed over her.

  Dash studied Lucy, his gaze open, curious, waiting. She leaned across Dash to study Violette across the aisle. And Violette studied the green countryside zipping past as they made their way north.

  “I’m not sure,” Lucy admitted. “But you should have seen the look on her face when she said she wanted to go. If nothing else, even if this proves to be a wild-goose chase . . . look at what we’re witnessing.”

  Dash followed her gaze to Violette, whose foot tapped wildly, but whose every other feature was schooled into determination. Determination gilded with the lightest, brightest coat of hope.

  “Isn’t that kind of wonder worth it?” Lucy asked.

  “I know. It’s rare. But I’ve seen it before.”

  Lucy looked at him, trying to temper her response. To make it come out slowly, not as desperate and demanding as it felt. She was so thirsty for such light in a world that had felt cold and dark for so long. “Where?”

  His brown eyes stayed on her, steady, as he tilted his head, shaking it ever so slightly. “In you.”

  His words collided in the air and dropped in pieces into her lap. They did not make sense. She was pragmatic Lucy, the skeptic at her father’s elbow.

  “Not me,” she said, the words nearly a whisper. She felt ashamed, somehow, saying them. But she felt a fraud holding them in. “I wish that could be true. But look at her.” She lowered her voice. “She’s lived on a hillside—nearly in a hillside—for years and rarely spoken to a single soul. Such a quiet creature, but I wonder if there isn’t more meaningful dialogue going on inside of her than in the whole of London.”

  She’d watched Violette, the way the girl soaked in the world around her, gathered treasures, and searched for miracles—and found them right where she walked and breathed and lived her moments. Hers was a rich, deep, expansive life right there on that farm.