Set the Stars Alight

by Amanda Dykes

  “I’m fine,” Violette said. “Ready to drop off to sleep, actually.” It had been an incredibly full day.

  “Will the observatory even be open?” Lucy asked.

  “Observatories come alive at night. Something about the . . . stars, I think?” He feigned confusion. “And even if they didn’t . . .” Dash held his hand up, dangling a key. “Perks of being a nerd,” he said.

  “You mean star veteran. That’s what Clara called you.”

  “I like it.” Dash pointed, then tipped his head. “Ready?”

  And they were off, walking past their fountain, through the wrought iron gates of Candlewick Commons, to the Tube station that used to play the part of the dragon in Father’s stories. As they boarded, making sure to “mind the gap,” as the recording congenially reminded them, Lucy quieted.

  Candlewick to Greenwich. They had ridden this route before, too many times to count. It was a route that had changed her forever.

  “You okay?” Dash said.

  “Just remembering.”

  Dash studied her, an invitation in his eyes.

  “You remember . . . the blackout?”

  He nodded, solemn, sharing her silent remembering. Here they were again, riding that same line, the train all but empty this late in the evening.

  Soon they reached Greenwich station and walked through the stone-and-iron gates to climb the long uphill path to the observatory. Dash whistled a tune with his easy stride as they passed brick buildings with black domed tops, white columned stairs, and apartments of royal astronomers.

  Two men passed them, and one of them nodded. “Dashel.”

  “Hey, Jerry!” And Dash strode on.

  They approached the building that housed the grand equatorial telescope, the one they’d called “the onion” when they were young, for the white dome atop the stone building looked indeed like a white onion. But they’d never gone in.

  “Come on,” Dash said when she slowed her pace.

  “Are you sure? I don’t know if I’m allowed . . .”

  He looked up at the darkening sky and then back at her. Let the door shut. “Know what this telescope was built for? To study two-star systems.”

  He looked as if he’d just proven a point, but she didn’t know what it was.

  “Stars that orbit each other,” he said. “Like Capella A and Capella B. To us, they’re so close they look like one bright star. But they’re two separate stars that keep crossing into each other’s space. Over and over, until they become one to anyone looking on.”

  “I had no idea,” Lucy said, and then hesitantly added, “but . . . I’m not sure why that means I’m allowed in.”

  He looked flustered. Not frustrated. Just tongue-tied, at a loss for how to complete his explanation. Which was completely unlike him. His eyes lingered on her, pleading for her to understand the message beneath his words.

  A two-star system. Us. She swallowed, eyes wide.

  “Come on in, Lucy.” Dash held the door open again. “You’ll be fine.”

  They entered into what felt like the inner realm—right into the domed room that reached higher and higher into the sky. In the center, a gigantic beige apparatus stood, a cluster of people conferring at its base.

  “Hey, Dash!” a girl said brightly. “You’re back!”

  “Guilty,” Dash said, and introduced Lucy around. “She’s a maritime archaeologist of the highest order. Wait ’til you see her research. She—”

  Just then, the dome began to open. With a great creaking groan of metal, it parted, peeled away as if someone had sliced into the onion, and unleashed the telescope.

  Dash got to talking stars with those gathered, and Lucy stepped back, loving watching him in his element. Congenial and charged with energy. No end to his curiosity.

  “When the Pleiades rise . . .” one of them was saying.

  “Oh, no, don’t bring the sisters into this again,” another bantered back. “It’s not always about them. There are other constellations, you know.”

  The star talk went on—data and coordinates and deep space. A foreign language to her, but fascinating.

  When she and Dash finally crossed back over the brown-checked linoleum and into the night, her heart was full, having seen him in his element.

  They walked on until they’d reached the cobbled courtyard with the metal line embedded into it. Its brass gleamed in the walkway lights. Dash stopped, facing her.

  “Some things never change,” he said. “You’re in the west . . .”

  She looked down, at her toes pointed directly at his, with the prime meridian running right between them. “And you’re in the east,” she said. “Worlds apart.”

  “And yet . . .” His fingers reached for hers, knuckles brushing and waiting. Patient, steady, as she slowly laced hers between his. Familiar and yet . . . so different from when he’d held her hand on the Tube as teens. So very, very different. As if every moment between then and now had been leading up to this, the homecoming of their hands.

  “Lucy. Maybe I don’t have the right to say this. I’ve been gone from your life for so long—and that’s my fault.”

  “Mine, too.” She dropped her gaze, studying the city names and coordinates inlaid in the cement beneath their feet. Athens. Tokyo. Jerusalem. Places he had seen from far above, hundreds of times.

  She could have reached out to him, asked how he was, rather than being entirely consumed by her own loss. He had been the closest thing she’d had to a brother. And—an opening deep in her chest cracked wider—so much more.

  He brought her hands up, right over that line in the ground. A London wind tumbled up the hill, swirling about them and sending a shiver up Lucy’s spine as Dash’s palms met hers, warmth radiating.

  The wind pricked tears into her eyes. It had to be the wind, for surely it was not this swelling inside of her, this hope of a moment she had longed for and walled away in a secret place, where it could not hurt her anymore.

  That hope was breaking out of that secret room now. Slowly, tenderly, Dash kissed the fingertips of the watchmaker’s daughter, right there where time began. Fingertip by fingertip, brick by brick, that room in her heart opened up. A perfect swirl of purest joy. Deepest fear. Longest hope. And truest, dearest Dashel Greene.

  “I’m here now,” he said. “If that’s okay with you.”

  His eyes were wide, waiting. Looking a little like the lost boy again . . . all grown up. And this time, it was her turn to find him.

  With a heart filling, she pulled his hands to her lips, and kissed the fingers that searched the stars.

  To speak would have been to shatter this moment. She wanted to hold it close, to protect it from everything outside of themselves. Surrendering her hand to his encompassing grip as he traced her face with his free hand, they walked in silence back down the hill and on toward home.

  That night, with Violette sleeping soundly on the sofa and Dash sleeping deeply outside, Lucy pried the old floorboard up once more. Retrieving the painting, she curled up in her bed and ran her fingers along its torn edge.

  “The Way Home,” she murmured, wondering what it meant. Wondering what all of it—this whole tangled story—meant, and what her part in it was now, more than two centuries later.

  Lucy drifted off on dreams of pairs of stars that danced together in the great beyond. It wasn’t until the far reaches of the early morning that the snippets she’d overheard at the observatory took hold of her in a new way.

  The Pleiades. Sisters.

  Seven sisters, seven more.

  While it was yet dark, she pulled her atlases out of their moving box, found one of Dad’s old star charts, and entered a realm far outside her own. Emerging at the breakfast table looking like Medusa, escaped hairs sticking out from her lopsided ponytail, she held two maps up to a stunned Violette and Dash.

  “Seven sisters, seven more,” she said, talking too fast. The two pots of Earl Grey she’d already had were making her words come out supercharged.
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  “See?” She tapped the map of the coast. The white cliffs that stood to the west of Pevensey. “The Seven Sisters. And see?” She planted the star chart on the wobbly table, causing their breakfast dishes to rock. “The Pleiades. Also called the Seven Sisters. Right?”

  She looked at them—Violette, chewing her pancakes slowly, eyes narrow, and Dash, standing, taking off his Astros hat and running his thumb and fingers over his forehead. “Fourteen,” he said. “Seven sisters, seven more.”

  He surveyed the room, his gaze landing on a pad of Dad’s graph paper. Pulling one of his Sharpies from his pocket, he started calculations. Scratched words like ascension, intersection. Studied his numbers, eyes flicking back and forth between the graph paper and the map. Finally, he planted his pen on the map—just beyond Edgecliffe, in the cove guarded by the sea stacks.

  “If you follow the line of the cliffs, and the place where the Pleiades rise directly above Weldensea, this is where they would intersect.”

  It was nothing. Or . . . next to nothing. Just a country road a tiny bit inland. She looked at Violette. “You know the area best.”

  “I’m no expert. . . .”

  Dash gave a half grin. “She’s being modest. She knows the area like the back of her hand.”

  “And . . . do you know what would be here?” Lucy said, spinning the book so that it faced Violette.

  “That’s St. Thomas’s. The chapel.”

  “All right, Killian Blackaby,” Lucy said. “Let’s see what you know about the Jubilee.”

  thirty-one

  HMS Jubilee

  1811

  So this was death.

  His body shivered—his body, and not himself, for he felt strangely detached from it, as if he were looking on and pitying this poor soul who could only register darkness.

  And cold. It was colder than he’d expected. Yet . . . there was a stillness here that he could sink into happily. Stillness, carried along by the sound of water dripping somewhere. He felt it folding around him, swallowing him up. Perhaps this quiet, then, was heaven.

  He’d thought there was not supposed to be pain in heaven. He did not know much of theology and the afterlife, but he’d expected to see streets of gold, and light. Perhaps he was only partway there. Though that did not sound right, either.

  His eyes flew open.

  He assumed he was in heaven. But here he was, in darkness so thick it was unlike any he’d ever encountered. He was in great pain. Could it be . . . Had he . . . miscalculated his faith? Was he in . . . the other region? A deep fear snaked through him, bringing the urge to retch.

  Oh, God. Please, God. The prayers blazed across his consciousness, and he spoke them, too. There was an echo here. So eerie and alone. Were his prayers too late?

  The throbbing in his head grew fiercer, and he clasped his head desperately with both hands. Hands that had no chains. He blinked hard, willing his eyes to see something, urging his ears to hear something besides the incessant dripping. Shouldn’t there be a choir of heavenly host singing, or some other celestial sound? Harps, perhaps? If he were indeed in the lower regions—he could not bring himself to call them by name—should it not be unspeakably hot? Where was he?

  Show me, God. If I be in heaven, show me an angel. He laughed dryly. It was a bold prayer. Death, apparently, made one audacious.

  Through the darkness he heard a sound so incongruous it tangled his thoughts all the more. Handel’s Messiah—not as his mother had played it, but slowed and gentled into the cadence of a lullaby, hummed in a hoarse, sweet voice. Was it . . . Mother?

  Frederick was no scholar of the canon, but none of this seemed to rightly reflect the afterlife. Surely he had misheard. He shook his head, casting the thought away. He was delirious, clearly. That was the only explanation.

  But as the song stopped a new sound joined—a soft footfall, somewhere in the dark. An angel. His prayer was being answered.

  He strained to see, but to no avail. But then the metallic scrape of a strike sounded, flint on steel as flame jumped to life. Its orange light fell on a face streaked with grime, wild eyes against gaunt face, looking at him as if he were to blame for everything unfortunate under the sun and all the travesties in the world.

  He swallowed and held back a holler, beholding this truly fearsome sight. This was no angel. But Frederick could not—or would not—look away from this goblin-like creature. Somewhere beneath the fierce grime he saw something that drew him in, something vaguely familiar. Reminiscent of another time he had collided with a fierce creature, but that time out on the pastures of Edgecliffe.

  “Juliette?” Her name came out up and down, like an impossible riddle. Which she was, always. “I . . . I mean Miss Heath.”

  No. That wasn’t right, either. As affirmed by the scalding look she gave. “Mrs. Flint,” he rectified.

  The figure raised the flame to a lantern, and the glow grew until he could make out looming silhouettes of masts. The world bobbed gently, and recollection gathered. He was on board the Jubilee. Yet where was the sky?

  He had the inexplicable perception that somehow there was a ceiling above him, and walls around him, though he could not see them through the darkness. And how, after all, could there be a ceiling above the masts?

  He rubbed his throbbing temples. How hard had he hit this thick head of his?

  “You’re not real,” he said thickly, through parched mouth.

  “Really.” The figure spoke dubiously. The figure, for it could not truly be Juliette Flint, and he could not truly be cloistered with her aboard a ship, in some great cavern. “The binding of your wound would tell a different tale.”

  She took hold of his hand, which was bandaged—when had that happened?—unwrapped it carefully, though never letting her guarded look leave her face. An angry wound emerged, and her quick study of it sent her into the shadows, where she soon emerged with a canteen.

  “You’re lucky some old captain had a taste for the drink.” She unscrewed the lid, and the sharp-sweet smell of brandy pierced the air, unhinging his stomach afresh. Before he could think, she poured the amber liquid over his hand. Everything in him recoiled. His muscles anchored his hand in place amid the flame of pain.

  A flash of something softened the emotionless resolve on her face . . . but vanished just as quickly.

  “You were singing,” he said through gritted teeth, trying to distract himself.

  “Aye. I sing to the babe.” She stood, brushing her skirts, and that was when he saw, in the fall of flamed shadows, the way they fell over her swollen middle.

  “That song . . . how do you know it?”

  She screwed the lid back on the canteen. “Used to drift on the wind and over the fields, from the great house,” she said. “Got itself inside of me, and it’s been locked away there ever since.”

  His mind etched a vision of her, standing over her sheep in the fields, hair whipping about in the same wind that carried his mother’s song.

  He had thought himself alone then.

  He’d thought his life at an end now.

  He seemed to be having a rather startling run of being . . . well, wrong. “How . . . how are you here?” And where was here? His head would clear. This would all fade away, and he would be anchored in port, awaiting his doom.

  “You don’t remember.” Her eyes narrowed, pensive. She lifted her hand to his face and held her fingers to his temple. “You took a blow to the head.”

  “And . . . how did that happen?”

  His questions hung unanswered, covered in a cloak of troubled spirit. She did not appear to be ignoring them of sheer obstinacy, though he knew she would if she had a mind to. No . . . something more was at work.

  She picked up the pooled muslin and began to tear, making a long strip that matched the bandage she’d removed from his hand. She gripped the fabric much harder than it warranted, and the tearing sound split through the darkness around them until it snagged. He could see how she drew herself up, how she pulled in
deep breaths, how all of it was walling away a flood of sorrow. Her eyes brimmed but she would not let a speck of it past the fortress she’d constructed.

  Wincing in pain, he stood and stepped toward her, took hold of the muslin. She held fast, and he laid a hand upon hers where it trembled. She flicked her gaze at him so quickly he nearly missed it, but in that instant he saw a world of hurt.

  He remembered then. Only a flash—Juliette in the night. “Elias is dead.”

  His eyes lingered on Juliette’s, his hand around hers, and her stiffness bespoke the searing truth.

  Frederick did not know aught of stonework. But in that moment, a great invisible chisel pounded into his soul, carving out a piece of him that would never grow back. A void with edges sharp and depths unseen, so empty it nearly broke him. Perhaps that was what this was—this cave, or cavern, or whatever darkness they now occupied. It was a manifestation of their loss.

  But no. The bile in his mouth told the truth. This was real. Elias . . . was gone.

  His eyes burned, and Juliette seemed to plead with him. To forbid him to cry. He would not. He would not.

  So he swallowed the heat and sharp edges into the silent growing void and set his chin against the grief.

  She pulled her hand back and dashed her tears away with a quick swipe.

  Confusion swirled. How had she learned of his end? How had this all come to be?

  Seeming to sense his colliding grief and confusion, she drew a ragged breath and spoke. “I had word,” she said. “About Elias.”

  How much did she know?

  “At your trial, a friend of yours stopped me outside.”

  He remembered the cloaked figure, the change in her countenance. But what friend had he now, in all the world?

  “A man from your ship. Mr. Blackaby. He . . . he told me everything,” she said. “I came for you because of him.”

  Snatches of memory pelted in the dark. . . . A silhouette. The loosing of his bonds. The ship creaking in voyage, just hours before he was meant to have been marching to the gallows.

  “You cannot die, Frederick, for something you did not do. Elias would not want that.” She bit her lip. “I do not want that. And so I came.”