Set the Stars Alight

by Amanda Dykes

  He could hardly reconcile it all. The dripping in the distance plodded on. “But . . . where are we?”

  This summoned a dry laugh. “D’ye not know your own land? Hanford land?”

  The dark disappeared into darker-still crevices around them.

  “Or perhaps ye’ve never ventured beneath it before,” she said. “Elias and I . . . We knew a way in, down the cliffs. We used to build a fire when tide was low and plan for the farm we would one day have.” A dream covered in the lapping tide now, by the sound of water beneath them.

  “We’re in the cave,” Frederick said. “But that’s impossible.”

  “Aye. ’Tis. But some say nothing is impossible. D’ye know of the sea flood?”

  He did, and nodded.

  “It lifted us over the sea stacks. We sailed in. None shall seek us here. ’Tis a good thing, too, for you are worse than a traitor now. Ye be a wanted man, surely, and word’ll spread faster’n the wind—trust that. And I-I’m no better. I may’ve been seen. The widow of a man killed in an act of betrayal against his king . . .” She shook her head. “There’ll be none who look too kindly upon either of us. We’ll need to stay put, for now.”

  Then the pieces of the puzzle began to slide into place, and he felt hot shame. He had done all this to spare Elias’s child the fatherless life he and Elias had both known too well. In doing so, he had put Juliette and the baby in great peril. His plans had all unraveled, and Juliette had landed in the worst place possible, with no good name, no husband, and no father for her child.

  Her hollow expression told him these were the least of her burdens. She had lost her friend. Her very heart.

  Looking at her now, seeing a flicker of the young girl whose heart he’d broken, he felt the pull to touch her face, to brush away the pain he had caused her again. But this was Elias’s Juliette, who quite frankly was looking at his hand as if it were a poisonous insect and that if he dared touch her, it would be obliterated accordingly.

  He kept his hand firmly at his side.

  “You did not need to do this for me,” he said, his voice low.

  “I did not do it for you.” She pierced him with her look. “I did it for him. Elias—” A shadow came over her, her arms wrapping her round stomach.

  “Are you all right?”

  Her form bent. “I’m fine,” she said, but her face pinched in pain. “’Tis nothing.” She straightened again. “Elias lost his way,” she said defensively.

  Frederick hung his head, understanding the need she had to state this, to clear the man she’d loved. And though that lost way was wrong, he understood.

  She continued. “’Twas only his love for this child that drove him to do things he shouldn’t.” Her voice was fierce, but he heard a quaver that told him she was as much in need of convincing as he. “After delivering you to the Jubilee, he . . . he went to meet with a known smuggler for France. Delivered some papers to him. Mr. Blackaby followed. He said he is sure Elias was telling the man he would no longer work with him.” Her jaw worked, eyes shifting, and Frederick saw she was not convinced. “But we shall never know. He delivered his papers, received his pay, and . . .” Her voice broke. Dropped to a whisper. “He was shot.”

  Frederick winced at the word. An image came to him unbidden: Elias crumpling to the ground. The rightful road he was fighting to choose, lying ever untrodden before him.

  His whole being lurched in pain of it. My brother.

  He watched her standing there, cloaked in soiled white. An angel, indeed. And for the first time in . . . he imagined for the first time in her life, Juliette Flint looked frightened. Not just frightened but bordering on broken, there with her arms circled beneath the child within her. She was child and woman herself. And as she stood in that light in the dark, this woman who had taken on an entire impossible sea all on her own—and in her condition—looked at once invincible . . . and unspeakably vulnerable.

  He furrowed his brow, summoned words from behind the throbbing, and reached for a prayer. Lord, soften this blow. Do not leave her side. Though Frederick knew little, he knew at least that He was a God well acquainted with grief, who knew what it was to be left by His friends in His hour of greatest need. He would not then desert Juliette, His beloved.

  “Elias . . .” he began.

  Juliette shot him a glance that was half fire, half thirst. Daring him to speak anything of her beloved, yet begging for hope.

  Gentle this blow, Lord. Give me wisdom.

  He swallowed. “You are right, Juliette.” Her name felt rare and precious on his lips, here in this broken place. “Elias lived and breathed for his child. And for you.”

  He opened his mouth to say more, but she shoved out a hand as if to dam his incoming words with sheer will. And as she did, she doubled over, face pinched into pain.

  Realization rolled in and over him like a crashing wave. It was her time. Heat stole over his face—his hands numb and exceedingly clumsy, of a sudden. What did one do in times such as this?

  “You’re in need of a doctor,” he said.

  She only closed her eyes tighter, shaking her head no.

  “A-a midwife,” he said. That was right. Wasn’t it? His face burned, chest pounding.

  But she shook her head more fervently.

  “A woman’s help, then. I’ll go for someone—”

  A laugh of derision. “How,” she said. “You’re fair crippled, and know not where you are. And I-I am not ready.” She swallowed, fear flickering over her. “My child is not ready.”

  In the shadows of memory, Frederick was reading Juliette’s words to Elias. “If you get the chance to steal away home in some six months’ time, there will be someone eager to meet you, Elias.” But that had been, what? A mere four months earlier. And even accounting for the time it took for a letter to reach a ship . . . He knew little of these things but knew, at the very least, that it was not time.

  But he had heard of this before. Distressing news bringing pains upon a woman with child. He had vowed to give his life for Elias’s in a heartbeat, but what of Elias’s child?

  He looked at the woman bracing herself now with both hands against the helm.

  “’Tis nothing,” she said. “I shall be fine. The child shall be fine.”

  Please, God. Let it be so.

  thirty-two

  The fog lifted slowly there beneath the ground, days and nights unfolding in one shapeless stretch. Juliette’s pains subsided. Frederick’s injuries faded into a dull ache, an ache that propelled him to move, to be rid of it.

  Always, he felt a shadow behind him, hounding him with the question of how long they could remain here. Caves along the coast were havens for smugglers who brought goods in and absconded with prisoners to take with them back across the Channel. They were known to go to great lengths to keep their activities hidden. If they were to discover an entire ship in this cave, it would become a thing to be pillaged, taken away piece by piece.

  He held a foggy hope that the cave, being so unreachable, was not frequented by smugglers, but he couldn’t take the chance that this, her prison and only haven, could be taken.

  So at low tide one day he wrapped a length of the ship’s broken bow in sailcloth, doused it in oil, and lit it. Then, with the ache of his muscles urging him on, he climbed down from the ship and sloshed through wet gravel and mud, feeling his way back into the cave.

  At first, all its damp walls and the water stain ten feet up the cave wall told him was what he already knew: the tide came and went twice a day, lifting the Jubilee, sailing her nowhere, and setting her back down again when it withdrew. ’Twas like a rocking of an enormous cradle by the hand of a sea, in great swells of tide.

  He followed the walls, hands running along the cold, damp stone. Light from his torch bounced long shadows, and he did not so much see the heights above him as catch glimmers tucked high above. Wet and shining, but for all the world looking like stars up there in the dark.

  He rounded the back of the ca
ve . . . and something sank inside him. While the cave hadn’t seemed terribly deep, he had thought—hoped—there might be more to it. That perhaps, somehow, he might happen upon a kindly old smuggler who had repented of his ways, who might then just happen to tell them how to live here, or how to escape. But the back was solid, rounding gently to lead him again to the Jubilee and beyond it, to the mouth of the cave.

  His head ached fiercely. Finding a place where the wall of the cave jutted out into a rolling ledge, he rested. Elbows to knees, forehead to hands, he closed his eyes and prayed. He did not have eloquent words and was rather thankful just now that the ceiling above him was that of a rugged cave, and not that of a soaring cathedral. It seemed fitting for the state of his heart, his life. The mess he’d made of it all. His thoughts ran into prayers like the rivulets at his feet, which joined into one trickling stream glistening in the dark.

  That stream ran between his feet, its melody seeming to tease him. As if it were telling him a riddle, or asking him to follow it.

  “I’ll not follow the likes of you,” he said. His grip on reality must be slipping for him to be conversing with water. “You brought me here, and here I’ll stay.”

  But the water chattered on, heedless of his mad ramblings. He stood to go, took three steps back into the cave, and froze. There was something about that water.

  It was not flowing into the sea from the cave.

  It was flowing toward the cave. More than that, it was flowing beyond it.

  In two strides, the ache forgotten, he was kneeling palm to floor, feeling the current over his roughened hand. Yes . . . it was flowing beneath the back of the cave. And not pooling in the way of a caught thing. It was going somewhere.

  But the cave stopped here. Did it not?

  He retraced his steps, ignoring the protests of his leg. This time, he ran his hand vertically as well as horizontally against the cave wall, stopping to examine every contour. When he reached the back again and ran his fingers around the smooth stone, he just barely brushed a rough patch, where wind and waves had not smoothed it in the same way as the rest of the surface. A fissure just wide enough to reach his arm through and confirm that, yes, something lay behind it.

  Raising the torch, flickering light revealed that the fissure widened, and widened, as he drew his gaze up and up.

  His chest pounding, breathing labored by the exertion he’d spent to ignore his injury, he willed to ignore it further. Retrieving one crate and then another from the Jubilee, he worked until he had a makeshift stair tall enough to see into the widened portion of the fissure.

  And he saw it—a chasm ascending into a shelf of a floor, a dome-like room within. He cast a glance back. Juliette was sleeping on a pallet he’d fashioned for her in the ornate captain’s quarters. He could not leave her long with the pains that had been coming. They had quieted the past days, but if they returned . . . Well, he knew not what the clumsy hands of a sailor could do at such a time, but he owed her any help he could give.

  Still, the chasm pulled at him as if some force were anchoring a rope about his soul and hauling him in. He would take a quick look. Nothing more. Only to ascertain whether the room there went on or stopped there. If the former—what might he find beyond? And if the latter, it was still a safer haven than the open cave. He couldn’t help but think of another such hovel, so long ago in Bethlehem, where a wee one was ushered into the world in a place of humble dark. Could this be Juliette’s manger? A safe place for her, and for the child? Walled away from the tide . . . and from anyone who might come seeking the reward of the price surely on their heads.

  Even with torch in hand, oppressive dark enveloped him inside the chasm. It made the cave, with its window to the world, seem like the noonday sun. His eyes straining, he ventured forth to the shelf. Feeling the rock to see if it was sound, he hoisted himself up, shone the torch in, urgency driving him harder, faster, to discover what was there.

  What he found was dark, and dark, and continued dark. It should have swallowed him with dread, but something foreign quickened within him. A spark, a lifting . . . a hope.

  There was room here. Passages, some cobwebbed, some clear, all of similar height and width, as if someone had taken care to make this place traversable. He’d heard the tales of smugglers of a hundred years back hewing tunneled networks from sea to towns, storing all manner of goods along the way.

  He went on to discover more rooms. He hoped to find a second entrance, a place he might escape to procure good things for Juliette.

  Juliette.

  How long had he been gone? By the scrapes on his skin and the pounding in his head and the way his torch sputtered—he did not like the answer.

  “Fool!” He spat the word into the darkness, loathing himself for straying so far. In the same breath, his torch gave one last heave of light, and sizzled to a sickening black. Smoke cinched his lungs.

  A low moan tumbled through the corridor, chased by the sound of faraway surf. He spun, listening. The moan repeated, louder this time, longer. His heart lodged in his throat. Those moans were—they had to be—the sounds of a woman who had come to her time.

  thirty-three

  “Juliette!” Frederick shouted, not for the first time. “I’m coming, Juliette!”

  How could he have been so stupid? To leave like that, to assume he’d be able to find his way back with no issue. As it was, he was navigating blind and by dim memories. Juliette’s moaning echoed through the caverns, reaching out like some unfurling, unseen hand to beckon him back.

  He followed in the dark, turn after turn until he was hopelessly lost—and her voice went silent.

  Only the faraway dripping of water answered his calls.

  Now fear was the hand reaching in the dark, and it threatened to choke him. Was she . . . ? Had she . . . ?

  Please, God. He continued on, limping—nearly dragging his leg now. As he rounded a corner, the distant sound of surf shot hope straight into him.

  “Juliette!”

  Only waves, upon waves, and then—a sound so small he barely heard it, and yet it sent a surge of life through him: the tiny cry of a baby.

  He could see a shaft of light now. The room he’d first entered, and beyond it, the crack in the earth. Heedless of the screaming pain in his leg—for surely it was nothing compared to what Juliette had endured—he hauled himself up and through the jagged opening. He sloshed through rising tide and clambered up the makeshift stair of outcroppings in the cave’s side to board the ship again.

  Pulse pounding, he followed the sound of the cries, and swallowed at the sight of Juliette leaned against the wall, eyes closed, chin lifted, a bundle in her arms wrapped in sailcloth. A pool of blood-soaked rags surrounded her, her skirts bloodied but tucked about her with care. A knife glinted next to a flickering kerosene lamp.

  “Juliette?”

  Not a hint of movement. Dread pummeled him, sinking into his stomach like lead. He knelt and watched for the rise of her shoulders. Please . . .

  With the lightest of flutters, her eyelids lifted, green eyes searching, falling on him, and then down into the face wrapped with care, tracing a rosy cheek.

  “I . . .” He swallowed. A man had no place here, he knew. And certainly had no place in a room of birth as a woman labored. Yet still, he felt the heavy cloak of failure for not having been there for her. They were not living in the world of societal norms any longer. He was the only human being who could have given support to her during her ordeal. And he had failed.

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry you did this alone.”

  “I was always going to do this alone,” she said. And when she beheld him with weary, haunted eyes, he knew she spoke of more than his absence in the cave.

  When he looked at Juliette, he’d always seen fierceness. A beautiful fierceness that had captivated Elias. A fierceness that had driven Frederick to a distance, unsure what to do with a creature who seemed to hold the wind in her very soul. But here—with evening’s golden sunl
ight stealing into the dark and splashing a gentle glow about her uneven plait of hair and tired features—he saw vulnerability. Softness. Love—and fear, too—as she gazed upon the tiny face in her arms.

  “A daughter,” she murmured, voice hushed in awe.

  A daughter. Frederick looked upon the pair, seeing hope. And seeing history repeated. Two daughters before him, both of them fatherless.

  “What is her name?” he asked, voice husky.

  Heaviness descended. “Elias was to name her,” she said. “I can’t . . . ” Her voice grew thick, a tear rolling down her cheek.

  Frederick reached out, brushing that tear, laying a hand on her shoulder. It was the first time he’d ever touched her, and he was breaking his very first promise to her to do so. Yet how could he not, here in this moment, if he could but erase his question, her pain.

  “In time,” he said, willing those two words to push out the walls closing in upon her, to give her room.

  Give her room. The words struck him, and suddenly he knew what he could do.

  It was seven days before he could show her. Seven days of hauling pieces of the ship away, secreting them into the tunnels, evading her questions and wary looks as she tended the baby. Seven days of cringing when he dropped materials, giving away his whereabouts far beyond the main room of the cave. Seven days of bringing her fish and hardtack and “tea”—water collected from the cave’s condensation, where it had been stripped of its salt, boiled over a driftwood fire, steeped with old tea leaves from the galley that he hoped to get just one more cup out of . . . again, and again, and again. She should be dining on silver-plated dishes of steaming eggs and sausages after all she had done. He was determined she would have her tea, such as it was.

  On that seventh day, when she was moving with a bit more ease—and when he thought she’d go mad with the frustration of continued confinement—he put a torch in her hand and waited.

  “What’s this?” she asked, looking at it as if a fallen star had just landed before her.