Set the Stars Alight

by Amanda Dykes

  The boy who had held her hand through the darkness of the Underground, who had sat with her behind the house when they were locked out and scooted to give her the driest spot when all heaven unleashed its downpour, had given everything he had, always. And now . . .

  She pressed her eyes shut, fear shooting through her as she imagined herself holding out her heart, unveiled—there for the taking.

  On the wings of the fiddle and the waves far beyond, the wind swooping into the tunnel and spinning about them, the girl and the boy who had crossed hemispheres and atmospheres and everywhere in between, stepped together—and their lips met. Soft, safe, warm, strong.

  Lucy’s heart swelled within her, both aching with fear of losing him again and spilling over with joy at being in his arms.

  Her Dash.

  Perhaps Father had been right. Nothing was impossible.

  thirty-five

  Summer 1811

  The Cave

  Hearing the cry of new life takes a man’s very breath. To hear it, then, tumbling down corridors beneath the earth where the sun does not reach . . . pierces a man’s soul. The three of them settled into a rhythm in their maze of tunnels. Juliette tending the wee stowaway as she grew from a babe in arms to a creature pushing her curious self up, belly to earthen floor, as she watched her small world. Frederick bunking in a sparse alcove, keeping watch. Strangers, the three of them, yet the only inhabitants of this deep world.

  They made a life there beneath ground, and as the rest of the world reveled in the joys of summer . . . Juliette was wilting. Not her fortitude, for she was as courageous as ever. More so, even. But there was a quietude that fell upon her often, and the freckles that had always sprinkled her face were now faded, skin pale, the rosy glow of spunk replaced by a white sheet of determination.

  She deserved more. She was a creature of the sun, made to live in the light of that bright star.

  While exploring the honeycomb of cave rooms and network of tunnels, Frederick had discovered an opening in the ceiling of the cave that came out on the rise behind Weldensea. It was difficult for him to see it at first because it was heavily covered by tangled barbs of raspberries. But the sound of birdsong had summoned him, and the birds had taken flight from their brambly roost the moment their song was interrupted by a hand reaching from their haven of sticks.

  From there, he had excavated an exit, taking care always to cover it over with the brambled hedge, a living fortress for his small family—or his wards, he corrected himself. He dared not presume to call them family. It was too intimate. Too . . . good.

  Frederick watched and waited for a stormy night that covered the moon and stars, and finally, when all was safe with his secret exit, he stole out into the night, skirting the village, noting the shadowy landmarks along the way: a view down into the alley where he and Elias were first pressed into service, the tree where Tom Heath had found him, the graveyard where that same shepherd now lay. These things drove him on, reminders of why he now must sneak into the home of his inheritance and steal goods like a common thief.

  At a crossroads, he stopped to read a sign hanging on a post. Looking carefully around, he took a chance and struck steel to flint, lighting a small flame to read. It was a list of war criminals—deserters and the like—known to be in the area. At the bottom of the wooden sign, painted in white lettering, he saw it:

  Wanted, though presumed dead: Frederick Hanford. Deserter, traitor, coward, and fiend. 200 pound reward.

  He tossed the flame to the ground—stomped on it.

  The words branded his very being. He pressed on, but now the shadows reached longer, voices around corners more sinister, and his own reflection more ghostly.

  This, then, was what had become of him. He did not know why it settled so heavily within him. He had chosen to be labeled traitor, taken his friend’s sentence upon himself. But he had never figured on being alive to witness the long legacy of it. Seeing it there, spelled out without hope of defense, with Edgecliffe looming on the rise beyond . . . he began to realize his actions had reached farther than he had ever considered.

  Sneaking into Edgecliffe was like entering a haunted place, and that sign helped him understand why. A skeleton staff was running the place, as evidenced by the essentially empty downstairs servants’ quarters, where once a veritable army of servants had slumbered at night. The sleeping room doors stood open but for those of the butler, housekeeper, and two housemaids.

  From the servants’ quarters, using his routes in the walls, he visited his mother’s chamber and his old room. He gathered odd-shaped bundles of clothing, books, food, another lantern, and more oil . . . and finally, he made it to his old perch on the roof and retrieved his telescope. Encrusted now with dust and the weathering work of sea wind, it had sat forlorn since the night of his impressment.

  “Hello, old friend.” His voice was as rusty as the telescope, so little did he have occasion to speak. But he strapped it onto his back, determined to give it new life. “Come with me. There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

  A vague thought tugged at him, telling him he’d lost his head, talking to a telescope and carrying it off to a woman beneath ground. He laughed dryly, shaking his head. Life was a wonder, that it could spin into such a tale.

  At the threshold of the servant’s exit the night air drew him. He drank it in as if it were life, so unaccustomed was he to being inside. Still, something stopped him. The silence called him back to corridors that had once thundered in battle, halls that bore echoes of fencing matches long silent . . . and to his father—the man who had commanded a fleet and the respect of a nation but who had missed the son beneath his own roof.

  Frederick’s chest ached. Everything in him told him to press on away from Edgecliffe, to never look back.

  But something summoned him back—the same thing that had driven him to ring the bells for the shepherd, to till the soil with the farmers, to march before the magistrates for Elias. The silent voice, so strong in him that he had begun to recognize the tender grip of it as being heaven born.

  Go to him.

  So he did. Back into the labyrinth he stole, turning and turning, first to his father’s empty bedchamber, and then into the heart of his study.

  In the room hung dark, thick sorrow. The embers of a fire lay in the hearth, and a form so altered he barely recognized The Admiral slumped over in his chair, a nearly drained glass of brandy at his elbow.

  A deep sorrow like he had never known split through Frederick, blindsiding him unexpectedly. In Frederick’s disgrace, the proud man had lost his last hope at continued prestige for their family in his cherished Royal Navy. And worse, Frederick had muddied the distinguished family name.

  A shrouded rectangle loomed on the wall. It called to him, luring him until he lifted the drop cloth that veiled it.

  It was him. His portrait. He hardly recognized himself, for the proud look the artist had given him, with his hand tucked inside the navy cutaway jacket and bicorn hat perched like a great black crown. Brass buttons gleamed as if heaven itself shone upon him, declaring a bright future. He was a stranger, the man in this depiction. All of his father’s hopes wrapped up in that shell of a man.

  The artist had gotten one thing right, though. There was a longing in his dark eyes. Hunger, ambition—like any good man of the sea, his father might say. But the truth of it reverberated straight through Frederick. It was the expression of a man cut loose. Without home, without family, without belonging.

  And he knew right then—through his trial, Juliette’s heroic rescue, and the birth of a babe—all that had changed.

  He turned, taking in the scene spread before him. Newspapers piled upon the empty chair across from Father, where Frederick had once sat. The chess table stood just as it had on the night of his impressment . . . but for one marked difference. The ebony square where his pawn had been poised to overtake Father’s king . . . was empty.

  “You’ll distinguish yourself, Frederick. Don’t
look so doubtful. The house of Hanford is intended for great things, and this is your path. And one day you shall inherit all I possess.”

  All of his father’s hopes, dashed. Silently, carefully, Frederick retrieved the black poker and stoked the embers, placing a log upon them until it glowed with warming flame. This smallest act, at least, he could offer.

  Frederick reached out and hovered his hand over his father’s, so close he could feel its warmth. He looked older, much older, than warranted by the eight years elapsed since his father had suspended their match. How much of that was Frederick’s fault?

  He moved to retract his hand and ever so slightly brushed his father’s fingers by accident. They opened, barely. The glow of the fire cast a tendril of light over something cradled in his father’s palm.

  Frederick moved, changing his angle to see better, and realized it was the pawn. There in the hand that had never reached out to take his.

  A yawning ache expanded in Frederick, urging him to somehow make it all right, to breathe hope into his father’s shriveling soul, to undo the great hurt that fairly pulsed in the room.

  But he could not undo it. To return now would further sully the Hanford name. But perhaps there was something else he could give the man.

  Traversing the long hall to his mother’s conservatory, he passed through a curtain of cobwebs. This place that had once embodied light and beauty was now so unlike her. During one of his drunken benders, his father had forbidden the upkeep of the place after her passing, but he had never thought the man would let things go for so long. The years had spun gossamer webs that formed an eerie shawl about the place. Bathed in blue moonlight, it looked like an ice palace.

  And there, still on the piano, was her Bible.

  Hands numb, he reached out and took the book from the cobwebs’ clutches. He blew off the dust, watched it fall like snow in the moonlight. Returning to his father’s study, he placed it in the middle of the chess board and, with great care, plucked the small pawn from his father’s fingers. He ran his thumb over its smooth, rounded surface, this relic he had last touched as a twelve-year-old so unsure of the future, of the world, of his place in it.

  But rather than returning it to its place on the board, or executing that final move Father had preserved for so long, he instead laid the pawn down on the open Bible, pointing to a verse he had repeated to himself over and over while imprisoned: Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

  It was not the full story. He might never be in a place where he was free to communicate the whole story, but as he snuck away from Edgecliffe, he prayed that his offering might give his father some measure of peace—and even more, some measure of hope.

  He stole across the pasture, goods strapped on his back in a great awkward lump. And when he lowered himself back into the cave, stored his supplies, and laid a couple of his mother’s gowns at the foot of Juliette’s bed of straw when she was away walking the restless child through the corridors, he told himself once more that it was not stealing. He was no thief, taking these things from the home of his inheritance. And truly, when one considered the geography, he wasn’t even removing these things from the estate, but rather relocating them to a story below. That was all.

  thirty-six

  Frederick ventured out other nights to pluck berries or procure eggs from the Edgecliffe hens betimes, but he never darkened the doors of the house again. When the first wisps of dawn floated across the sky, and the sound of sleepy sheep’s bells jingled softly across the hills, he knew lights in the fishing village would soon be glowing, boats heading out to pull in nets—and it was his signal to return home.

  He would lower himself through the hole, cover it over again with the tapestry of fallen branches and brambles, just one of a thousand such structures over the landscape harboring birds and squirrels. Shepherds none the wiser that a small family was living out their days in the dark beneath.

  But he again corrected himself. They were not a family. If they were a family, Juliette would not try to hide her tears the way she did, by wandering to the farthest reaches of the tunnels before letting those tears fall.

  If a family, he would not try to hide the widening desire within him that burned to wrap his arms about her small frame and catch those tears. As it was, he not only hid it but beat it back with everything in him, finding other ways to take care of the two souls who now lived engraved upon his very being.

  After one of his nights of foraging, he dropped down to the floor of the cave room he had come to call the chapel, for it was the one place the heavens shone down into this abyss. He felt the cool of the cavern floor against his palms and remained there, crouched and staring into a puddle. When he’d first thought of this room as the chapel, he had mopped that puddle up whenever the rain trickled through the hedge and bracken above. But after a time, he began to find solace in the way it summoned bits of lantern light reflected in ripples caused by droplets descending from dew. Majesty, right there in the dark.

  But as he now stared at the reflection he saw only a lost soul with dark eyes. A man with no name—for his own name was that of a man presumed dead. He and the child shared more than a cave, after all. They were both nameless. The only nameless people in all the world, perhaps. What was he doing, anyway? The woman he was sharing this life with—if a few shared meals each day could be called so—had saved his life. And what sort of life was he giving her in return? One devoid of even the most basic comforts? Devoid of joy? Robbed of . . . of love, itself?

  Angry at the man in the reflection, he swiped at it and winced as something gashed his palm.

  He had sought to give them life, by laying his down. How had he muddied things so badly?

  Pressing his wounded hand into the other, he stared at the rippling reflection again.

  That man stared back . . . and issued a challenge. So give them your life.

  “How?” His question came out raspy. How could he help? He, a wanted man, who if he made himself known would only drag the woman and the child even farther down than he already had. And—he laughed derisively—they were living in a cave, after all, so that was a good way down.

  Give them your life. Pledge it.

  “I have.” Had he not? He had tried. He had been ready to face the gallows for them.

  And he would do so again, though Juliette had pleaded with him months back to never turn himself in. “Elias’s crime required a death to pay for it,” she’d said, with eyes afire. “A price that he has paid.”

  He could not argue against her logic, though it all seemed such a muddle. But would he trade the gallows for an altar? His life, he knew, was meant to be given for her, poured out for her. And there was only one way to do that, short of turning himself in—which she would never agree to. And even if he did, who would care for her and the babe?

  Marry her.

  The words ricocheted off of the walls, pounding him with preposterousness.

  She would never have him. Why would she? He was the reason her husband was gone. He was the one warned never to speak to her again, all those years ago.

  “I cannot do that to her,” he said, silencing the earlier echoes with defiance.

  But as hard as he fought it, the questions hovered around every corner. Why can you not? How can you not? It was the unseen thread that cinched tight the space between them as she insisted she bind the open wound on his palm, tying the bandage off and brushing his palm with her thumb, lingering a moment longer than he could account for.

  The shadow of this question—How can you not?—chased him across the moor as he foraged supplies. And it was the incessant pounding of it that kept him company as he built for her the one thing he had to give, besides his life.

  He worked among the brambles under the cover of darkness, pulling branches off the hillside and into walls that disguised his entry and exit to and from the earth. He harvested more berry brambles from the wild, transplanted them over hill and dale, to become livi
ng walls. A room he hoped Juliette could emerge into with some measure of cover.

  One night, when he dropped down from his preparations, she looked at him with surprise and asked, “What are you wearing?”

  Until that day he’d worn only house-servants’ clothing he’d pilfered from the manor, not quite ready to wear the field-worker’s clothing he’d also collected from their place hidden beneath the base of his wardrobe. They had been oversized on his wiry body when, as a boy, he had procured the shirt and pants from an Edgecliffe gardener, who had only shrugged and handed them over when Frederick had asked for an old pair of his clothing. They fit him now as he summoned the old remembered motions of breaking earth to plant things.

  Juliette laughed. “Did you rob the gardener’s shack?”

  Dropping his gaze, he wondered how much to tell her. “They’re mine,” he said simply, planning to leave it at that.

  “Yours,” she said, shaping the word like the mystery it was. “But why? When would you have worn clothing such as those?”

  She was asking in, asking to be a part of his story, or at least to understand it.

  She studied him, her eyes wide, expectant.

  “You remember that morning your father brought me to your home,” he said.

  She nodded, somber.

  “You . . . and he . . . and even Elias and your mother gave me a taste for what it meant to do good work. To be tired from it. To see something changed because of the toil of your hands. Once I got a bit older, it made me want to understand more.” He went on, telling her of the tenant farmers he had come to work with, becoming plain old Fred. The other workers giving the nickname Rivers, soggy string bean that he’d been after falling into the River Welden that first day in the field.

  She looked shocked . . . and then narrowed her eyes. “You mean to say you took payment from the very farmers who were already paying your father exorbitant amounts of money to farm the land they poured their very souls into?”