by Amanda Dykes
The girl could jump to conclusions faster than sparks flew from fire. Though he had witnessed a kind and tender side of her, she still had the fury of the wind, too. A passion for justice.
“You could put it that way,” he said. “Though I did have worthy use for that money.” She needed not know why.
But he should have known better. Juliette Flint was not one to let something go so easily. She took a step closer, the tendrils of unanswered questions pulling her in. “What could you have needed the pay of a hired hand for?” She shook her head, her questions void of any bitterness or incredulity now. Only true wondering.
He did not want to tell her. ’Twould spoil the bells for her, knowing the man who paid to have them rung was the man responsible for her father’s death in the first place.
Above them, floating down through the branch-covered window to the sky, the church bell tolled eight o’clock. He gripped the shovel tighter, clenched his jaw more, willed away the heat rising to his face.
And she, hearing the bells, seeing his manner, understood. He saw it on her face. The surprise of her eyebrows. The narrowing and then softening of her eyes. The tilting of her head.
“It was you,” she breathed. “The bells.” And when he did not answer, she had her reply. She shifted the babe to her other side, and placed a hand on his arm. “All along, it was you,” she said, tears rimming those lingering eyes.
He met her gaze and gave a single nod. “He deserved much more.”
A tear broke loose from those pooling upon her lashes.
He lifted his hand, and caught one as it coursed down her cheek.
“I didn’t know if it would matter,” he said. “Ringing them every year.”
“It did. It does.” She sniffed, her jaw warm in his hand. “It meant the world, Frederick.”
She lingered there long that night, the silence comfortable. After that, a slow warmth sprinkled their interactions, growing and growing, summoning the calling pounding inside of him: Pledge yourself. Give yourself.
And so one night, after watching, and waiting, and observing the heavens for the brightest moon—since it was all the jewel he was prepared to offer her—he brought Juliette Flint and her six-month-old daughter up to the house of brambles and he cloaked them in a blanket beneath the high moon. Standing here beside them, as she turned slowly to take in the low hedges, the makeshift table, and chairs of odd-sized stumps he had rolled into place, he saw how rudimentary his offering was. Childlike, even. It had felt grandiose as he built it, but now he felt his face burn, felt the veil drop away and saw only prickly thorns and remnants of trees long dead . . . and Juliette taking it all in, clothed in the gown of a lady of the manor.
The contrast was enough to silence him. For as much as her lack of reaction smote him, what was to come would be the nails in the coffin. But he must speak the words. It had become his very heartbeat. If ever a man knew what thing he must do, it was this—here and now.
Juliette spoke. “What is this place?”
He tried to weigh her tone, find any trace of distaste there. But it was clear and open, a simple question. With no simple answer.
Frederick beheld the dark soil, so recently upturned as he transplanted the hedges. In the distance, Edgecliffe loomed against the stars. “This place,” he began, “is everything it should not be.”
Juliette tilted her head in a question.
He filled his lungs, and began to explain the impossible. “I . . . I meant to give you a safe, happy home with Elias, and I have not. I meant to give you my inheritance, and now I cannot. If I had a good name to offer you, I-I would.”
He felt heat grip his throat, doubt pressing back the words. But he saw understanding in her wide, round eyes—she knew what he meant. There was no turning back now. Had there ever been? Since that day her father gathered him up and gave him life? Was his life not one long unfolding of giving to Juliette Flint? It seemed so to him now, looking back. And down in his very soul it seemed . . . right. His chest pumped, pushing blood through him, urging him on to do what he had been born to do.
He swallowed. “Juliette, all I have is the air in my lungs, the work of my hands. Not even the soil beneath us is mine any longer. To join yourself to such a person would surely be . . .” He shook his head, the admission coming so much faster and easier than anything else he had yet spoken. “It would be madness. But if it is a madness you can bear”—he dropped to his knees and took her hand—“I offer myself to you. I do not ask for love. I know to whom your heart belongs. And I will guard that.”
Breath was short and quick in his lungs. The soil was damp against his knees. She pulled her hand from his, but her gaze did not leave him. He felt her eyes upon him but could not bring himself to lift his eyes to meet her stare.
Behold her. The pumping in his chest commanded it—and the pull of her eyes summoned it. Until he turned his face toward hers, and what he saw there took his breath. It was not refusal. Neither was it assent. It was not, thanks be to God, horror.
It was . . . searching. As if she were peeling back the layers of him. Letting him sink into her soul, considering what she felt there.
And he waited. He had not felt such a thing since that day so long ago when he’d sat at her family’s fireside. It was . . . what it meant to be seen. To have one’s heart held. “To be known is no shame,” her mother had told him.
And suddenly, everything in him ached to hold Juliette’s heart—the one he understood as well as his own, having lived in a single, intertwined heartbeat for month upon month upon spellbinding, otherworldly month. The little fingers and toes and laughs and cries of the stowaway stitching their hearts together.
“You would marry me, Frederick?”
He tried to read her voice, her face, the way she held the sleeping child, whose arms draped over her shoulder. Juliette’s thumb stroked back and forth across the child’s frock she’d fashioned out of one of his mother’s old dresses. He wondered what Mother would think if she could see her garments now, wrapping a sunbeam, a wee bundle of light.
“I would.” His voice husky with sincere longing and desperate conviction. “But even if you refuse, I will give my life in any fashion to make a place for you, and for the stowaway.” He pinned his hands to his side, though he wished with everything in him to reach out, let his hand land upon the wee girl’s back . . . the touch of a father.
Oh, the terror that shot through him then. What if Juliette banished him? The stowaway had wended her way into Frederick’s heart until it was impossible to imagine a world without her pure, sweet presence.
“I will make a way to take you north of here. Or sail you away to Australia, or America, or . . . or anywhere, to give you both a life. Someplace she can run in the sunshine.”
He shook his head slowly, the ache inside of him growing. “This girl was made for the sun, and the sun for her. She cannot grow up in hiding, slinking about smugglers’ tunnels, never knowing what it is to breathe fresh, bright air. And neither should you be confined to such a life, Juliette. So be it by marriage, or be it by working the rest of my life to make a new place for you, I will get you away from here,” he said, resolve shaking his voice.
Juliette’s eyes moved over him, following his hand as he, at last, reached out and stroked the babe’s slim shoulder. It hurt him that she was such a twig of a thing. She should be dining on custards and cakes and every good thing that could brighten a little girl’s world.
“D’ye not know, Frederick?” She curved the question downward in a melody.
His eyes stung. “Know what?”
“These months . . . this home ye’ve made for us. The cradle, the space you fashioned for her to one day run free in these depths . . . and now this place.” She laid her hand upon his, where the babe’s soft breathing rose and fell beneath their tentatively locked fingers.
“Ye’ve given us life, Frederick.”
Her words fell like dew upon a parched land, the soil of his heart marked with the
dark spreading hope of them.
He cleared his throat to loosen his voice, frozen in disbelief. “I brought you stale food and stolen clothing, and you dwelled in a hovel. You deserve so much more. You deserve everything, Juliette.” And it was true. She did. The girl who had been light to him from the moment he awakened to her curious face, haloed in wild, sun-gilt hair as he lay ill by her fire. She had been the sun to him.
He forced himself to stand straight, await her refusal, and rest in the knowledge that he would at least have offered everything. He would swallow his doubts, his fears, his pride, to surrender all.
“D’ye not hear me?” She laughed. “Ye’ve given us a palace, where we were destined for a poorhouse. Life, when the world would have nothin’ to do with us. And more than all of that . . . ye’ve already given us yourself. Every day, and every night, and every moment in between.”
She cast her face toward the moon, and its light baptized her. She closed her eyes and basked in it, as if it held the warmth of the day.
Perhaps she did not understand. Perhaps, after all, he needed to say the words more clearly. To spit them out, clunky as they were.
“Juliette.” He rested his eyes upon hers, long and deep. “Will you have me to be your husband?”
Silence knocked the ends right out of the box of their small world. It stretched itself out like a drawbridge, ushering in the sounds of the surf, of the frogs in a nearby farm pond, singing their great gulping chorus, which sounded suddenly like a symphony when stacked up against his clumsy speech.
He dropped his gaze, understanding. The silence was her answer. She was too gracious to say it outright. “I understand,” he said. “And I will find a way to make a home for you both. Somewhere you’ll be safe—known only for your true selves and not the story that marks you here. I will leave you be, but will make plans for your provision.”
He went on, naming the port he would sail from for Australia. There was work there, he had seen in a leaflet. He named the solicitor he would entrust his pay to, to be passed on to her. The details rattled out with ease—for it did not cost him what his ill-fated proposal had.
But Juliette’s touch to his face stopped him.
Those eyes—the ones that had always held fire in them—beheld him with depth that left nowhere to hide. He had laid bare his soul, and in this touch, she was reaching through the walls that divided them and gathering that soul up.
“I will,” she said.
The flood of sound about them seemed to ebb, to pull back and let her words shimmer in the night. But surely she did not mean . . .
“You will . . . go?”
She shook her head. “I will marry you, Frederick.” The way she said his name—she was trying it on, deliberate kindness there. It was not the love of the ages, with the passion or spunk she had as a girl with Elias. But it was something chosen. And by the steady light in her eyes, something true.
The parish priest wed them that week. They came to him quietly of an evening, knocking on his door in humble clothes, no wedding laces or top hats, but with a friend in tow—procured from a ship in port several towns away. It was clear what he surmised of their circumstances, babe in arms and not a penny to their names. But bless the man, he congratulated them on doing what was right in the eyes of God and asked no further questions, not even mentioning the publishing of banns for the customary three weeks.
“I’ve seen the oldest story, redeemed by the ancient story, more times than I can count. Each one a miracle,” he said.
He wed Juliette and Fred Rivers in a chapel beneath the ground. The priest, so taken with it, promised to protect their secret, claiming he would record the location as annex to the chapel. It would always be a holy place, where the kindly man had united two battered souls. There was only one witness to the humble ceremony. A man accustomed to the writing of ballads, who had watched their story from near beginning and vowed to see it kept for the ages.
“Promise me you won’t tell,” Frederick said, clutching the man’s parchment when he brought quill to it as the moon rose that night. “It must never be known,” he said. “Or they’ll be ruined.”
Killian Blackaby raised a finger, a twinkle in his eye. “My life has but one mission, my boy—to find a ballad for the ages, to preserve it. But it does not follow that I shall make it known. All shall be cloaked, all shall be veiled.”
And so they’d lived on, Blackaby returning to the sea, and the small Rivers family hoping against hope that he would be true to his word.
thirty-seven
How does a world shift? Frederick did not know, but he felt it tilt and upend, as surely as the dawn he rarely saw. Outside, cannons blazed in the ongoing war, parliament raged, matrimonial matches maneuvered in ballrooms, and ships upon seas traversed the world. And yet here in the belly of the earth . . . all he felt was air. All he saw was light. And oh, did the light deepen, for he knew he should never have been afforded this time.
When they had been wed a number of weeks, he rounded a corner and spotted Juliette lying on her side on her bed, with the stowaway nestled on her arm. Her finger traced her little girl’s cheek, softly, slowly, as though the act might infuse the child with all the strength and fight Juliette feared she would need in her life.
It became suddenly hard for Frederick to swallow. Retreating, he pressed himself against the corridor, unsure why it should matter whether she knew he’d seen that tenderness toward his daughter. His daughter—heaven be praised for such a mercy. Awakening sprang up in him at the miracle of it.
And that awakening soon took on a life of its own. It quickened at the unlikeliest times. When Juliette dropped down from the garden room one night trailing dirt behind her, she held out her cupped hands and offered freshly picked berries—her favorite thing, given to him. The night air had enlivened her whole spirit. He felt it. He saw it on her face. When she stomped her feet to shake the soil loose from her boots, he froze. In the lantern light, he saw that she’d slipped her small feet into his large boots, and worn them into the garden.
“What?” she said, her eyes smiling. “Lacing boots is the most perfect waste of time in the world. Yours are big on me. All I have to do is pull them on. See?” She tromped down the corridor, clunking clumsily, and turning to rest her hands on her hips while she beamed with pride. “No lacing needed.”
He laughed, and the laughter dug that contented place inside of him deeper and wider. Would she have touched his boots with even a rotting branch a year or two before? Never. And now here she was, wearing them, and laughing.
Her garden trips grew more frequent. One night, with his boots strapped on about her tiny feet, and the baby asleep in the cradle, she clutched a basket and made to go up for berries again. At the arch leading away from their respective caverns and into the tunnel, she paused, hand on the wall, and turned.
“Come,” she said. So simply, just dropping the single syllable into the night as naturally as one of the drops from the spring rains.
He set his book down, leaned forward. Surely he had not heard right.
“Or don’t,” she said, and shrugged. She disappeared around the corner, her footsteps receding into the echoing yonder. He dashed after her. There, where the night sky spilled starlight down into the dark of the earth, she turned. “Coming with me?”
“Yes,” he sputtered, hating the way his face flushed at how fast he’d spoken. But he never imagined that Juliette Flint—Juliette Rivers—would invite him to join her, unless she meant to trick him into falling into a volcano. But she was not that same girl—and he was not that same boy.
Above ground, silence settled over them easily. The earth struck up a quiet song of night herons, wind through the heather beyond, and the steady soft landing of berries in a basket. Soon even that fell silent.
Frederick looked to her, saw grief written upon her face as she beheld the stars.
At last, she spoke. “Do you ever wonder . . . about him?”
“Yes.” He did not need
an explanation. He knew exactly who she meant. “Every day.”
Juliette turned to face him, eyes pooling. “What happened?” Two words that surely required immeasurable amounts of courage, for the way they laid bare every fortress wall she had constructed around the subject of Elias. As she’d said them, he’d felt the laying down of something.
Frederick inhaled. Closed his eyes. When he opened them again, she was searching him, biting her lip.
“Come.” He gestured to the cracked-log bench beneath the budding lilac. She followed and sat.
For this tale he did not feel right sitting next to her, nor standing before her, nor sitting on the ground. So he sat on a nearby low boulder, careful not to let his knees touch hers, though their distance was so close he felt her warmth.
“Elias . . . he just . . . He fell, I think.”
Juliette narrowed her eyes, nodding, inviting more, asking him for the specifics he did not wish to hurt her with. He spoke of his friend’s radiance upon receiving her letters. He spoke of the way his soul seemed to double in size when he learned he would be a father. He told of the way the past came biting at his heels—how Frederick watched him fight it back, as if he held a club in his hands. Yet the battle bloodied him, the lies and doubts thick like soupy fog, and the lure of the smugglers’ city drew him.
“And he was caught,” she said.
Frederick nodded. “It was a slow fall, at first. And he did fight it. But he believed one small lie, and it led to another, and another. One lie at a time, one step at a time, until he was there at the gates of the City of Smugglers. I believe with everything in me, Juliette, that had someone asked him first thing, straight out, to go to the city and take those documents, he would have refused. He would’ve revolted at the thought. But it started with smaller things, which bigger things built on again and again, until the big betrayal no longer felt like a plunge to him. It was a small—almost natural—next step.”
Frederick had spent the past months reliving every moment of it all, piecing together the fall of Elias, wondering what he could have done differently, haunted by the terror in his friend’s eyes, and he heard himself speak it again in the telling to Juliette. “Take me,” he’d said. Elias had shaken his head violently, and Frederick had silenced him with a look of steady determination.