by Amanda Dykes
Lucy understood. Sophie had lost much, and Dash had become like a son to her. A son who had also lost much, and whom she did not want to see hurt.
Lucy nodded. “Dash is . . . one of a kind.” She meant it with all her heart.
“He is at that.” Sophie looked as if she might say more but stopped.
Lucy felt a wavering connection and did not want to let that vanish. “Is he very much like him?” she asked, praying to God she was not presuming. “Your son, I mean.”
Sophie pursed her lips, standing straighter, looking out over the sea, considering.
For a long time, Lucy thought she might not speak.
“No. And yes. In some ways. Jesse was . . . I’ve never seen so much life in a single soul,” she said. “Except in his father.”
She remembered the wedding picture—the man who looked so kind, the way Sophie beamed at him. “I’m so sorry for your losses,” she said, wishing there were words that did not sound so . . . cliché. But she meant them, truly.
“Yes, I am, too. Every day. But the losses would have been greater if I’d never known them. That’s the gift of it all,” she said. “That’s what I told myself when we were married. I knew his time would be short and that there was a chance he would pass his condition on to any children we might have. But . . .”
“Numbers have nothing to do with how extraordinary something is,” she murmured, remembering her conversation with Dash.
Sophie darted her assessing gaze to Lucy, reading her.
Lucy considered how best to explain. “I just mean . . . in a world where everything is measured, calculated, sometimes we miss the biggest blessings of all.”
Sophie jutted her chin out. “Yes, you could say that. And I’d do it a thousand times over again for the gift of loving those two men. No matter how short the time. A single life can make more of a difference than we can possibly imagine.” When Lucy agreed, Sophie’s manner softened, and she crossed the rubble to stand overlooking the sea stacks. Lucy held the painting in her hand, and she half hid it now, uncertain of how to explain her possession of such a thing.
But Sophie did not miss much. “What’s that?”
Lucy, with no other explanation to offer, showed her.
“Remarkable,” she said, turning the aged paper in her hands gently. “How old do you think it is?”
Lucy had wondered that, too, and had done some research on the paper used. “A century or two old, I’d guess.”
“Is that all,” Sophie muttered. Lucy looked askance at her and was rewarded with a rare half smile.
She explained where she’d found it, and her father’s recommendation of Stone’s Throw Farm to Dash. How it all seemed too interconnected to be coincidental.
“Hmmm. Well, anything is possible. That’s what he used to tell you, right?”
And she was off, leaving Lucy to ponder. Leaving Lucy to jolt upright when the thought struck—how had Sophie known what Father used to tell her?
She ran from the rubble out onto the moor. “Sophie!” she called after the woman who had seemingly vanished without a trace. “Mental note,” Lucy said. “Find out what Sophie knows.”
Walking east along the cliff, Lucy pulled a paper from her pocket—she’d written down Killian’s ballad—and read it for the umpteenth time. She’d thought it a dirge, at first, with all the talk of death and laying to rest. But what if it wasn’t?
There seemed to be something between the lines, but she could not pin it down.
“‘Cast thee down, cast thee up, cast thee in between . . .’” Her footfalls crunched to the rhythm of the words. She ran her finger down the page. “‘Covered is he, from deep to deep.’” She’d thought that had meant Hurd’s Deep. Definitive evidence—or at least something akin to that—that she could present to the committee. But with the talk of the sisters, his secrets cloistered in their cove, the mention of Weldensea—all signs pointed to . . . well, not to Hurd’s Deep.
She should have been crestfallen. She’d staked everything on that theory. But instead, a quickening of her spirit sped her on to the next lines of the ballad. The thrill of the chase—of solving this puzzle at last—drove her. Her pace picked up, as if she were unraveling the mystery with every step she took.
“‘The tides do come, the tides do go; The Traitor-Man did rise on them, To depths in dark sublime.’” This was the line that stumped her every time and filled her with delicious curiosity. Tides were her language, after all. But how did one rise to depths? The two seemed polar opposites.
“Think, Lucy. Think.” The waves crashed against the cliffs in echo: Think . . . think . . . think.
The ballad spoke of burial, being covered over. But where could a vessel that large take cover, if not beneath the waters? Waters that sounded oddly near just now.
Her pace quickened, her pulse with it, the nearness of the answer just out of reach. Her toe snagged on a rock that held its grip long enough to send her sprawling headfirst toward a gaping hole in the ground.
The blowhole. White mist rushed up at her as she braced her hands, heart in her throat. Landing with a crack, she watched Killian’s ballad slip through the protective grate that had just saved her from falling. The painting fluttered and spun atop the grate, and she grabbed it just as it was about to follow the ballad into the hole.
She lay frozen, shoulders heaving, eyes smarting. Two thoughts clashed like resounding cymbals, sharp and cutting:
She might have died, if not for the grate.
And she knew where the Jubilee was.
No. No, that wasn’t possible. Was it possible? How had she not noticed before?
She took off running, straight for the yew tree and the man who lived beneath it.
forty
Her fist was starting to throb from pounding at Dash’s observatory. He must be gone. Turning to go, she stopped at the sound of an opening door. The sight of him looking at her with befuddled, half-asleep eyes smote her.
“You were asleep,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’ll come back later.”
His hand went around her arm, stopping her with gentle warmth. “I can sleep anytime,” he said. “You’re almost jumping out of your skin. What’s going on?”
Where to start? “I tripped at the blowhole and—”
His gentle grip around her tightened into a protective one. “Are you okay?” He braced both of her arms, looking her over. “You’re okay. Are you?”
“I’m fine. But, Dash, I-I remember another one.”
His brown eyes grew round in amazed excitement. “Your dad’s stories?”
She nodded quick and furious. “Remember the one about the stone carvers?”
He scratched his head. “I’m not sure . . . tell me.”
She couldn’t be sure whether he was feigning ignorance just to give her the chance to speak it, to hear her newly found story in her own voice, but she was happy to comply.
“We had just finished building the telescope and were out back where the shrub blocked the streetlamp, waiting for dark. You were looking so hard at the sky, like if you looked hard enough, you could peel daylight back and crack through to the distant galaxies.”
Dash whistled a descending scale. “Way to be dramatic, Matchstick Girl.”
She grinned, feeling the rush of adrenaline as the memories stacked up, one behind another, begging to burst to the surface. “Dad told us a riddle.”
She pressed her eyes closed around the words, making sure she found the right ones before she opened her eyes again. “What do seashells, ballrooms, Winston Churchill, and hospitals have in common? You said they were all timeless British institutions. I said they all had good foundations. And Dad said they were all under the earth.”
“And then you groaned and said he couldn’t talk about Churchill that way,” Dash said.
“Right! He said he was speaking of Churchill during the war, and that the answer came back to the stone carvers. Unseen workers of wonders. He said, ‘While your stars move about the hea
vens, the stone carvers are hard at work in the obscure dark, carving away great swaths of stone with the simple giving of themselves.’”
Dash tilted his head. “That’s . . . really specific.”
“I only remember because I gave him a hard time for his dramatic descriptions of ordinary things. I finally asked him what the stone carvers were, and he said I would love it . . . because they were water.”
“I remember,” Dash said. “He talked about the waves hollowing out caverns from the cliffs, and drops diving into cracks where they froze and expanded—”
“And over time”—Lucy sucked in a breath—“caves were born.”
“Which got turned into tunnels, and Churchill used them in wartime.”
“Right. Dad went on and on. About the tunnels in the white cliffs of Dover being used for war rooms and shelters and hospitals. About a farmer and his son discovering a hole in their field far inland while trying to dig a duck pond—and how it was encrusted with shells in intricate designs, and nobody knew why. He talked about Oxford using an old salt mine to store their library books. And smugglers and pirates’ lairs, and a cave in Victorian times being used to host a ball.”
He laughed. She’d had no idea he had actually been to that ball, or at least a modern version of it, in his boyhood. The memory was so strong now, she almost could see it, and hear him, and feel how the far-off tremble of the Underground had sounded during his story, a tribute to his treatise on subterranean life.
“Just think, Lucy,” he’d said. “You sleep in a room where glass was ground down, and adhered to tiny sticks of wood. Little makers of light. Dashel, you watch planets and stars because of pieces of glass in a long metal tube. Glass placed into a device, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, all because a maker of spectacles and some schoolchildren in his shop accidentally discovered what glass could do, when lenses were stacked one upon another. Just think . . . that glass was made from heat, from fire. And now you use it to see fire in the sky.”
“Just think.” Father had been on a roll. He had been hard to keep up with when he got like that. “An entire underground shell kingdom was discovered because of a duck pond. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in a cave because of a shepherd boy looking for a lost goat. I heard of a man who immigrated from Sicily to California and found the farmland useless in the heat. Do you suppose he gave up? No! He began to dig. Grottoes and tunnels for miles and acres and stories beneath ground, planting trees. Trees! Underground! Day lighting the tops of them to receive sun. An entire world in his underground trenches.” Dad had chuckled and shook his head with a smile. “Ducks, goats, trees, caves—anything is possible. Remember that.”
“Anything is possible,” Lucy said, bringing herself back to the present, and readying herself to tell Dash the most preposterous thing she had ever thought of.
“Dash . . . I think the Jubilee is in the sea cave.” It sounded even more ridiculous spoken aloud. People would’ve found it by now if it were true. It could never have fit. A thousand voices told her it was impossible . . . but one echoed steadily within her: Anything is possible. “It could only have gotten past the sea stacks if one thing came into play.”
Dash’s forehead pinched. “A miracle?”
“Yes. In the form of the spring tide.”
“Spring tide,” Dash said, rubbing the last traces of sleepiness from his eyes. “Are you sure?”
“I’m anything but sure. But think about it. The spring tide brings the strongest high tides, with the new moon. But then there are those times when it gets taken one step further . . .”
“The earth, the new moon, and the sun all lined up perfectly during a spring tide. You’re talking about a super tide.”
“Or . . . ?” She waited, and he stared blankly. “A sea flood. Isn’t that what they call it around here?”
Now she had his attention.
“You’re the one who said you thought the local girl who vanished the night of the sea flood could be connected to the Jubilee. Same night, right? So?”
She shoved the picture into his hands, tapping the sea stacks. “What if . . . ?”
“What if what?”
Words were failing her. She caught her breath. “What if she helped Frederick Hanford escape? What if she somehow got on board the Jubilee, and they sailed her into the cave beneath Edgecliffe?”
He studied the coastline and the sea stacks in the distance. “The sea flood could have lifted them right over them. But the timing would have had to be exactly right. They would have had to know this intricate coast. So many things would have to line up, Lucy, I don’t know. I hate to say it, but it seems . . .”
“Impossible?” She waited, breathless. The word had been gifted to them all their lives as a challenge. A lens to see wonder where others saw walls.
“Yeah,” he said, a smile spreading slowly.
And so the plan was hatched. Borrowing Barnabas’s powerboat, they would navigate the sea stacks and enter the cave.
Violette and Spencer would come along—indeed, would not have been kept from the expedition, once they were filled in.
Lucy’s feet itched as she thought about the possibility the Jubilee was beneath them, just waiting to be rediscovered.
forty-one
Stone’s Throw Farm had gone to sleep, but Lucy’s soul was a barrage of steadily marching memories. Tomorrow they would enter the cave, and she felt as if she were following bread crumbs of a tale dropped into her life every step of the way. Running through the stories in her mind, she could not sleep. They were coming, and coming, and coming after her. Knocking at her soul, lining up and waiting to be transmitted from the invisible world to the actual world.
“God is the pursuer of your heart, Lucy,” Dad had said. “He is coming, and coming, and coming after you. In every sunset, in every snatch of birdsong. In everything that stirs deep into you and makes you hungry for bigger things, eternal things. That is Him, pursuing you with tenderest grace. In the places so hard they wring your soul. In the places so beautiful they steal your breath. He is there, filling your soul, giving you breath.”
To believe these words now was frightening. For the truth of them called her out from the familiar, from the dark confines of her springhouse, to meet truth in the sky.
Lucy gripped pen and paper. An act of defiance against the voice inside her that told her to lay down her pursuit of truth. To stay in the dark, to resurrect the wall between her heart and her past.
The return of these memories was a gift. But the recollection was hard.
She climbed onto the slope of her springhouse roof, where the blades of soft grass were so long, they whispered an embrace about her as she sat.
This time it would not be Dash unraveling the story for her. He had done his work, returned what he could to her.
It was her turn now.
She closed her eyes and remembered the one story that could never have made it into Dash’s compendium. The one her father had tried to tell her, his last night.
Her hand shaking, she set pen to paper . . . and wrote.
The watchmaker’s time was at an end.
“Tempus custodit veritatem,” he said to the girl, all grown up.
“Time is truth’s keeper,” she said back, holding tightly to his hand. Not ready.
“Remember that,” he said, tapping the watch in her pocket. “And remember”—his voice had been quiet, but his words were just as full of life as they had always been—“baby . . . in a cave, cradle . . . from the sky. Man . . . gives his life, and love . . . lives.”
It was the ancient story. The one he’d lived with every bit of his life. He had loved Christmastime, the way it brought this Nativity tale to the top of people’s hearts. “Nothing . . . is impossible.”
Lucy’s pen slowed on the last word, and when she lifted it, she felt the weight of this truth.
“Let that be so.” She whispered her prayer into the far-off sounds of the waves that would carry her straight into the impossi
ble when morning came.
forty-two
The earth seemed to shiver around Lucy. Her heart followed suit, skittering as they climbed from the blaring white of the cliff into the dark yawning of the cave. Water droplets plinking and plunking from all directions in different notes and skipping cadences mixed with the thumping of Barnabas’s boat as it bobbed on the shore to spin a curious melody.
She was glad to have disembarked. Though the vessel was small enough to navigate between the sea stacks, it had been a tumultuous passage as churning surf at the stacks’ bases had done its best to toss them asunder.
The cavern was massive. As her eyes adjusted, Lucy caught glimmers of light reflected from wet sheen on a ceiling far up. In a craggy arch, the ceiling spread and sloped down into walls. Lucy closed her eyes, imagining. Could an entire ship truly have landed here? There was certainly no ship here now, but wasn’t that to be expected? Wreckers and storms over the years would surely have picked the old girl apart, taken her piece by piece. But surely there would be some trace, if she had been here.
The very thought dropped a veil over the scene, and she imagined the years disappearing like tendrils of sea smoke.
Dash leaned close, his arm pressing gently against hers. “Anything is possible, Matchstick Girl.”
She faced him, eyes wide. He was reading her thoughts, it seemed. Or perhaps he was feeling the same thing—the sense they were stepping foot inside of Father’s stories, the stories coming alive into one living, breathing thing.
He winked at her, adding that tilting jot of character to a somehow sacred scene. When they came to a rise in the cave floor, Dash offered a hand to help Lucy step up. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Spencer do the same for Violette, who eyed his hand as if to say What’s that for? and lifted her brow. Lucy smiled. She could nearly hear Violette’s silent question, D’ye think I’m a helpless lass?