Set the Stars Alight

by Amanda Dykes

  Spencer, to his credit, took her reaction in stride, busying himself with a head torch, switching it on and then giving one to each of them.

  Dash led the way, surveying the wall before them with eyes accustomed to patient study of the dark. They all stood in a line beside him, and Lucy had a vision of what they must look like, standing as if they were waiting for the stone wall itself to open before them.

  She eyed Dash and saw a glimpse of the boy he’d once been in the way he stood as if awaiting the starting gun to fire at a race, his shoulders rising and falling in syncopated anticipation.

  She desperately wanted to hold on to their friendship forever. To never, ever lose it—as they once had, for so long. And yet . . . she hoped even more to hear particular words from his lips, words she dared not even give name to.

  Stepping forward, she placed her palm against the wall. It was cold and wet, its craggy terrain smoothed from winds and waves and years gone by. She began following it, feeling it draw her on. Had Frederick or the girl—Juliette Flint, she recalled, from the records at St. Thomas’s—done the same once?

  They had returned to examine the birth records and discovered that the young widow had also been the baby born the night of the sea flood eighteen years prior to Elias Flint’s death.

  Suddenly, she stopped. “Here.” Her fingers curved around, following the contour of the cave back. It beckoned her on, until she turned and a reaching black schism stood before her.

  If she had thought, upon entering the cave, that it was dark—she had been mistaken. For ahead she saw only black beyond black, so tangible it seemed ready to swallow them all. One step, and then another, a climb over a low-lying boulder that seemed to be standing guard—and she was in another world.

  The next hour they picked their way along dark corridors illuminated only by their head torches, placed palms against cool walls carved from stone. Graph paper and pen in hand, Spencer scratched out a map along the way, tracing their path.

  It was a bit eerie, the way the light beams sliced and wove, crisscrossed and circled, then dissipated off into the desolate unknown. And yet, for all that desolation, Lucy felt something else. Unseen embers, somewhere, of a story kept. Waiting.

  At length, they stopped in a cloister of sorts, where shelves carved into the walls held bottles long empty, wooden boxes long splintered, and a small web in the corner where a lone spider perched.

  “How came you here, little one?” Lucy whispered, glad the others were gathered over Spencer’s map and did not hear her imagination. But if that spider could talk, what would it say? Was it part of some ancient remnant of life down here? Had its predecessors witnessed all that they now pursued? It seemed laughable, somehow, that an eight-legged creature might—if this were a fairy story—know everything that four grown inquisitors did not.

  Without giving answer, the spider skittered away, and Lucy’s eyes followed its path to the bit of wall between two of the hewn shelves.

  She stepped back, narrowing her eyes, willing her beam to shine brighter, for before her on the wall . . .

  “Are those words?”

  The others were at her side in an instant. Violette brushed cobwebs away, and Spencer scribbled madly.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said. “It’s the last stanza. The lost one. It has to be! Verse six, remember? It’s the same meter, and it is definitely Blackaby’s cadence. Most definitely.”

  Dash read aloud slowly:

  “He gave his life to spare his friend.

  He gave himself indeed.

  For he was not a Traitor-Man

  Despite what all may read.”

  Lucy pressed her eyes closed, recalling the words she’d read so often she’d memorized them. “‘We lay to rest the Traitor-Man, His tale, with words, bury.’”

  “What does that mean?” Violette narrowed her eyes.

  “The story is quite literally buried,” she said. “The cave is guarding it.”

  Silence fell over them as they each looked from the inscription, to the branching tunnels. The two passageways diverged before them like a great, spreading riddle.

  “Which way is guarding the rest of the story, then?” Spencer asked. “Perhaps there are more stanzas! The implications of this in the literary world are . . .” He stopped, shaking his head. Speechless, miracle of miracles.

  “How about we split up?” Dash asked.

  A lump rose inside of Lucy. “N-no.”

  Violette held Spencer’s map straight out in front of her, as if it would provide a clue. “Yes,” she said. “We’ll meet back here and compare what we’ve found.” She seemed to notice Lucy’s hesitancy and softened. “It’s either that, or we spend twice as long to discover half as much.”

  Dash looked befuddled at that math but agreed, taking Spencer’s map and copying it down on another piece of paper.

  Then all eyes were on Lucy. She filled her lungs with the air, which had traded its cloak of sea salt for the spice of chalk earth.

  “All right.” She thrust her hand into her pocket and, fingering her pocket watch, added, “But let’s meet back here in an hour—no matter what.”

  Violette looked at Spencer, who shrugged, and the two seemed to be having a silent conversation. Violette was extraordinarily expressive in ways other than speaking, but this connection between them was something more.

  “Make that two hours,” Spencer countered, “and you have yourself a deal.”

  forty-three

  The deeper she and Dash went, the deeper the quiet grew, until it was a presence in itself. The corridor stretched on and on. Ducking her head to cast the torch’s beam upon her pocket watch, she saw that nearly a half hour had passed.

  “Dash,” she said, clearing her throat to speak past the lump forming there. “Do you think . . .” She trailed off, afraid to speak it, afraid that saying it aloud might make it true. “Never mind.”

  “Never mind?” Dash repeated. “Too late for that. Tell me, so I can mind.”

  “Do you think this is a fool’s errand?”

  He stopped, looking into the reaching avenue of nothingness that unfurled before them.

  “Are you calling me a fool, Matchstick Girl?”

  For a moment, all she could see was a vision of Dash at fourteen, his feet too big even for his tall body, bumping into console tables with his sunglasses on in the corridor at Candlewick. If they’d been anywhere but a tunnel under tons of earth, she would have laughed at the memory, punched him on the shoulder like old times, and given him back as good as he gave in a battle of wits.

  But they were wandering in an uncharted cave, hunting down a legend pieced together from threads and snippets of what felt like a thousand wispy stories, in a tunnel wending deeper into the dark belly of the earth.

  “You know what I mean, Dash. Why are we here? England has as many legends—true, fabricated, and everywhere in between—as it has cups of tea.”

  “Too many to count?”

  “Precisely. So again, why are we here? Why are you—an astrophysicist with three degrees and two trips to a scientific laboratory in outer space under your belt—here?”

  He stood silent. Picked up his left foot and scratched his right shin with its heel. He lifted his face to meet her eyes—and there, in his suddenly serious, pleading eyes was answer enough.

  Everything in him answered with one unspoken word: you.

  But she dared not believe it.

  So much hung in Dash’s gaze—and she could not bear to think of what might crumble if whatever words were spoken next were not the words she longed to hear. What would it cost her to lose him again? And more, what would it cost him? Would he once again lose the only home he had if this proved to be a fool’s errand? What if he’d gone and attached his name to her research proposal, only to be ruined by it?

  Breathless at the gift of what it seemed he was wordlessly offering her—himself—she shifted her gaze. And as she did, the shadowed room beyond reached to her in specters and odd
shadows, different from anything she’d seen so far.

  “Dash,” she breathed, shining her head torch in that direction. “Look.”

  Together they stepped into the small room and stood caught in the middle of a tale frozen in time. There was a narrow bed, its blanket pulled neatly into place as if its owner had merely stepped out for the day’s work. Only the additional blanket of dust declared otherwise. Beside it, a barrel lay on its side, gently slanting stoppers appearing like four feet.

  Lucy drew near enough to peer inside. “Someone’s built a platform at the bottom. Almost like . . . a cradle.” She pictured a pink-cheeked cherub lying within, smiling up at her.

  Dash leaned in to look, running his hand around the edge. It appeared to have been sanded with care, nary a splinter to be seen. “These notches,” he said, pointing at two half circles carved from one end. “What do you make of that?”

  Lucy’s stomach did a little flip, the sight striking a familiar chord. “Of course,” she said, shaking her head in slow wonder. “It’s a crow’s nest, from a ship.” She touched the grooves, nodding. “They’d have rested their spyglasses here. To leave for the next watchman, to have them in arm’s reach at a moment’s notice. They made a cradle of a warship’s lookout,” she said. She did not know if it was beautiful, or tragic, or somewhere in between.

  She and Dash moved about the small cave room that had likely once been used to stow smuggled goods but had become a refuge. For a woman and her child, by the look of things. She shook her head, thinking of another baby in another cave, long ago in Bethlehem.

  Baby in a cave. Those words hit her like a landslide. She was at her father’s bedside again, fingers laced within his. He was not entirely lucid, breaths coming harder, words dredging up from deeper places. Or perhaps he’d been more lucid than she’d thought.

  “Baby in a cave . . . Cradle from the sky . . . Man gives his life . . . Tempus custodit veritatem.”

  She’d assumed he’d been speaking of the Nativity. And perhaps he had, but . . .

  Her heart picked up speed, snatches of stories flying into the darkness like bats on the loose. Her consciousness grabbed at them, head pounding.

  “Lucy?”

  She shook her head, turning slowly, as if the walls would speak.

  Dash touched her elbow. “What is it?”

  She faced him, searched his eyes. “It’s just . . . look at us. Standing in a cave beneath the ground. A place of impossible life—a hidden kingdom. An underground city, like the people of Coober Pedy. From a rising tide, like the one he spoke of. Was Dad telling us this story all along? Giving us one giant riddle, our whole lives through?”

  Dash looked back and forth, as if dredging up those stories of old, reconciling them with what she was saying.

  “So many times he told me, ‘We keep the stories.’ He said we pass them on—it is our duty . . . and our honor. In a world as dark as this, people forget how to see the light, so we need to remind them by telling the truth. Paying attention . . . setting the stars alight.”

  “It sounds like him,” he said. “But why? Why him? What would he know of all of this?”

  The pieces did not all fit neatly together. There was still much to discover. But this room kindled the embers within her, gave her hope that more answers were tucked into this cave.

  She paused at what appeared to be a curtain. The once-white cloth hung limp and crooked, snagged by a few rough spots of the cave wall. A small gathering of sticks rolled as Lucy’s toe nudged them by accident. But no . . . they were not mere sticks. They were black bits of burnt wood fashioned into rudimentary writing utensils.

  Noticing that her light was growing dimmer, Lucy knew that they should be turning back before this world plunged into darkness, but she couldn’t stop now, not yet. Gently, she pulled the curtain back, as one might pull aside a sheer silken curtain to gaze out upon a vast and captivating view.

  But what she saw instead captivated her all the more: a scene drawn in charcoal. A man holding a baby. A woman watching on in the corner.

  At the bottom Lucy saw writing. Dash stepped behind her as she knelt to read it, narrowing her eyes to see. Each jot, each stick of every letter, each quirky curve of the letter s . . . was a gift carved with care. A shiver ran through her as she began to read.

  forty-four

  Slowly, haltingly to puzzle over the smudged bits, she read aloud.

  “Here a man lived, and gave the truest thing that ever he could. He gave his life to three souls. Everything in him. For one of those souls, he took on shame, all to give the man a chance at truth and life. And for two of those souls, he carved a simple life in this cave. By turns, his giving led to love.”

  There was more . . . but it was too smudged. She leaned closer, nose nearly touching the wall, and saw that the charcoal had been carefully etched over with something sharp. Again and again, carving the words into the wall. Ensuring they would last, treasures stored up for the ages.

  She reached a finger to trace the script and read in a whisper. “‘And he was loved.’”

  She could not explain the way those simple words made her want to weep.

  And he was loved.

  Her heart flooded with it. For Frederick Hanford’s sake—whose tale she had a feeling they were just barely scratching the surface of—and for the sake of another lost boy, who had spent his life in search of home, and who had crossed the world to explore this dark abyss with her, to discover the light of this story.

  The nearness of that very soul warmed her, and she let her fingers lace his. They stood, facing each other in this place where time stood frozen. Preserved, it seemed, just for them. As wars raged above, and the fire of the sun blazed above that, and a thousand fires greater still shone beyond that in the vast unknown . . . this quiet, endless moment spun itself around them.

  She opened her mouth to speak only to come up empty. What to say to a love carved in the depths in so many ways? To the yearning that it opened inside of her, which reached into the dark for her friend’s heart.

  He squeezed her hand. Gone were the ever-present smile-crinkles around his eyes. In their place, story upon story upon story were written, reaching wordlessly right into her.

  He gently tugged on her hand, surely sensing a sort of reverence in this room, as if they had tread into a place where wonder slumbered, and though they would leave, it would cling to them forever.

  It trailed them in gossamer threads as they ventured farther down the corridor, and they found the story was still unfolding as they stepped over a threshold into what felt like a hushed and holy place.

  Before them stood an old pew, one of its legs splintered and repaired with care. Stepping closer, she saw a hymnal upon it, laid open as if the place had been waiting for them so the service could begin. There was no pulpit, but there was a large rock, and upon it a communion chalice carved from what appeared to be driftwood. A wedding bower stood with bunches of heather tied in simple twine. Crisp, and most of it long decayed away, but enough was left that Lucy could picture a man constructing this bower for his bride and stealing above ground to bundle heather for her.

  Somewhere above them, melodic ringing began to sound. A bell, slow, thoughtful, remembering.

  “That’s close,” Lucy said.

  “Really close.” Dash tipped his head, studying the ceiling. “Could we be near St. Thomas’s?”

  Lucy tried to trace their path in her head, envision it in relation to the village above. “It very well may be,” she said. The tolling went on, somber and slow. There was no mistaking it now—they were near the chapel. Right in the middle of a wedding ceremony frozen in time.

  “This is the annex,” Lucy breathed, her voice a whisper of wonder. If her growing theory was correct, this hovel in the ground, blasted and carved by marauders and smugglers . . . had been witness to three lives united in the impossible. A fresh start. New life.

  The truest story . . .

  As she turned, soaking it all i
n, her head torch starting to shimmer. Lucy’s eyes landed on the far wall . . . and she stopped. Swallowed.

  “Dash,” she said. Pointing, in case he hadn’t seen.

  But he had seen. They both froze in place, as if one breath more would undo the sight before them.

  A slide of rocks, arrested in time. Spilled from the earth in a river of stone, their path unmistakable. The rocks had, at one time, been set on filling this room, on burying any who stood where Lucy and Dash now stood. A splintered beam jutted here and there from the rubble—vestiges of a safeguard from the smugglers, she remembered from Barnabas’s explanation of the ballroom.

  The rockslide appeared stuck in suspended animation, restrained by the intentional damming of wooden planks, hammered with care into a makeshift wall rising waist high.

  But those were no ordinary wooden planks.

  “What on earth . . . ?” Lucy moved to step forward, and Dash held her in place.

  “Be careful, Lucy. I don’t think it’s safe. I can take a picture, zoom in.”

  She studied the debris, the way the rocks rested against one another. The slide had occurred at least a decade ago, if not centuries before, by the looks of things. By now, she hoped they were surely settled well together, but they had no way of knowing.

  Dash was right. It was unpredictable. But Lucy couldn’t resist the draw of those planks—they were a siren call. If they were what she thought they were, they could change everything.

  “I think it’s all right,” she said. “Whatever falling those rocks were doing stopped long ago. Someone made sure of that.”

  Dash warily stepped forward. The two of them approached the wall. He with leery curiosity, she with disbelieving wonder.

  She ran her hands over the planks and beams. She knew this wood. The black of it, the gilded detail carved in ornate relief. She had studied it. She had hoped to go in search of it—on the floor of the English Channel. And, if she was not mistaken, it was the same wood she’d taken tea on at the kitchen table at Stone’s Throw, and that of her very own bed stand in the spring cellar.