by Amanda Dykes
He’d been cleaned up, his hair combed more carefully than she’d ever seen it, not tousled out of place as during the wild chase of his stars. Scratches, bruises, and a few stitched wounds marked him, bringing tears to Lucy’s eyes.
“You’re quite a pair,” a nurse who entered said. “Matching scars, you’ll have.” Lucy hadn’t even given thought to her own face. In the reflection of the glass frame on the wall she saw she was smudged, scratched, and bedraggled. But most of all, she was so thankful.
She spent the night sitting at his side, his hand in hers. At some point she’d fallen asleep and woke to see the most welcome sight—his eyes open, studying her.
“Matchstick Girl,” he said, before drifting off to sleep. That was all. And so much more. Stories upon stories, years upon years, love upon love, woven into those words.
In the days that followed, after his release with strict instructions for convalescing, they walked more of Stone’s Throw Farm than she’d thought possible. Talking, remembering, dreaming. Short walks at first, and longer each day as Dash’s strength returned.
“Well?” he said one afternoon, when they found themselves at the far pasture, where the star party had been. “What now, Lucy?”
“We could rest a bit.” She gestured toward the seats near the cold campfire ring. “Or keep on. Maybe walk down the road a bit . . . ?”
He smiled, amused. “I mean, you have done the impossible. You have found the lost ship Jubilee. Or what’s left of it. I think your committee is going to be more than impressed by your . . . What did they call it? Indisputable evidence?”
“It’s ironic, though. Now I have no need of the research funds.”
He dipped his head side to side, weighing that. “Maybe. Or maybe you can request a reallocation. There’s a lot of the story yet to discover about your Frederick Hanford and the lady Juliette. It’ll take some digging. Some time. Less funds than you needed before, but with such ‘compelling evidence,’ I have a feeling Professor Finchley won’t be so stingy with that grant this time around.”
Lucy nodded in agreement, but she couldn’t help wondering. Frederick and Juliette’s story had been protected for so long. She felt compelled to research it, but should it be made public? A part of her believed they might not mind their story finally being told, if it could bring hope to others.
She looked at the stretching patchwork of green pastures, the landscape dotted in houses of stone and white clouds of fleecy sheep. Beatrix bounded toward them ahead of Sophie, who approached slowly across the pasture.
“What do you say?” Dash sounded nervous, suddenly. “Will you stay?”
There was nothing for her in London—only boxes waiting for her move from the cottage that was no longer home, and a promise of a one-room flat from Mr. Bessette. Then she thought of the tiny springhouse that—with its cozy lights and earthen embrace, and the stream running through—had come to feel more a home than any tiny hovel logically should.
She did not know what would come of it all, but she planned to see the story through, whether the committee gave their approval or not, and whether she shared it with the public or not.
“I will stay,” she said, the revelation a sweet sound to her own ears. “That is . . . if it’s all right with you, Sophie.”
“What’s that?” The older woman neared them, an envelope in her hand.
“Might I request a longer stay in the spring cellar?” Lucy bit her lip, waiting. She knew Sophie had been none too keen on her presence at the start.
But miracle of miracles, the corners of Sophie’s mouth turned up ever so slightly. “We’d be glad of that,” she said. “For as long as you like.”
She paused, holding the envelope, running her thumb over it. “You’re gathering documents for your research?” she asked.
Lucy nodded. She had much to track down to uncover what had transpired between Frederick and Juliette Rivers. Cross-referencing ship’s records and magistrates’ records in Portsmouth, clerks’ receipts, local art from the time—the work would be intricate and painstaking, and she would love every moment of it.
So many questions remained, so many strands of this tapestry to make sense of yet. And the archaeologist in her was bursting to sit down and dig deep, to question every soul living at Stone’s Throw, find out each of their perspectives, the lore passed down over the ages, the holes such tales might fill.
Sophie tapped Lucy on the shoulder with the envelope to prod her from her planning. “This was given to us many years ago. It might help, I think. Your father . . . came to us just after your mother passed on and stayed for several days.” As she stood there in her pearl earrings and flannel plaid shirt and knee-high muck boots, Sophie’s compassion was tangible.
“This is where he went,” Lucy breathed, thinking of those nights he had called home and then returned different, determined to see her through.
“He was a man on a mission. He walked the pastures and the cliffs, climbed down to the beaches, walked the shores. Day in and day out, searching. Every afternoon we sat him down for scones and tea just where Clara sat you your first day.”
Tears sprang. “He sat there?”
“Yes. As boy and man, both. He believed, Lucy, that you would come to us one day, too. I have a feeling he pulled a few strings to be sure of it, urging Dashel here for his research as he did.” She winked at Dash, who scuffed his foot in the soil and shrugged.
“A riddle always has a safeguard,” Lucy murmured.
Sophie placed a hand on Lucy’s shoulder and squeezed it. As engulfing as a full embrace it was, coming from her.
“Thank you, Sophie,” she said.
And then Sophie was gone, leaving them to open the envelope.
Inside, crisply folded graph paper unfolded into a letter with handwriting so familiar it felt like an embrace.
Dash drew close to listen as she read.
“Dear Lucy,
So you’ve found it, have you? The story. I expect you’ve also figured out that it’s one important to our family.
Love letters are as old as time, Lucy. Some folk write in sonnets, some in prose, and some in really terrible songs. But the truest suitor—the one who’s been pursuing since time began and who won’t stop until it ends—writes His love letter across the very sky. Within the very earth. In every sunset. Every star. Every refuge hewn from caves and mines and seas.
So we keep the stories, Lucy. Matchstick Girl. Keeper of light.
Our family has been entrusted with the keeping of this tale, and how you do it is up to you. Killian Blackaby began the tradition with his ballads. His son Jonathan carried the tradition on in painting, capturing the sea stacks and titling them ‘The Way Home.’
Each generation embodies the story in a way fit for them. Some, such as one simple Simon, determined to piece it out, bit by bit, in veiled story while turning gears and telling tales to two wide-eyed kids who needed each other more than they knew.
I have kept that story back, in hopes that you will discover it on your own. You’ve been chasing it since you were a girl, the Jubilee planting itself in your heart, towing you out to sea. Some stories must be lived to be believed. So I planted the seeds and watered them where I could, and set you free to do something impossible.
You’ve done it, my girl. I knew you would.
It is up to you now, Lucy, how you keep the stories and pass them on. Board your ship. Chase your mysteries. Wherever you are called, your chance to keep the stories will be there.
The world is dark, so dark we sometimes forget the stars. But they are always there—we need only fight to see these places of brilliant light, these echoes of the truest story. Of a man who gave his life for another—and of a Man, centuries before him, who gave His life for the world. The One who is coming . . . and coming . . . and coming after you. Fighting for your heart. Every breath a gift.
He sets the stars alight, my girl. And we open our eyes to this in benevolent defiance of the dark . . . by remembering.
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Take note. Live deeply. And be well, my daughter.
All my love, always,
Dad.”
Lucy slipped her hand into Dash’s. The Matchstick Girl and the Lost Boy. And together, they walked into a future as bright as the sun.
Epilogue
The village of Weldensea never forgets its legends—part of the enchantment of this land, so they say. Its people gathered the threads of stories like those of the good shepherd; and Mad Kit Bill with his odd-sized bundles, stealing across the dark; and the scandal of the traitor Frederick Hanford. They wove them into the fabric of time, passing them down from generation to generation. Snippets of the story were passed down, too, with no one the wiser that they were vessels. Humming bits of Handel’s Messiah to babes as they fell asleep. Naming pigs after the one who came before it, and before that, and before even that. Generations of pigs named Salt, nobody dreaming the name sprang from the sty of one of the finest warships ever to traverse the seas in the name of His Majesty the King.
But beneath the canopy of tales and legends, a story so ordinary it escaped notice planted itself, too. That of the Farmer Rivers and his young wife and child. Aerie was her name, called so after the name for eagles’ nests. “Or crows’ nests,” her father sometimes said with a wink.
If one paid attention, leaned in, they would notice the way this family held one another with a closeness that was almost otherworldy. The family came to Weldensea when the girl was ten, having spent the first years of her life in a northern county. “Letting time pass,” they’d said, but one got the feeling there was something time was meant to sweep over in those passing years.
Upon their arrival, they took up residence in an old sheep farm far north on Hanford land and called it Stone’s Throw Farm, being it was so far removed. The empty house of Hanford, in Edgecliffe, stood in the distance on the seaside cliff. And villagers swore that from time to time, bits of Handel’s Messiah could be heard drifting from its abandoned piano, its notes both mournful and healing. Always the refrain of bonds being broken asunder, and always the notes being carried by the sound of the waves beyond.
With the purchase of their farm, the Riverses inherited a prodigiously aged pig named Salt from the village woman who had lived there for some years. They planted trees. Thick and green to border the farm, that they might live an extra quiet life. The girl, Aerie, flew across that pasture, wings on her feet and sunlight in her golden hair.
As years went on, she led three young children—her siblings in perfect stairstep height—through those pastures, sometimes playing crack the whip, and their father watched on, carving figurines from bits of soft stone he’d salvaged from a nearby cave, as he told it. Here the four children herded sheep, learned tunes, lived wild and free beneath the light of the sun and the love of a mother and a father whose devotion knew no bounds.
Sometimes the whole family perched all in a row upon their small thatched roof with a telescope, or sat upon its ridge and listened as the Shepherd’s Bells tolled from St. Thomas’s chapel.
Every few years or so, they all traipsed down to the seaside cliffs by moonlight to watch the waves climb higher and higher at spring tide, eclipsing rocks and towers, all on their way to greet this family who those same waves had delivered into safety so long ago.
They could be seen, betimes, as figures cloaked in hushed dusk, approaching the churchyard and leaving bundles of wild heather upon the gravestone of the last master of Edgecliffe Manor.
“Admiral Barnard Hanford,” Aerie read reverently from the grave marker one such evening. “Who was he, Father?” Aerie slipped her hand into his, and his wife did likewise, enclosing her fingers in his.
Frederick’s jaw twitched as he searched for an answer he still did not fully know, himself.
So he gave her the truest thing he knew. “He was a man who lost much,” he said. “But who gained more than he could ever have imagined.”
Aerie nodded gravely, not understanding everything and yet grasping the honor in such a moment. As she and the young ones drifted away into the dusk one by one, the farmer lingered long, reaching into his pockets and placing something hidden in the tall grasses lining the marker. Six pawns, carved with care from the walls of the cave beneath Edgecliffe. One for each of those Riverses—The Admiral’s legacy.
In the quietness of their life, they were happily forgotten by most. But the story of the Traitor-Man, his betrayal and the scandal, was carried on from generation to generation by people never dreaming that very man had once lived right beneath their noses. Never recognizing the sacrifice, the redemption, or imagining how it shaped generations to come.
But the story was kept faithfully by descendants of the Blackaby line. And if that Blackaby line were able to trace things back and back, they would find their forefather Killian, boots up on the hearth of that stone cottage, taking bread and cheese and tea with the Riverses every few years when he passed through on his rounds. He would play for them his favorite ballad, the great tale he’d spent his life in search of.
The Ballad of the Traitor-Man.
The story of life.
And the story of light.
Author’s Note
Dear reader,
Can I tell you a secret?
I think you might relate.
Sometimes this sitting at the keyboard and tap-tap-tapping out words is . . . hard. I wonder what the black letters on a white screen really mean, whether they matter, whether I should be spending my time doing something else.
But as I wrote this story, God whispered a bit of bolstering encouragement into my heart about it. If I had to assign one word to describe it, it would be this: wonder.
Not wonderful—it felt far from wonderful, as I worked through the various stages of its creation.
Not wondrous—unless you mean wondrously perplexing and how in the world are all these pieces ever going to mesh together, ever?!
No . . . just wonder. An aching word, a thing radiating hope if we will but pay attention and be amazed at the miracles of this life, of this very world.
Because, you see, this world can be a dark place. I don’t need to expound. We all know it. We see it every day. We feel the heaviness of it descend when we turn on the news.
But there is something else in this world, too. And it is light. Hope. Truth. Wonder. There is proof all around us, stories in every nook and cranny, promises yearning with joy to be fulfilled. That is what this story is about, at its very core. Wonder. Light that fights the dark. I pray that truth might come through my meager words, that it might breathe life in the spaces between my letters, words, lines.
It was Galileo Galilei who first looked through a telescope pointed beyond our world and toward the moon and stars beyond. He, too, had his breath stolen by the wonders of the universe and, what’s more, by the Maker of those wonders. To the detriment of his own safety and good standing in society, he completely revolutionized mankind’s understanding of the universe with his “radical” ideas of the planets revolving around the sun. Like Lucy, Dash, and the watchmaker, Simon, in this humble story, Galileo found miracles in both the small and the grand.
He said, “The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.”
I smile reading those words. For isn’t that just how God loves us? Shining light intimately into our lives, in personal ways, even though He is simultaneously orchestrating rising tides, star fall, sunrises, and sunsets.
I am a quiet soul. Sporadic even online, harboring hobbit-like tendencies toward tea and comfort and general aversion to adventure . . . but God allows even quiet souls to help fight for that light in this world. He placed a pen in my hand, some words in my heart, and my hope is to use them to fight for that light. For the wonder. For the hope.
I think He has done the same for you, too. He has entrusted you with tools uniquely meant for you. And tools are meant to be used to carve awa
y that darkness and magnify the light.
Be encouraged, friend, in whatever you are setting your hand to today. In His hands, crafted with His heart and placed into yours . . . it matters.
With joy,
Amanda
Acknowledgments
More than any other story I can recall working on, Set the Stars Alight feels to me like one of those wooden nesting dolls, where each doll opens up to reveal another doll inside. On it goes, layer by layer, story upon story. This novel holds within it so many other stories, hearts, and sources of inspiration, without whom it may have turned out to be merely a hollow shell. Here are a few, in no particular order, to whom I offer all my thanks.
Simon Murphy, curator at the London Transport Museum, who gave me an incredibly detailed account of the underground power outage of August 28, 2003. Imagine my shock at the coincidence when I learned that one of the affected lines was the Jubilee Line. This was long after the ship in the story had been named the Jubilee . . . and the shiver of coincidence this fact gave me just had to make its way into the story. Thank you, Mr. Murphy and the LTM, for your care-filled records and willingness to help!
Henry, Archdeacon of Huntington, who wrote in his 1100s chronicle of England’s history, Historia Anglorum, of King Canute’s challenge to the sea, and proclamation thereafter.
The people of Coober Pedy, who carve homes into the earth and pull light from the dark.
The industrious and whimsical London souls who have held festivals on ice, cricket matches on dry riverbeds, mudlarking to find treasure in the muck—and made memorable delight out of potentially disastrous times on the Thames.
To those ladies and gents who climbed the grand stair of the Boston Theatre, never knowing that in doing so, they ascended the air above a house encased beneath. And to Paul Collins, who with the briefest mention of this phenomenon in his memoir, Sixpence House, set my mind reeling years ago. How he learned of it, I know not, for it took every ounce of my research-sleuth muscles to dig up the briefest mention of it from a single old newspaper clipping. How a large house beneath an even larger staircase could disappear twice, entirely, from history, I don’t know . . . but perhaps the lives it once held can be honored here.