by Amanda Dykes
Praise for Amanda Dykes
“Moving between a contemporary setting and the early nineteenth century, Amanda Dykes has written a sweeping split-time novel, in turns mysterious and adventurous, mythical and romantic. Filled with magic, wonder, and gorgeous writing, Set the Stars Alight is a stirring gem from a gifted author.”
—Julie Klassen, bestselling author of A Castaway in Cornwall
“Amanda’s lush tale took me to another time where her subtly crafted scenes left memorable impressions of the mysterious expanse of faith, hope, and especially love. Timeless love. I hope you’ll linger over the pages. Hidden in the carefully crafted words is an invitation to share the rare gift of a sense of wonder.”
—Robin Jones Gunn, bestselling author of the HAVEN MAKERS SERIES and Christy Award Winner
“The stars align beautifully in this latest tale from Amanda Dykes. A split-time search for light both in the past and present, brings the reader on a poetic journey to find belonging and hope. Misted with sea water and lit by the moon, the words on every page of Set the Stars Alight become integral to the reader’s own journey, and the ending will resonate long after the last page has been closed.”
—Jaime Jo Wright, author of On the Cliffs of Foxglove Manor and Christy Award-Winning novel The House on Foster Hill
“An absolute gem of a debut! With her breathtaking prose and captivating setting, Amanda Dykes weaves a tale of utter charm along the rugged coast of Maine. Whose Waves These Are transcends to the highest level of fiction. The author has paused to see humanity at its most real and precious, leaving the reader to tuck this one among the classics. It’s a novel that wraps around the heart, breathing of hope and light in every scene. Equal parts relevant and nostalgic, this is a novel for the ages.”
—Joanne Bischof, Christy and Carol Award–winning author of The Gold in These Hills
“This is the book everyone will talk about all year—lyrical, lovely, full of heart and heartache, secrets kept and revealed. These characters, this town, and their stories will seep into your soul and leave you wanting more. A novel of hope and reconciliation you won’t forget for a long time, probably not forever.”
—Sarah Sundin, bestselling and award-winning author of When Twilight Breaks
“With a gorgeously inimitable voice, Dykes sets herself apart with a debut novel as timeless as its themes of redemption and everlasting love. I dare you not to be swept into a yarn of age-old tales and seaside secrets deftly penned by a lyrical pen that pliantly shifts between contemporary and historical frames. Romantic, spellbinding, and wonderfully unique, Dykes’s sense of setting and emotional resonance is nearly unparalleled. A book world to be savored and returned to again and again.”
—Rachel McMillan, author of The London Restoration
Books by Amanda Dykes
Yours Is the Night
Set the Stars Alight
Whose Waves These Are
NOVELLAS
Up from the Sea from Love at Last: Three Historical Romance Novellas of Love in Days Gone By
From Roots to Sky from The Kissing Tree: Four Novellas Rooted in Timeless Love
© 2021 by Amanda Joy Dykes
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
www.bakerpublishinggroup.com
Ebook edition created 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-3146-5
Scripture quotations are from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
This is a work of historical reconstruction; the appearances of certain historical figures are therefore inevitable. All other characters, however, are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Cover design by Kathleen Lynch/Black Kat Design
Cover image of poppies by Trevor Payne/Trevillion Images
Map illustration by Najla Kay
Author is represented by Books & Such Literary Agency
To Ben,
my beloved.
The “boy born in a barn.”
What a gift to travel this road with you.
And to the four million men who served in the American Expeditionary Forces of the Great War. Your journey was harder than we can know, your lives more meaningful than we can say.
Contents
Cover
Praise for Amanda Dykes
Half Title Page
Books by Amanda Dykes
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Map of France
Epigraph
Prologue
1. Matthew Petticrew
2.
3. Mira
4. Captain Jasper Truett
5. George Piccadilly
6. Mira
7. Matthew
8. Henry Mueller
9. Captain Jasper Truett
10. Matthew
11. Mira
12. Chaplain George Piccadilly
13. Matthew
14. Captain Jasper Truett
15. Mira
16. Matthew
17.
18. Mira
19. Matthew
20.
21. Mira
22. Henry
23. Matthew
24. George
25. Mira
26. Matthew
27. Captain Jasper Truett
28. Mira
29. Henry
30. Mira
31. George
32. Matthew
33. Henry
34. Mira
35. Matthew
36. George
37. Mira
38. Matthew
39. Henry
40. Captain Jasper Truett
41. Matthew
42. Mira
43. Henry
44. Mira
45.
46. Captain Jasper Truett
47. Matthew
48. George
49. Mira
Epilogue: Matthew
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Ads
Back Cover
“The day is Yours,
the night also is Yours . . .”
Psalm 74:16
Prologue
October 24, 1921
Chalons-sur-Marne, France
Ceremony for the Choosing of the Unknown Soldier
There are days you live over and over again, for as long as you live. October twenty-fourth of 1918, just days before the unending war ended, was one of mine. I went into a forest of darkness that day, never imagining how that place would claim me. Four years ago, to the day.
And four caskets before me now.
There were four of us, then, who took a journey. Armed with bayonets and canteens and a mission we had no idea how to accomplish, bumbling fools that we were. A mission of greater import than we realized at the time. One that would change us all.
I watched now from the outskirts of the solemn ceremony as a man in uniform gripped not a bayonet, but a bouquet. A grip of roses�
��white. Pure. Absent of the scarlet we’d all seen too much of. Slowly, he walked down the line of boxes that held the remnants of so much life. Nobody knew whom the boxes held. And yet everybody knew a thousand soldiers, brothers, friends whom they might hold.
We were no different. I stood shoulder to shoulder with two of my brothers from that time. We’d seen it all, then. We’d seen each other at our best and our worst. We’d scorned one another and needed one another and had left that battle-gouged land with battle-gouged hearts. We’d left one of us behind, in that forest, and though we would never know who lay in these caskets, every one of us wondered: Is it him?
The man before us now would walk this line. He would place that spray of roses on a single casket. The casket would be taken back across the sea, to our nation’s capital, to the soldier’s homeland, to be entombed there. Guarded, always. Kept safe from war, from loss, from all the atrocities he had faced. And in this . . . he would bring something to a nation. Something we brought out of the forest that day, a lifetime ago.
Hope.
This is our tale.
May we never forget.
1
Matthew Petticrew
1900
Greenfield, New York
Rules:
1) Keep off the racetrack, you dolt! That’s what Mr. MacMannus says. He says if Maplehurst Stables is the crowned jewel of thoroughbred racing, then “that dirt you think you can just run on any old time is good as gold.”
2) Feed the hens and horses between the hours of four and five, and if you finish early, stay out and play. Do not come back to the caretaker’s quarters before that. And don’t run on that gold dirt.
I looked at my old notebook, with these two rules scratched inside. I was five—almost six—and I had written them down with the help of Mr. Haggerty, the gardener, so I wouldn’t forget. When I forgot, bad things happened. He’d looked at me a little funny when I told him what they were, but he wrote down the hard words for me before getting back to pruning his roses.
The rules weren’t so bad. The rest of the green rolling hills of Greenfield Springs, New York, were mine for the taking, and most of the racetrack, too. But tonight—tonight there was one more rule.
“Stay with Mrs. Bluet, tonight,” Mother had said. “You know the way?” She’d smiled and winced at the same time, cradling her swollen belly before reaching out to ruffle my hair. I was not the smartest boy around, but I could tell something was different. Her breath came quick or sometimes not at all, like she’d been the one caught running around the racetrack and not me.
Her hand was stiffer than usual, and her smile so tight. It wasn’t right. Her smile always went deep and wide, probably the deepest, widest thing I knew.
So, I packed a clean shirt like she told me to right after she’d kissed me on the top of my head. But I tucked myself under her window outside instead of heading to the cook’s quarters at Mr. MacMannus’s house. It sat just on top of the hill, looking down on our little house, the way hawks look down at field mice. I didn’t like it there. It was called Maplehurst too, just like the stables. It sounded sweet like the syrup, but for all its fancy rooms and people coming and going in suits and dresses, it felt awful cold and un-sweet to me. I accidentally called it Maplehurts once when I was there eating a molasses cookie in the kitchen. Mrs. Bluet looked at me with flour on her face and her eyebrows raised and said, “Well, young Matthew, if that isn’t about the rightest thing I ever heard.”
I did not wish to go there that night. I didn’t want to be near Mr. MacMannus and his rules and the big, cold house. I didn’t want to be away from my mother. She needed me. I could tell.
Only once did I peek inside the window, where an oil lamp glowed so dim I could barely see her there on the bed. Her face was so pinched up that it hurt me to look at her, and her cheeks were wet with tears.
That was the night I first felt the Flame. I called it “the Flame,” for it burned in my chest, right where Mrs. Bluet said my heart was. I once saw them set off dynamite at the quarry over the hills. The way the spark chased a cord to the place it would explode—that’s how I felt. A spark hot within me, a cord running between me and Mother, but I was not allowed in, not allowed to let that spark rush in and explode inside the little house and chase her pain away.
Two ladies came and spoke together so quietly I couldn’t hear. Mother always said that hearing was my gift because I could hear things others couldn’t. Even so, strain as I might, I couldn’t make out what their concerned tones were saying. One woman kept coming and going, bringing cloths and boiling water, while the other one stayed with Mother and said things to her and held her hand while her cries turned into the sort of moan that could dig into your insides and hollow you out. What was wrong?
The groans grew louder and longer until the spark inside of me was gone, smothered by a blanket of fear so heavy I didn’t know whether to run or stay.
So, I prayed. We always prayed on Sundays. Mother would tuck her white blanket around my shoulders and read scriptures to me at our table beneath the very window I now crouched under. She baked something very special on those days, like an apple cake just my size, which she gave completely to me, or vinegar pie, which we shared. I felt like a king on Sundays, wrapped up in that blanket like those red capes that kings wear, only mine was so old and had been washed so many times, it was much softer than any king’s.
But for the rest of the week, she was quiet and troubled most evenings, her only prayers silent, and mine, too.
That night was a Tuesday. I prayed aloud on a Tuesday for the first and only time I could remember, that night. The shortest prayer—it did not rhyme or sound very right, but it was the truest prayer I had ever prayed.
“God in heaven, help her.” I pressed my eyes shut so tight it must have sent my prayer higher, louder. It had to. I rocked myself back and forth to the words and said it again. And again, and again, and again, my words mingling with her cries until her cries grew quiet and were replaced by another, smaller cry. That of a baby.
Something strange happened, then. I have never felt it since that moment and maybe never will again. But as I rose to my knees and clutched the windowsill, my fingernails caked with dirt, and peeked inside that golden-glow room, I saw something perfect.
Mother, happy. A baby in her arms, all wrapped up in the old king’s cape blanket and her smile once again so deep and wide.
That was the last time I saw her. I did go up to Maplehurst after that, and when the morning came, I awoke to Mrs. Bluet sitting beside me and holding my hand. She looked like the whole world had cracked open overnight. And when she spoke, I found that it had.
Mother was gone. She had died in the night, gone to the angels and God above. Leaving behind one tiny angel in her place, and both of us without a mother or a home.
2
1914
The world was going to pieces at war, way across the sea. But at Maplehurst, the earth erupted every day at twelve o’clock sharp. It started as a rumble. A tumbling, trembling sound that burrowed through the soil like it burrowed through my veins. And then it grew louder, the current separating into rhythm, the rhythm pulsing into force, eclipsing the tick of the clock on the stable wall.
I looked down the corridor. I’d pitched hay, mucked stalls, and pounded horseshoes since before dawn. I’d known little else in my nineteen years, but it was a good life. My work was done—almost. And the pulsing called to me until I obeyed, leaving the home stable behind and letting my own pulse sink into it as I ran out the big white doors, up the pasture hill, over the ridge until I could see the cloud of dust rising, like it was reaching up to see me. My own feet pounding back into the earth in response: I’m coming.
I knew each one of those beasts like my own always-smudged face. From the time Mr. MacMannus discovered me and Celia squirreled away in the old loft rooms over the stable, where Mrs. Bluet and Mr. Haggerty took turns smuggling us food and staying with us while we were still small, he’d looked at
us grim and silent and said a few words—powerful and unhappy words—to our unlikely caretakers. They’d said a few words back—quiet and strong ones—that seemed to silence his anger, or at least send it deeper inside of him, away from us. Ever since, I’d been the resident stable hand, and Celia a small seamstress at the ready, mending blankets and garments for horses and humans alike by the light of our one window. She sewed, and I worked shoulder to shoulder with the best thoroughbreds in New England. “The finest in the country,” Mr. MacMannus liked to tout to his visitors.
It was not a bad life. We had a home. We had food. We had the gruff humor of Mr. Haggerty, who gave us a garden plot out behind the barn and liked to call me “the boy born in a barn!” Stable, I’d correct him with a laugh, even though we both knew neither was true. I only lived in a stable, and Celia was closer to being born in one than I had been.
Still, something in me rather filled up with a sort of pride when the gardener called me that. At times, it felt like it must be true, this tale of my being born in a barn. For this was what I was born for. Mr. Haggerty started saving the funnies from his Sunday edition of the Herald, slipping it my way so I could read “The Escapades of the Rough Riders.” It was a comic strip, but nothing was comic about it at all. I followed the daring deeds of Theodore Roosevelt, Jasper Truett, and the rest of the men, wondering why I hadn’t been born two or three decades before so that I could’ve been valiant alongside them.
Mrs. Bluet, whenever she sensed either of us was feeling sad, would bake a blueberry buckle before the sun was up and sneak it our way. It was a consolation, but also an omen of sorts. I always got a sinking feeling when I smelled the sweet dish in the air, for it meant something difficult was afoot.
We had good work to do. We had a surly overseer in Mr. MacMannus, who’d tanned my hide a time or two when he’d discovered footprints on the track. I couldn’t tell him who they really belonged to. But for the most part, he ignored us, so long as we did our work and didn’t raise a racket.
Celia had inherited Mother’s deep and wide smile, and she loved to hear me tell of it. She’d soaked in the stories of vinegar pies and Sunday scriptures like a person starved for air, especially during the long nights bedded down with a sick mare or struggling foal. She was drawn to them, then, a better sickbed attendant than I, and would stay up all night asking for stories and tending to the horses, with a knack for soothing a worried animal. Stitching its wounds, healing both fear and hurt.