Set the Stars Alight

by Amanda Dykes

After that night, Elias and Frederick were not exactly fast friends. One did not owe undying allegiance to the other in effusive thanks for saving his life. But two clumsy boys forced into manhood became something more. Brothers.

Aww

He looked over at Elias, who was tracing images into the air with a stockinged foot, his big toe poking through a hole. He . . . was her one good thing. The one reason she smiled. He and his big, fat, clumsy toe.

LOL

So it went, him on the outside looking on—just as it always had been.

Finished with her admonitions, Sophie knelt and gathered a lamb up into her reedy arms, and something changed. Gentleness entered the woman, like a thing long lost, finding home at last.

Barnabas sidled up. “We none of us know quite what to do when something is broken. Might be we’ll make it worse. But if we do nothing, it’ll surely stay broken. Ain’t it worth takin’ a chance on that?”

“Take a broken thing, gather around, and wrap it. That’s where it begins.

This was marine archaeology brought to life. The study of life in and around the sea. And Edgecliffe—the way it leaned in its ruined state to get a better view of the village below, as if an outsider looking in, seemed so . . . familiar.

“Can we go there now?” Dash tipped his head at Edgecliffe. “Go there?” She nodded, her heart beating quicker, her feet carrying her that way. “Yeah,” he said, laughing. “Looks like you already are.”

She surveyed the scene, tried to envision Frederick Hanford, whom everyone knew from the oil painting his father had had commissioned after his promotion. He seemed a solemn fellow, with his dark hair and blue eyes which always seemed, to Lucy, so sad. She’d wondered more than once what the reason for the sadness had been. And whether, perhaps, that sadness had been part of what had driven him to betray his ship. His country. But he had, and so her compassion was short-lived.

What were the sounds of childhood for an infamous traitor?

Yelling and pianos

This place was peppering her with parts of herself. She felt as if she’d stepped into a swirl of memories, all out of order, all pulling her in.

“I mean . . . ” What was the American term for it? “Costumes? Period dress?” “If you want to name it after punctuation, I’d pick a semicolon. Because it’s semi-crazy.”

LOL

“He spoke of your studies, your work. He was so proud of you. He spoke of you being as stubborn as ever and refusing any tea but Earl Grey.” The laughter felt good. “Long live the Earl,” she said. Then Dash’s face grew more serious. “And he said he never could figure out how we’d drifted apart. He said my head was in the stars, always had been, and always should be. And that you, old soul that you are, are moonlight. Pure light in the darkness. But he insisted that the moon and stars aren’t so different, our worlds weren’t as far apart as we imagined them to be, and that someone needed to knock some sense into us both.

and he was right of course

“I’m sorry, Dash,” she said. “I could have reached out, too. I just thought . . . I didn’t want to be a bother, and—” “A bother?” He vaulted himself from his leaning position to stand at his full height. With a flicker of hesitation, he lifted his hand and let his fingers touch her jawline. Steady, kind, familiar—and yet . . . entirely new, this jolt it sent straight into her heart. It was the first time he had touched her in fifteen years, and something, in that small gesture, fell away. Broke into a chasm within that scared her, for it was the place she kept the treasures—and she had so few of them now.

But he remained serious. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life,” he said, “and letting go of you was the biggest.

JNFKAHBSDFHBAUHFU

There beside the warmth, it seemed a place where happiness was born.

Her hazel eyes flashed sheer disbelief. “But that’s impossible! The only place those are found anymore is atop the hill. That’s much too far for you to climb with your lung trouble, Roger Falke. Why, the last time we were there we were mere schoolchildren.” “Some things are worth a long journey,” the man said. “You know that, Clara.”

STOP

He studied her, his concern deepening. And then, rather than trying to explain it away or offer a platitude of some kind, he just reached over, right into her aching confession, and took hold of her hand, with no apparent thought of ever letting go.

“All stories—the very best ones, anyhow—may be full of fairy tales and nonsense and lore, but if they are to be lasting . . . they must have truth at their very core.”

Clara twisted her apron in her hands. “Oof,” she said, cheeks glowing. “’Tisn’t right to speak so of the dead. So long gone, and us with no way of knowin’ what’s true and what’s fabled over time.” Lucy liked that. “Fabled over time”—as if stories changed and grew, facts and twists sprinkling upon them like sweet white confectioner’s sugar from Clara’s sifter.

God had a way of redeeming wounds with the strengths in others.

Elias and his home among rocks and seaweed . . . matched with Juliette, and her home—indeed, her life—of fortitude and sunshine. It had redemption written all over it.

that’s so cute actually

“Ah, blokes, now gather ’round and hear the ballad of the poor cotton weaver. A sorry tale, if ever there was one.” He cleared his throat and began to sing. And when he sang, everything ridiculous about Killian Blackaby became suddenly solemn. His baritone voice rose to the beams above as if it had been hewn and mellowed right along with the wood.

THIS WRITING

Frederick had seen a soul broken in those words—harm done to him by his own father. And now that he had the chance to stand guard against that legacy in the life of his own child, Elias would choose right, a thousand times over. Frederick had been a fool to doubt it.

Elias was fastidious about keeping his letters from Juliette. He would trace the letters in the dim light and try to sound out the words—his wife teaching him to read, as it were, from across the ocean.

Reskell’s voice was in his head again. “Line up the factors, Master Frederick. Add them up with all logic, and the answer will become clear.”

“You’re the best friend a bloke could ask for, Freddy. You know that.” And with that, he was gone. Swallowed into the dark of the stairwell.

GONNA CRY

From what Sophie and Clara had said, the girl soaked in privacy and quiet as if it were the air she breathed.

I’ve been paying better attention to bookcases ever since we talked about the way books are history living right in the present.

The watchmaker smiled. “The historian wrote that he jumped back and proclaimed, ‘Let all the world know that the power of kings is empty and worthless, and there is no king worthy of the name save Him by whose will heaven, earth, and sea obey eternal laws.’”

“Just think.” Lucy murmured her father’s favorite words, folding Dash’s page back up and pressing it close to her heart, praying the other stories, in time, might return to her, too.

And yet, she knew it was more. There was something connecting these pieces. They circled her, spinning about her mind and tangling this way and that, trying different combinations but always falling flat. She, at the center of the puzzle pieces in their chaos, felt as much a question mark as they seemed.

“But I don’t live here,” Dash had said, when she’d given him a hard time about it. “I just sleep here. I live out there.” He’d gestured at the rolling green pastures.

The moon slipped from behind a cloud on the horizon, a herald of the night sky to come. “I saw it first!” they said at the same time, their childhood competition for the first to spot the moon resurrecting effortlessly.

that’s adorable

“Needing a dose of art in your life?” Lucy laughed. “More like needing to make sure I haven’t abandoned my senses. I want to be sure.” “You haven’t ‘abandoned your senses.’” Dash attempted a horrible excuse for a British accent as he quoted her. He’d been away much too long.

“Trust your gut, Lucy. You have better instincts than you give yourself credit for.” He stretched his arms to the sky and then locked his fingers behind his head in his familiar easy manner. Encouragement breathed from Dash like rivers to the sea. She’d forgotten this about him.

“Read it to me?” “Sure.” She flipped through her notebook, pulled out the printed pages, and began to read, keenly aware of Dash’s intense study of her. Or of the words she spoke. The latter, surely.

surely, right.

“Less ambient light leads to better star viewing,” Dash explained. “Right,” Lucy said. “I seem to remember a certain kid making me wear sunglasses indoors to make my eyes adjust.” “Sounds like a smart kid. And I bet you looked pretty cool, too.” Lucy laughed. “The coolest.”

“Dash insisted we have no light at first, but I told him, ‘You can’t look at burning balls of fire in the sky while you’re freezing. That’s too iconic.’” “Ironic, Clara,” Barnabas said from his perch on a nearby boulder. “Yes, that’s what I said.”

Lucy thought of the noises that filled her world back home. Wake-up alarms and message alerts and broadcasts that ushered her forward and forward, always forward. These bells seemed to do the opposite. They called her to pause. Breathe. Consider a soul who loved well and was well loved. “I like that,” she said. “We could do with a great deal more remembering.”

we find the Plough?” “The Plough,” Dash said with a smirk. “I think you mean the Big Dipper.” “Well, if you’re going to be all American about it, then yes. The Big Dipper. Could we find that?” “Sure! Anything you like, if it’s in season. The universe is yours, Matchstick Girl.”

“Nothing is impossible,” Dash said. That phrase had her once again sitting at her dad’s workbench, listening to his tales. Wondering where it was all going. Having it all boil down to a truth he repeated regularly—nothing is impossible.

But he was shaking his head, slow and thoughtful. “I think of your parents, sitting on the back stoop in that tiny garden, with the bushes blocking out the light. They—and you—gave me more in that minuscule plot of land than anything up there ever could. Because what people are chasing up there all amounts to one thing. It took me a decade and a half to learn this, but what they’re chasing . . . it was present right there with the crickets in that garden.” Her breath came thick, as if her lungs knew the words she meant to speak could cost her much. “What was it?” “Hope. Wonder. Light. All wrapped up in the stories, in truth.”

“Parts of them. But don’t you remember the way he used the fairy tales to tell us the true stories, after? The more I studied this universe—the more places I went—the more I realized what your parents were doing.” She waited. “They were building us a scaffolding. Story upon story, account after account, of true, impossible things—to hold up the truest story of all, when we would find it later.”

“The stars are magnificent, Lucy. Always have been, always will be. But no more magnificent or miraculous than the ground beneath our feet, where life grows from dirt and water and sunlight. Or the depths of your ocean. Or the very air we breathe. It all points to the same truth.”

that Yahuah is AWESOMEEEE

and see, Clara,” Roger said, imploring as he opened his arm toward the telescope. Hesitantly, she did, bending and looking, face a pinch of puzzlement until it broke into a wide smile. When Clara smiled, her whole countenance smiled. “I see it,” she said. “Oh, my. ‘Canst thou bind the cluster of the Pleiades . . .’” She sighed contentedly. “Such freedom, to know our limits. And to know the God who has none.”

“I . . . I’ve been making my way back to you ever since.” He inhaled, and his eyes shadowed, dropping away their jesting and morphing into pools of sincerity born of brokenness. She looked at him, questioning. And he looked back, a mirror of her questions. When he left, the magic of Candlewick Commons began to dissipate. And after Dad had died, it had just been a shell of a place. Nothing of the home it had once been. But here, standing before her, was all of the warmth and life of those lost years, in human form. Here . . . was home. Come knocking on her front door, when she’d thought it lost forever. “I’m glad you came back.”

Her father’s familiar words gave chase in her heart. “Don’t you forget it, Lucy my girl. The God of the stars . . . He is coming, and coming, and coming after you. Always. The heart of a father who will never forget his daughter.”

She shivered, but she had a hunch that had less to do with the temperature and more to do with the warmth of the company, the tight-woven fabric of family and community she had seen at the campfire tonight. It swelled her soul and carved the longing deeper in her to find such community herself.

Struggling to his feet, he stood. Empty palms to the sky, grief and joy twining about him until they cinched his lungs tight. He ached with every beat of his heart, drinking in hope as if it were air. A flood of May air filled him with hints of a summer he would never see. He shivered, gulped that air as tears ran down his face.