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He was desperate to tell him—or her—to look to the skies when things were dark. For there always would be light. Steady and sure.
He was suddenly a young boy, back on the roof of Edgecliffe, flipping through the pages of Uranometria, untangling stars into shapes and feeling so much smaller—and so much better, in his smallness.
Broken. Whole. Alive. The three twisted and twisted and summoned his mother’s song, which used to do battle for him, warding off the dark. Setting the stars alight.
So she closed her eyes, wishing for sleep, wishing to remember and to forget, all at once.
“Perhaps,” he said. “But one thing I do know. Made-up tales that stand through time . . . they are echoes.” “Echoes of what?” He thought for a moment. “Truth.”
“There’s a secret in that. Usually, the true stories are even more fantastical than the made-up ones.”
“Just think,” the watchmaker said. “One never knows what ground one is treading upon.”
But now his expression ran deeper. The longing and belonging stirred the ribbon of space between them until her chest ached with an echo of it.
“The Theatre in the Sky,” she said. “With the staircase house.” She laughed. “Yes, exactly.” He looked at her, shaking his head, mouth slightly agape, as if she’d just told him the most astounding thing in history. And just as quickly, he stuck his hand up in the air and waited. “High five, Matchstick Girl!” She laughed. Dash. Miraculous and down to earth. He did her heart good in so many ways. She slapped his hand and loved the way his smile lingered, holding her victory inside himself like a treasure.
She’d watched Violette, the way the girl soaked in the world around her, gathered treasures, and searched for miracles—and found them right where she walked and breathed and lived her moments.
Soon they were stepping from the train with its yellow-and-blue paint bright against the stone-and-brick of Oxford. Teahouse aromas swirled into the streets, pubs touted fish and chips and gravy, and sidewalks unrolled in cobbles and unseen footsteps of writers and reformers and politicians of eras gone by.
But where was the magic in the glowing screen of kilowatts staring at her in white-screened splendor? There was nothing of the chase in it, nothing of the dust upon pages of books, the way touching the spines of old tomes was like touching a world outside one’s lifetime. Reaching into the past and fingering pages that some other soul hundreds of years before had last touched.
Here she slipped into the sound of turning pages as a queen into a trailing cape, finding their adornment safe and boundless.
“An honor, Miss Claremont. A true honor. I am Spencer T. Ripley. Your humble servant, ready to usher you into the halls of greatness.” Where had this fellow come from? She’d gotten the basics from her Internet search, but he seemed rather more like a visitor from the past who had landed in the wrong era, and was as happy as could be to make everyone aware of the wonders of his true time. His dark eyes shone behind his wire-rimmed glasses, radiating some sort of eternal youth.
How . . . had this happened? The return of the boy who had been so much of the reason this cottage had been home. It had felt so empty for the past two years, to the point that she’d usually dreaded returning. And now . . . it felt like home again. Because family, gathered from odd corners of the earth and pieced together in growing friendship, was here.
“Come on,” Dash said when she slowed her pace. “Are you sure? I don’t know if I’m allowed . . .” He looked up at the darkening sky and then back at her. Let the door shut. “Know what this telescope was built for? To study two-star systems.” He looked as if he’d just proven a point, but she didn’t know what it was. “Stars that orbit each other,” he said. “Like Capella A and Capella B. To us, they’re so close they look like one bright star. But they’re two separate stars that keep crossing into each other’s space. Over and over, until they become one to anyone looking on.” “I had no idea,” Lucy
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KAJSDHFHSADKFHSAKHFU
“Some things never change,” he said. “You’re in the west . . .” She looked down, at her toes pointed directly at his, with the prime meridian running right between them. “And you’re in the east,” she said. “Worlds apart.” “And yet . . .” His fingers reached for hers, knuckles brushing and waiting. Patient, steady, as she slowly laced hers between his. Familiar and yet . . . so different from when he’d held her hand on the Tube as teens. So very, very different. As if every moment between then and now had been leading up to this, the homecoming of their hands.
That hope was breaking out of that secret room now. Slowly, tenderly, Dash kissed the fingertips of the watchmaker’s daughter, right there where time began. Fingertip by fingertip, brick by brick, that room in her heart opened up. A perfect swirl of purest joy. Deepest fear. Longest hope. And truest, dearest Dashel Greene. “I’m here now,” he said. “If that’s okay with you.” His eyes were wide, waiting. Looking a little like the lost boy again . . . all grown up. And this time, it was her turn to find him. With a heart filling, she pulled his hands to her lips, and kissed the fingers that
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AHHHOOHHMYGOSHHH
“That song . . . how do you know it?” She screwed the lid back on the canteen. “Used to drift on the wind and over the fields, from the great house,” she said. “Got itself inside of me, and it’s been locked away there ever since.” His mind etched a vision of her, standing over her sheep in the fields, hair whipping about in the same wind that carried his mother’s song.
His thoughts ran into prayers like the rivulets at his feet, which joined into one trickling stream glistening in the dark. That stream ran between his feet, its melody seeming to tease him. As if it were telling him a riddle, or asking him to follow it.
And curiosity—as it was meant to from the time God breathed life into the great wide world—made way for wonder.
Dash’s smile grew serious. “Yeah. But more, too. It was as if everything on earth was a sermon to him.”
And this our life . . . finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.’” “Lucy Claremont, if that was you quoting Shakespeare, then I’ll be watching the skies for flying pigs next.” Her cheeks burned. She had taken a Shakespeare course her first year at university, pining for the boy who had taken to muttering the bard’s lines in the reading room.
“I wonder if it’s even possible to overestimate the significance of a single life,” she said, brushing bits of dirt from the pawn and standing it with care upon the old headstone. “Words spoken, hearts changed, a meal provided to a hungry sojourner—who knows? Who knows how far everyday actions reach? It’s incredible, when you think of it.”
Everything a miracle.”
“Starry night in human form—that’s what you are,” Clara said. “Implicit.” “I think you mean exquisite, sister,” Sophie said, quirking a brow and . . . had she actually smiled at Lucy? “Quite.” Clara picked a flyaway bit of fleece from Lucy’s dress.
As the quartet struck up again, this time with the wild fiddle strains gentled into those of Bach, Lucy spotted Dash headed toward Sophie. She watched as he said something to the prickly woman, stuffing his hands in his pockets. Looking at the ground. Waiting. Sophie looked ashen. She pursed her lips tightly, took a step back. Dash pulled a hand out of his pocket to wave it in apology, saying something else. But Sophie caught his hand midair, lifted her chin, and—this much Lucy could decipher across the room—said a simple “Yes.” And they stepped out on the dance floor. Curious, Lucy opened her
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Aw
“Whoa,” Dash said, putting his hands up between them and backing off. “Just looking for a dance partner. I’m quite a catch on the dance floor, if you didn’t notice. I only tripped eleven times.” Lucy laughed. “But Sophie taught me a thing or two and I am now ready to sweep you off your feet, Matchstick Girl.” He held out a hand, grinning that lopsided grin.
I LOVE HIM
A lilting, quirky waltz began to play, one with a skip in its step and an occasional minor chord, one with a sense of wonder as much as a sense of humor. Like it had been written for the two of them.
“What did you mean, Dash?” “Which time? I hardly ever know what I mean.” “You always know what you mean.” It was one of the things about him she’d missed terribly when he’d gone. He always said what he thought. He always asked what he wondered. And he blazed right past small talk and into the heart of the matter, whether the matter be his undying love of marmalade, or the meaning of life as gleaned from his observance of the stars. But
She sighed, playing into his game. “You said I was an M4.” “Ah, she divulges her secrets at last,” he said, eyes twinkling with candlelight. “The M4, eh? My bet says you’ve already dug up just what I meant.” “You don’t know that,” Lucy said, her offense only half real. He narrowed his eyes, nodding. “You’re right. I don’t. But I do know you conveniently disappeared at the Bodleian. I do know you went in the general direction of the science library. And . . .” He let the word trail out dramatically. “I once knew a girl who would never let a question hang over her for more than two seconds
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“Numbers have nothing to do with how extraordinary something is.”
His hands ran down her arms. “M4, even in your silence, you find a way to sing. Carving light from darkness, chasing down lost ships, giving a crazy guy like me a chance to know you again. My Matchstick Girl.”
SOBBINV
On the wings of the fiddle and the waves far beyond, the wind swooping into the tunnel and spinning about them, the girl and the boy who had crossed hemispheres and atmospheres and everywhere in between, stepped together—and their lips met. Soft, safe, warm, strong. Lucy’s heart swelled within her, both aching with fear of losing him again and spilling over with joy at being in his arms. Her Dash. Perhaps Father had been right. Nothing was impossible.
Life was a wonder, that it could spin into such a tale.
It was . . . what it meant to be seen. To have one’s heart held. “To be known is no shame,” her mother had told him.
He had laid bare his soul, and in this touch, she was reaching through the walls that divided them and gathering that soul up.
Killian Blackaby raised a finger, a twinkle in his eye. “My life has but one mission, my boy—to find a ballad for the ages, to preserve it. But it does not follow that I shall make it known. All shall be cloaked, all shall be veiled.”
“Offerin’ help to the damsel, are ye?” she asked, a twinkle in her eye. “Have ye forgotten which of us sailed this old girl here to begin with?” “Right.” Frederick laughed. “I won’t tell you how long it took me to get to where I didn’t flop like a fish from the rigging.” She laughed, genuinely enjoying herself. It seemed so, anyway, and he prayed it to be true. “Come on, then.” He led the way, she racing up the netting beside him. He sped up, giving her a challenge, and the look of sheer delight on her face was priceless.
His arms, which had cradled her babe but had never so much as brushed her shoulder, ached as if they were near home. And they burned then, as he stepped back instead. Slowly.
Here they were. Two souls, buried alive beneath the earth, beside the sea, in a place of nowhere—an empty cave that felt impossibly full as Juliette took flight where there was no sky. This was a place of impossible. And what a beautiful impossible it was.
