She had turned to go when a scrap of paper on the table caught her eye. She knew it was for her before she even read her name, printed there in his stick-straight writing. Dash always wrote with fine-tip permanent marker. “No sense writing something down if you don’t mean it,” he’d once told her.
Unfolding it now, her heart sank at the sight of only a few lines. She didn’t know what she’d hoped for. A novel? A letter? A map to find him, perhaps?
But instead, it read:
To the Matchstick Girl. I had to go . . . my aunt had a job offer she couldn’t say no to, over in the States. She said it was time I returned to my roots. I know my roots are here, if they’re anywhere—right out by our fountain—but I’ve got to go. I’ll write as soon as I can. I won’t say good-bye to you, because I know it’ll never be good-bye for us. Not ever.
And that was it. She turned a circle, slowly, in that empty flat, hating the paper in her hands. Anger boiled up in her at Dash. For leaving, for not saying good-bye, for so many things.
When she and her dad looked through the telescope that night, she missing Dash and his glasses and his supernova quips, he tried to encourage her as she had him in the midst of his darkest hour. “When things seem dark, Lucy, that’s when you fight for the light.”
The next night she’d found a book on her pillow, tied with a length of twine and a lilac tucked underneath. Dad’s work again, with a nod to Mum in that lilac.
Into the Void: The Search for the HMS Jubilee, bound in scarlet.
“Dad,” she said, warmth in her voice at his thoughtfulness in hunting down a book on one of her favorite subjects. She dove in, devouring the accounts of seafloor searches, underwater trench excavations, all in search of the famed lost ship that had vanished with a traitor aboard during the Napoleonic wars.
True to his promise, Dash sent a letter from New Jersey. A few lines meant to be a friendly hello, but only enlarging the hollow place inside of her. She tried to hide it but felt Dad’s compassion as he watched her, the determined set of his jaw.
A year later a postcard from Harvard in Massachusetts announced he’d been admitted to the astronomy and astrophysics programme. Next stop the moon! But not before stopping back at Candlewick to pick you up, Lucy. If you’re not diving the ocean depths and finding the lost ship Jubilee by then, that is.
His words made her smile, that time. Less of the longing, more of a joy for her friend. For his dreams, his home in the stars. Time, as she had learned, did soothe the rough edges away from wounds, even if the wounds still ran deep and a distant ache remained. And the pain was once again stifled by the appearance of another book on her pillow, a biography of the traitor Frederick Hanford, the man who absconded with the Jubilee and disappeared without a trace.
She heard from Dash a few more times over the years, and soon she was neck-deep in her own studies at university. She wondered, sometimes, looking up at the domed ceiling in her beloved Oxford library, how Dash was doing.
And she wondered where he was when she desperately needed him more than a decade later. For as Dash found his place in the world, the watchmaker had fallen ill. Lucy declared she would put her master’s degree on hold, but Dad didn’t allow it. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said stubbornly. “Chase that mystery, Lucy. Find your answers.”
She was researching the Jubilee, and it gave her father, in particular, a spark of joy to see the elements of his fireside tales igniting a flame in her.
But Lucy was as stubborn as he, and so they found a middle ground. She moved home, working on her thesis from afar with special arrangement from her mentor and professor, Dr. Dorothy Greenleaf, and she tended to the watch shop at Cecil Court to be nearby on Dad’s bad days.
She got lost in the pages of the British Museum’s reading room for hours at a time, emerging to lay the fire at night when the watchmaker no longer could, his health failing faster. She sat beside him when a stroke stilled the work of his hands, but not his heart, and she filled the silence with her own stories procured from the annals of history.
It was Lucy who “put his affairs in order”—the doctor’s words, uttered with compassion, shattering her world with one gentle blow. And it was Lucy who, walking the rooms of the too-empty cottage at thirty years old, felt her pocket watch’s warm, engraved metal slip from her hands and fall to the ground. It sliced through those old dusty sunbeams and winked back at her from the creaking floorboard. In that same spot where Dash used to sit, glasses sliding down his nose as he worked the screwdriver to adjust the telescope they were building . . . before he disappeared.
But when she knelt to retrieve the watch it would not come. The chain snagged, caught like her heart, stitching itself to this place. With fingers long accustomed to coaxing delicate parts to cooperate, she eased the chain from its splintered captivity . . . and stilled.
It was no splinter at all. It was a carefully notched pull, spun on its wooden axis as if to point at the darkness beneath. Holding her breath, Lucy lifted it and pulled out a brittle envelope.
Every riddle has a safeguard. Dad’s writing scrawled upon it from a time when his hand was much steadier.
Opening the envelope, she found a faded watercolor picture of a stone-clad structure—part of a castle, perhaps. It looked as if it might have been painted from a rooftop, for dark sky pinpricked with starlight served as a canopy to the seascape below. The scene sent a shiver up Lucy’s spine. Five white sea stacks rose from the churning black waves like so many bony fingers, such that any ship would be dashed to pieces if it sailed into them.
At the bottom of the painting, studied handwriting—perhaps a bit shaky—spelled out three words. At first she thought it to be the name of the building pictured or the harbor in view. But instead the three words read to her narrowed eyes, The Way Home. The right half of the painting was torn clean off, and part of the building with it. And in the bottom corner where an artist might have made his mark, a single initial: J.
The rumble of the Underground shook right through the floor and straight into Lucy’s veins, thundering with her pulse. She slipped the painting into the envelope, this vestige of life and mystery. It meant something, and she must know what it was. As the shaking walls stilled, in breathless anticipation, Lucy opened her watch and spoke into the room full of memories:
“Let the story begin.”
seven
Edgecliffe Estate
East Sussex, England
August 1802
The wind rose again in the night, and with it, Father’s temper. The two were intertwined. A gale bellowed down the cliffs to the sea below, snatching up its fury in swirls and delivering it back into The Admiral’s soul. Cannon fire in the English Channel beyond rolled in like thunder, echoes of Napoleon’s ongoing war.
Orange fire glowing from the hearth behind him, The Admiral stood at the window in his study as a man far from home, commanding a battle he could not see. Lamenting his absence from it, and the way the endless searing pain in his leg caused a pain deeper than the physical. It took him from that war, shut him out of it.
The cannons, and the wind, and the fury of it all would pour out on whomever was around.
On this night, Frederick Hanford was determined it would not be him this time. He would not wait for his father to summon him for an inquisition.