He always made demands like, “Boy. Name the sails.” And Frederick, nameless in the angry great man’s presence, would recite them like cogs in a machine. Mizzen. Mizzen topgallant. Main topsail. Fore topsail.
Sails that infused Frederick with the majesty and adventure of what awaited him out there in the great blue, someday. He knew them all, knew them perfectly.
But perfection did not satisfy. Father would not even look at him. Never acknowledge his good studying. Onward to the next thing. Name the decks. The guns. Captain of the Victory. The Orient. The Ville de Paris.
On, and on, and on it went. Glass catching firelight, firelight catching that word. Boy. As if he were just a tool in The Admiral’s arsenal, his one remaining campaign in Great Britain’s war.
In the past, the hollering had most often been met with another sound—the ivory-keyed piano. Father, in the west wing, poured amber liquid to fuel his tirade. Mother, in the east wing, sat at her instrument and countered the yelling the only way she knew how: Handel’s Messiah.
She, playing her part alone, had sent her notes down the corridor. An invitation to the man whose heart and hand she had won playing that very piece at a benefit concert for the London Foundling Hospital.
And not long afterward they’d had a son. But war, injury, and the loss of his place commanding his ship all but killed her husband. The void had run so deep in their home—with these three souls spread to the far corners of Edgecliffe Manor—it felt hopeless. But she’d done what she could—played her notes, always from the refrain: Let us break their bonds asunder.
She’d played them with passion, conviction, desperation. And perhaps more than anything else, with the effect of a long, flowing garment tossed up in the air like a sheet in the sun, falling over the yelling to dampen it. To breathe beauty back into the night.
Maria Hanford had not been the sort of mother who would sing Frederick a lullaby or draw him into an embrace, but these late-night concertos, he knew, were sent to do battle on his behalf. Fierce in their beauty, just like her.
Though Frederick had not known the reason at the time, as her end approached, the notes tumbled down the corridor with more desperation, colliding with Father’s yelling as a force sent to shatter the pummeling words, to wall them away from her son. The two forces had done battle there, right outside his bedroom door, tangling in the night.
It was thus that he would fall into a fitful sleep and forget, for a spell, the darkness that shook the age-old walls, sometimes turning in his hand the old sixpence his mother had slipped him once to buy a peppermint stick in the village. A peppermint stick would be gone in an instant, he’d known, but a coin, he could keep. Hold. Slip beneath his pillow to run his thumb over and pretend instead it was his mother who ran a thumb over his cheek, as mothers in the fairy stories always did.
He’d wrapped his thoughts in her notes, let them bury the cannon fire in the distance, and the shadowy someday of his future among those cannons.
Now that his mother’s notes had fallen silent—consumed forever by the fever—The Admiral’s amber liquid flowed more abundantly, and the wrathful words bellowed freely without any music to fight back.
So this night, when darkness shook those walls again, Frederick slipped inside them . . . and escaped. The house had been built with priest holes, hidden passageways, and secrets in its very stones. For the first time, he thanked the heavens for his dark suit of mourning, the way it blended him into the night.
He knew not where he was going as he stumbled past St. Thomas’s chapel and its graveyard with weathered tombstones sticking up into the night like crooked teeth. With wide young eyes and shaking hands and legs, he wandered on in the dark through cliff-side pasture paths and stick-built gates, growing more and more fearful as the harsh night descended.
But kindness, as it happened, did not reside only in Handel’s Messiah. It also dwelled in the blistered hands of a shepherd who gathered up Frederick’s shivering body from beneath the lone yew tree as if he were a lost lamb. He brought him home to a single-room cottage, laid him on a mattress of straw before the crackling fire.
In his nine years Frederick had never known such warmth. Not from the fireplaces of all the twenty-seven chimneys that turned his own home’s roofline into that of a fortress. Nor had he ever experienced the odd sort of light that seeped into his soul when woken by the sound of laughter.
“He looks lost, Father,” a voice sweet and gold as honey said.
“And well he might be,” the man responded, casting a shadowed look through a small window.
Frederick rubbed his eyes, sitting up to take in the scene: mottled walls with stonework breaking through plaster. The room was simple and bare, its only adornment two small windows, with light spilling in as if from heaven itself.
A door creaked open, bringing with it air so fresh it seemed to clean his soul. The sea mists had not yet burned off the pastures. How early was it, here in this other world?
“Eggs,” a new voice said. A woman. The mother? The ache inside him yawned as Handel’s Messiah tiptoed through his memory. He watched as she cracked an egg into a steaming pot hanging over the crackling fire.
“We’ve got a double yolk today, we do. Must be the hens knew we had a young guest with us.”
Frederick’s still form filled with shame as he watched the family’s flurry of activity. He stood, his unpracticed hands fumbling to pull the blanket over the makeshift straw mattress. Was this how one . . . made a bed? His face burned. Here he was nearly ten years old—a man, according to Father—and a heap of straw made him glow like a hearth fire.
“Never you mind, dear,” the woman said, placing her hands gently about his shoulders and guiding him to a table of weathered wood. “Time enough for me to do that later.”
The shepherd stood from the stool at Frederick’s side and strode to the door. “Sheep are callin’. The day’s a-wastin’.”
In the silence that followed the shepherd’s departure, Frederick swallowed, trying to find words in this new place.
That honey-filled laugh sounded again. “Cat got your tongue?”
“Hush, Juliette.” The mother swatted the girl playfully with a rag. “You’d do well to learn a lesson or two from him on how to hold your own tongue.” Her words were strict but her tone was gold, offered with a wink. “Heaven help us, the girl comes into this world with the sea flood, and she takes the force of the sea with her wherever she goes.”
Frederick tilted his head. “Sea flood?”
“Aye. Surely you know of the great sea flood?”
When his silence answered to the contrary, she leaned in as if to impart a great secret. “Every eighteen years, the moon draws closer than any other time. Like a great silver dish in the sky, it draws the sea up higher . . . and higher . . . and higher. All the fisherfolk around clamber to see it. Legend has it that to be touched by the spray of a sea flood wave is to be granted good fortune all the days of your life.”
“And . . . Juliette was sprayed?”
She laughed. “Oh my, no. Juliette was born the night of the last sea flood. Folks like to say the moon and the waves delivered her right into our arms.”
She shook her head. “I know ’twern’t the moon, but I do believe the sea got caught up in that girl’s soul. ’Tis in her, the force and the call of it. She vows she’ll be there to meet that tide, next time it do come ’round.”