Corvus (Stars and Sails, Book 1)

Seven

The night winds were strong, they blew in through Amelia Rose's open window. Her room was a little whirlwind of cool air and night sounds—frogs and nighthawks calling out. The occasional dog barked, the rattlesnake shook its tail. The wind pushed her sheet away. The night wind took it away and it fluttered like a ghost for a moment before collapsing back onto her four-poster bed. Her nightdress felt cool against her ankles as she walked to the door of her bedroom. She pressed her ear against the white wood and listened.

Nothing.

She opened the door, wincing as it creaked and filled the house with its sorrowful noise. With half of her head wedged through the door, she listened again. Still nothing. She pressed her back to the door frame and took a breath. She eyed her father's door carefully. A small smile folded into her lips. No matter what she wanted to say, Amelia Rose liked this rush of defiance, even if it was trivial and petty.

Tugging her hair out of its ribbon, she unraveled the long braid. She stepped into the hallway and felt the wood shift under her feet, then thunder like metal on metal. She shuddered at the noise and held onto the stairwell railing. The study was right across the hall. She could reach it in just a few steps if she was graceful, but Amelia Rose was only graceful when she wasn't trying to be. Executing a stunt like that was hazardous. She liked that. She felt like a performer in a circus show. Living in that house was like walking on a narrow rope or leaping from a great height. Her life was so boring, but these little nights were the exciting moments she savored for weeks after. She was satisfying a great hunger for adventure.

She bounded through the air, two, three times. The floorboards creaked tremendously. First, it was moaning, a crying, a screeching of the house. Her father was moving in his room. There was more moving—his pounding footsteps rumbling across the floor, shaking the walls and the pictures.

Moon above.

She scurried back to her room and shut the door, not bothering to worry about the noise she made. She crawled into bed and tucked the sheets over her shoulders, splayed out her hair wildly and closed her eyes. She heard her father's door swing open in the hall. She heard his muffled voice. Her own door swung open. She twisted and turned in her bed and sat up on her elbows.

"Father?" she asked. "Father, why are you awake?"

"I heard something," said Mr. Wagner. He glanced around the room.

"Is there someone outside on the porch?"

"What?" he asked.

Amelia Rose lay back down and nestled her head into her pillow. "The porch was creaking so loudly."

That distressed Mr. Wagner immensely. He wouldn't be able to sleep thinking that there was a bandit on the porch. He grumbled and headed down the stairwell. When Amelia Rose heard the front door scrape open across the wooden floor, she hopped out of bed and ran into the hall. She dashed into the study.

Amelia Rose opened her mother's little box, shaped like a red rose, and fished about for a key. She heard footsteps on the porch. Hurrying, she ran to the windowsill and opened the chest. The front door started to close. She dug around for the wooden box. Her father was walking in the foyer, she could hear him. She had to will herself not to collapse from fright. She closed the chest, tucked the key back into the pot and placed the top back on.

The steps. Her father was on the steps.

Don't think, don't think!

The noise she made blended in with her father's as she leapt across the hallway. She made it back to her room, tossed the box under her bed and hopped under the sheet. With her head on her pillow, she peered out her doorway. She forgot to close the study door. Biting her lip, she pulled the covers up to her nose. Mr. Wagner rounded the staircase and stared at the study, unsure of why it was open.

"You left my door open," Amelia Rose called, "Could you close it? I'm so weary."

"Why is the study door open?"

"You opened it to check for intruders," she smiled sleepily. "But it's just us, father. It is always just us." She closed her eyes. The door squeaked as her father closed it.  She pushed the sheet down and sat up. Reaching under her bed, she felt for the wooden box and tugged it out. Her mother's name was on the top of the box. When she pulled on the latch, the box swung open.

Mr. Wagner wouldn't give the box to Amelia Rose. He liked to keep the box in the chest in the study, locked away. That box was the only piece Amelia Rose had left of her mother; her mother who was just like her. Her mother, who she had never known, but dreamt of all the time. Her mother, who her father refused to talk about or hear word of.

But she knew that her father had just as many wounds as she did. Some nights, his weeping was too loud and the sound bled through the walls.

Every time she opened the box, Amelia Rose felt a rush. It was filled with all the things she would have wanted for herself. She didn't need fancy nightdresses or a big house with a parlor. She loved her mother's leather-bound atlas. She loved the weird instrument that her mother kept in there, too. She thought it might play music when she was younger, but as she got older, she found that it was for measuring celestial angles, but she didn't know the name of it. She couldn't find an entry for it in her mother's encyclopedia, either. Her father wasn't all that happy that her mother had these things, which was probably why he didn't want Amelia Rose to have them. Mr. Wagner wanted Amelia Rose to be a traditional woman. He had her taught how to embroider, but she wasn't very patient. Mr. Wagner got tired of having napkins stitched with crescent moons on them. He tried to get her to cook one year, even though it was improper to have her under the direction of the scullery maid. But mostly she thought it was about the encyclopedia. Mr. Wagner had carefully weighed his options and found that it was less desirable for her to be more educated than the man she would be engaged to.

Amelia Rose pushed her window open. It sounded lovely outside. She loved the crickets chirping and the nighthawks whirring. She loved the cool night air. She knelt at the sill and held up her mother's celestial instrument to the sky. She looked at the moon through the lens. Big, bright, beautiful. She turned the knobs and swung the arm back and forth until she saw two moons. She didn't know if that was supposed to happen, but she liked the way it looked. On a piece of paper, she noted the measurements. It looked like a time. She swung the instrument around on its hinges. She saw the moon wander about the sky, then touch the horizon and just lay there. She felt like she was changing time, but when she pulled the instrument away, the moon was still high in the sky. The instrument confused her, but she thought she was onto something. If she just had a few more nights with it, she was sure that she could figure it out. She set the instrument down on the sill and looked out at the stars. Her mother's atlas taught her all about the constellations as well as the places besides Aydesreve that she would never see. Her mother had apparently never seen them, but her mother was a dreamer just like her. That much, Amelia Rose knew.

She tucked the atlas back into the box and hid it in her armoire under a box of riding boots. If her father found her mother's things, he would hide them again, but that didn't scare Amelia Rose. Her father wasn't nearly as persistent as she was. She took one last breath of the night air and tugged her window closed. She tumbled into her bed.

That night, Amelia Rose dreamt that she was wandering the sky in a big gondola and all the stars were shimmering like holiday candles. She curled up in the big boat and drifted off somewhere in between the moon and the sun.