Up from the Sea: A Whose Waves These Are Novella

By Amanda Dykes

Deep in a New England forest, an ancient tree stands at the center of a tale passed down through the generations. So much so, that the residents of Ansel-by-the-Sea, Maine, no longer know what is truth and what is fable. A woman fleeing in the night, rumors of treason, revolution, retribution . . .

When Savannah Mae Thorpe, born and raised near the golden sands of the South, arrives with a version of the story unlike any heard before, she finds herself the unlikely leader of an expedition into the woods to discover the truth. With help from local lumberjack Alastair Bliss, who holds a shadowed past of his own, her search to discover the truth of the Atonement Tree may have unexpected ramifications on her life--and the lives of those around her.

A tale of origins, this novella is a story complete on its own but also an invitation to discover the legacy that came before the story of Robert Bliss, the fisherman-poet who changed the tide of a nation with his unsuspecting words in Amanda's full-length novel, Whose Waves These Are.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781493416646

Amanda Dykes

Amanda Dykes is a former English teacher, a drinker of tea, and a spinner of hope-filled tales. For more information, visit www.amandadykes.com.

Book preview

© 2019 by Amanda Dykes

Published by Bethany House Publishers

11400 Hampshire Avenue South

Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

www.bethanyhouse.com

Bethany House Publishers is a division of

Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

Ebook edition created 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-1664-6

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Jennifer Parker

Author is represented by Books & Such Literary Agency

Map illustration by Najla Kay

For April. My sister, my friend.

Because . . .

History.

Courage.

Hearts beating with the song of redemption.

Sandwiches in the forest.

Things I like about you.

contents

Cover

Half Title Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Map

Epigraph

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Epilogue

Author’s Note

About the Author

Back Ad

They shut the road through the woods

Seventy years ago.

Weather and rain have undone it again,

And now you would never know

There was once a road through the woods. . . .

Yet, if you enter the woods

Of a summer evening late . . .

You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,

And the swish of a skirt in the dew,

Steadily cantering through

The misty solitudes,

As though they perfectly knew

The old lost road through the woods . . .

But there is no road through the woods.

—from The Way Through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling

prologue

SUMMER 1774

COASTAL MAINE

The forest floor came alive that night. Footsteps pounding upon it, roots forging slow paths on dark soil. Two worlds about to collide. The young woman flew through the trees, the frantic swishing of her skirt masked by the sound of wind through the bending pines above.

Something snagged—a bramble against her white lace shawl. With a rip that matched the rending of her heart, she freed herself and continued on, one arm holding fast to the boxy bundle wrapped within her shawl.

There, on the back side of a mountain, she broke into a clearing. Her destination. The place where a massive stump of freshly cut white pine looked like an altar in the moonlight. And well it might, for the sacrifice it had made. Spiced soil was soft beneath bracken as she fell to her knees and began to dig with cold fingers.

Setting her bundle within the fresh hole, she made quick work of mounding soil over and around it. A wooden box, its wood and paper contents nestled inside—and atop it, the roots of a sapling tree. All her regrets, and all her hopes.

She’d thought herself alone. Just her, the moon, and the secrets she’d buried. But a stone’s throw away and off in the shadows, a solitary figure on horseback looked on. If she had known, perhaps she would not have spilled her tears into the earth, watering that tree with her very soul.

Perhaps she would not have pulled out the dull knife from the pocket of her mud-splattered skirt. And perhaps she would not have etched in that young trunk, three deep scars that would mark the living wood for centuries to come.

But she did. And as the man watched on, two words that would have gone unheard, instead became a legend.

Forgive me, she said. She slipped back into the darkness, the sound of her feet vanishing against the haunting echo of her words.

one

ONE HUNDRED FIFTY-ONE YEARS LATER

OCTOBER 1925

Ragtime music spun around Savannah Mae Thorpe. Even as jaunty measures of the string quartet pulled couples onto the glow of the resort’s wooden dance floor, it slipped right through her with a whisper: Come away. You don’t belong here.

The temptation was strong. From an open window beckoned a pine-laden breeze, laced with the sound of the sea. A step to the left—and then another, careful to keep her borrowed gown as still as possible so as not to let its blue-on-white sequins catch attention—and she was nearly to the door. No one would ever notice her absence.

Her eyes fell upon her cousin Mary across the avenue of cologne and fringed garments. Mary was Savannah’s opposite in every way. Flaxen-haired, fair-skinned, and blue-eyed was she, where Savannah’s eyes matched her dark hair, which escaped from a simple braid most days. Her face sported freckles from so many days running in the sun and sand as a girl. Freckles she’d never given a thought to, until arriving here.

Bedecked in a black beaded dress and a cloak of buoyant laughter, Mary caught Savannah’s gaze and lifted a single brow. As if she knew precisely what Savannah was up to. Her admonition from earlier that evening echoed in Savannah’s mind: "No slinking off like one of your Georgia swamp possums tonight, Savannah. You’re one of us now."

"It’s O-possum," Savannah said under her breath, pasting on a smile and nodding a greeting to her cousin. The ragtime band struck up again in the corner. They did so every night as the well-to-do descended from their rooms at the Gables, having changed from their rowing and lawn tennis outfits into their evening wear, to fill the ballroom with merriment.

Couples around the room began to move again in spins and flails of the Charleston—Mary along with them, and Aunt Fern watching on approvingly from a red velvet-backed chair. Her mother’s sister, though the two were as opposite as the north and south they’d each occupied all of their adult lives.

Soon, Cousin Wilbur was on the dance floor, too, spinning around a pretty girl whose cheeks flushed with the heat of the room. A fresh breeze blew in from the window. This was Savannah’s chance. Ushered by bright notes, she slipped out, hurried down those curving stairs with a branch-woven railing, and disappeared into the tree line.

Pressing her back against a towering pine, her pulse slowed to the easier cadence of the forest. Freedom.

The treetops swayed, and it was as if they’d been waiting for her. There was something breathtaking about it—that trees standing for a century or more before she was even born would play a symphony of wind and leaves for her now. It was silly, perhaps. A vestige of her mother’s vivid imagination, inviting her into a fairy tale right here at the edge of the forest.

Or maybe it was something more concrete that made these trees feel like a home to her. The knowledge that they were hers by rights—or rather, the wilderness up the mountain was. Her inheritance, though she could not touch that inheritance until she turned twenty-one. Another two years. Two years of slipping out of dances and frippery.

Closing her eyes and inhaling, she savored this moment. She could get by for two more years this way if she had to. Limping along from stolen moment to stolen moment. Couldn’t she? Still, something within her yearned for more than mere survival. Here in this land where her absentee uncle, always off in New York minding bank business, left her to the whims of her cousins.

The brass clasp of her tapestry purse

Reviews for Up from the Sea

[Stephanie Lombard · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I so enjoyed this novella. How I’d have loved to go exploring for such a castle on my GrandFather’s land!