The River Lark cuts a neat line across the northern half of Fenbourne. June likes to stand on the banks of the river and watch the water curl past. At home she has a map of what the village used to look like, before they dredged the Lark and changed its course. When she watches the Lark now she thinks about the ways even a river can change direction, and about the more distant rivers Alec has told her about. She would like to see the Ganges, or a bright cold stream making its way from the Himalayan snow to the plains. Right now the River Lark is her river, the water coursing green and brown through her veins, or it might as well be. Will these currents eventually be replaced by others, by a twisted set of rapids or a broad, smooth stream? Perhaps someday. People tell her parents that she is too clever by half. Sometimes they mean she’s destined for something bigger than Fenbourne, or she hopes they do. Sometimes they mean something else.
Today she’s on her way to a spot where the light hangs differently against the water, just south of the bridge that crosses the Lark and connects the northern tip of Fenbourne to the rest of the village. The week before she had seen an unusually large pike in the shallows where the riverbank has been cut away, and she wants to see it again before someone catches it. She’s brought a blanket to sit on, in case the pike makes her wait.
When she gets to her spot, though, she finds Alec there, almost knee-deep in the shallows, his shoes and socks wadded up against the old bricks of the bridge. He’s singing to himself—it sounds like some kind of dubious music hall tune, echoing off the bricks. She should have known he would be there, and she smiles, trying not to be cross about the fact that he has almost certainly frightened off the pike. He is so occupied with whatever he’s looking for under the bridge that he doesn’t see her at first. She waits.
After a moment, he emerges from the shadow, the August sun lighting his hair like white gold, and stops mid-verse. He blinks up at her. “June!”
“Hallo, Alec.”
“Do you remember the first time we skated here?”
June puts her head to one side. Of course she remembers. “Yes.”
He grins at her. “Come and look?”
She spreads out the blanket on the almost flat place she likes on the bank, shaded by the bridge on one side and by an alder sapling on the other. She hadn’t planned to actually go into the river, but why not? It’s a warm day. She slips off her socks and shoes and puts them neatly on a corner of the blanket.
Alec puts out a hand and helps her step into the water. It’s cool against her legs, and she tucks away a hint of remorse that there will be mud on the hem of her skirt. She follows him as he wades back into the shadows, gesturing at the rough bricks arching over their heads. June looks up.
“Oh, Alec!”
She gives him an affectionate smile, and they stand together, the river coursing past their calves, and look at the constellations he’s drawn fresh against the dark underside of the bridge. The first time he’d done it had been that first winter nearly four years ago. The Lark had frozen, and June had taught Alec how to ice-skate. They had explored the riverbanks and canals for a mile in both directions out of Fenbourne, Alec awkward at first in his skates, and then suddenly sure of himself. By the second winter, he’d joined the boys who waited all year for the fens to freeze so they could race. But that first winter, when they were eight years old, he had come out by himself on the ice one morning and drawn the stars he remembered from his journey west, and that afternoon he had shown them to June.
“I fixed them for you,” he says bashfully.
“But how?”
He grins at her. “Tall enough now.”
“Oh,” she says. She steps back and looks at him more carefully. Of course she’s noticed how much he’s grown over the years; she sees him nearly every day. But she had not realized that where he had once been eight and not tall enough to reach the arch without the added height of ice and borrowed skates, he is now a week away from twelve and able to put his palm to the lowest row of stars. She tilts her head. “But . . .”
“I borrowed a punt for the higher ones,” he says. “Frank Burleigh let me take it for a day.”
Frank Burleigh is the smith’s son, much older than June and Alec. He seems an unlikely ally. And, as if he can see that realization on June’s face, Alec blushes and looks away.
“I told him I needed it for a surprise, but he made me give him tuppence.” He shrugs. “Don’t tell Aunt Constance.”
“I certainly won’t,” June says. He is so impetuous, and she wishes he would think things through. What if a sudden summer storm had swelled the current and something had happened? Well. That does not bear thinking about. She looks at him, at the anxious creases on his forehead as he waits to see if she will scold him or praise him. “Oh, Alec. Thank you.”
His face goes pink with relief. June smiles and goes back to looking at the stars. In Aunt Constance’s parlor, there is a globe, and June has not forgotten the afternoon she spent there with Alec showing her his India, and the long sail to England. All those places, and she knows how much the shipboard stars meant to him. She feels it somewhere deep in her heart that he keeps giving them to her, one way or another.