Star-Crossed Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Minnie Darke

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in Australia by Penguin Random House Australia, North Sydney, and in Great Britain by Bantam Press, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2019.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781984822826

  Ebook ISBN 9781984822840

  Book illustration by K1r1/Shutterstock

  Cover design by Elena Giavaldi

  Cover illustration (hand) by Kristina Jovanovic/Shutterstock

  v5.4

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Aquarius: January 20–February 18

  Pisces: February 19–­March 20

  Cusp

  Aries: March 21–­April 19

  Cusp

  Taurus: April 20–­May 20

  Cusp

  Gemini: May 21–­June 20

  Cusp

  Cancer: June 21–­July 22

  Cusp

  Leo: July 23–­August 22

  Cusp

  Virgo: August 23–­Aeptember 22

  Cusp

  Libra: September 23–­October 22

  Cusp

  Scorpio: October 23–­November 21

  Cusp

  Sagittarius: November 22–­December 21

  Cusp

  Capricorn: December 22–­January 19

  Cusp

  Aquarius: January 20–February 18

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For my favorite Scorpio: P. T.

  The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles!

  What distant and different beings in the various

  mansions of the universe are contemplating the same

  one at the same moment!

  HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  Astrology is like gravity. You don’t have to believe in it for it to be working in your life.

  ZOLAR’S STARMATES

  No passion on Earth, neither love nor hate, is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.

  H. G. WELLS

  Aquarius

  JANUARY 20–FEBRUARY 18

  Nicholas Jordan was born not beneath a starry sky, but in Edenvale Hospital—a modest red-brick building on the outskirts of a town that had four pubs, no banks, one swimming pool, six service clubs and bitterly resented water restrictions each summer. The hospital was surrounded by beds of bright pink bougainvillea and rectangles of thirsting lawn, and at the moment of little Nick’s birth, the sky above its hot tin roof was the scorching blue of a southern hemisphere noon in February.

  And yet the stars were there. Out beyond the cloudless heat of the troposphere, beyond the stratosphere’s blanket of ozone, beyond the mesosphere and the thermosphere, the ionosphere, the exosphere and the magnetosphere, were the stars. Millions of them, patterning the blackness and orbiting themselves into the precise configuration that would be forever mapped onto the soul of Nicholas Jordan.

  Joanna Jordan—Aries, owner-operator of Edenvale’s Uppercut hair salon, the freakishly accurate goal attack for the Edenvale Stars netball team, and a two-time Miss Eden Valley titleholder—did not think of the stars in the hours that followed her son’s birth. Blissed out and disheveled in the hospital’s sole delivery suite, she only stared into little Nick’s face, and charted influences of a more terrestrial nature.

  “He’s got your nose,” she murmured to her husband.

  And she was quite right. Her baby had a perfect, miniature replica of the nose that she knew and loved on the face of Mark Jordan—Taurus, square-shouldered Australian Rules defender turned polo-shirted financial planner, lover of baked cheesecake and helpless admirer of long-legged women.

  “But your ears,” Mark said, feeling his hands to be suddenly and gigantically out of scale as he smoothed back a wisp of the dark hair that feathered Nick’s newborn head.

  And so, Joanna and Mark looked over their son and traced back to various sources his cheeks, forehead, fingers and toes. The new parents found an echo of Mark’s brother in the wide setting of their baby’s eyes, and a hint of Joanna’s mother in his full and expressive lips.

  Nowhere, however, did they find, or even think to look for, the fingerprints of Beta Aquarii, a yellow supergiant burning some 537 light-years from Earth. Or the more diffuse touch of the Helix Nebula, or indeed any of the other heavenly bodies that comprised the sprawling constellation of Aquarius, within whose auspices the sun was housed at the time of their baby’s birth.

  An astrologer, looking at the pinpricks of destiny as laid out in little Nick’s natal chart, might on the day of his birth have been able to tell you that this child would grow up to be original to the point of slightly eccentric, creative and caring, but with a competitive streak so wide that his siblings would prefer eating Brussels sprouts to playing Monopoly with him. He would love costume parties and have a habit of bringing home any starving dog or flea-ridden cat that crossed his path.

  This same astrologer might have allowed themselves a fond smile as they foretold that Nick, from his midteens onward, would be a true believer when it came to the stars. Nick would like the fact that he was an Aquarius—a sign he would associate with innovative and original thinking, as well as summertime, music festivals and hot young hippies who smelled of patchouli and sex.

  On the day of Nick’s birth, however, there was no astrologer at hand, and the only person who did make an astrological prediction about baby Nick at that time was Joanna Jordan’s friend Mandy Carmichael. Mandy—Gemini, dimple-cheeked darling of the regional television network’s weather report, radiant newlywed, ABBA fanatic—appeared at the hospital like a good fairy, straight after work. Her face was still thickly plastered with foundation and she teetered on high heels as she balanced in her arms an enormous blue teddy bear and a bunch of supermarket chrysanthemums. Soon the teddy was reclining in a chair, the chrysanthemums were in a Fowlers preserving jar and Mandy was barefoot beside the bed, cradling her friend’s firstborn with infinite care.

  “A little Aquarius, hm?” she said, her eyes misting. “Don’t expect him to be like you and Mark, will you, JoJo? Aquarians are different. Aren’t you, little one?”

  “Well, he’d better like sport,” Jo said lightly. “Mark’s already bought him a tennis racket.”

  “Which is why he’ll probably be an artist. Or a dancer. Won’t you, my treasure?”

  Mandy slipped her finger into the closing star of baby Nick’s hand, and for a moment she was uncharacteristically speechless. Then she said, “Jo, he’s beautiful. Just beautiful.”

  By the time Mandy stepped out of the hospital, dusk had fallen, bringing with it a breeze as softly cool as the wistful mood that settl
ed on her as she cut across the spiky grass—carrying her shoes—to the parking lot. The western sky was a smoky blue strung with drifts of low, pinkish cloud, but in the east a few eager stars had already burst through the deepening dark. Mandy slipped in behind the wheel of her car and watched those stars for a good long while. The smell of baby was in her nostrils.

  * * *

  The following Friday, at Curlew Court—a cul-de-sac in a newly built part of Edenvale that was full of concrete curbing and single-story homes with bright-colored roofs, mown lawns and eucalypt saplings in plastic plant guards—Drew Carmichael flopped onto his back and said, “Wow.”

  Alongside him, on his next-door neighbor’s trampoline, was an empty bottle of Baileys Irish Cream, two smeary tumblers and his sweaty, smiling, semiclad wife. Drew—Libra, agricultural consultant, amateur aviation enthusiast, Pink Floyd aficionado and fearsome bedroom-mirror air guitarist—had been home from a two-week business trip for less than an hour, and he had a sense of having been quite deliberately ravished. Drained of his essence, even. Fortunately, the neighbors were on holiday in Queensland.

  “Mmmmmm,” said Mandy, smiling up into a star-filled sky.

  Drew propped himself up on one elbow and looked at his wife. He could see a shadow on her left cheek where it dimpled, and smell the mischief on her damp skin.

  “What was that all about?” he asked, putting a hand on the soft paleness of her exposed belly. “Hm?”

  “Excuse me,” she said, slapping his hand away but grinning widely, “but I’m a married woman. Don’t touch what you can’t afford.”

  He tickled her, and she giggled.

  “What are you up to?”

  “Up to?” she said. “Up to? I…am looking at the stars.”

  Slightly drunk and entirely happy, Drew pillowed his head on folded arms and followed her gaze, up into space.

  On that February night, the Carmichaels set in motion a baby girl, who would be born in the early hours of a November morning under the sign of Sagittarius. She would arrive, petite and perfectly formed, with her skull capped in a finer version of the light brown hair that would eventually curl around the sharp contours of her face. Her eyes would be hazel, her chin would be pointed and her lips—like her mother’s—would form a pronounced Cupid’s bow. Her dark eyebrows would—like her father’s—be straight and almost severe.

  An astrologer might have predicted that this baby would grow up to be a straight shooter; playful, but also something of a perfectionist. She would love words, appear at age nine on a kids’ TV spelling contest (which she would win) and usually have a pen wedged behind her ear. Always her bedside table would groan under its payload of books (read, half read, to read), and there was a good chance that you would find, concealed within this pile of books, an IKEA catalogue, since wardrobe-organization porn would, for this girl, be a lifelong guilty pleasure. Her memory would be as flawless as a gleaming, stainless steel filing cabinet and even her text messages would be faultlessly formatted and punctuated.

  It might also have been accurately foretold, with a sorrowful shake of the astrologer’s head, that this child would grow up to have scant regard for the stars. To be frank, she would consider horoscopes to be a crock of implausible hog-shit.

  “Justine,” Mandy murmured, mostly to herself.

  “What?” said Drew.

  “Jus-tine,” Mandy said, more distinctly. “Do you like it?”

  “Who’s Justine?” Drew asked, perplexed.

  You’ll see, Mandy thought. You’ll see.

  Pisces

  FEBRUARY 19–MARCH 20

  Time passed. Moons orbited planets. Planets did laps around the brightest stars. Galaxies swirled. And, as the years went by, more and more satellites joined in. Then one day, as if by magic, there she was: twenty-six-year-old Justine Carmichael, carrying an unsteady load of takeout coffee cups along a leafy suburban street on a Friday morning in March. She wore a cheerful swing dress of green-and-white polka-dot linen and nearly white sneakers that caught the sunshine and shadow as she made her way along the light-dappled sidewalk.

  The street—about two hours east of Edenvale—was Rennie Street, one of the main thoroughfares in the dress circle suburb of Alexandria Park. This was a district of late-nineteenth-century mansions and art deco apartment blocks, flower boutiques and cafes, the sort of place where it was easy to get a Vienna coffee in a tall glass with a long spoon, and where dog groomers specialized in cuts for Maltese and West Highland terriers. Justine’s destination was the headquarters of the Alexandria Park Star, where she worked. Officially, her job description was “copy-runner,” although the editor—who was prone to verbal flourishes that in no way resembled the incisive brevity of his journalism—liked to refer to her as “our dear, darling cub-reporter-in-waiting.” If he had been writing about her, he’d have called her “dogsbody.”

  The Star’s headquarters were in a gracious, converted weatherboard home that was set back slightly from the road. As Justine turned without pausing through an open front gate, she passed beneath one of Alexandria Park’s most controversial monuments—the star itself. As ugly as it was unmissable, it was a mosaic sculpture the size of a tractor wheel that swung, high and bright, on a post-mounted bracket above the pavement. It was fat and curvy for a star, and its five not-quite-symmetrical points were crudely covered in chips of acid-yellow tiles and the smashings of a tea set patterned with yellow roses.

  Thirty years earlier, when the star had first been hoisted into place, the locals had dubbed it the “yellow peril,” and they had tried every trick in the municipal council rulebook to have it pulled down. In those days, most of Alexandria Park’s residents regarded the Star as a grubby little street rag, and its young editor, Jeremy Byrne, as a despicable long-haired degenerate. It was their strongly held opinion that Winifred Byrne’s dissolute eldest son had no business installing a muckraking fish-wrap at his late mother’s elegant Rennie Street address.

  But Alexandria Park learned to live with both the publication and its gaudy, street-side emblem, and now the Star was a glossy and well-respected magazine of current affairs, sport and the arts. Each month’s new edition was read not only in Alexandria Park, but right through the city and out into the suburbs on the other side. Although Justine’s job was somewhere beneath the very lowest rung of the ladder, there would still have been any number of other bright young journalism graduates who might have seriously considered kneecapping her in order to take her place.

  On her first day on the job, Justine had been given a tour of the premises by Jeremy Byrne himself, no longer long-haired but quite bald, and these days a good deal more patrician than peacenik. He had stood her beneath the crazy yellow bulk of the star.

  “I want you to think of it as a talisman of the fearless, fiercely nonpartisan journalistic principles upon which our brave little publication was founded,” he had told her, and Justine had tried not to find it weird and embarrassing when he had spoken about the star’s “inspirational rays,” and even mimed them raining down onto her head.

  The Star was a great place to work, just as its editor had promised. The staff were hardworking, but not above having some fun. The Christmas parties were Bacchanalian feats of catering, and the quality of reporting in the magazine was high. The trouble for Justine was that the Star was such a great place to work that none of the journalists ever resigned. There were currently three staff writers in the office, and one in Canberra, and they’d all been in their jobs for a decade or more. The copy-runner before Justine had waited three years for a reporter position before giving up and taking a job in public relations.

  On that day when Justine had stood pink-cheeked beneath the star with Jeremy Byrne, she had been convinced that her predecessor had done all the waiting for her. A real job, surely, had to be just around the corner. But two years had gone by with no sign of advancement in sight and Justine was be
ginning to think that her first byline at the Star would not come until one of the current crew died of old age.

  Justine hurried along the lavender-lined path, restacking her jumble of cardboard cups so she had a hand free to collect up a bundle of mail lying on the flagstones. At the top of a low flight of steps, she pushed open the front door with her hip. Even before the door had swung closed behind her, a sugar-dusted voice drifted out into the hallway.

  “Justine? Is that you?”

  The voice belonged to Barbel Weiss, the advertising manager, who had transformed one of the Star’s two beautiful, bay-windowed front parlors into a space as well groomed and feminine as she was. When Justine stepped into this office, Barbel—in a dusky pink pants suit, and with her blonde hair twisted into an arrangement that looked like it belonged in a German bakery—didn’t get up from her desk, only waved a brochure in the air.

  “Darling, take this down to the art department, will you? Tell them the font I want for the Brassington advertisement is this one. Here. I’ve circled it.”

  “No problem,” Justine said, maneuvering herself to the side of the desk so Barbel could add the brochure to her load.

  “Oh,” said Barbel, registering Justine’s arsenal of coffee cups, and allowing her brow to furrow just a smidge, “you’re only just back from Rafaello’s. But you won’t mind popping down there again, will you? I have a client in twenty minutes, and I thought macarons would be nice. Let’s have…raspberry. Thanks, Justine. You’re a cherub.”