Straight On Till Morning

by Liz Braswell

  “Oh!” Wendy blushed and turned around.

  The pirate cackled again. “What, you think I’d stick it with a needle while it’s on me own skin? I’m unskilled, not daft, ye silly co’. Now settle down. Ye can’t see me privates or me bum, and there’s them that wear less on washing day round here, so ye’d best get used to it.”

  “Well!”

  Wendy tried to rearrange her shocked expression while busying herself sorting through the mess of cloth. He was right, of course. She was in alien country now: a ship full of uncivilized men. All she could do was act properly, like a decent civilized person, as there was no guarantee that others would.

  She settled herself down on a tipped-over quarter cask and smoothed out the pieces. Actually, the pirate had made a very nice, neat little knot to begin with. But that made sense, she supposed. Sailors had to be very good at knots, hadn’t they? She bet they would be excellent at macramé, or even crochet, if patiently taught.…

  Wendy whistled and hummed to herself and felt much better with something familiar in her hands. In a short while the patch was finished and held tightly on by tiny and neat little stitches.

  “There, all done. You can see how I—oh!”

  There was a crowd around her now. Pirates, speechless and wide-eyed to a man.

  “BLIMEY! Do mine next!” one said, whipping off his shirt.

  “No, me! I got no seat on me trousers!” another begged.

  “No! Me next!” whined a third.

  “All right, all right now…”

  She put her hands on her hips, feeling crowded and overwhelmed. It was on the tip of her tongue to say that as long as she was on board, she would do any minor repairs and mending that were needed. Might as well make herself useful, right? That’s what she always did: made herself useful, and as a result she was always needed. And liked.

  Then again…

  She had paid her passage on this vessel. A very dear one. She wasn’t a scullery maid; she was a customer.

  “My jacket’s fearful cold when the wind blows—I’ll give ye a halfpenny if ye do it first,” a fourth pirate said slyly, seeing her hesitate.

  The others caught on fast.

  “I’ll give ye me grog ration! For me pants!”

  “I’ll give ye a whale-bone needle and carve ye a thimble, if ye like. Can ye make things, too? Like a muffler for cold days?”

  Well, that’s better, Wendy decided. I think.

  Pirates were very transactional—and seemed to respect you more if you were as well. In some ways it was rather a windfall: who knew what other supplies she would require for her foray into Never Land? In her dreams and stories there was always just the right-shaped stick or rock or key discovered at the last possible moment. But was the real Never Land like that?

  And, of course, the pirates would have to talk to her now.

  Take that, Shesbows! thought Wendy, very pleased with herself.

  There was no sun to mark the passage of time. After her third mending project, Wendy began to grow restless. She asked the hovering pirates the precise o’clock but they all shook their heads.

  “Without a sun ye can’t use no sundial,” one said, pointing to the dark gray wall of fog around the ship. “And Hook don’t allow no modrun clocks nor watches nowhere on account of that crocodile what took his hand. It tocks like the clock it swallowed.”

  Aha…Now it made sense! She had called the creature Tick-Tock in her own telling of the story. Hook’s hand had given the beast a craving for more of the pirate captain, and it followed the Jolly Roger everywhere. The noise of the clock it had swallowed always presaged its appearance.

  (The boys would shriek with glee when Wendy said things like: “But wait! What was that? Off in the distance? Tick…tock.…tick…tock.” “IT’S A CROCODILE!” Young Michael would cry.)

  “That thing hasn’t been around for years,” another pirate said. “Probably dead from indigestion. But Hook, he still thinks it’s out there somewhere.”

  “He can’t bear being reminded of it. Thinks the beast is still after ’im,” said a third. “Every time he hears a clock it drives him batty.”

  She wondered what had happened to the crocodile in the real Never Land. She hadn’t killed it off in her own stories—yet.

  But despite the lack of clocks, lunch came anyway, and blessedly just in time. Wendy’s stomach was growling in a most unladylike way. She followed the crew to the mess hall. Each pirate presented his own bowl to the, er, sous chef. It was then filled with glop that might have been a chowder or a mulligatawny. One polite fellow (whose waistcoat Wendy had fixed) offered to give her his own bowl once he was done. She discreetly tried to wipe it out. The tall, slouchy pirate with the two big gold earrings saw this and cackled.

  “Have you anything of your own you would like fixed?” Wendy asked him, trying to change the subject and distract attention from her covert actions.

  “Oh, I’m plenty handy with a needle and thread,” the pirate said, posing for her. And in fact, he was more solidly dressed than the rest. Everything was mostly clean, if not perfect, and unpatched. “I just don’t let it get out too much, know what I mean?”

  “I suppose I do,” Wendy said uncertainly as the pirate winked at her.

  “The name’s Zane,” he said with a bow. “Alodon Zane, at your service.”

  “Wendy Darling at yours,” she said with a curtsy.

  “MISS DARLING, WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN HERE WITH THESE LOUTS?”

  Captain Hook was suddenly filling the door like a bad omen and roaring like an enraged lion. At her dismay and the other pirates’ shock, he immediately softened his voice. “My dear, you’re a guest, not a midshipman. Come dine in my quarters. Mr. Smee will serve us.”

  Wendy shivered. She might have read a few books that were not strictly approved by Father or prescreened by the bookseller. In those typeset pages, she’d had glimpses of the greater world—even if she didn’t fully understand it. She knew it was not proper to be alone in the company of a strange man.

  “Dinna worry,” Zane whispered into her left ear. “He’s not…I mean, Hook’s a lunatic, but he loves decorum. Your maidenhood is safe with him. Not yer throat, maybe. But the rest of you is.”

  “Thank you?” Wendy whispered back. Then she returned the bowl to the pirate who had provided it. “Thank you, sir, but I suppose I will be dining on the lido deck instead. Your generosity is very much appreciated.”

  “Oh, yes, me too. Absolutely, ma’am,” the pirate blustered, bowing.

  Lunch with a pirate captain could have been many things: terrifying, spooky, embattled—even romantic, given the right circumstances.

  But in reality, lunch was…awkward.

  Wendy sat up properly and used her best manners.

  Captain Hook bowed and flourished and removed his hat and pulled out a chair for her. The table was a tiny fold-out thing spread with a fancy cloth, silver utensils, and a clever golden candelabrum that was held upright on chains so it didn’t tip with the waves. It was all very lovely, and for the first moment Wendy was overcome with the precise perfection of the scene. There was even a spinet piano in the corner of the room.

  “I do play, if you’re wondering,” Hook said, following her eyes. “A bit harder since the…well…hook, but I make do.”

  They settled down to empty plates.

  “Mr. Smee,” Hook called politely.

  No one came.

  “Mr. Smee,” he said again with a growl—while still smiling at Wendy.

  Silence.

  “MR. SMEE!” the captain finally cried, slamming his hook down on the table. “Blast that man. He’ll be at the grog again, no doubt.”

  He leapt up and crashed through the door, muttering under his breath.

  “Confounded…lazy…overpaid…”

  Wendy sat stiffly and continued to look around at everything she had already looked at.

  Eventually Hook came back, awkwardly carrying a plate of carved beef, a bowl of neeps
and tatties, and a beautiful if stale-looking baguette, all cradled in his hand and hook.

  Wendy leapt up to help, but he tsked her back down and actually quite neatly and deftly laid out the feast.

  “Good help is so hard to get,” he said apologetically. “I should have had him walk the plank years ago, but we go way back.…He’s even saved my life a few times. It’s like keeping an old dry cow around because you can’t bear the look in her eyes.”

  “Oh,” Wendy said uncertainly.

  They concentrated on serving themselves in silence. Wendy wondered if this was what having a distant uncle was like—an odd grown-up who didn’t know how to interact properly with young people and who often said inappropriate things.

  “So I’m curious, Miss Darling,” Hook finally began, with a casual tone so false Wendy’s ears practically curled at his words. “Whatever made you come to the rather rash decision to trade Peter Pan’s shadow to his greatest enemy in exchange for passage to Never Land?”

  Wendy was about to interrupt and point out that Hook wasn’t Peter Pan’s greatest enemy. Depending on how you looked at it, Peter Pan’s greatest enemy could have been growing up, his own sense of self-importance, or his more immediately dangerous foes: the warlike, winged L’cki, the Fangriders of Upper Hillsdale, or the Cyclops of the Cerulean Sea. Hook was a recurring enemy. Not his greatest enemy.

  Then she thought better of mentioning it.

  “Well, you know, he never came back for it. He just left it there,” she said airily. Trying to ignore the agency she had in the decision, that what she had done wasn’t right. That these words were false. “What was I supposed to do, keep it around for the rest of my life among my trinkets and bric-a-brac? Hanging after me? You seemed to want it more than he, and I wanted a little holiday. Everyone is happy. Shall I pour you some water, Captain?”

  “Thank you, my dear, but I’ll stick to this lovely Barolo. A very interesting…argument—justification, maybe? Now don’t look at me like that; it’s just us, Miss Darling. But surely you of all people know that Never Land is a bit trickier than that. There is no holidaying there, like Blackpool or the South of France. You have made quite the commitment. I can’t help but wonder what drove such a pretty, innocent little thing like you to such desperation—abandoning her life and family to leap into the unknown, and trading in her hero’s shadow in the process.”

  Wendy had mixed feelings at these words. On the one hand, they made her sound a little epic.

  On the other hand, was her life really that dire? Her family loved her. Nana loved her. Ireland was terrible, but it was for only a short period of time, right? And safe…

  She looked up at the pirate, suspicious. In her stories Captain Hook was always planning, always conniving. He had an angle on everything, even if that angle was stupid and resulted in ridiculous defeats. So what was he driving at now?

  “Yes, it shall make a fascinating chapter in my memoirs, won’t it?” she said as haughtily as she could, pouring herself another glass of tar-scented water.

  “Won’t your family miss you—the Mister and Missus Darling?”

  “I don’t really know how time operates between Never Land and the real world. Perhaps I’ll just have been gone a day,” she answered carelessly. “Perhaps it will be a blink of an eye. Perhaps this is all now a dream and I will wake when it’s over, back in my bed. Either way, Mother and Father have their hands quite full with Michael and John. I daresay they shan’t miss me beyond needing to write an embarrassing explanation to a certain family in Ireland. I just hope Nana remembers to feed Snowball.

  “But what about you, Captain Hook? What exactly are your plans for Peter’s shadow? Are you going to keep it and hold it over his head forever? In return for your…hook?”

  “Forever?” Hook sat back in his chair, looking astonished. “Oh no, no, my girl. I have no desire to continue this endless charade with Peter Pan any longer at all. I have wasted far too much of my life on it. My crew hasn’t looted a merchant vessel or stormed a port in years. No, I am done with Never Land. Rather permanently. I think it’s high time I put it and Peter behind me. Rather permanently.”

  “That sounds a bit ominous,” Wendy observed.

  “It was supposed to. I’m actually quite thrilled by the fact that you will be here as an audience to his and its fate.”

  “What precisely are you going to do, if I may ask?”

  “Well, my dear, unlike the villains in your quaint little tales, I am not daft enough to reveal my cunning plans to anyone—a hero or even a bystander like yourself—before carrying them out.”

  Wendy took some umbrage at the term bystander—wasn’t she on a pirate ship headed to Never Land of her own volition? Didn’t she invent much of the world he inhabited?

  But there were more pressing issues than her own ego.

  “Of course not,” she agreed, around a sip of water so she wouldn’t choke on her subterfuge. “But surely you couldn’t keep such ideas entirely to yourself. Even a great captain like yourself needs help with the dirty work. And perhaps a sympathetic ear.”

  “Well, you are right there, of course,” Hook said, swirling his deep red wine in its glass. “But I have Mr. Smee, who holds all my secrets dearly. He alone is aware of the not so happily-ever-after that awaits all of Never Land.

  “And I’ll have you know, Miss Darling, I was rather despairing of ever being able to carry out all the details needed for my plans. Your offer of Peter’s shadow came like a miracle out of the blue—finally Mr. Smee and I can get to work on it!”

  Wendy…was, however inadvertently, responsible for setting in motion one of Hook’s most murderous schemes? That involved all of Never Land? Rather permanently? She swallowed and tried to stay calm.

  “Lucky break for you, I suppose,” she said casually. “But how does it involve Peter’s shadow? You couldn’t have made all of these plans without knowing for certain you could get it, and—”

  “Tut tut,” the captain said, shaking a finger at her like a schoolmarm. “It’s highly impolite to question a pirate captain so closely when he has invited you to lunch, don’t you know? Terribly bad form.”

  And Wendy ground her teeth, defeated.

  The moment lunch—or whatever it was; the world was still gray and formless—ended, she escaped back to the deck. Her eyes had that dry, crusty feeling of having been open too long from being up too late. How long had it been since she had left the house? It was mad not having clocks or watches around. Despite just eating a rather substantial meal she felt a little light-headed. But not queasy. Even with the rhythmic rocking of the ship, she walked steadily and her stomach remained firmly digesting the surprisingly good repast.

  “Lady! Missy! Miss Darling!” A pirate ran up to her, a loop of string in his hands. Two other pirates came reluctantly behind, looking chagrined. One of them cradled a badly bleeding hand.

  “My goodness, whatever happened here?”

  “Me and these louts was just arguing about the proper play of cat’s cradle,” the pirate with the string said. “The White Duke here kept flubbing it up.”

  “I had to cut him,” the second pirate admitted, pointing at the wound on the third’s hand.

  “Can you show us how to do it, proper-like?” the Duke asked, heedless of his injury.

  Wendy gave them all a severe look.

  “Let me take care of this poor fellow first and then see what we can do.”

  She took the pirate’s bloody hand and gently peeled open his fingers for a better look. It wasn’t so bad, really—just deep and narrow. All it needed was to be thoroughly cleaned before infection set in. For this they used some pure rum and one of Wendy’s precious handkerchiefs. The pirate tried not to swear during her judicious application of the stinging cleanser.

  Only then did she take the loop of string and demonstrate the proper sequence of cat’s cradle. She even included some of the more difficult variations like the clock tower and the bishop’s cap.

 
Delighted, the pirates clapped her on the back rather harder than she would have liked and strode off, guffawing and chatting like there had never been a row to begin with.

  Wendy sighed and shook her head. If all of Never Land’s adventures were as easily won as that, she was in for a nice time indeed.

  She leaned on the gunwale and looked out. Was it getting lighter? Really this time?

  Yes! The rosy fingers of dawn had finally slipped through the fog and gently pulled it apart, separating the tendrils, weakening it.

  Wendy watched in fascination. She almost never saw the sunrise except in winter and that was through her window, under the gray sprawl of London Town. Nothing like this. As the sea lightened and the sky began to clear, the two elements resolved themselves into colors unlike anything she was used to: brilliant emerald and deep aquamarine, pellucid azure and shining lapis. It was so storybook perfect she wouldn’t have been surprised at all if the sun came out with a great smiley face drawn on it.

  “Miss Darling,” came a whisper behind her.

  Wendy spun around. A cadaverously skinny pirate stood there, the one who had leered at her so loathsomely before. His one eye was narrow and lecherous, his smile thin and frightening.

  “I don’t believe we’ve properly met yet. How do you do?” Wendy said, putting out her hand.

  “Oh, I do just fine,” the pirate growled—and pushed her back up against the railing.

  Wendy was caught before she could even figure out what was happening. It took her a moment to find her voice and one more to realize that, despite struggling, she had no ability to fend off this attacker.

  “Unhand me!” she cried.

  The pirate laughed, his foul-smelling breath nearly asphyxiating her. Wendy screamed.

  The pirate leaned over her—

  A shot rang out.

  So loudly, so close, she felt its hot wind singe her face.

  Her attacker looked surprised and then slumped to the deck.

  A pool of blood formed under his head. As his body crumpled into a more permanent position, she saw the perfect hole behind his ear where the bullet had gone in.