Straight On Till Morning

by Liz Braswell

  The men looked at each other in surprise; apparently this was an idea new to them. Mothers always did the wash, didn’t they? But perhaps they hadn’t much experience with the type.

  One leaned forward with his long knife and actually growled.

  “Oh, cut me if you will, Ziggy,” Wendy said, rolling her eyes. “That’s proper behavior toward a mother. Let’s ignore the fact that not a single one of you has presented me with a posy, or a badly done but affectionate drawing, or a pretty shell you found, or even a—” She had been about to say kiss, but thought better of it at the last moment. “Even the tiniest token of your appreciation. And after I sang you all that lullaby last night!”

  The pirates looked, if not exactly chagrined, then at least a little thoughtful.

  “We’re new at this,” the one with green teeth said: T. Jerome Newton. “Ain’t never had a mother before. Don’t know the rules.”

  Another—Djareth—cleared his throat. “Well, if you’re not ginna do the wash…then just…set a nice table tonight then. With folded napkins? Maybe?”

  “We’ll see,” Wendy said levelly.

  The pirates shuffled off, muttering, chastised.

  Wendy collapsed. It had taken all of her will to remain indignant and cold. Their knives were actually absolutely terrifying, and the pirates’ behavior was violent and insane.

  “And here I am, negotiating with them,” she said with a disgusted sigh, kicking the washtub. “They’ve made me their slave, and I’m telling them I won’t do the very worst of the work.”

  She sighed and picked up the finished clean clothes, folding them. These she dropped into a basket, trying to remember which thing belonged to which pirate so she could place each on the proper hammock and they wouldn’t just tear into the pile, throwing things all over the place as was their usual custom.

  What a mess.

  She had escaped her boring, dismal life in London only to enter an even more dismal one in Never Land! Where were the wishes? Where were the palm trees? Where were the adventures on savage shores?

  What to do?

  She could see one terrible possible future: one in which she remained with the pirates and became a little hard like them, praising some and castigating others, wrapping them all around her finger until they did her bidding like good little boys. Maybe even to the point of rebelling against their father.

  Er, Hook.

  There was of course a far more immediate and pressing concern than her eventual career aboard the Jolly Roger: the fate of Never Land itself. Hook had definitely implied its—and Peter’s—destruction at his hand. Somehow she didn’t believe that “rather permanent” meant the decision of never docking on its shores again.

  Despite some sly questioning of the newly friendly crew, Wendy received no answers about Hook’s plans: the pirates didn’t know, nor did they care. They were sick of Never Land and eager to get on with their privateering on other seas. That was all they cared about.

  (Which of course begged the question: What other seas? She’d never really thought about the rest of this world, beyond the island where Peter and the Lost Boys lived.)

  And somehow her handing Peter’s shadow to Hook helped him with his plot.

  She had to escape, to find help—to find Peter Pan. There was nothing else for it.

  But how?

  As she carried the basket of clothes toward the hatch that led belowdecks to the crew’s quarters, Hook swooshed by her, all ruffles and coat and double cigars in their fancy golden holder.

  “How goes it this morning with you, Mother?” he asked, a sly smile on his face.

  Wendy felt a twist of violence in her stomach. It had been bad enough when John and Michael joked about how rarely they saw their own mother and how Wendy had taken her place. It was of course worse when these murderous hooligans called her Mother. But there was something specifically, especially nasty about Hook’s use of the word. The way a quarrelsome old husband might say it to his old wife. Not that there was anything untoward about it; the captain wasn’t at all suggesting anything inappropriate in their relationship.

  It was just…wrong.

  “This morning is going most terribly, Captain Hook. I will organize, fold, and mend the crew’s clean clothes. But I will not do the washing. I have my limits,” she said firmly.

  “Ohh, whatever. We can have that done ashore if we must,” he said, rolling his eyes as if she were silly for even mentioning it.

  “And how are you doing this morning?” Wendy asked coldly. “Or, shall I ask, what are you doing?”

  “Just the usual captainy, piratey things,” he said, whirling his hand in the air. “Trying to figure out the proper route to take…with a little spectral help.…And then we shall set sail.”

  Wendy didn’t like the sound of that at all. “A little spectral help? Do you mean Peter Pan’s shadow? What are you doing with it?”

  “Miss Darling.” He leaned forward and grinned eerily into her face. “If you were so worried about its fate, perhaps you shouldn’t have traded it away in a deal with the devil?”

  And with that, he spun and strode off, obviously pleased with his answer.

  Wendy felt what remaining energy she had drain out through her feet, slide along the planks, and spill overboard.

  She sank to the deck, resting her head on the pile of clean clothes, and began to weep.

  What had she done?

  She knew it was wrong. She knew it. No good would ever come of trading Pan’s shadow. Any arrangement made with Hook and his pirates could never end happily. She had known that in her heart, and still she had done it, desperate to escape to Never Land.

  And now it seemed like all of Never Land was going to pay for her rash decision.

  “Pirate’s life got ye down, love?”

  Wendy looked up, wiping her tears. Standing there in a swaybacked, repugnantly self-assured slouch was Zane.

  “I thought I was coming here to have adventures,” she said disgustedly, wiping her tears. “Not to be a slave to pirates for the rest of my life while Never Land is utterly destroyed. I have to get out of here.”

  “Ah, so many of us look for adventure and wind up as slaves, one way or another,” the pirate said philosophically. “When you’re young, you think the world will make room for who you are and what you want.…And then you find the world of adults is even more limiting than the world of children. With no room for adventure, much less yer own thoughts.”

  Wendy regarded the pirate curiously. This was the most thoughtful, intelligent thing she had heard on the ship so far.

  He laughed quietly at the look on her face. “I’ll get ye out,” he promised.

  “Really?” Wendy asked, surprised out of her usual politeness. “But…why?”

  “Because some of us always have to escape, to hide in plain sight, to fight with the world to get the adventure we deserve. Ye’d think a pirate would be the freest person in the world, wouldn’t you? But even here there are other people’s rules to follow. And men don’t like what’s different—at least not at first, now do they?”

  “No, I suppose not,” Wendy said thoughtfully. She wasn’t entirely sure what he was driving at. Maybe he didn’t want to be a pirate? Maybe he wanted to be something else altogether. What if she and the boys, just by imagining it, had cast him in the roll of buccaneer forever? What if he wanted to be a shepherd, or even a banker? The poignancy of his words struck her heart.

  “I might be trapped in the part I play…and maybe it’s because o’ that, but I can’t stand to see others what are constrained against their will, too. And maybe it’ll be a good deed what goes against my own litany of skullduggery.

  “But enough o’ ruminatin’. The captain’s involved in that shadow nonsense and the crew is getting restless. He’s promised we’re soon back to our villainous ways, so when the tide turns on the morrow we’ll be off—or there’ll be mutiny, mark my words. You’ll have to get out tonight, just before dawn.”

  “I
can’t swim,” Wendy said, looking doubtfully at the water below. “At least, not very well.”

  “There’s a one-man dinghy for repairs and whatnot I’ll toss over the side. But you’ll have to slide down the rope to it, and I don’t think I could spare more’n one paddle without raising suspicion. If you care enough about your freedom, you’ll figure out how to use it right.”

  “I feel like that is some sort of metaphor you could apply to your own life, sir.”

  The pirate laughed again, and not at all like a villain.

  “Just make sure you’re up before the Southern Cross fades from view, and meet me stern side.”

  “Not that I am not greatly appreciative of all of this,” Wendy said politely, “but what is to keep Hook from turning around to look for me? Even if I manage to figure out how to row with one paddle, I daresay it’s unlikely I could be on the beach outrunning a crew of angry pirates bereft of their…mother.”

  Zane gave a thin smile. “Oh, don’t you worry about that, love. I’ll just say, ‘What’s that? Anyone hear the tickings of a clock?’ And Hook will have us speeding out of here like that old dead croc is on his pants. Or he’ll say it’s the croc—but between you and me, I think it’s just the sound of time passing that puts the fear of the devil into him. I think he knows somewhere in that musty head of his that his old companion is long gone.

  “Anyway, our beloved captain is mostly engaged in other pursuits. You’re a pretty thing, and useful, but a thin detail in the calamitous fable of our captain’s life. He’s after bigger prey.”

  “Bigger prey?”

  “Ain’t it obvious? His using the shadow to somehow find and get Peter Pan. Thought we were done with that nonsense years ago,” Zane said, sighing.

  “But what about his first mate, Mr. Smee? It sounds like he’s very loyal to Captain Hook. Won’t he see through your ruse and try to persuade Hook to chase me?”

  At this the pirate just laughed and kept laughing, wandering away and slapping his knee. It wasn’t pleasant laughter, and despite the rescue she was being offered, it left Wendy uneasy.

  To stay up, she tried a trick she’d read about in a book: she drank several pints of (tar-scented) water just before bedtime.

  (This was hard to keep from the pirates, who drank nothing before bed besides their grog ration and whatever flasks they had hidden.)

  The crew had made her a private “bedroom” belowdecks among the ship’s stores, and to their credit, they hung there a very nice hammock and covered it with whatever they had that passed for cushions. Hook even contributed a tiny fringed velvet pillow that looked more like a jellyfish than something fit for a bed. Wendy contemplated it now, wondering what hapless ship or manor it had been looted from.

  She drifted off, almost pleasantly, in the gently rocking hammock.

  It didn’t seem like any time had passed at all when her eyes snapped open to utter darkness. The terrible, disturbing noises of a ship full of sleeping pirates came from the berths above her: snoring, tossing, turning, talking or whining in their sleep…as well as other far more unmentionable noises.

  Wendy tipped out of her hammock as quietly as she could, wincing at the creaks from the newly knotted ropes. Then she strapped on her leather satchel (now full of strange bits and bobs and pirate treasures) and climbed the ladder.

  The pirate noises reached a crescendo as she pulled herself up onto the gun deck right behind their quarters. Her mind whirled through all the possible scenarios of being caught. She expected a hand to clamp down on her shoulder at any moment, her flight discovered. Although she tiptoed, it was probably unnecessary: the ship rattled and groaned like a haunted mansion as it rode the little nighttime waves. The planks she walked didn’t squeak at all.

  Shaking and trembling she finally made it out to the main deck, where a great gulp of fresh air and an upside-down bowl of stars were a welcome relief. She studied the sky and finally managed to locate the Southern Cross, which was already fading in the false dawn. Funny that Never Land skies should be so similar to the real world’s, Wendy thought. Not London’s skies, of course, for rare was the night that one could see stars through the fog. And that particular constellation was of course absent from northern heavens.

  The mizzenmast rose like a great sentinel. She cast a wary eye up to the crow’s nest, but it was empty; perhaps the most dreadful pirates on the seas of Never Land didn’t need to post a lookout for Royal Navy ships or potential foes. Still, the cockiness (or laziness) of it irked her sense of propriety.

  She edged up to the rail and looked down. Directly below her was the balcony that hung off the captain’s quarters. While it wouldn’t have surprised her at all to see the nearly inhuman Captain Hook awake and smoking his infernal cigars, pondering whatever insanity it was that kept him going, the balcony was blessedly empty.

  Far, far below that was the black sea, little white tips of its baby waves playing in the starlight.

  “Quietly done, young miss,” came a voice from behind her.

  She spun around. It was just Zane, but now he was shaking his head.

  “That is, I was impressed with your sneaking, until it were obvious you had no idea I was here. You’ll never survive Never Land if you’re not on your guard.”

  “Survive Never Land?” Wendy whispered indignantly. “It’s a place of fantasy and imagination. I lived Never Land growing up. It is mine as much as yours.”

  “And how well do you know yourself then, I wonder,” the pirate said softly. “Anyhow, look.” He pulled back a tarp that was lying on the deck, unnoticed amongst the dregs and bits aboard a pirate vessel. A very tiny dinghy was revealed. It was more like the coracles children played with at the seaside than a proper boat.

  Wendy sucked in her breath but didn’t say anything.

  The pirate picked up the boat and gave it a surprising throw: it arced out almost like a fishing line before dropping to the water with a very minute splash. It could have been a large fish leaping from the water. Angelic blue phosphorescence dazzled for a moment in a ring around the boat before fading.

  “Down you go, lassie,” Zane said, pointing to another rope tied to the railing.

  Wendy looked at the old frayed-looking rope and the sea far below.

  But she was an English girl. She squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and saluted the pirate.

  “Thank you, sir. I shall endeavor to repay your kindness someday.”

  “Nobody salutes on a pirate ship,” he said with disgust. “We’re all equals here, except for the captain. More than anywhere else in the world, I might add. You should think about that some, missy. Off you go, then.”

  He hoisted her up over the railing, making sure her hands were tight around the rope.

  Then he let go.

  Aside from antics in the nursery and some games when she had gone to school, Wendy’s physical activity had been limited to bracing constitutionals around the park. Fast walks, in other words. Barring a few morning stretches, her arm strength was delimited by chores.

  She was terrified.

  But she closed her eyes, wrapped her feet around the rope, and…slid.

  What it must have looked like from a distance! A tiny, pale girl slipping down a thin rope from a galleon that floated silently on the midnight sea. Her light blue dress ballooned around her like a paper lantern lit from underneath, yet it was not without a certain amount of grace that she made her way to the icy waters below.

  Zane had fished the dinghy as close to the ship as possible, so only half of Wendy’s skirts got wet as she awkwardly transferred to the tiny boat. The equally tiny paddle was hooked in just under the hull as neat as a child’s play set.

  She waved once to the figure on the ship high above her; whether he waved back or was even still there at all was impossible to tell against the blackness of the sky.

  Wendy gritted her teeth, settled herself on her knees, and began to row.

  This was the point where, if she were telling the stor
y to Michael and John, she would say something like this:

  “And so the hero struggled, arms growing weak, a glittering sheen of cold perspiration covering her brow. She felt faint. In the east, rosy-fingered dawn was just brushing the sky, but all else was black: the black vault of heavens above her, the black sea around her, the black distant shore, the thousand slimy things that lived in the murky waters below and occasionally brushed the boat with their black fins.

  “Countless hours passed.

  “It was all she could do to keep her eyes fixed on the shore and her strength at the paddle. The terror of being captured and the need to escape drove her through the harrowing gauntlet of exhaustion and fear. Wearily—but triumphantly—she passed through to the other side. Though the task seemed endless, nevertheless she persisted.”

  But the real Wendy was growing weak and utterly fatigued. The whole thing seemed less heroic and more like a scene from some farce: she was paddling a prop boat, comedically dipping her oar on one side and then the other, frantic and ceaseless, making no headway along the silken scrim.

  Above where the sun would eventually rise, a few decorative clouds swept tentatively past: sleek, long, thin, and dark purple, unlike London clouds. The air itself was somehow lightening, glowing a sort of pale green.

  Was time finally passing? Was she actually making headway?

  At first Wendy thought she was hallucinating, delirious with exhaustion. But the shoreline did seem a little closer. When she let herself turn around once or twice in fear, straining her neck, the pirate ship, too, seemed a little farther away.

  After a time, Wendy looked down and saw that the sea was only a couple of feet deep and as clear as drinking water. Despite a thousand different ingrained rules telling her no (don’t get your feet wet, you will catch cold; don’t ruin your skirts in the salt water; don’t get your clothes wet also because they will become see-through), our hero was fed up with the boat. She slipped her boots off and tied their laces around her neck. She carefully undid her stockings and did the same with these. Then, holding up her skirts, she stepped out into the water.