“Yessir!”
The boy raced off again, and Hook closed the door.
“Well then,” Wendy said, “I’ve done as you asked. I’d prefer to return to Dover as soon as possible, but if transportation can’t be arranged until morning, I’d certainly understand. Either way, we can be ready to leave as soon as needed.”
“The only place you’re going is back to Hertfordshire.” He didn’t even look at her when he said it, staring instead at a relatively unaltered map of the southeastern coast of England on the wall.
“What?”
“You heard me. If we find the ship where you say it is, I’ll consider sending you back to your post once the everlost threat has been eliminated. I won’t send a woman to a massacre.”
“Massacre?” Wendy echoed.
“What did you think, Miss Darling? That I would invite them to a tea party? We … are … at … war. We’ll take one or two as our prisoners, if we can, for interrogation. The rest will die.”
“But that’s impossible,” Wendy protested. “We don’t even know how to kill them.”
“You don’t know how to kill them. That information is classified.”
A memory flashed before her eyes: Peter’s face, flushed and in pain, shouting at her in the darkness at the Hertfordshire estate. Hook is my enemy! He is death to all my kind!
But that didn’t make any sense …
“You’re lying,” she said. “If we knew how to kill them, you would have told our platoon.”
“Outlying platoons, Miss Darling, are little more than sentries. They are not meant to engage the enemy and do not, therefore, need to know our most tightly held military secrets. Do you really think you are my confidante? Do you believe I would entrust the king’s highest military secrets to you just because you came to me with some wild story about resurrection and flying ships?”
He paused and smiled at her cruelly. “Or is it perhaps on account of your beauty that you assume men will do anything to please you? You do not know everything I do, nor will I tell you my reasons for doing it. You will return to Hertfordshire and await further instructions. If all goes well, I will restore you to your post, as we agreed. But it will be at my discretion. Is that clear?”
Wendy felt a ball of cold, hard ice settle into the pit of her stomach, and her heart shivered in her chest. It was all too clear, in fact. She had just betrayed Peter and his entire crew to their mortal enemy. She had stolen their only means of escape, and then she had offered them up for slaughter.
he Home Office kept several rooms on the top floor of its headquarters for official guests, and Hook insisted—citing Colin’s safety—that they all remain there until morning. Wendy could see no way around it and was forced to spend a long, sleepless night in London, trying to decide what to do. She couldn’t let Peter die. Not because of her. She just couldn’t.
She knew it was a traitorous thought, but it didn’t feel traitorous. She hadn’t decided to give up her position with the Home Office. Or to abandon her platoon. Or anything nearly so dramatic. It was a simple matter of logic. If Peter remained alive, she would have time to investigate the reports of missing orphans and murdered guardians. She would have time to hear Peter’s version of things. But if he died there would be no more time for anything.
Besides which, he had saved her life more than once, and he had saved poor Reginald on her behalf. Saving Peter’s life in return was the right thing to do. It was a matter of honor.
She just didn’t know how to keep him alive without putting good Englishmen in danger, and she wasn’t about to do that either. Even if she could figure out how to warn Peter, she couldn’t let the everlost ship ambush Hook’s men. She didn’t want to give Peter an advantage in the fight. She wanted to stop them from fighting at all. At least for now. At least under these circumstances.
But getting to Peter was a problem in and of itself. She couldn’t fly anymore, and even though she had never in her life been able to fly until—goodness, was it only last night?—she was already finding the lack of it to be a considerable inconvenience. Still, no matter how hard she thought up, her feet remained firmly planted on the floor. (She even tried thinking happy thoughts, just in case, but that didn’t work any better than it had the first time.)
Nor did she have the funds to sneak off and arrange transportation.
Colin had always been happy to take her anywhere she pleased, but she couldn’t involve any of her friends in this. Treason was punishable by death. And even if she were willing to drag them into this mess, she wasn’t entirely sure they would be sympathetic to a plan that involved saving the enemy.
Not to mention that if she left without telling them, they would alert Captain Hook as soon as they discovered her missing, thinking they were protecting her.
No, there wasn’t anything for it. She was going to have to stay right where she was until morning and endure the long ride to Hertfordshire, knowing all the while that Hook was preparing to set sail for Dover and that she was traveling in the wrong direction. Moving farther away from Peter with every passing mile.
Wendy woke them all early enough that they were ready to leave by dawn, but the journey still lasted some five or six hours. To Wendy, they were longest hours of her life. She spent almost every minute drumming on Nana’s head, her anxious fingers rolling out the cadence of a galloping horse—onetwothreefour, onetwothreefour, onetwothreefour—while the actual horses drawing the carriage never came close to that pace.
When they finally arrived, Mrs. Medcalf was delighted to welcome them all back. The explanation offered was that the captain had found himself called out upon another, rather unexpected sea voyage, and the sympathetic woman spent almost an hour reassuring Wendy that her fake engagement was still very much intact. Not that Wendy was really listening. Instead, she was imagining how Hook was going to kill Peter. Or how he might be killing him this very moment.
As soon as she could, Wendy broke away into the garden and tried to call for Tinker Bell, but there was no delicate jingling in reply. As she had feared, Tinker Bell was still angry with her and had stopped spying on her altogether.
But Wendy hadn’t counted on Tinker Bell’s help. She knew that had been a long shot, at best. Instead, a far more intricate plan had formed in Wendy’s mind over the hours it had taken them to return. It was a good plan, and it left John and Michael and Colin and Nana and Poppy completely out of everything. But it required waiting until after dinner so as not to be discovered.
Wendy got through the afternoon by unpacking (which included placing the thimble back in her coat pocket), and then sitting in the library pretending to read, her eyes restlessly scanning the pages without taking in anything at all. When dinner finally arrived, she wolfed down the meal in a very unladylike manner, blaming her behavior on the stress of travel, and then retired early to her room—making it very clear that she needed her rest.
Once she was sure no one would come looking for her before morning, she snuck back out to the stables, stole a lovely bay mare, and rode the horse at breakneck speed to the home of Monsieur Dumas. She would have loved to ride all the way to Dover, but that was a distance of ninety miles or so, roughly three times the trip from London to Hertfordshire. A gallop like that would kill a horse long before it arrived.
The only way she could ride ninety miles in one night would be to trade out horses as she went. She didn’t know anyone along most of the route, but Monsieur Dumas had hinted that Frenchmen in England tended to seek out each other’s company, being something of an oddity and universally distrusted—and, of course, finding common familiarity in the French language and customs.
If Monsieur Dumas was surprised when Wendy arrived at his home at such a late hour on the back of a sweat-lathered horse, that was nothing compared to his shock when he learned what she needed him to do.
“So, you want me to tell you where to change horses some eight to ten times between here and Dover,” he said, after she had explained her plan, �
��provide you with a letter of introduction for each stop along the way, and encourage my fellow countrymen to give an Englishwoman a fresh horse in exchange for a spent one in the middle of the night, no questions asked? And you can’t tell me why.”
When he put it like that, Wendy realized she was asking the impossible, and tears welled up in her eyes.
“You’re right. I’m sorry,” she said sniffling. “I didn’t think it all out. It was desperate and stupid. I should not have asked you.”
She turned away, embarrassed, but Monsieur Dumas placed a gentle hand on her arm. “Desperate?” he prompted.
“It’s a matter of life and death, as I said.”
“Whose death?” he wanted to know.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Can you at least tell me why you can’t tell me?”
“It would be treason to tell you,” she replied.
Monsieur Dumas might not have known anything about magical creatures or flying men, but he was no fool.
“So,” he said, “you intend to save the life of a man King George views as an enemy.”
Wendy nodded, watching him carefully.
“And you can’t ask your friends at the Hook Estate to help you because they, too, would see your efforts as treason.”
Wendy nodded again.
There was only one sort of man that Monsieur Dumas would expect to be hated by all of England, and that, of course, was a Frenchman. If Wendy had, perhaps, expected Monsieur Dumas to leap to this very conclusion, well, that wasn’t the same thing as lying, in her opinion. And she really was trying to save a man’s life. The fact that it didn’t happen to be a French life didn’t make it any less worth saving.
“I see,” Monsieur Dumas told her. “Unfortunately, I cannot do as you ask.”
Wendy’s heart sank, but then the man smiled.
“Instead,” he told her, “I’m afraid I must insist on coming with you. No Frenchman will trust an Englishwoman dashing across the countryside in the dead of night. But they will trust me. Come. Your mare is already spent. We will retrieve two rested animals from my stables. Like me, they still have some fight left in them.”
He said this last with an even wider grin and a wink, and Wendy was so overcome with relief that she rushed into his arms and hugged him tightly.
“You’re welcome,” he said, chuckling. “We will save the life of your young man. But we must hurry, yes?”
“Yes,” she agreed. “I pray we are not already too late.”
They raced through the dead of night on horseback. Wendy gave up any attempt at propriety from the beginning, discarding her dress to reveal her fighting leggings and tunic so she could ride more easily. If Monsieur Dumas was surprised, he gave no sign of it, only nodding his approval. They had a long night ahead of them, and the stakes were high. It was not the time for parlor manners.
Changing out their horses went more smoothly than Wendy could have hoped. At each new farm, Monsieur Dumas exchanged a few clipped words in French with his fellow countryman, and they were on their way again. During the third exchange, they were met by a young couple, barely older than Wendy herself, and the woman smiled knowingly.
“I hope you save your love,” she said to Wendy, gripping the arm of her own French husband tightly.
That’s why they’re all here, Wendy realized. These are all Frenchmen who fell in love with Englishwomen. That’s why they’re helping us. They think I’m like them.
It gave her a fresh pang of guilt, but she didn’t have time to worry over it. She was more worried about what she was going to do when they reached the shore. After all, Peter wasn’t in Dover. Peter was on a ship out at sea.
She had vague thoughts of trying to use the thimble to communicate with him once she was close. Or maybe using it to raise the ship out of the water and fly it to her. But she didn’t know whether either of those things would work. All she knew was that she had to try. She had figured out how to get to Dover. Once she was there, she would see what possibilities might reveal themselves. It was all she could do.
So when they reached the white cliffs of Dover, she shoved her hand into her pocket and gripped the thimble tightly. But aside from its slight warmth, she felt no power running through it. She could not hear Peter in her mind. She could not feel the ship responding to her thoughts. She could only stare out into the distance at the rising sun, the clear skies, and the vast expanse of the water, without even a hint of Pan’s ship anywhere to be seen.
There was just one sailing ship in sight, and it proudly flew the English flag.
Wendy’s heart sank into the pit of her stomach.
Hook.
He had arrived ahead of her after all.
Was he about to discover Peter’s ship? Or had he already sunk it? For all Wendy knew, Peter could already be dead, his lifeless, winged body sinking slowly to the bottom of the straits. She imagined his beautiful face submerged in the water, his blue eyes unseeing, staring up at the morning sun filtering down from the sky above, as his hair fanned out around his temples. There was nothing she could do to save him. Nothing. She had come all this way for nothing.
And it was all her fault.
fter staying up all night galloping across the English countryside—to get this close and still be too far away, well, it was all a bit more than Wendy could take. She sat upon the back of her tired horse near the edge of the cliff, wiping furiously at the tears that blurred her vision of the sea.
Monsieur Dumas brought his own horse next to hers and spoke to her gently.
“He was supposed to meet you here?” he asked.
“No,” she admitted. “I didn’t … that is, we didn’t …” Her voice trailed off into silence.
“Ah. He doesn’t know you are coming. But then, it means nothing that he is not here, yes? There could still be time?” His crestfallen expression took on the barest glimmer of hope.
“I suppose that’s true,” Wendy said, sniffling. “But even if we aren’t too late, I don’t know how to get to him from here. And after we’ve come all this way …”
Monsieur Dumas smiled just a little and cocked his head to one side, watching her. “Well, I have not known such a small thing to stop you before.”
In that moment, Wendy paused to think about what a true friend she had in Antoine Dumas. He had galloped through the entire night by her side, believing that if they were caught they would both be jailed or killed. Especially him, a Frenchman on English soil. By that logic, he had risked the safety of all his friends along the way as well, just to do this one thing for her, and without knowing anything more about it than that she was trying to save a life.
She couldn’t bear to let him down after all that. She couldn’t let him believe it had all been for nothing. Whether she could save Peter or not, at least she could send Monsieur Dumas home with a heroic memory to keep him company in his quiet little cottage in Hertfordshire.
So she smiled for him and sat up straighter, trying to appear confident. She looked around for inspiration, intending to come up with some story to tell him about what she was going to do next, and why he could leave her here. Why he could believe that everything was going to be all right.
But what she found was even better.
When she looked down, she saw the same leggings she had been wearing the first time she had ever laid eyes on Peter. When she had fought him on the lawn of Dover Castle with her platoon. And when she looked up, she saw that very same lawn. And that very same castle.
Of course! she thought wildly. The Fourteenth Platoon!
They were all still stationed in the castle—a castle that had boats. John and Michael and Nana might be in Hertfordshire, but the others would still be there, including poor Reginald. They would help her. Even if she had to be a bit vague about the details. It might not be too late to reach Peter first.
Or at least find a way to warn him!
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Monsieur Dumas! I know what I have to do! Thank you s
o much for everything you’ve done for me! I have friends in the castle. They can help me from here. I know they can!”
“Good!” he exclaimed, clearly relieved. “Excellent! Do you need me to wait for you?”
It was understood that he would not go with her to the castle. The appearance of a Frenchman here in Dover would only raise suspicions.
“No,” she assured him. “I’ll be quite all right from here. You’ve done more than enough. Thank you. You have saved more than one life this night.”
“Whatever good we have done, we have done together,” he replied, smiling at her fondly. “But there is no time to waste, yes? Go. Do what you must. I will take the horses back to their owners, as promised.”
“You’ll be all right?” Wendy asked.
“Of course!” He dismounted at once and reached for her reins. “Although after so many hours in the saddle, I think I’ll walk for a bit.”
He said this last with a small chuckle, and Wendy all but leaped out of her own saddle to hug him.
“Go on!” he said to her, laughing more fully now. “Just promise you will come tell me the rest of the story, yes?”
“I promise!” And with one final grin at her friend, she took off running for Dover Castle.
But as the castle grew closer, what began as a run turned into a jog … and then eventually into a brisk walk. It wasn’t that she was tired. (Or rather, she was, but she could have run the whole way if she had felt like she should.) It was just that she needed to think about what she was about to do.
She needed a plan.
She wouldn’t know the new lieutenant in charge, whoever he was. The rest of the platoon would vouch for her, but she needed a plausible story to secure their help. And then there was the bit about arriving at the everlost ship with a small boat of British soldiers and convincing them all not to kill each other.
Obviously, she had a few things to work out yet. But still, it was hope, and even the tiniest bit of hope is infinitely better than having no hope at all. She just had to figure out how to grow that seed of possibility in the direction she wanted it to go, and away from any future in which Peter’s dead body lay sinking through the water.
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