by Lisa Jensen
“Eager to assume my badge of office, eh Mr. Filcher?” I sally.
“We was going to bury it,” he murmurs to the hat.
“Out of respect,” Burley chimes in hopefully. “Swab said we had to put it in a box or it wouldn’t go down.”
I nod at Burley, sweep my gaze back to Filcher, quaking before me. “And who told you I had drowned?”
He seems unable to account for it, shoots an uncertain glance at Nutter.
“It was the boy,” Nutter declares, making a decisive movement to coil the line back in place that the others follow.
My blood chills. Did Pan see me at the lagoon? “You spoke to the boy?” I demand of Filcher.
“Not just me, Cap’n,” my first mate hastily rejoins.
“They came two days ago, Cap’n. For a parley.” Nutter takes up the tale. “Him and his fairy. Asked where you were. We didn’t know. He said he’d beaten you, and got rid of the … new mother … in the Mermaid Lagoon.”
“Wot was we to fink?” Filcher pipes up.
“And then, when you didn’t come back…” Nutter shrugs, and Filcher nods enthusiastically.
“That’s right, Cap’n, that’s how it was,” Burley agrees.
Hook would snarl that he was back, and they’d all better look lively, but my brain is racing. The boy is not so easily gulled as my men, but if the rumor goes round that I am dead and Stella as well, drowned in the Mermaid Lagoon, might we not gain the advantage? If Pan had to come sniffing round my men to learn my whereabouts, perhaps he doesn’t know for certain I was ever at the lagoon. His spy, the crocodile, saw us emerge, but what if it didn’t live to tell the boy? Pan forgets those he kills, and if we disappear from his sight, Stella and I, drowned in the lagoon, might he not forget us both? This might be my quest, a rebirth, as the merwife called it, if not a victory over the boy, at least a means to wriggle out from under his control. To abdicate my command here at long last, retire from the field. It’s worth a try. Indeed, it’s in the best interest of my crew if I am not here to draw the boys’ fire. I have only to invent some plausible story to pacify them.
“Well, men, I was at the Mermaid Lagoon,” I confess, gratified to see the shudder that pulses through them all.
“And the woman?” Filcher asks sullenly.
“I meant to snatch her back if I could. She was a valuable physician whose skills would have been useful on this ship,” I tell them. “But the boy condemned her to death, and there was nothing I could do.” Let them construe what they will from this. The fewer people who know Stella lives, the safer she’ll be. “I scarcely escaped from the place myself,” I continue. “I was driven into the water and had to fight for my boat. One of the loreleis gave chase; tenacious as a bloodhound, she was. Pursued me downriver.” I struggle not to laugh aloud over this inspiration; if the men believe the loreleis inhabit the channels as well as the lagoon, they’ll be far more likely to stay out of the waterways altogether. “But I routed the creature and sent her sniveling back to her sisters.”
I’d better play Hook to the hilt if my ruse is to succeed. I eye each man in turn to see who dares dispute me. None do. My grimy appearance does nothing to dispel my story, and most of them gaze upon me with renewed admiration.
“Now, men, we mustn’t contradict the boy.” I beam at them. “If he believes me gone, he’ll be off his guard. So I think it’s best if we carry on with this funeral.” I nod at the wooden box. “Although, Mr. Filcher, I’d appreciate it if you’d spare my hat.”
With an audible gush of relief, Filcher hands my hat to me.
“My time among you must be brief if we are to maintain this fiction,” I counsel them as they all hop back about their business. “Filcher, you’re in command when I’m gone. Keep the larder stocked and the weapons in trim.”
“But Cap’n, where’ll you be?” Filcher grunts, grabbing a line beside Nutter to lower the boat again.
My malicious grin cheers them, and they bend eagerly toward me. “I will be in the skiff on the river. Scouting a passage to the boys.” The hauling and hammering still as they all swivel their faces toward me. “The redskins have their lakes up in the high country, and the loreleis their lagoon in the south. There must be a channel connecting them that flows through the wood, and I mean to find it. Now that I’ve survived the Mermaid Lagoon, the whole of the river is ripe for exploration. The boys council I attended was held in a public place, but how much more likely are we to find their secret lair by cunning, from their private waterway? Think of it, men! Why should we constantly wage a losing war of defense when we might enter into the heart of boy country by stealth, launch a preemptive strike on their own turf? Murder them all before they have the wit to fly!”
Now the men finally open their lungs and cheer. How like the boys they are. Kill, kill, kill. Stella is right; we men are a sorry lot.
What ever possessed her to love me?
This unwelcome thought steals in upon me like a sudden frost in the middle of my triumphant charade. But I shake it off, order the burial party over the side with Burley in command, and a brick from the ballast in the hold to weigh down the box. I give my abused scarlet coat to Brassy and go into my cabin to collect fresh clothing for my presumed voyage of exploration, my French cutlass, and an extra dagger. With Brassy off in his cupboard with his brushes, and Cookie packing the victuals I requested from the galley, I steal into Stella’s cabin to purloin another shift out of the chest I gave her, along with the clothes she wore here, and the volume of Milton that gave her such joy, all of which I stuff into a pillow sleeve.
Back in my cabin, I return my ribbony hat to its peg. My plumed and lacy tricorne is so unsuitable for skulking about in shadowy places, even my men might notice, so I hang it up as well, pluck off the black hat, and draw on my black coat. But at the last moment, I find I cannot bear to leave behind the frothy pink feather, still redolent of Stella. So I snap it out of the brim of my tricorne and slide it inside my shirt, under my black coat, next to my heart.
* * *
I scarcely step foot upon Le Reve when Stella comes bounding up the hatch and across the deck to kiss me.
“You must be sweltering in that thing,” she exclaims, pushing my black coat off my shoulders.
“If you are going to undress me every time we meet, Parrish, we’ll never get anything done,” I protest, making no attempt whatever to move away from her busy hands.
“Well, you look like an undertaker!” she laughs.
“How fitting, as I’ve just come from a burial.” And I tell her all that transpired aboard the Rouge. “I need only go back now and then to hear news of the boy. Only think, if he forgets about me, about you…” I’m arrested in the act of shrugging entirely out of my coat. “Perhaps they will all forget,” I breathe. “The boys, my men, all of them. The Neverland. They might forget all about us, Stella. They might leave us here in peace.”
But Stella frowns. “Here?” she echoes. “We can’t stay here, you know that.” Her hands clasp my shoulders, her dark eyes are vivid. “I’m going home, James. And you’re coming with me!”
Chapter Twenty-four
THE REDEEMER
“Home? The world of men and war you were so eager to escape?” I suck on a stringy piece of salted wild pig purloined from the galley of the Rouge, along with a bottle of port. We’ve removed ourselves below to the salon as dusk creeps over the Neverland. “Have you changed your mind?”
“Coming here changed everything,” says Stella. “I never realized how much I’d miss all I left behind. Little things. Daft things. A snug home, a fire in the grate, and a rattling good book. An excellent glass of port.” She raises an empty hand in mock salute; we must pass the bottle between us, as all my goblets are back aboard the Rouge. “The changing of seasons, the company of friends, the healing cycles of time, grown-up pleasures, I crave them now.” She sits back a little, sighs. “Running away doesn’t solve anything. It’s time to go back and rebuild the world we’ve got.”
“Prayed, is it?” She cocks an eyebrow at me. “Perhaps you invoked the wrong gods.”
“In my day you’d burn at the stake for such talk,” I note admiringly.
“It’s not witchcraft,” she says. “Forces exist in the world far older and more compassionate than the gods of men. Or boys. The miracles of nature are more powerful than anything church or science can imagine. Mysticism is as old as time. The shaman spoke of a dreampath—”
“Poetic metaphor,” I protest.
“All right, but he said the quest belongs to someone brave enough to follow the dreampath the other way. Out of the Neverland! Lost Boys and Wendys go back all the time. Peter flies in and out all the time. The merwives go back and forth underwater.”
“I mean there is no way back for me.”
She shakes her head, her bouncing hair nearly the color of the port in the warm lamplight. “But it’s all different now. You yourself have visited the fairy queen and the mermaids.”
“Only because I was witless enough to follow you.”
“And why didn’t the fairies stop me, as Peter asked that day, remember?” Stella counters. “Why didn’t the Indians shoot me down? Why didn’t the mermaids drown me? Because the signs appear in all their folklore, and I must be part of it, somehow.”
“It may be your journey entirely,” I agree. “But not mine. Eden must have its Satan.”
“But surely you are the sacrifice here, not the Devil,” she exclaims. “You are the redeemer.”
I stare at her. “Madam, in my time I’ve been accused of many things—”
“You’re the one who suffers for their games,” she insists. “You are the one who dies over and over again so children may have their innocent Dreaming Place. So Peter can win, over and—” she pauses, wide eyes gazing inward, then gapes again at me. “His dreams are freighted with centuries of losses, that’s what the merwife told us. How can he not explode? He has to take it out on someone. Then you come along, the dark and sinister man, the pirate, symbol of the cruel grown-up world that has stolen so much from him. But this is the world where children prevail, where Peter always wins!” She is eager now. “Maybe he doesn’t even know why, but it must relieve the sorrow somehow, all his victories over you, the sorrow he can never be allowed to remember. That must be why she sent you here! Your witch, your voodoo queen.”
“Why would she care if the little whelp has bad dreams?”
Stella shrugs. “Might she have been a Wendy?”
I frown. “If so, she would have no memory of this place, would she? But … she did commune with spirits of the dead.” Bienvenue, Mama Zwonde. It chills me still to think on it.
“Maybe she didn’t care anything about Peter,” Stella suggests. “But she cared a great deal about you.”
“To curse me to eternal torment?” I gape. “By God’s hamstrings, it’s lucky she didn’t dislike me!”
“A curse and a chance,” Stella persists. “Lazuli told us the Neverland was in grave peril once because Peter was on the verge of giving way to all his sorrows. What if it was you coming here that put things right? However awful your other crimes, your witch must have known this would outweigh them all. Preserve harmony in the Neverland, keep this place safe for dreaming children everywhere. Redeem the Neverland and redeem yourself.”
And it comes to me again, what Proserpina said that day about my future, a violent end, my unshriven spirit forbidden to rest in peace. I took it for a curse flung at me in anger. Was it a warning?
“But … it’s fantastic,” I mutter. “Why would she bother?”
“She must have loved you,” Stella murmurs. “As much as I do.”
I am stunned to speechlessness.
“It just wasn’t supposed to take so long,” Stella adds.
“Perhaps my crimes were greater than she imagined.” I’m shaking my head against a floodtide of grim memory. “I should have faced the charges against me like a man, stood up to my accusers, removed the stain from our family name. But I chose to run away, take it out on the world, like a fool. Like a boy.” I draw a heavy breath. “My father might have lived.”
Stella grips my hand in both of hers. “Your witch knew what you were. She knew how much you had to answer for. But she expected you back in her lifetime. She wanted you back, I’m sure of it. What prevented you?”
I shake my head. “That was centuries ago. My memories of that time are naught but a blur of one fruitless campaign after another. After Pan slaughtered my original crew, he started bringing in replacements, former Lost Boys with no better sense than to dream themselves back. I would find them dazed and helpless in some forgotten corner of the island or other, de facto outlaws in this fairyland of children. How could I not—”
“They never came back before?” Stella interrupts. “The old Lost Boys?”
“Well, before I came, I cannot say, but I never saw evidence of any other grown men, save the braves, until after all my original crew were killed. And why would there be? If Pan so despises men, why would he ever bring them back?”
Her expression is all the answer I require. To fight and kill, of course. So they might join my crew, die under his blade, hundreds of them, thousands, so he might have his revenge on the grown-up world and spend his sorrow. And I am his accomplice, his high priest, his bawd, leading his victims to their ritual slaughter, over and over again. How many more must die? “By Christ, I will never go back,” I whisper. “I am irredeemable.”
“No,” Stella says firmly, twining her fingers through mine. “You’ve done all that was asked of you. Peter and the Neverland thrive! There are other men to take up the battle now, and there always will be.”
“Yet more pointless deaths.” I sigh. “That can’t be what she wanted.”
“Perhaps not,” Stella agrees, considering. “But nothing turned out the way she planned, did it? You’ve had two centuries to pay for all your wrongdoing, James. That’s long enough. And now the signs are in play.”
I sit back, my wits harrying her notion for its hidden flaw. There must be one. “The shaman spoke of three signs,” I remind her.
“There hasn’t been a third sign, in the sky, yet,” Stella agrees. She gazes up the hatchway, out to where the first of the stars are winking to life. The moon is waxing now, the merest sliver of light in the evening sky, everything the same as it always is.
“There’s something we haven’t said or done yet to get you out of here, James. We must find out what it is.”
We, she says. We’re on this journey together.
“But what?” I sigh. “Some offering, perhaps? Incense? Animal bones? You’ve already been purified. What do your books have to say on the matter?”
“Well, curses are broken all the time in the old tales. Sleeping Beauty. Snow White. Beauty and the Beast—”
“How?”
Her mouth quirks up. “True love’s kiss.”
I lean across the table obligingly and kiss her piquant mouth. But no thunderclap, nor tidal wave, nor volcanic eruption from the bowels of the earth disturbs the placid Neverland evening. “Well?”
“It can’t happen just like that.” Then her expression brightens. “Your witch! Didn’t you see her in the Fairy Dell? We must go back to the fairies, find her again!”
I do not dignify this harebrained suggestion with a reply.
* * *
How can it be true, any part of it? Yet Stella so ardently embroiders this fantasy of escape, I cannot help but be buoyed up with each new stitch; her hope is as contagious as the pox.
“Where will we go, when we are free?” I prompt her that night as we prepare for bed. I so want to believe her.
“Trescoe Island in Scilly,” Stella replies eagerly. “My aunt’s cottage—well, it’s mine now. Such a fine prospect, a thousand isles, gilded by
the western sun. A huge panorama of stars that change with the seasons, tumbles of rock and stone like ancient castles, a wild, abandoned, beautiful place, James. You will love it so much.”
How I crave to hear the pounding of restless, living surf, the scree of gulls; the Bay of Neverland is so eerily calm. “I wish I could believe it will be as rapturous as you make it sound.”
“Well, it won’t be all that rapturous. The cottage is half ruin inside, and we’ll have to hack it out of the overgrowth. The islands are battered by fierce winter storms. And there are all sorts of … modern conveniences … to contend with,” she adds with asperity. “Automobiles. Airplanes. Telephones. You may find them a very great nuisance, as I do.”
“Since I’ve no notion what any of those things are, I’ll reserve my judgment,” I promise her. “What are we to do there?”
She regards me, chewing on her lower lip. “You’ll laugh.” I gaze back at her with my gravest cardplayer’s face. “Well, the great age of smuggling and murder is long past,” she says wistfully. “Now the islanders are mostly devoted to flowers.”
“Flowers?” I laugh.
“See?” she reproves me, but her eyes are merry. “Yes, flowers, growing them, tending them, harvesting, packaging, hauling them to the mainland. That’s their industry. That’s how they all live.”
“So the ferocious Hook will finish his days gamboling among the posies,” I muse.
“A skilled carpenter is employable anywhere,” she nods at me. “You’ll be able to get work in Hugh Town on St. Mary’s, the big island.”
How easy she makes it sound. “When I left, I was a wanted man on three continents,” I sigh. She’s scooted up beside me on the edge of our bed, and begins unhitching the little buckles of my harness. “Suppose your world won’t have me back?”
“It’s a very different place now,” she replies, peeling the straps off my arm. “Everyone you wronged, or who ever wronged you, they’re all long gone.” She slides the apparatus gently off the end of my truncated arm, sits gazing for a moment at my hook in her hand. “Your crimes are mere trifles next to what the world has seen since.”