Chapter Twenty-six
SUITE: FAREWELL HOPE
1
“This is madness!” Stella insists.
“This is war. It’s madness to believe otherwise.”
The oaken panel is heavy in the inner curve of my hook as I stand midway up the companion ladder, lining up the teeth of the hinge. It was the stoutest board I could find on the Rouge, thick enough to resist the boys’ blades. It took some sawing to fit it to the hatchway; all of Le Reve reeks of sawdust still. Its innovation is it will swing up into place from underneath the hatchway. The boys can pry open the coamings on deck, but this can be sealed from below.
“We will always be at war here,” I tell her.
“Then don’t play—” she begins.
“This is not a game! He knows we’re alive. He will find us again. We must be ready.”
There is no escape. The heavens have not cracked open to disgorge another friendly sign. Even my old dream of release has abandoned me; the comforting stranger in a garden, escape on the phantom ship, I’ve not had it in weeks. Our seclusion and safety on board Le Reve are but illusions, I know that now, tricks to make his next victory even sweeter. That is the way of things here, to play out the line a little, let me delude myself that I have earned some infinitesimal measure of peace, respite, happiness, before all is wrenched from me yet again.
But Stella’s expression is tragic as she stands below in the salon, amid the litter of boards and tools and hardware, gazes with loathing at the extra sword and shields I’ve also brought back from the Rouge.
“Don’t do this to Le Reve, James,” she begs me. “This is our only refuge. She was never made to go to war.”
I do not like to see her face like that, cannot bear to be the cause. But I did not begin this war, and I’m damned do I not defend what is mine. My men know this much, even if I have forgotten.
“This is the world where Pan always wins, you said it yourself,” I remind her, and drive in the pin that joins the teeth, securing the panel to its new hinge in the deck above. It hangs there forlornly alongside the hatchway, blocking out the sun. “I can’t let him hurt you, Parrish.” I am all but pleading, as well. “I must prevail, this one time!”
“And then what?’ she demands. “Will you become the new tyrant of the Neverland? Rule over your enemies, bend them to your will, until you become the new despot they’re all plotting to destroy? Don’t you see that it never, ever ends?”
“How can I stop him? What else can I do?”
She sighs. I sneak a glance at her, see her turn away into the gloom. I know what she wants to say. I do not want to hear it.
“They can’t all be as perverse as their queen,” she murmurs at last.
“They all do her bidding.”
“But they must know the laws of magic that govern this place,” she urges me. “Someone will know what we must do. Or maybe we can find one to show us your witch again.”
“The fairies have never been friendly to me, Stella—”
“What about the one who came to your ship that day? She told you it was your last chance.”
“A taunt, nothing more,” I reason. “I know now the terrible Hook can expect no mercy here.”
Another brush with the imp queen could only erode what’s left of my sanity and rob me of the only thing of value I possess—Stella’s love. If, indeed, it’s still mine.
Apocalypse wakes me in the morning; I come to my senses thrashing in Stella’s arms, blood thundering in my ears, brain exploding with images of fire, tempest ruin.
“Easy, easy,” Stella croons, her arms sliding round me in the cold chill of dawn. I roll away from her, gasping, and she curls up behind me. “What were you dreaming?”
“The end of the world.” I can’t even name what I dreamed, sinister foreboding beyond all imagining. I sit up on the edge of the bed, reach for my trousers, too agitated now for sleep. With a sigh, Stella too throws off the bedclothes.
“We must get away from here, Maestro,” she murmurs.
Another miserably bright blue boy day is dawning, a quarter of an hour later as I finish buckling on my harness. Stella brings me a shirt.
“We’ve got to ask the fairies—” she begins.
“No!” I snap, still raw from my dream.
“But, James—”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter what happens to me, once you complete your journey.” I cannot stop my bilious words as I haul on my shirt. “Think of the adventure! You can put it in a book.”
“What?” Stella gapes.
“Why else subject me to the fairies a second time? Or perhaps Pan is right, and you’ve no intention of—”
“Pan? You spoke to him? About me?”
“Perhaps it makes no difference to you if I dissolve in a pillar of salt or wither away in the sun, once you’re free of this place,” I press on guiltily, daring her to prove me wrong. I am beyond all prudence, so desperately do I need her reassurance. “All you want of me is passage out of this hellhole!”
“You know that’s not true!” Stella cries, outraged. “Since when does his word count for more than mine? You’re as bad as the damn boys!”
Wounded, I snap back, “Trade me to the fairies for your freedom if that’s all the more I mean to you. Or perhaps you’ll simply let me slip away when you’re done with me, like your child—”
Her expression checks the volley of my terrible words; even I am shocked to hear them. They are like a thousand laughing demons exploding out of the air, digging a chasm between us that can never be bridged, never ever. It’s another frozen moment before I realize what I take for the pounding of my heart is the distant report of real cannon fire echoing in from the bay.
Just because Pan has not found us out doesn’t mean he’s not up to mischief elsewhere.
“Damn and blast, that’s the Rouge,” I bluster, grateful for the interruption, turning quickly away, as if rapid movement might reverse the flow of time, erase these last few, fatal seconds. But Stella’s face tells me otherwise, beyond pain, beyond any rage that even I have ever known, blistering as the sun.
“That’s right, run away,” she says tersely. “Go back to your ship, your men, your precious boys, back to your stupid war; that’s all you care about. You’re just like all of them! Stay here forever, if that’s what you want. God forbid you should ever grow up and be a man!”
The wan apology that had struggled to my lips curdles on the instant. Without another word, I grab my black coat, launch myself up on deck, and clamber over the side for the boat, awash in fury and shame.
2
But the Rouge lies to anchor placidly enough as I round the last bend of the creek and pull out across the bay. The intermittent booming of shot has punctuated my journey, and I’m near enough now to smell acrid smoke and see a smudge of gray adrift above the Rouge. Yet I see no war canoes, no flying boys, hear no echoes of jeering laughter, only a hollow percussion of footfalls, a distant staccato of barked orders conducted over the water. It’s some sort of drill, but with real shot, a foolhardy waste of supplies and energy. And upon whose orders?
I tie up astern and climb the chains, but all activity is on the foredeck where Nutter is bawling orders to a ragged line of men making clumsy efforts to obey, hauling up powder-filled breeches wrapped in flannel from below.
“Aw, c’mon ladies,” he yelps, as the others scramble about their work. “You look like a bunch of faggots. Let’s go!”
“Who gave the order to fire that gun?” I ask Filcher, when I’ve herded up the men to attend me on deck.
Filcher glances sideways at Nutter.
“The boys respect the gun,” Nutter chimes in. “They keep their distance.”
I don’t say the boys keep away because I am not on board for them to humiliate. “Until you waste all your powder firing at nothing. Drill all you like, men, but save your live ammunition for the boys.” Still, I praise their martial enthusiasm and set them to stowing the rest of the shot back in its magazine below. Someone in the Neverland, at least, has the wit to keep their enemies at bay.
“More grape for Long Tom,” I bellow into the hatchway at the men clattering down to the hold.
“Captain.” I come about to find my steward poised gingerly at my elbow. “We—”
“Brassy!” I hail him. “A pot of your worst, if you please. Bring it to my quarterdeck.” It will take a tankard or more to burn off the edge of my rancor.
But I chase the first with a tankard of rum shared with the men in the mess room after their morning labors. It’s brutal hot on deck, but pleasant enough down here. Nutter fetches me another, and whatever sense of urgency I came here with is fast ebbing away. I can scarcely recall now what it was that so troubled me earlier. But whatever it was I had to do can surely wait. We’ve nothing but time in the Neverland.
A faint, brash piccolo, or perhaps a tiny bell rouses me out of deep, dreamless torpor. The next thing I know, an agitation like furtive bees snags my attention once more, another high piping, echoing down as if from some prodigious height. My wits are uncommon sluggish; the voices, if such they be, are out of harmony with each other, one lugubrious, the other harsh, fleet, rattling.
“What do you get out of it?” rolls the first.
“The destruction of my rival,” spikes the other.
I must be dreaming, after all; it can’t be fairy speech. But thought of fairies bursts the dam so painstakingly built up out of rum, anger, and oblivion, and my argument with Stella comes flooding back to me in all its naked viciousness. I groan, sit up, grapple for my coat, and the dream voices vanish.
Blinking about, I see I’m in my cabin aboard the Rouge. The sun is westering toward the distant fog bank; the golden light of afternoon slants across my stern windows. How can I have been here so long, the day all but gone? What must Stella think? My bruised, defiant heart cares nothing for her thoughts, but now my wits are ticking back to life, I’m more ashamed than angry. We spoke terrible words to each other, and now I must go back and face the consequences. It is all that separates me from the boys. Otherwise, I prove her accusations true.
At my cabinet, I select two crystal wine goblets, which I wrap up in another linen shirt and conceal inside my coat. I stop in the galley for another bottle, not rum, a seasoned port. Stella’s favorite.
“But Cap’n, you ain’t leaving us?” Nutter protests, clawing up on deck as I march astern for my boat.
“My work is best done at night, while the boys sleep,” I tell them all, and climb down the chains.
Stella does not come on deck to greet me when I tie up and climb aboard Le Reve. Small wonder, after our bitter words. The golden afternoon has given way to violet dusk, and the gloom below decks is total. I pause, blinking, at the foot of the ladder to get my bearings until the shadows arrange themselves into the familiar shapes of cookpot and bricks in the galley, heaps of tools stowed away in the salon. But none are Stella. The cabin too is empty, and the hold. In a panic now, I race above again, but discover no fallen form, collapsed in a swoon or worse, behind the cabin top or in the bows. Stella is an excellent swimmer; she can’t have drowned in the lake. Swum off to the beach? But I don’t need my glass to see the whole of the black sand beach is empty.
She is simply gone.
I can scarcely breathe for the fear clutching at my insides. The boys, it must be, made off with her at last. But there is no evidence of struggle. The hatch cover hangs complacently where I left it, unlatched, not hacked to bits. There is no toppled furniture, nor stray arrows poking out of planks, nothing disturbed or out of place. Nothing at all is the matter with Le Reve except Stella’s absence.
I grasp the rail, heart pounding. She’s run off. Abandoned me to this living nightmare for all eternity. She didn’t get what she wanted of me and now seeks it elsewhere. She is either the falsest, cruelest woman to ever draw breath, or part of some vast conspiracy in the Neverland to wound me beyond all enduring. Both explanations are equally repellent. Hook, the gull. Hook, the fool. Rage boils up inside me from some deep, rank place, blotting out the day, the beach, my sloop, the feeble bleating of my ruined heart. Rage, my oldest ally and only friend, hotter even than the bloodrage of battle, seductive as black drops, an inferno of consuming, unthinking rage; take me my old friend, use me.
I storm below again, desperate to stop the spinning of the world and all its mockery, trembling with the urge to destroy some thing of hers as she has destroyed me. All is fearfully shipshape in my cabin, bedclothes straightened under the coverlet, a little pile of her garments folded neatly on the bed. The lantern hangs on its peg; candle stubs and flints are arrayed upon the shelves beneath the window, alongside her precious Milton and the long, curling pink flamingo feather. This last I grasp, but it seems to hum against my skin like a kiss or a sigh, or a butterfly’s downy wing, sensation more potent than memory, fraught with all we shared. Once.
I slam the feather back on the shelf. Damn her and all her kind! I never claimed to be aught but the monster I am. I challenged her to love me, and she failed that challenge. If she thought to reform me, like some coy little Wendy, with her laughter and her clever talk and the sweet refuge of her body, she was sadly mistaken. I’ve been cozened and betrayed by women all my life. Why is this one so remarkable? Perhaps it’s the precision with which she cut through my defenses, found the part of me kept hidden even from myself, dazzled me with the falsity of hope, and then destroyed it all. Devastation will consume me for the rest of eternity. Infinite wrath or infinite despair? Which way I fly is Hell.
Thus paralyzed I remain on board Le Reve as night falls, hoping against all reason that Stella might yet come back to me.
Blue moonlight bathes the frothy carrot tops, the corrugated cabbage leaves, mutes the vivid hues of my irises until all resemble an eerie, phantom landscape on the bottom of the sea. The pealing of a tiny bell, and a presence rustles up beside me, so near I could touch it, a voice as soft as the moonlight.
There’s always a way. We can find it together.
I turn slowly; the shadows fall away. My hand stretches out as the figure comes closer still. At last, I see my companion, my redemption, a woman’s pale face under cinnamon colored hair, dark greenish eyes, mouth tilted slightly up in heartbreaking intimacy. My heart soars. Stella.
Take my hand.
A grazing of skin, a surge of joyful relief. And then consciousness glimmers and all of it, redemption, release, Stella’s warm, forgiving smile, all spirals away from me like sand in a hurricane. Clutching madly at nothing, feverish with remorse and despair, I come awake alone on board Le Reve, reeling, heartsick, my sex so hard I have to relieve myself with my hand like a green youth. My agony is complete when in the very instant of self-release, I moan for Stella. Never, not once in over two hundred years I’ve suffered in the Neverland, never, ever have I so wanted to die as in this moment.
3
“She’s dead, Cap’n.”
Filcher blinks at me with rabbit-like sincerity, but the shock his words produce must tell in my face, for he melts back another step. “That’s wot you said, i’n’it?” he falters.
Recovering myself, I nod to reassure him. “So I thought.”
The sky is murderous blue today, back aboard the Rouge. Stella did not come back to Le Reve last night. Run off to the loreleis, perhaps. Had she any intention of coming back to me, she’d have done so at night, while the boys slept.
But had the boy himself or any of his allies captured her, he’d waste no time coming to me to trumpet his victory. For this reason, I’ve returned to the Rouge at first light. I know not which I dread more, that Stella has deserted me or been made off with by some enemy, but either way, I must know.
“She never came back here?” I quiz Filcher.
“Blimey, Cap’n, what for?” he exclaims.
Why, indeed? To beg my forgiveness? Not likely, after what I said to her. Or to launch a new plan of escape, for another grim thought has stolen upon me in the bleak light of day: that the signs and the quest have nothing at all to do with Proserpina cursing me. It was only Stella’s insistence that led me to imagine they were connected. What if I am still here because my eternal curse can never be lifted? If Stella realized it, she might have even gone off in search of some other man whose journey the signs foretell, some renegade Lost Man, ready now to go home. Perhaps she’s already found the way out, the path, the lover’s kiss that was truer than mine.
I must know, must feed my anger, stoke up my flagging rage; I will be a sniveling, broken thing forever if I don’t steel myself against the anguish of losing her. Did she find a more compliant ally among my crew, I must torture myself with knowing to which man she’s transferred her pinchbeck love, which body she prefers to mine, quell the whining of that simpleton, James, within me, before he can point out how little rage, revenge, or even the phantom hope of escape can ever mean to me without Stella.
There’s no more reason than ever to assume one of my men is on this prophetic journey. Except for the trouble someone took to keep me aboard the Rouge yesterday, for if I know my hook from a handsaw, I recognize now the hypnotic effect of black drops. Someone must have found an old vial of the stuff after all. I will know soon enough by whose orders they were placed in my drink. And why.
I peer again at my first mate, so gifted at lurking in the shadows. Those voices I thought I heard yesterday: product of my delirium or something more sinister? Did anyone else hear them?
“Filcher, you didn’t happen to be anywhere astern yesterday—” I pause, trying to recall the angle of the setting sun through my stern windows. “Say, an hour before twilight?”
Filcher’s shiny eyes round in apprehension; he’s not sure whether “yes” or “no” is more likely to satisfy me.
“I … don’t rightly recall, Cap’n.”
Surely, had he overheard anything remarkable, he’d have been eager to tell me. I wave him off with my thanks, and he melts gratefully away.
The idlers are still below at their morning mess. Going above, I mark Gato in the crows nest, and Sticks and Swab on watch. Filcher assured me Burley went out in the gig with Nutter and young Flax to manage the nets, and I go to the larboard quarter to watch as the fishing party pulls in. But all three men are there in the boat, Burley in the stern, Nutter and Flax on their feet, fixing the dripping net with its cargo of fish to the tackle Filcher sends down.
Flax is up the side first, after the fish are hauled in.
“Handsomely done,” I tell him as he clambers in over the wales. “Oh, and, Flax, where were you yesterday, an hour or so before twilight?”
Nothing seems to alter in his open face. “Dunno, Cap’n,” he shrugs. “With the lads, I reckon.”
Nutter is lumbering up over the railing, and I ask him the same question.
“Dammit, Cap’n, we got a ship to run,” he blusters. “I don’t know where I am every minute of the day.”
I gaze after them both. I’d make a jest about how the River Lethe appears to be flowing into the Bay of Neverland, but only Stella would understand it.
I turn to the tackle, where men are beginning to haul in the boat, absently take up a line. Perhaps she didn’t need any help from my men to effect her escape. Yet, how—I freeze in the act of winding the line round my hook. Suppose it was Stella’s voice I overheard yesterday, bargaining with a fairy. Ridiculous! What would either one of them be doing on the Rouge? Those voices were hallucination, nothing more, I convince myself, as we sway up the boat. And yet, Stella was the one so keen to talk to the imps.
Was she so angry with me yesterday, she made some unholy bargain with a fairy to leave the Neverland in my stead?
Is that why they drugged me? The destruction of you rival. Suppose Stella discovered that she and I were rivals for the escape route foretold in the signs. And then we quarreled. I must have made it so easy for her. I even dared her to trade me to the fairies to make good her escape. What if she did? Hook sacrificed on the altar of the boy’s pleasure, left behind for damnation eternal in the Neverland, was that the price of her freedom?
I scarcely notice water cascading across my boots from the streaming boat until Burley good-naturedly pulls me aside and takes my place at the lines. The shouting of the men swaying the boat in to her blocks seems as distant as the moon, as a rift of pain tears open my heart. Did my cruel words make Stella hate me so much?
Then the shouting of the men grows more urgent. The sky darkens above Pirates Beach as they come yelping and hollering toward us, a swarm of boys racketing along to the screech of Pan’s war pipes. Nutter stumbles over the tails of the lines he’s coiling on the wet deck, charges late round the deckhouse for Long Tom in the bows, bawling for his gun crew. But they are scarcely to the ladder before the boys gain the starboard rail. One grimy little fellow with a snakeskin across his middle lights on the foot of the gun near the touch hole and draws an arrow through his bow, a perverse little Cupid aiming at Nutter, who has sense enough to halt at the top rung.
“Hook!” cries Pan, from his perch in the center of the others along the rail. “I knew you’d come back!”
“What do you want?” I bark, steeling myself for the news that Stella is his captive, or worse.
“She’s gone, isn’t she?” He’s positively beaming. “I told you!”
My first response is relief, followed by an agony of loss more bitter than I have ever known plunging through my vitals; it takes all the willpower I possess to conceal it. “Well, what of it?”
Pan frowns at me as if I am a stupid child, then his eyes light up. “So I am the true captain of the Neverland!” he crows, exuberance lifting him high off the rail. “And you are nothing!”
He actually feints backward in the air, grasping the hilt of his sword, anticipating my furious charge. The boys too loom up expectantly, threading their bows, drawing their weapons, eyeing the men. I myself tremble with the urge to go roaring after him, a target at last for all my renewed misery, and my men would not fail me. It’s what they all want, men and boys, all of them.
But my imagination gambols on ahead to the aftermath of my decision: the deck of the Rouge strewn again with the corpses of my men, unprepared for battle, without even Long Tom for cover, flesh sprouting arrows, stab wounds gaping blood. I can drive them to a brave and glorious death, as commanders have done since the beginning of time, and they are sheep enough to thank me for it, but why? The whole business revolts me, our battles to the death over nothing at all, Hook’s pompous pride, so easily ignited, the boy’s childish imperatives.
The boys shriek with pleasure as I yank my French sword from its scabbard, but they choke on their hurrahs when I throw it to the deck and stride across the waist, leaving the men in a knot on deck, Gato in the ratlines, Needles peeping out of a hatch, Nutter teetering on the balls of his feet, all of them staring at me as I march to the center of the boys’ line and glare up at Pan.
“Go home, boy.”
His gray eyes sparkle, his sword is in his hand, but as I am unarmed, there’s naught he can do but brandish it menacingly about my head, each thrust a little closer, so I feel a scurry of air against my cheek, a flutter of blade in my hair. It’s as if he were trying to coax a cat into swiping at a string, clucking and simpering at me. Flat steel slides against my cheek, a point glances off my shoulder. A stout little fellow in raccoon furs nervously fingers his bow and arrow behind the Pan. Agitation boils across the whole of the ship.
“I am master here!” Pan yelps, his little teeth bared in a grin a jackal might envy. “Say it, Hook! Say it!”
But I stand like a block of stone, ignoring his whooshing blade. This time, for once in my life, it’s myself I refuse to betray by giving in to the mob. I am done with his games. Let him scalp me if he wants, mutilate me again, prick out my eyes; how I wish he’d prick out my eyes so I might never have to see the Neverland again. He scowls, mouth compressed into a line, flourishes his sword, and the other boys swarm in closer, rattling their weapons, growling.
A larger shape looms up to my left, tall, solid, reeking hot sweat. Another weapon clatters to the deck, and the boys paddle about in confusion as Nutter plants himself beside me. The snake boy on the gun has to rustle up and follow to keep Nutter in his sights. The big redheaded fellow stares straight ahead even as blade points and arrow tips jab in the air round his face. The tide of the boys’ attention turns again when Burley heaves up on my other side, square and stony-faced. Gato’s knife rings against the deck as he drops out the ratlines to stand beside Burley; Flax, then Swab, even Filcher join the line, all of us unarmed and resolute in the face of the boys’ chivvying.
“I am master here!” Pan tries again, but his voice falters with frustration. His boys begin to chorus, “Pan! Pan! Pan!” but more out of habit than zeal.
An arrow gripped by its shaft grazes Nutter’s cheek, but his amber glare sends the assailant reeling backward. One little fellow cries “Codfish!” and a few others take up the chant, but even that feeble jeer dies off. The boys paddle more strenuously now in testy confusion. They can’t call the pirates afraid, not this time.
Pan darts to me, his face as dark and furious as I have ever seen it, snorting through his teeth like a little terrier, trying to perceive what part of me he can no longer control. With an abrupt movement, he snaps his blade back into his belt.
“C’mon, men!” he cries to his boys. “We might as well fight a bunch of girls!” The boys hoot with laughter, scrambling to close ranks behind him as they all rise in the air. “But we’ll be back!” Pan exclaims, drawing a few random cheers from the boys. Irresistibly, Pan zooms down once more to me. “That’s two games you owe me, Hook,” he growls. “Maybe you don’t have enough pride to fight for yourself. But I bet you’ll fight for her!”
“But she’s gone,” I remind him.
“Not yet,” he hisses at me. “Not unless I say so!” And off they all fly, an erratic pattern in a sky newly besmirched with sinister gray clouds.
My men neither guffaw nor congratulate themselves, shocked to sobriety by their newfound stature, dispersing their line in silence. Only I remain rooted in place.
She’s not gone yet. Stella is still in the Neverland.
“Cap’n’s acting funny.”
I pause at the foot of the ladder, hastily stuffing a strip of dried salt fish into my coat pocket, as Flax’s covert voice drifts past the hatchway above.
“He’s just smarter than you, is all,” answers Nutter.
“It was smart not to fight?” Flax prods.
“Little bastards had the advantage,” Nutter points out. “We wasn’t ready. Cap’n played a smooth trick on ’em, though.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure he did. Next time they come back, they’ll think we’ve all gone soft. That’s when we’ll give ’em what for.”
I’m astounded that Nutter thinks so highly of my methods. One impulsive act of bravado and Hook is reborn, his despair taken for tactical cunning. Thus are military legends made, of hot air and delusion. I creep up the ladder, behind them. As the voices move off toward the deckhouse, I hear Flax make a derisive click of his tongue. “If you ask me, he’s soft already.”
“That’s why nobody’s asking you, old son. Cap’n done the right thing—this time.”
“Who’s to say he won’t turn yellow again?” says Flax.
“Oh, there’s a fight coming, I promise you,” Nutter chuckles confidently. “And next time we’ll win!”