Chapter Seven

MAKE-BELIEVE

Have I cursed Death in my drunken belligerence?

“No,” she said, “I don’t think so,” she said, and I heard myself refused again, mocked again, cheated out of my reward yet again. I had no more sense than to reel out of her cabin, damning her for her mockery.

But now, in the bleak, cold light of daybreak, I realize it must have been a test, some formal exchange I was too witless to perceive in my rage. What else can it mean, a woman in the Neverland, but a chance extended to me at last? Now I can only pray it is not too late, that I can yet fulfill whatever is required by this Angel of Death. Perhaps she didn’t even know me last night, mistook me for some other ruffian in my crew.

I rouse Brassy, my steward, as the first gray tentacles of dawn slither up over the island. I call for a pot of his vile brew, and a bucket of cold water in which to dunk my head and brace up my wits.

“Has my guest been seen to?” I demand, wringing out my hair.

Brassy pauses at the row of my hats hanging on their pegs beneath the stern window, caught in the act of selecting my pink-feathered tricorne to lay out beside my canary breeches. Did I leave it to my steward, I’d be dressed like a clown at Bartholomew Fair. He eyes me with more than his customary uncertainty.

“Food? Drink?” I elaborate. Death may not consume mortal food, but for form’s sake, I must offer hospitality.

“No, Captain. No one told us to feed her.”

This is a canto from Spenser, coming from my monosyllabic steward. “Have Cookie stew a decent piece of fish and take it in with a bottle of my best madeira and my compliments,” I instruct him, sending him off.

Turning to my wardrobe, I select dark breeches, white hose, a lawn shirt with a waterfall of French lace at the throat. My ceremonial scarlet coat, braided in gold, my grandest bucket-cuff boots, and a black velvet ribbon to tie back my hair. Elegant hats have always been my most shameless indulgence, and I choose my most impressive, indigo, upswept on one side, its wide brim boiling over with fat ribbons of scarlet and gold. I mean to impress. This time, my savior will know me.

She’s perched on the bunk, one leg tucked up immodestly beneath her, the other outthrust, a bare toe peeping out from the ridiculous slipper beneath her trouser leg, her shirt tails hanging out. She scoots forward as I sweep open the door, but freezes there when I display myself in all my finery, hat cocked at a rakish angle, my fine French cutlass at my side, hand fisted at my hip, hook tilted slightly upward. Her eyes dilate like a cat’s in the dark; they seem to fill her entire face.

“Bloody hell,” she exclaims.

Eons of practice have taught me to keep a grip on my composure. “Welcome to my ship.”

Her dark, wary eyes move to my upraised appendage. Slowly, slowly, she inclines her head.

“Captain Hook.”

“At your command,” I reply with elaborate politesse, as I decide how best to play her. If I am recognized as the scoundrel who affronted her last night, she does not show it. At the last moment I remember to sweep off my hat and make a leg like a courtier in a Italian comedy. My manners are as rusty as the corroding hull over which I stand, but I’ve never needed them more. Her eyes remain fixed on me. Only a few token pins still cling to her dark hair; the rest is loose, wavy, bouncing just above her shoulders. “To what do I owe this great honor?” I prompt her delicately.

She remains utterly still but for her keen, roving eyes. Savior or not, I don’t care for the impudent way she’s staring at me, her gaze traveling up and down my finery, plume to boots and back again, as if I were a dish of flummery. No, I don’t care for it at all.

Then her mouth tilts upward. “Oh, I must be dreaming!” she titters, shaking her head. “That’s it! You’ve had dreams before, old girl, but this is a real doozy!”

Death dares to mock me again, his faithful servant for all these years? I am outraged, advance another step into the cabin, and the charge of my anger crackles across to her. In an instant, her expression deflates, her fingers clutch at the bedclothes.

“Good God,” she breathes. “You’re real. I thought you were … make-believe.”

“I am as real as daylight,” I assure her, stepping into the sunny rectangle leaking in through the skylight over her bunk.

“But—aren’t you supposed to be dead?” she blurts.

Breath catches in my throat as phantom hope races through my blood, and I step closer, all anger forgotten. “By all the laws of justice and reason, yes,” I whisper.

She stares at me, lips slightly parted. One hand flutters upward in a small, impulsive gesture, and my own gaze drops in humility and gratitude for that imminent benediction, a word, a touch from Death’s unholy angel that will end my suffering forever. But as I lower my eyes, I spy an old bailing bucket, warped and wormy, on the deck at the base of the bunk. A pungent stench distinct from all the other odors of decay and neglect in the cabin arranges itself in my nostrils: human waste. And hope curdles within me. Even were Death’s minion to partake of a convivial meal for form’s sake, why subject herself to the lowly business of voiding it?

Whatever she is, she follows my gaze. “I beg your pardon, Captain,” she begins carefully. “I’m … sorry for the mess, I couldn’t get outside. I found a bucket over there.” Her hand waves vaguely toward the debris still cluttering the far corner of the cabin. “I had to empty it out,” the reckless creature babbles on, indicating a little pile of objects heaped on the foot of her bunk. “I didn’t know where I was, or what I was sup—”

“Silence. Woman.” Shamed that she has seen me so exposed, I ward off further scrutiny with terse words “Your name, Madam.”

“Perish.”

“Liar!”

She jumps where she sits, fingers braced against the wall. “That’s my name. Like a church district, but with two—”

“I can spell,” I grimace. Parrish. Wine alone deluded me last night. She is something far less kindly than Death, and more terrible, a grown woman of unknown provenance aboard my ship. I’ve given too much ground already, come in as an abject supplicant, not the wily gamesman I must be to gain the advantage. “Who are you, Madam Parrish,” I begin again. “Where are you from?”

She eyes me cautiosly. “Name, rank, and serial number, eh?” she murmurs. “Well, last thing I knew, I was in London.”

Of course, that’s where he always goes to round up new confederates, although I should have expected the sun to rise in the west before he would ever ally himself to a grown-up, especially a woman. Noticing the bottle of excellent madeira I sent in to her, of which she has sampled less than would sustain a gnat, I affect a congenial tone. “I fear my hospitality does not agree with you?”

Her gaze follows mine to the bottle. “It’s a little early in the day, even for me,” she says tartly. “You wouldn’t happen to have any strong, black coffee, would you?”

“I might,” and I raise my hook to scratch thoughtfully at my beard, “would you consider answering my questions.”

She peers at us both, my hook and myself, her expression unreadable. Then her mouth tilts up again. “Oh, all right, then, who are you really? Did Freddie Grange put you up to this? I swear, I’ll throttle that—”

“I am Captain Hook. This is my ship. And you are a long, long way from London.”

This silences her again, and I press my advantage. “We are not at war with his mothers, Madam. I seek only to know your business in the Neverland.”

This last word has an extraordinary effect. At last, she wrenches her gaze away from me, scans all about the cabin as if for the first time, takes in the deck beams above, the junk heap of reeking, salt-corroded nautical gear in the corner, slides tentative fingertips along the ancient, wormy bulwark to which her bunk is fastened, peers out through the skylight, where nothing much can be glimpsed but a bit of spar and sail and boy-blue sky beyond. Avid for every detail, her gaze travels down to the unprepossessing objects she’s piled at the foot of the bunk: the remains of a tallow candle stub, a couple of French ecus, a small, tarnished silver bell with a tall handle, the kind a fancy fellow might use to summon his servant, relics perhaps dating all the way back to the original captain of this vessel. The sorts of things some crewman might have taken for valuables and stowed away in a handy bucket generations ago. “It’s all real,” she whispers, as if to herself. “Oh my God.” She turns back eagerly to me. “But where are the children? I thought there would be children.”

“Is that why you were in the wood?”

If possible, her eyes go even rounder. “I was in a wood? I thought that was a dream!” She shoves a hand back through her unruly hair, dislodging a few more pins. “God, I must’ve really tied one on,” she murmurs to herself. Then she frowns again at me. “Then what am I doing here?”

“My question exactly,” I sigh.

“I mean here, on board your ship,” she counters, in some agitation. “I’m supposed to be out there. In the Neverland.”

“For what reason?”

“Because something called me here! Something I couldn’t resist.”

“The boy?”

“No! No, it wasn’t Peter,” she says hastily. Peter, she calls him, like one of the doting Wendys. “I know that much.” She retreats somewhat from our engagement, eyes shifting about more cautiously. Her fingers pluck up the silver bell at the foot of her bunk, from which she shakes a nervous little peal. “Tinker Bell, perhaps?”

I shrug off this name out of the storybooks; all the wretched imps are one to me. “Then who brought you here?”

She shakes her head. “You tell me. I went to sleep in London, on a perfectly ordinary spring night in 1950, and I woke up here. That’s all I know.”

“Only the boy knows the way,” I point out quietly. “Please consider the matter very carefully before you lie to me again.”

She straightens, frowning, alert. Unable to resist a moment of pure theatricality, I add, “You’ve heard of the plank?” As if any pirate ever bothered with a plank; chucking a fellow overboard was good enough in my day.

But the woman laughs. Laughs! No nervous titter this time, but a sarcastic yip worthy of a dockside harlot. “Oh, surely not, Captain! No pirate has ever walked the plank in the history of the world! It’s complete fiction!”

Devil bugger me! Most folk are eager enough to swallow that lie. My new men are always disappointed to find no such object aboard the Rouge. “I do not speak of pirates walking the plank,” I point out icily.

She swallows her hysterical mirth, peers at me again, shakes her head. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with a fictional character.”

“Believe what you like,” I begin, “but we are at war—”

“What? I’m not at war with anyone!” she cries.

“All of Neverland is at war, and that is not make-believe either.”

“No” she exclaims. “This is a fairyland for children!”

“Confess your business, and perhaps I can ransom you without bloodshed,” I press on, pleased to have needled out her weakness at last.

“Oh, God, this is crazy,” she wails, shoving back her hair. “Men and their stupid wars! You can’t ransom me; nobody cares about me. Peter doesn’t even know I’m here. I’ll leave, I don’t care, but don’t hurt him!”

Spare him, Captain. Take me instead. I’ve heard it a thousand times in the pirate trade, a crescendo of pleading that fouls my dreams still. It’s always mercy they want. As if anyone ever showed mercy to me.

“I don’t want to make any trouble,” Parrish babbles on. “Please, Captain. Send me back.”

I can only freeze, breath suspended, for what she might say next, the charm, the sorcery that would make such a thing possible. Back. To London. Out of the Neverland.

“Whatever it is you want of me, Captain, whatever your price, take it, get it over with, and let me get out of here!”

“You think I know the way out?” I bluster. “God’s bowels, would I still be here if I did?”

A dropped bucket clunks and rattles above, followed by a collective rumbling of unease, from which I pick out a single word.

“Fairy.”

The woman hears it too, stares again at me. “Oh my God—”

“Stay where you are!” I order, glancing again at the skylight. If Pan is searching for his lost mother, I can’t have her discovered aboard my ship, and I step out into the companionway, pulling the door shut behind me.

But a tiny fizz of light is already spiraling down the aft hatch, flitting toward me in the gloom of the passage. The faces of my men are crowding into the hatchway to watch, and I step boldly forward to greet the creature, concealing my trepidation. I suppose she’s female; the ones in thrall to the boy always are.

“Madam,” I hail her, as if I disport with fairies every day. Best not let on to my men what a rarity it is, a fairy on board the Rouge to parley with the pirates. We are sworn enemies, her tribe and mine, but nothing is the same in the Neverland today. The light pauses in the air above me. “How may I be of service?” I raise my arms, so she can see I make no move toward my sword. As if our clumsy weapons are any use against the imps.

She darts down at me, and such high, discordant chiming fills my head that my mind closes instinctively against it; I back away, struggling not to cringe from her blistering assault. The imp veers suddenly off toward the shadowy gun deck, an indigo blur trailing light and harsh, tinny noise; she comes about just as swiftly, speeds past me in the direction from which I’ve just come, but as I pivot about, the passage goes dark and quiet. In the sudden gloom, it takes a moment for my eyes to recognize an outline of pale light as the gap of Parrish’s cabin door, lit dimly from within by the skylight.

I shove into the cabin, and the imp bolts straight back from the door until her tiny wings are humming against the skylight. I slam the door shut behind me, revealing Parrish braced against the wall on its other side, staring after the fairy. Stooping between the deck beams, I lunge for the bunk to hook up Parrish’s plaid jacket, stretch it like a net between hook and hand, and feint toward the imp, still beating her wings at the skylight. She can only be a spy for Pan; why else has she come? If she gets free to tell him what she’s found, my men will pay with their lives. It will be another massacre. My first swipe just misses; I hear alarm in her frantic noise as she skitters sideways. Swooping the garment toward her again, I trip on the feculent bucket and she flies over my head to the other side of the room.

By the door, Parrish stares into the imp’s glimmering light, lips forming words, fingers touching the latch. Is she bewitched? Parrish pulls the door open a crack and the fairy light shoots out. I race after it, but there’s naught in the dim passage but a trail of sparks and a lingering odor of sulfur and allspice. I scarcely know what I roar in my fury, but someone bleats from above that the fairy is gone.

Hurling the plaid across the room, I glare at the woman. “Are you mad?” I rage, shoving her against the wall with my hand, pinning her there between my hand and my hook.

“Well, what harm could she do you?” she cries. “You’re a hundred times her size!”

“Fairy power has nothing to do with size,” I retort. “She belongs to the Pan, and Pan is the enemy.”

She stares at me. “He’s only a boy.”

I stare back, my face only inches from hers, my phantom hand itching to strike. “Your precious boy will come looking for you, now his fairy knows you’re here. There’ll be a fight,” I add maliciously.

“You were trying to kill her!” the blasted woman persists.

“I wanted to talk to her.”

“She was talking!” Parrish exclaims. “Didn’t you hear her?”

“Madam, if your fairy confederate—”

“My confederate? What do I look like, Titania, the goddamned fairy queen? She came here to see you!”

My jaw all but unhinges at this delusion. “What?”

“She came because she heard the bell,” Parrish elaborates. “She said she had a message for you.”

I back away, struggling to lace her insane words into coherent meaning.

“She said, ‘This is your last chance,’” Parrish insists. “That’s what she wanted me to tell you.”

What madness is this? “Meaning what?” I demand.

“I don’t know! I just got here.”

She must be in league with the boys after all, if the imps speak to her. And then another awful possibility wavers into my brain: that she’s telling the truth, that she’s only an ignorant intruder who’s just allowed the one ceature in the Neverland who might have explained my phantom chance to escape.

“Stupid, stupid woman!” I cry, and storm out of the cabin, locking the door behind me.

I should know by now to expect nothing but treachery from a woman.

I’ve known it all my life. Why should this woman be different than all the others?