Chapter Nine

SUITE: THE FAIRY REVELS

1

It’s taken all morning for our expedition into the wood, to re-set our game traps and hew suitable lengths of timber from the fallen trees. But not even hours of sawing in the fierce Neverland sun has entirely burned off the heat of my anger, so I bid the men row the gig down to the opposite end of Pirates Beach, near the mouth of Kidd Creek, that we may labor another fruitful hour or more in our garden. The men don’t care for it much, but no one disobeys Hook.

I’ve little fear that the boy will launch an unprovoked attack on the skeleton crew I leave behind on board the Rouge; that wouldn’t be fair. But a reckoning is coming, and soon, now that Pan’s fairy knows the woman is here. All women are half-witch, as I know to my cost, and who knows what improvements have been made in the Black Arts since my day? But whatever she is, this Parrish woman, confidante of fairies, neither she nor the boy will get the better of me.

Burley I sent out again in the gig with his lines and tackle to catch our supper while the rest of the men and I raked and culled. And now, as we head back for the Rouge in the late afternoon, laden with fragrant lumber, ripening fish, and a pile of cabbages and potatoes, I feel something useful has been accomplished. We are well supplied against any siege, and the building of our new barricade may begin directly. I’m prepared to work through the night while the boys sleep to gain ground.

Once we gain the Rouge, I am the first up the chains and on deck. Waving off Brassy with his proffered bottle, and some yammering from Filcher, I turn to supervise the others hauling in the gig and offloading her cargo, the victuals to Cookie in the galley, the timber into the charge of Sticks at his work station on the fo’c’sle deck. With this business noisily underway, I plunge down the ladder for her cabin; now she sees I am in earnest, I’ll give the Parrish woman one more chance to speak the truth to me if she means to forestall a bloody battle with the boys.

But no sooner do I thrust the key into the lock than the door gives way. Pushing it open and peering about, I see her cabin is empty. She’s not there.

I scarce set foot across the threshhold when my boot crunches something against the deck. Stepping aside, I stare down at one of her black metal hairpins, bent straight; I see now how she used it to prise open the lock in the cabin door from the inside. She does not want for cunning, this female. Would any of my men have had the wit to do it?

Storming above again, I find the men fastening the dripping gig boat. But this time, I notice the chocks for the skiff, our smaller boat, stand empty.

“It’s like I tried to tell, you, Cap’n,” Filcher says bleakly, “Nutter ‘n’ them forgot to ‘aul it in last night. Left it in the water.”

I race up to my quarterdeck, peep astern, but I already know what I’ll find.

“Gone,” Filcher confirms. “She took it.”

Well, at least she wasn’t magicked away by the fairies. “Did it not occur to anyone to stop her?” I ask conversationally. This is what happens when I leave the ship to Filcher and a few idlers.

“Never saw her, Cap’n,” Needles blinks behind his round black spectacles.

“Gato didn’t even see her until she was already out in the bay,” chimes in Sticks, which my lookout confirms with a guilty shrug from the crows nest. “And we couldn’t chase her,” Sticks adds. “You had the other boat.”

Astonishing, how little pointing out the obvious improves my humor. I pluck off my hat, shove back my hair.

“What do we need ’er for, anyway?” Filcher grumbles, sotto voce.

A fair enough question. Despite what Pan said, she must be his creature; where else could she be off to so late in the day, with such impunity? The redskins watch over the bay and the fairies are always in the wind. Only an ally of the boy would risk it. Clearly, her mission to me has failed, whatever it was, and now she’s obliged to report back to him. And when she does, when she enters the boy’s wood and beats a merry path straight to his secret lair, if I have the wit God gave a turnip, I’ll be right behind her.

“No one defies Hook!” I declare in ringing tones. “’Vast hauling there, men! Put the boat back in the water,” I translate, clamping my hat back on. “I’m going ashore!”

 

 

We spied the empty skiff lolling under the rushes in a shallow inlet beyond the northern end of Pirates Beach, near the bluff where we climb to the wood. I’ve changed into my black coat with the silver figures, all the better for stealth, but damnably hot as I claw my way up by the stakes for the second time today, with the sun slanting to westward behind me. The men didn’t like to leave me, but I told them I could always come back in the skiff, should my venture come to naught, and they were eager enough to return to the Rouge before nightfall.

Gaining the crown of the bluff, I creep into the outer reaches of the wood. Bypassing the neglected thicket where we keep our traps, I stay to the main grassy path, which soon becomes a verdant tunnel into a towering greenwood of firs, pine, and scrub oak, reeking of sweet jasmine, the boy’s favorite, that twines blithely round every trunk. On I press, deeper into the wood where the trees grow more thickly together, their loftiest branches forming a kind of canopy that blots out the last of the daylight. Peering about in the gathering gloom, pierced now by only the most heroic rays of the sun, I spy an unnatural tremor in the green and brown shadows up ahead, as if a shrubbery had uprooted itself to stagger off on its own. That is her plaid. I fall into step some way behind, watching. She doesn’t appear to be in any haste, or perhaps her insubstantial slippers impede her in this unfriendly terrain of rocks and twigs and bristlecones. But she stops often to examine the grasses and flora growing among the trees, some of which she plucks and stuffs in her jacket pockets.

A chill begins rustling through the trees. The gloom in the wood is total. No more gilded shafts of light pierce the darkness. Drawing my black coat closer, I strain to discern the woman’s form before me, crunching dead leaves and bracken underfoot, yet the black shapes of the nearest trees grow more visble in the gloom, trunks twisting like gibbeted outlaws, limbs curling like predator claws.

Through an archway of trees, Parrish emerges into a clearing of overwhelming green, as if it were raining emeralds and diamonds. Unnatural light, insane music, and an undertow of pulsing menace assaults all my senses at once, but it’s too late to turn back. The archway of trees has closed behind us, the path disappeared.

It’s not the boy who calls Parrish so doggedly. It’s the fairies.

2

The full moon shines faintly green tonight above the Fairy Dell. All round the clearing, trees thrust up like spikes and jagged teeth, indigo-violet against a tarnished pewter sky, but the center glows green and silver, where the fairies hold their revels. At first glimpse, it’s like a bright silver coin in the distant grass. But it grows larger as I come nearer, until it seems high as a bonfire on May Eve, framing the woman’s dark silhouette before me as she emerges from the shadows into a wall of silver flame that draws us both forward. Every particle of my being hums with dread. But for two hundred years, the fairy world has been closed to me, and now it opens like a chest of riches before Parrish. I must know what power she wields among them, so I shut away the warnings of my creeping flesh and press on.

The surrounding trees are enormous, scraping the dark sky, while the revels spread out before my eyes, a vast green ocean of brazen activity. The fairies themselves, never any bigger than dragonflies before, are grown to grotesque, obscenely human proportions. I don’t feel shrunken, as if my body were compressed down to imp size; it seems my perception alone has altered, and I’m all the dizzier for it, reeling and disoriented.

It’s like a scene out of Dante. The screeching of dozens of fairy fiddles pitched higher than human hearing erupts like grapeshot inside my nerves; I feel raw and fragile, licentious and despairing, all at once. Vocalists hover above the fiddlers like hummingbirds, carried aloft on the updraft of their pagan songs, some plaintive in tone, others mocking. A corps of fairies dance raggedly in a wide circle, three steps this way, three steps that, red-faced with drink, laughing and reeling, shiny with sweat to the very tips of their dripping wings. They go by in a haze of color, sparkling, evanescent clothing, skin stained in vegetable hues—saffron yellow, pea green, the violet of beets; some have scored their bodies with tribal designs Bill Jukes would envy. Others stumble off into the shadows, hoisting buttercup wineskins, too besotted to join in. Small wonder the boys are compelled to sleep so deeply at night, lest their precious innocence be defiled.

My gaze follows one plump and forlorn fellow, his wings doused and dragging behind him, as he passes a hollow between two tree roots. Inside, a sloe-eyed female bares her rump for a grizzled artisan; by rushlight, he etches a lewd design in her skin with a blackberry thorn. In the surrounding shadows, pale, languid bodies, too close together to tell which limbs are whose, sprawl in the grass beneath a drooping poppy blossom, passing the dripping end of its style from mouth to mouth. A pair of young bucks frisk by, arm in arm, while other tangled bodies in confounding combinations fornicate merrily wherever they fall. Harsh, bubbling mirth, husky moans and raucous cries chime in counterpoint to the manic fiddling, a crescendo of abandon.

My legs wobble beneath me, the urge to dance overpowering, as is the urge to tear off my clothes and wallow like a beast in mud and moonlight and fairy glamor, the urge to plunge my sex into any warm, yielding thing, the urge to throw myself off a cliff, all are one: wholesale madness without limits, a frenzy of nameless desire.

A tawny minx spangled in gold like tattered cobwebs flutters by me in the close dark, brushing my cheek suggestively with her downy wing. I’m ripping the lace from my throat, eager for more of her caress, when I spy ahead a singular shadow against the dazzling palace of light the glowing sphere has become. Another human, not a creature of gossamer and moondust, but an unmistakably earthy figure approaches the palace steps unobstructed. She’s going into the fairy palace, the citadel of power in the Neverland, the very heart of enemy country. I grasp hold of my few remaining wits, shove past the lusty fairy, glimpse a flash of indignant golden eyes, and blunder toward the light, caring not where I tread, nor whom nor what I interrupt. But by the time I maneuver round the ring of flailing dancers, elude a pair of chattery young females in heat and the tumescent intentions of a predatory male, I’ve lost sight of the Parrish woman. Yet the fairy palace suddenly shudders up into being before me. The palace steps shimmer and shift like a false vision of water in the desert, yet they support my weight, and I mount them.

I scarcely climb at all, finding myself suddenly inside, or at least surrounded on all sides by a brilliance of light with no visible source. There are no torches, no lanterns, not so much as a firefly, yet all is aglow with a light of staggering volatility. The damp, dark, shadow world of the forest seems very far away. Never have I beheld such light before; there are layers of light like shadows, gold, silver, green, violet, concealing gauzy depths within, and I flounder about dazed, certain of nothing but solid ground, slick and shiny as marble beneath my feet. When I glimpse a movement of something more solid than light, I follow it. Parrish. She must know the way.

Yet around a fold of purplish mist, a different figure emerges, a graceful young woman, small and willowy, golden hair dressed in pearls, one long roll of it hanging down her back. Recognition stabs me to the core. No. It’s not possible. Not Caroline. Not here.

She halts, grasps up her ice blue skirts in both her little hands, whirls about. Her eyes, as pale and unclouded as the fabric of her gown, peer out beneath her smooth, white forehead. Her face and bosom and arms are powdered moonlight white, deadening the effect of her dewy youth, in the fashion of the day. My day. My Caroline. Rooted to the spot, I’m unable to speak, nor do I believe my worthless eyes. She looks back at me intently, yet her gaze passes over me, as if I were a phantom, and her features droop in anxiety.

“Where have you gone, Jamie?” she cries.

A ragged breath catches in my throat; I scarcely remember to breathe at all. “Caroline,” I gurgle, “I’m right here.”

“They say such horrid things about you,” she goes on. “How can it be true? We are in love, I tell them. He would never, he could not ever—”

I choke on my next attempt at speech, cannot force the words out. Had she truly been in love, how could she betray me so completely? How could she be so easily persuaded? How could she believe it of me? And familiar anger courses through me as it always has, blotting out whatever desire for Caroline I harbored in my foolish youth. I’d have done my duty by her had she waited for me. Had she only believed in me. Vixen, who is she to come here moping about when it was she who betrayed me?

“Why did you never come back to me?” Her pretty little voice wavers plaintively.

“Why didn’t you wait?” I spit back. How could I have ever cared for this duplicitous little chit, with her airs and her grand family name, and her black, faithless heart? Even as I stare at her, daring her to answer me, her image fades like a distant ship lost in a blinding sun. All that’s left is a pitiable voice, soft and sad.

“I waited all my life.”

It’s too hot, too bright. Throwing my arm across my eyes, I stagger with hand outstretched for some retreat. My fingers touch bark, and I know I must have stumbled outside again. A salty breeze ruffles my hair, bearing a whiff of thyme and jasmine. Peeking out, I find myself in blessed shadow again, in some underpopulated part of the forest with sand, not grass, underfoot. A giant green lizard lumbers across my path and scrabbles halfway up a bare tree trunk, where it pauses to glare at me. I back off, round another trunk, and a more substantial figure, slow and sensual, rises up out of the shadows. God’s cursed life, I know that languid shape. The most faithless female of them all. Proserpina, the voudon priestess, as alluring and sinister as ever, her body bursting out of its colorful rags, her dark eyes as narrow and pitiless as the reptile’s.

“Why are you here?” I gape at her.

“Why are you still here, Capitaine,” she murmurs back. The timbre of her voice alone, so well-remembered, so undiminished by time, is enough to rouse every part of me capable of standing, a helpless tide rising to her moon. I so crave her touch, I might fling myself at her like a drowning man upon a spar, until I see the insolence in her black eyes, hear the amusement in her throaty purr.

“Because you sent me here, Witch,” I seethe, a release hotter and more gratifying than desire surging through my body.

Her bare, shiny brown shoulders rise in a careless shrug, her black eyes glittery. “La, la, Capitaine,” she croons at me. “As quick as ever to give in to the fire of your rage. You should have chosen more wisely.”

“I had no choice!”

“There is always a choice,” she coos. “I offered you peace, but you chose war. I offered you love, but you chose hate.”

I shut my eyes against the memory of the man I was then, abused by life, commander of a crew of murderers who cared for nothing by blood and revenge against the world. Why didn’t I choose her when I had the chance?

“You said you loved me,” I whisper.

“You will never know how much. That is your tragedy, Capitaine.”

“Enough to curse me to this place because I would not stay with you,” I say bitterly.

She rounds her eyes at me like a stage ingenue. “You believe I punish you for my poor broken heart? La, la, no wonder you never came back.”

“Back?” The single syllable, musty with impotence, all but chokes me.

“I waited for you so long,” she murmurs, toying idly with the strings of coral, turquoise, and ebony beads that decorate her breast. “How could I know it would take you so long?”

To do what? I can scarcely grasp the notion before she stretches out one brown hand to me. And for all my rage, for all the suffering she has caused me, the dead stump in my chest shudders for an instant and I see my own hand reach for hers. Yet I feel no warmth, no weight, no solid flesh; my fingers clutch at nothing but air, and I stumble in the sand as her teeth shine in a cruel smile.

“It is too late to choose me,” and she waves me away like a meddlesome fly. “I am dead.”

Of course she’s dead; they are all dead these two hundred years and more. Dead, the only choice that can never be mine. This is how she loves me. “How long will you torment me?” I demand.

“Wrong question, Capitaine,” she sighs. “Perhaps you are still not ready. I may regret I gave you this chance.”

“What chance?” I cry. But Proserpina is evaporating into the shadows, leaving nothing behind but a last, insinuating purr. “Play well.”

Jezebel, to torture me with phantom hopes and riddles. I will never play again, and she knows it. And as I whirl round and round in the shadows, desperate for escape, the trees and the sand and the night all vanish with Proserpina and I am once again in the midst of blazing light with a solid surface under my feet. I cringe, narrowing my eyes against the sudden brilliance, until the lights mute themselves to a softer glow. Somehow, I’ve strayed into a vast hall. Elegant alabaster columns support an arched ceiling too distant to be seen, mountains of fragrant flowers—lilies, jasmine, narcissus— on huge piles of greenery erupt out of urns and pots and tubs and baskets in every direction, and the surrounding walls shine like glass, mirroring the light. I turn round and round in my dazzlement and terror. The Great Hall of the Fairy Queen.

 

 

She enters by nothing so prosaic as a door. Rather, a shifting in the quality of light, as indistinct as the edge of a rainbow, and a rustling among the flowers announces her presence. In any direction I look, there she is, advancing upon me, the dark intruder in her proud domain of light.

She’s draped in some gauzy stuff, ephemeral as morning mist, all flowing, glittering train with no substance. Her body is entirely visible within, skin so smooth and rounded she gleams in the light, nipples sparkling on creamy breasts, like fine confections tipped in silver dust. Arcane symbols painted in royal purple decorate one exposed shoulder and trail down to swirl suggestively round one breast. Her pale hair is not blonde but bright, waves of it shimmering all around her in a spectrum of colors too brilliant to register on mortal eyes. Her own vivid eyes are shifting echoes of the moonlight, circled in violet and shadowed in green. She’s like an effigy of spun sugar and ice, fragile as breath, but for the primordial power of her presence.

She needs no throne, no pedestal, to loom before me, nor does she disturb the silken, translucent wings that arch so high above her head and trail their filigree appendages upon the floor. She merely glimmers there, an imposing figure of more than my own height, less than an armspan away, radiating unnatural heat, and a dangerous earthiness born of an underworld mortal men are wise to fear. And yet, every part of my traitor’s body, my palm, my sex, my withered ghost of a heart throbs in unison just to behold her, do I will it or not.

“Welcome to our revels, Captain.” She addresses me not so much in language as in sensation I am powerless to resist, not discordant like the common fairies, but slow, beguiling; her meaning flows inside my head, a shivering of distant chimes on a warm breeze. “To what do we owe this … pleasure?”

Too late I remember who I am and what business has brought me here. “My Lady—” I stammer.

“I am Queen BellaAeola, sovereign of this place.”

“Majesty,” I amend, remembering at last to make a leg and bow. “I mean no harm,” I lie. I can’t confess I’ve come to her forest to ferret out the boys. “I seek … a friend.”

The fairy monarch flutters closer, her expression lively. “You have found one.”

My flesh crawls even as my blood boils from her nearness. Her purple tattoos dance about on her skin like living things; lacy patterns twist and unfurl round the fullness of her breast, tongues of liquid flame stretch lewdly toward her swollen silver nipple.

“Ask of me what you will, “she murmurs with drowsy intimacy. “This is not a night for refusals.”

I open my mouth, but no sound emerges. My wit has flown with the queen’s arrival, leaving only hungry flesh and gnawing desire, defenseless and exposed. How can she not know me for what I am? She is the queen of all witchery.

Her fluting merriment sounds again, echoing all round the iridescent walls. I sense her pressing closer, although she does not appear to move, her rich, musky scent, her simmering laughter, the sheer voluptuous power of her person cocooning me, shutting out all else. “I know what you seek, Captain,” she chimes.

I am not fit to reply.

“Release,” she hisses softly.

“Yes,” I whisper.

“Comfort,” she murmurs, her inflection slow and musical. “Rest. Peace.”

“Please,” I groan, closing my eyes. Respite, release, indeed, such pleasure as I have not known in centuries, all could be mine, if only I would surrender. She can do it, I know it, I can feel it. My bully self, my pride, my wit, my rage, all are dissolving, along with my will. I have no will. I have no self. Her glamor oozes over me like aspic, trapping me in helpless thrall. Yes. Please.

The round, precise notes of her voice are a rippling arpeggio of unparalleled beauty. “What will you give me, Captain?”

“My life,” I rasp.

“You do not value your life,” the enchantress replies carelessly.

My eyes startle open, a tremor of fear shivers through me. She watches me avidly, tilting her head from side to side like a curious sparrow.

“My … my soul,” I babble, and receive only another volley of brittle laughter worthy of Proserpina for my reply. “Majesty,” I plead, like the most creeping, cringing, vilest sot, “whatever I have, it’s yours—”

What might I not promise away next, in my humiliation? But the fairy queen is already disengaging me from her spell, the trembling promise of peace, respite, comfort, hope ebbing away, leaving me shipwrecked and stranded on cold, unfriendly shoals.

“Talk, talk, talk,” she flutes in her sing-songy manner. “Foolish man. You have changed nothing.”

With a single massive swoop of her wings, she rises up into the limitlesss vault of the hall above me.

“Majesty, wait!” I’m all but sobbing, falling to my knees on the hard stone floor.

“You value nothing, Captain. You are of no use to me.”

“But—”

“Twice before, the Red Moon has risen, and you have done nothing,” her waterfall voice pipes down to me. “This is your last chance. You will not get another. Seize it soon, or your cause is lost.” And she sweeps herself up out of the light, and all is suddenly darkness and stillness and despair in her wake. The hall, the mirrors, the bountiful flowers, all vanish, and I’m on my knees in the forest, the wet of trampled grass seeping into my stockings. The laughing moon is slinking to westward, the forest is black and still and unpopulated to my eyes so recently bedazzled by the light. A mournful breeze stirs in the trees, bringing with it the acrid scent of crushed nectar and the occasional fleeting sigh or snuffle of an unseen sleeper in the dark, but the revels of Faery are concluded, or else I can no longer see them.

I’d have wagered anything that my deliverance was at hand at last, but nothing is won here without the forfeit of something else. Not until I shiver with more than the night chill at how close I’ve come to losing my grip on all that I am do I begin to recover my senses.

By what unbalanced delusion could I even imagine the imp queen would help me? This is the Neverland. No one will help me here. I’m no more than a game to Queen BellaAeola, as I am to her ally, the boy. Fairy seduction is only another victory to win over me, and I exposed my back to the cat like the most witless gull, begging and sniveling for the favor of her rejection. As if my encounters with Caroline and Proserpina were not cruel enough; by God’s black heart, how could they still wound me so completely after all this time? The fairy queen spoke too of a red moon, a Blood Moon, twice risen. Once when I did for old Bill Jukes, centuries ago. When was the other time? Only in my dreams. And this chance they all taunt me with, surely no more than another means to unbalance and humiliate me. What cause is not lost here? We are all lost. We are all damned.

I’ve not risen from the grass, as immobilized by despair as I was in BellaAeola’s erotic web. In the damp silence, I begin to notice a low, quiet, miserable sound. It’s not the distant sirens this time, nor the moaning of fairies, but something more wretched. A human voice.

Shifting to my feet, I follow it in the dark, picking my way across tangled roots and pine needles to an ancient tree stump, half as high as a man, covered over with moss and bramble. Something shelters there, on the ground between two roots. By the last of the moonlight, I recognize the Parrish woman on her knees in the lee of the stump, her pale face bent over something cradled in her arms. She reacts not at all to my approach, only kneels there, keening mournfully. Too weary to maintain the game of cat-and-mouse, I steady my hook in the old bark and lower myself to crouch beside her, peering at what she holds. What I take at first for a moldering bouquet proves to be an armload of dead, dry grasses, reeds and rushes. A dark shape lies within them, and I peep closer over her shoulder to see what it is. A brown sparrow, stiff and cold, stares up at me out of its dead, glassy eye.

Parrish turns her white face up to me, her dark eyes glazed with sorrow. “My baby,” she rasps. “I’ve lost my baby.”

I should flee for my sanity, had I an ounce of strength left, but I can only cling to the stump as she gazes up at me from the depths of her unvarnished wretchedness.

“Madam.” My shaking voice betrays me, and I stop.

“I tried to hold on to him,” she murmurs. “I held him in my arms, they let me hold him.” She lifts up her ghastly burden a little, and I struggle not to recoil. “He lived. He looked at me. He knew me, I’m sure.”

She turns back to the bundle in her arms. “We knew each other, didn’t we?” she croons softly. “You and I. My baby. You were so much stronger than me, so much wiser, such an ancient soul, oh, God—” Her voice catches; she clutches the dead bird closer, and my blood chills. She begins to rock her upper body, back and forth, back and forth, cradling the thing to her breast.

“I was the failure,” she whispers to it. She looks back up at me, a white face so beyond tragedy it seems inanimate. “I couldn’t keep him alive. I lost them both. I failed them both.”

“Madam,” I try again, shaken to gentleness by our fearful encounters, desperate to break through this last grim enchantment. “This is not your child.”

She blinks at me. “I know,” she agrees sadly. “My baby’s dead. I killed him.”

3

Chilled by more than the pre-dawn cold, it takes me a few moments to command my wits to action. At last, I inch my hand toward her bundle, and her gaze slides down to watch.

“Let me.” I can scarcely breathe the words.

Parrish nods slowly, and when my hand is near enough, she sighs and shifts her little burden to me.

“Don’t hurt him,” she whispers.

I lower the creature in its bed of brown grass as carefully as I might into the shelter of the next root, steady the makeshift nest with my hook to see the little corpse does not tip out. She watches in stoic silence.

“Thank you, Captain,” she murmurs at last.

“You know me?” I almost groan with relief; she’s not yet a madwoman, and I am still a creature of flesh and blood and sanity.

Her gaze turns to me, and I see some faint trace of life and purpose returning to her eyes. They have a greenish tint here in the wood, or perhaps it’s the moonlight. She regards me in silence for another moment.

“You are Captain Hook,” she says, at last, “and I am a long way from London.”

“Welcome to the Neverland,” I say dryly.

She shivers a little inside her jacket, darts a wistful glance at the dead bird in its nest. “I thought it might have been him,” she adds softly. “I thought maybe he was the one who called me here.”

“This is scarcely Paradise. The dead do not come here to seek their reward.”

“I saw him just now,” she says to her empty lap.

As I saw Caroline and Proserpina, nearly forfeiting my wits for the fairies’ idle amusement. A part of me longs to fly like wingéd Hermes back to the protection of my ship, my cabin, and my pots of rum, to obliterate the memory of all I’ve seen in the Dell. Yet I crave the presence of another mortal in this desolate place, for if Parrish were truly one of their witchy tribe, why would the fairies discard her so cruelly?

“You saw phantoms only,” I tell her. “The imps will find out your weakness and use it against you. They will turn your dreams to ash, destroy even the memory of whatever might have once been good in your life—”

I have her full attention now. I stop talking, embarrassed by her scrutiny.

“Come away, Parrish,” I begin again. “We mustn’t stay here. This is an evil place.”

I grasp the tree stump to steady myself, offer my hook arm to help her up, and she takes it. Her grasp is strong, substantial, alive, and I am grateful for it. We are not out of this wood yet.

 

 

Some primordial thing as out of time as myself flaps by overhead on leathery wings with a raucous shriek that startles us both out of our separate reveries. The forest answers with a volley of restless snarling and trumpeting; shrubs rustle, twigs crack, a covey of starlings spooked up out of one roost, circle in a fractious black cloud, and alight in another. Night in the wood belongs to the imps, but dawn belongs to the beasts.

It’s not yet daybreak as I herd Parrish along an old hunter’s trail, but a rising tide of birdsong greets the promise of dawn. If we lose our turning, I listen for the boom of surf and sniff the air for salt to keep us heading for the bluff above the bay. But she can’t be hurried, shuffling along in her useless slippers, now sodden and filthy, lost in her own thoughts.

“I’m sorry I took your boat,” she offers, after a while. “I didn’t mean to keep it. But I didn’t want anyone fighting over me. I thought I could prevent it if I left your ship.”

“You meant to warn the boy,” I suggest evenly.

“Well, I suppose if I’d found him, I’d have tried to talk him out of it, yes,” she agrees. “But I was trying to find out what called me here.”

“Your child?”

“He’s not here,” she sighs. “I know that now.”

“Then your other loss?” I prod carefully, eyeing her. “You spoke of ‘both.’”

Her gaze drops. “My husband.”

Husbands do not typically venture to the Neverland and then call for their wives. It could never have been one of my own men; they are all unloved and unlamented when they arrive here.

“Why search for them in the wood?”

“I know about the forest, where the fairies live,” she says at once. “I’ve seen it in my dreams.” She shakes her head. “I thought the fairies could help me.”

And the Dell opened readily to her eyes so they could have the pleasure of humiliating her. Dead leaves skitter across our path in the dawning breeze like empty fairy promises.

At last, we come to the edge of the bluff, where the path winds down for the beach. I hope I haven’t idled away another hundred years among the imps, for fairy time obeys no laws but its own. But the dark smudge of my ship is still visible out in the bay. The skiff bobs in the scrubby grass at the foot of the bluff, neither covered over in barnacles nor sunk to the bottom with age.

Parrish is all but hobbling in her useless slippers; I must give her my arm all the way down the trail, clawing brush and bramble aside with my hook. At last we plow into powdery sand at the foot of the cliff. Off to our left, Pirates Beach stretches away southward, under its treeline of palms, ghostly in the moonlight. I glance again out at my ship, and begin to long for the quiet and comfort of my bed.

I look at Parrish, who gazes stoically back at me, trying not to let me see how she’s favoring one foot.

“Let’s rest a moment,” I suggest. “It won’t be light for a while yet.”

She nods gratefully, and I draw her back round a curve in the bluff, protected from the shore breeze. She slumps down in the sand and starts rubbing at one battered foot. I sit beside her, sweep off my hat, set it down on the sand.

“Peter doesn’t even want me here, you know,” she sighs. “I’m old and silly, he told me.”

“He spoke to you?” I peer at her. “When?”

“In the nursery. Back in London.” She reads the confusion in my face and begins again. “My dreams of Neverland gave me no peace. I was so sure I was meant to be here, that someone needed me. I did everything I was supposed to, got a situation as a governess near Kensington Gardens, left the nursery window open every night, just like in the stories, and sat up waiting for him.”

She must be a madwoman after all. “And he came for you.”

“I think so.” Something sardonic lurks in her sideways glance. “He might’ve been a hallucination. He might’ve been make-believe. The fact is I was drunk, Captain. I’d become that worst of clichés, the tippling governess.”

I nod. In truth, we are all as drunk as bishops most of the time here, thanks to our never-ending liquor supplies. Pan prefers his enemies pickled in bravado.

“But he didn’t want me,” Parrish sighs. “He refused to take me with him. Said he’d have no silly ladies about the place, bothering him. He swirled his cloak of fairy glamor about him and stalked off, as it were, if such a thing can be imagined three floors up and in midair. ‘Grownups can’t fly!’ he taunted me, and off he went. I was devastated. I wanted it as passionately as any child, the Neverland, more than anything I’ve ever wanted before.”

“But … why?” I blurt.

“The grown-ups have made an awful bloody mess of the world,” she says tartly. “I couldn’t stand it any more. I wanted out.”

This, at least, makes a kind of sense to me. I watch covertly as she shakes out her dark hair, turns back to her blistered foot. She never went to the boys tonight, nor was she welcomed with anything like affection by the savage fairies. Can it be she is not Pan’s creature at all, but the victim of some powerful sorcery? If this woman killed her child, might she have been sent to this vile place for punishment, as I was? I sign her death warrant do I leave her here alone, for there is nothing Pan so despises as a grown woman, the destiny of all the Wendys he can never forgive for growing up and leaving him. I’ve seen it hundreds of times. He sends the Wendys off with a great show of indifference, but he cannot purge them completely from his memory; that miracle is reserved only for those enemies he kills in battle. The pain of so many losses accrues over time, as I know too well, and Pan is more than capable of making this woman pay for them all.

Of course, it is no concern of mine what the little whelp chooses to do in his kingdom of witchery. But who knows better than I what it is to be friendless and alone in this place? And in one instant of resolve, however foolhardy, I set my course, for good or ill.

Pale dawn is already creeping up over the island, chasing off the moon. “Daylight is coming,” I tell Parrish. “Perhaps you ought to come back to my ship.”

She looks at me warily. “As your hostage?”

“As my guest.”

She draws a breath, gazes down the beach, gives her head another little shake. “I don’t want to cause any trouble. Surely there must be some … cave, or something, that—”

“Madam, I have lived here for two hundred years,” I tell her plainly. “There is no other safe place.”

She’s still looking at me uncertainly as I stand up and slap the sand from my breeches. “If what you say is true, you cannot imagine the danger you are in,” I warn her. “Let me help you.” I offer her my hand.

At last she nods, and takes it. “Thank you, Captain,” she says as I help her to her feet.

I turn back to sweep up my black hat and notice some tiny red thing poking out of the sandy dirt beneath it. Some species of sand crab, I think at first, or cocooning insect, but for the speed with which it’s thrusting itself up out of the ground, the length of a finger already, now two.

No, it’s not a sentient creature at all, but tiny red leaves at the tip of a sturdy green stalk. Up it comes, winding out of the sand as I stand frozen in the act of shaking off my hat. Green leaves, fully formed, begin unfurling from the stalk, while the small, shiny red leaves at the tip belly into a fecund round bud. Other buds on other stalks are sprouting out of the earth as well, all within the little crater in the sand and scrub where we were just sitting, green stalks stretching up toward the dawn, splitting into branches spiked with thorns, shaking out their leaves, buds popping open like ripe figs.

Roses, by God’s blood! A little thicket of them growing into being before my dazzled eyes: knee-high, now waist high, aburst with heavy blooms—blood crimson, violet, sunset pink, yellow blossoms as vivid as the sun.

I turn to see Parrish frozen in astonishment behind me, all agog, staring at this impossible spectacle.

“How did you do that?” she demands of me.

For once, no glib retort rises to my lips.

“Well, don’t look at me!” she exclaims. “I couldn’t grow moss in a swamp!”

It’s some witchery, of course, some fairy spell. Clamping on my hat, I reach out to the nearest bush to touch one of the scarlet blooms. The petals are velvety soft against my skin; its heady fragrance lingers on my fingertips. They are as real as they are beautiful. And sinister, for Pan despises roses, as well as climbing bougainvillea and all species of citrus, any devious plant whose fragrant fruit or lovely blossoms conceal thorns to prick him. Briars and bramble he adores; his wood is carpeted in sharp, bristling things to be beaten back and mastered, but he’s outraged by the perfidy of beautiful things that tempt him only to wound him, and he will not have them on his island. He favors the jasmine that runs riot in the wood, honey-sweet, uncomplicated. All through this island, where anything grows at his command, Pan has banished roses. Why do these disobey him now?

This is some new species of sorcery unknown even to me. After all the time I spent with Proserpina, queen of witches, I thought I had seen them all.