Alias Hook (12 page)

“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.

Chapter Ten

SAINT-DOMINGUE, 1724: PROSERPINA

They called her Proserpina. Tall and straight, she was, with mahogany skin, and lustrous eyes as deep and rich as Spanish chocolate. My crew and I shared a taste for vengeance as well as profit, and I ran them hard aboard the
Jolie Rouge
. But we’d run afoul of a frigate off Saint-Dómingue; laden with plunder, we’d barely limped away with our lives. One of my men was native to the place and knew of a hidden bay where we could shelter and careen the ship. I’d taken a wound in the thigh that would not heal, dripping pus and bringing on bouts of fever, so they took me to Proserpina.

It was whispered that she knew voudon, that she consorted with spirits of the dead, jumbies and demons, a queen of the underworld indeed. But it made little difference to me. For days I scarce knew where I was, beyond a straw pallet covered in some indigo stuff where I lay writhing. In more lucid moments, I perceived a shadowy chamber of earth and straw, low mud walls open to the breezes under a high roof of thatch. My pallet lay in one corner, near a table littered with baskets and hollowed-out gourds filled with powders, buds and seeds, small clay pots sealed with moss, bunches of dried grasses and herbs strung upside down across the open space, all of it reeking of spice and ferment, the sweet-sour perfume of dying things.

In the opposite corner, Proserpina kept her private altar of piled stones, a shallow basin on the bottom, little niches above for candles, festooned with flowers and beads, a gourd rattle, feathers, small bleached bones. Once or twice, woken in the night by a tang of smoke in the little hut, I heard the witch chuckling at her altar, conversing softly in her motley island patois with unseen visitors whose formless voices rasped like the dust of centuries. One night, the sweet scent of jasmine crept into my dreams. “
Bienvenu,
Mama Zwonde,” I heard the witch murmur. “Your daughter greets you from the living time.”

My fever had broken at last, but my thigh was yet too tender to bear me up. I awoke one sun-glazed afternoon to see some yellowish thing moving across the shadows above my pallet. Peering closer, I saw it was a spider, fair the size and color of a gold doubloon, creeping along an invisible line. I lashed out with a cry and a wave of my hand, but the thing scuttled up out of my reach.

“No, no, no,
Capitaine,”
Proserpina scolded me softly from where she stood at her table, fiddling with her pots and balms. Turning my head to look at her, I noticed a large spider’s web glowing faintly gold in the sunlight in the opening above her table, between the edge of the roof thatch and the top of the wall. With a small coaxing sound, Proserpina raised a hand above her head.

“Come, Sister,” she murmured, tugging gently with one finger on a thread I could not see. The spider hastened along it over my head, all the way back to where the witch was waiting, and crawled onto her hand with long, probing, tiger-striped legs. My own flesh prickled with dread, but Proserpina turned to gently place the creature on a broken upper spoke of its web, where it set at once to spinning and weaving.

“Your pet,” I said gruffly, to cover my unease.

The witch smiled faintly, returning to her pots. “We have an understanding. She gives me what I need.”

I glanced again at the shimmering halo of web behind her.

“It spins gold,” I whispered.

With a low chuckle, Proserpina turned again to the web. At an outer edge of its intricate pattern, some distance below where the spinner squatted now at its own task, Proserpina’s deft fingers pulled loose several strands and eased them out, scarcely disturbing the rest of the orb. She brought the oozy stuff and one of her pots, and a little clamshell dish over to me, and sat on the floor beside my pallet. With a practiced hand, she shifted aside the hem of my shirt and spread something warm and fragrant from her little pot over my wound. After working the sticky bit of webbing with her fingertips, this too she began to stretch across the gash in my leg, where it clung of its own accord without bandage or splint, as light as down against my skin. A small contented groan escaped me. I had no need for pretense with the witch; she had seen me raving with fever, weeping in shame. I could be myself with her as I never dared among my men.

“Gold,” Proserpina clucked. “This far more useful. It will knit you up like a second skin,
Capitaine.
So many come to me with stings, scrapes, cutting wounds. My sister, she is very busy.”

Again, I peered up under the palm-thatch roof, where the yellow creature the witch called her sister plied her web. “Surely there are other spiders.”

“Not like this one. She is the best. She came to us so long ago, in the sail of a broke-up ship our wrackers find out in the shoals. The only one of her kind ever seen on this island.” Proserpina paused in her work to gaze up at the industrious thing. “I was not even born then,” she murmured. “This was my grandmere’s house.”

I swallowed a grin that this native woman, for all her skills, could be so credulous. “It cannot be the
same
spider,” I pointed out.

She shifted her gaze back to me, her expression amused and indulgent. “Of course she is. I see to it. Like my mother before me.”

Eerie cold gripped my spine over a fugitive memory, fearful villagers mumbling among themselves. The living dead. “Zombie?” I whispered.

“
La, Capitaine,
she is alive as you and me,” Proserpina chuckled. “The
loas
agree not bear her away to the time beyond until her work here in the living time is done.” The witch gestured upward with one expressive hand. “They lift her out of the current of time for as long as she is useful to me.”

The
loas,
shadowy beings who interceded in the world between the living and the dead on the witch’s behalf, so the villagers said. I had thought them myth, superstition. But by then I had cause to appreciate Proserpina’s powers, had heard dry, ghostly voices rasping gibberish in that very hut in the dead of night. I glanced again at the superannuated spider busily tending her web. “But—is it not monstrous?” I could not help but ask.