Alias Hook (15 page)

“Hook! What are you doing here?” Pan growls at me.

“Merely strolling along my beach,” I say innocently.

“
My
beach,” the boy insists, quite as agitated as his fairy.

I respond with the slightest shrug of indifference. “Then they must be
your
roses,” I observe. “Charming!”

He flutters higher in a fury of paddling limbs. “This better not be your doing, Hook!” he shouts.

“You are master here,” I remind him smoothly. “It’s
your
beach, after all.”

Playacting composure is my habit with the Pan, but beneath it I’m fascinated. I’ve never seen him so thwarted over so little, a nothing, an innocuous patch of flowers. I’ve never seen him thwarted at all.

He glares at me stormily, his imp glimmering in the air between us, ready to charge in either direction. Then the boy glides up a little higher and makes a sweeping gesture toward the roses.

“Here’s what I think of your charming roses,” he cries. He swirls his hand in the air, and I wait for the roses to disappear in a burst of fairy light. Pan is not a sorcerer, as far as I know, yet all things in the Neverland bend to his will. But instead the rose petals begin to fade to the colors of sand and rock, curl up like parchment, fall to the ground. Green leaves yellow and shrink into themselves, disintegrating like ashes. Rose hips droop on their naked stalks and wither into dry husks until the weight of each one snaps off the twig supporting it. And when all that remains is a bramble of blackened stems and naked thorns, the boy nods his head, and the entire stand of withered sticks crumbles to dust before my eyes. Dust. He doesn’t command them to vanish; he commands them to die, while he watches with venomous pleasure. His keen gaze shifts to me to see the effect of his will, although I’m careful to keep my expression impassive.

“I win!” he cries, but his words are more hollow than usual. He was too piqued to call a game, so I owe him no forfeit; perhaps he hopes I’ll crumble in despair like the cursed roses. His imp seems eager to herd him away, and he flutters up to go, but at the last moment turns again to me.

“Whoever did this will be very sorry!” he shouts crossly. “I better not find out it was you!” And off they soar over the cliff.

The mocking sun shines more boldly now as I gaze at the pile of ash and dust that was such magnificent beauty only moments before. When I no longer feel the malevolent chill of his presence in my bones, I plod back down the sand to where Parrish still shelters behind the weeds.

“You wanted a word with the boy, I believe?”

She wrenches her gaze away from the cliff and stares up at me. “What’s the matter with him?”

“He has banned roses from the Neverland,” I tell her. “These disobeyed him. That is how he deals with defiance.”

She clambers slowly to her feet. “This is not how I imagined it.”

“You supposed the land of eternal childhood would be a happy, carefree place, full of gamboling elves and unicorns,” I suggest dryly. “A bed of roses.”

We both glance again at the pile of ash, smoking in the pitiless sun. It’s a ghastly thing to see, such wanton destruction. He didn’t smash them in a petulant temper; he reduced them to ash with the force of his hatred.

At last, Parrish shifts her gaze back to me, her expression bleak. “Now what am I supposed to do? Off to see the wizard?”

The fairies and the boys are proven inhospitable. The woman is running short of options, and I believe at last she realizes it.

“There are dark, dire forces at work here you know nothing about,” I tell her plainly. “Whatever brought you here is more powerful even than Pan. I seek only to understand what it is. The lives of my men may depend on it. Your life may depend on it.”

She frowns at me. “I won’t be part of your stupid war,” she says.

“Perhaps you are here to end it,” I improvise.

The effect of these words is immediate. I see her eyes widen hopefully at this possibility. “Come back to my ship,” I urge her, pressing my advantage. “We want the same thing, you and I: to understand your purpose here. Dine with me tonight, and I may be able to help you.”

She is watching me very carefully. “And what do you want in return?”

“I would appreciate your honesty.”

She sends a last, baleful glance at the smoking ruin where the roses had been, peers again at me. “I hope I can expect the same from you, Captain.” And she turns and climbs into the boat.

It may be true that she’s told me all she believes she knows. But memory is a coquette that wants coaxing, and I must plumb the depth of hers soon, before the Neverland can erode it entirely, as happens so often with my men. The most interesting things slip out unbidden when people are divorced from their wits. Shameful secrets. Hidden desires. Buried memories. And Parrish is fond of drink.

Chapter Twelve

HAMMER AND TONGS

Still, it’s not without a great deal of deliberation that I permit her into my cabin, my sanctum sanctorum. All the relics of my long, weary life are here to be discovered, possibly mocked by her, yet I determine to hazard all. I clear the little cherrywood table, set silken pillows on the chairs, unearth a gilded candelabra from a forgotten corner of my wardrobe. I have more plunder than even I remember stowed away in the shadows. I lost my taste for fine things during my long years in that French island prison, but I regained it with a vengeance when they came at the expense of other, more fortunate men.

I’m once again in ceremonial scarlet and gold lace, my beard trimmed to shadow. The inverted bells of two polished crystal goblets sparkle in the candlelight. Parrish arrives in her own vagabond shirt and trousers, agog at my finery.

“I’m sorry, Captain,” she murmurs. “I didn’t realize this was a formal occasion.”

“Not at all,” I assure her. “I have so few guests, I’m afraid I no longer know what fashion is.”

She darts another of her speculative glances at me, as I withdraw a chair for her. I see she has taken some trouble with her toilette; her hair is pinned back from her face in a few strategic places, while the rest falls loose and wavy to just above her shoulders. As I seat myself opposite her, one corner of her mouth quirks slightly upward. “You look very dashing,” she flatters me.

“Ah!” I say, in relief, as Brassy scuttles in with a decanter of port, and just as quickly out again, his eyes averted to the deck.

“Your men don’t like having me about,” she observes as I fill her glass.

“I am captain here,” I shrug, filling my own.

We salute each other, sip.

“Ooh, this is excellent!” The wine coaxes a genuine smile out of her, then she leans forward. “But can’t they overrule you? Your men?”

“Mutiny?” I scowl. “You take liberties, Madam…”

“No! Democracy. I’ve read that pirate captains only command at the pleasure of their men. They can vote you out, or challenge you to trial by combat.”

I bark a derisive laugh. “Nobody wants my command, I promise you.” I knock back another bracing gulp. “Democracy, Blackbeard. Where do you get such notions?”

“I studied history at university,” she sniffs, but already her attention is wandering as she gazes wide-eyed all round my cabin. Thinking to disarm her further, I give her leave to satisfy her curiosity. Was she ever a Wendy, she might have been aboard this ship once, in this very cabin. Something might stir her memory, although it must have been longer than this woman has been alive since I realized how pointless it is to take hostages. She rises and begins to rove about, drinking everything in with her eyes, slides a finger along the sleek wood of one of my carved bedposts, takes note of their pineapple-shaped finials, a device recalled from the Indies. Coming to my old sea chest, she studies its arched lid branded in frilly script with the legend “Jas. Hook Esq.” A relic from my peacock days. Her fingertip follows the elaborate course of the “J” up and down and around, and up again. She glances back at me.

“Jacobus,” I tell her loftily.

Her mouth tilts up again. “Oh, I see,” she smiles. “James.”

How odd and empty that name sounds, as distant from me as my severed hand, so long gone.

I watch her fingertips trail along the lavish scrollwork of the stern window frame, above the curly pegs from which my hats depend, caress the carved wooden cabinet mounted above my writing table. I am mesmerized by the way her fingers glide over everything, as if the act of touching feeds her more information than her eyes can take in on their own. My phantom fingers stretch longingly, but my hook does not stir.

“You have a skilled carpenter aboard, Captain,” she tells me.

“It’s been an age since any of my men had the skill of a rhubarb,” I reply. “I find that whittling helps to pass the time.”

She glances back at me. “This is your work? It’s very fine.”

She has no idea how long I’ve had to perfect my craft, how little there has ever been to distract me. Indeed, a rhubarb might have produced such work had it had such an infinity of time. “You mean, in spite of this,” I suggest, tilting up my hook to save her the bother of pretending not to look at it.

She gazes briefly at us both, my hook and myself. “Quantity of hands must not matter so much as the skill with which they’re used,” she says with an easy shrug.

“There are few pieces of scrap wood so worn out and damaged they can’t be put to some use,” I mumble, and I swallow another deep draft so she might not see how her praise discomposes me. “Even by so poor a craftsman as the terrible Hook.”

“Oh, that’s just an alias,” she replies, with a brazen smile. “This is the work of a maestro.”

She comes at last, as I knew she must, to my harpsichord, so long silent, its polished mahogany shining bravely in the candlelight. Unlike the
Rouge,
I can’t bear to let it fall into disrepair, but tune and polish it as attentively as any fatuous lover.

“Do you play, Captain?”

“I did once.”

“Surely there are one-handed compositions?” she persists.

“Perhaps you would care to play me one,” I ooze.

Her laugh is light, not mocking. “Not me, Captain, I haven’t the gift. Females no longer learn music and needlepoint and drawing in the nursery any more, you know. It’s an altogether different world.”

“What do you do, then, in your world?” I prompt her. “Besides misinterpret history?”

Impudence fades from her expression, and she gazes down at the keyboard. Her fingertip depresses one key so gently the note does not strike.

“I used to write books,” she murmurs. “Romances.”

“Like masques in Shakespeare? Magic, fantastical journeys, exotic scenery, whimsical Fate?”

Her eyes crinkle up. “Your education is showing, Captain.”

“The education of the playhouse,” I shrug. Not at all the sort of schooling one was meant to boast of in my day. “I am not unacquainted with Shakespeare, as well as the modern scribblers. Congreve, Farquhar, and the like.” I find I am boasting after all.

This amuses her, for some reason, then she shakes her head. “My books were trifles in which a man and a woman defeat obstacles through love. I gave them up when I realized what lies they were,” she adds wistfully. “I lost the heart for it.”

I pick up the glass she left on the table and carry it to her. “Heartlessness is a quality we all share in the Neverland,” I point out. “Is that what brought you here?”

“For that I might’ve stayed where I was, thank you very much,” she scoffs, and downs another sip. “I dreamed this would be a happy place. Childhood reborn.”

Dreams or memories? “You dreamed often of this place as a girl, I suppose?”

She looks surprised. “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“Perhaps to escape some childish sadness,” I try again, raising my own glass. It’s my impression that the children who dream their way here in fact, as opposed to those who only visit during their dreams, are at odds with the other world somehow, dreaming their way here out of desperation.

“Not me, Captain. I had the most boringly happy childhood,” she grins. “My parents were still alive. We had our house in Devon, and summers I spent with my aunt and uncle in Scilly; I had beaches for my playground, and the whole of the ocean to dream on!”

So that’s how she knows her way around a boat.

“It wasn’t until after the war, a year or so ago, that the Neverland started really haunting me,” she goes on thoughtfully. “When I found the book.”

“Book?” I nearly choke on my wine. Is she an enchantress after all, mistress of some volume of arcane lore?

“
Peter and Wendy,
” she replies. “My aunt gave it to me when I was very small. It was autographed. Lovely, ornate old thing, dark green binding, Peter and the mermaids on the cover, I believe, done in gilt.” I marvel over her recollection of such details, not at all like my men. “I only just found that book again, it was put away for years. And inside, beside his name, I found that he’d written one word. ‘Believe.’ And that’s when the Neverland started coming alive in my dreams.”

“Do you say the Scotch boy sent you here?”

Now it is her turn to stare at me.

“The one who went home and wrote down the stories of Pan for the first time,” I explain.

Her eyes widen. “You knew him? He was here?”

“Oh, aye, Inky or Blinky, or some such as they called him, nearsighted little fellow, always scribbling things down,” I mutter, and take another satisfying draft. “Previous to him, they were just stories whispered by children to each other. I should scarcely recollect him now, but for the way the stories have altered since he laid siege to ’em.” Parrish is still staring, enrapt, so I go on. “He got it all wrong, of course, wrote about Pan as if he were a product of his own era, newly run off to the Neverland, although this place is eternal and Pan has been here so much longer than that. Always trumpeting about that he would never grow up, the Scotch boy, that he would never forget.”

“And he never did,” Parrish murmurs.

“A pixilated distortion of the facts, at best, and happy enough he was to invent the rest,” I correct her. “I suppose he’s still spewing the same bilge back in your world.”