Alias Hook (2 page)

“Turlow said it was handsome done,” I said hopefully. “He says I’m clever with my hands.”

My father gazed down at me, pale blue eyes stern behind his spectacles. “I shall have a word with Turlow. You are not to go to the carpenter’s yard anymore.”

“But … why?” I stammered, horror-struck. My happiest hours were spent among the joiners and planers in that busy place.

Father bent down with a sigh and laid a hand on my shoulder, and unusual gesture of affection. “You are a gentleman, sir. Only common laborers work with their hands.”

My mother always received me with warmth and tenderness when I came to her with my troubles. I recall the armies of tiny pearls worked into her bodice, a halo of fine white dust from her powdered curls, her fragrance of violets and tonic. She was a fragile creature to be cherished and honored, but she had no power to influence my father on my behalf. “You are his only surviving child,” she told me gently. “He only wants what’s best for you.”

But I forgot my disappointments on those grand days when I was permitted to go with Father down to the Bristol docks to his warehouse. How I loved to go racketing round the waterfront, its cobbled streets worn smooth from the horse-drawn sledges that ferried heavy loads to and from the ships. But my father had ambitions for his only son, and shortly after the incident of the toy ship, I was sent off to school to be educated as a gentleman.

Master Walters was snoring like an army of kettledrums in the next room by the time we finished the Purcell prelude. It was the hour after midday when no one had any business in the chapel and we were least likely to be disturbed. Carver and his mob of bullies were off shrieking at their games. Master Walters, the organist, was sleeping off his dinner of mutton and port, but his servant knew to let us into the study where he kept a harpsicord for his private compositions.

“Bravissimo!”
I cried, as we made our final flourish. Four hands gave the music wings. By then I might have managed a tolerable accounting on my own, but it was always more fun with two of us.

“Nay, sir, we have put our audience to sleep,” said Alleyn in mock reproof, with a nod toward the rumbling from the next room.

“Then we have played well,” I pointed out, “for I am sure no one can hear us over the din.”

Teddy Alleyn was eleven years old, two forms above me, and by his careful instruction alone had I progressed thus far in my illicit studies. He’d been playing since he was big enough to sit on a bench, and I treasured our stolen hours playing preludes and airs. He grinned now, and tucked a glossy curl behind his ear with one of his long white fingers. Alleyn’s delicate features and soft curls enraged the other boys; they thought him weak and girlish, harried him without mercy. But he was kind to me. He taught me to play. He was my friend.

“You must learn to get on, Jamie,” my mother tried to soothe me after my first year away, when I complained of how the bigger boys taunted me. They derided my small size, my fancy clothing, a father in trade. My father’s advice was more succinct. “Be a man,” he commanded me.

“You’re certain no one saw you come in here, Hookbridge?” Alleyn asked me.

“No one pays any attention to me,” I reminded him.

Alleyn’s mother paid extra fees to continue his musical instruction, which the organist earned chiefly by allowing his pupil access to his instrument whenever he pleased. It was our only refuge, and Alleyn guarded it absolutely, as he guarded the fact of our friendship, to spare me the stain of our association in the eyes of the mob. Alleyn had a way of turning inward when the older boys tripped him up in the commons or called him names. He neither cried, nor fought back, nor defied them with insults, and they could never forgive him for it. I hated to see him so abused, longed for the power to defend him.

“When you’ve attained my great age, sirrah, you will understand what a mercy that is,” Alleyn said loftily. And then we both snickered, outcasts together, confederates in exclusion.

“Come, what next?” he went on, paging through the sheets of music on the stand above the twin keyboads. “We’ve time, I think, for the minuet—”

A babble of voices erupted out in the passage; the study door burst open to disgorge a gang of shouting boys, Carver in the lead, stout, ruddy, sandy-haired, eyes bright with belligerent glee.

“There they are, the little lovebirds!” he cried, and several of the others made smacking noises with their lips.

“I told you!” shrieked another, as a half dozen more tumbled in, above the feeble protests of the servant out in the hall.

Two boys dragged Alleyn away from the bench, held him fast. Carver himself came for me, plucked me from the bench like a flea off a hound, pinned my arms behind me.

“Don’t touch him!” shouted Alleyn, setting all the other boys atwitter.

“I won’t have to, will I?” Carver smirked down at me, looming, feral and terrifying in the enormity of his power. “He kissed you, didn’t he?” His big hands were crushing my arms. “Say it, Hookbridge! The filthy invert kissed you. Say it!”

I shook my head, but the other boys were all crowding around us, chanting, “Say it! Say it!” like a game. Alleyn stood frozen, dark eyes sad and urgent, watching me. His guards were heavy, pitiless boys, baying with the others, itching to strike.

“No!” I yelped in my impotent outrage, only to see Alleyn wince in pain; one of his captors was twisting his fingers.

“Yes,” I squeaked.

Such whooping and confusion followed this utterance, I scarcely knew what I was about, but that the racking of my arms out of their sockets ceased, and Alleyn’s captors let him go. No such thing had ever occurred between us, of course, but my heroic delusion that my false confession had saved us lasted just until I saw the usher, the headmaster’s assistant, in the doorway, pursing his lips in a very worried look.

“You heard him!” Carver crowed over the heads of the throng.

And the chattering boys parted as the usher came to lead Alleyn away. The last look he turned on me was not angry, nor hurt at my betrayal, so much as resigned, as if he had expected no more. It stung worse than if he’d peppered me with invective.

“Well done,” Carver said to me. He motioned to one of his toadies, a smaller boy clutching the muddy stick Carver liked to use at games, and nodded for him to give the thing to me. “Carry that for me, Hookbridge. Let’s go, men.”

Teddy Alleyn was expelled the next day, collected in a carriage and bustled off the grounds. I never saw him again. But I was taken in by Carver and his mob. At first, I consoled myself that I’d worm my way into their good graces in order to wreak a terrible revenge on them all. But as time passed, I was glad enough to have traded a lie for their protection, bartered away my only friend for a pack of allies in petty schoolyard rivalries. They were wild things searching for a target for their malice, and Carver was clever enough to give them one, else they had fallen on each other.

Alleyn’s weakness had forced me to perjure myself on his behalf, or so I convinced myself. How else could I bear what I’d done? Affection made a person vulnerable, and so I learned to mask whatever feelings might be seen as weak in myself behind a show of bravado, and advanced among their ranks.

Thus my education began.

Chapter Two

LOST MEN

Winds have been fractious all day, heavy weather for the Neverland. The boy prefers blue skies and bright sun. The blow is not so hard it disturbs the slovenly tilt at which my ship, the
Jolie Rouge,
has lain at anchor for two centuries, but there is reefing to be done, and yards to be swung and set so she rides more easily. My crew is eager for activity, but unskilled at the work, lubbers that they are, and I must do most of it myself.

Fractious too are the men, much later in the day, when the breeze has slacked off. I go below to find a brawl in progress in the mess room, onlookers circling in to watch, hooting and braying. “Hey, foul!” yodels a voice above the din, to which another yelps, “Aw shut it, this ain’t the bleedin’ Marquess of Queensberry rules!”

As I head into the melee, somone blunders into me out of the shadows, and my sword scrapes out on pure instinct, bloodrage erupting in my veins, and it’s only by the narrowest glimmer of reason that I prevent myself slicing open one of my own men, the big one they call Nutter. Stooping under the deck beams, face as crimson as his curly red hair, fists knotted beneath the tattered sleeves of his blue and white striped jersey, he’s rounding on an assailant who crouches low in the shadows. I whirl about as well as his opponent comes about, the gleam of a blade in his fist, and I recognize another of my crewmen. I leap between them before the small, wiry one we call Dodge can skewer his shipmate.

Both men stumble to a halt on either side of me, Nutter held back by my hook arm, Dodge crouching before me at the business end of my sword. Fingers gripping his clandestine knife, eye purpling from a blow, he’s gauging if he might yet warp round me and strike home with his vicious little blade. His name is well earned.

“Think again, Mr. Dodge,” I suggest. Did any of them bother to think even once, I’d swoon in ecstasy. “Consider the odds.”

Dodge is a gaming man; I’ve seen him yowling over dice. He takes one step back, defiantly shakes a forelock of dark hair off his battered eye, but his weapon thumps to the deck. Good. I’ve no wish to be bled by that cunning device, a wicked weapon for its size, with a narrow blade that pops out with the flick of a switch. They are always bringing the damnedest things back with them from their world, my men.

“Well?” I prompt.

These men are not like my original crew, Bill Jukes and the rest of them, gone these two hundred years. This lot scarcely qualify as sailors, should that word imply the act of actually sailing anywhere, yet they are my responsibility still. Now the others fall back, give us room, shift about, eyeing each other for an advocate. My roving gaze picks out Filcher, my current first mate, shrinking into the shadows. Colorless hair straggles out from beneath his red bandana. His long nose, forward teeth, and shiny black eyes give him the look of a startled squirrel, uncomfortable in the spotlight of my glare.

“Well, Cap’n, Dodge ’ere said the Addicks could whip Millwall,” Filcher begins, “and Nutter said ’e was full of shit.”

Nutter growls at my shoulder, “Millwall could murder ’em!”

“Millwall is a bunch of pussies,” Dodge croaks.

“
You’re
the blee—”

“Silence!” I bark. “Someone will explain this to me in the King’s English, or you’ll all tell it to the cat,” I add, with a suggestive flourish of my sword. It’s been ages since I flogged anyone, but these men don’t know that. Men don’t last for ages in my crew.

“They’re clubs, Captain.” It’s Jesse who dares to enlighten me. The others set to nodding and murmuring; they know I give him more leeway than most. “Millwall and the Addicks,” he elaborates, limping toward me out of the gloom. “Football.”

I gape at them all. “Football?” I try again, as if a different inflection might improve the taste.
“Football?”

This is what comes of idleness. The boy has not been seen much of late, off rounding up new recruits for his tribe, I suppose, but intead of luxuriating in this brief respite of peace, my men spend their wrath on each other. They want a nursemaid, not a captain. Some things never change.

Look at them. Big, florid Nutter panting like a mastiff at my elbow, wiping sweat off his face with one fraying sleeve. Dark, spidery Dodge, at whom I nod to retrieve his weapon, snap it shut and pocket it. Filcher, blinking his rabbity eyes in search of the nearest escape, every inch the Covent Garden pickpocket he was in his last employment, my mate by default, the only one aboard at present with even a nodding acquaintance with a criminal trade. They can scarcely remember their real names when they come here, yet the tribal rivalries of some meaningless sport persist in them still. And none of them, not even Jesse, whom I credit with a modicum of sense, had the wit or inclination to stop this fracas.

It says little for the state of their world that my men grow more foolish with each generation. The boy will have them all writhing in Hell soon enough, yet they’re ready to murder each other now over a game. None of them would last five minutes in a fighting crew under sail in my day. They are Lost Boys still, the lot of them.

The urge to send them to bed without their tea is all but overpowering, but the jest would be wasted on them. They already believe me half madman, that is why they obey me, but I mustn’t let them think me feeble-minded. Before I can utter a word of dismissal, however, a mighty clang like Hell’s judgment trumpets from above. My men and I exchange a look of round-eyed alarm. Bugger me crossways, it’s the damned ship’s bell, silent for centuries at my command. Who dares to ring it now?

Flax, our newest recruit, stands at the belfry above the forward hatch; what’s left of the corroding bell rope has come off in his hands. As we all stream up on deck, Gato, my Spanish lookout, stretches out of the crows nest gesturing like a wild man, but a quick scan of the dusky sky reveals no warlike flying wedge of boys.

“
Oye, Capitan!
” Gato cries, cupping his hand to his ear.

Once I raise my hook for silence, I hear it too, a low rumbling of Indian drums, echoing down from the distant High Plains of the island and rolling across the water, such relentless drumming as I have not heard in decades. It’s been ages since the tribes went on the warpath, not since the boy made them his pets. What’s got them stirred up?

“Wot’s it mean, Cap’n?” ventures Filcher, at my elbow.

I’m all but sniffing at the breeze, like a bloodhound. No, not the tattoo of war drums of old. There is something of excitement, almost anticipation in these drums, an
allegretto con brio,
not unpleasant, yet ominous in that it has never been heard before. Do I only imagine a rattling of fairies, a rippling of mermaids, something foreign, dangerous in the air? The boys are enchanted to sleep at night, but the Indians and the diabolical fairies are active at all hours, and we never know from what quarter a new game will be launched. Glancing back, I see all eyes turned to me as the distant, rhythmic pounding goes on and on. This is not the moment to lose my place in the text. Time to bring the clown Hook out of his box and rally these fellows to some purpose. What else am I fit for? Why else am I here?