Alias Hook (7 page)

But my medicines are long gone.

They always bring him medicine, the Wendys, hoping to control him in the way parents have hoped to control their children for centuries. In my day, a pot of gin did for the little whelps, but medicines have grown more subtle since then, more dark and alluring. I have tried them all. They never can control the Pan, of course, and even though the Wendys leave their medicines behind when they leave him, he soon forgets the promises he made them. I suppose one day he comes upon the bottle or packet or cunning little jar gathering dust on his shelf and can’t recall what it’s for; more often than not, he pitches it over the cliff onto my beach. That is where I find them.

The black drops are the best, lazy in the mind and sweet with forgetfulness. Aches and pains wash away, along with cares, worries, anger, despair. Nothing hurts any more. Nothing matters. My sleep is sound and dreamless. Time is beguiled; for a few hours, I can be content. It was a very great pity to me when the drops fell out of fashion. Later medicines have been foul in the nose, vile on the tongue, and unsettling to the bowels, causing more anxiety than they relieve. Yet I’d gladly swallow a hogshead of any of them this minute, could I find any.

I slam shut the lid of my chest and sway up by the bedpost as an idea glimmers, wraith-like, in my brain. The woman. The mother. Perhaps she’s brought medicine for the boys. I hook up the lantern by its ring and stagger out into the passage.

It’s still as a tomb inside the dark little cabin, and it stinks of the mold of centuries. Lamp hanging from my hook, I halt in the doorway until its jittery light washes over her plaid garment, tossed over the foot of the makeshift bunk. Ignoring the lump in the bedclothes where she lies, I stalk the few steps across that narrow space, flatten my hand over her coat. Some woolen stuff it is, nappy under my fingers as I pat it for hidden recesses. From one square pocket, I withdraw a small circlet of some dark, tarnished metal that might have once been silver, tiny ornaments of a nautical character— a seahorse, a dolphin, a miniscule sailboat, a tiny bell that has lost its clapper, as I notice when I shake it, but none large enough to conceal even a grain of powder, and so I thrust it back in its pocket. I flip the thing over, feel along the satiny lining, but discover no other bulges, no ridges, not so much as a single friendly drop.

“What are you doing?”

Her voice cleaves the shadows and I jerk up my hook to widen the dim pool of light to where she is, propped up on one elbow in the furthest corner of the bunk, wide eyes on me.

“That is no concern of yours,” I rumble, releasing her useless coat with an angry flourish.

“I don’t have any money,” she persists, sitting up by inches, her back pressing into the corner.

“Your money is no use to me,” I spit back. How dare she take me for someone like Filcher, a common thief? Yet how must I look to her, shirt askew, hair unbound, my hook in the shadows above the circle of light.

“Who are you?” she asks.

“Who are you, Woman?” I parry. “That is the question.”

Her eyes are dark and steady in the dim room, where all else seems to pitch with the swaying light. “I’m called Perish.”

The light trembles under my hook, cold shock jolting through my bones. Perish. Has my savior come at last, formed like a woman? Who else can it be? He whose name is Legion: bone-crusher, blood-drinker, life-taker. Reaper. Ravager. Ruin. Perish. Almighty Death, the only god to whom I’ve prayed in two hundred years.

Is that why I had the dream again tonight? This must be the chance I am meant to seize, could I but find voice to respond.

“Have you come for me?”

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.