Alias Hook (8 page)

She swallows her hysterical mirth, peers at me again, shakes her head. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with a fictional character.”

“Believe what you like,” I begin, “but we are at war—”

“What? I’m not at war with anyone!” she cries.

“All of Neverland is at war, and that is not make-believe either.”

“No” she exclaims. “This is a fairyland for children!”

“Confess your business, and perhaps I can ransom you without bloodshed,” I press on, pleased to have needled out her weakness at last.

“Oh, God, this is crazy,” she wails, shoving back her hair. “Men and their stupid wars! You can’t ransom me; nobody cares about me. Peter doesn’t even know I’m here. I’ll leave, I don’t care, but don’t hurt him!”

Spare him, Captain. Take me instead.
I’ve heard it a thousand times in the pirate trade, a crescendo of pleading that fouls my dreams still. It’s always mercy they want. As if anyone ever showed mercy to me.

“I don’t want to make any trouble,” Parrish babbles on. “Please, Captain. Send me back.”

I can only freeze, breath suspended, for what she might say next, the charm, the sorcery that would make such a thing possible. Back. To London. Out of the Neverland.

“Whatever it is you want of me, Captain, whatever your price, take it, get it over with, and let me get out of here!”

“You think I know the way out?” I bluster. “God’s bowels, would I still be here if I did?”

A dropped bucket clunks and rattles above, followed by a collective rumbling of unease, from which I pick out a single word.

“Fairy.”

The woman hears it too, stares again at me. “Oh my God—”

“Stay where you are!” I order, glancing again at the skylight. If Pan is searching for his lost mother, I can’t have her discovered aboard my ship, and I step out into the companionway, pulling the door shut behind me.

But a tiny fizz of light is already spiraling down the aft hatch, flitting toward me in the gloom of the passage. The faces of my men are crowding into the hatchway to watch, and I step boldly forward to greet the creature, concealing my trepidation. I suppose she’s female; the ones in thrall to the boy always are.

“Madam,” I hail her, as if I disport with fairies every day. Best not let on to my men what a rarity it is, a fairy on board the
Rouge
to parley with the pirates. We are sworn enemies, her tribe and mine, but nothing is the same in the Neverland today. The light pauses in the air above me. “How may I be of service?” I raise my arms, so she can see I make no move toward my sword. As if our clumsy weapons are any use against the imps.

She darts down at me, and such high, discordant chiming fills my head that my mind closes instinctively against it; I back away, struggling not to cringe from her blistering assault. The imp veers suddenly off toward the shadowy gun deck, an indigo blur trailing light and harsh, tinny noise; she comes about just as swiftly, speeds past me in the direction from which I’ve just come, but as I pivot about, the passage goes dark and quiet. In the sudden gloom, it takes a moment for my eyes to recognize an outline of pale light as the gap of Parrish’s cabin door, lit dimly from within by the skylight.

I shove into the cabin, and the imp bolts straight back from the door until her tiny wings are humming against the skylight. I slam the door shut behind me, revealing Parrish braced against the wall on its other side, staring after the fairy. Stooping between the deck beams, I lunge for the bunk to hook up Parrish’s plaid jacket, stretch it like a net between hook and hand, and feint toward the imp, still beating her wings at the skylight. She can only be a spy for Pan; why else has she come? If she gets free to tell him what she’s found, my men will pay with their lives. It will be another massacre. My first swipe just misses; I hear alarm in her frantic noise as she skitters sideways. Swooping the garment toward her again, I trip on the feculent bucket and she flies over my head to the other side of the room.

By the door, Parrish stares into the imp’s glimmering light, lips forming words, fingers touching the latch. Is she bewitched? Parrish pulls the door open a crack and the fairy light shoots out. I race after it, but there’s naught in the dim passage but a trail of sparks and a lingering odor of sulfur and allspice. I scarcely know what I roar in my fury, but someone bleats from above that the fairy is gone.

Hurling the plaid across the room, I glare at the woman. “Are you mad?” I rage, shoving her against the wall with my hand, pinning her there between my hand and my hook.

“Well, what harm could she do you?” she cries. “You’re a hundred times her size!”

“Fairy power has nothing to do with size,” I retort. “She belongs to the Pan, and Pan is the enemy.”

She stares at me. “He’s only a boy.”

I stare back, my face only inches from hers, my phantom hand itching to strike. “Your precious boy will come looking for you, now his fairy knows you’re here. There’ll be a fight,” I add maliciously.

“You were trying to kill her!” the blasted woman persists.

“I wanted to talk to her.”

“She was talking!” Parrish exclaims. “Didn’t you hear her?”

“Madam, if your fairy confederate—”

“
My
confederate? What do I look like, Titania, the goddamned fairy queen? She came here to see you!”

My jaw all but unhinges at this delusion. “What?”

“She came because she heard the bell,” Parrish elaborates. “She said she had a message for you.”

I back away, struggling to lace her insane words into coherent meaning.

“She said, ‘This is your last chance,’” Parrish insists. “That’s what she wanted me to tell you.”

What madness is this? “Meaning what?” I demand.

“I don’t know! I just got here.”

She must be in league with the boys after all, if the imps speak to her. And then another awful possibility wavers into my brain: that she’s telling the truth, that she’s only an ignorant intruder who’s just allowed the one ceature in the Neverland who might have explained my phantom chance to escape.

“Stupid, stupid woman!” I cry, and storm out of the cabin, locking the door behind me.

I should know by now to expect nothing but treachery from a woman.

I’ve known it all my life. Why should this woman be different than all the others?

Chapter Eight

LONDON, 1709: CAROLINE

Up in London, great things were expected of me in the marriage trade. I’d have gladly delayed this venture indefinitely, but my father threatened to stop my allowance if I did not take a suitable bride, and I knew I should not long be welcome in the society of my friends could I not pay my own way. So, in short order, I was promised to the daughter of an aristocratic family all too eager to trade away their distinguished name for a share of my father’s money. Caroline was small and fair and easy to charm, and I daresay she found my person not entirely disagreeable. I wooed her with music, and flowers, and poesy, and she was easily won, the artless young thing. For my part, I was charmed by the idea of romance. Sweet, timid, pretty, obedient Caroline; surely I could learn to care for her in time.

But as buoyed as I was by my prospects in the world as a gentleman of means with a titled wife, and as eager to discharge my duty to my father, matrimony seemed a dull thing next to the adventures of youth. There was something yet astir in me that a quiet life of ease with the pliable Caroline could not quench, a desire to achieve something worthy on my own account, beyond my father’s fortune. We were ever at war with France in those days, over some foolery or other, and I thought brave action against the French might become the ship to the stars I’d sought from boyhood, a means of securing my reputation. So we postponed our nuptials for one year. I told Caroline I was going to manage the sugar estate my father had purchased on the island of Jamaica in the Indies, to better learn the business.

“A kiss to seal our bargain,” I begged her on the eve of my departure.

“Oh, sir, I cannot.”

“Nay ‘sir’; I am your betrothed,” I rebuked her gently.

She colored prettily. “Jamie, then. But I dare not.”

“A kiss, a nothing, a mere trifle,” I persisted.

“Then should it not betoken a trifling sort of love?” she dared to riposte. “Our Savior was betrayed by a kiss.”

She could not know how her words unnerved me; I claimed my token with more force and less joy than I’d anticipated, and she was too mild to protest. Or too shamed, or perhaps she enjoyed it too immodestly. I would never know. Poor little chit, I believe we might have loved each other in earnest, had I stayed with her. How much misery might have been avoided if only I had. Why didn’t she make me stay?

But I was all hot blood and foolish youth in those days, eager to cover myself with glory in the world. And what a grand thing it seemed, to go to war! I fitted out one of my father’s ships and got a privateering commission out of Kingston to harass the French. I captured many ships and put aside the profit against such time as I would set up as a gentleman with my bride.

Back in port after one such successful sortie, I learned from my father’s agent that my mother was gravely ill back in Bristol, that she had been asking for me. But my crew and I had intelligence of a train of French supply ships heading out within the week, and an expectation of our greatest, most profitable victory yet, so I stifled the pain in my heart over my mother’s welfare and made the choice to lead one more cruise of prey. I’d return to her in triumph, I told myself; would that not be the best possible tonic? Surely she would wait for me.

But the supply ships were more heavily guarded than we anticipated, and the battle turned against us. I was taken captive and imprisoned in a crumbling stone fortress on one of the French islands. I’ve heard that captured military officers are well-treated in enemy prisons if they are gentlemen of noble birth. Their families may pay a sizeable ransom for them, or perhaps their captors expect to encounter them again one day on a diplomatic mission or at the gaming tables when the hostilities are over. But my family was in trade, my commission not strictly military. My captors cared little for my good opinion. And as undermanned as the place was out in that island backwater, they had little enough time or supplies to spare for the decent maintenance of the prisoners.

It was a dark, dank place, damp in all seasons and sweltering hot through most of the year, although sunlight rarely penetrated to the cellar where I was shut up. I was kept separate from the other English prisoners for fear I would rally them to foolish heroics, and the French prisoners were all in use in the war. Some Englishmen too, I believe, were permitted to work off their parole in servitude on French plantations. But not me. I’d made off with too many of their ships, mocked them with too much bravado. I was shut away in the dark, and little more notice was taken of me.

My outrage, my sense of injustice soon enough gave way to the more pressing concern of my starving belly. Rations could not always be spared for the prisoners, and I took to feasting on the straw in my cell, if that were all I could find, or, on one or two grim occasions, whatever burrowed within it. Dining on rats does little for the digestion, much less the disposition, but it kept me alive in that hellish place. That and my dreams of Caroline, a goddess of mercy and devotion grown to Titanic proportions in the desperation of memory. How she would welcome me home, succor me, heal me. I came to regret squandering my youth in empty bluster and braggadocio. I set myself to recalling all the many ways I knew how to please a woman; should I survive, I vowed I would devote the rest of my life to earning my Caroline’s love. It was all that kept me sane.

In that condition I was left to fester for an eternity, as I reckoned it then, until a tenuous peace was once more declared, when I was released sans ship, crew or fortune. I was scarcely more than a rat myself by then, hair and beard long, filthy and unkempt, my fine clothing in rags. I worked as a common seaman for my passage back to Jamaica, a grimy hammock slung before the mast a dream of luxury after my long confinement.

“But my father owns the place,” I tried to explain, yet again, to the carter. He was a surly-looking white fellow, a bookkeeper, perhaps, or assistant overseer off some struggling plantation, no doubt miffed that he had to drive the team all the way into town, like a slave. I could see he took me for a beggar, and who could blame him? Stooped, cramped, and exhausted from the ship, sweltering in the midsummer heat, I’d arrived in Kingston dressed in tatterted seaman’s slops, the few meager coins of my pay jangling forlornly in my shirt. Dusk was falling, and my father’s warehouse was shut up for the night. Oddly, there was a sign in the window that said “Murchison,” but that was the least of my concerns, at the moment; I couldn’t pay for a hired horse, and I doubted my aching legs would bear me all the way to St. Elizabeth Parish on foot.

“Eden Estate, in St. Elizabeth’s,” I told the carter.

“That’s too far away,” he grumbled.

“My father will pay you something extra for your trouble,” I promised. “I’m James Hoo—”

“Young Mistah James?” A strapping black youth, dressed like a dock worker, had paused in the street, eyeing me. I didn’t know him, but there was something familiar about the eyes, even as they rounded to look on me.

“It is you,” he exclaimed. “I used to sweep out your daddy’s warehouse.”

I peered at him, trying to bore through the fog in my brain. “Why … Thomas?” I was rewarded with a smile that revealed a distinctive gap between his front teeth. “Thomas!” I exclaimed. “You’re a man grown!” By God’s blood, how long had I been away?

“You used to bring me cane,” the fellow grinned.

“You remember me?” I cried, relief like the purest spirits pumping through my blood. My trials at an end, at long last. He knew me!

But his expression sobered even as he moved close enough to slide a surreptitious hand under my elbow and steer me ever so slightly away from the suspicious-looking carter. “Let’s you an’ me take a walk, Mistah James,” he whispered.