From the moment she stepped through its grand double doors, Wendy couldn’t help but feel that she might remain in that library quite happily for the rest of her life—if only she could take it with her on a ship, that is. (And then she wished she could at least take it back with her to Dover Castle, which would better accommodate the space than any ship could ever hope to.)
Hook’s collection was so extensive as to fill not just one story but two, with a spiral staircase in one corner that led up to the second level, where a balcony made of iron railings ran all the way around the room. There was a large fireplace for warmth and south-facing windows for light, as well as lamps for the evening hours. There were armchairs near the hearth for pleasure reading and a massive table in the center for more serious study, the latter of which Wendy claimed for herself immediately, at least in her own mind.
“Oh! It’s magnificent!” she exclaimed.
“Why thank you, miss,” Colin said, grinning from ear to ear. “I thought you’d like it. It’s why I was so pleased when you asked about it. It’s Captain Hook’s pride and joy, it is. He only comes to the house once every month or two, but when he does, he always asks me what I’ve read since he left. He lets me pick whatever I want, but somehow he always knows the book. I think he knows every one of them! Can you imagine? He asks me questions and such, just to make sure I read it carefully. For my education, he always says.”
“Does he?” Wendy asked.
“Aye, he does. My father makes sure I learn the groundskeeping, and my mother makes sure I learn proper manners for a nice household like this one. So I can find a good position of my own one day. But Captain Hook makes sure I read. ‘Books allow everyone a traveler’s education, Colin,’ he always says.”
“Well, I’d have to agree,” Wendy admitted, albeit grudgingly. She was surprised to discover anything that she would agree with Captain Hook about, given her current circumstances.
“Whenever he travels,” Colin continued, “he brings back new books from wherever he went. There are volumes here from France and Spain and even from the Far East. All kinds of books about all kinds of things!”
“Are there?” Wendy asked quietly.
With a library this extensive—especially when that library was curated by Captain Hook himself—there might well be hidden within it a treasure or two that could finally provide her with some insight into the true nature of the everlost. If they weren’t vampires, as Pan had claimed they were not, then it was her duty to find out precisely what they were.
And how to kill them.
s soon as the shouts rang out that John’s carriage had been spotted on the road, returning from London, Michael and Nana raced to meet it. Michael was dressed for the occasion in a pair of tall black boots, an impeccably white shirt, and a blue riding coat. The boots were polished to such a shine that they could have turned Medusa herself to stone if no mirrors were handy, and the coat was his very best—which is to say, the one upon which he received the most frequent compliments from the ladies.
Nana, of course, wore a blue ribbon to match.
They arrived at the front entrance even before the carriage had come to a full stop. Michael stood smartly upon the curb, his heart swelling with anticipation as John clambered down from the vehicle. He smiled expectantly—a smile that turned to puzzlement and then descended into an outright frown when the carriage failed to produce anyone else from within its depths. Not even after several long moments of awkward stillness.
“Where is Wendy?” he finally demanded.
John could hardly look him in the eye, staring instead at his own booted foot, which he shuffled forlornly in the street, looking for all the world as though he had just lost his best friend. Which, truth be told, was precisely what had happened.
“Well?” Michael demanded again. “Where is she, man? What did you do with her?”
At this John looked up sharply. “What did I do with her? What kind of question is that? It isn’t as though I threw her to bandits somewhere along the road, for heaven’s sake. I didn’t do anything with her!”
“But where is she?” Michael’s voice was perhaps a bit more stern than it should have been in speaking to a superior officer. But Nana was of the opinion, if anything, that he did not sound quite stern enough. She had the exact same question, you see, and she kept jumping into the carriage, turning all around within it, leaping back out to stare accusingly at John, and then jumping right back in to repeat the process all over again.
“That’s enough, Nana,” John said, and the dog leaped out one last time, cocking her head at him with a deeply worried brow, demanding an explanation.
There was no good way to say it, so John expelled a long sigh—puffing out his cheeks with the exertion of it—and then forged ahead bravely, which is the best way to proceed when one is forced to say something that one absolutely must say but would honestly rather not.
“She’s in Hertfordshire.”
“Hertfordshire?” Michael replied, his tone incredulous, and then he said it again, only now he sounded more than a bit cross. “Hertfordshire!”
“There wasn’t anything I could do,” John protested, shrugging his shoulders dramatically and raising both hands in the air as though that were any sort of proof of the matter. “She left under Captain Hook’s orders! If I had tried to stop them, they would have thrown me in irons!”
Michael said nothing, continuing to glare at him in silent reproach, a response with which Nana wholeheartedly agreed. No matter how many times she had been chained up in the yard for her trouble, that had never once stopped her from trying to do what she knew was right in the excitement of the moment.
Never even once.
“Look, don’t worry,” John tried. “She’s perfectly all right. Hook’s family has an estate there—a rather fine one, I’m told.”
“She’s staying at Captain Hook’s private estate?” Michael all but wailed.
“He just wants to ask her a few more questions—”
“I bet he does want to ask her something, and I bet I know what,” Michael grumbled, but John ignored the interruption.
“And then he’ll send her back to us,” John continued, trying to sound confident. “You’ll see. She’s out in the country, nowhere near the everlost.”
“If Captain Hook’s taken a liking to her, the everlost are the least of our problems,” Michael growled, to which John made no reply at all, as this was the exact same thought that had been torturing him along the entire journey back from London.
After supper, John sat in his private office trying to attend to the accounting that had piled up while he was away, his eyes running over and over the same lines of figures while his mind stubbornly ignored them. Instead, his brain insisted on replaying his time in London, trying to come up with some way—any way, no matter how implausible—in which he could have prevented Wendy from being whisked off to Hertfordshire.
He could (for example) have knocked on her door in the middle of the night and convinced her to tie their bedsheets together, climbing down the side of the building and fleeing into the anonymous throng of London’s poor. Or he could have clothed himself in one of her most voluminous dresses, hidden his face beneath a floppy hat, and stoically taken her place on the coach to St. Albans. Or better yet, he could have challenged Captain Hook to a duel—and he could have won, obviously, as long as he was imagining things, inspiring Wendy to swoon gratefully into his arms.
It was an entirely useless exercise, as there was nothing he could do about it now even if he were able to arrive at some reasonable alternative. But still, he couldn’t seem to give it up.
It didn’t help any that Michael was also sitting in John’s office, slumped over Wendy’s desk, resting his cheek upon his arm and idly tracing the grain of the wood with his index finger, leaning down every so often to pat poor Nana on the head and say, “There, there,” in a sad, commiserating sort of way, while the dog lay forlornly on the floor at his feet, beyond consol
ation.
When Michael started imitating Wendy’s mournful sort of drumming—thumping out the slow, miserable cadence with his third and fourth fingers together—well, that was the last straw. John was just about to say, “Please, Michael,” in a tone very much like Wendy herself would have used, but that was also the exact moment in which Nana’s head shot straight up into the air. A growl began deep in the back of her throat, rising steadily in volume until she was snarling viciously at the window.
John thought immediately that he had never felt so relieved in all his life. He would rather face the possibility of death itself than be forced to suffer even one more moment of their combined melancholy.
“Where is Wendy?” Peter demanded.
“You must be joking,” John muttered under his breath.
This is not, of course, how things had started out. When Peter Pan had first arrived—alone this time—diving through the night sky to hover ominously over Dover Castle, John had shot at him. As had every other member of the Fourteenth Platoon of the Nineteenth Light Dragoons of the British Home Office.
The bullets, however, had not had their desired effect. Peter had sat through the entire ordeal patiently—or rather, hovered through it patiently—until the men were all quite finished with their first volley and were stuck reloading their muskets. (Which is more of a bother than you might think if you have never reloaded a musket yourself.) It was into this relatively quiet interlude that he finally spoke, demanding to know the whereabouts of Wendy Darling.
“I am most certainly not joking,” Peter assured them. “Where is my Wendy?”
“She’s not your Wendy!” Michael snarled. “She’s not your anything!”
“Where is your Wendy then,” Pan tried again, addressing Michael this time.
“She’s not his either,” John snapped, perhaps a bit too quickly. Michael furrowed his brow and shot him a rather nasty look, but John refused to meet his eye, pretending not to notice.
“Fine! Not my Wendy. Not your Wendy. Where is the Wendy? You must tell me at once!”
“Fire!” John shouted, the musket reloading having been accomplished by this point.
They all fired. Peter waited through it again, looking somewhat less patient than the last time. His body flew backward through the air just a bit, due to the sheer momentum of the ammunition, but otherwise the second volley had no greater effect than the first.
“Tell me!” Peter shouted.
“Reload!” John ordered his men. “Clip his wings this time!”
“This isn’t over!” Peter warned them, but a powerful downbeat of those very same wings propelled him higher into the air, and another one higher still, continuing on until he had flown so high as to be entirely out of sight.
“We must get word to Wendy!” Michael paced so vigorously back and forth across the carpet in John’s office that it seemed in danger of being worn out within the span of a single evening. Not that John could blame him. He felt the same way, in fact. To be so far from Wendy when she was so clearly in danger was a torture the likes of which he had never known.
“I’m already writing the letter,” John assured him. “What did you think I was doing?”
“By special courier,” Michael insisted.
“Of course,” John agreed.
“But not to Hook. To Wendy.”
“Of course to Wendy! If we sent a letter to Hook, God only knows where he might move her, and then we’d have no idea where to find her.”
Michael stopped in his tracks and stared intently at John. “Maybe we should go find her.”
“And abandon our posts? Absolutely not.” If John were the type to abandon his post, he would have done so in London, where he might have convinced Wendy to run off with him alone. Not that he was about to share that thought with Michael.
“No, you’re right. Of course, you’re right.” Michael’s shoulders fell in helpless resignation, and he resumed his pacing. “Nana, please. I’m tense enough as it is!”
Nana was standing up on her hind legs with her front paws propped against the windowsill, trying to look outside. She had not stopped growling ever since Peter Pan had flown away, and it was beginning to set Michael’s teeth on edge.
“A special courier. You promise,” Michael said again. It was not exactly a question.
“As I’ve said,” John promised.
“To be carried to Wendy directly, at Hook’s estate in Hertfordshire. Not via the London office.”
“To Wendy directly,” John assured him.
“Oh, thank heaven!” Michael exclaimed, which was very much something Wendy would have said, had she been there herself, but he said it only partly in reply to John’s words.
It was mostly in response to the fact that Nana had just in that moment settled back down onto the carpet, the growl in her throat falling mercifully silent—now that the tiny, magic-scented wings outside the window had finally flown away.
igh up in the night sky, Peter hovered above the clouds, holding a miniature, living dragon in the palm of his chiseled hand. She spoke to him in the fairy language, which sounded more than anything else like the vigorous jingling of a thousand tiny bells. It might have seemed odd—a palm-sized, golden dragon speaking in a symphony of delicate chimes—but Peter was used to it. The dragon’s name was Tinker Bell, and he knew her very well indeed.
One might even suggest that he knew her a bit too well for his own good, but that remains to be seen.
He knew, for example, that she was not a dragon at all. Tinker Bell belonged to that rarest and most precious of fairy species (known as the innisfay by those who still remember such things) who can turn themselves into any sort of animal at will. In their natural form they look a bit like you and me, with a few significant exceptions.
One, they possess wings. Two, they approximate the size and jeweled brilliance of your average hummingbird. Three, every last one of them is devastatingly beautiful (which makes them quite vain as a general rule.)
Tinker Bell, as it happens, was particularly proud of herself at the moment, having discovered the whereabouts of the Wendy for Peter (whatever a Wendy was) through a very clever deception, in which she had disguised herself as a bat and dangled upside down above a particular window of Dover Castle, eavesdropping in a very literal sense on the conversation within.
It is a special peculiarity of the innisfay that the color of their hair (or their fins, or their scales, or what have you, depending upon their form) always reflects their mood. This is why it is sometimes said that the innisfay cannot lie.
On the contrary, they can lie extraordinarily well, spinning such elaborate and magnificent yarns at the drop of a hat that you would have a very hard time disbelieving any of it. Because how could anyone invent such a preposterous and complicated set of circumstances on the spur of the moment, you would think to yourself. And in any event you would not want to disbelieve it, as it would all be so much more interesting and entertaining than the truth.
When they are engaging, however, in such calculated exaggerations, their hair (or feathers, or fur, or what have you) turns a distinct shade of gray, ranging anywhere from a light, ashen color if the lie is a relatively innocent one, to an ominous hue of thick, choking smoke if the deception is born of cruel intentions.
So, had Tinker Bell been lying to Peter about finding the Wendy, he would have known it immediately. Just as he would have recognized a sorrowful shade of blue if she were sad, or a nasty, envious shade of green if he had something she wanted. Instead, her bright, golden hue reflected her profound sense of pride, so Peter knew she was telling the truth.
(In point of fact, Tinker Bell exhibited a dazzlingly golden hue—of hair, or fur, or feathers, or scales, or fins—a vast majority of the time.)
But knowing the truth of her report did not make it any easier to bear. Peter’s eyes narrowed dangerously, his teeth grinding together as he snarled a single word into the darkness.
“Hook!”
Wi
th that, he tossed the little dragon unceremoniously into the air and shot away through the night to the northwest.
Tinker Bell, of course, was not harmed in the slightest, as she was more than capable of flying quite well on her own. She was, however, a bit miffed not to receive an exuberance of praise for her cleverness or even so much as a thank you for her trouble, and she turned an angry sort of red—cursing after him in the most delightfully lilting trills, the translation of which shall not be attempted here, on certain magical principles regarding the safety of all concerned.
The curses of the innisfay are not to be trifled with.
But when Peter made no attempt to counter her tirade, continuing to fly away even as she hurled egregious (albeit melodious) insults in his general direction, Tinker Bell’s curiosity got the better of her. She ended her stream of invective abruptly as a new color flashed over her from nose to tail.
Had Peter been watching, he would have recognized it, and he would have known that in Tinker Bell, it could only mean trouble—the shimmering, moonlight shade of pearlescent silver that lies at the heart of all great inquiry.
But, sadly, Peter was not watching. So there was nothing to stop her when she took off after him.
he very next morning, Wendy stood in the kitchen of the Hertfordshire estate, watching Mrs. Medcalf as the kindhearted cook kneaded the dough for their afternoon tea scones. Mrs. Medcalf, you’ll remember, was Colin’s mother, and Wendy had liked her from the moment they met. She was a robust woman, with bright red hair, warm brown eyes, a plump midsection, and arms that reflected hours upon hours of scraping and chopping and slicing and basting. Not to mention kneading and rolling countless lumps of dough by hand, just as she was doing now.
The Wendy Page 9
