She did it all without complaint, fueled by the considerable love she obviously felt for Mr. Medcalf and Colin and even Huxley—and now fueled even further by the newfound responsibility she clearly felt toward Wendy.
Take the scones, for example.
The scones were the only request Mrs. Medcalf had so far managed to wrestle out of Wendy, and the woman had been happy to oblige her in it every afternoon since. Which was perhaps a bit more often than Wendy had intended.
They had been visiting with each other for quite some time on this particular morning, Mrs. Medcalf finally having worked up the courage to ask a few pointed questions of their new guest. She had her suspicions about Wendy’s sudden presence at the manor and had finally broached the subject head on, clearly hoping to learn what to expect from … well, from the woman she believed to be the future lady of the house.
Wendy, needless to say, was at a loss.
(Poppy, for her part, lay at Wendy’s feet, clearly hoping for snacks, but so far none had been forthcoming.)
“Mrs. Medcalf,” Wendy was saying, blushing wildly, “I can assure you, the captain has no intentions toward me whatsoever, whether honorable or otherwise.”
“Why, of course his intentions are honorable!” Mrs. Medcalf exclaimed, pausing with her hands deep in the dough and snapping her head up to gaze at Wendy in a shocked sort of way.
“I’m not trying to question his honor,” Wendy assured her quickly. “That isn’t the point. What I’m trying to say is that I’m quite certain he has no intentions toward me at all.”
“Oh, don’t you worry about that,” Mrs. Medcalf replied, her features relaxing into a sly grin. “Now, it shows your fine character that you wouldn’t assume. That it does. And I can see why the captain is fond of you. But he wouldn’t invite you to stay here without a reason. He has intentions. I can promise you that!”
The cook smiled reassuringly and started back in on the dough, her motions firm and efficient, while Wendy furrowed her brow in confusion, trying to sort out how to respond. On the one hand, she didn’t want people getting the wrong idea. But on the other, she wasn’t free to tell anyone the truth, given the clandestine nature of her appointment in the Nineteenth Light Dragoons.
It only made sense that they would make certain assumptions.
Mrs. Medcalf interpreted Wendy’s puzzled silence to be an embarrassed confirmation of those assumptions and chuckled merrily to herself, beaming at the prospect of a wedding. Perhaps this summer, or maybe even later this spring.
“And what is your view on cake, my dear?” she asked Wendy, seeming to change the subject (although of course she wasn’t really.) “I’ve always had a particular fondness for lemon myself. Do you like lemon?” Her voice held a distinctly hopeful tone, but Wendy was spared further difficulty by Colin’s sudden breathless appearance in the doorway.
“A courier, Miss Darling!” he exclaimed, his eyes wide. “With a letter for you! He says he’ll speak to no one else. He wouldn’t even let Huxley take it!”
“For me?” Wendy echoed. “I’ll come immediately, of course!” Never in her life had Wendy felt so relieved to exit a kitchen. She followed Colin out the door at a fast clip, with Poppy trotting at her heels.
ater that night, despite the warning from Dover, Wendy could hardly believe it when she smelled the taste of pickles in the air. It had been wonderful to hear from John and Michael and Nana, but she didn’t see how Peter Pan could possibly find her here. The whole point of sending her out to the countryside had been to keep her safe (much to her annoyance.)
Nonetheless, she had been studying in the library, as had become her habit after the dinner hour, when Poppy’s hackles suddenly rose straight up along her spine, and the dog stalked toward the windows with a menacing growl.
“No! Here? But how could he have found us?” she asked Poppy, who had no answer for her, continuing to snarl instead at the darkness outside the manor.
“Come along then,” Wendy said, bracing her shoulders and rising from her seat at the table. “We must not allow this threat to breach the house. Huxley and the Medcalfs have nothing to do with this fight, and we shan’t bring the everlost into their home. Whatever happens, we must face them out there.”
She gulped, and for just a moment her face betrayed her nervousness. But then her eyebrows set themselves into a grim line of determination—both of them at once, in a splendid show of solidarity.
“Poppy, you have no obligation to follow me. I think it best if you stay here to guard Colin and his parents.”
But Poppy, of course, would have none of that. She padded to her mistress and sat firmly by her side, putting an end to any further discussion on the matter.
“Oh, I must admit I’m relieved you feel that way.” Wendy smiled gratefully at the Dalmatian, who looked up into her eyes with such tender loyalty that Wendy felt very moved indeed. “All right. Let’s both go, then.”
They tiptoed through the house toward the grand entrance, moving as quietly as they could so as not to disturb the staff, and as they passed the trophy room (as Colin had called it during his tour of the manor), Poppy paused and whined softly. This was, after all, the Hook family hunting estate. The trophy room held an impressive array of guns and ammunition.
“No, Poppy,” Wendy replied, understanding her immediately. “Although I certainly do appreciate the suggestion. Guns won’t help, I’m afraid. They will only alert the others without doing us any good. But never fear. We have our wits, and we have each other. We must pray they will be enough.”
Poppy thought she would rather put her faith in her teeth than in her wits when it came to ominous scents in the night, but she could see how Wendy might feel the opposite. At any rate, they possessed both teeth and wits between the two of them, which seemed better than having either one alone.
As soon as they were free of the house, they sprinted across the lawn, through the pasture gate, and out into the open fields. Looking from there up toward the clouds, Wendy could already see a lone everlost plummeting toward the earth, his giant hawklike wings folded close around his body. She kept expecting him to open his wings and catch his fall, but he continued to drop like a stone until he was so close to the ground that she thought he would surely crash into it.
“Oh!” Wendy exclaimed, opening her eyes wide and covering her mouth with one horrified hand. But at the last possible moment, he snapped his wings out dramatically, one knee and both hands slamming into the grassy earth of the pasture, absorbing an impact that would have crushed human bones into shards.
Wendy exhaled and regained her composure, patting the waist of her dress primly back into place. But Poppy decided right then and there that she did not like men falling out of the clouds. She did not like it at all. She began to bark as loudly as she could, but Wendy ordered her immediately to be silent, afraid that Colin would come to investigate and place himself in danger.
“Did I frighten you?” Peter asked, paying no heed to the dog, who continued to growl at him, albeit quietly. He tried to stand up, but the deep holes he had just made in the soil with his landing prevented him from doing so with any dignity. Surveying his situation in a detached sort of way, he finally stepped up out of the depressions and crossed his arms proudly across his chest, the awkwardness of the moment not seeming to faze him in the least.
“You most certainly did not,” Wendy replied, placing her own hands on her hips and glaring at him sternly.
“Then why did you shout?” he demanded, tilting his head and curling his lips into a smirk.
“I did no such thing,” Wendy retorted.
“Oh!” Peter shot back. He spoke in a falsetto that captured her voice just a bit too well for her liking, opening his eyes wide and covering his mouth with one hand, mimicking her reaction perfectly.
“I was startled, at best,” Wendy declared, hiding her annoyance behind a matter-of-fact sort of tone. “But only that you found me, not that you might have been hurt. I can assure you,
your safety means nothing to me.”
“Ha! I found you easily! And all by myself!” Peter boasted, ignoring the second bit and also conveniently forgetting any role that Tinker Bell might have played in the matter. “I followed your courier! Oh, the cleverness of me! Did you know he rode straight through the night? He must have changed horses at least half a dozen times, but I’m faster than all of them! I flew ahead and chased the clouds. More than once you know, just to have something to do while I waited. I bet you’ve never touched a cloud!”
Unfortunately for Peter, the two things in the world that Wendy Darling had the very least patience for were acts of unkindness—especially when directed toward children—and incessant bragging. And Peter Pan was guilty of both (even if there did not happen to be any children present at the moment.)
She drew herself up to her full height, squared her shoulders, narrowed her eyes dangerously, and addressed him with such venom that Peter raised both of his own perfectly sculpted eyebrows in the air and took half a step backward in surprise.
“What are you doing here, Peter?” she spat at him. “Why are you following me? Because I certainly have no interest whatsoever in speaking with you! You are the enemy of the crown. You and all your kind!”
“What am I doing here?” Peter echoed, his own eyes narrowing in response to hers. “What are you doing here? Why are you at Hook’s family estate?”
“That’s none of your business!”
“Hook is my business!” he shouted back, his voice filled with gravel in its sudden intensity. “Hook is my enemy! He is death to all my kind! All of us! What is he to you?”
They stared at each other for a long moment, Peter’s nostrils flaring, his chest rising and falling in anger with every breath.
“He is my countryman,” she said finally. Her voice was soft, almost reluctant, but she looked him directly in the eye when she said it, understanding the wall she was building between them with that simple truth and regretting it somehow, despite her irritation.
Much to Wendy’s amazement, Peter clenched his fists, tensed his arms, thrust his chest forward, and roared at her—an inarticulate, anguished howl that echoed through the night.
Wendy’s eyes flew wide and she took a step back as Poppy bravely leaped in front of her. But he made no move to harm them. His scream finally fell away and he stood a moment longer, his chest still heaving, his gaze locked onto hers, with the most heart-wrenching look of betrayal on his face that Wendy thought she had ever seen.
Then, without another word, he burst into the air and flew away.
Wendy watched him shrink into the distance until he finally disappeared altogether into the night, marveling all the while at the strange trickery of the wind as it rustled through his feathers—making them sound for all the world like the distant, improbable jingling of tiny bells.
y the next evening, Hook had returned to Hertfordshire.
Wendy had been reluctant to inform him of Pan’s appearance—not being in any hurry to see the captain again—but in the end, she had spent half the night drafting a complete and accurate report, depositing it with Huxley at dawn and asking that it be delivered to Hook personally in London as quickly as possible. It was her sworn duty to crown and country, and she took that duty seriously.
Which made the captain’s current accusation all the more galling.
“What did you tell him?” he demanded.
Wendy was seated at the table in the library, with Poppy resting loyally at her feet, while Hook paced back and forth. A leopard in a cage of books. She watched him in fascination, amazed that it was he himself who had cultivated the vast collection of tomes that surrounded her. He seemed so much more a man of action than of quiet reflection or study—unable to sit still even long enough for a simple conversation.
“I assure you, Captain,” she said calmly, sitting ramrod straight, shoulders back, chin tilted proudly in the air, defying his implication with her very posture, “I told him nothing of any significance.”
“I don’t mean this time,” he countered, coming to a sudden halt and scowling at her. “I mean the first time. Obviously he came looking for you here, hoping for more information. You must have told him something back in Dover.”
“What makes you think he was looking for me?” She made the question sound as innocent as she could. John and Michael had taken a significant risk in writing to her at Hook’s estate. She wasn’t going to admit she knew anything about Pan’s second appearance in Dover, whether or not Hook was aware of it himself.
“Do you think I’m stupid?” he demanded.
“No, Captain. Of course not.” She folded her hands before her on the table and stared directly into his eyes. He stared back for a long time before speaking again.
“Surely even you can see that his sudden appearance here, so soon after your arrival, is an unlikely coincidence. Especially given your earlier encounter.”
“Even me?” Her eyebrow rose in a silent warning—a warning that would have given him pause had he known her better.
Unfortunately for Hook, he did not.
“Yes, you. A woman. Designed by our Creator for the tender care of children rather than the strategic calculations of war, the rational pursuit of science. But even you must surely recognize that he is somehow following you. The natural deduction is that you are providing him with useful information, whether you realize it or not.”
“Oh, I see. Even me.” Another long silence extended between them during which Wendy fought to maintain her composure, while Hook presumed she was trying to follow his reasoning.
“Well?” he said finally.
“I apologize for the delay,” Wendy said evenly. “It’s just that your previous statement is incorrect on so many levels that I’m having trouble deciding where to begin my rebuttal. So as to approach it in the most logical fashion.”
“I—”
Wendy closed her eyes and raised a gentle but preemptive hand, an action that surprised Hook so deeply he fell silent on the spot. When she was certain she had his attention, she opened her eyes again and began to speak.
“Firstly, you said that Pan’s appearance here was an unlikely coincidence. On that much, we agree. But being unlikely is not the same thing as being impossible. A true logician must allow for the possibility that it was, in fact, a coincidence, albeit an unexpected one.
“Secondly,” she continued, “you stated that he must therefore be following me, and that the natural deduction—I believe those were your exact words—is that I have been acting as a traitorous informant.”
“Now wait just a moment, I never called you a traitor—”
“Yes, of course. You presume I am too stupid to be a traitor. That I have been accidentally committing one of the worst crimes imaginable before God and King.”
“That’s not what I—”
“It is very much what you implied, whether or not you said it directly. That is a logical deduction. What is not a deduction is the preposterous leap from ‘not here by coincidence’ to ‘gaining traitorous information.’ At the very most,” Wendy forged on, hardly taking a breath, although her voice remained imperturbably calm, “if we presume Pan’s presence here not to be a coincidence, then clearly he must be here for a reason. Which, by the way, is a rhetorical tautology rather than a deduction. But that still provides us with no indication as to what that reason might be. The idea that he is gathering useful information from me is a supposition, certainly not a deduction, and only one of several possibilities that a good logician must consider.”
Hook said nothing, merely staring at her as though she, not he, had become the exotic creature on display in the library zoo. A tiger crouching upon a tree limb, pontificating to its prey.
“For example,” Wendy continued, gaining momentum, “Pan might have been searching for your family’s estate. You yourself admitted that the two of you share a particular enmity. Perhaps you have been the target of his pursuits, not I. Or he might have been hoping to
learn something from me precisely because he has not yet been able to do so. He might see it as a challenge. Or, speaking of challenges, he might have enjoyed matching his wits against my own, having been unable to find a worthy adversary among the king’s men. There are many reasons for which he might have paid a visit to this estate, but again I assure you, it was not because I have ever helped him in any way!”
As Wendy said this last, she rose from her seat until she was glaring at Hook across the table, both of her hands planted firmly upon it, her elbows locked, her eloquent eyebrow raised in defiance, daring him to challenge her again. Hook still did not know Wendy very well, but he certainly knew her better now than he had even a few moments ago. He recognized what that eyebrow was trying to tell him, and he chose finally to heed its warning, skirting the confrontation by approaching her from a new angle.
“Well then, what have you learned from him?” he asked.
“I’m sorry?” She continued to lean menacingly across the table, but her face now registered confusion alongside its original hostility.
“Presuming, for the moment, that you are correct—that he has not gained any useful information from you, and that your wits have bested his at every turn—then surely you have managed to learn something useful from him, yes? Something, Miss Darling, anything, that we might use to turn the tide of this war.”
As he said it, Hook mirrored her posture, calmly placing both his hand and his hook on the table directly across from her and leaning toward her. His thick, raven locks were tied back behind his neck, and his eyes of forget-me-not blue locked onto hers in a way that made her uncomfortable for more reasons than she would have wanted to admit.
She straightened back up and tidied her dress demurely.
“Perhaps if you would treat me like an actual member of the Nineteenth Light Dragoons,” she suggested, “and brief me on our current initiatives rather than hiding me away on your family’s hunting estate like some sort of swooning romantic interest, I might be in a better position to help the cause.”
The Wendy Page 10
