Unfortunately for Wendy, he had not been unhappy enough to send her back to Dover. He had instead taken steps toward “reining in the unruly filly,” which was the exact phrase he used in his letter, comparing Wendy to an ill-tempered horse.
Needless to say, this was a poor choice of words.
Wendy had attempted straightaway to send Colin out in her place to spend more of Hook’s money, on the orphans’ behalf and with a much longer shopping list. But the boy had reported sadly, with his hat clutched in both hands and his eyes downcast, that Hook’s letter had been quite clear on the matter. Wendy had no authority to spend the money of the Hook Estate, and therefore Colin could not do so at her request.
Mrs. Medcalf, having been apprised of the request by her son, went to comfort Wendy and found her in her room, which was the only place in which she could escape the lieutenants. The kindhearted cook recognized the depth of the young woman’s disappointment immediately. Wendy sat on the edge of her bed, looking down at her hands in her lap, doing nothing. She didn’t even look up and smile when the older woman opened the door, which wasn’t like her at all.
“Oh, my poor dear,” Mrs. Medcalf said, rushing to her side and sitting next to her, taking one of Wendy’s hands between her own and patting it gently. “It’s going to be all right.”
“Is it, Mrs. Medcalf? I don’t see how, I’m afraid,” Wendy admitted sadly, although each woman was speaking of something altogether different than the other.
Mrs. Medcalf assumed Wendy was worried because Hook was angry with her, afraid this might mean the end of his affections. In fact, Wendy had hoped he might be a bit more angry than he was—angry enough to send her back to her platoon and be done with this false engagement. She was only sad that her plan had backfired, leaving her with even less freedom than before.
“Of course it is, dear,” Mrs. Medcalf assured her. “He’ll get past it. He has to. The captain has always been careful with his money. Too careful, if you don’t mind my saying so. He understands finance well enough, but he doesn’t understand society. One has to keep a proper appearance in town, and that means donations to the Church, of course, and alms for the poor. If a wealthy man fails in these things, eventually people will talk. You were only protecting his reputation. He will come to see that, when he returns to Hertfordshire and hears the kind words people say to him regarding his generosity.”
Even though Wendy wasn’t concerned about any of that, she found the older woman’s fond attention and plump, steady presence—which always smelled delightfully of apples and cinnamon—so comforting that she began to take heart, nonetheless.
“Do you really think so?” Wendy asked. “He’ll get past it, and he’ll let me go out again?”
“Let you go out again? What do you mean? What’s this then?”
“Oh, Mrs. Medcalf! Then you don’t know! The letter wasn’t just about the money. He commanded the lieutenants to follow me everywhere, even here at the estate, and to prevent me from leaving at all, ever again!” (The “ever again” part was a bit of an exaggeration, but that was how it felt to Wendy, so that was how she said it.)
“What?” Mrs. Medcalf exclaimed. “Why, I have half a mind to write to the captain myself! It’s one thing for a man to choose how he wants to spend his money—even if he’s wrong about it—but it’s another thing altogether to try to lock his fiancée away like a prisoner! There’s no call for that. It isn’t as though you’d go against his direct wishes, now that’s he’s made his position clear.”
“Of course not,” Wendy agreed. “I would never!”
It went through her mind that the very first thing she did was try to get Colin to spend more of Hook’s money, a fact of which Mrs. Medcalf was perfectly aware, and Wendy winced a little—but only on the inside. Outwardly, she maintained a look of wide-eyed innocence. She hadn’t been successful at it, so to claim that she would not do so from now on seemed reasonable enough.
“But truly, Mrs. Medcalf,” Wendy continued, “I would not want you to interfere. You and your family have been so kind to me. If you were to risk your position here at the estate, I would never forgive myself.”
“There, there,” Mrs. Medcalf said. She was touched that Wendy would be so considerate, especially when she was being treated so wrongfully herself.
“I only wish I could find some way to go out, just for a bit. Not to spend any more money of course,” she added hurriedly, “but only to represent him in a positive manner. To visit the local parsonage, for example. So that when he comes back, as you say, everyone will be speaking well of me.”
“Of course, dear. That would be an excellent thing to do. If only it could be managed, that is. It is always best, I’ve found, to prove a man wrong by one’s actions, rather than by one’s words. They tend not to listen to us, I’m afraid. But when faced with evidence, the good ones always come around eventually.”
“I have found the exact same thing, Mrs. Medcalf.”
Mrs. Medcalf beamed proudly. (Between her husband and Colin, not to mention Huxley and even Captain Hook, she had been surrounded by men for a very long time. Although they were good men, in her opinion, and she adored them all, it was still nice to have another woman in the house. And such a sweet young woman at that, to listen to her advice, and even to agree with her point of view.)
“Do you think, Mrs. Medcalf,” Wendy asked, watching her closely, “that if there were a way in which I might get out for a while, to go visit the parson’s wife, for example, that I might be able to count on your help?”
“Of course, dear! Why, I would even bake a lovely tart for you to carry with you, by way of introduction. But I don’t think we can convince the lieutenants to allow it.”
“No, I don’t either. But the letter never said that Colin couldn’t drive me in the coach. It didn’t say that he had to keep me here, or that you had to keep me here. It only said that the lieutenants had to keep me here. It was very specific.”
“Was it now?” Mrs. Medcalf asked, and then she smiled. It was a devious sort of smile, with a wicked gleam in her eye that revealed, just for a moment, the spirited girl that Mrs. Medcalf herself had once been—now almost forgotten in the midst of cooking for the estate and comforting a husband and raising a child.
Almost forgotten, but not quite.
Wendy had been quite fond of Mrs. Medcalf from the beginning, but it was in this very moment, with this particular smile, that she came to love her.
endy’s visits with Monsieur Dumas began with an elaborate plan of escape, or rather a series of escapes, the first of which involved eleven mice and a lot of high-pitched shrieking by Mrs. Medcalf as she hopped from foot to foot, clutching her bonnet to her head with one hand and directing the lieutenants with the other.
“Look there! Another one! Eeeeeek! No, there! Get that one!”
By the time the rodents had all been gotten, Wendy and Colin were nowhere to be found.
The lieutenants were reluctant to report the incident. After all, Wendy returned unharmed, having been chaperoned by Colin the entire afternoon, and they didn’t see the point of getting themselves in trouble for nothing. So their weekly letter to Hook left that bit out.
But the first escape was followed by three others, each new scheme more carefully orchestrated than the last, involving afternoon tea; poppy seeds; a croquet mallet; two of the estate’s trained peacocks; Mr. Medcalf’s old, battered bugle; a thoroughbred stallion; a honeycomb from which the bees had not been properly removed; and eventually a broken window, which even Mrs. Medcalf admitted privately had probably gone a bit too far.
Wendy, however, wasn’t sorry for any of it. It was the lieutenants’ fault, not hers, that they refused to report her absences. She enjoyed her time with Monsieur Dumas well enough, and he was exceedingly grateful to have found a friend. But the whole point of these shenanigans was to get Wendy out of Hook’s glorious hair by sending her back to Dover. If the captain didn’t know what was happening at home, the plan didn’t
have a chance.
The lieutenants were only forcing her to escalate things, and heaven only knows how far things might have gone if it hadn’t been for Pan.
There was something intriguing about the Wendy, Pan thought, and he had decided to keep an eye on her even though he was still a bit irked.
He couldn’t watch her directly, of course. She had too good a nose for magic, and she had a dog with her besides. So he sent Tinker Bell to do his dirty work for him. (Tinker Bell did not think kindly of this, and she had several other unkind thoughts besides, but it is probably best not to repeat them.)
Now, Tink had the scent of magic upon her just as Pan did himself, but she was smaller, which made the effect more subtle—in the same way that you might ignore a single tree in the midst of a city block, but you could hardly miss the sudden appearance of an entire forest. Being small also gave her more places to hide, and if Wendy was being followed by a distant golden bird, flitting from tree to tree across the countryside of Hertfordshire, neither she nor Poppy took any notice.
This affected Tinker Bell in a very unsettling way. On the one hand, she was proud of her ability to sneak about undetected. But on the other, she was annoyed that anyone could fail to notice her exceeding beauty, no matter how hard she was trying to hide it. As a result, Tink’s feathers took on an intriguing shade of red-burnished gold—an angry sort of pride. Still beautiful, mind you, but far more natural in effect than either red or gold would have been alone, which only enhanced her ability to blend in among the robins and the finches.
She would watch as Wendy evaded the lieutenants and ran off to visit Monsieur Dumas, shooting at targets and reading books in the garden whenever the weather allowed it. Reporting back to Pan, Tink would embellish these events by dragging out every detail of each escape—she couldn’t help herself, Pan’s rapt attention being almost intoxicating to her ego—so that before she knew it she had made Wendy out to be larger than life. A brilliant military strategist with the speed and endurance of the ancient gods.
Looking back on it, this made Tinker Bell even madder. She didn’t know exactly how the Wendy had tricked her into such embellishments, but Tink vowed to have her revenge, one way or another. (This was just like the innisfay, who believe to their very core that nothing is ever their own fault—one of the many reasons why it is best to avoid them whenever possible.)
Wendy, however, didn’t know this, which is why she reached out her hand toward Tinker Bell the very first time she saw her.
Wendy was reading in the garden behind the modest home of Monsieur Dumas, a lovely cottage surrounded by an explosion of flowers that masked the subtle, pickle-green scent hiding within it. When a tiny hummingbird of red-burnished gold burst forth from among the bellflower leaves to hover in the air before her, Poppy raised her head and barked even before she had fully comprehended the danger.
But Wendy ignored the dog’s warning, reaching out in wonder toward the little bird, its wings a blur of motion, its body impossibly still, radiant in the late afternoon sun. That’s when Tinker Bell turned back into a dragon and bit her.
“Oh!” Wendy exclaimed, but she said nothing else for the moment as she was already sucking on the tip of her injured finger. It was bleeding, albeit just a little, the metallic taste of it sharp against her tongue.
Poppy sprang into action, trying to snatch the creature out of the air, but Tink only flew higher, chattering away amidst her jingle bell laughter.
“Pan,” Wendy said, putting two and two together. “He sent you, whatever you are.”
Tinker Bell’s chiming stopped cold. She hadn’t planned on the Wendy figuring that out. Tink came from a place where magic was common—where there was no particular reason why the appearance of one magical creature should remind you of another, any more than your next-door neighbor dropping by should make you think of the baker. She had not accounted for the fact that people in England were aware of very few magical creatures, so that the arrival of one might remind them of the only other one they had ever met.
Naturally, she blamed the Wendy for this oversight.
Launching back into her melodious tirade, Tinker Bell dove straight at Wendy’s eyes, intending to gouge them out. Wendy threw her hands up in defense, but Poppy was already on the move, leaping with all her might to gnash at the tiny dragon, her teeth snapping together wickedly in the empty air, having just barely missed the creature’s tail.
Tink trilled out a lovely screech and sped off toward the distant trees, leaving Wendy with little doubt as to where Pan was hiding. Monsieur Dumas was due back with their tea at any moment, so Wendy set off at a run through the fields before he could return, following Tink as best she could, with Poppy trailing eagerly behind.
They soon lost sight of Tinker Bell in the forest, but by then the scent alone was enough to track Peter Pan. Wendy realized, standing among the trees and the light undergrowth that tugged playfully at her skirts, that he smelled very much like the forest itself (except, perhaps, for the taste of pickles). In fact, he smelled even more like the forest than the forest did. It was as though she were constantly moving toward its richest and most vibrant depths—where it was most alive—as though Peter Pan stood always at the heart of it.
When they finally found him, he was standing in an oak tree scolding Tinker Bell, who perched somewhat above and away from him, looking blue. Literally. Peter stood with his left foot on one branch and his right foot on another, his back leaning casually against the trunk, his arms folded across his chest, his chin thrust angrily toward the small creature.
“I told you not to let her see you,” he said.
Tinker Bell chimed back in a protesting sort of way.
“That isn’t the point,” Peter told her.
More chiming.
“Excuse me,” Wendy called up to him, “but is he actually speaking? Why, that’s remarkable!” The fact that the small creature spoke in jingle bells seemed even more amazing to Wendy than the fact that it looked like a miniature dragon, which tells you just how much she had been coming into contact with magical creatures lately.
“She,” Pan corrected Wendy, accompanied by the sound of several dozen strands of Christmas bells all being shaken at once.
“Oh. I’m sorry,” Wendy apologized. “She’s very beautiful. Does she always change color like that?” The dragon had morphed into a fiery red, glowering down at Wendy from her high branch.
“Her color matches her mood, of course,” Peter replied. “All the innisfay do that. Don’t you know anything?”
“The innisfay?” Wendy asked, ignoring the implied insult.
“You don’t even know what they are?” Peter asked, his tone incredulous.
“Well, I know she’s one,” Wendy said, sounding a bit defensive. “So at least I know what they look like.”
“Ha! You know nothing!” Peter moved away from the trunk and began to pace back and forth along one of the two branches he had been straddling, staring down at her all the while. “The innisfay can look like any creature they please! Birds, foxes, sprites, dragons! That’s how she’s been following you!”
“Following me!” Wendy exclaimed, and Pan stopped pacing, his expression sobering just a bit. He obviously hadn’t meant to tell her that part.
“Yes,” he declared, as though he had intended the conversation to take this new direction all along. “And she has told me everything. How you come here to shoot. How you’ve been running away from Hook’s men. That’s why I decided we could be friends again. You’re a prisoner of war. I respect that.”
Wendy almost corrected him, but she had only followed Tinker Bell because of Hook’s promise: She could return to Dover if she could find out where Pan’s island was. Perhaps if Pan thought they were on the same side, he would be willing to confide in her.
“Thank you,” she said, straightening her shoulders and tilting her chin upward in stoic dignity. “It has not been easy, as you can imagine.”
“Does he beat
you?” Pan asked, but he sounded more curious than sympathetic.
“Well, no. No one beats me,” Wendy admitted.
“Do they chain you to the wall, forcing you to watch while they eat their rich dinners, your empty stomach growling in agony?”
“Of course not,” Wendy protested. “Nobody chains me up, and Mrs. Medcalf feeds me very well.”
“Hmph,” Pan muttered. “Then he’s not a very good jailer. That’s what I’d do if I had any prisoners.”
“Well then I’m glad I’m his prisoner and not yours,” Wendy snapped. The very thought of anyone being treated in such a way made her angry.
“You should be.” Pan’s face darkened and he stepped out of the tree, opening his wings just before he slammed into the ground. He landed mere inches away from her, staring down into her eyes. “But you are his prisoner, so we are on the same side after all. Come away with me. I shall grant you asylum.”
“What? No!” Wendy said, her mind racing. “No, I can’t. I’m using the situation, you see. To gather information. To learn about the strength of his forces—where his ships are, how many men he has. That sort of thing.”
“Ah!” Pan exclaimed. “Yes, of course! That’s very good thinking!”
“But I don’t know enough yet,” she continued. “Let me learn everything I can, and then I’ll steal one of his ships and come to your island. You just have to tell me where to find you.”
“Ha!” Pan laughed. “None of his ships can find my island. It’s impossible!”
“Impossible?” Wendy asked. “Why is it impossible?”
Peter drew himself up to his full height and looked down at her proudly.
“Because none of his ships can fly!”
hat night, Wendy couldn’t sleep. Instead, she sat in a chair by the window in her room, her feet tucked up underneath her, and she stared out at the stars.
A flying ship!
She tried to imagine it—a ship full of winged men sailing through the sky. Their voices calling to each other in the night. The deck bucking in the wind. Nothing but an explosion of stars above their heads, strewn across the heavens. It felt as though all the dreams of her childhood had been magnified a thousand fold and then wrapped up like a gift, just for her.
The Wendy Page 12
