by Lisa Jensen
“As you were the focus of his for so long,” Stella says to me. “No wonder Kestrel wanted to get rid of you.” She turns again to Piper. “That’s why she wanted me there, isn’t it? She didn’t care about my dreampath, but if I helped break the spell somehow, James would become mortal again. And the next time Peter … killed him … would be the last.”
“My sister behaved very badly,” Piper agrees sadly. “And I did not see it. I was thoughtless enough to believe that Kestrel’s interest in breaking the spell was the same as mine.”
“Which was?” I prompt her.
She shimmers at me in surprise. “Your freedom.”
“Why did no flying boys ever discover this beautiful ship?” Stella asks the fairy.
“We charmed it from their sight,” Piper confesses. “I convinced the Sisterhood how important it was, and Kes could not betray us.” She turns again to me. “You needed your refuge. You needed your work.”
“But why should the Sisterhood care about me?” I wonder.
“Your coming did a great service to the Neverland,” she tells me, dawdling along on the air like a tiny seagull riding a breeze. “We agreed that in return, you had earned your sanctuary. And such a lovely thing you made there,” she glimmers happily, spiraling round in the air as if to take in the whole of my sloop.
“With your help, I believe.”
The little creature makes a pretty, self-effacing shrug. “How else would you ever finish?”
“You kept warning me about my last chance,” I continue.
Piper shakes her tiny head in apology. “I was too hasty the first two times. I thought you were nearer to breaking the spell than you were.”
Stella peers intently at the little creature. “The fairy of the earth, the sea, and the air,” says Stella. “You were the instrument of Proserpina’s spell.”
“I would feel the tremors of her spell before the others,” the imp agrees.
“Then, you were supposed to determine when James broke it.”
“No, it was in my power only to open the passage when the time seemed near. The passage between ours and the mortal world.”
“The shadow of the earth across the Neverland moon,” I whisper. “Red Eclipse.”
“You were so close to breaking the spell before,” Piper says to me. “A spontaneous act of kindness, a glimmering of wisdom. But you were never quite ready to leave. This time I had to be sure. The passage closes as soon as the next moon rises to her new position, and this was your last chance.”
“You were there the night Bill Jukes died.”
“Yes, Captain. You did him a very great kindness.”
“You were there when I first met Stella.” I recall the tinkling bell charm on the girl’s wrist, heard so often in my dream. Ring a bell to summon a fairy.
“As a witness only. I had no need to interfere. She eluded the boys all by herself. It was by her choice alone to reveal herself to you. To trust you.”
“I had no earthly idea who you were,” Stella says to me.
“No,” Piper smiles at her, and then turns again to me. “It was your decision to escort her to the First Tribes. I only helped get you there faster.”
Glimmersailing, of course. No wonder I dreamed so often of a flying ship above the stars.
“I was so eager to see justice done,” the little fairy beams at me.
“Justice?’ I echo in surprise, gazing at her.
Piper nods, idly adjusts the preposterous coils of her black hair, shakes particles of dust from the folds of her tiny gown.
“But … why do so much for me?”
She pauses in her maneuvers to gaze at me. “Because I am your fairy, Captain.” She hovers before me, shimmery wings softly thrumming. “I have always been your fairy.”
It takes my breath away. All those years, decades, centuries I wasted in fear and rage, misery, appalling loneliness. Had I only sought relief. Had I only opened my eyes, my hand, my heart. I raise my elbow and she lights upon it, weightless as a butterfly. We peer at each other.
“Thank you for your extraordinary patience,” I whisper.
“Thank you for your trust, Captain,” she says, with a soft, glimmering smile. “It was worth the wait.”
“I will never forget all you’ve done for us,” I tell her.
“Of course you will,” she reminds me gently.
The last shreds of fog are beginning to stretch apart. Beyond, I glimpse the miracle for which I’ve hungered for over two centuries: a sweeping vista with no Neverland in sight, a broad black sea stretching to the far horizon under stars I know. The Southern Cross. The Phoenix. And I realize how little time is left. It’s the damnedest feeling, knowing the moment we most crave, to begin our lives anew back in the world, is also the moment we dread above all others.
As if we yet dream the same dream, Stella moves beside me again, laces her fingers tightly through mine. I press myself into her warmth, command every cell in my body to cling to her impression, even if my capricious brain forgets. Can it ever be enough? It may happen at any moment now, the enchantment from which Stella and I will never wake. Impervious even to True Love’s Kiss.
An impulse too fleeting to pass for a fully-fledged idea shudders inside me. “It would please me very much to leave you something of mine, in thanks,” I say to Piper. “Will you grant me one more moment to get it?”
She rises gently off my elbow. “You owe me nothing, Captain. But one moment more will do no harm.”
I hurry below, the memory of Stella’s trusting fingertips against my skin as sweet as a kiss. Can memory be encoded in a touch, an object, a scrawl of ink? I find the cabin much as I left it my last night on board, the night I saw Stella in my dream, the bedclothes in disarray, her neatly folded clothing piled in a corner. The volume of Paradise Lost sits on the bed shelf, alongside the flamboyant pink plume.
I can scarcely grasp the feather for the trembling of my fingers. Pressing its shaft to the wooden shelf with my hook, I pluck out a single slender frond, no thicker than a silken thread, and lay it aside. Gripping the shaft with my fingers, I apply the tip of my hook to its point. Its clumsy enough work, but in the absence of the materials I need, I must improvise. It may not be a kind of fairy enchantment at all, the price demanded by the Neverland, the same rules may not apply. But I must try. And there’s so little time.
* * *
In the end, we are more resolute than we ever thought possible. What would be the point of spending our last few moments together in misery? We have already endured so much unhappiness, Stella and I. We choose to embrace our joy for as long as it lasts.
“It will be like waking from a dream,” Piper promises us; she sports the pink flamingo thread I gave her plaited fetchingly through a loop of her black hair. “You will feel neither pain nor sadness. You will be in the place you’ve chosen with the adventure of your lives before you.”
We stand together in the bows, not the helm, as we’ll not be sailing Le Reve in the usual way. Stella has changed back into her plaid jacket, jersey, and trousers. She fears she’ll be taken up for a madwoman should she set foot in Scilly garbed in a nightdress and leaves. All that remains of the Neverland are the buckskin slippers on her feet. The last wisps of fog are slipping astern of us, revealing what is now an enormously fecund white pearl of a moon high in the sky.
I turn to Stella, cradle her face in my hand. Kiss her beautiful tilted mouth one last time. “Don’t give up, ma rose, ma coeur,” I whisper to her. “You are always in my heart.”
She takes my hand in both of hers. Her eyes are bright, her smile unbearably valiant. “I love you, James. Goodbye.”
A lavender-blue spark rises from the rail. A tide of moonlight washes across the deck as Le Reve emerges from the fog and soars into the air against a canopy of stars, but I find I am too weary to watch any more.
* * *
What words can possibly name the riotous dream I’ve had? Yet I feel not unduly grogged, as I peer, blinking, about
the decks of this smart little sloop-rigger. A light leading wind from south by southeast ruffles her tops where she rides high on the flow tide alongside the quay of a pretty little harbor. I do not know it, or have not seen it in a long time.
From the larboard bows, I peer out into a wide, deepwater bay giving way to a broad channel studded with rocks of all shapes and conditions, jagged islets, the dark silhouettes of distant islands. Not the Caribbees; the breeze is too cold and smells of northern things, brine and salt, not spice. Red dawn bleeds across the sky, turning the sea to wine.
What pert little vessel is this? I marvel at her clean lines as I cross the deck to judge the character of the harbor. Reaching for the starboard rail, I jolt at the sight of something hideous emerging from my right sleeve; bugger me, it’s a length of black iron curved like a hook. No less shocking than the look of the ghastly thing is the instinctive ease with which I’ve tossed it over the rail. Whatever befell my hand, it must have happened long ago. Mercifully, my left hand appears to be intact, and as it closes upon the rail, something stirs within me, some primal feeling beyond the power of verbal intelligence to name. I sense it in my skin upon the polished wooden rail, in my bones, in my heart. This is my ship.
Something stings as I slide my hand along the rail; I raise it to suck absently at a small pinprick on my forefinger as I watch the sunrise gild the windows of the waterfront buildings. They are solid stone under peaked roofs. The signs are in English. Peering down the row of buildings opposite the quay, I see signs for fishing supplies, a bake shop, a chemist, a public house called the Mermaid Inn. The rest of the town sprawls up the hill behind them; an ancient stone fortress with battlements and pointed turrets occupies a haughty rise above the rest.
There are few enough folk about at this hour. A sleepy merchant’s boy emerges to sweep off a stoop. Two or three big fellows, muffled up against the chill, roll into a warehouse. And a woman in a plaid jacket is hurrying away from me along the quay.
Coda
HUGH TOWN, ST. MARY’S, SCILLY ISLES
1950
“Handsomely there, Boy.”
His head pops up under a quiver of short brown curls on top, shaved almost to stubble on the sides, blue-gray eyes squinting in the befuddlement my words so often seem to prompt. “Eh?”
“Not so hard, and pay more attention,” I explain, nodding to the sanding block clutched in both his little hands. “You’re not grinding walnuts.”
Alfie’s fair, ruddy-cheeked face relaxes. “Oh. Sorry, guv.” And he presses the sander more gingerly to the upturned hull of the little rowboat raised up on sawhorses between us.
I watch him covertly for another moment before I go back to scraping a patina of barnacles and old paint off the port bows, steadying the hull with the curve of my hook. I must stoop like Father Time over much of the work, while Alfie, who is small for his age—not above nine or ten, if I am any judge of boys—cannot quite reach the keel, even stretched to the fullest extent of his limbs. But he’ll not be put off sweeping up sawdust and shavings forever. And as he comes round every day after school, I reckon there’s a deal less mischief he can get up to with a block of sandpaper than some of the more formidable tools in this shop.
Mad for boats, his mum says. I was like that once. I think.
I went back to Bristol for a few days, but nothing looked the same as I thought I remembered it. No one knew me there. The name Hookbridge is unknown in the Hall of Records. My dubious memories of the place seem antiquated and unreal, as all my memories seem fantastical to me now, no more substantial than a play I might have seen once, or a film at the cinema. Amnesia, the doctors call it; not uncommon in men who’ve been through war.
So I came back to the Isles, here to Hugh Town on St. Mary’s, where I first appeared. Back to my sloop, Le Reve, as is painted on her stern, all that I know in the world that is mine. The authorities held her for over a month, impounded, as they put it, during which time she was the subject of a great deal of postal correspondence, telephone calls, and, I believe, police investigation into her origin and provenance. But as no such vessel has been reported lost, stolen, or missing, they have recently returned her to me. There is some trade to be had, I’m told, in sailing a boat between these islands, especially as an alternative to the bowel-rattling steamer that provides that service now. Perhaps I’ll look into it.
In the meantime, to pay for her berth, I work here in the woodshop for old Mr. Barnes. He also lets me a little gabled room upstairs in this solid stone building with its prospect of the broad beach and the bay of St. Mary’s Pool. It’s not fine woodworking; we most often repair small fishing craft. But hammering, sawing, sanding, and shaping are skills at which I appear to have some facility, although I can’t recall where I learned them.
The calendar in this shop says 1950. I can find no record at all of where I might have spent the intervening years. It’s as if I am reborn.
A shadow appears in the open double doorway, a slender silhouette against the afternoon light glinting off the water. Alfie’s mother, Mrs. Harris, breezes in, on her way home from work, her hair still pinned up under a kerchief, a battered canvas sack of groceries in her arms.
“Thanks for minding him, Mr. Benjamin,” she says to me. I’ve dropped the surname Hookbridge; it sounds like a joke, considering. “I hope he wasn’t too much trouble.”
“Aw, Mum,” the lad rolls his eyes.
“Behave yourself, you, or I’ll tell her the truth,” I warn him, sotto voce. His mother looks stricken for an instant, until Alfie erupts in giggles, delighted to be branded some sort of desperado, if only in jest.
“Really, you should let me pay you something,” she tells me.
“No, no, no,” I wave her off. “An extra pair of hands is always useful around here.” This I say without irony or self-consciousness. The depredations of the war are well known here. Ludlow, the house painter, came back with a wooden leg; the publican’s son lost an arm. But the Scillonians are a hardy lot, as rugged as their landscape, and do not squander time and energy on anything so useless as pity. They simply get on with things. It’s what I most enjoy about this place, the hardworking folk and the nearness of the sea.
“Well, come on, then,” Mrs. Harris urges her son. “Your dad’s coming home tonight and I’ve got a chop for supper.”
Alfie all but hurls the sander back onto the workbench in his eagerness. Like so many in these Isles, his father must go often to the mainland to find work. The separations must be hard, so soon after the war, but I imagine the homecomings are twice as sweet.
They both wave goodbye as Mrs. Harris herds the lad out again. I watch for another moment as they hurry down the road, her fingertips on his shoulder, the boy’s animated hands describing the day’s adventures. It makes me wistful to see it, as it often does.
Perhaps I was married once. I know I have been loved; I feel it in my heart the way my hand knew the touch of my sloop. Whoever she was, wherever she is, I pray she does not grieve for me.
* * *
Le Reve rides the tidewater at the end of her slip off the quay. Things are calm enough now, in May, heading on toward summer, but I must see about housing her more securely for the winter months, I think, as I hop down to her deck. It’s always a joyful moment to board my little ship, odd as she is, an old-fashioned wooden sailing vessel. I suppose I looked quite the buccaneer myself, when I first arrived, with my long hair and battered old coat. I am barbered now, and dress more sensibly, although it’s funny to think how flummoxed I was at first by common things like zippers and snaps.
I’ve not had much time to myself on board since I got her back, but Barnes is closing up shop tonight, so I’ve scarpered off. Perhaps the thought of a wife has made me melancholy for all I might have left behind, but I pay closer attention than ever as I rove across the deck, down the hatch, prowl through the salon, for any forgotten receipt or bill of lading or harbor pass that might tell where we’ve been. I suppose the police have been thro
ugh here at least once, but finding no corpses or runaway Nazi spies secreted below decks have left things not much disturbed.
In the cabin, most of the space is occupied by a rectangle of bed, a mattress set into a built-in wooden frame that juts out from the stern wall. Two mattresses, by the depth of the frame, and as I reach out to press down one corner beneath a pretty silken coverlet, I realize it’s stuffed with wool, possibly even feathers, and without springs. An old-fashioned lantern with a tallow candle sits on the shelf above the bedstead. Is she a replica built for some historical exhibition? I wish I knew. It’s a lonely feeling to be so completely unknown in the world, even to myself.
Perhaps there is some purveyor’s mark somewhere on the bed linens, someone who might recall the circumstances of this order. And twitching up the corner of the coverlet to peer down into the bedstead, I spy something odd, some pinkish, fluffy thing peeking out from between the two mattresses. I pry up the corner of the top mattress with my hand and gingerly hook aside the trailing bedcover. It’s a feather, yes, but far too grand to ever stuff inside a mattress, a single, long feather from some tropical bird, a flamingo such as I have never seen outside of the Indies, in the most provocative hue of sunset pink. What’s it doing here? And what is that object it’s protruding out of?
Shifting the corner of the mattress to my hook, I reach in and withdraw a small leather-bound book with the uproarious feather stuck between its pages. Dropping the mattress, I turn to perch on the bed, securing the antique book on my lap with the curve of my hook, sliding my fingers over the embossed gilt lettering of its title: Paradise Lost. Why is poor, respectable Milton hidden between the bedclothes, like some lewd pornographic verse? Does opium, stolen jewels, the whereabouts of some lost treasure, lie concealed within its pages? Who has thrust it here so furtively?
