Chapter Twenty-one

LE REVE

Beyond the waterfall, around another bend, the tributary widens into a deep, placid pool, glittering like shards of emerald under the canopy of Neverland stars. A strip of black beach nestles in the lee of a high cliff overhung with jungle vegetation. Nothing can be seen beneath the cliff, in the shadows, but I work the boat around until a proud black silhouette becomes plainly visible against the riot of stars and their reflections in the middle of the pool.

My beauty. My pride. My sanity. Le Reve.

She’s sloop-rigged, her canvas below, the naked spine of her mast and lines exposed to the night. Her elegant prow thrusts forward, her stern is pert, but low, for faster sailing. Her brave paintwork gleams, black trimmed in green to blend in with the black beach and surrounding jungle foliage. Her deck, less than a third of the length and width of the Jolie Rouge, is uncluttered and tidy, everything properly stowed and secured. She rides to anchor, poised and alert, ready to spring, ready to fly. She is everything the Rouge is not.

I’ve fallen silent as I work our boat round her stern, beneath the name Le Reve, in green. It’s another moment before I remember Stella sitting beside me. She too is rapt as I paddle us round in silence to tie up to the starboard quarter. I grasp the cable; by now it’s no surprise that Stella throws her skirts round her hips and climbs up like the hardiest old salt. I follow her up, and we stand together on a deck that shines with ghostly elegance in the starlight.

“Welcome aboard Le Reve, Madam,” I say.

Stella turns slowly, her eager gaze sweeping the deck, from graceful stem to clean, slender waist, to the polished wheel in the stern. There’s no stern castle, only a low rise of cabin top between the mast and the wheel.

“This was never in the books,” Stella breathes at last.

“No. It’s my secret,” I agree. “I built her.”

She turns to me in astonishment. “By yourself?”

I nod. “Mostly. Otherwise it should not have stayed secret for very long.”

Stella’s inquisitive fingers stroke the polished gunwale in her eager way of knowing a thing by touching it. Admiration shines in her face as her glance rackets all round the deck. It’s as if I’ve peeled back my skin and laid myself bare for her, a thing I’ve never done for any other living creature in the Neverland. When her vibrant gaze returns to me, I see she does not take the moment lightly. And in the perverse way of the human race, when I see how deeply she understands, the more uncomfortably exposed I feel.

“However did you manage it?” she asks, her voice hushed.

“Plank by plank. Spar by line.”

The toe of her moccasin slides along the deck, she crouches down to stroke a hatch coaming, sanded and buffed to a soft sheen. “It must have taken you ages,” she breathes.

“Fortunately, I had ages to spare,” I remind her. “I spent years on each section—the hull, the deck, the cabin.” I’m warming to the topic in spite of myself. “I scavenged what I could from the stores of the Rouge, instruments and supplies we plundered from other ships. I built the rest from timber my men have taken from the wood over time. The wood is never depleted, you know. There is always new growth to accommodate the boy. They did most of the sawing and cutting, my men, so many … willing hands … to do the work.” Now I’ve plunged in, I can scarcely stop myself. “It kept them from idleness. I did the finish work myself, planing, sanding, carving. Generations of former Lost Boys picked oakum and spliced new lines from our stores of hemp and junk. It was no business of theirs how I chose to dispose of the fruit of all their labor after they were gone.” I’ve rigged up a tackle to lower away the boats from the Rouge by myself, hauling boatloads of tools and materials to my hidden Black Beach during those long periods when I had no crew.

“There is full running rigging stowed below,” I go on. “Extra spars, sails. Best to keep ’em out of sight. There’s a galley, a small salon, a cabin, all with furnishings pilfered from the Rouge.”

Stella climbs to the cabin top, crosses its planks, steps down to the wheel, inspects the binnacle, savoring its clean lines and smooth finish with her fingertips. The compass I pried loose from the Rouge; none of my crew were ever mariner enough to notice its absence.

“Will she sail?” Stella’s raises keen eyes to me.

“She might, was there anywhere to go,” I sigh. “She’s no more practical use than a ship in a bottle, although she took a great deal longer to build.”

Stella gazes at me still, her dark eyes as vivid as the starlight. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful, Maestro,” she says earnestly.

I look away, more discomposed than if she’d ridiculed me. “Her chief virtue now is her privacy,” I declare, motioning Stella toward the ladder. “No one alive in the Neverland knows about this place. You’re safe here, for now.”

I peep into the galley below to see if anything edible remains from my last visit, and when I emerge empty-handed, I find Stella sunk into a motley pile of plundered cushions on the bench in the salon. Her long ordeal catches up with her at last: she lies in a stuporous sleep, still wrapped in my scarlet coat. I meant to show her into the cabin and claim the salon for myself, but I won’t wake her now. So I stoop under the deck beams and go into the little cabin, shutting the door behind me.

Striking a spark off my hook to ignite the tinder, I light the candle inside the lamp by the bed. Its trembling glow does not extend far into the room, but it’s a beacon of warmth and comfort after the dark and wet of the lagoon. I plunk myself down on the bed, a proper mattress in a wooden frame that fills most of this small compartment. With a deep groan, I drag off my sodden boots and soaked shirt, cold wet hair snaking down my back. The leather straps that bind my hook in place have seized up like a torture device from their soaking, biting into my flesh all up my arm, over my shoulder, around my chest. My phantom fingers clench with cold and discomfort as my actual fingers pluck clumsily at the buckles holding the straps in place. At last I peel the harness away, shaking off my heavy hook until iron and brace and buckles all clatter in a heap to the deck.

My maimed arm looks even more gruesome than usual in the lamplight, criss-crossed with red welts. With irresistible morbidity, I touch one red stripe, feel the depression in my skin. My fingers move up my arm, feel similar gouges over the saddle of my shoulder and across my chest. Rubbing does little either to ease or erase them. Finally, I grope behind me for the spare shirt I keep stowed among the bedclothes. My fingers close on linen, soft with age, and I wrestle the shirt on over my head, fastening neither yoke buttons nor sleeves, craving only concealment from my own eyes.

I peel off what remains of my grimy stockings; it seems a lifetime ago that I drew them on to go play advocate at the boys’ council. Undoing the buttons of my sodden breeches, I roll them down, and kick them aside next to my hook and harness. Nothing should please me more than to sink into oblivion now, but for a persistent humming in my blood; my body is still too stoked up on the day’s adventures for sleep. Time crawls, and I sit up again, wishing I’d thought to stow a supply of black drops in this cabin, to prevent myself thinking too deeply. For all my half-wit gallantry on Stella’s behalf, I’ve only delayed the inevitable, once the boy finds her out again. She’d have been far better off with the loreleis.

But I’d be more alone than ever.

How could I ever bear to lose her again?

Flame flickers in my lamp, as if on a draft. The door gapes slowly open, and something alive, not ethereal, rustles into the shadows of the cabin. My weapons are back aboard the Rouge. My hook is out of my reach. I sprawl, bare-legged, on the bed dressed in only a shirt, as trapped as I was in the loreleis’ net. Brass glitters in the dark as the crouching figure nears. I recognize my own coat by its gold piping. Stella huddles inside it, holding it round herself with both hands.

She emerges out of the shadows, a glimmer of flotsam on the tide, and as she comes into the light, I see she has not a stitch on under my scarlet coat. Her crossed arms cover her breasts, but I’m mesmerized by the little thatch of dark fur between her legs as she perches herself uninvited on the edge of my bed. Her face is in the light now, her dark eyes intent, looking into mine.

“That was a very brave thing,” she says, “coming after me.”

Frozen by the shock of her nearness, I inch my damaged arm into the folds of my shirt, phantom fingers groping for cover. “You may speak plainly,” I mutter. “It was an act of utter foolhardiness. I had no more sense than a boy—”

“No,” she interrupts, her eyes serious, her agile fingers stretching impulsively toward me. “No boy would ever have done it, cared so much. Felt so much. Risked so much. I’ve never been worth so much to anyone before.”

Her fingers land on my forearm, below my elbow; the muscle clenches with anxiety as her fingers slide down with agonizing, intoxicating slowness. I can’t stop them. They close round my wrist, withdraw my ruined limb out of the folds of my shirt into the light. She cradles my hideous stump in both her hands, gazes at it without flinching. Fetishist! Pervert! I’m furious that she’s found me so naked, shuddering with rage, yet too spellbound to move. I watch in horror as she lifts my stump to her mouth, presses a kiss I can’t feel into my deadened flesh. Were my hook in place, how I’d love to tear her mocking lips from her face! Her eyes remain on mine as she presses her mouth again to my ruined flesh. And something stirs within me, a thing I thought as dead as my stump, so long buried I can’t even give it a name.

“James,” she whispers to me.

Can some withered, mottled remnant of James live still inside this rotting hulk that is Hook? Never. Impossible.

“You mistake me, Madam.” I mean to freeze her with my coolness, my fabled sang-froid, but I scarcely keep the tremor out of my voice. She feeds on my weakness, growing bolder still.

“Do I?” She holds my stump against her cheek, her other hand stretches toward me. The coat falls away from her shoulders as her fingertips light on my exposed chest. I jump at their warmth on my skin. What is this staccato in my chest, beneath her touch? This is no phantom; it’s the hammering of my heart.

My hand twitches up at last. She doesn’t pull away, caresses me still, bold eyes fixed on mine. I might slap her hand away, strike her face; even I don’t know what I might do. My hardened fingers brush her soft cheek, curl in her hair, curve round her neck, and I pull her to me with sudden force; it’s not yet too late to take charge of this game. I’ll show her my mettle, if that’s what she wants. I expect her to cry out, claw at me, but instead her mouth opens under mine, and I taste hunger as raw and ravenous as my own, magnetic, irresistible. Then she pulls away, of course, her fingertips rising to my lips, pressing me back. But before I can sneer over my victory, she takes my face in both her hands, kisses me again, slowly, deeply, soundly, until I am reeling inside. I’ve had saucier kisses, before, craftier, but never anything that seared so deeply into the very heart of everything I thought I knew, everything I thought I was.

Her trembling body settles in to mine. She’s not so composed as she pretends. I’m shaking like a schoolboy.

“I..I know I take liberties…” she murmurs against my cheek.

“Oh … Stella,” I riposte; I have no other words at my command, much less wits. I can only cradle her to me, my maimed arm curling round her back, my fingers in her hair. Her fingers slide over my hand; she draws it down over her breast, her nipple smooth and swollen as a grape under my palm. I caress her slowly, gently, and she moans with pleasure at my touch. Mine. Her skin is unbearably soft, her body ripe and firm for a woman of her years, a miracle for a man of mine.

I cup her breast in my hand, lower my face, tease her nipple with my lips, my tongue. She sways closer, fingers in my hair, chafing down my back, keening softly. My phantom fingers yearn to glide over her body, but my ruined arm is awkward against her soft skin.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, “I’ve never done this one-handed.”

“It’s all right,” she murmurs, tilting up my face, her eyes glistening in the warm light. “All it takes is practice.”

And she nudges me back across the bed, slides up my shirt, takes inventory of my ruined body with her sweet mouth and probing fingers, bringing warmth and life to parts of me that have felt nothing, nothing, for centuries. One-handed or not, I would consume her in a fury, like a hurricane, but she slows me down, savors every part of me, soothing and tormenting at once. It’s like the rhythm of the sea, the way our bodies rise and fall, rise and fall, the little trembling swells of desire, the furious surge of release, my incoherent cries, the sweet music of her laughter.

Never in my life has any woman ever loved me with such tenderness. As a rakish young coxcomb, I was all hot blood and fire, brimstone and gall indeed. I’d have rejected tenderness were it ever offered me. But I am young, cruel, heartless no more. It’s not Hook Stella loves with such slow, shuddering abandon. It’s me.

What unholy force do we release into the Neverland this night with our forbidden passion? Thus was the Fall of Man perpetrated; Eve tasted the forbidden fruit and transmitted all she knew to Adam in a kiss. But what if Eve forsook Adam and kissed the Serpent instead? Is it enough to corrupt the boy’s precious Eden of innocence? Perhaps Stella gives me a greater gift even than herself. Oblivion eternal.

Has my Angel of Death come for me at last?