Chapter Twenty-two

IDYLL

Hell could never be so pleasant, but Stella’s gentle, searching fingers make me less sorry than usual to wake to another day.

 

 

“Has no one ever discovered this place?” She sits beside me on the thwart, twining my long hair into two plaits, Indian-fashion. Green ferns explode from the top of the distant ridge against a bright blue sky, throwing lacework patterns across the water. I unearthed a bottle of rum from the galley and a spare oar, and we’ve rowed out into the channel and catch fish to cook over the galley fire, although neither of us hungers much for food.

“Lake Hypnos, as I have christened it,” I tell her, with a cautious tug at my line. “Which continues to slumber out of sight of the boy. Perhaps all water belongs to the loreleis, and the boys steer clear of it. Like the crocodile.”

“Ah. That explains why Peter made the braves paddle me in a canoe to the lagoon. The boys wouldn’t go on the water.”

I glance at her. “A water route from the wood to the lagoon?”

She nods. “Through a deep ravine, until we got to the big river. Incredibly gorgeous, like drifting through the center of the earth.”

She must mean the Terraces, the steep blue hills in the interior of the island that rise from Pirates Beach at sea level to the high plains of Indian country. A channel that waters the wood and connects to the river, hidden from me for centuries.

“They had to stop and perform a ceremony along the way,” Stella recalls. “The offering—that was me—had to be purified. They drew circles and burned sage leaves, and there was a lot of chanting. It took hours. Not even Peter could speed them up.”

“Perhaps they hoped the boys would give up and go off on some other game,” I suggest. Or perhaps the wily chief was buying time for me to get to the lagoon and intercept them. Astonishing, the confidence he placed in me.

Stella only shrugs, ties off the second braid with a bit of vine. “Peter was pretty determined this time. It drove him crazy when the village elder, Grandmother Owl, they call her, kept me secluded one whole day before the trial. She said a council was a serious thing, and the prisoner must spend a day reflecting on her crimes.”

“Do you mean the Indians disobeyed the boy?”

“No, they compromise,” Stella corrects me. “Give and take. Their chief is quite the diplomat. No one in the village contradicts Grandmother Owl, not even the chief. Peter made the braves play war games with him all day, because he had to wait. That’s when they gave me these,” she adds, nudging out a foot in its buckskin slipper.

She sits back, shades her eyes with a hand, squints briefly up at the blue sky above the rim of foliage. “Peter doesn’t fear the sky, you know,” she observes. “That’s his particular element. I wonder he’s never seen this place from above.”

 

 

Aboard Le Reve, we answer to nothing but the ebb and flow of our own desires. The Neverland, the boys, the fairies, my men, all might as well be on a distant star for all the difference they make to us now. Stella wears my linen shirt above, the one she peeled me out of so shamelessly that first night. Below, she parades about in nothing at all. I go barefoot in my breeches, sometimes in my other filthy shirt, sometimes without. Stella is as undaunted by the scarred wreckage of my body, even in broad daylight, as she was by my ruined arm, so I forget my hideousness for a while.

Below, at night, Stella is a symphony in pink, rose, as the French say, her cheeks aglow in rosy lamplight. The merwives’ pink spiral shell dangles between her breasts, glistening against her damp skin. She’s got hold of my tricorne hat with its luscious flamingo feather, plops it on her head, pretends to preen in the dark cabin window.

“Peacock!” she giggles at me, glancing over her shoulder. There is no cruel glass in which to view myself here, only the tender sheen in Stella’s eyes.

“I feel a perfect highwayman,” she declares, as I unhook the last buckle and peel the harness off my arm. She whirls about, sweeps my hat off her head, points the extravagant pink feather at me. “Stand and deliver!”

My body complies on the instant, yet I come about, disarming her with a single swift feint, sending her scurrying backward into the bed pillows. “No silly lady is going to make a man out of me!” I declaim, grappling my hat about so the soft flamingo down grazes her cheek. “First, Madam Outlaw, a taste of your own cruel justice.”

I slide the feather slowly down. She lifts her chin, exposes her throat to its whispery touch. “Oh sir, I’ll reform,” she murmurs.

“I certainly hope not, Madam,” I parry. “At least, not yet.” The fronds of the feather slide up and down her collar bone, rise up over the mound of one breast, part round a plump pink nipple. Her protests are less coherent as I move the feather over her body, across her belly, slowly, gently down between her legs, until she is squirming, and I am no longer master of myself. “Permission to come aboard Madam,” I rumble.

“Aye. Aye. Captain,” she breathes.

 

 

I’m accustomed to women begging for my favors, practiced whores well-paid for their cozenage, or ordinary women desperate to exchange their bodies for mercy.

Please Captain, for God’s sake, take me, spare my husband, my daughter, my child …

Their voices blur together, a single lament that creeps into my dreams sometimes like the mournful tremor of a bass viol beneath a bright quartet. I did what they asked if it suited me and pleased myself the rest of the time. It was my power over them that pleased me most. But it’s not like that with Stella. She begs for nothing, and I surrender everything to her.

 

 

We’ve put out the galley fire and hauled a few mismatched pillows and bolsters up on deck to lie gazing up through the rigging at the rising Neverland stars. The moon has disappeared from the night sky, so the stars are more vivid than ever.

“The tribes have names for them,” Stella tells me. “The women told me. There is the Hunter, and the Hawk, just rising over that ridge. That column of three vertical stars, with the little ones above it, that’s the Sheaf. And, see that circle?”

I peer up at a ring of tiny stars. “Yes?”

“The Medicine Wheel. Most cultures have something like it, the Wheel of Fortune, the Circle of Life, or some such,” she expounds. “One day, they say, the wheel will turn.”

I glance at her skeptically. “Surely their pattern is fixed?”

“It’s just what they believe,” she shrugs, and settles back again.

The loreleis’ crooning to their mer-babes is a soft, graceful adagio tonight, dipping and soaring as gently as mist along the river. “What a magical place this is,” Stella sighs. “No wonder children love it so.”

“Magic is overvalued in your world,” I remind her.

“It can be abused, like any intoxicating thing,” Stella allows. “But children must believe in magic.”

“Must they?”

“Absolutely! The world needs magic, now more than ever. If there is no safe place for children to dream, how will they ever dream themselves a better world?” She shifts around a bit among her cushions. “My dreams of Neverland sustained me through some very dark times. I even wrote a story about them once.”

“A story? You said your dreams were shapeless things.”

“Well, yes,” she agrees. “But all writers hear voices in their heads, you know, talking to them. I’d hear bits of dialogue in my head, and I tried to make sense of this feeling I kept having in my dreams, this elation, this … connection. It felt so important.”

“Do you recall what you wrote?” I ask her.

“Oh, yes. It was called The Girl Who Made Friends With Fear. Very Freudian,” she adds, and when I shake my head at this foreign expression, she smiles. “Very symbolic. It was my attempt at a modern fairy tale. A little girl is lost in a deep and frightening wood and trying to have courage. She knows if she gives in to fear, she is lost. She meets a mysterious stranger in the wood – he might be Death, he might be the Devil, she doesn’t know, but she doesn’t run away. To her surprise, the stranger treats her like a friend, and the wood becomes a beautiful garden.”

“A garden?” I interrupt. “Not a golden palace with a handsome prince?”

“Well, I didn’t want to overdo it,” Stella grins. “It’s enough that she suddenly finds beauty and peace in a place she had thought was so terrifying. Her courage is rewarded, you see. Now she can face anything.”

“And?” I prompt her. “What happens next?”

Stella shrugs. “She wakes up back safe at home. Ready to take up her life again, I suppose.”

“That’s all?” I frown. “Hardly a thrilling climax.”

“I guess not,” Stella laughs. “Maybe that’s why I couldn’t sell it!”

She sits up to pummel the pillows into a more forgiving shape behind her, then lies back again, bare legs cocked up at the knees, myself stretched out to full length beside her.

“What does it take to fly?” she asks suddenly.

“The approbation of the fairies, for one thing,” I sniff. “They provide the magic dust.”

“But why fly the boys and not you?” she demands. “Why not even the odds? Wouldn’t that be more fair?”

“Only children fly in the Neverland.”

“Then it must take more than fairy magic,” Stella insists. “Something only children possess.”

“Happy thoughts?” I suggest dryly.

“Oh, it can’t be as mundane as that.” She sits up, turns lively eyes on me. “Even you must have had one happy thought in all the centuries you’ve been here.”

“I’m having one now,” I grin, reaching out to gently stroke the curve of her thigh, so ill-covered by the hem of my shirt.

She swallows a renegade smile. “And?”

I roll up on my elbow. “Hmmm. I do detect a certain … elevation—” But she grasps a corner of a pillow and claps me across the chest with it. I lunge up, grab her by the waist and pull her back down with me. She doesn’t put up much of a fight.

“Is it their youth, do you think?” she goes on with maddening tenacity, once we’ve settled again.

“I suppose so. My men were all flying boys once, but the fairies have abandoned them. They are fickle in their affections, the imps.”

“But what do you actually know about them?” Stella’s head pops up from my shoulder. “Do they conjure, turn men into toads?”

“They are allies of the boy,” I say firmly.

“Are you sure? What about this ship?”

I stare at her.

“You say you built it yourself, and I believe you. You’ve a deft hand, I can vouch for that,” she adds, with an impudent tilt of her mouth. “But swaying up the mast? Alone? Somebody must have helped you.”

“There are … gaps in my memory. I am more prone to drink when I am entirely alone here,” I confess. “I awoke one day, and the mast was stepped. But I must have done it in a stupor of passion, don’t you see? Drunkards are often capable of the most stupendous feats they can’t even remember.”

“True,” Stella muses. “But what about that fairy who came to your ship when she heard the bell?”

“Do you not recall how she lured you to the Fairy Dell?”

“I remember it very well,” Stella says softly, lowering her head again to my chest. “That was the first time you were kind to me.”

I’ve not thought of it in quite those terms.

“They know a way out, don’t they?” Stella murmurs. “The fairies.”

“But no one ever makes the journey out but Lost Boys and…” I pause, eye her. There’s no longer any point in trying to trick an answer out of her. “You were never a Wendy, were you?”

“What?” Her head pops up again.

“Well, think about it, Parrish. It might account for you dreaming your way back with such ardor.”

“To cook and clean and mend for the boys?” Stella exclaims, sitting up. “A lifetime of drudgery, you think that’s what called me here?”

“You once spoke of teaching them compassion.”

“But at what cost?” she counters. “To obey Peter like the little god he thinks he is? What do the Wendys do here? Scrub and mend and pick up after the boys, exactly as they did at home, while the boys go off on adventures. No woman needs the Neverland for that. It’s no wonder the Wendys never come back here!”

“But, the stories—”

“Your Scotch Boy knew nothing about women,” Stella insists. “Contrary to his fantasies, Wendys cannot possibly long to return. Maybe for some of the more spirited, their taste for adventure, for flying, stays with them. In my world there are women who fly in airplanes. Aviatrixes, they are called. Those are your Wendys.”

“So that’s why you turned Pan down at the lagoon,” I venture.

“I’d come to my senses by then,” she agrees. “No more grown-up thoughts, he told me.” She smiles down at me, slides one fingertip lazily down my chest. “Too late for that, I’m afraid.”

She bends over me again and follows the line she’s drawn with a series of kisses. “I love you, James,” she murmurs.

“You are a madwoman,” I remind her, which discourages neither of us when she burrows again into my arms, and we give ourselves up to the fragrant night, the mermaids’ swoony lullaby, and each other. Once I should have called myself unmanned, but not now. Never have I ever felt more like a man than when I look into Stella’s eyes and know she loves me. Against all the laws of Nature and reason, Stella loves me.

 

 

We lose track of the days we idle aboard my sloop. But one morning, Stella jerks out of my arms and rolls apart from me in the bed.

“What is it?” My phantom hand clutches for a weapon.

She lowers her eyes guiltily. A splotch of red smears the rumpled Holland sheet between us. Another little tributary of blood trickles down her naked thigh.

“You’re hurt!” I gasp, jolting upward.

“No. Oh, no,” she says quickly, shrinking away from me.

I frown at the sudden maelstrom of possibilities. “But … good God, I’m not … I mean, your marriage—”

“I’m thirty-eight years old, James; you’re hardly the first man to ever make me bleed,” she assures me, with a brief smile. “It’s only … it’s my monthly cycle.”

I’m horrified, of course, although it would be churlish to let her see it as I edge away from the spot between us.

“It’s just … unexpected,” she goes on. “It hasn’t happened for a while. Odd, isn’t it? The last time I remember was just before I moved to Kensington Gardens.”

I have no interest at all in speaking about such things, but I reach out to cradle her face. “Does it hurt?”

My answer is the stoic way she sighs and shrugs. In her haste, she’s rolled over onto my castoff linen shirt. I spy a fold of it beneath her as she shifts about, smudged with red.

“I’m sorry,” Stella whispers, “I’ve stained your shirt.”

“Never mind, cara,” I tell her. “Take it. Rip it up into rags if you like. I’ll get another. It’s high time I returned to the ship to see how the men are faring, in any case,” I add briskly, ashamed at how grateful I am for an excuse to leave her to her business. “Will you be all right?”

Her mouth tilts up. “It’s not a disease.”

“No, but you should rest. Stay below. I’ll not be long.”

She’s watching me with perfect comprehension. Her wry smile broadens. “It may take a few days,” she warns me.

“God’s eyeteeth, Stella, do you think I would leave you alone for one moment longer than I have to over such a little thing?” I demand, struggling to sound wounded. “Do you take me for a boy?”

Her smile warms. “No. No, I don’t.”

Blood or no, it’s hard to leave her when she looks at me like that. I lean across and kiss her. “I’ll be back by evening,” I promise.

 

 

I can’t say I expect my men to cheer like the mangy boys upon my return to the Rouge, but they might at least muster some feeble sign of welcome. When I row out of Kidd Creek and pull up alongside the Rouge, however, absolute silence is my only greeting. The men on deck either freeze in place or stumble to the rail to stare at me, eyes wide, jaws agape. Gato wriggles down the backstay, signing a hasty cross over his chest. Men clutching tools in the waist stare in wordless astonishment as I climb the chains to the deck.

“Well, men, what news?” I hail them pleasantly, for Stella has put me in a high and forgiving humor. Yet I chafe under their eerie silence. The dry spice of sawn wood hangs in the air. A planked workbench is set up amidships with a little tumble of sawdust on the deck below. Sticks stands beside it, guiltily fingering a handsaw. Flax braces himself behind the bench. The fruit of their labors sits on the bench, a little wooden box, pink and freshly made, perhaps a foot and a half square. A sea chest for an infant, perhaps.

Or a coffin.