Chapter Twenty-four

THE REDEEMER

“Home? The world of men and war you were so eager to escape?” I suck on a stringy piece of salted wild pig purloined from the galley of the Rouge, along with a bottle of port. We’ve removed ourselves below to the salon as dusk creeps over the Neverland. “Have you changed your mind?”

“Coming here changed everything,” says Stella. “I never realized how much I’d miss all I left behind. Little things. Daft things. A snug home, a fire in the grate, and a rattling good book. An excellent glass of port.” She raises an empty hand in mock salute; we must pass the bottle between us, as all my goblets are back aboard the Rouge. “The changing of seasons, the company of friends, the healing cycles of time, grown-up pleasures, I crave them now.” She sits back a little, sighs. “Running away doesn’t solve anything. It’s time to go back and rebuild the world we’ve got.”

I reach out to stroke her hand. “Stella Rose, my sweet outlaw, my tumbling star. There is no way back from the Neverland. I prayed for centuries. I should have found it by now.”

“Prayed, is it?” She cocks an eyebrow at me. “Perhaps you invoked the wrong gods.”

“In my day you’d burn at the stake for such talk,” I note admiringly.

“It’s not witchcraft,” she says. “Forces exist in the world far older and more compassionate than the gods of men. Or boys. The miracles of nature are more powerful than anything church or science can imagine. Mysticism is as old as time. The shaman spoke of a dreampath—”

“Poetic metaphor,” I protest.

“All right, but he said the quest belongs to someone brave enough to follow the dreampath the other way. Out of the Neverland! Lost Boys and Wendys go back all the time. Peter flies in and out all the time. The merwives go back and forth underwater.”

“I mean there is no way back for me.”

She shakes her head, her bouncing hair nearly the color of the port in the warm lamplight. “But it’s all different now. You yourself have visited the fairy queen and the mermaids.”

“Only because I was witless enough to follow you.”

“And why didn’t the fairies stop me, as Peter asked that day, remember?” Stella counters. “Why didn’t the Indians shoot me down? Why didn’t the mermaids drown me? Because the signs appear in all their folklore, and I must be part of it, somehow.”

“It may be your journey entirely,” I agree. “But not mine. Eden must have its Satan.”

“But surely you are the sacrifice here, not the Devil,” she exclaims. “You are the redeemer.”

I stare at her. “Madam, in my time I’ve been accused of many things—”

“You’re the one who suffers for their games,” she insists. “You are the one who dies over and over again so children may have their innocent Dreaming Place. So Peter can win, over and—” she pauses, wide eyes gazing inward, then gapes again at me. “His dreams are freighted with centuries of losses, that’s what the merwife told us. How can he not explode? He has to take it out on someone. Then you come along, the dark and sinister man, the pirate, symbol of the cruel grown-up world that has stolen so much from him. But this is the world where children prevail, where Peter always wins!” She is eager now. “Maybe he doesn’t even know why, but it must relieve the sorrow somehow, all his victories over you, the sorrow he can never be allowed to remember. That must be why she sent you here! Your witch, your voodoo queen.”

“Why would she care if the little whelp has bad dreams?”

Stella shrugs. “Might she have been a Wendy?”

I frown. “If so, she would have no memory of this place, would she? But … she did commune with spirits of the dead.” Bienvenu, Mama Zwonde. It chills me still to think on it.

“Maybe she didn’t care anything about Peter,” Stella suggests. “But she cared a great deal about you.”

“To curse me to eternal torment?” I gape. “By God’s hamstrings, it’s lucky she didn’t dislike me!”

“A curse and a chance,” Stella persists. “Lazuli told us the Neverland was in grave peril once because Peter was on the verge of giving way to all his sorrows. What if it was you coming here that put things right? However awful your other crimes, your witch must have known this would outweigh them all. Preserve harmony in the Neverland, keep this place safe for dreaming children everywhere. Redeem the Neverland and redeem yourself.”

And it comes to me again, what Proserpina said that day about my future, a violent end, my unshriven spirit forbidden to rest in peace. I took it for a curse flung at me in anger. Was it a warning?

“But … it’s fantastic,” I mutter. “Why would she bother?”

“She must have loved you,” Stella murmurs. “As much as I do.”

I am stunned to speechlessness.

“It just wasn’t supposed to take so long,” Stella adds.

“Perhaps my crimes were greater than she imagined.” I’m shaking my head against a floodtide of grim memory. “I should have faced the charges against me like a man, stood up to my accusers, removed the stain from our family name. But I chose to run away, take it out on the world, like a fool. Like a boy.” I draw a heavy breath. “My father might have lived.”

Stella grips my hand in both of hers. “Your witch knew what you were. She knew how much you had to answer for. But she expected you back in her lifetime. She wanted you back, I’m sure of it. What prevented you?”

I shake my head. “That was centuries ago. My memories of that time are naught but a blur of one fruitless campaign after another. After Pan slaughtered my original crew, he started bringing in replacements, former Lost Boys with no better sense than to dream themselves back. I would find them dazed and helpless in some forgotten corner of the island or other, de facto outlaws in this fairyland of children. How could I not—”

“They never came back before?” Stella interrupts. “The old Lost Boys?”

“Well, before I came, I cannot say, but I never saw evidence of any other grown men, save the braves, until after all my original crew were killed. And why would there be? If Pan so despises men, why would he ever bring them back?”

Her expression is all the answer I require. To fight and kill, of course. So they might join my crew, die under his blade, hundreds of them, thousands, so he might have his revenge on the grown-up world and spend his sorrow. And I am his accomplice, his high priest, his bawd, leading his victims to their ritual slaughter, over and over again. How many more must die? “By Christ, I will never go back,” I whisper. “I am irredeemable.”

“No,” Stella says firmly, twining her fingers through mine. “You’ve done all that was asked of you. Peter and the Neverland thrive! There are other men to take up the battle now, and there always will be.”

“Yet more pointless deaths.” I sigh. “That can’t be what she wanted.”

“Perhaps not,” Stella agrees, considering. “But nothing turned out the way she planned, did it? You’ve had two centuries to pay for all your wrongdoing, James. That’s long enough. And now the signs are in play.”

I sit back, my wits harrying her notion for its hidden flaw. There must be one. “The shaman spoke of three signs,” I remind her.

“There hasn’t been a third sign, in the sky, yet,” Stella agrees. She gazes up the hatchway, out to where the first of the stars are winking to life. The moon is waxing now, the merest sliver of light in the evening sky, everything the same as it always is.

“There’s something we haven’t said or done yet to get you out of here, James. We must find out what it is.”

We, she says. We’re on this journey together.

“But what?” I sigh. “Some offering, perhaps? Incense? Animal bones? You’ve already been purified. What do your books have to say on the matter?”

“Well, curses are broken all the time in the old tales. Sleeping Beauty. Snow White. Beauty and the Beast—”

“How?”

Her mouth quirks up. “True love’s kiss.”

I lean across the table obligingly and kiss her piquant mouth. But no thunderclap, nor tidal wave, nor volcanic eruption from the bowels of the earth disturbs the placid Neverland evening. “Well?”

“It can’t happen just like that.” Then her expression brightens. “Your witch! Didn’t you see her in the Fairy Dell? We must go back to the fairies, find her again!”

I do not dignify this hare-brained suggestion with a reply.

How can it be true, any part of it? Yet Stella so ardently embroiders this fantasy of escape, I cannot help but be buoyed up with each new stitch; her hope is as contagious as the pox.

“Where will we go, when we are free?” I prompt her that night as we prepare for bed. I so want to believe her.

“Trescoe Island in Scilly,” Stella replies eagerly. “My aunt’s cottage – well, it’s mine now. Such a fine prospect, a thousand isles, gilded by the western sun. A huge panorama of stars that change with the seasons, tumbles of rock and stone like ancient castles, a wild, abandoned, beautiful place, James. You will love it so much.”

How I crave to hear the pounding of restless, living surf, the scree of gulls; the Bay of Neverland is so eerily calm. “I wish I could believe it will be as rapturous as you make it sound.”

“Well, it won’t be all that rapturous. The cottage is half ruin inside, and we’ll have to hack it out of the overgrowth. The islands are battered by fierce winter storms. And there are all sorts of … modern conveniences … to contend with,” she adds with asperity. “Automobiles. Airplanes. Telephones. You may find them a very great nuisance, as I do.”

“Since I’ve no notion what any of those things are, I’ll reserve my judgment,” I promise her. “What are we to do there?”

She regards me, chewing on her lower lip. “You’ll laugh.” I gaze back at her with my gravest cardplayer’s face. “Well, the great age of smuggling and murder is long past,” she says wistfully. “Now the islanders are mostly devoted to flowers.”

“Flowers?” I laugh.

“See?” she reproves me, but her eyes are merry. “Yes, flowers, growing them, tending them, harvesting, packaging, hauling them to the mainland. That’s their industry. That’s how they all live.”

“So the ferocious Hook will finish his days gamboling among the posies,” I muse.

“A skilled carpenter is employable anywhere,” she nods at me. “You’ll be able to get work in Hugh Town on St. Mary’s, the big island.”

How easy she makes it sound. “When I left, I was a wanted man on three continents,” I sigh. She’s scooted up beside me on the edge of our bed, and begins unhitching the little buckles of my harness. “Suppose your world won’t have me back?”

“It’s a very different place now,” she replies, peeling the straps off my arm. “Everyone you wronged, or who ever wronged you, they’re all long gone.” She slides the apparatus gently off the end of my truncated arm, sits gazing for a moment at my hook in her hand. “Your crimes are mere trifles next to what the world has seen since.”

“The world war you spoke of.”

She nods. “One man, full of hate, he was the start of it all.” She sets my hook on the shelf beneath the window, straps dripping over the board. “He had to be stopped. The good war, they called it.”

“Wars of aggression will always meet with passionate defense,” I reason.

She glances at me. “If leaders were made to fight their own battles, wars would cease.”

“Bugger witchcraft, my dear, they would hang you for sedition,” say I. “My men do not guess where they are, or why, when they come here. But no sooner do they spy a fighting ship in the bay, hear the first tattoo of war drums, than something primal stirs inside them. They surrender completely to this place, this war, crave battle above all things.”

“If men gave birth, they would understand how precious every life is,” she says softly. “And how fleeting.”

She has slid back among the bedclothes, taken up a pillow which she cradles to herself absently, her expression suddenly bereft. I pretend to fiddle with my harness, coil it away.

“I did kill him,” comes her soft, desolate voice. “My son.”

I would speak, but her face silences me.

“Damaged, they said. Unresponsive. Unfinished.” She gazes at her pillow. “It happened so fast. They had to get everything ready, tubes, wires, machines. They let me hold him. He looked at me. He knew me, I’m sure of it.” Her eyes are dry, her expression unbearable. “He was so beautiful, my tiny, damaged boy. He never even cried. All those months I carried him under my heart.” She draws a quavering breath. “I must have known in that moment he was leaving me. How could I not see it?”

“You couldn’t know that.”

“As surely as if we still shared the same heartbeat.” Her voice is empty. “It happened so fast. I should have screamed for the nurse sooner, made more of a fuss. They might have saved him.”

“Or there might have been nothing at all they could do,” I tell her. “You might have only prolonged his misery. You can’t know, Stella; you can’t say for sure what might have been.”

Her stark gaze meets mine. “I let him go.”

“You were merciful,” I say carefully. “He died in the arms of someone who loved him. A good death. Better than most of us will ever know.”

She gazes down at her twisted pillow. “I couldn’t keep either of them,” she whispers. “I couldn’t love them enough.”

I reach for her, but she shrugs away, hugging the pillow closer to her ribs. So I blow out the light, curl up nearby. It’s a long, long time before she lets me hold her.

We search the skies, day and night, for any unusual activity, but see nothing out of the ordinary: sun, blue sky, the occasional wispy cloud, a full complement of Neverland stars, and a nearly quarter moon, cracking on for her next full phase. But neither do the boys trouble us. Stella is more restive than ever, but I’ve hit upon a plan to test my theory: if the Neverland has forgotten us, surely it will begin with my men. Perhaps they are already addressing another man as captain in my stead.

I am in the skiff, rounding the last bend in Kidd Creek, near the fertile place where we keep our garden, before I feel the first internal pang of dread.

“Hook!” caws the Pan triumphantly, vaulting up out of the foliage. “I knew it!”