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  To my own James.

  We’re on this journey together.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Neverland Map

  Epigraphs

  Kensington Gardens, 1950

  Prelude: Him or Me

  1. Bristol, 1688: Jamie

  2. Lost Men

  3. London, 1702: Young Blood

  4. Pugatorio

  5. The Infernal Boy

  6. Perish

  7. Make-Believe

  8. London, 1709: Caroline

  9. Suite: The Fairy Revels

  10. Saint-Dómingue, 1724: Proserpina

  11. Roses

  12. Hammer and Tongs

  13. The Neverland, 1724: Hook

  14. The Fallen

  15. Suite: Resurrection

  16. The Pirates Are Afraid

  17. Indians

  18. The Boys Council

  19. Suite: The Mermaid Lagoon

  20. Crocodile

  21. Le Reve

  22. Idyll

  23. The Funeral

  24. The Redeemer

  25. A Parley with Pan

  26. Suite: Farewell Hope

  27. Suite: Farewell Fear

  28. Suite: Bravery

  29. First Judgment

  30. Suite: Folie à Deux

  31. Suite: The Queen’s Price

  32. The Bloody Plank

  33. Pan or Me

  34. Mortal Magic

  Coda: Hugh Town, St. Mary’s, Scilly Isles, 1950

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Perhaps everything terrible is something that needs our love.

  — RAINER MARIA RILKE

  Children’s plays are not sports, and should be deemed their most serious actions.

  — MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

  Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.

  — CONFUCIUS

  Desperado, why don’t you come to your senses?

  — THE EAGLES

  Kensington Gardens

  1950

  Second star to the right of what? The Big Dipper? Big Ben? Well, it’s a fairy tale, old girl, not a bloody road map.

  Perhaps the children should be sitting up with me. I could roust them out of their beds, invent some game that requires us to all gather around the open nursery window. Their parents should never know, they scarcely pay any attention to the prattling of their children. That’s my job.

  But these little ones are too modern for fairy stories. It’s not that they remember the war, exactly; little Maggie wasn’t even born until after D-Day. But the rubble of London, the shortages of nice things, the strain and anxiety and impatience of the grown-ups trying to put their lives back together, well, it all argues against magic, somehow. There’s no place for fairies any more in this world.

  So I sit and wait alone, me and my dear and constant friend, Mr. Boodles. Waiting for what, well, I wish I knew. But an urgency stirs my dreams, however heavily I try to medicate them with the tonic in this glass, a sense of longing that comes from some place unimaginable, as deeply rooted as memory, as old as time. It haunts me beyond all reason, an ache in my heart I can’t explain or ignore. And it all began with the damn book.

  There it sits, the crumbling old thing, on the tea table next to the window. I run my fingertips over its nubby, embossed cover, the gilding almost entirely worn away, a boy in leaves and a pair of tarty little mermaids. I needn’t open the cover again to see what’s written there; it’s scrawled just as indelibly in my memory: a single word, Believe. And I do believe, far more than these sleeping children. Far more than the gray old grown-up world, with its rationing and austerity, and its never-ending loss and deprivation.

  A better world exists, some place where the grown-ups haven’t got to yet. I’ve seen it in my dreams. I know it in my heart.

  This book ends, as books must do, but there’s always more to the story.

  Prelude

  HIM OR ME

  Every child knows how the story ends. The wicked pirate captain is flung overboard, caught in the jaws of the monster crocodile that drags him down to a watery grave. Who could guess that below the water, the great beast would spew me out with a belch and a wink of its horned, livid eye? It was not yet my time to die, not then nor any other time. It’s my fate to be trapped here forever in a nightmare of childhood fancy with that infernal, eternal boy.

  No one knows what came next, the part you never read about in the stories. I clawed through water bloodied by the corpses of my crew driven overboard to make a meal for the sharks, flailed for the hull of my ship before the sharks caught up to me.

  I saw it all by moonrise as I hooked my way up the chains to the deck. One of my men lay asprawl on the hatch coaming, dead eyes staring at the moon, curled fingers frozen over his ruptured belly. Another had dragged himself a few paces toward the rail before he expired, leaving a smear of fresh blood on the deck that could never be stained red enough to disguise it. Half a dozen others lay about in shadowy heaps, limbs twisted, faces ghastly, silent as waxworks. Everything stank of blood and decay. One man was draped face down over the foredeck rail, arrows sprouting from his back. The redskins were teaching the boys archery, as if they needed any more advantage over us in battle. None of the dead were boys.

  Those who’d gone over the side screamed no more. The ship’s bell, rung when the battle commenced, tolled no more. Even the monstrous ticking had subsided. My ship was as silent as the tomb she had become. The boys had gone larking off again, but not in my ship; all of the fairies’ black arts could not raise my Jolie Rouge out of her moldering berth in the bay. Solemn drumbeats from the island told me the Indians were collecting their dead from our skirmish in the wood, but none were left to mourn my men but me.

  I started for the nearest body, to drag it to the ship’s boat, but as I passed the deckhouse, something groaned within. The deckhouse. That’s where he’d hidden to lure us into his trap.

  I shoved open the door, peered into the reeking gloom. Jukes I recognized by the sprawl of his tattoos in the ghostly moonlight. The Italian lay nearby, face frozen in an eternal scream. I crept in across sticky planks toward a soft grumble of pain, a sudden seizure of breath. My fingers touched still-living flesh, and Jukes groaned again. There was a new hieroglyph on his naked chest, thrust in with less art than the rest, and still leaking red. I knelt in the puddle, worked my hook arm around his back, and propped him up. Heavy as a corpse already, yet his head lolled back on my arm and his dull eyes opened to look at me.

  One. The boy had left me only one.

  “Well, Bill.” I could scarcely steady my voice.

  “Sorry, Cap’n,” he lisped through the blood in his mouth. “He come at me in the dark.”

  “Don’t talk,” I cautioned, yet I was desperate for the comfort of his voice. We’d sailed together since New Providence; his pictographic skin was a living gallery of our exploits from the Indies to the Gold Coast. He was the closest thing I’d ever had to a friend in the pirate trade. “Save your strength.”

  But it was already too late. We both knew it. The boy hadn’t even done it proper; life was escaping in an agonizing drip, not a clean burst.

  Jukes dragged another tortured breath out of his ruined lungs. “Thought you was done for,” he wheezed.

  “Come, now, you know me better than that.” I
clenched my teeth in assumed heartiness. “No mere boy is a match for me.”

  A furtive smile glimmered briefly amid the blue and black dots and calligraphic swirls on his face. I could see what even so slight a movement cost him in misery. There was only one way to help him now, could I but steel myself to do it.

  “The women are warm in Hell, eh, Cap’n?” he prompted.

  “Save me a place at the Devil’s mess,” I answered by rote, summoning every ounce of my resolve.

  Red bubbled between his teeth. “Aye, aye—”

  His eyes bulged for an instant, whites agleam in the shadows, then the lids drooped in relief. “Thank’ee, Cap’n,” wafted out on his last breath, as I extracted my knife from between his ribs.

  Gone, all of them gone now. Slaughtered one by one, like a game. It’s all a game to the boys.

  I stretched Jukes out beside the twisted Italian, sat back on my heels, forced my brain to think on practical matters. Two or three trips in the gig it would take to see them all properly consigned to deep water. The eerie, animal keening of the loreleis singing to the moon rose up across the water, cold and tormenting. I was the last human left alive in the Bay of Neverland.

  * * *

  The Neverland, they call it, the infant paradise, the puerile Eden where grown-ups dare not tread. They are wise to fear it. But all children visit in their dreams. He finds them by their longing, stray boys for his tribe and girls to tell him stories.

  They are not always English children, although he is partial to London. They have erected a statue to him there. Fancy, a public statue of Pan, the boy tyrant in his motley of leaves, like a king or a hero. While Hook is reviled, the evil pirate, the villain. There is no statue to me.

  I’ve heard all the stories. I know the world thinks me not only a simpering fop but a great coward, so affrighted by the crocodile I would empty my bowels at the first sinister tick of its clock. But it’s the ticking itself I can’t bear, the tolling of the minutes, the very seconds, that I am forced to spend in the Neverland for all eternity. Elsewhere, time is passing in the normal way, but not here. Not for me and the boy.

  “It’s Hook or me this time,” the boy jeered as the massacre began. But it’s never him. And it’s never me. Since then, he has defeated me innumerable times, but never quite to the death. He wills it so, and his will rules all. How often have I felt my skin pierced, imagined in my wounded delirium that Death has relented and come for me at last? Yet every time, my blood stops leaking, my flesh knits. Sooner or later, my eyes open again to yet another bleak new day, with nothing to show for my pains but another scar on the wreckage of my body.

  Is it any wonder I so often tried to kill him? Would not his death break the enchantment of this awful place and release us both? But I can never best him. He flies. He has youth and innocence on his side, and the heartlessness that comes with them. I have only heartlessness, and it is never, ever enough.

  * * *

  Outside the deckhouse, the night had gone dark. I crept out again, still drenched in Bill Jukes’ blood, and saw that the moon itself, so full and white an hour before, had turned red, as if she too were awash in blood. A red eclipse, as mariners say, but never before had I seen the shadow of the old world fall across the Neverland moon. Perhaps it was only a trick of my fevered imagination, or some monstrous reflection from the deck of the Rouge, yet it glared down on me like a bloodshot eye, catching me out in all my crimes.

  Once, I thought I could never have enough of blood. It was all that could satisfy me, for so long. But it wearies me now, the tyranny of bloodlust, the serpent that feeds on itself. The game that never changes. The game that never ends.

  “How long can you stay angry at the world?” she asked me once. Why didn’t I listen?

  Chapter One

  BRISTOL, 1688: JAMIE

  “James Benjamin Hookbridge! What is the meaning of this object?”

  My father was a mild man, most often buried happily in his accounting books or off to his warehouse. He did not countenance disobedience, but on this morning, I had no notion I had disobeyed, eager to claim credit for the marvel he held in his hand.

  “It’s a ship, Father,” I crowed, jumping up to greet him, glad to escape my tutor. My father’s appearance in the nursery was a rare event to a lad of seven. “I built it!”

  For weeks I’d scavenged scrap wood, chips, shavings from the floor of the woodshop down by the stables on our estate. It was a patchwork affair, dark mahogany from the Indies jumbled with native oak and white pine, no larger than a small half-melon, discounting the thin doweling mast and handkerchief sail. But old Turlow himself, the senior carpenter, had shown me how to lap the narrow strips of board for the hull and nail down the deck.

  “So I heard.” Father did not look pleased. Perhaps my work wasn’t fine enough.

  “Turlow said it was handsome done,” I said hopefully. “He says I’m clever with my hands.”

  My father gazed down at me, pale blue eyes stern behind his spectacles. “I shall have a word with Turlow. You are not to go to the carpenter’s yard any more.”

  “But … why?” I stammered, horror-struck. My happiest hours were spent among the joiners and planers in that busy place.

  Father bent down with a sigh and laid a hand on my shoulder, an unusual gesture of affection. “You are a gentleman, sir. Only common laborers work with their hands.”

  My mother always received me with warmth and tenderness when I came to her with my troubles. I recall the armies of tiny pearls worked into her bodice, a halo of fine white dust from her powdered curls, her fragrance of violets and tonic. She was a fragile creature to be cherished and honored, but she had no power to influence my father on my behalf. “You are his only surviving child,” she told me gently. “He only wants what’s best for you.”

  But I forgot my disappointments on those grand days when I was permitted to go with Father down to the Bristol docks to his warehouse. How I loved to go racketing around the waterfront, its cobbled streets worn smooth from the horse-drawn sledges that ferried heavy loads to and from the ships. But my father had ambitions for his only son, and shortly after the incident of the toy ship, I was sent off to school to be educated as a gentleman.

  * * *

  Master Walters was snoring like an army of kettledrums in the next room by the time we finished the Purcell prelude. It was the hour after midday when no one had any business in the chapel and we were least likely to be disturbed. Carver and his mob of bullies were off shrieking at their games. Master Walters, the organist, was sleeping off his dinner of mutton and port, but his servant knew to let us into the study where he kept a harpsicord for his private compositions.

  “Bravissimo!” I cried, as we made our final flourish. Four hands gave the music wings. By then I might have managed a tolerable accounting on my own, but it was always more fun with two of us.

  “Nay, sir, we have put our audience to sleep,” said Alleyn in mock reproof, with a nod toward the rumbling from the next room.

  “Then we have played well,” I pointed out, “for I am sure no one can hear us over the din.”

  Teddy Alleyn was eleven years old, two forms above me, and by his careful instruction alone had I progressed thus far in my illicit studies. He’d been playing since he was big enough to sit on a bench, and I treasured our stolen hours playing preludes and airs. He grinned now, and tucked a glossy curl behind his ear with one of his long white fingers. Alleyn’s delicate features and soft curls enraged the other boys; they thought him weak and girlish, harried him without mercy. But he was kind to me. He taught me to play. He was my friend.

  “You must learn to get on, Jamie,” my mother tried to soothe me after my first year away, when I complained of how the bigger boys taunted me. They derided my small size, my fancy clothing, a father in trade. My father’s advice was more succinct. “Be a man,” he commanded me.

  “You’re certain no one saw you come in here, Hookbridge?” Alleyn asked me.


  “No one pays any attention to me,” I reminded him.

  Alleyn’s mother paid extra fees to continue his musical instruction, which the organist earned chiefly by allowing his pupil access to his instrument whenever he pleased. It was our only refuge, and Alleyn guarded it absolutely, as he guarded the fact of our friendship, to spare me the stain of our association in the eyes of the mob. Alleyn had a way of turning inward when the older boys tripped him up in the commons or called him names. He neither cried, nor fought back, nor defied them with insults, and they could never forgive him for it. I hated to see him so abused, longed for the power to defend him.

  “When you’ve attained my great age, sirrah, you will understand what a mercy that is,” Alleyn said loftily. And then we both snickered, outcasts together, confederates in exclusion.

  “Come, what next?” he went on, paging through the sheets of music on the stand above the twin keyboads. “We’ve time, I think, for the minuet—”

  A babble of voices erupted out in the passage; the study door burst open to disgorge a gang of shouting boys, Carver in the lead, stout, ruddy, sandy-haired, eyes bright with belligerent glee.

  “There they are, the little lovebirds!” he cried, and several of the others made smacking noises with their lips.

  “I told you!” shrieked another, as a half dozen more tumbled in, above the feeble protests of the servant out in the hall.

  Two boys dragged Alleyn away from the bench, held him fast. Carver himself came for me, plucked me from the bench like a flea off a hound, pinned my arms behind me.

  “Don’t touch him!” shouted Alleyn, setting all the other boys atwitter.

  “I won’t have to, will I?” Carver smirked down at me, looming, feral and terrifying in the enormity of his power. “He kissed you, didn’t he?” His big hands were crushing my arms. “Say it, Hookbridge! The filthy invert kissed you. Say it!”

  I shook my head, but the other boys were all crowding around us, chanting, “Say it! Say it!” like a game. Alleyn stood frozen, dark eyes sad and urgent, watching me. His guards were heavy, pitiless boys, baying with the others, itching to strike.