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  Mrs. Ralston glided up to greet us, garbed in rich but sober midnight blue. “Lord Spendler, an honor,” she hailed my friend with a demure nod.

  Spendler gestured back with impressive grandeur, given that his arms were draped around Dartmouth on one side and Harrow on the other as they struggled to bear him up. The young lord was slender enough, but like to have consumed half his weight again in port wine during the course of the day.

  “Young Mr. Hookbridge, always a pleasure,” the proprietess smiled at me.

  “Kind words indeed, Madam, from such an expert in the field.” I swept off my gaudy hat, letting my dark hair spill free under the warm, flattering light, and made a bow that scarcely wobbled at all.

  My father was an importer who had made his fortune in the sugar trade out of Bristol. I came often up to London on his business, where I sought out the company of other preening young males like myself to enjoy all the pleasures the city had to offer. Since school, I had journeyed many times to the Indies as supercargo on my father’s ships. I learned to sail from his most daring captains and found a life to which I was far better suited than the dreary routine of account books and business affairs, haunting quarterdeck and boatyard alike, far from my father’s eyes. Back in town, I fancied myself irresistible in my wine-colored coat and gilded frogs, trim breeches, and bucket-cuff boots. In business, I often affected a wig of fulsome curls in the manner of the late king, merry Charles Stuart, who had restored profit and gaiety to the realm. But I was vain of my own dark curls, which had grown long and luxurious at sea and delighted the ladies.

  “Come on, man,” grunted Harrow. He and Dartie were already listing off toward the taproom, with Spendler in tow. The young lord was in disgraceful condition, as usual, yet I suppose we were no worse than any other young bloods of twenty or so with coin to spend and sap rising in our veins.

  “Will you play for us this evening?” Mrs. Ralston asked me.

  “With the most intense delight,” I said, and I turned to the others. “Raise a glass to the fair sex, gentlemen, and meet me in the parlor.”

  “Aye, aye, Hooky!” Spendler agreed, and risked a wave of his hand. “On, on, noblesh Englisss…” he exhorted the others, as the three of them turned again toward the taproom. He was my superior in blood, breeding, and fortune, yet he deferred to me. They all did. I was their leader.

  Others of our acquaintance were already hailing us from the taproom, calling out jests, greetings, carnal encouragement. We were the envy of every clerk and apprentice in London, and most of their masters. We were dazzling. We were immortal.

  * * *

  An excellent Flemish harpsichord occupied the back corner of Mrs. Ralston’s parlor. Painted in primrose yellow with an abundance of gilding and floral motifs, it featured an edifying scene of pagan nymphs and satyrs afrolic inside the raised lid. I suited my repertoire to the occasion, beginning with “My Lady Has a Pretty Thing,” which delighted what damsels were still downstairs and their prospective gentleman clients.

  My father thought music a frivolous pursuit for a man of business and permitted no instruments in his home. Since school, I’d had to take my education where I could find it, most often of late in houses of this nature, where my particular gifts were appreciated. After concluding a spirited account of “A Maid Must Have a Youngman,” my hands flying across the twin keyboards, and most of the house warbling along, I stood at the bench and made an exaggerated bow from the waist to the company, knowing full well how scandalized my father would be to see it. Perhaps I hoped the tales would carry back to him, that he might know me at last for who I was, not who he wanted me to be.

  After a deal of careful attention, I finally saw my men disposed among the most forgiving of Mrs. Ralston’s seraphim. Then it was time at last to address the business of the evening. Some of the younger girls were primping hopefully, but I was in no humor to be flattered and chattered at all night after a tumultuous day out and about in town. We’d had words that had nearly come to blows with Lord Mortimer and his men over a singer in the entr’acte at Old Drury. She was a drab and timorous little thing, to be sure, but the lady said “no,” and so we saw our duty to intervene. Although she might just as easily have said “yes” to much the same effect, for it was ever our purpose to oppose Mortimer and his dogs in all things. There would be hell to pay when my father heard about the altercation, of course, a homecoming I intended to delay as long as possible, and so I made my choice.

  Flora did not bestir herself with any particular haste on my account, rising calmly, adjusting the drape of her dressing gown. A veteran of the profession, perhaps ten years older than myself, she knew better than to come at me like a spaniel, all nervous quivering and twitchy tail, and I admired her the more for it. We knew each other’s ways, by now.

  * * *

  “Ah, Flora, I’ve had a hellish night,” I sighed voluptuously, sinking back into her plump armchair.

  “Not surprising, for such a devil,” she sauced me back from her perch on the tufted ottoman, as she pulled off my boot. She wore her dark hair pinned up in loose curls on one side, the rest tumbling down her back; it glistened in the soft candlelight of her small, private chamber that smelt of dried rose petals and crushed lavender and the sweat of commerce.

  “Hell is not just for devils, you know,” I sallied, as she slid off my other boot. “The poet Dante tells us there are circles for even the most ordinary sinners,” I went on, showing off the education for which my father had paid so handsomely. In other matters, Flora was the tutor, and myself an apt and eager pupil.

  “Aye, and who might those be?” Flora prompted, as she rose. She reached for my hands to pull me up, and I stood before her in my shirtsleeves.

  “Oh, traitors and thieves and suchlike are the worst,” I said. “Panderers,” I added, and peeled off her dressing gown to puddle on the floor at her feet. She obligingly struck a languid pose, displaying her nakedness to alluring effect. “Seducers.”

  “Ah.” She slipped her hands beneath my shirt and stroked me beneath my breeches for a long moment before loosening my laces. I closed my eyes and drew a freighted breath, but I’d not cry quarter so soon.

  “The violent,” I whispered. Flora grasped the hem of my shirt in both hands and ripped it off over my head with a great show of savagery, then raked her fingertips down my chest, not deep enough to cut; only to make the blood sing beneath my skin. Laughing, I wrestled her onto the bed.

  “The gluttonous,” I went on, nipping playfully at her naked shoulder. Rolling her over in my arms, I began to feast with more attention on the delicate lobe of her ear, the tender flesh beneath her jaw, the succulent cleft of her throat, running my fingertips all over the delectable landscape of her body until she was murmuring and arching in response. “And last of all, the lusty,” I breathed into her ear.

  Flora nudged me aside. “If lust is such a sin, why did God make us to feel pleasure?” she demanded reasonably, leaning up on one arm.

  “Well, it’s only a little sin,” I shrugged. “Far closer to God than all the rest. The next circle up is Limbo, for pagans and unbaptized innocents. Then comes Purgatorio, where those who might yet be redeemed serve out their time before their release into Glory.”

  “And what’s the punishment for such a little sin?”

  I raised a sardonic eyebrow at her. “An eternal gale of passion where the lustful copulate ceaselessly without gratification.”

  Flora’s expression dimpled into a grin. “There’s proof your poet is a man,” she exclaimed, pushing me over on my back. “Gentlemen never appreciate how much pleasure might be had on the way to being gratified.”

  She came to lick the last of the wine off my lips while her reckless hand slid once more beneath my loosened breeches, probing and teasing. Steady on, my bully, I cautioned myself, as my blood began to pound; the night is young and we must make the most of our time.

  “A gentleman knows the difference,” I said huskily, knotting my fingers gently
in her hair, while the fingers of my other hand performed a slow, urgent glissando over all the rounded swells of her flesh and down into her secret crevices. “But man in general is a race of warriors,” I murmured, “and in love and war, we are schooled to demand satisfaction.”

  She sprawled back among the pillows, laughing, and braced up her heels. “Oh, hush now, Jamie, and put that clever tongue of yours where it will do some good!”

  My father wished me to marry, but time and my father’s fortune were mine to waste in those days. It was all a game to me, then. A wife required patience, indulgence, and some pretense to affection, skills I had no need to cultivate so long as there were willing females like Flora to be bought at my pleasure.

  Indeed, we had nothing but time, my men and I. Life was ours for the plucking. Were we not immortal?

  Chapter Four

  PURGATORIO

  I never even hear the thump, the crash, the final bloody au revoir of yet another departing life. Once again, Death has stolen aboard and left without me.

  The first I know of it is my steward, Brassy, lantern aloft like Diogenes, breathing the news at me from beside my bed in the dead of night. Dodge, who spent the night dosing himself with extra tots of rum for his injuries in the brawl, missed his footing in the ratlines during the middle watch above and dashed out his brains on the deck. Gone are the days we fought to the death for gold and glory; now my men die for football and stupidity.

  “Rouse Filcher to get him cleaned up,” I mutter. “Tell the men we’ll perform the ceremony at first light.”

  It would be fearful bad form just to chuck a fellow over the side, or attempt to inter him in the shifting sands of Pirates Beach. There’s not sand enough on the whole island to bury all the crews I’ve lost.

  I take the fresh bottle my steward has brought me to sweeten his grim news. I’ve had the dream again: Don’t be afraid. Take my hand. An unknown companion I could almost touch. Pale moonlight streams in my stern window. Seize your chance, that’s what it said, the voice I must have dreamed. It’s no surprise my very dreams turn against me here. It’s folly to believe in phantom chances whispered on the wind in this kingdom of delusion.

  * * *

  The breeze is fresh but not squally as I go above in the purpling dawn in my sober black coat with the silver figures, and my plumed black hat. My best sword depends from my sash, my French cutlass, lightweight, sturdy, flint-edged, and sharpened to a rapier point for both thrusting and cutting. The cultivation of coffee is unheard of here, so I always train my stewards to brew a foul decoction from local bark wood, bitter and bracing enough for whatever the day might bring. I clutch a steaming tankard of the stuff now and pace my quarterdeck.

  My ship lies at anchor in the bay like a debauched whore, as she has for centuries, one broadside to the beach, the other to the sea that refuses to carry us out of the Neverland. Her head lolls to the north where the blue terraced hills beyond Pirates Beach rise into the densely forested bluffs of the wood where the beasts and the boys keep their lairs. I gaze astern to the southern end of Pirates Beach, where sprouts the fertile mouth of Kidd Creek, aburst with green ferns and palmettos. The creek snakes inland to join up with the Mysterious River which flows southward into the noxious heart of the jungle around the loreleis’ lagoon, the most treacherous place in the Neverland. Even I have never gone so far as that. Out of the jungle at the island’s southernmost tip rises the green cone of Mount Merciless, spitting a little funnel of white steam into the sky above its coronet of pink clouds. The volcano is permitted to spit, just as the beasts are permitted their razor claws and my men and the redskins our weapons. The boy delights in real danger, or his mastery over all would not be as sweet.

  At the larboard rail, the men haul out the boat and lift in the slack weight of the corpse, tightly bound in hammock netting. All are somber, even Nutter, who’d have happily stove in Dodge’s brains himself yesterday. I order Needles, my sailmaker, to throw a length of canvas over the body, then I give the order to lower away.

  There comes Jesse across the foredeck, his lopsided gait far less noticeable with a pistol in his hand. Sartorial splendor is no longer the fashion in their world, as it was in mine, judging by the pedestrian dress of my men. But even by their pitiable standards, the plainness of Jesse’s rig—dun-colored trousers, shirt, and cloth jacket, clean-shaven, brown hair cropped short—along with his quiet demeanor, bespeak a lifetime of fading into the crowd, escaping notice. That has changed since he came aboard the Rouge.

  Carpenters called Chippy or Sticks I’ve had aplenty, stewards called Brassy for the buttons in their care, canvas-stitchers named Needles, galleymen called Cookie, each man named according to his use or temperament. Only I recognize them as remnants of the babyish names they once wore with such pride in Pan’s tribe. A fellow in the piratical trade needed an alias back in my day, but the sobriquets adopted among my crew aren’t meant to disguise a man’s identity, but to give him one.

  But this fellow has earned his name. How much more formidable he looks, strapping on his brace of pistols in the molten dawn, than the furtive clubfoot he was when he first arrived, before I discovered his singular talent. Gimpy, they called him then, until his first weapons drill; I’d loaded a pistol for him, and he put a ball in the center pip of a Three of Spades nailed to a canvas target. Jesse James, they call him now, in honor of a gunman famed in their world, as I understand it. Since then, Jesse has devoted himself to learning the secrets of my antique weapons. None of my men has had any notion of handling a flintlock for generations; the boys consider themselves immune to pistol shot. Bravado may make them careless, one day.

  And it hits me like a broadside: a weapon the boys no longer fear. Can this be the chance foretold to me? A chance to end the boy’s tyranny forever. A chance to win. What else can it mean? Why else am I here yet again with another crew?

  My sojourn has not been entirely unbroken here. There have been long passages now lost to my memory, stretches between those times when blessed solitude is welcome and the inevitable crushing despair of loneliness. But always, I find myself back on board my ship, providing refuge for another wandering soul, or two, or more, defending them from the boys, back in the teeth of war yet again. I’ve brooded over a thousand Neverland dawns in this manner, praying for inspiration—the weapon not yet deployed, the advantage not taken, the weakness not yet discovered that might bring me victory over the boy at last and end my bitter tenure here forever. And, there it lopes across the foredeck, within my grasp. Jesse.

  I down the last caustic drop of Brassy’s potion, struggling to nurture this tiny seed of an idea into a bloom of possibility, as my steward himself bounds up the ladder. A quadroon, perhaps, with his café au lait complexion and a thumbprint-sized birthmark like a dull bruise on his cheek, the fellow has no conversation, but he’s quick about his work and knows to tread with better care than most belowdecks. He comes for my empty tankard, fresh from his excavation of the dead man’s effects. Their memories of what they were begin to fade like coral bleaching in the sun as soon as they arrive here, but it’s unusual not to find some forgotten souvenir from their world squirreled away somewhere.

  “Sorry, Captain,” Brassy murmurs, and proffers a species of that object he knows I loathe above all others: a watch. I have banned all ticking timepieces from the Rouge for the same reason I’ve forbidden the tolling of the hours on the ship’s bell; the eternity I spend here is no fortune to be measured. I take the thing gingerly, inspect the small case of some base metal without fob or chain, strung on a leather band. But the name Hopkins is engraved upon the back of the case, which will do for now, and I hand it back to Brassy with instructions to tuck it into Dodge’s shroud.

  “And what of that fleet little blade of his?” I ask.

  This Brassy produces as well, with no further explanation, the blade folded innocently into its black horn handle with metal findings. I do not ask if it came from the dead man’s things or his corpse; all my
men are scavengers. I examine the mechanism, revolve it in my hand with a care for my fingers, and press the button. The thin stiletto flicks out with a rasp of steel. I shove the blade back in with the curve of my hook, and drop it absently into my own coat pocket, my mind on other things.

  * * *

  We are six in the boat, not counting the dead man: Burley, my bo’sun, at the helm beside me in the stern, Nutter and young Flax, with his upswept bristle brush of fair hair, at the oars facing us. Jesse and lean, weathered Swab, my jack of all work, sit at the oars behind them. They are dainty with their feet so as not to tread upon the lifeless thing stowed in the bottom, and I order a northwesterly heading according to the sun.

  “Stay clear of the fog bank,” I remind them.

  There’s witchcraft in it, the low fog that encircles the bay and prevents escape. Only Pan knows the way through, and none of the Lost Boys he’s guided out of the Neverland ever remembers the way out when they come back to me as men. Of course, none of the Wendys ever come back.

  When we are far enough out in the bay, we put a drag over the side and muster the corpse out of the bottom.

  “Receive this, our good shipmate, er, Hopkins,” I intone. “May he ever find a fair berth, strong drink, welcome companions, and eternal peace in the kingdom beyond.”

  To whom do I address these remarks? The sea, perhaps? My men have little interest in spiritual matters, but I always mention drink and companions in my makeshift service, things they will understand. Eternal peace I cite for myself.

  My crews never expect to die here. They are young men still; Burley, who cannot be much above five and thirty, is senior among them at the moment, Flax scarcely twenty. Could I but lop off a score of years from my own vast eternity for each man, perhaps we could grow into a kind of companionship over time, or at least I might content myself with their prolonged company. But their lives here are brief. I teach them to trim the ship and defend her against the boy and his allies, school them in hunting, fishing, swordfighting, curing meat, working the garden we keep at the mouth of Kidd Creek. Such men as prove apt, I drill in artisan skills—gunnery, carpentry, sailmaking—all in hopes of extending their brief lives a fraction longer. But I can’t defend them forever, nor send them home again. All I can do is try to see that each man dies well, without suffering, without fear. For Dodge’s sake, I pray he hit the deck before his muddled wits could comprehend his fate. Another pointless loss in the game that never ends.