Straight On Till Morning (Disney Twisted Tales) - Liz Braswell Page 0,17
and flourished and removed his hat and pulled out a chair for her. The table was a tiny fold-out thing spread with a fancy cloth, silver utensils, and a clever golden candelabrum that was held upright on chains so it didn’t tip with the waves. It was all very lovely, and for the first moment Wendy was overcome with the precise perfection of the scene. There was even a spinet piano in the corner of the room.
“I do play, if you’re wondering,” Hook said, following her eyes. “A bit harder since the…well…hook, but I make do.”
They settled down to empty plates.
“Mr. Smee,” Hook called politely.
No one came.
“Mr. Smee,” he said again with a growl—while still smiling at Wendy.
Silence.
“MR. SMEE!” the captain finally cried, slamming his hook down on the table. “Blast that man. He’ll be at the grog again, no doubt.”
He leapt up and crashed through the door, muttering under his breath.
“Confounded…lazy…overpaid…”
Wendy sat stiffly and continued to look around at everything she had already looked at.
Eventually Hook came back, awkwardly carrying a plate of carved beef, a bowl of neeps and tatties, and a beautiful if stale-looking baguette, all cradled in his hand and hook.
Wendy leapt up to help, but he tsked her back down and actually quite neatly and deftly laid out the feast.
“Good help is so hard to get,” he said apologetically. “I should have had him walk the plank years ago, but we go way back.…He’s even saved my life a few times. It’s like keeping an old dry cow around because you can’t bear the look in her eyes.”
“Oh,” Wendy said uncertainly.
They concentrated on serving themselves in silence. Wendy wondered if this was what having a distant uncle was like—an odd grown-up who didn’t know how to interact properly with young people and who often said inappropriate things.
“So I’m curious, Miss Darling,” Hook finally began, with a casual tone so false Wendy’s ears practically curled at his words. “Whatever made you come to the rather rash decision to trade Peter Pan’s shadow to his greatest enemy in exchange for passage to Never Land?”
Wendy was about to interrupt and point out that Hook wasn’t Peter Pan’s greatest enemy. Depending on how you looked at it, Peter Pan’s greatest enemy could have been growing up, his own sense of self-importance, or his more immediately dangerous foes: the warlike, winged L’cki, the Fangriders of Upper Hillsdale, or the Cyclops of the Cerulean Sea. Hook was a recurring enemy. Not his greatest enemy.
Then she thought better of mentioning it.
“Well, you know, he never came back for it. He just left it there,” she said airily. Trying to ignore the agency she had in the decision, that what she had done wasn’t right. That these words were false. “What was I supposed to do, keep it around for the rest of my life among my trinkets and bric-a-brac? Hanging after me? You seemed to want it more than he, and I wanted a little holiday. Everyone is happy. Shall I pour you some water, Captain?”
“Thank you, my dear, but I’ll stick to this lovely Barolo. A very interesting…argument—justification, maybe? Now don’t look at me like that; it’s just us, Miss Darling. But surely you of all people know that Never Land is a bit trickier than that. There is no holidaying there, like Blackpool or the South of France. You have made quite the commitment. I can’t help but wonder what drove such a pretty, innocent little thing like you to such desperation—abandoning her life and family to leap into the unknown, and trading in her hero’s shadow in the process.”
Wendy had mixed feelings at these words. On the one hand, they made her sound a little epic.
On the other hand, was her life really that dire? Her family loved her. Nana loved her. Ireland was terrible, but it was for only a short period of time, right? And safe…
She looked up at the pirate, suspicious. In her stories Captain Hook was always planning, always conniving. He had an angle on everything, even if that angle was stupid and resulted in ridiculous defeats. So what was he driving at now?
“Yes, it shall make a fascinating chapter in my memoirs, won’t it?” she said as haughtily as she could, pouring herself another glass of tar-scented water.
“Won’t your family miss you—the Mister and Missus Darling?”
“I don’t really know how time operates between Never Land and the real world. Perhaps I’ll just have been gone a day,” she answered carelessly. “Perhaps it will be