physical activity had been limited to bracing constitutionals around the park. Fast walks, in other words. Barring a few morning stretches, her arm strength was delimited by chores.
She was terrified.
But she closed her eyes, wrapped her feet around the rope, and…slid.
What it must have looked like from a distance! A tiny, pale girl slipping down a thin rope from a galleon that floated silently on the midnight sea. Her light blue dress ballooned around her like a paper lantern lit from underneath, yet it was not without a certain amount of grace that she made her way to the icy waters below.
Zane had fished the dinghy as close to the ship as possible, so only half of Wendy’s skirts got wet as she awkwardly transferred to the tiny boat. The equally tiny paddle was hooked in just under the hull as neat as a child’s play set.
She waved once to the figure on the ship high above her; whether he waved back or was even still there at all was impossible to tell against the blackness of the sky.
Wendy gritted her teeth, settled herself on her knees, and began to row.
This was the point where, if she were telling the story to Michael and John, she would say something like this:
“And so the hero struggled, arms growing weak, a glittering sheen of cold perspiration covering her brow. She felt faint. In the east, rosy-fingered dawn was just brushing the sky, but all else was black: the black vault of heavens above her, the black sea around her, the black distant shore, the thousand slimy things that lived in the murky waters below and occasionally brushed the boat with their black fins.
“Countless hours passed.
“It was all she could do to keep her eyes fixed on the shore and her strength at the paddle. The terror of being captured and the need to escape drove her through the harrowing gauntlet of exhaustion and fear. Wearily—but triumphantly—she passed through to the other side. Though the task seemed endless, nevertheless she persisted.”
But the real Wendy was growing weak and utterly fatigued. The whole thing seemed less heroic and more like a scene from some farce: she was paddling a prop boat, comedically dipping her oar on one side and then the other, frantic and ceaseless, making no headway along the silken scrim.
Above where the sun would eventually rise, a few decorative clouds swept tentatively past: sleek, long, thin, and dark purple, unlike London clouds. The air itself was somehow lightening, glowing a sort of pale green.
Was time finally passing? Was she actually making headway?
At first Wendy thought she was hallucinating, delirious with exhaustion. But the shoreline did seem a little closer. When she let herself turn around once or twice in fear, straining her neck, the pirate ship, too, seemed a little farther away.
After a time, Wendy looked down and saw that the sea was only a couple of feet deep and as clear as drinking water. Despite a thousand different ingrained rules telling her no (don’t get your feet wet, you will catch cold; don’t ruin your skirts in the salt water; don’t get your clothes wet also because they will become see-through), our hero was fed up with the boat. She slipped her boots off and tied their laces around her neck. She carefully undid her stockings and did the same with these. Then, holding up her skirts, she stepped out into the water.
It wasn’t cold at all.
She felt like an idiot standing there in such a lovely current, skirts raised like some sort of fainting milksop from a terrible operetta. So she let them drop and strode to shore, pushing against the water. Little fish she couldn’t quite see scooted out of her path.
The sun pushed its way through the purple clouds and its light grew on the beach strangely and organically, starting out weak and white and then ripening strong and yellow. Wendy cast a final glance back. The ship and she—the only two tall things in an endless flat plain of water and shore—seemed to regard each other in wonder. Then she turned from it and stepped onto land. The dry rattle of coconut palms swaying in the distance filled the air when the sound of the ocean began to recede.
Wendy had arrived in Never Land.
The beach sand was crunchy and perfectly golden, like—well, like in a winter Londoner’s wildest imagination. Wendy walked inland watching her feet, her toes curling and spreading into the sensual granules. Halfway to where