Chapter 4
CHAPTER
AS I WALKED home from the hospital, I thought of the children at Marigold House. Willie and Agnes, Harold, and Tom. They and Edward, all of them acting so strangely.
I ran through that day. The knife. The blood. We had broken the cycle, or so I thought.
Big Ben boomed. The sound rolling through all of London.
I moved fast, needing to get home and needing to hold my journal in my hands.
The streets seemed to vibrate with motion, men in overcoats and women clutching handbags against the wind. Above, the sky was brushed like a bruised plum, deep and violet.
Then something tugged at the back of my hair. I spun around.
Faces turned toward me. Glazed with exhaustion.
No one spoke. No one paused.
I lowered my hand. A few loose strands clung to my glove, static or wind, or …
No, just the cold and the wind.
Still, I stood there a long moment, watching the faces walk past, making sure no shadow detached from its source.
Outside Blake’s Grocer, a group of children counted coins on their palms, their faces lit by hope. Mr. Blake leaned against the doorway. Then he saw me. His face faltered.
I looked away.
Once, that had been my brothers and me outside his shop, arguing over toffees, our chatter rising like startled birds. Mr. Blake would lean over the counter, feigning outrage as he let us underpay, winking as though goodness were a small secret we all agreed to keep.
At one time, everyone on this street looked at us with joy and kindness.
Always so happy to see us. But soon after returning, the looks in their eyes changed.
Smiles were forced when we crossed paths.
Or, more often, they avoided us altogether.
One day we were loved and cherished by everyone. The next, shunned.
We were looked at like we were wicked things. Things that spread spectacle and disease. No one outside of our parents or our maid Liza wanted anything to do with us. I learned too young that victims, in the eyes of the fearful, become indistinguishable from the monsters themselves.
London cheered for us when we returned. The lost Darlings.
In time, the stories we told began to crack under questions.
Where had we gone?
What had we seen?
How had we survived when so many children went missing and never returned? Or worse.
I told them my truth. About the sky that split open. A sea that sang. Wings that were not quite wings. But no one wanted to hear that. They only wanted comfort.
When my words failed to give them any meaning, their pens stopped moving. Notebooks snapped shut. Smiles stiffened. Applause collapsed into silence.
Not long after, J. M. Barrie penned his tale Peter and Wendy, a work of fiction that borrowed from my life, weaving our experiences into a narrative stripped of truth.
“Peter was not quite like other boys,” Barrie hinted in his text.
Of course he wasn’t. Because he wasn’t a real boy.
Barrie took all of my words, and when he wasn’t twisting them, he was laying my life out bare.
How could I ever trust anyone again after that? My parents. The constables who pressed me with questions. The reporters who recorded every word I said. And then Mr. Barrie, who took my story and made it his. A man who’d turn my own terror into his profit.
“It’s a work of fiction” was all he’d say. And in time, everyone forgot about my account of pain and turned to his for joy.
My lungs tightened. I reached for my satchel, the worn leather steady beneath my fingers.
“Miss Wendy! Miss Wendy!”
I turned.
A boy came charging down the street, cap askew, boots striking the cobblestones.
“Willie?”
His grin broke through the dusk. And there, in his hand, my journal.
Relief and dread hit me at once. If I had lost it. If those pages had fallen into anyone else’s hands …
“You dropped this, Miss Wendy!” He held the journal out. Proud as if he’d recovered buried treasure.
“You found it,” I managed. “You found my journal.”
I took it from him, hands trembling. The leather was warm from his grasp. Soap and sweat and street dust clung to it. I pressed it to my chest.
“It was under the bed in the flat upstairs! Agnes and Harold and me were playing hide-and-seek, and I was the best hider. I was! I felt it there by my elbow.”
I remember now, my satchel falling this morning and the contents spilling out.
Guilt crept through me.
Why couldn’t you just have left it back there in that faraway place? Why did you have to bring it with you? Your past clinging to you at all times? Maybe you should have forgotten. Forgotten it all. Forgotten all of them.
But I knew the answer.
Because it was mine.
Willie grinned. “Agnes said leave it be, but I knew it was yours. You always carry it. I said, ‘Wait till Miss Wendy sees I found it, she’ll be ever so pleased!’ ”
It’s all here. Still real. The words. The truth. My memories. Not imagined. Not invited.
I had guarded this journal for years, never letting it leave my side. It was more than paper. It was the only thing that remembered what the world refused to believe. The cover rasped beneath my hands. I turned the pages. And then there—the pressed leaf.
Still green. Faintly luminous. Its veins caught in the lamplight and seemed to glow.
It should have browned long ago. Curled in on itself, shriveled into dust. But it hadn’t.
The leaf from my childhood looked just like the day I had placed it between these pages.
The faint shimmer along its surface pulsed. Breathe. I placed it back in my journal.
“Where’s that from?” Willie asked, leaning closer.
“A place very far away.”
“Barbados?”
“No.”
His brow rose. “China?”
“Farther.”
He tilted his chin up. “One day I’m going to see the world.”
“I’m certain you will. And you’ll write to all of us at Marigold House about your adventures.”
“Think so?”
“Indeed.”
Before I sent him off to the house I had to ask. “Willie,” I said gently. “Did you read any of it?”
His eyes traced the cobblestones. “I didn’t mean to, Miss Wendy. Honest. It fell open.”
“Of course,” I murmured. “That’s how you found it.”
Willie nodded.
Behind me, a broom rasped against stone. Mrs. Crane, sweeping what didn’t need sweeping, her eyes pinned sharp on me and Willie.
I stepped closer to Willie, my coat folding around us like a drawn curtain. “Tell me exactly what you saw.”
He hesitated, breath fogging the air between us. “There were some words underlined,” he said. “Just a few.”
Oh no.
Above us crows shrieked in the sky.
“Willie, don’t …”
But he was already saying it, just as I moved toward him. My fingers catching the shoulders of his coat, but those words were already leaving his mouth.
The crows went silent. Mrs. Crane’s broom stopped mid-sweep. The street, the entirety of the city, all went still.
And the only sound I heard were those words that hadn’t been spoken in years. Words carved into a black rock on an island that should not exist.
Peter, Peter, shadow eater.
Everything inside me went still.
The city continued its rhythm, the tram’s rattle, the clock tower tolling the hour. Mrs. Crane resumed her sweeping, but none of it reached me, just those words. That name.
“Did I say something wrong?” Willie’s eyes were wide and confused.
I didn’t know what to do so I pulled him into my arms and held him tight.
“Are you all right, Miss Wendy?”
“Yes, Willie.” My voice sounded so thin. “I just … you’re just such a sweet child for coming all this way.” I held him out at arm’s length, studying his face.
“What does that mean?” he asked. “The rhyme?”
“Nothing,” I forced a smile. “Just a silly thing children used to say when I was little. It doesn’t mean anything.”
But they weren’t just words. They were an incantation. A summoning. And even if it was dead … I didn’t want to test fate.
Names had power and I had been warned of that long ago, and Willie had just rung a bell.
“Just don’t ever repeat the name carved on the Black Rock,” Roger had told me once. We were sitting on the beach, our feet buried in the black sand, watching the tide roll in. “That rhyme is tied to his power.”
“But that’s not his name? Peter, Peter, shadow …”
He pressed a finger to my lips. “I said, don’t say it.” He waited until I nodded before lowering his hand. “And no, that’s not his true name. His name is Peter Pan.”
“Pan?” I frowned. “Like from myth? The god?”
Out of the corner of my eye, a ship crested the horizon. Roger stood, waving his arms back and forth, a waterlogged hat clutched in his hands.
“He didn’t tell you?” He glanced back at me, surprised.
I shook my head.
“The god of wild nature. Of panic.” He turned back to signal the ship. “Of hunger and appetite. Timelessness. He’s not actually a god. Guess his maker thought that was a suitable name to give him when he came here. Pan.”
Later, he brought me aboard his father’s ship, one day to be his ship.
The deck groaned beneath my feet, the planks still warm from the day’s sun. The smell of tar and rope. The metal tang of gunpowder. The crew stared as though they’d glimpsed an apparition. Eyes wide. Hands drifting toward swords and daggers, until they noticed my hand in Roger’s.
As we passed each man, they took five deliberate steps backward.
“That’s the captain’s boy with … Peter’s friend,” one muttered. Awe and suspicion twisted into a single breath.
They gave me my own room. Grand. Gleaming.
Paneled in a dark, polished wood that smelled of coconut palms and beach roses.
Crystal chandeliers swayed gently with the tide.
A closet full of gowns in jewel colors. Chests glinting with gems and gold, spoils from adventures I would never ask them to recount.
“Find whatever suits you best,” Roger said, lingering in the doorway.
His gaze softened when it found me. Rugged. Sea-worn. Yet unexpectedly kind. He looked at me the way sailors look at land after weeks out on water.
“I have to go back.”
“What do you mean? You’re soaking wet. You nearly drowned. He left you for dead.”
“My brothers,” I whispered. “I can’t leave them.”