She isn’t what he expected, the woman Wendy Darling has become. Though what he expected precisely, he cannot say. Someone timid, perhaps, more compliant. He sees her at Pan’s heels, only a child, eyes wide in wonder and adoration. He keeps trying to reconcile the woman sitting across from him in the swaying train car with the girl he knew, however briefly.
They were both different back then, and he wonders how she sees him. In the time that’s passed, Wendy Darling has grown harder, while he has only diminished, a shadow of his former self. Kinder, Samuel might say. The thought rings bitter in James’s mind. Weaker, he cannot help thinking.
One thing James can guess about Wendy Darling is that she does not trust him fully. For that, she has his admiration. She’s grown wiser since her time as Pan’s shadow. Perhaps it would be to his benefit to refrain from trusting her too easily as well.
After all, she bested Pan where he never could. She made death possible in Neverland. And in doing so, she may have severed the last link to that place allowing Samuel to hold on. Perhaps he should loathe Wendy Darling.
He glances at her, his enemy’s friend. Even as the thought occurs to him, he knows laying the blame at her feet is too easy. Samuel’s fate is his fault alone. He brought Samuel to London. He asked for Samuel’s trust when he plied the black blade, and again and again after that while he dulled himself with drink and smoke, while he continued to thieve and murder. He made promises, and in the end, he broke every single one.
It strikes James that the woman in the train car with him now is fundamentally different from the woman in his flat earlier. There, she was open, raw, and he felt for a time that he had the upper hand. Now, she is all brusque business, her face creased in lines of concern for her daughter who sleeps on the seat beside her, head resting against the window, breath misting the glass.
An hour and a half to Newark-on-Trent. And then Wendy Darling will welcome him into her home. She had brothers, didn’t she? Also trailing on Pan’s heels, though never as loyally as her. Will they be there too? He cannot help but picture them as children still, despite the grown woman before his eyes.
Wendy’s sleeping daughter he cannot read at all. There’s a similarity between the two, a rawness to the girl as well, another open wound, but under it, an anger simmering deep at her core. And no wonder. James saw the shadow on the bed stripped of its sheets—the bed that belonged to the murdered girl. Too perfect to be a stain, and Wendy’s daughter had said it emerged over time, faint at first, but fading-in darker. An emergent haunting, much like the stain on the alley wall outside the pub where he’d found the dead man.
Twice now, the hunting beast has snapped its jaws and missed.
Wendy told him how Pan took her daughter to Neverland as well. James sees the faint glow hanging about the girl, the same he sees around Wendy herself, but even more sharply defined. Even if the beast’s senses are not as attuned to him as they once were, it must be following the residue of Neverland—the one that hangs about all three of them. The beast snapped once, and caught this girl’s friend instead of her; it snapped again and caught the man in the alley instead of James. Will they all be as lucky a third time? A question best kept to himself for now, James thinks.
He rubs absently at his wrist, the flesh and bone below the carved wood suddenly aching with cold.
Across from him, Wendy removes an embroidery hoop from her bag. He watches as she makes stitches only to pick them out again, seeming oblivious to his observation. It looks like a ritual meant to calm, the way Samuel on occasion would absently carve figures from wood. As if his hands needed always to be occupied if they weren’t actively engaged in healing.
James turns to the window, watching the landscape slide by. The rolling motion of the train reminds him of the best times at sea, nothing but open water and waves, as though they could sail forever, and never find an end. If it had only been that, perhaps he would have stayed, but Neverland was meant as a paradise for one boy, holding everyone else in it a prisoner to his whims.
A newspaper sits folded, untouched beside Wendy as she continues restlessly making and unmaking her stitches.
“May I?” He gestures, and she startles slightly before nodding, then turning her attention back to her work.
He unfolds the pages, smoothing them with his wooden hand. It’s a moment before the text comes into focus. Has the type the setters use grown smaller, or is it that his eyes have grown older? He grimaces, considering abandoning the endeavor of reading and trying to sleep like the girl who currently appears dead to the world. Just as he’s about to fold the paper, a small square near the bottom catches his attention, mention of an unknown man found dead in an alleyway.
Wendy raises her head and James lowers the paper, meeting her gaze.
“Something troubling?” Her voice is low, so as not to wake her sleeping daughter.
He turns the paper so she can see, tapping the story in question.
“The other death you mentioned?” It isn’t quite a question.
“Mmm.” A noise of agreement.
How much should he reveal? He wants very much to reach for his pipe, to breathe in sweet smoke and let it relax his troubled mind. How long before his hand starts to shake, before he starts to sweat and need breaks him down? He doubts either Wendy or the train’s conductor would approve, and he leaves it where it is, tucked into the inner pocket of his coat. For now.
“It seems,” he says, thinking of the rough brick supporting him, the way his head swam as he nearly lost himself, “that the beast missed its mark twice. Perhaps it is not the hunter it once was.”
“Beast?” A shadow flickers through Wendy Darling’s eyes, and James curses himself silently.
He hadn’t meant to say so much. He puts a smile on his lips that he hopes is enough to assuage her doubts.
“What else do you call one who has committed a double murder?”
Wendy glances at Jane, a frown shaping her lips before they press into a thin line.
“Nothing merely human did that.” Her voice is sharp, her gaze, when she flicks it to him briefly before returning it to her daughter, accusing.
James weighs his words, grateful for Wendy’s distraction. She lifts her hand, as though she would brush the hair away from Jane’s face, then lets it fall to her lap. Trouble creases the space between her brows. A mother’s ache, her concern for her child. The aura of Neverland clings to the girl, rising above her skin, like a certain scent, changing the way she carries herself, leaving a guardedness in her eyes. And if he can tell as much about her at a glance, then surely the monster can as well.
“Beast, then,” James says. Perhaps it is better to lay his cards on the table after all. Some, at least, if not every one of them.
“You know what it is?” Again, it is not fully a question.
“Perhaps. What to do with that knowledge, however.” James lets the words hang.
Silence fills the space between them once more, stretching long enough that when Wendy speaks again, it startles him.
“If it’s come looking for you, why now?” she asks.
The astuteness of the question catches him off guard. Her suspicions align with his—that he is the beast’s target, and the two deaths thus far mere collateral damage. Wendy turns the embroidery hoop in her hands, another nervous habit. James tries to guess precisely what she’s asking him. Surely she knows as well as he that time works differently in Neverland.
So then, she’s asking what has changed, asking him to admit that he reached where he shouldn’t have, that he opened the very door she spoke of, one that ought to have stayed closed. That what Samuel told him again and again over the years was true, and he should have believed it all along. His weakness had turned James into a bridge and allowed something terrible to come through.
A memory takes him, sharp where it ought to be dull, the wound long-scabbed by now. The weight of Samuel in his arms. His skin like paper, burned and crumbled to ash. James holding tight, teeth grit, trying to keep Samuel with him by force of will alone, the last two left. But it hadn’t been enough.
James had spoken one word, not the words he should have said. If he hadn’t allowed himself to be ruled by fear, even after all the years between them, might they have been an anchor? But the word he’d spoken—the wrong one—was, “Don’t.”
Don’t leave me. Don’t let go. Selfish to the last. No wonder Samuel had left him alone. James had begged him not to go, yet given him no reason to stay.
Samuel’s mouth opened, but whatever he would have said in return never reached James’s ears. He’d held Samuel one instant, and in the next, he was gone.
James turns the sound that wants to escape him into a cough, using it as an excuse to reach for the flask, tucked next to the pipe in his coat. Wendy can’t begrudge him this at least. The liquid stings going down. He wipes his lips with the back of his hand, and as an afterthought, he tilts the flask in her direction. Wendy shakes her head, but at least the set of her lips is more amused than disapproving. He tucks the flask away.
Perhaps they are both to blame in their own way. A thread snapped. Neverland changed. And yet something remained. A link. The cold iron embedded in his flesh. His ghosts. Always a part of him existed there and a part of him here. It was only a matter of time before he allowed something to cross over. Something left behind in Neverland, hungering and biding its time until his guard was sufficiently down.
NEVERLAND – 22 YEARS AGO
The ship creaks, a gentle sighing of wind making the timber and the ropes sing their own particular song. There’s a storm coming. Hook feels it in his bones; he feels it in his missing hand. He feels Pan and the hunting beast like a coiled darkness beneath the skin of the world, waiting to strike. But for this moment at least, all is calm.
Eerily so. The water is flat, the line of the full moon reflected all the way from the hull to the distant horizon. It looks almost solid, a path he could walk over the sea and into another land. If only it were so easy.
He draws the black blade from inside his coat. Despite resting close to his body all through his and Samuel’s journey back to the ship, and however many hours it’s been since, the metal is cold. Hook still isn’t even certain it is metal. At times it looks more like pitted stone. Now, in the moonlight, it gleams like black glass.
A humming note creeps up to the nape of his neck from the base of his spine. It sets his nerves on edge, yet it isn’t entirely an unpleasant feeling, and that in itself is unsettling. It feels like power—raw, wild, and dangerous.
“You still mean to use it?” Samuel’s voice is soft behind him, but Hook startles nonetheless, almost sending the knife tumbling overboard.
As they’d rowed back to the ship, Hook had explained what he intended to do; he’d largely made it up as he went along, speaking the words aloud to test them. Samuel had listened, doubt in his eyes, but he hadn’t interrupted. Now Hook wonders—did the blade whisper the suggestions to him through its strange music, telling him how it wants to be used, or has the flower finally rotted his brain, a thousand, thousand deaths over who knows how many years finally eroding the last of his sanity?
Samuel holds a tin cup in either hand, both steaming. His smile is almost shy as he holds out what might be a peace offering, or perhaps a gesture meant to soften Hook before trying to talk him out of his plan. The wariness as Samuel moves closer, as if the surgeon still isn’t certain whether his captain is a dangerous creature, irks him. Hooks slips the blade back into his coat, reaching for the cup and smoothing his expression into something he hopes looks human.
He wants the surgeon’s company. At the same time, he’s annoyed at himself that he does. Since when did the fearsome captain of Neverland’s pirates need anyone’s company other than his own? And of all people, why this man, soft and kind-hearted, unsuited for violence or even life at sea.
He lifts the cup with a faint nod, a gesture of thanks without saying the words. He sips, and studies Samuel through the steam rising from the drink. A faint, dark aura surrounds him. He’d seen it first in the rowboat, but now he can be certain it isn’t merely his imagination of an after-effect of being in the cave. As he’d explained to Samuel, the black knife is meant to do what any blade is meant to do—cut. He will use it to cut the pirates from Neverland, severing their ties to this place and freeing them from Pan. And he will use it to cut their way between worlds and leave Neverland far behind.
It sounds mad, even in the privacy of his own thoughts. Yet the aura around Samuel is clearer now. It writhes like a living creature, like a kraken from the deep.
Hook sets his cup on the rail, draws a flask from his pocket, and tips a measure into his drink. His hand trembles slightly. If Samuel notes it, he makes no comment. Knowing he must do a thing and actually committing the deed are two different things. As Samuel pointed out in the rowboat, Hook doesn’t truly know what the knife will do. He doesn’t know what it means to cut the lines binding them to Neverland. He might just as easily be committing wholesale murder.
He tips the flask toward Samuel, who shakes his head.
“I’ve seen to Killdeer.” Samuel’s tone is grim, audible disapproval as he leans against the rail. Hook thinks again of Samuel’s deft fingers, stitching him closed and the expression on his face then. He pushes the thought away. “His wounds are healing, if slowly. Harrigan is with him.”
Hook catches himself on the cusp of offering an apology—not for Killdeer, but for Samuel. Irritated, he tamps it down. He did what was needful to maintain order on his ship, he has no reason to apologize. Yet he finds a kind of excuse tumbling from his lips anyway. He wants Samuel to understand.
“Doesn’t it unnerve you? That men die here and return only to die again? That I can tear out a man’s throat and then…”
He gestures, letting the words hang against the night’s stillness. Samuel glances at him from the corner of his eye, the prim look of disappointment. How can Hook convey that Pan, that this place, is the unnatural thing and not his act of murder? That what he plans to do next is not yet more violence, but that it will set them free. If no other man among the crew does, Samuel at least deserves better than this place.
Hook sips from the tin mug, frowning in the dark. Tea, with an odd, floral taste, strangely medicinal, but not in an unpleasant way. He tries a different tack.
“I remember drowning, the air crushed from my lungs, freezing in the depths in the coils of a beast’s tail. I have felt Pan’s blade go through my heart.” Hook taps his chest. “And yet I live.”
He draws the flask from his coat again and drinks directly. He feels Samuel watching him. Has the surgeon ever died? He thinks not. He’s been sheltered, Hook thinks, set apart. Protected.
Again, the tugging sensation, the feeling of willful forgetting. The sense that he may have put something aside that is too painful, too dangerous to think on.
“The life we have here, it isn’t living.” He leans his forearms against the rail, giving his attention to the lanterns hung from the rails reflecting in the water. It strikes him that perhaps they shouldn’t be speaking like this, like equals. He is the captain; he doesn’t need permission for his actions, nor comfort or forgiveness for taking them. Hook doesn’t move.
“Do you remember anything before this place?” he asks.
Hook doesn’t miss the way the surgeon startles at the question, an involuntary movement he covers quickly by rolling a cigarette against the rail of the deck. It’s clear Samuel needs something to do with his hands more than he truly craves smoke.
“Sometimes I…” Samuel’s voice falters.
Hook turns his head. The emotion on Samuel’s face is hard to read—is it fear, regret, a sense of loss?
“I remember a bird,” Samuel says at last, his voice soft. “It had a broken wing. I don’t remember how old I was, I just remember trying to help and it pecking at me in its fear, its beak tearing me up.”
He holds his hands out in the moonlight, turning them as if expecting to see blood or scars. But his hands are white and smooth, long-fingered and delicate. Hook glances away, clears his throat.
“There was… I don’t remember who he was to me. Maybe a cousin or a brother. He crushed the bird’s skull with a rock. Said there was nothing I could do for it and that death was the kindest thing. I was so certain I could help though.”
Samuel spreads his hands as though letting something go. Hook catches himself about to lift his own hand as if he would lay it on Samuel’s shoulder and comfort him. He shifts slightly, putting an inch more distance between them.
“I cried. I remember that much. It wasn’t sorrow so much as I was frustrated. I know I could have helped that bird if I’d only been allowed to try.”
“Is that what made you want to become a surgeon?”
Samuel shrugs. “I suppose. I wish I remembered more. Except sometimes, I don’t.”
A shudder passes through the surgeon’s frame, one he doesn’t seem aware of. Hook understands. Memory can be a curse. Especially in this place. It’s why he’s spent so much time forgetting. Tonight, though, he wants to remember. His memories suddenly seem precious, something he can gift and share.
“Sometimes I remember,” Hook says. “Nothing whole. I had a sister. My mother and father died when I was very young, and my sister raised me. I went to sea to make an honest living for Anna and myself. I thought I would return to her within a year, pockets lined with enough to set us both up for life.”
“And then?”
“I discovered the world is not designed for young men to make their fortune by honest means if they weren’t already born to it.” A sour expression twists his mouth. “I sent home what I could, but it was never enough. I can’t tell you how many years passed. I think I was on my way home to see Anna, and then a hole like a mouth opened in the water and…” He lets his words trail, gesturing to ship around them.
“This,” Hook says, drawing out a compass and holding it in his palm. “This is all I have left. Proof that there is a world beyond this one.”
Anna had kissed his cheek and pressed it into his hand. At least he thinks that’s what happened, but sometimes he wonders—did he steal it—the spoils of a pirate—and merely tell himself a comforting story about its origin?
Samuel looks up from the compass to meet Hook’s eyes; it’s a strangely familiar gesture. Green, Hook thinks. The surgeon’s eyes are green, like the waters of a lake, or a particular shade of moss deep in the woods. It’s too dark to see if he’s right, and there’s no reason he should know or notice such a thing.
“I remember you.” Samuel’s voice is a hush, barely audible, almost as though he hopes Hook won’t hear him. “More than that other life, I remember you. Even when you forget.”
Even when you forget me. Samuel doesn’t say it, but Hook hears it anyway. He suddenly understands the flickers of disappointment he’s seen in the surgeon’s eyes, the times he looked away as though hurt—ashamed of his vulnerability. Guilt threads itself through his veins. How much has he forgotten, how much has he left Samuel alone to bear?
Though the sea is calm, he’s unbalanced, unsteady on the deck in a way he’s never been even in the worst storm. There’s no reproach in Samuel’s voice, and that almost makes it worse. What Hook hears instead is hope—that dangerous and bright thing. It’s as though Samuel holds something cupped in his palm, a delicate flower, and it’s down to Hook to take it and keep it safe, or crush it in his hand.
Would it be kinder to kill the hope now? Or is that the coward’s thought that’s made him turn tail and run every time they’ve come to this point before?
“Tell me what you remember.” Hook’s mouth dries and his voice cracks. He drains his flask, but it does nothing to steady him, and his throat remains parched.
“The first time I saw you—it’s the first thing I remember about Neverland. There was a fight, shouting, blades clashing, men screaming. The air smelled like gunpowder and there was blood everywhere. I was certain I would die. I thought perhaps I had already and I’d found my way to Hell.”
A faint, wry smile touches Samuel’s lips, self-deprecating – the barest hint of hidden sin beneath the surgeon’s veneer. A sudden warmth creeps to Hook’s cheeks, his pulse turning over. He tries to imagine what Samuel could ever do to feel he deserves a place in Hell, but just as quickly decides it’s an unwise course of speculation.
“And then the Devil himself appeared.” If anything, Samuel’s smile grows, turns into a grin, the light in his eyes taking the sting from the words as he turns to fully face his captain.
“You stepped out of the blood and the smoke, your skin, your clothes, your hair, coated with gore. You held out your hand and helped me up, told me to go below decks where I would be safe, and then went back to fighting.”
Hook wracks his brain, trying to recall the moment painted by Samuel’s words, wishing he could see it—live it—again. He tries to imagine himself, a blood-soaked and terrible angel, and wonders why that vision of him should make Samuel smile.
“Do you still think me a monster?” He tries to keep his voice light, but it wobbles. It matters very much what Samuel says next.
The surgeon’s expression changes, something Hook can’t quite read, or is afraid to. It gentles, and his tone is more serious that Hook would like.
“I never did. I was a stranger to you when you saved me. I might have run you through with a blade the moment you offered your hand for all you knew, but you chose to trust and help me even with death all around. I wanted to think you saw something in me that moment that seemed worth saving.” Samuel shakes his head, another self-deprecating gesture, then after a moment, he goes on, softly. Beside him, Hook holds his breath.
“There was something in your eyes, behind all the horror and blood. I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but that’s what I’ve always seen. Not the Devil, just you.”
Hook has to turn away; Samuel is too bright to look at right now. He can’t stand the surgeon’s eyes, terrified of being seen in the way Samuel describes seeing him. A tremor wants to start beneath his skin, even though he isn’t the slightest bit cold. He tries for lightness again, but what comes out is bitter.
“You might be the only one. The rest of the crew thinks me mad at least, if not a monster.”
“Will you give them a vote before you use the blade, whether to stay or leave?” There’s only curiosity in Samuel’s tone, no judgment. And whatever else might have been there a moment before feels as though it’s passed—an opportunity missed, or a terrible reprieve—leaving them only captain and surgeon again.
Hook shakes his head.
“I won’t give them the chance to mutiny. Killdeer and Harrigan already plot against me. This is my ship, and my word is law.” He makes his voice hard, as if tyranny will give him confidence he doesn’t feel.
When Hook glances over again, he sees Samuel’s lips flatten, and finds himself frowning in turn. He wants to turn the expression into a scowl, or a sneer. Whatever passed between them, feels raw in its wake. Samuel flayed him, left him exposed, and even worse – now that the scrutiny of his gaze is withdrawn, the knowing in it, Hook finds he misses it.
The urge to bark a command, send the surgeon scampering below decks, almost rises to his lips. He opens his mouth, but Samuel straightens, leaning farther out over the rail and pointing.
“Look.” Wonder colors Samuel’s voice.
Hook’s breath stutters, catching, a thing he hadn’t thought possible anymore. Luminous shapes, hundreds of them, glide below the surface of the water. Jellyfish, but they look like rogue stars, streaming across an ocean of night, headed for the distant horizon to spill off the edge of the world.
Samuel leans against the rail, everything but his awe forgotten. Close enough their shoulders nearly brush, the surgeon’s hand resting a scant inch from the captain’s glittering hook as if unaware of its deadly potential. Hook’s chest tightens, ribs aching as surely as if he were being crushed to death by the beast all over again. He is already torn, split in two. He wants—needs—to leave this place. He cannot abide it any longer. Nothing good can persist here.
That spark, possibility he saw in Samuel’s eyes, will be snuffed here if they stay. He needs to get out. He needs to get them both out if the fragile blossom held out in Samuel’s hands is to have any chance to flourish and survive.
“I hope you’ll trust me.” He says it quietly after a moment, keeping his gaze on the moving stream of stars lighting the water with their milky glow.
Samuel gives no answer, and for a moment, Hook feels a combined stab of relief and disappointment. Then Samuel shifts, and it is almost an imperceptible thing. The center of gravity moves between them. His shoulder touches Hook’s and does not draw away. His fingers rest just beside the point of the hook and they are fearless of harm. Samuel doesn’t turn his head, and Hook doesn’t dare either, but he hears a smile in the surgeon’s voice as he gazes at the luminous water. His proximity and his words, even though they aren’t an answer, feel like enough.
“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
* * *
James stands, stretching muscles grown stiff from sitting too long. They must almost be at their destination. The car sways, and he braces himself, almost falling into Wendy. The motion is so like the rolling pitch of a ship’s deck that for a moment he loses himself, disoriented.
Is he back in Neverland? A shouted order locks in his throat. No, he hasn’t been in Neverland for years. He isn’t… A flicker of motion catches his eye, just beyond the door leading to the next car. He steps forward without thinking, his bad leg nearly failing him. He steadies himself, hearing Wendy’s concerned voice behind him and ignoring it as he presses his face to the glass.
The scaled tip of a tail, disappearing out of his range of vision. Hook’s pulse hammers. No. Not Hook. He is James. He wrenches the door open, leaning into the space where wind rushes between the cars, where tracks flash past underfoot.
“Captain!” Wendy’s voice, the concern rising to alarm behind him. She sounds younger, a girl, forgetting to call him James.
He doesn’t bother to correct her; he doesn’t answer her at all. But she holds his cane out, and he takes it as he peers down the length of the train. There, the tail again, vanishing into the next car. Roiling, like smoke. Vast and scaled. Impossible. The train jerks, nearly pitching him onto the swaying join between the carriages. Only Wendy’s hand on his shoulder, hauling him back, saves him.
“James. What is it?” Her voice is sharp with fear, her eyes wide.
“There’s about to be another death.” He nudges her back toward their seats. If he is right, the farther they are from what is about to occur, the less attention they draw to themselves, the better.
The less he thinks about Neverland, the more he centers himself in the here and now, the safer he will be.
“What’s happening?” The girl, Jane, wakes finally, blinking up at them.
Wendy touches her daughter’s shoulder, tension clear along the line of her arm. But instead of answering Jane, Wendy looks at him.
“We have to warn someone.”
“More likely than not, it is already too late. And do you want to explain how either of us knows what will occur?”
Doubt flickers in her eyes, and he sees that he has her; she knows he’s right. And whatever kindness is in her, her sense of self-preservation is stronger still. Good girl. Wendy opens her mouth, but everything lurches again, brakes screaming protest as the train grinds to a halt. They are not yet at the station. Murmured questions rustle up and down the aisles. After a moment, the door between carriages opens, a harried looking conductor—face blanched and pale—darts a gaze around the car.
“Is anyone here a doctor?” His voice is hoarse, barely above a whisper, almost as if he’s afraid of the question being heard.
Wendy darts a glance at James, accusing, but before she can speak, Jane is up, trying to move past her mother and toward the conductor. Wendy seizes her daughter’s arm.
“What are you doing?”
“I can help.” Jane tries to shake off her mother’s grasp, and Wendy only tightens her hold.
The two women glare at each other, jaws equally set, eyes equally hard. There is no mistaking the blood between them. Jane pulls her arm free.
“I’m a medical student.” She strides toward the conductor, leaving Wendy looking stricken. “Keep asking in the other cars, but in the meantime, I’ll do what I can.”
The conductor’s expression clearly says he wants to dismiss the girl, but Jane doesn’t wait. She is used to this battle, James can tell, and wholly weary of it. She strides past the man, not giving him time to stop her. James can’t help admiring her, nor can he help the brief, fleeting thought that she would have made a good pirate. Wendy tries to follow her daughter, and now it is James’s turn to catch her and hold her back.
“We would be best off keeping out of the way.”
She resists him for a moment, then the fight drains from her. Wendy slumps. Conversation, speculation, ripples up and down the train car. The tension—like a storm gathering over them—is palpable. James finds himself gripping the head of his cane, his knuckles aching.
Time stretches, and yet it seems only a heartbeat before Jane returns, looking worn. She shakes her head, dropping heavily into the seat beside her mother, shrugging off her concerned touch.
“There wasn’t anything I could do. There’s nothing anyone could have done. It’s…” She lets the words trail, turning a haunted, hollow expression toward the glass.
All three of them watch as after a time, the coroner’s wagon pulls into the road parallel to the tracks. Eventually, a covered body is carried from the train.
“Just like Peg.” Jane’s voice is bitter, tired, and angry all at once.
She flexes her hand in her lap, and James watches the blood flush and retreat from the skin around her knuckles. She longs to blame someone, he can see it in every line of her posture, the desire to shout and demand an explanation.
Wendy cuts her eyes to him, her expression stony. James shrugs, turns deliberately to look again through the glass. Now is not the time or the place.
The coroner’s wagon departs, and several moments later, the train begins to roll again. The conductor passes through the cars, offering apologies for the delay. James notes that he does not stop to thank Jane for her help, and sees the girl note it as well.
When they stand, finally, to collect their bags as the train nears Newark-on-Trent station, Wendy touches James’s arm again and he sees she will not be put off this time.
“How did you know?” Her voice is low, urgent.
“I saw something…familiar.” How to explain the impossible?
Wendy’s fingers circle his wrist, the space where flesh meets wood, and squeezes—a warning.
“You will tell me. Later.” She lets his arm go.
James sighs. The train draws to a halt, and he follows Wendy and her daughter as they descend to the cold station platform, each wrapped in their own silences, each of their expressions closed and grim.