Peter Pan in Scarlet (7 page)

‘Turn out your pockets!’ Starkey told Peter.

(And put Hook’s treasure map into the greedy paws of a common pirate?) ‘Never!’

‘Turn out your pockets, cock-a-doodle, or I’ll have my throat-slitters shoot you full of arrows, and take a look myself, after.’

Wendy saw the boy in the jay feathers and scarlet frock-coat glance towards the ship’s rail. She knew at once that he meant to leap to his death sooner than give up the treasure map to Starkey. ‘Don’t do it, Peter!’ she cried.

Starkey laid a fatherly hand on the shoulder of one young squaw, whose bowstring was pulled taut. ‘On my word, bucko … shoot him in the thigh,’ he said, and the squaw took careful aim. ‘Let’s see what an arrow can do to puncture his pride!’

Now, if Peter
had
had his charts in front of him just then, he would have seen that the Sea of a Thousand Islands had lately gained an extra sprinkling. Five small islands had appeared to port and, most unusually for islands, seemed to be
gaining
on them. What is more, they rose and fell on the swell, riding the waves, travelling against the current. When Starkey saw them too, the sight held him spellbound. The dreaded order ‘Shoot’ perched unspoken on his lip as he watched the flotilla of little islands sashay closer and closer.

At that very moment, the ancient engines of the steam-cutter, struggling to push the
Jolly Peter
along, overstrained themselves and blew. The funnel coughed up black smuts, then stopped smoking. The sickening forward surge slowed, and both ships were left wallowing. The five islands overtook, nestling closer. They were woolly with trees, alfalfa, and pampas grass, and were apparently hitched to one another by lengths of fraying rope. Did they have inhabitants, these bobbing patches of dry land?

Oh yes.

Grappling irons came over the ship’s rail like gigantic claws. After that came … well … gigantic claws. The Redskins saw the tigers first. The panthers were quicker aboard, but their pelts were so black that they were almost invisible. The bears were slow moving but just as unstoppable, flopping big furry bellies over the rail before flumping on to the deck like sacks of brown sugar. The baboons flew through the rigging, hand-over-fist-over-tail. The palmerions’ hooves made a hollow din on the deck-planks.

No doubt Starkey’s sprogs were, in the normal course of things, wonderful at archery and throat-slitting. But faced with packs of panthers and a pride of lions, with boarding parties of monkeys and a broadside of bears, their soft little hands shook and the bowstrings slid from between their sweaty fingers. They fled below decks. The search party aboard the
Jolly Peter
leapt back on to the bow of the SS
Starkey
, spilling their captain-nursemaid out of his swivel chair and into the paint-locker. They tried to push off, but the bow of the steam-cutter had wedged itself too deep.

Five islands gently bumped rubber-tree fenders against the
Jolly Peter
. Exotic breeds of animal spilled aboard from four of the five. The fifth island delivered up only one breed of animal. One solitary, two-legged creature.

‘Difficulties, sir? What good fortune that I should have been passing,’ said the Great Ravello.

Peter Pan drew his dagger and cut the cords of seven kitbags. The League of Pan wriggled free. Their first thought was to get as far away as possible from the wild animals roaming the ship, roaring and pouncing and dripping dribble on the deck.

‘Oh please!’ said Ravello. ‘Don’t mind my nippers and snappers. They know their place, and they rarely eat between meals.’ He cracked his circus-master’s whip. The beasts flinched, broke off from what they were doing, leapt over the rail, and swam back to their various floating islands. Except for the bears. They boarded the SS
Starkey
and sat themselves down around the open hatch of the fo’c’sle, dipping huge paws through it as if trying to catch fish through an ice-hole. The little Redskins inside could be heard screaming and whimpering and calling for their mothers. Peter Pan kept tight hold of his dagger.

‘Thank you, Mr Ravello!’ said Wendy. ‘You saved us!’

‘Pleasure, ma’am,’ said Ravello, bowing. There were scorch marks on his vast garment now, and a smell about him of charred wool. ‘I was very much hoping our paths would cross again.’

Peter—tiny alongside the circus-master—flinched. ‘Why?’

‘There was a fire in the Neverwood—you must have seen something of it as you sailed away. Yes?’ (The Twins put their hands over their mouths in guilty horror: was Ravello about to make them pay for burning down his circus? Had he come after them with thoughts of revenge or punishment?) ‘My livelihood was utterly destroyed by that fire. Everything gone. Tent, cages, staff … Thus I find myself without a profession—without the means of earning a crust.’ (The Twins mewed with panic and bitter regret and tried to slide under the tarpaulin of a gig-boat and hide. The Great Ravello intercepted them, a raggedy sleeve encircling each boy, a firm tug pulling their heads close against his body.) ‘So. I seek employment. One must work one’s passage on the voyage through Life, you do agree?’

‘Work’s for grown-ups!’ said Peter, who didn’t.

Ravello waved a ragged sleeve-end and let it drop. ‘Ah yes. Of course. I was forgetting. You people here have made Childhood your profession. Sadly I have rather
missed the boat
, in terms of being a little boy.
Ergo
, I must follow some other line of work.’ Within the woolly shadow of the hooded cardigan, Ravello’s pale brown eyes closed for a moment. ‘So I hope—dare I hope?—that I may be allowed to serve, in some humble way, the marvellous Peter Pan.’

Peter was genuinely startled. ‘Me?’

Ravello bowed, sweeping the tips of Peter’s boots with the ravellings of his cuff. ‘Your butler, perhaps! Your valet? Your serving man? I ask no pay, sir! Only my keep, sir! The honour of serving you would be payment enough. Simply to be allowed to be of use, sir! Say you can forgive my sin of growing big, sir!’ The shoulders folded forward, the head dipped. A dead sheep would have looked arrogant in comparison with the Great Ravello, as he sank to one knee in front of Peter Pan. ‘Let me serve you in any way I can!’

For a moment, Pan could not think what to say. ‘What would I call you? Great or Mister?’ he asked awkwardly.

‘No such formality, sir,’ said the Ravelling Man. ‘And how should I qualify for the title Great while standing beside yourself? My mother named me …’ It took him a moment to recall his first name: perhaps he had not used it in a long time. ‘My mother gave me the name Crichton, but like most things a mother gives, it is not worth the having. Ravello will do admirably, sir.’

‘Good,’ said Pan. ‘But we are going exploring, you know. I must warn you: it may get dangerous. Courage is everything.’

‘You stole the very words from my heart!’ said the Ravelling Man, with such intensity that the mercury in the ship’s barometer plummeted. ‘Courage is indeed
everything
.’

Just then, Starkey wriggled his way out of the paint-locker and peeped nervously over the rail. Seeing him, Peter Pan called sharply: ‘What’s your cargo, Starkey? Cos it’s mine, now!’

The pirate snorted defiantly. ‘Shan’t tell! Shan’t won’t!’ But as Peter stepped towards him, dagger drawn, the coward fluttered his tattooed fingers in front of his chest and confessed, ‘Silverskins, that’s what! Don’t kill me, Pan! Silverskins!’

Silverskins. A sleek, glittering word. A word with romance to it. Peter nodded solemnly and tilted his head just a little towards Wendy. Wendy tilted her head towards John, John whispered behind his hand to Slightly, ‘
What’s a
silverskin?
’

Slightly thought it might be the pelt of an ermine; John thought the peel from a silver nutmeg. Wendy thought of barracuda, silverest fish in the sea. The Twins believed it was a pirate term for a piece of money; Tootles that it was a moonbeam reaped with a sickle. Curly thought fairy slaves.

‘You are
indeed
rich, sir,’ said Ravello, his eyes wrinkling with joy. ‘Silverskins, eh?’ So no one confessed that they did not really know, because they did not want to look foolish in front of a grown-up, especially a butler. ‘The question is, sir; how will you
share the spoil
?
Traditionally (I believe) the captain takes half and divides the rest among his crew.’

That is how it started: the Silverskin War, the Feud of Fair Shares. Before Ravello came along, they would have shared out everything equally. That was how the League of Pan worked: even-stevens. But now Ravello had told them how these things were done.

So now Peter wanted half.

Tootles said that, as a Princess, she should have half too.

Wendy pointed out that, if they were going to start comparing, she was the oldest and she should have half, as well.

Ravello said: ‘Of course, another way of sharing out the takings is according to rank.’ At which point, the First Sea Lord said that he ought to have twice as much as the Other Sea Lord, and the Mastmaster sneered at the Deckmaster and one got kicked in the ankles. The puppy bit the Best Mate.

Fireflyer said that he was going next door to count the silverskins.

John said they should toss for it: when the coin came down heads and he said ‘Heads!’, he claimed that he had won the whole lot.

Tootles said that the Twins only counted as one member of crew because they did not have separate names. They would have to share their share.

The Twins said that Tootles could go and boil her head.

Curly said that, strictly speaking, Peter was not the captain of the
Jolly Peter
: he had just helped himself to the title and the captain’s quarters.

Peter retorted that if they threw Curly overboard that would mean more silverskins for everybody.

In short, things were said that should never have been put into words—terrible things. Wendy told Peter that he was a selfish baby and had not saved the ship at all. Peter told Wendy that girls did not count as crew, because they were good for nothing. Tootles tried to punch Peter on the nose for that, but missed. Peter grew pompous, then, and said, ‘I alone shall decide how the silverskins are divided up!’

Slightly said Peter was so stupid he would not know how to divide a ship’s biscuit between two rats.

Within minutes no one was speaking to anyone else. They were slumped in different corners of the ship, raging and sulking and feeling badly done by. John, aiming for Peter, rolled a cannonball along the deck but it ran over Slightly’s hand, which really hurt. Curly refused to go back into the crow’s nest to keep watch, because he said they would cheat him out of his fair share as soon as his back was turned. Peter said that, in that case, Curly would be hanged from the yardarm as a mutineer. Worse and worse the insults grew. Ravello was asked to act as referee. But he purred, in his softly cat-like way, that it was ‘not his place’, adding, with a touch of amusement, that they could always give the loot back to Starkey.

Pan, choking with rage, tugged at the white school tie uncomfortably tight across the throbbing veins in his neck. He called Ravello a fool. He called the League a ‘mutinous coterie’ and a ‘pack of blaggards’—‘filchers’ and ‘pinchers’ and ‘snappers-up’; ‘scurvy dogfish’ and ‘the scum of the sea’. He said he would strand Tootles and Curly on the next rock, or feed them to the sharks. In fact such a stream of abuse poured out of him that he had to shut his eyes for fear they popped. And when he opened them again, everyone was staring at him. Where had it come from, that outburst? Who had loaded him with such a fusillade of words?

That was when Starkey tried to make his getaway down the anchor chain.

Ravello brought him back—hoiked him back aboard by the scruff of his shirt collar. (Plainly the hands hidden by the dangling sleeves had a grip of steel.)

‘Break open your hatches and deliver up your booty!’ Peter roared in Starkey’s face.

After years spent teaching manners to Redskin sprogs, Starkey said it without thinking: ‘Now now, son. What’s the little word that gets things done?’

Again that infernal question! Peter searched his head for the magic little word. But he found only cases and cases more of bad-temper.
‘I don’t know! Is it “Flogging”? Or
“Plank”? Or “Maroon”?’

Starkey was so scared that he broke open his cargo hold with his bare hands. Out popped Fireflyer (who had squirmed his way in easily enough but had much more trouble getting out). The fairy was so crammed with food that he landed at Peter’s feet with a thud like a cricket ball.

‘Well, my trusty little spy? What
are
silverskins?’

The fairy burped. ‘
Onions
!’ he said. ‘
Spring onions
!’

‘
Onions?!’

Fireflyer burped again. ‘
There were seven thousand two hundred and
eighty-four
.
I counted
,’ he said proudly, ‘
when I ate
’
em
.’

‘Stow that fairy belowdecks!’ said Pan. ‘He has eaten our prize of war!’ And his lips curled back from his milk-white teeth in a snarl that would have shamed a shark.