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“Oh! Your copy ofPeter Panis beautiful.”
Zahara laughs and saunters over to the desk to pick it up. “That’s not mine. It’s Zach’s.”
“I thought he hated children’s books.”
“He does. But he’s obsessed withthisone.” She hands me the book. “You should see his annotations. They’re like the scrawlings of a madman.”
I take the book and turn it in my hands.
It’s a first edition copy, with the olive-green clothbound cover and the gilded illustrated frames around the title. The pages are soft with time as I flick through them, Bedford’s painstakingly rendered illustrations bringing the story to life with a wealth of details.
If I owned a first edition ofPeter Pan, I would have never dared to write so much as my name on the inside cover. The book is too beautiful, and at over one hundred years old, too old to be sullied by my penmanship. Zachary, though, seems to have felt no such compunction. His sister wasn’t far off when she described his annotations as the scrawlings of a madman, although that might be partly due to Zachary’s slanted, spidery handwriting.
Flicking through the pages, I find the places where his annotations are most dense. His notes hint at a rather dark interpretation of the whimsical story: he seems to fixate on Neverland, Peter Pan’s shadow, and, more than anything else, James Hook.
Chapter five, and the passage of Hook’s first on-page appearance, is so heavily annotated that his words cover every margin, and some notes are even squeezed tightly between the lines. My eyes slide over the underlined parts:In person, he was cadaverous and blackavised;his handsome countenance;his eyes were of the blue of the forget-me-not and of a profound melancholy;he was a raconteur of repute;the elegance of his diction;a man of indomitable courage.
Zach’s notes read:Dark, handsome, sad, brave and well-spoken. A villain—but a melancholy villain. A complex character, not just a pirate. He’s missing something, a part of him—his hand a metaphor? Missing his old life/the real world?
At the bottom of the page, he’s written in small letters,Does she see me in him?This is crossed out and replaced with,Does she see herself in him?
I remember, all of a sudden, Zachary at the Halloween party in the trees, drunk and dressed like Hook. He called me ‘angel’ that night, and he was drunk enough to be acting a little reckless. He told me he dressed as Hook to amuse me.
I told him I used to have a crush on Hook.
Laughter bursts from my chest like a bird from a cage, startling me as much as Zahara.
“You’re right,” I answer her questioning look. “The scrawlings of a madman, truly.”
Chapter 33
Dauntless Dreams
Theodora
ImeetZachary’sparentsa day later, and the day after that, we all have dinner together.
By this point, any nerves or anxiety I might have felt about staying at the Blackwood estate over the holidays has vanished. The house, with two days left until Christmas, is full of guests: a mixture of distant relatives and close family friends, and even a few people I know through my mother.
It’s easy to blend in amongst the guests, and nobody seems to find it particularly odd that I’m there, which takes much of my unease away.
Dinner with the Blackwoods is illuminating—and a strange experience. We sit at a long table in a dining room fit for aristocrats: polished floor, high-backed velvet seats, antique chandeliers and candelabras bearing real candles, silverware and cloth napkins embroidered with the Blackwood crest.
I sit at the end of the table closest to the Blackwood family. To my left is Zachary, to my right is his mother, Lady Blackwood, and facing us from the head of the table, his father, Lord Blackwood.
Zachary and Zahara both look like a perfect mixture of their parents: they have their mother’s doe eyes and long, curled eyelashes, their father’s sharp, graceful bone structure—the prominent cheekbones, the proud chin, the aquiline nose. The Blackwood parents, like their children, are highly articulate, inquisitive and earnest, and prone to sarcasm.
“It’s an honour to meet you, my darling,” Lady Blackwood tells me when Zach introduces me to her. “Your name is spoken in awe around here—you have become as good as a mythical figure in this household.”
She wears a gown in a rich shade of purple, gold bracelets on her arms, and her curly hair, black streaked with silver, is tied in a scarf of ochre silk. Her style could not be more different to my mother’s: Lady Blackwood wears very little make-up, and if she’s had any work done, it was subtle. There are lines around her eyes, but the rest of her face is smooth and polished, like Zachary’s.
Even her smile, the mix of warmth and arrogance, is exactly like his.
“She means a mythical figure like Saint George who slew the dragon,” Zachary tells me, tossing his mother a look. “With you, the sword-wielding saintess, and I, the slain beast.”
“That’s not at all what I meant,” his mother says with a raised eyebrow.
“It’s certainly how you made it sound—year after year. Have you finally defeated Theodora Dorokhova? Knocked her from the top of the results lists? Brought back her head to display at the top of our ramparts?”
