Holly lets the barb pass her by. She’s had a long and complicated relationship with her family’s history. But now Jane is right here. And Jane has studied Peter, studied Wendy, more than anyone she knows. It can’t hurt to ask again, now that she has a different reason for her questions. She tries to think.
“How did our family meet Sir James?”
“In the park.” Jane twines the silk scarf through her fingers. “He spotted the children—Wendy, John, and Michael—when they were on an outing, playing about. He found them fascinating, but then he was a drab little sparrow and couldn’t believe his luck, falling in with such a bevy of swans. Especially Wendy. He was dazzled by her, drawn to her glamour and more than a little jealous of her imagination. He was a writer, after all, but couldn’t match her stories. Or her life. So he stole them.
“And she tolerated it, in part because she was so young. But also, I think, because she could tell, even then, that he could help her. She wasn’t particularly happy at home, although she never talked about why, and Barrie’s story and the fame it brought, as well as the money he left her from the books and the movies, gave her a freedom not many women possessed at that time. He changed her life.”
The scarf has gone slack in Jane’s lap, but now she picks it up again. “I met him once, you know,” she says, and her voice has gone dreamy, the way it used to when she told Holly bedtimes stories about Peter Pan.
“After he was knighted? Yes, you’ve told me that,” Holly says, trying to keep the impatience out of her voice.
Jane shakes her head. “No, before. The first time. I was a little girl, very young. He’d come to the house, and my mother said we were to have a special visitor, and I looked at this tiny man in a brown plaid jacket that was too big and thought, ‘There’s nothing special about him.’ He smelled of liniment and tobacco smoke, and I couldn’t understand why my beautiful mother would have anything to do with him, or why she introduced him as one of her dearest friends.”
She’s silent a moment, lost in her memories. “We were here, in the library. Mother’s face was strained. She was waiting for the tea things to be brought. I had the distinct impression she was watching me, which was unusual, because she almost never paid attention to anything I did, so long as I was clean and polite and quiet. But she turned away to speak to the maid, and as soon as she did, he beckoned me over.
“？‘Hello,’ he said, leaning forward. He was sitting and I was standing, and we were almost exactly the same height. He took a peppermint stick out of his pocket and offered it to me. We both checked that Wendy wasn’t watching before I took it.
“？‘Seen that Peter fellow about?’ he whispered.
“？‘Mother won’t talk about it. Father says he’s just a story.’
“？‘Don’t let him hear you say that. I have it on excellent authority he’s a real live boy,’ he said with a nod toward Mother. ‘I made her famous, you know. I can do the same for you, if you tell me any tales.’ A distant look came over his face. ‘I always wanted to meet him. He seemed like such a nice chap.’？”
The scarf has fallen to the floor. Jane makes no move to pick it up. “It was the first I’d heard that, that Peter was real,” she says, and her voice is still far away. “Mother had never told me before—she’d always treated it as a story.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, she came back to the conversation and that was the end of our little tête-à-tête,” Jane says. She picks up the scarf. “Mother must have overheard, because she was quite cool to both of us, but I badgered and badgered her from that day forward until she broke down and admitted what he said was true. We owe him quite the debt, Mr. Barrie. If it weren’t for him, if it were up to my mother, we might never have learned the truth of Peter at all.”
“Indeed,” Holly murmurs. There are no answers in Jane’s story, only more questions after all.
* * *
Holly set her phone to silent while she was working. At the end of Jane’s tale, she glances down and sees a string of texts across the screen. One is from Christopher Cooke with his banking information, and the rest are from an increasingly worried-sounding Barry. They break the spell Jane’s had her under.
She holds up the phone. “I’m sorry, would you mind? I have a work call I have to make.”
“At this hour?” Jane glances at her watch. “Surely those Americans don’t expect you to work twenty-four hours a day?” She sees Holly’s face and relents. “Oh, all right. I’ll cajole the boy into helping me set the table, and then we can have a cocktail. Don’t be long.”