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He was as he had always been. I was as well, the long blonde hair that had been cut off with my illness (that’s how sick I was) now lying intact again in pigtails on the shoulders of my white nightgown, and my nails chewed off short. (I’d quit biting them the minute I left Mrs. Clegg’s).

Of course I said yes immediately, and being Peter, he completely forgot about putting fairy-dust on me to fly until we were standing on the window-sill, and then Ten Stars had to remind him: Ten Stars was the fairy he flew with by that time, and much less jealous by nature than her predecessor. Tinker Bell would never have bothered to keep a human — dreaming or not — from crashing to the pavement. To do her justice I don’t think Tink ever really understood why it wasn’t funny.

We flew over London, something I had always wanted to do. And it was as glorious as I had always known it would be.

It was not so very late: Big Ben was striking eleven in the distance as we stepped through the window at 221B Baker Street. We entered through the bedroom that had been John’s, now crammed almost floor-to-ceiling with Mr. Holmes’ books and souvenirs. I could hear the strains of Mr. Holmes’ violin from the parlor, smell strong shag tobacco with an intensity I hadn’t experienced since I was a child. By the sudden chill on my bare ankles I knew that Peter and I had stepped from dream into reality, and panic filled me at this thought. Peter, still keeping a grip on my hand, barged through the parlor door saying “Holmes!” but I hung back in the shadows, suddenly shy of meeting, in my changed dream-state, a man I knew as an adult in the cold adult world.

Holmes had already started up from his chair and the violin was out of his hands — I think he had a pistol tucked behind the chair-cushion — but he saw it was Peter and his eyebrows went up with astonished delight. The next second his glance went to me, still half-hid in the dark bedroom doorway, and his expression changed, but before he could speak, Peter jabbed a finger at him and snapped,

“You have to help me, Holmes. I am being accused of kidnapping — kidnapping! — and you must help me clear my name!”

The boy’s name was Robert Lewensham and his father was the Earl of Wylcourt. Peter didn’t know these things, of course; Holmes looked them up while I poured us all out tea. Peter’s account was only that Bobbie had come with him to the Neverlands twice — “He’s a tremendous sport and the Black Knight of Ravensmire lives in terror of his blade,” — after first meeting him in the bleak fells of Yorkshire, where one of Ten Stars’s relatives had gotten lost and Peter went to find her.

“This last time, he didn’t get back home,” Peter said. “It isn’t my fault. Bobbie knew the way. Only now his father’s hired men — wizards, some of them quite wicked — to find him, and the King of Dreams is saying, that this kind of thing can not be tolerated, and that if need be he will shut the Gates of Horn and Ivory that lie between this world and the Neverlands, so that no one may cross. He’s always saying things like that,” Peter added sulkily. It was the first time I’d ever heard him mention the King of Dreams. “And it isn’t fair.”

“It isn’t,” I added, a little timidly. “What about all those children who’ve never gone to the Neverlands, Mr. Holmes? What becomes of them?”

Holmes glanced across at me, the line between his brows telegraphing his uncertainty. In the shadows he had thought he’d recognized me, but sitting on his sofa before the fire — where so many times I’d sat in my adult life, all dressed up in proper gray delaine with a corset, bustle and husband — I could see he didn’t know why he’d thought so, or who he’d imagined I might be.

“What indeed?” Holmes remarked dryly, and turned back to Peter, who was devouring biscuits left over — like the contents of the teapot — from Holmes’ own tea earlier that evening. “Might your friend have been seized by something that haunts the space between the worlds, like the Gallipoot? There are other things as well—”

Peter waved impatiently with a biscuit.