The Time Garden

by Edward Eager

  The Time Garden

  Edward Eager

  * * *

  ILLUSTRATED BY

  N.M. BODECKER

  * * *

  AN ODYSSEY/HARCOURT YOUNG CLASSIC

  HARCOURT, INC.

  ORLANDO AUSTIN NEW YORK SAN DIEGO LONDON

  * * *

  Copyright © 1958 by Harcourt, Inc.

  Copyright renewed 1986 by Jane Eager

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

  in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,

  recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without

  permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be

  submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed to the following address:

  Permissions Department, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  First Harcourt Young Classics edition 1999

  First Odyssey Classics edition 1990

  First published 1958

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Eager. Edward.

  The time garden/by Edward Eager; illustrated by N. M. Bodecker.

  p. cm.

  "An Odyssey/Harcourt Young Classic."

  Sequel to: Knight's castle.

  Summary: While spending the summer in a house by the sea, four cousins,

  Roger, Ann, Eliza, and Jack, discover a bank of wild thyme whose magic

  propels them on a series of adventures back and forth through time.

  [1. Magic—Fiction. 2. Space and time—Fiction. 3. Cousins—Fiction.]

  I. Bodecker, N. M., ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.E115Ti 1999

  [Fic]—dc21 99-22565

  ISBN 978-0-15-202075-0 ISBN 978-0-15-202070-5 (pb)

  Printed in the United States of America

  B D F H J K I G E C

  MV P R T U'S Q O (pb)

  * * *

  For Cindy Packard,

  a persuasive persuader

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  1. ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD 1

  2. WILD TIME 23

  3. TIME WILL TELL 47

  4. ALL IN GOOD TIME 77

  5. COMMON TIME 108

  6. TIME OUT OF MIND 129

  7. THE LAST TIME? 153

  8. THE TIME IS RIPE 177

  1. All the Time in the World

  The house and the garden were waiting.

  The house had been waiting a long time now, three hundred years, and the garden nearly as long, if you believed Old Henry, who should know. The first garden was planted by the same Robert Whiton who built the house, and it had gone on and on, renewing itself, as gardens do if there are owners who care about them, and the owners of this one did. All the Whitons had green thumbs.

  Old Mrs. Whiton, who lived all alone in the house now, didn't, or at least Old Henry said she didn't, but then she was only a Whiton by marriage. She had been born a Miss Peterson, of Passaic, New Jersey. Even though she had lived in the house for over fifty years, Old Henry still considered her a foreigner.

  As for the bank of thyme that led down from the garden to the sea, Old Henry said that his grandfather had said that his grandfather had said that it had been there when he was a boy.

  What the Natterjack would have said, no one could tell, for no one had asked him. The Natterjack did riot mind. He bided his time. He could wait.

  He and the house and the garden were waiting. They were waiting for four children. They didn't care how long they waited. They had all the time in the world.

  Right now the four children were on a train. How they happened to be there is a long story. It is longest for Roger and Ann.

  It all started when their father, who had never done anything unusual before, suddenly surprised everybody by writing a play. Of course it was a good play, because everything their father did with his mind was good (though his swings fell down and his rabbit hutches came apart).

  And it must have been good, because the first man who read it wanted to put it on the stage right away. Only he wanted to put it on in England first and see how it went, before putting it on in America.

  When Ann and Roger heard the news, they were jubilant.

  "We can see the Tower of London!" said Roger.

  "And Blackheath, where the Bastable children lived!" said Ann.

  Their father and mother exchanged a look. It was the kind of look Roger and Ann had seen and grown to know in the past, and it usually meant that something could not be afforded.

  "You see," said their father slowly, as though he didn't want to say it, "we all like the play, but maybe the audiences won't. And until we know..."

  "Yes, of course," said Roger.

  "We understand," said Ann.

  "If it's a big hit, we'll send for you right away, and all have a wonderful time," said their mother.

  There was a silence.

  "What about the meantime?" said Roger. "Where'll we be?"

  "That," said their father, "will take some working out."

  "I think," said their mother, "I'll put in a call to Baltimore right now."

  "Jack and Eliza?" said Ann, and her eyes danced, for she and Roger had had a wonderful yeomanly magic summer in Baltimore, Maryland, the year before, with the cousins of those names.

  "No, Martha," said their father. "We can't go running to your sister Katharine to help us every time we have a problem!"

  "I think," said their mother, "I'll put in a call anyway, just in case."

  And it turned out it was a lucky thing she did. Because it turned out that Aunt Katharine and Uncle John were planning a trip to England this summer, too, and they'd been wondering what to do about Jack and Eliza.

  "It's just a quick business trip," said Aunt Katharine into the phone. "We wouldn't have time to take them places. It wouldn't be fair."

  After that the wires buzzed almost every night between Baltimore, Maryland, and Toledo, Ohio (where Ann and Roger lived), as one parent or another had a wonderful new idea about where to send the four children for the summer.

  Only for one reason or another all the wonderful ideas fell through.

  It was getting to be the middle of May and summer was fast approaching when Aunt Katharine thought of old Mrs. Whiton.

  "It's the perfect solution," she said into the phone that night to Ann and Roger's mother. "She's kind of a great-aunt of John's. She lives in a wonderful historic old house on the South Shore near Boston and she loves having children stay with her. She writes children's books or something."

  "It'll be ghastly," said Eliza to Jack, when she heard the news. "She'll keep wanting to draw us out. She'll keep wanting to get at the content of the child mind!"

  "Really, Eliza," said Aunt Katharine.

  "That's enough, Eliza," said Uncle John. And that was that.

  And the next thing that happened was June, and school closed its hideous doors, and all was trunks and tickets, and in practically no time Roger and Ann found themselves with their father and mother on the train to New York City.

  Roger didn't bring his model soldiers and knights with him this time, because he had outgrown all that (except for an occasional sliding back now and then, and strictly in private). But he hadn't outgrown some other things, and when Ann looked at him in a certain expectant, excited way, he knew perfectly well what she was thinking, and winked at her across the dining-car table.

  What Ann was thinking was that maybe this summer would turn out to be a wonderful magic one like the summer before. It had a lot of magic-seeming thi
ngs in it already—parents being called away and four children sent to stay in an old house by the sea. Lots of magic adventures in books started out that way.

  But the next morning came New York City, which has a magic of its own, and Ann and Roger's first sight of it was enough to blot out all thought of summer adventures, or indeed of anything else.

  Jack and Eliza and Aunt Katharine and Uncle John met them in the station and took them back to their hotel, and for the next three days they looked at tall buildings, and battled with shopping crowds, and went round Manhattan Island on a ferryboat, and saw wonderful plays called Kismet and The Pajama Game and The Teahouse of the August Moon, only Roger and Ann knew all along that their father's play would be even better than any of them.

  And then came the day of the sailing, and there was the great steamer to explore, and Eliza was spoken to severely by a man in uniform who might have been the captain, for running and sliding on the floor of the ship's ballroom. And all too soon the ship's whistle thrillingly blew, and there came the age-old cry of "All ashore that's going ashore."

  Everybody kissed everybody, and some cried (I will not say which ones), and the four children made their way down the gangplank. Ann stood with sinking heart on the pier and watched the watery gulf grow wider and her mother's smiling face go farther and farther away till she couldn't make it out anymore, but still there were waving hands to be seen, and she waved back at them till at last her arm grew tired and stopped of its own accord.

  The four children turned away from the water. Nobody looked at anybody else, and Ann could tell that the others must be having that same sinking feeling, too.

  Jack was the first to recover. "Now then," he said importantly. "Find a taxi and go straight to Grand Central Station." For those were the instructions that had been gone over and repeated again and again till all four children could have said them in their sleep.

  Grand Central Station turned out to be even more interesting than Ann and Roger had thought when they first arrived there three days before. They and Eliza could have lingered for hours looking at tropical fruit and magazine stands and gentlemen's haberdashery, but Jack would have none of this, hustling them along, finding the right gate and tipping redcaps in a lordly way, till soon Roger and Ann were sitting in their seats in the parlor car, and Eliza was running back and forth looking out of windows and comparing the car unfavorably with others she had ridden in in the past.

  This train would take them as far as Boston. Their parents had decided it would be all right for them to go that far alone, because Jack was old enough now to take care of the others.

  "Though a lot of care he'll take, if I know him," Eliza had said to Ann. "Not with this new horrible side of him that's beginning to show!"

  And sure enough, hardly had they left the station and gone through the tunnel than Jack broke off in the middle of a conversation he was having with Roger about the Brooklyn Dodgers, and sat staring up the car and across the aisle, his eyes taking on a glazed expression.

  What he was staring at was a female form that had just taken its seat halfway up the car. A few seconds later he got up and went into the washroom and slicked down his hair, and came back and sat on the arm of the female form's chair, and started muttering to her in a husky monotone that went up an octave every so often, when his voice broke. Each time this happened, the female form uttered a titter.

  "Honestly!" said Eliza to Ann. "To think we'll all come to that some day! If there's one thing I despise, it's a teenage girl!"

  "Disgusting," Ann agreed.

  "He won't be a bit of use to us all summer, you mark my words!" said Eliza.

  Roger's heart sank. What was he going to do with himself in a strange house with just two hapless females and a cousin who liked teenage girls?

  When lunchtime came, Jack sat with his new friend, and acted as if he'd never seen the other three before in his life, and sent their lunch money over to them by a waiter.

  And when the afternoon had dragged its weary length along, and they pulled into the South Station in Boston, his behavior was even more insulting.

  "Well, so long," he said regretfully to the teenage girl. "I have to manage these helpless infants now."

  "How too sickening for you," said the teenage girl.

  The blood of Ann and Roger and Eliza boiled.

  There was a slight delay at the South Station, because no one was quite sure what to do next. Old Mrs. Whiton had written that she would try to have Old Henry meet them, but that he was very difficult, and might refuse.

  "He'd better not try being difficult with me!" Eliza had muttered darkly, when she heard those words.

  But as five minutes passed, and nobody who looked as though he might be called Old Henry came up to them, it seemed that he was trying it.

  So then Jack got out old Mrs. Whiton's letter, and read the instructions in it, and found the right platform, and there was the train for the South Shore. Only it wasn't much of a train, being only one car long.

  They had to wait quite a while for the train to start. Jack made conversation.

  "That was some keen girl," he said. "Her name was Betsy Johnson. She goes to Dana Hall."

  "Does she?" said Roger.

  By the time the train started, Ann was too sleepy and hungry to care much what was happening, but Roger sat staring interestedly out on the passing New England countryside, and reading the names of the different stations, till it got too dark to see.

  As for Eliza, she bounced over to the opposite seat and tried the window to see whether it would open or not, and it did, and after that she hung her head out, sniffing for the first scent of the sea, till the conductor came by and asked if she wanted to get herself killed.

  "Ha!" said Eliza. "By a mere train? Not very likely!" But she shut the window.

  Their station was the last on the line, and by the time they got there it was almost completely dark. The four children jumped down to the platform and stood looking around.

  A figure approached, and a grizzled face regarded them without affection.

  "So it's you, is it?" said the figure. There didn't seem to be any answer to this. "Come along then, if that's the way it's going to be," it went on. And it shuffled away into the night without offering to help them with their luggage, and the four children agreed that if difficult was the word for Old Henry, this must be he.

  They followed him, lugging the heavy suitcases, and came to what must be the oldest black sedan in the world. Jack, who knew about such things, said it was a Willys-Knight, and they were extinct, and it ought to be in a museum.

  Old Henry hardly gave them time to get loaded before he stepped on the gas, and the car slithered away, over smooth highway at first, but then they turned into a woods, over a rocky road that bumped.

  And at last the bumping ended and they came out onto cleared land, and there was the house, standing bleak and severe and beautiful, the cold moonlight turning its weathered boards to silver.

  Old Henry slithered the car to a stop, and started shuffling off into the night again, but a deep, gruff voice called from the open doorway.

  "Come back here and help with those bags, you old ruffian," said the voice. And that was the four children's first introduction to old Mrs. Whiton.

  The rest of that evening was a confusion of unpacking and exploring, and abrupt steep staircases, and long rambling corridors that went up and down sudden unexpected steps and never seemed to lead where you thought they were leading. And always in the background was the boom of the sea, and yet the four children couldn't see it from any of the windows, because it lay far below, at the foot of the cliff on which the house was built, so old Mrs. Whiton told them.

  Old Mrs. Whiton didn't talk much or smile much, and what she did say sounded rather grim and forbidding, but that may have been because her voice was so deep. And she didn't try to draw them out or get at the content of the child mind, either.

  She gave them a supper of baked beans and hot Boston brown bre
ad, and then she said they would

  have plenty of time for exploring tomorrow, and now they had better go to bed, because the waves were sure to wake them early, till they got used to them. And she showed the four children to their rooms.

  There were two rooms, one for the boys and one for the girls, at the end of a long corridor, with their doors directly facing each other. Both rooms had huge fireplaces at one end, big enough to walk into. Over the fireplace in Jack and Roger's room hung two ancient flintlock guns.

  "Touch those at your peril," said old Mrs. Whiton.

  In Ann and Eliza's room were two immense double four-poster beds, and the beds had canopies over them that were called testers, Mrs. Whiton said.

  "Testing. Testing," said Eliza, starting to climb up her canopy to see if it would hold her weight.

  "Any more of that," said old Mrs. Whiton, plucking her down, "and you'll rue the day." And she left the room.

  "Isn't she an old grenadier?" said Eliza. "I like her!"

  Ann didn't answer. She was feeling rather small and lonely. And she felt smaller still when she had undressed and climbed into the middle of her vast bed.

  Eliza was at the window, flinging the casements wide and peering out. And at last she saw the sea, curling whitely on the rocks below. A thrill went through her. "This," she announced, "is a wonderful house. Spies could land here, and nobody'd ever know. Smugglers probably used it, in the olden days. It's probably honeycombed with secret passages. Indians could come down through the woods and slaughter everybody!"

  There was no answer from Ann's bed. Ann was asleep.

  Eliza wandered across the corridor and paused at the door of Jack and Roger's room. Through the door she could hear Jack's voice, telling Roger all about a keen girl he knew called Susan Snook. Roger wasn't answering.

  Eliza gave a sniff of disdain, and wandered back to her own room. And standing at the window again, she swore a vow to herself.

  "I vow," she swore, "that I'll be the first one up tomorrow and really explore this whole place. Anything could happen here!" And she got into bed and turned out the light.