Return to the Secret Garden

by Holly Webb

  Miss Rose opened the door and sighed, very faintly. “Come on, Emmie. Lessons.”

  Emmie stalked after her to the schoolroom, but her scowl was only to keep up appearances. If those notebooks were in her room, then they were hers, weren’t they? No one could mind her reading them. Not that she was going to ask anyway. She was almost sure that Miss Mary, whoever she was, wouldn’t mind.

  “Stop daydreaming, Emmie!” Miss Rose tapped her nails on the table in front of Emmie’s book, and Emmie blinked at her. She had been thinking about the robin, the rich orange-red of his feathers, and the way he’d looked at her with his head sideways, as though he thought she was interesting. Hardly anybody thought she was interesting, ever. She was just a nuisance, except to Lucy. It was stupid for a bird to make her remember a cat, but he did. He’d looked at her the same way – curious, a little bit suspicious. Emmie had tamed Lucy – perhaps she could tame the robin too?

  “Dolly Daydream!” Joey whispered, smirking. “What were you thinking about, then?”

  Emmie rolled her eyes at him. As if she’d tell.

  “She’s dreaming about that stupid cat again.” Arthur poked her arm with his pencil. “Weren’t you? See, she was, she’s gone red.” He was bored, and teasing Emmie was good value, if he could make her lose her temper.

  “Wasn’t…” Emmie muttered, hating the way she blushed so easily. Why shouldn’t she think about Lucy? “And what if I was, anyway?”

  “What cat?” Jack asked, and they all stared at him. He didn’t speak in their lessons, unless Miss Rose asked him a direct question. For the last two days he had trudged into the schoolroom with a haughty look on his face, and slid out again as soon as he could. He’d never spoken to any of them before.

  “She had a cat, back in London,” Arthur said, after a moment of silence. “Skinny black thing, a stray. Fed it half your food, didn’t you, Emmie? That’s why she’s so skinny too.”

  “And then she made an almighty fuss when Miss Dearlove wouldn’t let her bring it with us,” Joey added. “She cried.”

  Arthur sniggered. “She’s going to cry again, look.”

  Emmie dug her fingers into her palms hard, so the nails left purple half-moons in the skin. “I’m not.” She swallowed the tears back with a huge effort, and glared, not at Joey and Arthur, but at Jack. This was his fault. He’d asked. They might have let her alone if he hadn’t asked.

  He gazed back at her, his grey eyes hard, like shining stones. “So you left your cat behind?”

  Emmie didn’t answer him. She didn’t trust him.

  “You know what’s happening to cats and dogs in London, don’t you?”

  Arthur leaned further over the table, glancing back towards Miss Rose, who was busy counting wooden bricks with the smaller ones. “What? There hasn’t been bombs yet, we’d have heard about it.”

  “Destroyed. All of them.” Jack was still staring at Emmie. “Killed. Because there isn’t going to be enough food to feed them. And because they’ll be so scared of the bombs they’ll go mad. There was a leaflet sent out about it back in the summer, telling people it was the best thing to do. A leaflet from the government, like all those leaflets about shelters, and gas masks. Thousands of cats and dogs are getting put down. They take them to the vets, and the vets—”

  “That isn’t true,” Emmie burst out. “You’re just saying it because … because you hate us.”

  Jack shrugged. “I do hate you. But it’s still true. It made my mother cry, when she read about it in the newspaper. Some duchess is trying to get people to send them all to her country house, but it’s too late now.” He smiled, triumphantly, and Emmie could only shake her head. It was horrible; it couldn’t be true. But the duchess made it all sound real. How could he make that up?

  “Lucy wasn’t a proper pet…” she whispered. “No one would take her to the vets.”

  He shrugged. “I bet they’re catching strays too.”

  “Why would they?” Joey broke in suddenly. “Stop sniffing, Emmie. He’s just saying it because he wants to see you cry.”

  Emmie looked round at Joey, her eyes hot and blurred with tears. Was he actually sticking up for her?

  “No one could catch that skinny thing except for you anyway. She’ll be all right. Bet she can run faster than a bomb.”

  Arthur nodded, and then sniggered. “And she’ll be all right in the blackout, won’t she? She’ll fit right in.”

  Emmie snorted tearily. It was an odd feeling, to have them on her side for once.

  “Think what you like. No skin off my nose.” Jack glanced up at them, and his eyes glittered. He dropped his voice. “Anyway, she knows I’m right.”

  Mary Lennox

  Misselthwaite Manor

  14th January 1910

  I have been out into the gardens, because there is nothing else for me to do. It is much colder here, and everything is grey, even the sky. There is a fountain, but it hasn’t any water in it, just a lot of dead leaves.

  There was a bird sitting in one of the trees. I asked an old man who is one of the gardeners, and he told me that the bird is a robin. He chirped at me – it almost felt like he was talking to me. He had a brown body, and a front covered in soft scarlet feathers, and thin spindly little legs. He isn’t like any bird I’ve seen in India. When I saw him first he was sitting in the very highest branch of a tree over a wall. I tried to follow him, but there was no door to the garden full of trees. I think that the robin was in the garden that has been locked up for years and years.

  Martha, the maid, told me about this locked garden, and one of the gardeners too. I tried to ask him where the door was, but he was cross and said I was meddlesome.

  I want to see the garden, but it doesn’t have a door, or not that I can find, and I walked all the way round. There are two kitchen gardens and then the orchard, but there is another garden beyond that, with no way to get inside it at all.

  The robin was in the locked garden, I’m almost sure he was. I am going to find the door, or perhaps I shall climb over the wall. Then I could see the robin again. He sang so loudly, and he liked me, I think. I wish he would make friends with me.

  I don’t think I have ever had a friend, and I should like one.

  Emmie wriggled herself further under the quilt, fighting to stay asleep. She was warm, and if she woke up properly she would know how dark it was. The wind was screaming around the house, blowing down off the great purple slope of the moor. It howled in the chimney like a wild beast, and Emmie didn’t want to wake up and have to think about it. She pulled the quilt right over her head, and that warm, breathless darkness felt safe. But it was too hot and stuffy to stay huddled underneath for long. She burrowed out like a mouse, and lay twitching and listening to the wind, and Ruby’s thin little snore. The diary slithered slowly down the heaped patchwork quilt, and thumped on to the floor, but Emmie felt too edgy to reach down and pick it up.

  The wild beast noises were dying down now, but they were still eerie. Just strange little hiccupping cries – what made the wind do that? Perhaps it was an owl? Perhaps there was an owl sitting on the windowsill and wailing. Arthur had seen one, swooping down low over the courtyard – or so he had said.

  Emmie shivered, even though the room was so warm, waiting to hear the tap-tap-tap of a beak. She was properly awake now, it was no good pretending she wasn’t. She sat up, huddling her arms around her knees, and listening. However many times she told herself the noise was only the wind, it did sound as though something was trying to force its way in. She jumped as the windows rattled again, and gasped for breath.

  The wind dropped to a still calm that was just as frightening – the empty space where the sound had been echoed around her. Emmie buried her face in the quilt over her knees and waited for the wind to roar and slam itself against the walls again.

  But it didn’t. Instead a thin, sobbing wail ec
hoed down the passageway, so quiet and sad that it made Emmie gasp, and whimper herself.

  That was not the wind. She’d heard it earlier too, she realized, but she had thought the stifled gasps were part of the storm battling down from the moor. Now she was almost sure the noise wasn’t an owl either. It was somebody else, crying.

  She peered over at Ruby – no, she was definitely fast asleep. Miss Rose and Miss Dearlove slept next door to the rooms with the smaller children in, so if it was one of them crying, surely they’d have got up to see what was the matter? But she couldn’t hear footsteps, or anyone talking. Just the sobs, worn out and miserable, as though whoever was making them didn’t expect anyone to come. They were only crying because they couldn’t not.

  Emmie shuddered. What if only she could hear the noise, because it was a ghost crying in the dark? The house was old and full of history enough to be haunted, after all. Then she wrinkled her nose thoughtfully. If there was even a rumour of a ghost at Misselthwaite, that stuck-up Jack would have told her and Arthur and Joey. He would have done his best to scare them silly. In fact, she was quite surprised that he hadn’t invented a ghost, and dressed up in a sheet to try and catch them out. But still – in the dark, it was hard not to believe in ghosts…

  Another weary cry whispered into the room, and Emmie got out of bed. She wasn’t sure if she was going to see what was the matter, or if she was going to tell whoever it was to shut up. She just couldn’t listen to that sad noise any more.

  The Manor had electric light in most of the rooms, but because there were so many windows, and the staff hadn’t been able to fit proper blackout curtains over all of them, the children had been given candlesticks to carry if they needed to visit the lavatory at the end of the passage. Emmie lit her candle from the night-light flame and marched out into the passageway, clicking the door shut gently behind her. The passage looked darker even than her bedroom, and the blackness seemed to rush in on the small flame of her candle, as if it would like to swallow it up. Huge grey shadow-monsters loomed up the walls as Emmie began to walk towards the noise. It didn’t help to know that they were only her own shadow, thrown by the darting candle flame. What if the candle blew out? Then the shadows might leap on her.

  Emmie knew that was stupid, but she couldn’t help believing it anyway, just a little. Breathing fast, she cupped her hand painfully close around the flame, and hurried down the passage, trying to work out which door the crying was coming from.

  She got all the way to the little staircase where Jack had hidden on the first night – was that really only three nights ago? But then the noise seemed hard to pin down – as though it was echoing back from somewhere else. Perhaps that was only the wind… Emmie stood hesitating at the bottom of the steps, wondering whether to go up. But the wind had died down again, and the night was peaceful. Had she imagined it then?

  The candle flame skittered sideways in a sudden draught, and Emmie gasped as the shadows flung themselves in great tearing leaps around the panelled staircase. Perhaps the crying had stopped because the ghost was just behind her now, instead. It had tempted her in…

  She shut her eyes tight, wishing for Lucy, Miss Rose, even Miss Dearlove, anyone. But there was only the faint creak of the floorboards, her own weight shifting. She was all alone, and the night was still. Perhaps no one had been crying after all.

  26th January 1910

  I am sure it was magic.

  The robin showed me the key, buried in the hole – but something made him look for worms just there, just then. I might not have picked it up – it looked so worn and rusted and dirty. But I had to, because I knew it was the key to the garden that had been locked for ten years. I still couldn’t find the door, but the key in my pocket made me think that I would, one day.

  It was when I went out to skip with the rope that Martha’s mother sent me. I had never seen a skipping rope, but Martha showed me – she can skip to a hundred. I can’t skip to any more than thirty before I get tired, but I will get better. I skipped almost all the way down the walk by the locked garden, and the robin came to watch me.

  He sat on the top of the wall and sang to make me look at him, and it was magic, because it meant I was watching when the wind blew through the ivy. He made me look, and I saw the brown metal of the door handle, just for a second. The door was painted green like all the others, but so faded and worn and covered in ivy that I never knew it was there. The ivy hangs down like a thick curtain, and I crept underneath it, and opened the door with the key.

  It was so still. So quiet – but then no one has spoken inside it for ten years. Only the birds have been there. Everything was covered in great grey trails of roses; they’ve climbed and clambered over the trees and the benches and the statues and they’ve even gone snaking out over the grass in some places. They’ve grown everywhere, but I think they’re dead – they look so dry and grey. I wish they weren’t. I wish I’d seen the garden how it was ten years ago, with all the roses flowering. But then it wouldn’t have been so quiet and secret and mine. I can play my own stories there, and no one will watch me, or laugh. I have been digging around the bulbs, and there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of them, all sending up little green points. I pulled the grass away to help them breathe. I don’t know what to do to help the roses though. I don’t know how to make them grow.

  I asked the gardener about roses, but he snarled at me again – he is the most bad-tempered person, I have ever met. He might even be sulkier than me. The housekeeper said I was nasty-tempered, I heard her, and Martha is always saying how strange I am. But in my Secret Garden, I am only me, and no one minds.

  And I have the key – the only key! I am keeping it in the drawer where I hide this diary, to make sure no one sees.

  Emmie gripped the pages tighter, breathing fast, her heart jumping. Mary had a place all of her own – a secret, like Lucy had been Emmie’s secret. And now the diaries were in Emmie’s drawer. In her bedside table. So maybe the key…

  She sat up in bed, the diary almost sliding off her knees, and then glanced quickly over at Ruby. Had she woken her? But Ruby was still a small hump under her bedclothes, which wasn’t surprising. Emmie wasn’t sure quite what time it was, but she knew it was very early. When she’d woken up she’d almost been scared to open her eyes, in case it was still the same shadow-haunted darkness, but even through the heavy curtains, a faint light had turned the room an early-morning grey.

  Now the light was growing brighter, quite bright enough to see that there was definitely no key hidden in the drawer under the diaries. But this must be the place Mary had meant? Still… It was a long time ago, Emmie thought, pushing the drawer closed with a sigh. Almost thirty years. Who knew what had happened to the key – and to the door, and the garden?

  Emmie’s heart jumped. Was it still a secret? Mary had written that it was the garden beyond the orchard. And that the wall was covered in ivy – that was the dark-leaved stuff. Mr Sowerby had said so. Emmie knew where it was. She could go and see.

  Perhaps Arthur and Joey had already found it, Emmie thought with a sharp jolt of disappointment. They had climbed the trees, after all – perhaps they had looked over into the secret garden.

  She tried to remember the ivy-covered wall along the path. Had she seen a door? She had been into the kitchen gardens; that was where she’d seen Mr Sowerby. She was almost sure that she had walked through all three – but she had kept away from the orchard, as Arthur and Joey had been there.

  She would go and look today. Maybe even now before breakfast. No one had said that they couldn’t go out early, Emmie reasoned to herself, slipping out of bed again, and dressing as quietly as she could.

  She padded down the passageway barefooted, just as she had done the night before – there was no wind howling at the windows now, the storm had blown itself out, and she could see the pearly sky was deepening to blue.

  Emmie glanced up at the l
ittle staircase again, frowning. Perhaps it was the way the chimneys were built, that the wind made strange noises down them. In the daylight, the whimpering sounds seemed unlikely. Emmie shook off the memory of those haunting little cries, and stepped cautiously down the side stairs. The key was in the door, a heavy black iron key that made her think of Mary, and the door to the secret garden. Emmie’s fingers slipped on it in her eagerness, and she hauled it open, dragging on her shoes and dashing out down the gravelled path, forgetting to be quiet. She shoved through the shrubbery gate and ran as fast as she could through the trees, the shortest way down to the long path outside the walled gardens. This was where Mary had described the door, Emmie was sure of it. It was where she had been skipping when she saw the wind blow away the ivy.

  As she came on to the path alongside the great wall, Emmie stopped running. It seemed too important to run – she couldn’t come at the secret garden in a rush. She almost felt as though she needed to creep up on it, in case it had disappeared, like something in a fairy tale.

  She came towards the end of the wall, where Mary had written that the ivy was thicker and more overgrown than anywhere else, and looked round furtively. But everywhere was deserted this early in the morning. Perhaps she was the only one awake. The ivy still hung over the wall in a great heavy curtain, and there was more of it here. Emmie could feel her heart suddenly thumping all through her as she stepped on to the flower bed, behind a gnarled lilac tree, and felt under the ivy for the door handle. The ivy rustled against her fingers, and the flowers smelled odd, but she hardly cared – for there under her fingers was a smooth brass doorknob, worn silken with use.

  Emmie stopped, rubbing her fingers over the smooth metal. Would it open? Would she be able to get inside without the key? She stood hesitating, trails of ivy draped over and around her, not quite daring to turn the handle in case she was still shut out.