Return to the Secret Garden

by Holly Webb

  He looked sideways at her. “I could help you, with that weeding,” he muttered sleepily. “You could show me where the robin’s nest is.”

  “I think it’s in the roses, in that dark tangled bit, the corner just along from the bench.”

  He nodded. “That’s a white rose. It’s half-wild, but Mother loves it. David showed me a secret tunnel underneath it once, but I got stuck in the thorns; he had to pull me out.” He yawned, wriggling down a little more on his pillows. “Did you see the robin fly in there?”

  “Again and again,” Emmie whispered, watching him struggle to keep his eyes open. His eyelids fluttered, thin and fragile-looking and blue. She could tell he had been ill. “He must have a mate. Perhaps she’s sitting in the nest already. Perhaps she’ll lay eggs any day soon, deep in the roses…”

  “I can’t see anything,” Jack complained, shifting grumpily on the painted metal bench. “And I’m cold. Can’t we go in?”

  “No. Sssshhhh. Any minute now, I bet.” Emmie knelt up, peering around them at the tangle of rose stems and ivy in the corner of the garden. That patch was wilder than the rest – Emmie thought that perhaps when Mary and Dickon and Colin had rediscovered the garden, they had left that corner wild for the sake of the birds, and it had stayed that way. “It isn’t that cold, anyway. All the snow’s gone.” To Emmie, the spring sunshine felt delicious, even if wasn’t really warm. It made her cheerful. She kept finding unexpected things, first the snowdrops, and now primroses everywhere, in little creamy clusters.

  “So? I know it’s gone, that doesn’t make it summer, you know. The wind’s still cold.”

  Emmie turned back to look at him, suddenly worried. Perhaps it was because he’d been so ill with measles. Maybe it really was too cold for him? She was used to sitting for hours on a freezing fire escape, after all. Even Lucy had preferred to stay inside today. She was curled up by the huge stove, charming Mrs Evans into her feeding her scraps.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Jack muttered, turning away from her. “I’m not sick. I’d have gone back to school ages ago, if they hadn’t evacuated it so far away. And I’m stronger than you. I could beat you in a race.”

  A flutter of brown feathers caught Emmie’s eye, and she reached behind her, grabbing at Jack’s arm. “Look!” she whispered, leaning her head fiercely towards the grey rose stems. “Look! I told you.”

  The robin was perched among the faded stems, his fragile claws planted between the thorns, and some little insect caught in his beak. He eyed the children suspiciously, and Emmie caught her breath. What if they were too close? What if he decided that he and his mate should not make their nest here after all? But he gave them one last stare, and darted further in, so that all they could see of him was a faint dark movement in the coiling branches.

  “He’s feeding her,” Jack said. “They’ve built the nest, and now he’s bringing her food to build up her strength. Or maybe she’s even laid the eggs already. I don’t know, it might be too early.”

  Emmie turned round to look at him, wide-eyed. “You know all about birds’ nests?”

  Jack shrugged. “Only what everybody knows. There are nests all over the gardens.”

  Emmie sighed. “I didn’t know. I thought it was special.”

  Jack looked uncomfortable. “I still wanted to see. I like him.” Then he laughed. “He looked a bit like you just then. Sort of grumpy and suspicious.”

  “He isn’t like that at all!” Emmie cried, and then clapped her hand over her mouth, worrying that she’d frightened the robins. But there was no movement inside the clustered stems. “I know he’s shy and strange now, but before he was so friendly. He used to come and watch me when I was exploring. It’s just like…” She stopped short. She had been going to say that he was like the robin who’d shown Mary the way into the secret garden. She was still sure that he was one of that long-ago robin’s descendants. She had even imagined that the story was passed down among the robins, the same way that Mary had passed the story down to her through the diary. Perhaps they whispered it to their babies in the egg. This robin and his mate would tell their eggs. They could be telling it to them now, this very minute.

  Emmie looked round to find Jack rolling his eyes at her. “Joey and Arthur are right, calling you Little Dolly Daydream. What were you going to say? About the robin?”

  “Only that I wondered if there had been robins nesting here for always,” Emmie said quickly.

  Jack looked as though he wasn’t sure he believed her, but he didn’t say so. “Come on. I have to move, or I’m going to freeze on to this bench.”

  Emmie got up, gasping as her stiffened knees gave. “Ow. Oh, ow…” She balanced on one leg, shaking her foot.

  “You look like a stork.” Jack snorted. “A stork that’s going to fall over. Come on. Is there anything else new since yesterday?”

  They had got into the habit of this now – walking around the garden every day to point out the things that had changed and grown. It was better, having someone to show her discoveries to – even if the someone was Jack, rude and surly and far too boastful. Emmie had never expected to like him, but she almost did.

  She strolled along the line of trees, peering for leaf buds. Perhaps they were a little larger than they had been the day before? Jack dashed ahead, sniffing like a spaniel, as though he could catch the scent of spring.

  “Oh!” Emmie crouched down, and Jack came racing back to her. “These weren’t here yesterday! But they must have been…” She frowned at the mound of heart-shaped emerald leaves clustered around the trunk of the bare apple tree. They seemed too bright for her to have missed them. She leaned closer, intrigued, and caught a wisp of sweetness that wasn’t only the fresh scent of growing things. There were flowers buried among the leaves, she saw now. Tiny dark purple flowers that seemed too small to send out so strong a perfume. Emmie sat back, frowning. They smelled oddly familiar.

  “Violets.” Jack squatted down next to her. “Mm. Now I’m hungry.”

  “What?”

  “Well, the sweets.” He sighed at her, exasperated again. “You must have had them sometime. Or seen them in a sweet shop? Mother likes them. She has them in a little tin, violet pastilles, I think they’re called. They taste funny – sort of flowery.”

  Emmie shrugged. “Never heard of them.” Sometimes Jack made her feel as if she didn’t know anything. She didn’t want to say that she had never been to a sweet shop. “Are they made of these?”

  “Yes. And they make scent too. Your Miss Dearlove wears it. It’s horrible.”

  Emmie nodded, a smile lifting one corner of her mouth. That was what the smell was. “It’s nicer on the flowers. On Miss Dearlove it smells a bit musty.”

  Two days later, Emmie found a little tin, sitting on her bed, white, with a pattern of purple flowers painted on, flowers like the ones she had found in the garden. She could see that the tin said Violet on it, but most of the other words she didn’t understand. She suspected they might be French. Emmie levered it open with her nails, sniffing as a wave of sugar and flowers poured out. Inside were tiny sweets, richly purple and pressed into the shape of flowers. She slipped one into her mouth, smiling in surprise at the intense sweetness. The sweet stayed in the side of her cheek all through afternoon lessons, until she crunched it as she chased Jack out into the garden. Emmie suspected that the tin might last her for ever.

  Emmie followed Jack anxiously along the passage. She could see his white shirt in the dim light, she had her eyes fixed on it. The house was so large, and although she had been all round the gardens, she had never explored much inside at all. “We aren’t allowed,” she’d told Jack, when he first suggested it.

  “I am. It’s my house,” Jack pointed out, with his lordly air.

  “Miss Sowerby said we weren’t to.”

  “You can come if you’re with me. And besides, what else are you g
oing to do?” Jack waved at the window – the rain was so heavy that it seemed to be running down the glass in sheets. Lucy was sitting on the windowsill staring out at it disapprovingly. As Jack marched to the door of the schoolroom, she sprang down, and set off after him, waving her tail like a flag.

  Emmie looked hesitantly around the room. It was Jack’s house. She gave up worrying and chased after them down the passage, and then another passage, and another, past suits of armour, and strange dark paintings, and hundreds and hundreds of doors.

  “I’m lost,” Emmie called anxiously, and Jack turned back to grin at her. “Where are we going, anyway? I don’t have any idea how to get back.” Then she bit her lip worriedly, hoping she wasn’t giving him ideas of running off and leaving her behind. Nobody would find her for years. She’d die, and by the time anyone thought to look for her she’d just be a pile of bones. Emmie shuddered. Was that what was in all those old wooden chests they kept walking past?

  “I don’t either,” Jack admitted cheerfully. “But I always get back in the end. No one really uses this bit of the house, they haven’t for years and years. Even before Mother had to shut bits up because of the war. It’s like being explorers.”

  “You don’t know where you’re going?” Emmie hissed.

  “No. I was going to show you the elephants, but I thought we’d get to them about three corners ago, and we haven’t.”

  “Elephants?” Emmie was momentarily distracted from being furious with him.

  “Carved ivory ones – there are ninety-six of them, I counted. Some of them are only as big as my thumbnail. They live in a cabinet in a room at this end of the house somewhere.”

  “Don’t you mind being lost?” Emmie asked him. He didn’t seem to be worried at all.

  Jack shrugged. “I’ll work out where we are eventually. And if I don’t, someone will always come and find me.”

  Emmie supposed that actually, someone would come and find her too. She just wasn’t quite as sure of it as he was.

  Jack looked around at the heavy wooden doors, and then marched over to open one. Emmie had thought they might all be locked, but the door opened easily, with only a faint wheezing creak.

  “I wonder when anyone last came in here,” Jack murmured, looking round the door. “It smells of dust.” He put his hands in his pockets and strolled in, but Emmie thought perhaps he was only pretending not to care. The empty stillness of the room was daunting.

  The rain made the room dimly grey, so that the furniture seemed to loom at them out of the shadows. There was a huge bed up against the wall, carved from black wood, and draped with heavy red velvet curtains. Emmie couldn’t imagine sleeping in it, swathed in dark, dusty stuff. It would be impossible to breathe.

  Lucy jumped up on to the gilt-embroidered coverlet and sneezed as a little cloud of dust puffed up under her paws.

  Emmie followed her into the room, looking around cautiously. She almost expected the room’s owner to appear, and tell them to get out. It did seem like a room that had belonged to someone, once. There were ornaments on the mantelpiece, and a dressing table over by the window, with more red velvet for a skirt. The mirror was dark with greenish spots. Emmie turned away from it suddenly, afraid that she might see another face behind her own.

  The walls were covered in tapestries, like the ones in Emmie’s own room, but these hangings made a garden. Stiff, formal flowers twined all over them, and birds perched here and there. Emmie walked around the room examining them, and trying to see what the flowers were.

  “There’s a rabbit!” The little creature was hunched nervously in one corner under a tree covered in fruit. She turned to Jack, shaking her head. “Are all the rooms like this?” she murmured.

  Jack nodded. “Mostly. I haven’t explored all of them, though. It’s not as much fun on your own. David used to make trails,” he added, his eyes widening as though he’d forgotten. “He had a ball of string, so we could follow it back.”

  Emmie rolled her eyes. “And you didn’t think to bring one? I must say, your brother sounds a lot cleverer than you.”

  “He’s better at everything than me.” Jack’s voice was small, and he didn’t look at her, just went on leaning on the windowsill, gazing down at the gardens in the rain. “We’re not as far round as I thought we were. I can see the kitchen gardens, look.”

  “I didn’t mean it,” Emmie said guiltily. “I mean, of course he’s better at things than you. He’s years older, isn’t he?”

  “Eight,” Jack agreed. “But he used to let me follow him around when he was home in the holidays. He liked it. Dad used to say it was as if David had a puppy.” He frowned suddenly, and pulled away from the window. “I have been in this room before, I’d forgotten. It was years and years ago.” He plunged across the room to a huge wardrobe standing in the corner furthest from the window, and flung the doors open. “I thought so.” Emmie peered over his shoulder. The bottom of the wardrobe was piled with round boxes, patterned and striped in faded colours, and fastened with ribbon. Jack fought with a bow, and then lifted off the lid from the topmost box, grinning. “Can you imagine wearing this?” He pulled out a hat that was so huge it looked more like a cake, or a meringue. Mrs Evans and Mrs Martin had been trying to find ideas to get round rationing by looking at old recipe books, but mostly it had just made them feel worse. Emmie had seen a whole page with drawings of elaborate desserts that looked like this hat. It was swathed in puffs of net, dotted with little silk flowers, and ribbon rosettes. Jack reached out and perched it on Emmie’s head, yanking it down around her ears and making her squeak. It was surprisingly heavy.

  Jack pushed her over towards the spotted mirror on the dressing table, and Emmie let him. The hat might have belonged to Mary, or perhaps to Jack’s grandmother who haunted the garden. She wanted to see it. There were no such things as ghosts, she told herself.

  There was so much hat that she could hardly see anything of herself underneath it. She was no more than a small, freckled nose and a pointed chin, sticking out under a pile of flowered net. Lucy sprang on to the dressing table and peered up at her worriedly.

  “It’s all right,” Emmie murmured. “I know it looks like it’s eating me, but it isn’t. This hat is the silliest thing I’ve ever seen… Actually, no.” She had turned round, and caught Jack in an absurdly tall grey top hat that was falling down round his ears. “That is.” She pressed her hand across her mouth, giggling and sneezing in the drifts of dust as Jack let go of the hat, and it sank slowly over his eyebrows.

  “Get it off me!”

  “I think you look better like that,” Emmie told him, straight-faced, as she pulled the top hat off.

  “Just watch it, or I really will leave you here…” Jack told her, as they packed the hats away. Then he grabbed her hand. “Come on. I want to find those elephants.”

  Emmie was hidden, stretched out flat in the damp grass under one of the lilac bushes. It had dark pinkish-purple flowers, great fat clusters of them, and the scent was so sweet that Emmie wanted to drink it.

  She could hear Jack tiptoeing around, looking for her. He thought he was being so clever, but she knew exactly where he was. The only thing that might give her away would be if Lucy decided to come and join in. The cat didn’t understand hide and seek; if she decided to curl up under the lilac with Emmie, she’d purr and purr, and march around finding the best place to sit. Lucy was sleeping in the sun on the edge of the statue, though. At least, Emmie thought she was. She rolled over a little, peering out past the fringe of long grass. There was still a puddle of black fur slopped languorously over the edge of the stone plinth. Lucy looked like she was melting.

  The garden was so still in the early summer heat, with only Jack’s footsteps breaking the silence. It was as if the year was making up for the harsh winter, trying to fill everyone with sunlight. Making up for the bad news too. The newspapers seemed to get worse every day.
The Germans had invaded Holland and Belgium, and now they had poured into France. There was a British army in France too, the British Expeditionary Force, but it was a lot smaller than the wave of German soldiers, and not properly prepared to fight. It was more of a gesture to show good faith to the French, Jack said. His mother had left a letter from Lieutenant Craven lying around, and Jack had read it. Emmie could tell when he was quoting his father; his voice went slower, and deeper, and there were worried lines above his nose.

  Jack lurched from mad games, where he wanted Emmie to chase him all over the house, or he planned to walk along the top of the kitchen garden wall without falling off, or launch Lucy in his toy sailing boat across the pond, to moments of utter misery. He was anxious about his father, whose ship was guarding convoys on their way to Norway, and even more worried about his brother David, who had been based in France flying a Hurricane to support the British Expeditionary Force.

  Now all the planes had been pulled out of France to airbases on the coast, where they had to fly over the Channel to give cover to the army instead. It made the war seem so much closer – that there were only twenty-one miles of sea to keep the Germans away.

  The staff in the servants’ hall had taken to sitting over the newspapers in the evenings, shaking their heads – the British Expeditionary Force hadn’t enough tanks or heavy guns to stand up to the German army. Charlie Barker, one of the under-gardeners, had gone off to enlist back in September, and had been sent to France with the Green Howards, one of the Yorkshire regiments. He’d written to Mr Sowerby that hardly any of his battalion had pistols.

  “Not even compasses,” Mr Sowerby had snarled, folding the letter with sharp, jerky movements of his hands, and crumpling it as he stuffed it into his pocket. “All to do again, jus’ like before. How’re the poor sods meant t’ find their way back home? Runnin’ like rabbits.”