Tilly's Moonlight Garden

by Julia Green

  Copyright © 2012 by Julia Green

  Cover and internal design © 2012 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover illustration © Turine Tran

  Internal illustrations © Paul Howard

  Cover and jacket design by Jane Archer

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

  www.jabberwockykids.com

  Originally published in Great Britain in 2012 by Oxford University Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.

  Source of Production: Bang Printing, Brainerd, Minnesota, USA

  Date of Production: September 2012

  Run Number: 18379

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For my parents,

  Barbara and Reg Green

  with love

  Chapter 1

  Something was different.

  The fox sensed it.

  Curled up in its daytime hiding place in a nest of brambles, the fox lifted its head. It pricked up both ears to listen.

  It heard a car and voices. Next, a big moving truck drew up on the road outside the house. Someone banged a door at the back as they opened it.

  For hours, the moving men went back and forth, carrying boxes into the house. Tables and chairs came next; beds and bookcases, lamps and cushions and rugs. A whole house-load of things was carried out of the truck, up the front path, through the open door into the house.

  All day, the fox tried to sleep, curled up with the tip of its tail wrapped around its body, but its ears twitched, listening for danger.

  As evening came and shadows lengthened across the grass, the truck drove away. The front door banged shut. At last it was quiet—just the normal sounds of an autumn evening. A blackbird sang at the top of a tree. A squirrel ran along the edge of the rickety wooden fence.

  The fox uncurled itself. It yawned and stretched.

  Silently, on velvet paws, it slipped through the bars of the gate into the garden. No one saw its slim, red-brown body and long tail as it stopped at the edge of the lawn to sniff the night air. It looked up at the house.

  The fox called out into the dark. It was a strange sound, an eerie, high-pitched scream that echoed around the night garden and made everything afraid.

  Chapter 2

  Tilly’s spine tingled. She uncurled her legs from under the blanket, slid off the sofa, and went to the window to look out. What had made that horrible noise? But it was dark outside; all she could see was her own reflection in the glass, staring back at her.

  “Tilly?” Dad called from upstairs. “Time to get ready for bed. I’ll come and say good night later.”

  Tilly opened the living room door. The hall was dark. A tiny bit of yellowy light shone in from the streetlight outside, through the pane of glass above the front door, just enough to fill the hall with shadowy creatures. The stairs seemed to lead up into a yawning, black nothing.

  Tilly waited, in case that scary screaming sound came again. It was so quiet in the house she could hear the tick, tick, tick of the clock on the kitchen wall. She took a deep breath. She made herself step into the shadowy dark. She dashed to the bottom of the stairs, reached up to the light switch, and flicked it on.

  There! Now she could see it was just the hallway, with coats hanging on pegs, cold tiles on the floor, and a staircase with a strip of green carpet going up the middle, held tight by gold metal rods on each step.

  Everything in this house was old-fashioned and strange and smelled funny. The ceilings were high up and there were plaster flowers in the middle where the lights hung from. It was much bigger than their old house. It was almost big enough, Tilly thought, to get lost in. The furniture was big and dark too—wardrobes and cupboards and tables and chairs and pictures in heavy gold frames that had belonged to the old lady who had lived in the house before she died. The walls had old-fashioned wallpaper, with patterns of flowers and birds.

  They would change all that, Dad said. Paint the whole house, top to bottom, to freshen it up. Get rid of some of the furniture that the old lady had left behind and make the house more theirs. Eventually.

  It would be a good house for playing hide-and-seek in, Tilly thought. But she didn’t know anyone around here to play with. Not yet. In her old neighborhood, where the houses were all joined together and went in steps down the hill, all the children dashed in and out of each other’s houses every day after school and all day on the weekend. Her best friend, Ally, lived in the house two doors down. And now they were all miles and miles away.

  Tilly went up the bit of stairs that turned the corner, and then along the hallway. The carpet was soft, like moss under her feet. It went in a strip, with bare brown boards on either side. She was careful to stay in the middle. The dark wood on either side was shiny, like water. She was on a moss bridge, going over a river, and if she fell…

  Tilly stopped outside Mom’s bedroom door. She listened. Not a sound. There was no strip of light shining out from under the door. Mom must be asleep. For a moment, Tilly thought about pushing open the heavy door, tiptoeing in to kiss Mom good night…

  But she mustn’t wake Mom up. Mom wasn’t very well. Just as they’d unpacked the very last boxes, Mom’s head started hurting so much she had to go and lie down. And then it got much worse, and the doctor came, and all Tilly’s excitement about moving to the new house got swallowed up in worrying about Mom.

  The doctor said Mom needed to sleep so she could get better faster, and so that the baby would be all right. The baby was growing inside Mom; it needed to grow a lot more before it was ready to be born in early spring.

  “So, please be extra quiet and helpful, Tilly,” Dad said when the doctor had gone, “because I’ve got enough on my plate already.”

  Tilly padded on past the shut door, along to her own room. She stretched her hand up through the open gap and switched on the light. What was that scuttling under th
e bed? She shivered again.

  She knew what Dad would say. “Old houses are full of noises. It’s the radiator clunking and gurgling, water running along old pipes. It’s only the draft from the window making the curtain twitch. You’ve such a vivid imagination, Tilly!”

  Tilly turned on the night-light next to the bed. She picked up her neatly folded pajamas from her pillow and took them with her to the bathroom next door. It was a small room, so you could see into all its corners right away, and it was bright with white tiles and shiny faucets and the towels hanging on a warm rod. Tilly washed her hands and face, and brushed her teeth. She put on her pink rose-patterned pajamas and slippers. She padded back to the bedroom and closed the door and turned off the big light and climbed into bed to wait for Dad to finish his work and come upstairs to say good night.

  The night-light on the bedside table glowed like a moon. Little Fox was waiting for her, tucked under the blanket where no one else could see him. She knew she was too old, really, for night-lights and stuffed animals. But Little Fox was different. Tilly stroked his furry red-brown head against her cheek. His nose and eyes were shiny bright, and his ears and paws had black tips, but the tip of his tail and his chest were white. Little Fox had been with Tilly forever and ever. She had stroked and loved him so much he had a bald patch on the back of his head.

  She waited for ages, but still Dad didn’t come.

  The fox called again. Its eerie cry echoed into the night.

  The sound wove in and out of the night garden and into Tilly’s dreams.

  Chapter 3

  In the silvery light of dawn, everything looked different. The shadows in the room were dove gray. The cupboard with the framed photo on it of the last house, her bathrobe hanging on the back of the door, her old toy box, and the shelves of books were all soft gray shapes, as if they were waiting for proper daylight for the real colors to come back in.

  Tilly listened.

  Why had she woken up? Had there been a noise?

  Sometimes she woke up in the middle of the night and she thought she could still hear the echo of something, some sound. But she couldn’t say what, exactly, she had heard.

  The house breathed deeply, as if it was sleeping.

  Mom was sleeping. Dad was sleeping.

  Tilly climbed out of bed. She padded across the carpet to the curtains and pulled them back just enough to make a gap, so she could see out of the window.

  A fox trotted across the lawn below. Its black feet left silver prints in the damp grass. It stopped, looked up at Tilly at the window. For a moment it stood still as a statue, one paw lifted up, ears pricked up, and watched her. It looked deep into her eyes.

  Tilly pressed her face closer to the cold window glass. The fox turned, trotted on across the grass, and disappeared between two silvery-gray bushes.

  Tilly’s breath misted the glass; she rubbed it clear again but there was no sign of the fox now, just its faint prints left behind in the damp grass. The garden lay still and waiting, full of gray shadows. Tilly shivered. She climbed down off the windowsill and crept back into bed, under the warm blanket. Her hand reached out for Little Fox, but he must have fallen out of the bed, and before Tilly could climb out again to find him, she was drifting back into sleep.

  Tilly thought about the real fox while she was at school the next day. When Dad came for her after school, she nearly told him what she had seen. But she didn’t. She kept the fox her secret.

  “How’s Mom?” Tilly asked him as they went into the house.

  “Resting. But you can see her later and tell her about your day. Now, I’ve got work to do. Why don’t you play in the garden till teatime, Tilly?”

  Tilly sat for a while on the seat under the big tree in the middle of the lawn. The garden was warm in the afternoon sunshine. Even though it was late autumn, bees buzzed from one pink flower to another in the flower bed next to the hedge. Flies that looked like tiny wasps, but weren’t, hovered over yellow flowers next to a wigwam of sticks holding up withered, old bean plants. White butterflies flitted over the cabbage patch. The old lady who used to live here had loved her vegetable garden. “When we get ourselves organized,” Dad had said, “we’ll grow our own vegetables too.”

  Not cabbages, Tilly hoped. She got up and walked across the grass, the same way the fox had gone so early this morning. The sun had dried the grass; no paw prints were left. She found the two silvery bushes and went between them, brushing against the leaves that looked more green than silver now and left a strong smell on her hands. On the other side there was a metal gate.

  Tilly peered through. A grassy path went in both directions, left and right, and just across the other side was another gate, but wooden and tumbledown. Where did that go?

  “Tilly? Tilly?” Dad called.

  Tilly ran back to the lawn.

  Dad put a tray down on the grass next to the seat under the tree. There was a blue mug of tea for him and Tilly’s pink mug for her. Dad had made sandwiches.

  “Peanut butter,” he said. “And banana.”

  Tilly wrinkled up her nose. Dad had a funny idea about what tasted nice in sandwiches.

  “Have one,” Dad said. “It’s a long time until supper.”

  Tilly wasn’t hungry. She hadn’t been hungry since Mom got ill.

  She nibbled the corner of a sandwich. The peanut butter made her tongue sticky and thick and horrible.

  A small bird flew down from the tree and landed on the grass. It looked at Tilly with its beady eye, its head to one side. Tilly picked off a crumb of sandwich and threw it. The bird hopped forward and picked up the crumb. It flew back up to the branch, above Tilly’s head.

  Crumb by crumb, the bird ate all of Tilly’s sandwich. Dad didn’t notice. He was busy drinking his tea and thinking. Absentmindedly, Dad ate the other three sandwiches. Tilly knew he was in the middle of writing something, and all he was thinking about was the next bit of his story. That was the trouble with having a dad who was a writer. Most of the time, she didn’t mind.

  Dad slurped up the last sip of tea. He looked at Tilly as if he had only just remembered she was there. “How was school?”

  “All right,” Tilly said, even though it wasn’t.

  “Made any new friends yet?”

  Tilly shook her head. It was too soon. It was hard, starting all over again at a new school with new people. She thought about Ally. She wished she were at the new school with her.

  “One more chapter and some more tidying up in the attic, and then I’ll stop for today,” Dad said. “You OK out here by yourself for a little longer?”

  Tilly nodded. “I like it,” she said.

  “Good.” Dad ruffled her hair.

  “Don’t, Dad!” Tilly ducked away from his hand.

  He picked up the tray and went back to the house.

  Tilly walked around the garden on the ashy path that went down one side, past rows of raspberry bushes, along under an apple tree and a prickly bit with other fruit bushes, past a stinky compost heap, and then around the other corner and back next to a hedge. What now?

  She picked the last rose petals from the bush near the rickety wooden shed. She found an old jam jar on a dusty shelf inside the shed and filled it with water from the outside tap, and squashed in the petals and stirred them with a stick, to make rose scent. She put the scent jar on one of the shelves in the shed, next to a box of nails and a reel of garden string.

  She crossed back over the lawn to the metal garden gate and looked through again. The wooden gate opposite had rusty hinges and no latch. It was rotten and falling off the top hinge, and it was slightly open, with a gap just big enough for a slim fox.

  Tilly wanted to go through too. But not yet.

  Dad was calling her again. “Time to come in! Where are you? Tilly?”

  She was glad s
he was hidden behind the bushes. If he saw her at the gate, she knew he’d say she shouldn’t open it. Shouldn’t go through. But if he didn’t see her, if he didn’t say the actual words, maybe she still could.

  Just as she turned away, back to the house, she thought she heard something—a snatch of a song, in a thin, reedy voice. Someone did live close by, then, Tilly thought. Someone who might be a new friend, like Ally. Her spine prickled. It was an old-fashioned sort of song, like something Granny would know.

  “Hurry up!” Dad was calling.

  Tilly followed him into the house.

  “When I was sorting through the attic I found something you might like,” Dad said.

  “What is it?” Tilly asked.

  “Come and see.”

  Tilly went up the stairs behind Dad, along the landing to her bedroom.

  An old-fashioned dollhouse sat squarely on the floor in front of the radiator. The walls were made of thin wood, painted a creamy-white color. It had four green-painted bay windows at the front: two upstairs and two downstairs on either side of a green front door. The roof was painted red like tiles, and it had two chimneys at either end.

  “Open up the front,” Dad said.

  Tilly knelt down. The whole of the front of the house opened, so you could get to the rooms inside. There were two bedrooms and a tiny bathroom upstairs, and a kitchen, a living room, and a hall with a tiled floor downstairs. The bedrooms had wallpaper with a pattern of pink climbing roses. There was furniture too: a bed in each room, a wooden kitchen table and chairs, even tiny pots and pans, and a china dog in a tiny wicker basket.

  Tilly lifted everything out carefully and blew off the dust, and then put it all back again just as it had been before.

  “The back opens up too,” Dad said.

  Tilly pulled the dollhouse away from the radiator so she could reach around to the back. There were two plain wooden doors with hinges on either side; it wasn’t realistic, like the front of the house. She opened the doors and found another set of rooms, all empty except for a family of small dollhouse people: a mother, a father, and a girl, in faded clothes made of felt and with tiny feet in metal shoes. The figures were soft and bendy, so you could make them sit down or straighten them up again, or move their arms as if they were doing things.