The Time Garden (11 page)

Three of the four trussed-up children seemed to be peacefully sleeping, but the fourth and smallest was awake. Now she looked down at them, and Ann clutched Roger.

"Where have we seen that little girl before?"

"I don't know," said Roger. "She does look sort of familiar."

"I don't seem to see her very clearly," said Eliza.

"Don't you?" said Roger. "I do."

"Hello," called the little girl suddenly. "My name's Martha. Who are you?" And then Ann knew.

But what she knew seemed so impossible that for a second she couldn't take it in.

The others were talking, introducing each other and asking questions.

"We're caught by cannibals," said the little girl. "Did you come to save us?"

"Yes," said Roger. "I guess we must have. Excuse me a minute." For Ann was tugging at his sleeve.

"Don't you see?" she whispered excitedly. "Didn't you hear her say her name's Martha? It's
Mother!
It's Mother when she was a little girl!"

"How could it be?" said Roger.

"I don't know, it just
is
," said Ann.

"Why not?" said Eliza. "If all time is going on at once, the magic could take the wrong switch, couldn't it? We wanted to be with our mothers, but we didn't say
when!
The magic must have caught up with them way back in the past somewhere!"

"It's possible," admitted Roger. "That would be why we see the little one more clearly, I suppose, if she's
our
mother."

"Yes, and the next-smallest one must be mine. I can see her
lots
plainer!" Eliza was excited now. "And the other two must be Uncle Mark and Aunt Jane! Mother always
said
they had wonderful exciting times together!"

"But they weren't brought up on a South Sea Island!" objected Roger. "They would have mentioned it."

"What are you saying?" called the little girl Martha. "I can't hear up here."

Roger looked up at her. She
did
look like his mother, sort of. And she looked even more like the baby pictures that turned up from time to time in old trunks or his mother's bureau drawers. A warm protective feeling surged through him suddenly. But he proceeded with caution.

"How did you get here?"

"I wished," said Martha. "Only I wished wrong and the cannibals caught me. And then Mark and Jane and Kathie wished, and followed me and got caught, too. We've got a kind of magic."

"Why, so have we!" said Ann, beaming at her.

"I knew it!" whispered Eliza to Roger. "I always
knew
Mother and the aunts and Uncle Mark had magic adventures back in the olden days! Something Mother said once made me think so. This is the most wonderful thing that's happened to us
yet!
"

"We've been having magic adventures all summer," confided Martha. "Only we've never run into any other magic children before. I wonder why it happened now?"

"Shall we tell her who we are?" whispered Ann to Eliza and Roger. "I want to."

"I don't think so." Roger shook his head regretfully. "I think she's too young to stand it."

"Her infant brain would give way," agreed Eliza.

"How old are you?" Ann asked the small (yet later to be so grown-up and wise and motherly) Martha.

"I'm seven years old," said Martha. "I'm in the second grade next year. My teacher's name is Miss Van Buskirk."

"Why, she's younger than I am!" marveled Ann.

At this point there was a stirring among the other pinioned forms.

"Where am I?" said the one who was really Aunt Katharine (and Eliza's mother).

"Who's there?" said the boy who was Uncle Mark.

"It's Martha," said the Katharine one, peering down. "Who in the world is she talking to?"

"Honestly!" said the one who would grow up to be Aunt Jane. "Standing there gossiping at a time like this!" She glared down at Roger and Ann and Eliza. "Who are you?" she said crossly. If you wonder why she was cross, try being tied to a spear on a cannibal island for a few hours, and you may know.

A flurry of explanations and introductions followed. The cannibals meanwhile slumbered on, lulled by the music of seven childish voices, all talking at once.

"They're in a magic adventure, too," Martha was babbling happily, "and our magics kind of overlapped. Isn't that interesting?"

"Oh, they are, are they?" said the Jane one, still crossly.

"Yes we are," said Eliza. "Did you think
you
had all the magic in the world?" She had sometimes yearned to talk back to her Aunt Jane when their strong wills clashed in modern times, and this was her chance.

But she and the Katharine one got along beautifully, and were soon deep in a discussion of the things their different magics could do.

"Why," said Katharine, "when you think of it, there're probably hundreds of children in the middle of hundreds of magics, wandering all over the world all the time! It's a wonder we don't meet more often. It's a wonder we don't have collisions! How did you happen to come
here?
"

Roger and Ann and Eliza looked at each other. Should they tell or shouldn't they? And would anyone,
could
anyone believe them if they did? Luckily there was an interruption from the strong-minded Jane.

"Oh, for heaven's sake!" she said. "What is this, a social tea? What does it matter how they got here? The point is, can they get us down?"

More discussion followed. But action spoke louder than words in the soul of Eliza. To dig the point of Jane's spear from its confining sand was the work of but a moment. Jane fell suddenly and heavily to the ground. And if Eliza forgot to warn her on purpose, so that all Jane's wind was knocked out of her, at least Eliza was sorry for it afterwards, and worked over her quickly and helpfully, untying the bonds that held her to the spear. And it would be something to remember secretly in future, whenever Aunt Jane started ordering her around in her purposeful way!

Roger and Ann were busy meanwhile, freeing the others. "How did you get on this island in the first place?" asked Ann, as the liberated captives sat on the sand, rubbing their chafed wrists and gone-to-sleep hands.

"We were after buried treasure," said Katharine.

"Treasure?" said Eliza, and at the magic word all hearts kindled. "Can we help you find it? Where's it buried?"

Jane and Mark looked at each other and seemed to hesitate. Then Mark nodded. "Follow me," he said. "Better be careful. Walk tiptoe." And he led the others across the sand, explaining as he did so how Martha had been rash and had broken the rules of their magic, and now it had all gone wrong, and he and Jane and Katharine didn't know how they were going to get back to their own time with the treasure, even if they got it dug up and even if they escaped the cannibals.

"How
does
your magic work?" said Jane to Roger. "Maybe it could help. Do you say spells? Or do you have something with you? Some magic coin or something?"

Roger admitted they had
something,
and took the bits of common thyme from his pocket, to make sure they were still safely there.

"It gets us back to our own time when we're finished," said Ann.

"Maybe it'd get
you
back to
yours,
at the same time," said Eliza. "Only it
wouldn't
be the same time, if you see what I mean."

"Clear as mud," said Jane.

"
I
get it," said Mark. "You mean maybe it'd take us back to
your
time with
you,
instead."

"That's what I'm worried about," said Roger. And he repressed an inward shudder.

Because what if it
did
happen like that, and the young Jane and Mark and/ Katharine and Martha came back with them to modern times? He could think of two ways it might work out. They might take the place of their grown-up selves, and there wouldn't
be
any grown-up Jane and Mark and Katharine and Martha anymore, and that would be awful. Because nice as the small Martha was, as a parent she just wouldn't do.

Or else there Jane and Mark and Katharine and Martha would be, and there their grown-up selves would be, too, and they might bump right into each other. And
that
would be like those horror stories where people go walking down long dark hallways and meet themselves coming in the other direction. And everybody goes mad in the end, and no wonder!

Roger emerged from his thoughts. "You wouldn't like it," he said. "It wouldn't work out. You wouldn't fit in."

And now the boy Mark, who had been studying the sky, pointed out that the sun had started down from high noon and the cannibals would be waking up all too soon, and they had better be digging.

Eliza had been dancing with impatience ever since the first mention of the treasure, and now as Mark heaved away a flat stone that was half-buried in the sand, she and Jane started scrabbling with their hands in the place where it had been. The others followed suit. Soon the corner of a chest appeared in the ever-widening hole.

"Keep digging," said Roger. "We're getting there."

. "Let's get the top uncovered and look in, first," said Eliza. "I can't wait."

And though the boys counseled getting the chest out whole while the getting was good, the strong will of Eliza prevailed (assisted by the strong will of Jane). And at last the four corners of the chest lid appeared.

Jane laid hold of them and pulled. The lid flew back on its hinges. Everybody looked inside.

You all know what pirate treasure is like—the pieces of eight and the diamond necklaces, the emerald bracelets and ruby rings, the topazes and amethysts and gold moidores and all the rest of it.
This
pirate treasure was just what you would have expected, only more so.

"We'll go halves," said Jane.

"Let's start," said Eliza.

She reached for the nearest diamond necklace on her side, and Jane reached for the nearest similar one on hers. But at that moment a furious cry in native language rent the air.

"Wah! Samoa! Goona goona!" were the words of the cry. Or at least it sounded like that.

Eliza let her diamond necklace fall. Jane never even touched hers. The seven children turned as one, and looked in the direction of the cannibals.

The chief had wakened and was calling his cohorts. Siesta time was over. A hundred savage hands reached for a hundred savage spears and two hundred savage eyes lighted up with joy, hunger and avarice as they saw the children and the treasure. Two hundred feet raced over the sand.

There was only one thing to do.

"Quick!" cried Mark to Roger. "Make the wish!
Any
time's better than this one!"

Roger had hardly a second to do it in. Yet as he rubbed the stalk of common thyme, he managed to think a long careful wish.
Make it be like the time with Jo and Meg and Laurie,
he thought.
Take them back to their own time and us to ours. Please.

Ann and Eliza leaned with him to sniff the Thanksgiving-y scent. Jane and Mark and Katharine and Martha watched what they did and did likewise.

The next Ann and Roger and Eliza knew, they were in the kitchen garden. Roger poked the gray leaved stalk quickly back into the earth, where it immediately grew again.

Eliza looked around her. "Darn!" she said. "Not only the treasure gone, but those children, too! I
liked
them! Why couldn't we have brought them back with us?"

"We couldn't have kept them," Roger reminded her. "Mother and your mother would have found out sooner or later, and
then
think what would happen!"

Ann and Eliza thought.

"At least we could have played with them all summer!" said Eliza.

Roger looked at her. "They're not
toys!
They have their own lives to lead. It's better this way."

And the others reluctantly nodded.

"I'm going to understand Mother a lot better from now on, though," said Eliza. "Now I know she's been through the mill of the magic, too! And maybe now we know how, we can run into all of them again all the time!"

"Only the
next
time," said Ann, "I'd rather have Mother be just Mother."

And Roger agreed.

6. Time Out of Mind