The Time Garden (12 page)

There was so much to talk over about the island and the treasure and the cannibals that it was at least five minutes before anyone thought of telling the Natterjack. The one who thought of it was Roger, which was typical. As their mother often said, he was the thoughtful one.

The Natterjack, when found (still under its counterpane of woolly thyme) and prodded (by Eliza) and reported to (by all three children talking at once), looked grave.

"H'I
thought
it might 'appen that way," it said. "Difficult thing, common time. Not h'exclusive at all. Traffic gets crowded. Still, it was worth making the h'effort."

"And now you'll have to think of something else, won't you?" said Eliza.

The Natterjack gave her a look. "H'I don't '
ave
to do
anything
," it said. "I may possibly
try,
should the h'occasion h'arise!"

"Humph!" said Eliza. "If the garden's as magic as you say it is, you could try right now. The afternoon's still young. You could just tell it to take us to our mothers right this minute, and no nonsense!"

"I could," admitted the Natterjack.

"It'd be duck soup to it," said Eliza.

"And
you,
" said the Natterjack, "might h'end up in a stew! These things aren't so h'easy as all that. I'll 'ave to study the rules. It all 'as to be done according to 'Oyle, and that takes time."

"Here, then," said Eliza, pulling up a tuft of the woolly-leaved thyme and holding it out.

The Natterjack puffed itself up and its eyes seemed to send forth sparks. Ann and Roger and Eliza were reminded suddenly of its dragonlike behavior on the day it reformed the Concord kidnappers.

"Put that thyme back," it said. "You don't know where it might go! Any more tampering with this 'ere garding," it went on sternly, "and it's the h'
end!
"

Eliza rather shamefacedly replanted the woolly tuft. She knew (sometimes) when she had gone too far.

The Natterjack relaxed a bit, but its tones were still grim. "It might h'interest you to know," it said, "that if you 'ad rubbed that there at this moment, you'd 'ave ended up on a sheep farm in Australia in the year nineteen twelve. And little would 'ave been gained by h'anybody." It yawned. "And now leave me in peace. I've h'unfinished business to take care of."

"But you'll be working on it?" said Roger. "You'll be thinking of ways for us to see Mother?"

"I may," said the Natterjack, "and I may not." And the three children had to be contented with that. (But Eliza was not contented.)

Later that day Jack came home from his party of pleasure at Candy Drake's house, and of course he had to be told about the events of the afternoon. He was interested, not so much in what had happened, as in future possibilities.

"This is keen," he said. "If you could tune in on Mother and the others that way, we can pick them up again at all kinds of interesting times. Like when Uncle Mark made the touchdown for Harvard. Or when Pop proposed to Mother at the Umpty Six Formal!"

"Who cares about things like that?" said Eliza. "It's more of their magic adventures I want to see. And all the
other
magic children we might run into! We might find the
Phoenix and the Carpet
ones! Or that boy in
The Midnight Folk
the night he went to the witches' meeting and met Rollicum Bitem! Now we know about common thyme we can use the kitchen garden every
day
, and the Natterjack won't ever even have to know!"

Roger shook his head. "It wouldn't work."

"Why not?" said Eliza.

"I don't know. I just know it wouldn't. It would be repeating, and we never have, so far. It's as if there were doors into the magic, sort of, and you can only use each one once. Anyway, that's what I think."

"Bushwah," said Jack. "At least we can try. Let's go try now."

"Well, not
right
now," said Eliza. "Maybe tomorrow."

"Scared?"

"Of course not. It's just..." Eliza left her sentence unfinished. She turned and wandered away into the house and upstairs to her bedroom. She wanted to be alone.

"What do you say we go for a walk on the beach?" said Roger to Ann.

"All right," said Ann. And they started down the stairway in the cliff.

Finding himself
by
himself, Jack made a move in the direction of the kitchen garden. Then he stopped. What was the matter with him, worrying about magic plants and talking toads and things that couldn't possibly be true? That day in Concord with the March girls was all a dream. Probably. Or else there was some scientific explanation.

"How childish can you get?" said Jack to himself. And he went into the house to telephone Mary Lou Luckenbill.

Eliza meanwhile sat in her bedroom and thought.

I hope the thoughts
you
have been having about Eliza have not been too harsh. She was really not so bossy and forward and pert and impossible as she all too often seemed. It was the way she was made. Not enough patience had been put in, and too many of those things that your teacher calls "qualities of leadership." To be a leader is all very well when other people follow you, but when they suddenly don't and you find yourself charging off all alone in a wrong direction, it can be shaming. And when you seldom if ever think before you speak, that can be shaming, too, thinking back to it later on. >

When Eliza was alone, she was haunted more often than you might believe by the memory of the reckless things she had done here and there during the day. And the echo of her idle boasting would ring loud in her ears and bring a blush to her cheek.

But she was seldom one to admit she was wrong and learn by experience, or to sit back and wait for events to work out by themselves. Perhaps you know someone who is like this.

And if she missed her mother just as much as Ann missed hers, she was not one to admit this, either.

Now, as she sat and thought in her room, she decided to handle the current crisis in a reasonable and restrained manner. She would give the Natterjack three whole days to think up some kind of satisfactory procedure. If it hadn't hit on anything by that time, she would
act.

And that is exactly how it worked out.

The three days went by without sight of Natterjack, and the worldly events they contained were pleasant ones, but there was no magic in them.

It was on the afternoon of the third day that Roger and Ann and Jack and Eliza made their seventeenth visit to the thyme garden to see if anything were likely to begin happening, and found that nothing apparently was. The Natterjack, if present, was concealed. The four of them started back to the house. And because they had nothing to do and time hung heavy, they stopped off at the potting shed to bother Old Henry.

Old Henry was busily dealing with early seeds collected from the garden, storing them away in little labeled envelopes, for next season's planting.

"Breathe light," he said. "Chancy things, seeds is." And the four children could see that they were, some being smaller than grains of sand and as easily overlooked, while others were light and thistle-downish, the prey of every passing breeze.

There were store-bought seeds, too, lying in tantalizing packets on the shelf, and Eliza stood turning these over idly. The lettering on one of them caught her eye. She gasped. Then, almost before she knew it, she had slipped the small brown envelope into her pocket. Old Henry and the others didn't seem to have noticed.

"Come on," she said, trying to sound nonchalant. "Let's go sit on the cliff." But there was something in her voice that made the others obey.

"Look!" she went on, when all were established on comfortable rocks. She brought the brown envelope out and pointed.

"Old English Thyme—Mixed," read Roger from the bold capitals at the top, and then, farther down and smaller, "Thompson and Morgan, Ipswich, Suffolk."

"Well?" said Eliza. "If that won't take us to London, what will?"

"It might take us to Ipswich, Suffolk," said Jack. "It might be right across England."

"It won't if I tell it not to," said Eliza. "And if it does, we can catch a train."

"Would seeds work?" Ann wondered.

"Why not? They're the germ of the whole thing. There wouldn't even
be
any garden if it weren't for seeds in the first place! What's more magic than a seed, when you come to think of it? This ought to be the best way yet."

Roger shook his head. "They're stolen property. Cheaters never prosper. It'd be breaking the rules."

"There comes a time," said Eliza firmly, "when you have to. Anyway, look at that little girl Martha!
She
broke
her
rules, didn't they say, when she ended up on that cannibal island? And look who she grew up to be! You'll just be following your own mother's example!"

"Yes, and remember what happened to her!" said Ann.

"Nothing much
did,
in the end," Eliza reminded her triumphantly. "We came along and saved her. Something always does, sooner or later."

Roger shook his head again. "You can't count on that. Anyway, she was too young to know better."

"If a mere babe could do it," said Eliza, "who are we to be behindhand?"

"How'll we start?" said Jack. "Rub and whiff, same as usual? Only seeds wouldn't have any fragrance, would they? Maybe we ought to taste them."

"Stop encouraging her," said Roger.

Jack looked sheepish. "I'm kind of curious. I want to see if it'd work. Not that it matters. It's all just imagination. Probably."

Ann got up purposefully. "I'm going to find the Natterjack."

"Tattletale!" said Eliza.

"I don't think so," said Roger, getting up, too. "I don't think it comes under that heading at all. We're just saving you from your baser instincts."

"Come on. Hurry," said Ann. And she and Roger ran for the thyme garden.

"Quick, before they get there!" cried Eliza. "How'll we do it?"

"Wish first, and then try a little of everything," advised Jack.

"All right," said Eliza. "I wish we were in London right now."

Jack tore open the brown envelope. Tiny seeds rolled out into his palm. He and Eliza rubbed some between their hands (spilling quite a few that later came up and bloomed in the rock crevices and Old Henry never knew how they got there). They sniffed the fragrance, which was more like dust and old dried leaves than anything else. They tasted a few (and found them the reverse of succulent). The next moment London was all around them.

They knew it was London from the bustle and the noise and the crowds, and from the Tower that graced the background (only not near enough for Eliza to take a good look yet) and from the street cries that resounded in Cockney accents on every hand, "Sweet lavender" and "Cherry ripe, ripe, ripe" and "Shrimps h'all alive, oh!"

But it wasn't the London they had in mind at all. The men that thronged its streets were decked out in doublets and hose and pointed beards; the women wore long skirts and kirtles. The buildings were old and gabled and queer, and yet familiar from pictures in
Master Skylark
and
The Prince and the Pauper.

"What happened?" said Jack.

"It's that seed," said Eliza. "It said
old
English!"

"And it said 'mixed thyme,'" Jack remembered, "and it
did!
It mixed the centuries."

"Who cares?" said Eliza, looking around her with wide eyes. "This is keen!"

But now the lavender sellers and the cherry vendors and the shrimp merchants were looking at
them,
and first one and then another began to titter and point, until the whole crowd was roaring with laughter.

Jack and Eliza looked at each other, and then down at themselves. And then they knew why.

Up to now the four children had never had to worry about their modern clothes when thyme-traveling. The magic had arranged all that. So far no one had noticed a thing. But now Eliza had broken the rules, and the magic was not prepared to be so accommodating. And there she and Jack were, in the middle of old-time London, Jack in his best Bermuda shorts and sports jacket, and Eliza in a faded yellow cotton dress and ankle socks, and
everybody
was noticing.

"See the great boobies all part naked in the street!" said one.

"Mayhap they fell in the Thames," said another, "and their garments shrank!"

Jack blushed and edged behind Eliza, scrooching down and trying to make his Bermudas come as low on his legs as possible, but Eliza brazened it out. "You'd think," she said, "nobody had ever seen knees before!" And she glared haughtily at the crowd. Luckily at this moment there was a distraction.

A company of people was issuing from one of the buildings nearby. Surrounded by a crowd of gentlemen in peacock colors walked a stately lady in a wide farthingale, a jeweled stomacher, and an immense ruff. The face above the ruff was painted and its nose was sharp. Hair of the brightest red completed the picture. Neither Jack nor Eliza needed to be told who the lady was, particularly when all the onlookers took off their caps, and some knelt, and the air rang with cheers and huzzas.

And any doubts they might yet have were stilled when the lady encountered a mud puddle in her path and stopped short, turning to the bearded gentleman on her right.

"Well, Sir Walter?" she said, smiling grimly. "Have you forgotten your manners? You were more prompt in younger days!"

The bearded gentleman looked rebellious. Then he covered his annoyance with a smile. "Madam, will you walk?" he said. And taking off his fine cloak (not without a glance of regret for its rich velvet and its satin lining), he spread it over the mud for the lady to tread upon, while all the people cheered louder than ever and cried, "Long live good Queen Bess! Long live Sir Walter Raleigh! Long live the ancient courtesye!"

"You wanted to look at the Queen," muttered Jack in Eliza's ear. "Take a good look."

And Eliza did, not at all put out by the fact that the Queen had seen her now and was taking a good look at
her.