The Time Garden (2 page)

What he was staring at was a female form that had just taken its seat halfway up the car. A few seconds later he got up and went into the washroom and slicked down his hair, and came back and sat on the arm of the female form's chair, and started muttering to her in a husky monotone that went up an octave every so often, when his voice broke. Each time this happened, the female form uttered a titter.

"Honestly!" said Eliza to Ann. "To think we'll all come to that some day! If there's one thing I despise, it's a teenage girl!"

"Disgusting," Ann agreed.

"He won't be a bit of use to us all summer, you mark my words!" said Eliza.

Roger's heart sank. What was he going to do with himself in a strange house with just two hapless females and a cousin who liked teenage girls?

When lunchtime came, Jack sat with his new friend, and acted as if he'd never seen the other three before in his life, and sent their lunch money over to them by a waiter.

And when the afternoon had dragged its weary length along, and they pulled into the South Station in Boston, his behavior was even more insulting.

"Well, so long," he said regretfully to the teenage girl. "I have to manage these helpless infants now."

"How too sickening for you," said the teenage girl.

The blood of Ann and Roger and Eliza boiled.

There was a slight delay at the South Station, because no one was quite sure what to do next. Old Mrs. Whiton had written that she would try to have Old Henry meet them, but that he was very difficult, and might refuse.

"He'd better not try being difficult with
me!
" Eliza had muttered darkly, when she heard those words.

But as five minutes passed, and nobody who looked as though he might be called Old Henry came up to them, it seemed that he was trying it.

So then Jack got out old Mrs. Whiton's letter, and read the instructions in it, and found the right platform, and there was the train for the South Shore. Only it wasn't much of a train, being only one car long.

They had to wait quite a while for the train to start. Jack made conversation.

"That was some keen girl," he said. "Her name was Betsy Johnson. She goes to Dana Hall."

"Does she?" said Roger.

By the time the train started, Ann was too sleepy and hungry to care much what was happening, but Roger sat staring interestedly out on the passing New England countryside, and reading the names of the different stations, till it got too dark to see.

As for Eliza, she bounced over to the opposite seat and tried the window to see whether it would open or not, and it did, and after that she hung her head out, sniffing for the first scent of the sea, till the conductor came by and asked if she wanted to get herself killed.

"Ha!" said Eliza. "By a mere train? Not very likely!" But she shut the window.

Their station was the last on the line, and by the time they got there it was almost completely dark. The four children jumped down to the platform and stood looking around.

A figure approached, and a grizzled face regarded them without affection.

"So it's you, is it?" said the figure. There didn't seem to be any answer to this. "Come along then, if that's the way it's going to be," it went on. And it shuffled away into the night without offering to help them with their luggage, and the four children agreed that if difficult was the word for Old Henry, this must be he.

They followed him, lugging the heavy suitcases, and came to what must be the oldest black sedan in the world. Jack, who knew about such things, said it was a Willys-Knight, and they were extinct, and it ought to be in a museum.

Old Henry hardly gave them time to get loaded before he stepped on the gas, and the car slithered away, over smooth highway at first, but then they turned into a woods, over a rocky road that bumped.

And at last the bumping ended and they came out onto cleared land, and there was the house, standing bleak and severe and beautiful, the cold moonlight turning its weathered boards to silver.

Old Henry slithered the car to a stop, and started shuffling off into the night again, but a deep, gruff voice called from the open doorway.

"Come back here and help with those bags, you old ruffian," said the voice. And that was the four children's first introduction to old Mrs. Whiton.

The rest of that evening was a confusion of unpacking and exploring, and abrupt steep staircases, and long rambling corridors that went up and down sudden unexpected steps and never seemed to lead where you thought they were leading. And always in the background was the boom of the sea, and yet the four children couldn't see it from any of the windows, because it lay far below, at the foot of the cliff on which the house was built, so old Mrs. Whiton told them.

Old Mrs. Whiton didn't talk much or smile much, and what she did say sounded rather grim and forbidding, but that may have been because her voice was so deep. And she didn't try to draw them out or get at the content of the child mind, either.

She gave them a supper of baked beans and hot Boston brown bread, and then she said they would

have plenty of time for exploring tomorrow, and now they had better go to bed, because the waves were sure to wake them early, till they got used to them. And she showed the four children to their rooms.

There were two rooms, one for the boys and one for the girls, at the end of a long corridor, with their doors directly facing each other. Both rooms had huge fireplaces at one end, big enough to walk into. Over the fireplace in Jack and Roger's room hung two ancient flintlock guns.

"Touch those at your peril," said old Mrs. Whiton.

In Ann and Eliza's room were two immense double four-poster beds, and the beds had canopies over them that were called testers, Mrs. Whiton said.

"Testing. Testing," said Eliza, starting to climb up her canopy to see if it would hold her weight.

"Any more of that," said old Mrs. Whiton, plucking her down, "and you'll rue the day." And she left the room.

"Isn't she an old grenadier?" said Eliza. "I like her!"

Ann didn't answer. She was feeling rather small and lonely. And she felt smaller still when she had undressed and climbed into the middle of her vast bed.

Eliza was at the window, flinging the casements wide and peering out. And at last she saw the sea, curling whitely on the rocks below. A thrill went through her. "This," she announced, "is a wonderful house. Spies could land here, and nobody'd ever know. Smugglers probably used it, in the olden days. It's probably honeycombed with secret passages. Indians could come down through the woods and slaughter everybody!"

There was no answer from Ann's bed. Ann was asleep.

Eliza wandered across the corridor and paused at the door of Jack and Roger's room. Through the door she could hear Jack's voice, telling Roger all about a keen girl he knew called Susan Snook. Roger wasn't answering.

Eliza gave a sniff of disdain, and wandered back to her own room. And standing at the window again, she swore a vow to herself.

"I vow," she swore, "that I'll be the first one up tomorrow and really explore this whole place.
Anything
could happen here!" And she got into bed and turned out the light.

But it was Ann who woke up first the next morning.

She woke up and got dressed quietly and went downstairs, losing her way several times. In the big front hall she met old Mrs. Whiton. Old Mrs. Whiton was wearing an old-fashioned bathing dress that ought to have looked very funny, but somehow on old Mrs. Whiton it didn't.

"So it's you, is it?" she said. "Get your bathing things and follow me."

Ann ran back for her bathing things, still not waking Eliza, and followed Mrs. Whiton. They went down, not through the garden, but by a hidden flight of steps, cut in the face of the cliff.

"My ancestors built this stairway," said old Mrs. Whiton. "Stone by stone."

At the foot of the stairway was a tiny beach. The morning was bright and sunny, but there was a wind, and the waves that pounded on the sand were big ones. Ann hung back, but old Mrs. Whiton did not. She plunged boldly in, and after a bit Ann followed. Once the first cold shock was past, the waves were glorious, and the salt taste and the tingling. Ann could have stayed for hours at least, but such was not the order of the day.

"Breakfast now," said old Mrs. Whiton in her deep voice, after what seemed like only a few seconds had passed. She strode up the beach toward the stone steps, and Ann could only follow.

In the hall they met Eliza, in bathrobe and slippers.

"Wretch," she said to Ann. "How dare you get there before me? Wait a minute and I'll fetch my things and we'll go in together."

"You will not," said old Mrs. Whiton. "Breakfast is in five minutes. See that you appear properly dressed. And wake those slothful boys. Tardiness will
not
be excused." And she stalked away in the direction of her ground-floor bedroom.

Eliza made a face behind her back, but she obeyed. Five minutes later all four children were scrubbed and neatly dressed and at the table, which goes to show the power of a strong mind.

Breakfast was served by an elderly maid called Mrs. Annable, who seemed to be a maid of few words. She did not smile or speak when the four children were introduced. But the breakfast was hearty and delicious, with applesauce and toasted cornbread and cocoa, and oatmeal that was properly stiff and porridgey.

"No quick-cooking messes," said old Mrs. Whiton. "Inventions of the devil!"

"Not in
my
kitchen!" said Mrs. Annable. "Nor none of your nasty frozen vegetables, neither!" Which was her one remark of the morning.

"And
now
," said Eliza, when the last crumb had been eaten, and the last drop of buttery cream scraped from the bottom of the last porridge-bowl, "the open sea calls."

"It may call in vain for the next hour and a half," said old Mrs. Whiton. "No one has had cramps and drowned at this beach yet, and I don't intend one of you to be the first!"

Four faces fell. Naturally Eliza was the first to say what all the others were thinking. "But we can't
wait!
" she said.

"Oh, I think you can," said old Mrs. Whiton. "You've all the time in the world." She started for her room, but in the doorway she seemed to relent a little, and turned. "You can go into the garden while you're waiting," she said. "You
may
find something to interest you." And she stalked away. A few seconds later the click of a typewriter was heard.

"Whatever those books are that she writes," said Roger, "they must be for Spartan children."

"The garden!" said Eliza, in tones of contempt. "What are we supposed to do, make daisy chains?"

But when the four children wandered willy-nilly out into the sun and through an opening in a boxwood hedge, Ann caught her breath, and Jack wished he had brought his color camera, and even Eliza admitted that it wasn't so dusty.

The garden was long and rectangular, and every bloom of June brightened its borders. Fragrance hung on the air, birds sang, and from somewhere nearby came a drowsy, humming sound.

"The murmur of innumerable bees," said Ann, who was liking poetry and big words that year.

"Though I don't see any immemorial elms," said Roger, who was the family nature-lover. "That's a copper beech." He pointed to the end of the garden.

Beyond the copper beech was another opening in the boxwood hedge. And in the opening stood a sundial.

"Look," said Ann, going closer. "There's something written on it, down at the bottom."

"Don't bother," said Eliza. "It'll just say 'It is later than you think.' They always do."

"If they don't say 'I count only the sunny hours,'" said Jack.

But Ann and Roger had never seen a real sundial before, and Ann had to be shown how it worked, and Roger, who had read all about sundials in a book, showed her. Then they bent over the base of the pedestal. The lettering was old and crumbly and hard to read, but Roger finally made it out.

"It says..." He broke off and looked at the others. "It says 'Anything Can Happen!'"

"That isn't all," said Ann, who had wandered around to the back of the sundial. "The lettering goes on, around here. It says..." She leaned over to make out the final words. "It says, 'Anything Can Happen When You've All the Time in the World!'"

"What did I tell you?" Eliza's eyes were glowing now. "That old Mrs. Whiton sent us here on purpose! She's probably a witch! It all connects! It's true! I feel it in my bones! Anything
could
happen here! Something probably
will
any minute!"

As she spoke something flashed through the air and disappeared in the grass at their feet.

"What was that?" said Ann.

"It came from the sundial," said Roger. "Something live must have been sitting there, and then it hopped off."

"There it goes!" said Jack, pointing through the opening in the hedge.

"Come on!" said Eliza.

The four children raced through the opening after the hopping thing. Then they stopped short.

From where they stood a bank led down to the sea, and the bank was all covered with little flat creeping plants that flowed over rock ledges and turned boulders to flowery cushions, for the plants were studded all over with tiny starry blossoms, purple and lavender and white. The smell of the bank was like all the sweetness and spice of the world mixed together. And it was here that the innumerable bees hummed.