“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 going 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.”

Emmie had never seen him so angry – for a few minutes, he was the same distant, growling figure she had first met, so many months before. Remembering, she edged back further under the lilac bush, and shivered a little in the chill of the shadow.

The green door in the wall banged open, and Emmie flinched, scraping her knees on the dry twigs. The quiet, bee-humming afternoon was broken as a figure blundered into the garden.

“Jack! Are you there? Jack! Oh, please…”

Emmie heard him turn, his sandals hissing on the dry grass. He was still playing hide and seek; he waited for a moment, caught in the game. Then something made him run. He hurled himself at his mother.

It was the colour of the paper. Emmie saw it a few seconds after Jack did. Even from the shadows under the lilac bush, she knew what it was. A telegram. Everyone knew what that colour of paper meant. Mrs Martin the cook had received a telegram to tell her that her son had been injured while he was fighting in the army in Norway, and she had refused to open the yellow envelope. She was quite certain that the message was to tell her that Will was dead. She had sat holding it, and staring at it, and turning it over in her hands. Eventually Mrs Evans had sent Joey, telling him to fetch Mrs Craven so she could open the envelope for the cook. Mrs Evans had been so relieved that Will was only wounded that she had hugged everyone in the kitchen, and used all the sugar ration to make cocoa.

“Is it David?” Jack was clinging on to his mother’s arm. Emmie wriggled further back under the lilac bush. She shouldn’t be here. This was secret – too much of a secret even to fit into the garden. She tried to stuff her fingers into her ears, but she couldn’t make herself not hear.

“No.” Mrs Craven sat down suddenly on the grass, pulling Jack with her, half on to her lap. “No, darling. It’s Dad.”

 

Miss Sowerby told them the news properly at supper time. She slipped into the servants’ hall looking thinner, and round-shouldered, as though suddenly she wasn’t young any more. There were tears seeping through the smiling creases around her eyes.

She had known Lieutenant Craven since they were both children, since she was a clumsy little servant girl, too countrified really, to work in such a smart house. She had watched over him when he was a bad-tempered, sickly child who wore out his nurse. He had screamed and shouted at her in the middle of the night. And then he had grown up, when everyone had been so sure he never would.

“I never thought,” she murmured, dropping into a chair next to Mrs Martin. “After everythin’ that happened – there was always a spark of summat in him. They called it Magic, the children, when they were small. Even with the war like it is, I never thought…”

“What happened?” Arthur whispered, his eyes round. They had known he was dead – not from Emmie, they had seen Mrs Craven’s face as she ran calling through the gardens. She and Jack had stumbled together back into the house, and shut themselves away in Lieutenant Craven’s study.

“Is it certain?” Emmie asked, at the same time. “It couldn’t be a mistake?”

Miss Sowerby reached out to stroke her cheek. “I can’t see it bein’ wrong, Emmie. The telegram had his name, his number an’ all. It happened a week ago. There’s a letter to follow, they said. It was th’ Admiralty sent the telegram, they must know.”

“A week? He was at Dunkirk, then?” Joey leaned forward eagerly. “We thought that! When it came on the radio, we wondered if Lieutenant Craven might be there.” He was smiling excitedly – it had been exciting, hearing it. Emmie and Ruby had hugged each other, and Ruby had done a little dance around the kitchen. All those little ships, sailing off to France to rescue the brave soldiers, and bring them home. Some of them had been fishing boats, the man on the radio had said. Some of them were the sort of boats that took people on outings at the seaside. Britain had called, and the men in those boats had answered, everyone said. The story had been so dramatic that the rescue felt almost like a victory, not the crushing defeat it really was.

Joey ducked his head, his cheeks pink, suddenly remembering. “Sorry,” he whispered.

Miss Sowerby only smiled at him, the tears slowly spreading down her cheeks.

“He was good at rescuing things,” Emmie whispered. “If he’d go to all that trouble for Lucy, he’d make them pick up those poor soldiers from the water. That will be what happened. They were rescuing the soldiers.”

Joey nodded. “Maybe a U-boat…” But then he snapped his mouth shut again, as Emmie and Miss Dearlove and Miss Rose all turned on him with a fierce glare. Miss Sowerby leaned forward, pressing her hands over her face, and Joey hunched down, trying to make himself look small.

“It’s not a story,” Emmie hissed, and Joey nodded, just a little apologetic twitch of his head. It was hard not to talk about it. He wanted to know. The news had caught everyone’s imagination.

So many of the rooms were closed up and covered in dust sheets now that Mrs Craven had taken to sitting downstairs in the kitchen or the servants’ hall sometimes, especially to listen to the evening news. She said it was too lonely, hearing it upstairs on her own. But she didn’t come down that evening, and neither did Jack.

Jack didn’t appear at lessons the next day either. Emmie watched the door, hoping for him to slip in. She didn’t know what she could say to him, but she hated the thought that he was hidden away again, desperate. Even more desperate now than he had been the night she went to find him in the dark.

“I expect Jack needs to be with his mother now,” Miss Rose murmured. “We must leave them alone.” She was looking at Emmie as she said it, and Emmie nodded, though inside she wanted to argue. What if Jack wanted someone else to talk to? Or needed someone, even if he didn’t want them very much. She wouldn’t mind if he yelled at her again… Emmie leaned on her hand, and stabbed her pencil at the page. Well. She would mind. But she wouldn’t yell back, she promised herself.

He still has a mother… something whispered inside her. You don’t have anyone.

“But I never did have,” she murmured to herself. “It isn’t the same.” Then she looked across at Arthur expecting him to be smirking at her for talking to herself. But he was drawing tiny ships in the margins of his sums, and Joey was gazing into the distance across the room. For once, it could have been Emmie that teased them for daydreaming, but all she did was kick Joey gently under the table, and nod sideways. Miss Dearlove was watching.

Emmie bolted her lunch down, eager to get out into the gardens, away from the brooding sadness of the house. The roses were coming out. She hadn’t believed that there could be more flowers in the secret garden than when she had first seen it in September, but the buds were everywhere, unfurling, lines of pink and white and blazing red bursting through the green. There were more every day. She sped up as she ran down the paved walk by the gardens – there was a rose that climbed around the statue where Lucy liked to sleep, an early-flowering one that she had never seen open. Jack had told her that it was striped, dark red with white, and Emmie could see it in her head, like the stiff silk dress of the little girl in the painting that hung in their schoolroom. Even Jack didn’t know who she was, but she made Emmie laugh. She looked so cross. Her parents couldn’t have been pleased with the portrait, Emmie thought. The poor painter must have tried to make her smile, or at least look grand and proud. But the girl’s mouth was dragged into a determined line, and her eyes were snapping. She had wanted to be outside, Emmie was sure. Perhaps she had wanted to run about in the garden and stroke the petals of the striped roses, instead of being laced into that tight dress and made to stand still. Even the little dog in her arms was gazing wistfully out of the side of the frame – it wanted to dash about over the grass too.

Emmie twisted the brass handle under the ivy, and eased the door open, slipping through and looking eagerly over at the statue. She darted across the lawn to see if the striped flowers had opened yet, but then a fluttering of pink caught her eye, and she spun round.

Mrs Craven was lying on the grass under the great tree, her pink cotton dress the same colour as the rose petals scattered around her. Fistfuls of them. Emmie stared at them, not understanding. Mr Sowerby always made sure that the bush just next to the tree was watered, and carefully trimmed. The flowers had hardly opened, and now the bush was almost bare, a few buds limply trailing from the branches.

Mrs Craven put one hand up to shield her eyes from the sun, and squinted at Emmie as if she wasn’t sure who this was in her garden. Her hand was scratched – there was a thin trickle of dark blood running down on to her wrist.

“You tore all the flowers off,” Emmie whispered, shocked. “What did you do that for?”

Mrs Craven didn’t say anything – she just went on staring at Emmie as though she were a stranger.

Emmie stepped back, suddenly frightened. Mrs Craven’s face was so pale, her eyes looked almost black.

“Come away, lass.” Mr Sowerby caught her arm, and Emmie gasped – she hadn’t even heard him limping up behind her. “She needs us gone.”

“But the roses…” Emmie whispered.

“Do as tha’rt told!” He pulled at her arm sharply, and Emmie cried out – he’d hurt her, even though she could see that he hadn’t meant to. He hustled her back out of the green door and on to the path. “I’m sorry, Emmie. Mrs Craven needs th’ garden now, doesn’t tha’ see it? Tha’ just let her be. Did I hurt thee?”

“Yes.” Emmie sniffed, rubbing her wrist. “A lot. When can I go and look at the roses?”

He shook his head, and then rubbed a hand wearily across his reddened eyes. His scars looked darker. “No. Tha’ can’t. Didn’t tha’ listen? It’s her place, hers and his, their secret. Leave her alone. Stay out.”

Emmie gazed at him, dumbfounded, and then shook her head. “No! I can’t – you don’t mean it.”

But he hardly seemed to be hearing her. He turned away and began to hobble up the path, back to the kitchen gardens.

“But who’s going to look after the garden?” Emmie wailed. She ran after him, pulling at his jacket. “I help, don’t I? Please? You can’t make me stay away.”

“I’ll do it,” he growled. “Get away with thee, child. Buzzing about like a wasp, th’art.”

Emmie dropped back, staring after him with her eyes stinging. Even when she’d first arrived, he’d never spoken to her like that. It almost sounded as if he hated her. Emmie watched him until he limped into one of the kitchen gardens, and then she walked back to the door under the ivy. She wanted to sneak back in and she didn’t think Mrs Craven was in a state to notice. But then the brass doorknob under her hand was cold – it seemed to have lost some of its worn silken feel, that inviting golden softness that always tempted her in. Even in the hot June sunshine, the cold metal bit into her fingers, and Emmie stepped back.

She wasn’t wanted.

 

Emmie lay on the warm stone slabs around the pool, with Lucy sitting next to her. Both of them were staring at the fish, and occasionally Lucy would put out a hopeful paw, and then draw it back again. She wanted the little golden things so much, and she spent hours watching them, but she was afraid of the water.

“What if I can never go back?” Emmie whispered to her. “What if he meant for always?” She sat up, drawing her knees up under her chin, and closed her eyes, trying to see the garden in her head. But there was too much of it, too much to see and smell and touch. Even when she told it to herself as a story, only a hint of the magic came through. She needed to step through the door.

“I should have taken you with me,” she muttered, running her hand over Lucy’s sun-warmed fur. “No one ever tells you where to go.” She looked over her shoulder at the long flower bed, blazing with pink lilies, and hissed through her teeth. The heat was bringing them all on, and they were opening out like great cups – but it wasn’t the same. “I know that rose would be out. I could go back – Mrs Craven must have gone by now. And I don’t think she’d mind if I was there, anyway. She knows I love the garden. Emmie told Lieutenant Craven how helpful I was.” Emmie rocked back and forth gently, hugging her knees. “I could go back,” she whispered again. But she didn’t get up. She could – but she wouldn’t.

 

17th June 1910

 

Even the walls are covered now – tiny creeping plants have seeded themselves in the cracks between the bricks, and smothered them in flowers. White daisies, with each petal dipped in pink, and tiny little yellow flowers that look like specks of gold. One of the statues has a great clump of violet-blue campanula trailing out of the wall behind her; it’s grown down all over her shoulders like a cape of little bells.

There are so many columbines I could gather armfuls and fill a vase in each room of the house, if it wasn’t such a pity to pick them. They must be named after the dancing girl in the stories, I’m sure; they dance and shake their frilly petals as the wind blows through them. Today I lay down next to the tallest purple delphiniums, the ones that are almost as tall as me, and stared up at the sky. I made patterns out of the clouds. Colin said I looked quite mad, and even Dickon was trying not to smile, but I don’t care.

 

Emmie padded silently through the night-dark passages and up the steps to Jack’s room. She had been dreaming about the garden, Mary’s garden. She had found the pages in the diary for the summer, all those years ago. She could see the garden as she read – the words made it even harder not to be there. But she couldn’t stop.

Then in her dream she had got in there again at last – but the garden had kept changing, stretching out into tunnels of dark shadow. Emmie ran and ran to reach the bright sunlight and the roses, but could never escape the clinging greyness of the tunnel. She had woken up gasping, choking, to find Lucy stretched across her chest weighing her down – and grumpy when she tried to move.

Too scared to go back to sleep, in case she slipped back into the shadows again, Emmie got out of bed. She would go and find Jack, she decided. Maybe he wouldn’t want to talk to her, but at least she could try. Lucy stood up and stared at her, and then clambered quickly into the warm spot that Emmie had left in the bed, and curled up again.

The house was silent, and when she peered through the heavy curtains in the passageway outside Jack’s room the night was black. It must be late – the middle of the night. Emmie paused at the top of the steps, chewing her lip and peering into the darkness of the room. He was probably fast asleep. It was stupid to have come.

“What are you doing?”

Emmie nearly shrieked. Jack wasn’t in bed – he was curled up on the wide stone windowsill, glaring at her. The moonlight glimmered on the side of his face. He looked cold, and miserable.

“Why aren’t you in bed?” she snapped, surprised into sharpness. She’d forgotten that his father had died, and that she’d come all prepared to be nice to him.

“Why aren’t you?”

Emmie shrugged. “I dreamt – something bad. I thought I’d come and see you. To see if you were all right…” She ducked her head, embarrassed. It sounded so stupid. How could he be?

“I am. Now go away.”

Emmie swallowed down another sharp answer. “Do I have to?” she asked, her voice almost pleading. “I don’t want to dream it again. Can’t I stay here for a little bit?”

“No.”

“You don’t have to be so mean.”

“Yes, I do.” Jack spat out each word, and Emmie suddenly recognized the way he was talking. He was all buttoned up. Even his mouth was tidy, the lips pressed together. His hands were folded in his lap, the knuckles white. If he let himself go, he was going to scream.

“It might be better if…”

“What?”

Emmie shook her head. “Nothing. I’ll go then. Shall I?”

“Yes. Go away.”

Emmie began to shuffle away towards the steps, still looking at him, hoping that he’d change his mind. He watched her go – she could see the sharp glitter of his eyes in the light from the window. As she reach the top of the steps, Emmie was almost sure she saw him lean forward – did he reach out one hand, to snatch her back? But he said nothing. What would he do if she ran back, and hugged him, and curled up next to him on the windowsill? Probably push her off. Or cry. She wasn’t sure which would be worse.

“Night,” she murmured.

“Go away.”