The sun set and it was dark in the summer house. Mary had tried twice more during the day to light the fire and eventually even she had to admit that it wasn’t going to work. They ate cold meat pie for dinner, and felt better with some solid food in their stomachs. They’d managed to get some snow to melt so they had water to drink, but Mary longed for tea, and Colin complained.
‘I can’t drink this. It’s so cold that it’s giving me a headache!’ He looked at the half full cup of melted snow, but he was so thirsty he had no option.
They had settled down to sleep early – without a clock they had no way of knowing what time it was, but it was only an hour or so after sunset, so probably no more than half past four in the afternoon. The last thing Mary heard before she drifted off to sleep was a sniffling from where Colin lay – whether his nose was running in the cold, or whether he was crying she wasn’t sure.
They were woken hours later by the sound of a crunch and a creak followed by a bang. It was a sound that they instantly recognised – the door to the Secret Garden being pushed open and hitting against the stone wall. It was pitch dark in the summer house without fire or candle.
‘Someone’s coming!’ Colin said. ‘Someone’s in the garden. You don’t think it’s Crichton, do you?’ They couldn’t hear voices, only footsteps on the stone path at the other side of the frozen fountain pool.
‘It might be Dickon,’ Mary whispered back. She hoped it was, but she feared it wasn’t.
‘That’s not Dickon. He climbed the wall last time, he didn’t come through the door. If Dickon has told Crichton that we’re here I’ll have his whole family thrown out of their cottage,’ Colin declared through gritted teeth.
‘No you won’t. That would make you worse than her,’ Mary said. ‘Anyway, Dickon would never tell. But if he guessed where we were, so might somebody else.’ She lay very still and stiff, hoping that the search party, if that’s what it was, would somehow miss them. She reckoned that Mr Craven wouldn’t be home for another two days, so now they would have to endure whatever punishments Miss Crichton devised for them until he returned – if he came at all. Perhaps his business in London was so important that he wouldn’t return and they would be left to the mercies of the governess.
The footsteps were getting closer, around the edge of the pool and up through the rock garden. They heard somebody stumble over a rock and mutter a curse. It didn’t sound like Dickon, it was an older man’s voice. Perhaps the coachman or the gamekeeper had been sent to hunt through the garden for them. Whoever it was they were now coming straight towards the summer house.
Mary reached across the gap between the two benches and held Colin’s hand. He might have irked her, but she didn’t want to be separated from him. His hand really was very cold.
‘I’m scared,’ she whispered. ‘I’m scared of what Miss Crichton will do to us.’
‘We must be brave, remember?’ Colin whispered back as the footsteps got nearer. They were right outside the door now, and they could see a thin, swaying line of yellow light around the edges of the shutters, the light from a lantern, perhaps.
Someone tried the latch of the summer house and Mary held her breath as the door swung slowly open, and the lantern light shone into the room.
It wasn’t the coachman and it wasn’t the gamekeeper who held the lantern.
‘Father!’
‘Uncle Archibald!’ the two children said together, and Mr Craven put the lantern down and held out his arms.
‘Here you are! I’ve found you!’ he said, as Mary and Colin flung themselves into his arms.
‘Don’t ever go away again,’ sobbed Colin as he hugged his father tightly. ‘Not ever.’
‘I won’t. I promise you I won’t,’ said Mr Craven. ‘Martha and Dickon have told me everything, and I’ll never go away and leave you with a governess again.’
‘I’m so glad you’re home,’ Mary said, taking a step backwards, letting Colin hug his father that little bit longer and little bit tighter. ‘How did you get back so quickly?’ she asked.
‘I was already on my way back. After all, I did promise I’d try and get back for Christmas, didn’t I?’
‘But Miss Crichton told us you weren’t coming back,’ Colin said.
‘Miss Crichton said and did a good many things that she shouldn’t have done,’ said Mr Craven, grimly. ‘And now I have a good many things to say to her. Come on, let’s go back home.’ He took each of them by the hand and they set off out of the garden. Mary carried the lantern.
‘How did you find us?’ Colin asked as they closed the garden door behind them.
‘Oh, I knew, as soon as I heard you’d gone missing, I knew where to look for you,’ he said. ‘I knew I’d find you in the garden.’
Liz Taylorson 