‘See, I told you it would be a Christmas tree,’ said Colin, as the two children stared up at an enormous fir tree which stood in the hall. It was bedecked with gold and red baubles that glittered and twinkled, and tiny candles burnt on the ends of the branches. Presents were piled high underneath, wrapped in colourful paper, and tied with satin and velvet ribbons. It was hard to believe that this could all have appeared in such a short time while they were sledging with the Sowerby children. 

‘What do you think of your first Christmas tree, Mary?’ her uncle asked. He stood at the foot of the stairs smiling broadly, evidently pleased with the effect of the tree and the gifts. 

Mary was so delighted at the sight that her breath caught in her throat. It was so much more beautiful than she had expected. ‘It’s … magical!’ she breathed. Dickon had been right. She had found many kinds of magic in winter – in the frost and the snow, and now this special fairytale tree.

‘And another surprise!’ her uncled declared with a huge smile on his face. ‘There is someone I would like you to meet.’

‘Oh no, it’s another governess, isn’t it?’ said Colin. Mary’s faced creased with a frown of worry so that she looked almost like the Mary of the old days.

‘No, not at all. Nothing like that. No more governesses, I promise you. Caroline, my dear, please come down!’ called out Mr Craven, and a tall, slender lady in a deep red velvet gown descended the stairs. She looked nervous and she smiled a tentative, hopeful smile. ‘Colin, Mary, this is Caroline. I love her very much, and I am happy to tell you that she has agreed to be my wife. You are to have a new mother!’

Silence. 

Mary looked at Colin, Colin glared at the floor. He wouldn’t even glance at her.

‘I don’t need a new mother. I had one but she is dead. You are not my Mama,’ said Colin.

‘I know,’ she said, and her voice was soft and gentle. ‘Indeed, you won’t have a new mother, for no-one can replace a mother. But I hope you will find in me a good friend and companion. Someone to bring your troubles to, someone to help you and guide you – and teach you, if you will allow me?’ She stood beside Mr Craven and held out her hand to Colin, but still he stared at the floor and her hand fell back to her side. ‘I cannot have children of my own,’ she continued sadly, and Mary looked at her curiously. Her own mother had a child and didn’t want her, Mary had never considered that some women might want children but not be able to have them. ‘So, I shall try my hardest to love you both. If you will let me?’ She turned her gaze from Colin to Mary, and as their eyes met there was a flash of recognition. Mary knew that this woman was an ally, a friend in her life which had known so few allies and friends. 

‘Yes.’ She took a step forward and held out her hand. ‘Yes, I should like that, I think,’ she said, carefully. Caroline took her hand and gripped it, warmly. ‘We shall be friends, you and I,’ she said, and Mary nodded.

‘And Colin, I hope that in time you’ll come to see Caroline the way I do,’ said his father, putting his arm around the boy’s shoulders. ‘As the best of all women, like your mother was.’

‘I’ll try,’ he said grudgingly. ‘If Mary will be friends, then so will I.’

‘I’m so pleased to hear it,’ said Caroline, and shook his hand like a grown-up. She seemed to know that it was too soon for hugs and kisses, but maybe that would come in time.

‘Are we to go to school then? Now you will have a new wife?’ Colin asked.

‘Not at all,’ said Mr Craven. ‘Caroline is going to teach you.’

‘I’m lucky enough to have been to university, and I’ll be happy to help you learn.’

‘You’ve been to university? But you’re a woman!’ Colin said, rudely.

‘Women do go to universities, you know,’ Mary said grandly. ‘I shall go to a university when I’m grown. What did you study there?’ she asked Caroline.

‘Botany,’ Caroline said proudly. ‘I was studying the flora of Yorkshire last summer, which is how I met Archibald, up on the moors. Flowers and plants are my passion. Why, I have even written a book about them.’

And Mary knew. Her favourite book was A Collection of Moorland Plants and here before her stood the author.

‘C. A. Haworth. Caroline Haworth. You’re her, aren’t you?’ Mary asked.

‘Yes! Indeed I am. And we shall have some marvellous field trips up onto the moors in the summer in search of rare varieties of flowers, if you would like.’

‘I would. I should like more than anything to learn botany,’ said Mary.

‘Botany? I’d rather learn piracy. I wish she’d written Treasure Island,’ muttered Colin.

‘Why, that is one of my favourites. I’ve read it many times. Such a stirring story!’ And there was a tiny spark of recognition from Colin. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. ‘Though after all that happened with your last governess, perhaps we should have a break from study for a while. A Christmas holiday, and then start afresh in the spring.’

‘Start afresh in the spring,’ repeated Mary softly, as if it were a kind of incantation. 

Winter had its own magic, but in spring they would learn and grow, and that was the best magic of all.

The End

By Liz Taylorson.

This story is for Holly

It was warm in Mr Craven’s study and Mary and Colin sat with their feet by the fire and cups of hot chocolate in their hands, which Cook had made them as a special treat. It was two days after Mr Craven had found them, and today was Christmas Eve. They had slept most of yesterday, and today they were both comfortably reading: Colin his beloved Treasure Island and Mary her book of botany. Behind them the door opened softly, and Martha came in with a bucket of coal. 

‘Martha! You’re back!’ Mary jumped up and hugged her. 

‘You shouldn’t be doing that, Miss! I’ve been lugging the coal buckets around and I’m covered in smudges,’ she said, and indeed, her apron had a streak of black down the front. But she returned Mary’s hug all the same. ‘Your uncle gave me my place back. He came past our cottage after he drove Miss Crichton and Miss Prosser to the station and asked me to come back.’

‘He took them to the station himself to make sure that they went. He didn’t want them under his roof for one minute more than necessary,’ Colin told Martha. 

‘He dismissed them both without references. I heard Miss Prosser pleading that they had nowhere else to go, and I almost felt sorry for her,’ said Mary. ‘But Uncle Archibald said that they had showed us no pity, and therefore they deserved none themselves.’

 ‘I saw them through the windows of the carriage, and a more dejected pair I never saw. Miss Crichton had a face like stone, and Miss Prosser was crying into her handkerchief.’ Martha tipped coal from her bucket into the brass coal scuttle beside the fire.

‘Good,’ said Colin.

‘Then he stopped off on the way home and brought me back himself, in the carriage, imagine that! Me in a carriage! And he asked so politely after the family and all.’ She wiped her hands on her apron. ‘Eh, I didn’t know what to say, I was that overcome!’

‘I’m glad you’re back,’ said Mary.

‘Though it might not be for long, Miss. Can I tell you a secret? While I was at home I had more time to spend with my friend … I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned him to you. Name of Bob Strong?’

‘Oh yes, you’ve mentioned him!’ Mary grinned.

‘Well, he and I had a chance to be better acquainted, and …’ She blushed, and busied herself with sweeping the fireplace to hide her confusion.

‘And you’re sweethearts!’ Mary finished her sentence.

‘He’s asked me to marry him. I’ll be eighteen next year, and we’ve agreed to wed on my eighteenth birthday. And I’m hoping, Miss, that you might be my bridesmaid?’

‘Oh yes please Martha!’ Mary hugged the maid again. ‘Now don’t you worry about making up the fire. I can do that myself you know.’ Mary put some coal on the fire and watched it blaze up with satisfaction. If one day she had a home of her own, she wanted to be able to do things for herself, and not always rely on other people. She never wanted to feel helpless again.

The door opened and Mr Craven came in. The butler had brought a telegram for him and it needed to be dealt with straight away, though he wouldn’t tell the children what was in it. Perhaps news that Miss Crichton and Miss Prosser were safely in London, never to return.

Martha bobbed a curtsey. ‘Lawks a mercy, I nearly forgot. Mother asks if you might like to come over to the cottage while there’s still snow on the ground. Dickon has built a sledge for our young ‘uns and he wondered if you two might like to have a go. It flies like a bird, swooping down the hills.’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Colin. ‘I don’t like the cold, and I’m not sure that I’m strong enough to –’

‘I think that sounds like an excellent idea,’ said Mr Craven with a twinkling smile. ‘Flying like a bird sounds like just the thing for a winter afternoon. You go sledging, children.’ He turned to Martha. ‘I’ll have Cook put together a basket of Christmas treats for you to take for your family, as you were generous with your food when these two had none. Colin, Mary, when you return, perhaps there will be a surprise for you both.’

Mary’s face fell. She was afraid that the surprise was going to be another new governess.

‘Nothing to worry about!’ her uncle assured them. ‘Now get your outside clothes on and go and try out this sledge. But be back before dark, please. I don’t want to have to come searching for you in the darkness again. Go on, off you go!’

As they made their way down the corridor to pick up their coats, Colin turned to his cousin. 

‘I know what the surprise is. It’ll be a Christmas tree.’

‘I’ve never seen one. We didn’t have them in India.’ Mary frowned. She wasn’t sure she wanted a tree inside the house.

 ‘Mama always used to have the biggest tree and she used to decorate it on Christmas Eve. It’s another kind of winter magic, just you wait and see!’

By Liz Taylorson

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.’

By Liz Taylorson

‘It’s frozen!’ Colin said. He stood, with the kettle in his hand, in front of the pump at the top of the garden, staring at it as if he could he get it to work with the force of his stare. ‘I didn’t know pumps could freeze. And my hands hurt now from the cold, I wish I had my gloves. What are we going to do if we can’t get water from the pump?’

‘We can melt snow,’ said Mary, who was picking up some more logs from under the silver birch tree in the corner of the Secret Garden. She wished she had brought them in last night, for these ones were not sheltered and had been covered in snow so now they were cold and wet. ‘Fill the kettle with snow and we’ll melt it on the fire.’

‘If you can get it going again. It looked pretty dead this morning. And we haven’t got many matches left.’

Indeed, thought Mary, it had been harder to light the fire yesterday morning than she had expected. When Martha did it, she only seemed to touch the flame to the kindling and the fire would blaze up. When Mary did it, it had taken most of the box of matches.

‘Of course I can get it going,’ she said crossly. She loved her cousin very much, but after a whole day and half spent with him without a respite she was finding his company increasingly irksome. He complained about everything! Though even Mary had to admit that this morning didn’t have quite the same magic that yesterday morning had brought. The snow was trampled and had lost its brightness and a sharp frost last night had frozen it into grey, glassy folds that were treacherously slippery underfoot. The sky above them was heavy and dark and the wind was biting.

‘Let’s get back inside and I’ll light the fire,’ she said. 

As Colin had predicted, the fire was hard to light. She cleared away the ashes of yesterday’s fire and her hands were covered in ash and soot, and without the pump she wasn’t sure how she was going to get them properly clean again. She picked some tinder and kindling from her supply in the corner of the room and laid it in the centre of the fireplace. She put a match to it and the tinder blazed up, and soon the kindling had caught nicely. 

‘There, you see? We’ll be warm in no time at all!’ she told Colin, but as she added the first of the sticks she had collected today she knew she had made a mistake. The wood was too wet. It steamed and sizzled in the heat from the kindling, but it didn’t catch, and soon the kindling had all burnt away and there was no fire. She tried again, but the same thing happened. 

‘It’s not working. We’re going to freeze to death here,’ Colin grumbled. 

‘Well, wrap yourself in a blanket if you’re cold. At least we’re not going to starve, because we’ve still got the bread Cook sent us, and there’s some of the pie left for our dinner.’

She used some of the snow to clean her hands as best as she could, but her nails were grimy with soot.

‘What would Miss Prosser say to these?’ she said, showing her nails to Colin. ‘You’ll never be a fine young lady with fingernails like that!’ She hoped he would laugh at her impression of Miss Prosser.

Colin didn’t laugh. He shook his head. ‘She’d be right,’ he said, grimly, as he opened the canvas bag and got out the bread. It had been fresh and delicious yesterday, today it was cold and stale, and the crusts were hard to eat. He chewed and chewed. ‘It’s better than nothing,’ he said. ‘Marginally better than nothing.’

‘After breakfast, why don’t we go into the garden and –’

‘I don’t want to go outside. It’s too cold and wet. It makes my chest wheeze.’

‘Then we could read?’ she suggested, gesturing towards the books on the table. There was his favourite, Treasure Island just waiting to be picked up.

‘The light in here isn’t bright enough. It makes my eyes ache.’

‘I have some playing cards. We could have a game of racing demons.’

‘My hands are too cold and sore. I wouldn’t be able to hold the cards.’ He pulled the blanket more tightly around himself. 

‘Then what do you want to do?’ she snapped.

‘I want to go home.’

‘Well, we can’t. Imagine how much trouble we’ll be in. They’ll punish us.’

‘We’re going to be punished anyway, sooner or later. We’ll have to go back sometime.’

‘We can’t go back until your father comes home.’

‘And then he’ll punish us for running away. This was a bad idea, Mary, and I wish you’d never thought of it.’

‘So do I,’ she said, ‘but I did, and we’re here now. Two or three more days, that’s all. Just two or three more days, Colin.’

‘That’s two or three too many.’

‘You must be brave! Like in Treasure Island, remember, you wanted an adventure?’

‘This isn’t an adventure. It’s a disaster.’

By Liz Taylorson