He frowned.
‘The Victorians used to have them made from the hair of family members. This one belonged to Georgiana Mountrachet, Eliza’s mother.’
Christian nodded slowly. ‘Explains why it was so important to her. Why she went to retrieve it.’
‘And why she didn’t make it back to the boat.’ Cassandra studied Eliza’s precious items in her lap. ‘I just wish Nell had seen them. She always felt abandoned, never knew that Eliza was her mother, that she was loved. It was the one thing she longed to learn: who she was.’
‘But she did know who she was,’ Christian said. ‘She was Nell, whose granddaughter Cassandra loved her enough to cross the ocean to solve her mystery for her.’
‘She doesn’t know that I came here.’
‘How do you know what she does and doesn’t know? She might be watching you right now.’ He raised his brows. ‘Anyway, of course she knew you’d come. Why else would she have left you the cottage? And that note on the will, what did it say?’
How odd the note had seemed, how little she had understood when Ben had first given it to her. ‘For Cassandra, who will understand why. ’
‘And? Do you?’
Of course she did. Nell, who had needed so desperately to confront her own past in order to move beyond it, had seen in Cassandra a kindred spirit. A fellow victim of circumstance. ‘She knew I’d come.’
Christian was nodding. ‘She knew you loved her enough to finish what she’d started. It’s like in “The Crone’s Eyes”, when the fawn tells the princess that the crone didn’t need her sight, that she knew who she was by the princess’s love for her.’
Cassandra’s eyes stung. ‘That fawn was very wise.’
‘Not to mention handsome and brave.’
She couldn’t help smiling. ‘So now we know. Who Nell’s mother was. Why she was left alone on the boat. What happened to Eliza.’ She also knew why the garden was so important to her, why she felt her own roots connecting to its soil, deeper and deeper with each moment she spent within its walls. She was at home in the garden, for in some way she couldn’t explain Nell was here too. As was Eliza. And she, Cassandra, was the guardian of both their secrets.
Christian seemed to read her mind. ‘So,’ he said, ‘still planning on selling it?’
Cassandra watched as the breeze tossed down a shower of yellow leaves. ‘Actually, I thought I might stay around a bit longer.’
‘At the hotel?’
‘No, here in the cottage.’
‘You won’t be lonely?’
It was so unlike her, but in that moment Cassandra opened her mouth and said exactly what she was feeling. Gave no pause for second-guessing and worry. ‘I don’t think I’ll be alone. Not all the time.’ She felt the hot-cold sensation of an impending blush and hurried on. ‘I want to finish what we’ve started.’
He raised his eyebrows.
The blush found her. ‘Here. In the garden, I mean.’
‘I know what you mean.’ His gaze held hers. As Cassandra’s heart began to hammer against her ribs, he let his shovel drop, reached out to cup her cheek. He leaned nearer and she closed her eyes. A sigh, heavy with years of weariness, escaped her. And then he was kissing her, and she was struck by his nearness, his solidity, his smell. It was of the garden and the earth and the sun.
When Cassandra opened her eyes, she realised she was crying. She wasn’t sad though, these were the tears of being found, of having come home after a long time away. She tightened her grip on the brooch. Past. Future. Family. Her own past was filled with memories, a lifetime of beautiful, precious, sad memories. For a decade she had moved amongst them, slept with them, walked with them. But something had changed, she had changed. She had come to Cornwall to uncover Nell’s past, her family, and somehow she had found her own future. Here, in this beautiful garden that Eliza had made and Nell had reclaimed, Cassandra had found herself.
Christian smoothed her hair and looked at her face with a certainty that made her shiver. ‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said finally.
Cassandra took his hand in hers. She had been waiting for him, too.
Epilogue
Greenslopes Hospital, Brisbane, 2005
Cool against her eyelids; tingles like tiny feet, those of ants, walking back and forth.
A voice, blessedly familiar. ‘I’ll get a nurse—’
‘No.’ Nell reached out, still couldn’t see, grasped for anything she could find. ‘Don’t leave me.’ Her face was wet, recycled air cold against it.
‘I’ll be back soon. I promise.’
‘No—’
‘It’s all right, Grandma. I’m getting help.’
Grandma. That’s who she was, now she remembered. She’d had many names in her lifetime, so many she’d forgotten a few, but it wasn’t until she acquired her last, Grandma, that she’d known who she really was.
A second chance, a blessing, a saviour. Her granddaughter.
And now Cassandra was getting help.
Nell’s eyes closed. She was on the ship again. Could feel the water beneath her, the deck swaying this way and that. Barrels, sunlight, dust. Laughter, faraway laughter.
It was fading. The lights were being turned down. Dimming, like the lights in the Plaza theatre, before the feature presentation. Patrons shifting in their seats, whispering, waiting . . .
Black.
Silence.
And then she was somewhere else, somewhere cold and dark. Alone. Sharp things, branches, either side of her. A sense that walls were pushing in on both sides, tall and dark. The light was returning; not much, but sufficient that she could crane her neck and see the distant sky.
Her legs were moving. She was walking, hands out to the sides brushing against the leaves and branch ends.
A corner. She turned. More leafy walls. The smell of earth, rich and moist.
Suddenly, she knew. The word came to her, ancient and familiar. Maze. She was in a maze.
Awareness, instant and fully formed: at its end was a most glorious place. Somewhere she needed to be. Somewhere safe where she could rest.
She reached a fork.
Turned.
She knew the way. She remembered. She had been here before.
Faster now, she went faster. Need pushing in her chest, certainty. She must reach the end.
Light ahead. She was almost there.
Just a little further.
Then suddenly, out of the shadows and into the light came a figure. The Authoress, holding out her hand. Silvery voice. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’
The Authoress stepped aside and Nell saw that she had reached the gate.
The end of the maze.
‘Where am I?’
‘You’re home.’
With a deep breath, Nell followed the Authoress across the threshold and into the most beautiful garden she had ever seen.
And at last, the wicked Queen’s spell was broken, and the young woman, whom circumstance and cruelty had trapped in the body of a bird, was released from her cage. The cage door opened and the cuckoo bird fell, fell, fell, until finally her stunted wings opened, and she found that she could fly. With the cool sea breeze of her homeland buffeting the undersides of her wings, she soared over the cliff edge and across the ocean. Towards a new land of hope, and freedom, and life. Towards her other half. Home.
—FROM ‘THE CUCKOO’S FLIGHT’ BY ELIZA MAKEPEACE
Acknowledgements
For helping to bring The Forgotten Garden into the world, I’d like to thank:
My Nana Connelly, whose story first inspired me; Selwa Anthony for her wisdom and care; Kim Wilkins, Julia Morton and Diane Morton, for reading early drafts; Kate Eady for hunting down pesky historical facts; Danny Kretschmer for providing photos on a deadline; and Julia’s workmates for answering questions of vernacular. For research assistance—archaeological, entomological and medical—I’m grateful to Dr Walter Wood, Dr Natalie Franklin, Katharine Parkes, and especially Dr Sally Wilde; and, for
help with specific details, many thanks to Nicole Ruckels, Elaine Wilkins and Joyce Morton.
I am fortunate to be published worldwide by extraordinary people and I’m thankful to everyone whose efforts have helped to turn my stories into books. For their sensitive and tireless editorial support on The Forgotten Garden, I’d like to make special mention of Catherine Milne, Clara Finlay, and the wonderful Annette Barlow at Allen & Unwin, Australia; and Maria Rejt and Liz Cowen at Pan Macmillan, UK. I’m much obliged to Julia Stiles and Lesley Levene for their fine attention to detail.
I would also like to pay tribute here to authors who write for children. To discover early that behind the black marks on white pages lurk worlds of incomparable terror, joy and excitement is one of life’s great gifts. I am enormously grateful to those authors whose works fired my childhood imagination, and inspired in me a love of books and reading that has been a constant companion. The Forgotten Garden is, in part, an ode to them.
Finally, as always, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my husband, Davin Patterson, and my two sons, Oliver and Louis, to whom this story belongs.
If you enjoyed The Forgotten Garden, then you’ll love The Distant Hours.
Edie Burchill and her mother have never been close, but when a long-lost letter arrives one Sunday afternoon with the return address of Milderhurst Castle, Kent, printed on its envelope, Edie begins to suspect that her mother’s emotional distance masks an old secret.
Evacuated from London as a thirteen-year-old girl, Edie’s mother is chosen by the mysterious Juniper Blythe, and taken to live at Milderhurst Castle with the Blythe family: Juniper, her twin sisters and their father, Raymond, author of the 1918 children’s classic The True History of the Mud Man. In the grand and glorious Milderhurst Castle, a new world opens up for Edie’s mother. She discovers the joys of books and fantasy and writing, but also, ultimately, the dangers.
Fifty years later, as Edie chases the answers to her mother’s riddle, she, too, is drawn to Milderhurst Castle and the eccentric Sisters Blythe. Old ladies now, the three still live together, the twins nursing Juniper, whose abandonment by her fiance in 1941 plunged her into madness. Inside the decaying castle, Edie begins to unravel her mother’s past. But there are other secrets hidden in the stones of Milderhurst Castle, and Edie is about to learn more than she expected. The truth of what happened in the distant hours has been waiting a long time for someone to find it.
ISBN 978 1 74331 111 0
1
A Lost Letter Finds Its Way
It started with a letter. A letter that had been lost a long time, waiting out half a century, stifling summer after cooling winter, in a forgotten postal bag in the dim attic of a nondescript house in Bermondsey. I think about it sometimes, that mailbag; of the hundreds of love letters, grocery bills, birthday cards, notes from children to their parents, that lay together, swelling and sighing as their thwarted messages whispered in the dark. Waiting, waiting, for someone to realise they were there. For it is said, you know, that a letter will always seek a reader; that sooner or later, like it or not, words have a way of finding the light, of making their secrets known.
Forgive me, I’m being romantic—a habit acquired from the years spent reading nineteenth-century novels with a torch when my parents thought I was asleep. What I mean to say is it’s odd to think that if Arthur Tyrell had been a little more responsible, if he hadn’t had one too many rum toddies that Christmas Eve in 1941 and gone home and fallen into a drunken slumber instead of finishing his mail delivery, if the bag hadn’t then been tucked in his attic and hidden until his death some fifty years later when one of his daughters unearthed it and called the Daily Mail, the whole thing might have turned out differently. For my mum, for me, and especially for Juniper Blythe.
You probably read about it when it happened; it was in all the newspapers, and on the TV news. Channel 4 even ran a special where they invited some of the recipients to talk about their letter, their particular voice from the past that had come back to surprise them. Remember? There was the woman whose sweetheart had been in the RAF, and the man with the birthday card his evacuated son had sent, the little boy who was killed by a piece of falling shrapnel a week or so later. It was a very good program, I thought: moving in parts, happy and sad stories interspersed with old footage of the war. I cried a couple of times, though that’s not saying much: I’m rather disposed to weeping.
Mum didn’t go on the show though. The producers contacted her and asked whether there was anything special in her letter that she’d like to share with the nation, but she said no, that it was just an ordinary old clothing order from a shop that had long ago gone out of business. But that wasn’t the truth. I know this because I was there when the letter arrived. I saw her reaction to that lost letter and it was anything but ordinary.
It was a morning in late February, winter still had us by the throat, the flowerbeds were icy, and I’d come over to help with the Sunday roast. I do that sometimes because my parents like it, even though I’m a vegetarian and I know that at some point during the course of the meal my mother will start to look worried, then agonised, until finally she can stand it no longer and statistics about protein and anaemia will begin to fly.
I was peeling potatoes into the sink when the mail dropped through the slot in the door. The mail doesn’t usually come on Sundays so that should have tipped us off, but it didn’t. For my part, I was too busy wondering how I was going to tell my parents that Jamie and I had broken up. It had been two months since it happened; I knew I had to say something eventually, but the longer I took to utter the words, the more calcified they became. And I had my reasons for staying silent: my parents had been suspicious of Jamie from the first, they didn’t take kindly to upsets, and Mum would worry even more than usual if she knew that I was living in the flat alone. Most of all, though, I was dreading the inevitable, awkward conversation that would follow my announcement. To see first bewilderment, then alarm, then resignation, cross Mum’s face as she realised the maternal code required her to provide some sort of consolation. Worse, to then have to sit through a stilted talk about time healing all wounds, about being sensible, about looking on the bright side. Mum married her first love, my dad, and from what I’d gleaned it was never much of a grand passion. It seemed doubtful to me that she would understand what it was to have one’s heart wrenched from one’s chest, wrung out like a sloppy rag, then balled up and shoved back into place.
But back to the mail. The sound of something dropping softly through the slot.
‘Edie, can you get that?’
This was my mother. (Edie is me; I’m sorry, I should have said so earlier.) She nodded towards the hallway and gestured with the hand that wasn’t stuck up the centre of the chicken.
I put down the potato, wiped my hands on a tea towel and went to fetch the mail. There was only one letter, lying on the welcome mat: an official post-office envelope declaring the contents as ‘lost mail’. I read the label to Mum as I brought it into the kitchen.
She’d finished stuffing the chicken by then and was drying her own hands. Frowning a little, from habit rather than any particular expectation, she took the letter from me and plucked her reading glasses from the pumpkin in the fruit bowl. She skimmed the post-office notice and with a flicker of her eyebrows began to open the outer envelope.
I’d turned back to the potatoes by now, a task that was arguably more engaging than watching my mum open mail, so I’m sorry to say I didn’t see her face as she fished the smaller envelope from inside, as she registered the frail austerity paper and the old stamp, as she turned the letter over and read the name written on the back. I’ve imagined it many times since, though, the colour draining instantly from her cheeks, her fingers beginning to tremble so that it took minutes before she was able to slit the envelope open.
What I don’t have to imagine is the sound. The horrid, guttural gasp followed quickly by a series of rasping sobs that swamped the air and made me slip with the peeler
so that I cut my finger and blood dripped onto the potato.
‘Mum?’ I went to her, draping my arm around her shoulders, careful not to bleed on her dress. But she didn’t say anything. She couldn’t, she later told me, not then. She stood rigidly, with the exception of her shoulders, which were shaking as tears spilled down her cheeks and she clutched that strange little envelope, its paper so thin I could make out the corner of the folded letter inside, hard against her bosom. Then she disappeared into her bedroom leaving a fraying wake of instructions I couldn’t understand about the bird and the oven and the potatoes.
I don’t know about your family but in mine this was not normal. My mother doesn’t cry, not ever when I was growing up, even when her brother was killed in a road accident in Australia. The kitchen settled in a shocked silence around her absence and I stayed very quiet and moved very slowly so as not to disturb it further. An odd feeling had come over me, that all-over fuzzy sense of an old memory shifting. You know the one I mean? A little like déjà vu, where a part of your brain recognises a set of circumstances, an emotional register, and sends out tingling signals to the rest of your body. This moment, Mum’s upset, the shock of it, felt oddly familiar, as if we’d been here before.
After fifteen minutes in which I variously peeled potatoes, turned over possibilities as to whom the letter might be from and wondered how to proceed, I finally knocked on her door and asked whether she’d like a cup of tea. She’d composed herself by then and we sat opposite one another at the small linoleumcovered table in the kitchen. As I pretended not to notice she’d been crying, she began to talk about the envelope’s contents.
‘A letter,’ she said, ‘someone I used to know a long time ago. When I was just a girl, twelve, thirteen.’
A picture came into my mind, a hazy memory of a photograph that had sat on my gran’s bedside when she was old and dying. Three children, the youngest of whom was my mum, a girl with short dark hair, perched on something in the foreground. A step at the seaside? An old barrel? It was odd, I’d sat with Gran a hundred times or more but I couldn’t bring the girl in the photo’s features into focus now. Perhaps children are never really interested in who their parents were before they were born; not unless something particular happens to shine a light on the past. Ironic when you consider that it’s the things that happen to them then that turn them into the kind of parents they become. I sipped my tea, waiting for Mum to continue.