Free The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories by Garth Nix, Joan Aiken, Andi Watson, Lizza Aiken

there for a couple of hours. Then they picked an enormous basketful of cowslips and started home for a late tea.
    That night they listened carefully until the parents had gone to bed, and then slipped downstairs into the drawing-room. As before, the moonlight lay across the floor, but much farther round. Everything was silent, and all they could hear was their own breathing. Harriet began to have a dreadful feeling of disappointment.
    "Perhaps she won't come again,” she whispered gloomily.
    "Nonsense,” said Mark, “we've hardly been here any time. If your feet are cold, sit in the armchair and tuck them under you."
    Harriet thought this a good idea. They sat on, and now they could hear the grandfather clock ticking in the hall, and the lonely lowing of a cow somewhere below in the valley.
    All of a sudden a quiet voice said: “Ah! Children! There you are. I've been looking for you everywhere. This, Harriet, is your brother Mark, I presume?"
    Harriet's heart gave a violent jump, and then began beating very quickly. Miss Allison was standing, as she had been yesterday, on the edge of a pool of moonlight. She held a ruler in her hand and looked benevolent, but just slightly impatient.
    Harriet got up and curtsied, and then she introduced Mark, who was standing with his mouth open, but otherwise looked fairly collected.
    "Now we will go to the schoolroom,” said the governess, “and that is where I should like you to wait for me in future. We will only come to the drawing-room for music lessons on Tuesdays and Fridays."
    The children cast anxious glances at each other, but followed her upstairs meekly enough, watching with interest as she twinkled in and out of patches of moonlight in the corridors, and wondering which room she had decided to use as the schoolroom. They found that it was Mark's bedroom, which was very convenient, as Harriet whispered to him.
    "Don't whisper, Harriet dear,” said Miss Allison, who had her back turned, “it's unpardonably rude.” She was doing something which looked like writing on an invisible blackboard. “There, that's finished. Now, Harriet, will you bring your back-board out of that corner and lie on it. I wish to see you on it for at least half an hour every day, to give you a ladylike and erect deportment.
    Harriet had a look in the corner but saw nothing except Mark's tennis racket and a box of balls.
    "I don't see it,” she said unhappily.
    "Nonsense, dear. Your left foot is on it at the moment. Try to be observant."
    As Harriet's left foot was resting firmly on the floor, she felt rather injured, but, catching the governess’ eye, she hastily stooped, picked up an imaginary back-board with both hands, and carried it to the middle of the room.
    "It would help,” she said to herself, “if I knew what the dratted thing looked like. But I suppose it's as long as I am."
    "Put it down, child. Now lie on it. Flat on your back, arms at your sides, eyes looking at the ceiling."
    Harriet lay down on the floor, looking at Miss Allison doubtfully, and was rewarded by a nod.
    "Now Mark,” said the governess briskly, “I have written on the blackboard a list of Latin prepositions followed by the ablative case. You will occupy yourself in learning them while I write out an exercise for you both. Harriet, you can be trying to think of twenty wildflowers beginning with the letter l."
    She sat down at an invisible table and began briskly writing on nothing. Mark looked gloomily at the empty space where the blackboard was supposed to be, and wondered how he could learn a list of words he couldn't see. This adventure, it seemed to him, was a bit too much like real life. He wished Miss Allison was a more conventional ghost with clanking chains.
    Harriet gave him a grin, and then, as Miss Allison looked particularly occupied, she whispered:
    "A, ab, absque, coram, de..."
    Mark's face cleared. Of course, now he remembered the words. Thank goodness he had learned them at school. He thought for a