Free Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce

background of a yew-tree. In one hand she held up a twig of yew she had broken off in nervousness, or to play with; in the other hand she held her half-eaten apple: she held the two things like a queen’s sceptre and orb.
    ‘You can kiss my hand,’ she said.
    ‘I don’t want to,’ said Tom. He added, ‘Thank you,’ as an afterthought, in case she really were a princess; but he had his suspicions. ‘If you’re a Princess, your father and mother must be a King and Queen: where’s their kingdom—where are they?’
    ‘I’m not allowed to say.’
    ‘Why not?’
    She hesitated, and then said: ‘I am held here a prisoner. I am a Princess in disguise. There is someone here who calls herself my aunt, but she isn’t so: she is wicked and cruel to me. And those aren’t my cousins, either, although I have to call them so. Now you know my whole secret. I will permit you to call me Princess.’
    She stretched out her hand towards him again, but Tom ignored it.
    ‘And now,’ she said, ‘I will allow myself to play with you.’
    ‘I don’t mind playing,’ said Tom, doggedly, ‘but I’m not used to playing silly girls’ games.’
    ‘Come with me,’ said the girl.
    She showed him the garden. Tom had thought that he knew it well already; but, now, with Hatty, he saw places and things he had not guessed at before. She showed him all her hiding-places: a leafy crevice between a wall and a tree-trunk, where a small human body could just wedge itself; a hollowed-out centre to a box-bush, and a run leading to it—like the run made in the hedge by the meadow; a wigwam shelter made by a re-arrangement of the bean-sticks that Abel had left leaning against the side of the heating-house; a series of hiding-holes behind the fronds of the great ferns that grew along the side of the greenhouse; a feathery green tunnel between the asparagus ridges. She showed Tom how to hide from a search simply by standing behind the trunk of the big fir-tree: you had to listen intently and move exactly—and noiselessly, of course—so that the trunk was always between yourself and the searcher.
    Hatty showed Tom many things he could not have seen for himself. When she was lifting the sacking over the rhubarb-tubs, to show him the sticks of rhubarb, Tom remembered something: ‘Did you once leave a written message here?’
    ‘Did you once find one?’ asked Hatty.
    ‘Yes—a letter to fairies.’ Tom did not hide the disgust he had felt. ‘Fairies!’
    ‘Whoever could have put it there?’ Hatty wondered. ‘To fairies! Just fancy!’ She pulled a grimace, but awkwardly; and she changed the subject quickly. ‘Come on, Tom! I’ll show you more!’
    She opened doors for him. She unlatched the door into the gooseberry wire, and they went in. Among the currant bushes at the end they found a blackbird that must have squeezed in by a less official entrance, attracted by the fruit. The bird beat its wings frantically against the wire at their approach, but they manoeuvred round it and then drove it before them down the gooseberry wire and out—in a glad rush—through the door they had left open. ‘It’s lucky we found it,’ said Hatty. ‘I’m afraid that Abel …’ She shook her head. ‘I really think he’d rather see birds starving than eating his fruit.’
    For Tom, she opened the orchard door from the sundial path, and then the door into the potting-shed. Among the tools and seed-boxes and flower-pots and rolls of chicken-wire, they found a sack full of feathers—hen feathers and goose feathers. Hatty dug her fingers in and threw them up into the air in a brown-and-white storm so thick that even Tom thought he felt a tickling on his nose, and sneezed. Then Hatty crept over the floor, laughing, and picked up all the fallen feathers, and put them back, because otherwise Abel would be angry. Tom sat on the side of the wheelbarrow and swung his legs and pointed out any stray feathers still drifting down. He could not have helped Hatty: