Free Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce Page A

he knew that, with both hands and all his force, he could not have lifted even a feather’s weight. Meanwhile Hatty, on her hands and knees, seemed to have forgotten that she was a Princess.
    After that, they went to the little brick-built heating-house, at the end of the greenhouse, and Hatty set about opening that door for Tom. She was far too small to be able to reach the flat square of iron that latched the top of the door; but, standing on tiptoe and straining upward with her yew-twig, she was finally able to poke it aside. She opened the door, and they went down steps inside into darkness and the smell of rust and cold cinders—the weather was so warm that the stove for the greenhouse was not working. There was a small shelf with two or three books on it, that Hatty said belonged to Abel. The shelf was just out of reach, but they could see that the topmost book of the pile was a Bible. ‘Abel says the Bible must be above all the other books, like—like the Queen ruling over all England.’
    They went into the greenhouse, among the cacti and the creepers that swayed down from their roof-suspended cage-pots, and plants with strange flowers that could never be expected to live, like other plants, out of doors. Tom gasped for breath in the greenhouse, and wondered how they endured the stifling air. There was a Castor-oil Plant—Tom felt a little sick when Hatty named it. There was a Sensitive Plant, too, and Hatty showed Tom how, when she touched a leaf-tip, the whole frond drooped and shrank from her by folding itself together. The plant’s sensitivity was something quite out of the ordinary; it seemed to feel even Tom’s touch. He was so delighted that he worked his fingers over the whole plant, and left it in one droop of nervous dejection.
    Then they leant over the water-tank and tried to see the goldfish—and tried to catch them. Hatty bared her arm, to plunge it in; and Tom laid his arm along hers and behind it, with his open hand behind hers, finger to finger. So, as with one arm and one hand, they dipped into the water and hunted. Tom could have done nothing by himself; but when Hatty very nearly caught a fish, Tom’s hand seemed one with hers in the catching.
    Then Hatty led Tom back to the doorway of the greenhouse and showed him the coloured panes that bordered the glass panelling of the upper half. Through each colour of pane, you could see a different garden outside. Through the green pane, Tom saw a garden with green flowers under a green sky; even the geraniums were green-black. Through the red pane lay a garden as he might have seen it through the redness of shut eyelids. The purple glass filled the garden with thunderous shadow and with oncoming night. The yellow glass seemed to drench it in lemonade. At each of the four corners of this bordering was a colourless square of glass, engraved with a star.
    ‘And if you look through this one …’ said Hatty. They screwed up their eyes and looked through the engraved glass.
    ‘You can’t really see anything, through the star,’ said Tom, disappointed.
    ‘Sometimes I like that the best of all,’ said Hatty. ‘You look and see nothing, and you might think there wasn’t a garden at all; but, all the time, of course, there is, waiting for you.’
    They went out into the garden again, and Hatty began to tell Tom about the yew-trees round the lawn. The one he had climbed and waved from was called the Matterhorn. Another tree was called the Look-out, and another the Steps of St Paul’s. One tree was called Tricksy, because of the difficulty of climbing it: its main trunk was quite bare for some way up from the ground and could only be swarmed. Hubert and James and Edgar had all swarmed it in their time; Hatty could not swarm. (Tom felt superior—Princess or no Princess.)
    Sometimes Hatty’s information seemed doubtful to Tom. They paused by a bushy plant, to which Hatty drew attention. ‘This is the Burning Bush,’ she said. She plucked a leaf,