The Secret Garden

Mary Lennox was not a child anyone would have chosen to pity, nor one whose face invited tenderness. When she was sent away to live with her uncle at Misselthwaite Manor, all who saw her agreed she was the most disagreeable-looking creature imaginable—and they were quite right. Her face was thin and sallow, her body slight and sickly, her expression perpetually sour. She had been born in India, where the climate and illness had turned her complexion the color of old parchment, and where her parents had seen fit to ignore her almost entirely from the moment she drew breath.

Her father, occupied with government duties and his own poor health, had no time for her. Her mother, a renowned beauty who lived for parties and admiration, had no desire for a child at all. The moment Mary arrived, squalling and unwanted, she was handed over to an Ayah with strict instructions to keep the child invisible. And so Mary grew—not in affection or warmth, but in tyranny. The servants gave her everything she demanded, if only to keep her quiet, until by age six she had become as spoiled and selfish a creature as ever drew breath. Governesses came and fled in quick succession, unable to bear her temper. Only her own stubborn curiosity saved her from complete ignorance of letters.

Then came the morning everything changed—a morning thick with Indian heat and something far more sinister. Mary woke cross, as she always did, but crosser still when a strange servant stood where her Ayah should have been. The woman stammered and trembled but would not explain. The household moved in whispers and shadows, servants missing or hurrying about with ash-gray faces. No one would answer Mary's demands, and so she was left alone, forgotten even in her fury.

She wandered into the garden, stabbing scarlet hibiscus blooms into the dirt and muttering insults for her absent Ayah, when she heard her mother emerge onto the veranda with a young English officer. The Mem Sahib—beautiful, elegant, wrapped in floating lace—looked nothing like herself that morning. Her laughing eyes were wide with terror.

"Is it so very bad?" Mary heard her plead.

"Awfully," the young man answered, his voice trembling.

And then came the wailing—a terrible sound rising from the servants' quarters, spreading like wildfire. The cholera had come, swift and merciless. The Ayah had already died. By the next day, three more servants were gone, and others had fled in blind panic. Death moved through the bungalows like wind through dry grass.

Mary, abandoned and forgotten, hid in the nursery. She cried, she slept, she crept once to the dining room and found it empty—chairs pushed back, a meal half-eaten, as though everyone had simply vanished. She drank wine she did not know was strong and fell into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

When she finally woke, the silence was absolute. No voices, no footsteps, no weeping. Only stillness, and a small snake gliding across the matting, watching her with jeweled eyes before slipping beneath the door.

It was English officers who finally found her—standing rigid in the middle of the nursery, thin and cross and utterly alone. One man nearly stumbled backward at the sight of her, unable to believe a child had survived in such a place.

"There is nobody left to come," the young officer named Barney told her, his eyes bright with unshed tears.

And so Mary learned, in that strange and sudden way, that her mother and father were dead, carried away in the night—that the servants had fled without a single thought for the Missie Sahib no one had ever loved. She stood alone in the empty bungalow, with nothing but silence and a little rustling snake for company, on the threshold of a life she could not yet imagine.

Mary Lennox had always admired her mother from afar, thinking her quite pretty in the way one might admire a painting glimpsed through a doorway. But knowing so little of the woman who had given her life, she could hardly be expected to mourn her passing with any great depth of feeling. Indeed, she did not miss her at all. Mary was a thoroughly self-absorbed child who had always given her entire thought to herself, and she saw no reason to change this habit now that she found herself orphaned. Had she been older, the terror of being left alone in the world might have seized her, but she was very young and had always been looked after. She simply assumed she always would be. Her only concern was whether her new guardians would be nice people—polite people who would give her her own way, as her Ayah and the native servants had always done.

The English clergyman's house where she was first deposited would not do at all. The man was poor, his five children wore shabby clothes and quarreled endlessly, snatching toys from one another with grubby hands. Mary hated their untidy bungalow and made herself so thoroughly disagreeable that within days no one would play with her. It was then that Basil, an impudent boy with blue eyes and an upturned nose, bestowed upon her a nickname that made her furious. He found her playing alone beneath a tree, making little heaps of earth for a pretend garden, and when she snapped at him to go away, he danced around her singing that old nursery rhyme: *Mistress Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?* The other children took up the chant, and the crosser Mary became, the more they sang it.

It was Basil who told her she was being sent to England, to live with an uncle called Mr. Archibald Craven—a hunchback, he said, who lived in a great desolate house where no one ever visited because he was so horrid and cross. Mary declared she did not believe him and stuck her fingers in her ears, but she thought about it a great deal afterward.

The long voyage to England passed uneventfully, and in London she was handed over to Mrs. Medlock, her uncle's housekeeper—a stout woman with red cheeks, sharp black eyes, and a purple dress trimmed with jet. Mary did not like her, though this was hardly remarkable since Mary seldom liked anyone. Mrs. Medlock, for her part, made no secret of finding the child plain and unpromising.

On the train to Yorkshire, Mrs. Medlock attempted conversation, describing Misselthwaite Manor—six hundred years old, nearly a hundred rooms mostly shut up and locked, standing on the edge of something called a moor. Mr. Craven, she explained, had a crooked back that had made him sour, though he had softened briefly when he married a sweet, pretty wife. But the wife had died, and now he shut himself away in the West Wing, caring for nobody, seeing nobody.

Mary listened despite herself, picturing this gloomy house with its locked doors and lonely master. The rain began to pour in gray slanting sheets against the carriage windows, and it seemed fitting somehow—this dreary weather for this dreary journey to this dreary place. She felt a flicker of pity for Mr. Craven, remembering a French fairy story about a hunchback, but it faded quickly when Mrs. Medlock warned her not to expect attention or company.

She turned her face to the streaming glass, watching the endless gray storm, and somewhere between one thought and the next, she fell asleep—a small, sour, contrary child hurtling through the rain toward a house full of secrets she could not yet imagine.