Read Online Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce - Free Book Online

you’re going! I can’t help you—I’m off with the others!’ And he fled away after them, among the trees.
    Hatty followed, sobbing to herself, but almost absent-mindedly. She went among the trees and paths, searching. Her eyes glanced continually hither and thither, and she soon stopped crying and carried her head in the position of one intently listening. Tom could see that there was something expert in the way she looked for the three boys: this game had often been played before.
    Tom decided to follow Hatty in her search.
    She came across the gardener by the pond. ‘Abel, have you seen Cousin James, or Cousin Hubert, please? I don’t want to find Cousin Edgar, though.’
    ‘They didn’t come as far nor this, Miss Hatty. Are they playing Catch with you again?’
    ‘It’s the only game they’ll ever play with me.’
    ‘Why don’t you ask them to let you do the running away, for once, and they do the catching?’
    ‘It would be no good: I can’t run as fast as they can.’
    ‘They could give you a start.’
    She brightened: ‘If they did, they wouldn’t find me easily once I’d hidden. I could hide better than they do.’ She became boastful, jumping about on her toes in front of the gardener. ‘I know better secret places—many better secret places, and I can keep quieter than they can. So quiet, that nobody ever knows I’m in the garden at all.’
    ‘Can you, now?’ said the gardener, admiringly—to please her, Tom thought.
    ‘I see everybody, and nobody sees me,’ said the little girl. She was very cheerful now.
    Suddenly, from the trees behind her, came a ‘Coo-eee!’ She turned, and Tom did likewise: Edgar was showing himself, to renew her pursuit.
    Although she had said she did not want to find him, Hatty made for him at once. Almost immediately the other two boys broke cover. Together they all doubled back across the lawn towards the house. They would easily reach it before their pursuer, and Tom feared that he, as well as the unfortunate Hatty, would lose them. James was the last of the three runners, and Tom had taken to James: he was the kind of boy you might risk picking as a companion in tree-climbing or in any other pursuit. James was going rat-hunting that very evening—
    ‘Hey!’ shouted Tom, and, coming out into the open, put on a brilliant spurt in his running. ‘Hey, James!’ It was the first time he had ever shouted in the garden. Several birds rose in a flurry, but the boy he had called so loudly by name paid no attention. Tom overtook him, swerved across his path, calling him again as he did so: to James, Tom was invisible and inaudible. James pounded up the doorsteps and into the house and disappeared. All three had gone.
    Tom was bitterly disappointed. He had not minded being invisible to the others—to the maid, and the severe-looking woman, and the gardener, and the little girl, and even to Hubert (who looked stupidly grown-up) and to Edgar (whom Tom actually disliked). But he would have liked to have made himself known to James: they could have been companions in adventure.
    Stubborn against defeat, Tom followed more slowly, up the steps and into the house. He had gone in thus before, of course, every time he had gone back upstairs to his bed in the Kitsons’ flat at the end of each visit to the garden. This time, however, he did not close the garden door behind him: he knew from experience that would shut him at once into the house of the flat-dwellers. This time he wanted the other house—the house that went with the garden.
    So he left the garden door open, and advanced down the hall, past the wooden bracket and the barometer, towards the marble bracket and all the cases of stuffed animals and birds. He held his breath: perhaps, this time he would succeed in penetrating the interior of the night-time house, and explore it.
    Although Tom moved quickly along the hall, intending to turn upstairs to where he heard (or thought he heard) the boys laughing among