Mistress Mary, Quite Contrary . . .

For Star's writing challenge:

( Cinderella? )

It's an oddly-assorted group that's gathering around a table in the bar: a Time Lord, a Fable, and three small Yorkshire children, one of them in a wheelchair.

All three children have packs filled with food, water, maps, stakes, garlic, and other useful items - Mary made quite sure they'd all be prepared.

"Well?" Mary demands, as Dickon wheels Colin up around the table to join the rest. "Is everybody ready?"

OOC: MEME. Ask any of mine what you will!

- that would be Mary Lennox, Meg Giry, James Stanton and Sam-I-Am, at the moment. The vast majority of them will even answer pretty honestly.

Mary Lennox has the sort of voice that tends to be very easily audible. Even at great distances. No matter how much you might wish it wasn't.

It's part of her charm.

Therefore, when she announces, "Colin Craven, I know you are not asleep, so you need not bother pretending!" before pushing his door open and marching inside, there's really no possible way that Colin hasn't heard every word she's said.

In spite of his invalid back Colin wat up in bed in quite a healthy rage.

"Get out of the room!" he shouted and he caught hold of his pillow and threw it at her. He was not strong enough to throw it far and it only fell at her feet, but Mary's face looked as pinched as a nutcracker.


"I'm going," she said. "And I won't come back!"

She walked to the door and when she reached it she turned round and spoke again.

"I was going to tell you all sorts of nice things," she said. "Dickon brought his fox and his rook and I was going to tell you all about them. Now I won't tell you a single thing!"

. . . Mary went back to her room not feeling at all as she had felt when she had come in from the garden. She was cross and disappointed but not at all sorry for Colin . . .


Martha was waiting for her and the trouble in her face had been temprarily replaced by interest and curiosity. There was a wooden box on the table and its cover had been removed and revealed that it was full of neat packages.

"Mr. Craven sent it to you," said Martha. "It looks as if it had picture-books in it."

Everything was so nice that her pleasure began to crowd her anger out of her mind. She had not expected him to remember her at all and her hard little heart grew quite warm.

If she had been friends with Colin she would have run to show him her presents at once . . .

But since she was not, she picked up one of her new books - one of the ones with gardens in it - and went outside, to the door in the garden.

"Whatever happens," Mary says to Dickon, "you - you never would tell?"

His poppy-colored cheeks are distended with his first big bite of bread and bacon, but he manages to smile encouragingly.

"If tha' was a missel thrush an' showed me where thy nest was, does tha' think I'd tell any one? Not me," he says. "Tha-art as safe as a missel thrush."

Mary takes a breath.

"Then - then I have got something else to show you."

[OOC: Pre-Milliways.]

Mary runs into the bar, looking a little different than the last time she'd entered. Her face has lost some of its unhealthy sallow color, and her cheeks are red from the exercise of running across the moor, and her eyes shine with excitement. Almost, today, she could be any normal little girl.

Mary turned down the walk which led to the door in the shrubbery, in the Misselthwaite gardens . . .

When she had passed through the shrubbery gate she found herself in great gardens, with wide lawns and winding walks with clipped borders. But the flower-beds were bare and wintry and the fountain was not playing. This was not the garden which was shut up. How could a garden be shut up? You could always walk into a garden.

She was just thinking this when she saw that, at the end of the path she was following, there seemed to be a long wall, with ivy growing over it. She was not familiar enough with England to know that she was coming upon the kitchen-gardens where the vegetables and fruit were growing. She went towards the wall and found that there was a green door in the ivy, and that it stood open. This was not the closed garden, evidently, and she could go into it.

She went through the door and found that it was a garden with walls all round it and that it was only one of several walled gardens which seemed to open into one another. She saw another open green door, revealing bushes and pathways between beds containing winter vegetables. Fruit-trees were trained flat against the wall, and over some of the beds ther ewere glass frames. The place was bare and ugly enough, Mary thought, as she stood and stared about her. It might be nicer in summer when things were green, but there was nothing pretty about it now.

There was another door, though, which stood closed, but not locked, in the side of one of the garden walls. Mary wondered if perhaps there might be something prettier beyond it, and walked over to open it.

For a moment everything was dark, as she stepped inside - and then she saw roses; hundreds of roses, under a glass roof. At first she thought that she had found her way to the secret garden, but then she thought about it more, and found herself confused; for wouldn't she have seen the glass from over the wall? And surely if this was the secret garden, the door should have been locked.

She walked past all the silent roses, feeling almost as if she ought to tiptoe, as if in church. Then suddenly the flowers opened up in front of another door of glass and she was outside again. The roses were in a large glass building behind her, and in front was the door to a place she felt that she recognized . . .