by Cathy Gohlke
At the far corner of the maze, Claire pushed through the thinned boxwood—something she’d reprimanded each of them for doing over the last year and a half—and came out onto a garden walk, stomping her feet. She cut across the lawns and into the edge of the woods, then followed the high stone fence around the secret garden’s perimeter. When she reached the hidden door, she stopped so suddenly that two of the younger children bumped into her.
Claire gasped. Large footprints—a general scuffling—broke the snow at her feet. Who could have come here, and since last night’s snowfall? Muffled voices came from the other side of the wall. Claire’s confidence evaporated. No one should be here. No one should have access besides her and Aunt Miranda, and Aunt Miranda was lying in a hospital bed in faraway London.
The children, clustered uncertainly around her, inched closer.
“What is it, mademoiselle?” Gaston asked. “What is the matter?”
“Why are we here?” Elise wanted to know.
“Do you hear? Someone is on the other side of the wall,” whispered Josef.
“The other side of the wall? How did they get there?” asked Jeanine.
“Shhh,” warned Claire. “Let me think.” But it was as if her mind had been wiped clean as an empty school slate. All she could imagine was to march in and face the intruders. She knew she should be worried for the small army of children at her back, but in fact, they bolstered her courage. Claire reached for the key over the lintel, but it was gone.
The audacity! Now she was thoroughly vexed. She pushed the door, and it creaked open on its great and rusted hinges. The voices stopped. Claire pushed in, Aimee behind her, both hands clinging to Claire’s skirt. Claire scanned the garden, as far as she could see. No one. Not a sound. “Hello?” she called. “Is someone there?”
No answer came.
Claire wound through the pathways toward the center of the garden. Gasps of wonder, sheer delight, and awe followed in her wake. She wished she could let down her reserve and turn to see their faces as they viewed the garden for the first time, but she feared what might lie ahead. She reached the last bend in the path, bringing her within view of the evergreen tree at the center of the garden.
But it was not the evergreen decked in snow that she’d expected. It was a regal Christmas tree, half decorated in blue and crimson and silver balls that shone, a near blinding light, in the morning sun. Claire recognized some of the ornaments from the tree as it had been decorated last year. But David was nowhere in sight. Unless . . . Her heart flipped.
“David? David, are you here?”
But there was no answer.
“Who’s there? Show yourself!” Claire didn’t know whether to be afraid or to cry.
A sheepish Mr. Dunnagan stepped from one side of the tree, removing his cap as he did so. A bleary-eyed and reticent Dr. MacDonald stepped from the other. Each man held an ornament for the tree.
“Dr. MacDonald? Mr. Dunnagan? What are you doing here?” Claire could not keep the disappointment or the confusion from her voice.
“Ever so sorry, miss. We meant to be done before you came.” Mr. Dunnagan stepped back. “But she’s a beauty, ain’t she?”
The children swarmed gladly around the tree and their beloved gardener and their good, if sometimes gruff, doctor. But Claire stood motionless.
Dr. MacDonald handed his ornament to Mr. Dunnagan and stepped toward her. “Maggie—your aunt—sent me home on this mission. She wanted the tree fully trimmed for you when you came to the garden on Christmas Day. She was sure you’d come. I don’t think she expected you to share it with the children—not yet, at any rate. I promised her I would trim it, and meant to get here yesterday, but all the trains were redirected for troop movement.” He waited, but Claire could not say a word. “It is her Christmas gift to you.”
“It’s the same as last year.” Overwhelmed by such love, especially when her aunt lay so ill, and confused that it wasn’t David who’d decorated the tree the year before, Claire couldn’t think what to say. She’d been so sure that last year he’d discovered and claimed her secret garden.
“The same as every year, according to Maggie. She said she and Christopher decorated it together. She wanted to pass this sacred tradition on to you.” He stood back to admire the tree. “It’s a wonder, isn’t it? And to think she did this every year, even after she closed the garden, even after Christopher was gone.”
“Were you part of their tradition?”
“Me? No.” He looked somewhat crestfallen. “Maggie let no one but Christopher into her world in those days. It’s you, lass, that’s made the difference for her—in her. You, and these children, have given her back her life. I’m grateful to you for that, you know.” He blushed and grinned just a little, returning to the tree and the children. “It means she’s even noticed me standing at the gate,” he called behind him.
“Rather late, though, isn’t it?” Claire whispered, sad for faithful Dr. MacDonald, overwhelmed by the loving gift from her aunt at his hands, but disappointed that David had not been behind it. If he had known, if he had come, if he had decorated the tree, it would have been so romantic, so wonderfully, impossibly—
A low whistle came from just behind her. “Say, that’s some swell tree!”
Claire’s heart skipped three beats. She turned and looked up into the sparkling brown eyes of the man she dared to love. Did he feel the same? Could he feel toward her all that she felt? “Yes, it is. You’ve come.” It was all she could say.
David pulled laughing eyes away from the tree and the children, who danced and marveled in delight over the precious ornaments in the great outdoors, torn between their beloved Dr. MacDonald and their snow crowning of dear Mr. Dunnagan, the grandest Ben Weatherstaff ever known.
Claire searched David’s face until his eyes found hers. “Welcome home, David.”
The old image of Miss Havisham standing alone in a locked and frozen garden flashed through Claire’s mind. But in that moment the image cracked, splitting into a million pieces of sunshine as David grasped her elbows, pulled her close, and whispered, “Merry Christmas, Claire.”
“The merriest,” she whispered in return, gratitude and thanksgiving welling like a fountain inside her, spilling over, melting the snow of her worries, shooting up stars and rainbows and happily ever afters in her imagination all at once.
When he leaned down, cradled her face between his hands and kissed her, she knew this was no fairy tale, no exotic story. She was really, truly home.
Epilogue
JUNE 1946
THREE MORE CHRISTMASES and another spring came to Bluebell Wood and the secret garden before the war in Europe ended. Another year passed before Peter and Bertram, who’d come of age and enlisted late in the war, were free to return to their forever home at Bluebell Wood.
Golden daffodils and crimson tulips, pink-tinged wild cherry and delicate spring vetch blossomed to welcome the young men home, then faded into early spring.
By May, bluebells carpeted the woods once more in sapphire glory. Treetops filled with the sweet calls of linnets, buntings, skylarks, and redbreast robins. Burgundy and ivory peonies, lilacs in pristine white and every purple hue perfumed the air.
By mid-June, roses—pale pink, cream, and crimson—spilled over the fountains and arbors of Bluebell Wood, and lush, sweet, garnet-ripe strawberries swept the earth in ground cover. Even the stalwart purple foxglove rang its bells in preparation for the special day.
That same month, Claire’s mother, who’d spent the last years of the war collecting and mailing care packages of clothing and chocolate for the children and coffee, lemons, and rationed sugar for the adults, came too. Through letters that began one special Christmas Day, mother and daughter had formed a truce, then a tentative understanding, and finally a relationship. At last the Atlantic was safe to travel.
Both bride and groom insisted their wedding day wait for their loved ones to share.
Lambs frolicking the fells were a go
od two months old the morning the tartan-clad piper took up his bag and pipes to begin the wedding march.
The bride, clad in a floor-length, pearl-buttoned and fitted ivory gown, but needing no adornment beyond her radiant smile, tucked her short train behind her, letting it trail down the steps of Bluebell Wood as she descended to meet her kilted groom. Together they stopped at the front door, touched their fingers to their lips, and ran them over Aimee’s mezuzah. They thanked God for their home that had so abundantly received and given refuge and blessing, then marched through the porte cochere, down the drive, and through the maze. The proud groom winked, took a slight detour, and pushed back the thinning boxwood in the far corner, beckoning his bride to follow.
She rolled her eyes and grimaced, but only briefly, before following her mischievous husband-to-be through the hedge. They stepped onto the garden path, which had been mown and swept clean.
As they crossed the lawn, the couple was heralded by the morning cheep-cheep of two ochre-breasted robins, a cheering nuthatch with its tuit, tuit, tuit, and two bright yellowhammers demanding “a little bit of bread and no cheese, a little bit of bread and no cheese.” When they reached the edge of the woodland, a painted lady butterfly fluttered her wings. Even a displaced lapwing, sporting its tiara for the day, mumbled its congratulations from atop the high garden wall. The couple laughed in return.
The bride, her eyes sparkling and cheek color high, tucked her arm a little tighter into her soon-to-be husband’s, and they rounded the perimeter of the garden wall. Just before reaching the door of the secret garden, he stopped, pulled her closer yet, and turning her to face him, wrapped his strong arms about her. He leaned down and kissed her, a long and warm and very private kiss. “Are you ready, lass?”
Her breath came unsteady. She held back tears of long-awaited joy, smiled, and nodded, her heart too full to speak. But her eyes told him all he needed to know. Playfully, she pushed him back, nodding toward the garden and the guests who so patiently awaited them inside.
He grasped her hand and led her through the garden door. Lilies and roses, daisies, gardenias, rhodies, peonies, foxglove, delphinium, honeysuckle, and flowers of every fragrance and hue bursting in profusion, a kaleidoscope of color, greeted them—a magical, mystical garden in full bloom.
Every man, woman, and child who’d awaited this wedding stood from their wooden chairs and cheered the couple down the rose-petaled aisle, all the way to the center of the garden. The piper blew a last, long, plaintive note as the couple met the waiting vicar beneath the boughs of the evergreen, which had grown taller and spread wide over the years, so that it now formed a bower of blessing.
Claire imagined that in a way, the tree was a bit of Christopher, here to bless the nuptials. At least he was part of the memory that had helped to create this blessed day.
Aimee leaned close and whispered in Claire’s ear, “Do you remember, in Peter Pan, how Mrs. Darling held one sweet kiss just at the corner of her mouth—a kiss no one could capture?”
Claire smiled, tucking her soon-to-be daughter’s hand into the crook of her arm, and listened.
“I think Aunt Miranda holds that same kiss at the corner of her mouth, and I think Dr. MacDonald has captured it for good and all.”
Claire almost laughed aloud for joy, squeezing Aimee’s hand in silent agreement. As she watched her aunt and Dr. MacDonald take their vows before God and man, Claire leaned into her own dear husband, glad they had not waited till war’s end to marry.
Aunt Miranda’s surgeries, treatments, and recovery had proven long and brutal. She’d confided to Claire that it had taken her some while to accept that God did not plan for her to die with grace at this time, but to learn to live within His grace, His forgiveness, and with His unchanging, faithful, all-pursuing love. She had turned fifty the year after her surgery, and Dr. MacDonald had proposed on her birthday. Aunt Miranda took that as a sign for new beginnings—part two of her life’s book—and said yes. In Aunt Miranda’s acceptance and learning to live a life laced with joy, beneath the absolute singing of her Father in heaven, Claire had learned too.
But it hadn’t taken Claire as long to walk into her future. The minute David had proposed, Claire had accepted and together they’d set the soonest wedding date possible. Though David had still worked and often traveled for weeks at a time for Short Brothers until the end of the war, they had married and made their home with a recovering Aunt Miranda and all the children of Bluebell Wood.
When David’s war work had finished, he and Claire had opened a needed bookshop in the heart of Windermere. Josef, Franz, and Gaston stopped by after school to sweep the store’s floors, unpack new merchandise, and take first peeks at new books. Ingrid and Elise dusted bookshelves and trimmed the bright-red geraniums and forest-green ivy spilling over window boxes in front of the shop. Each girl had claimed a private reading corner for rainy Saturdays. Ingrid did all the lettering for store brochures and flyers advertising special reading events. Whenever home from college, Marlene and Jeanine pitched in.
Claire and Aimee gladly labored together, reading to children during the after-school story hour, creating all the voices and drama that time and space allowed.
The bookstore specialized in British authors—Wordsworth and Carlyle, the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Dickens and Shakespeare, as well as American authors whose stories the children of Bluebell Wood had read and loved. Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, and Frances Hodgson Burnett ranked high.
David created a special window display for the books of C. S. Lewis, to whom he and Claire acknowledged a great debt in their faith journey, and with whom Aimee and Claire continued to correspond, despite that good man’s prolific writing and arduous schedule.
In the children’s section, the books and prints of Beatrix Potter, the Lake District’s most beloved children’s author, held prime wall and shelf space. Sadly, Beatrix Potter Heelis—Aimee’s beloved Auld Mother Heelis—had died of severe bronchitis in December of 1943. She did not see the war’s end or the bookstore’s opening.
Busy as life had grown, Claire continued to write—journal entries for the Mass Observation Project and short stories. Her stories, published frequently in the UK and Canada, were billed as “moving” or “stirring,” sometimes “gripping” and “heart-wrenching”—and all were taken from her real life with her real and unconventional family.
Over three hundred more children, mostly Jewish boys from the horrific concentration camps of Europe, had come to Windermere in the summer of 1945. With the war over and the Short Brothers’ Sunderland factory at Calgarth closed, the boys were settled into the empty housing units of the estate to spend at least six months recuperating in the beautiful land of Wordsworth.
Josef and Gaston, and all at Bluebell Wood, had welcomed the boys with open arms.
Compassionate villagers of Windermere had donated ration coupons to collect extra food for the children. Once they collected enough so that each and every child could taste tomato soup for the first time.
Even Ed Foley, who collected cinema tickets once the Home Guard was disbanded in December of 1945, turned a blind eye when the boys snuck into the Windermere Cinema for free runs of Jeanette MacDonald and Errol Flynn films, or “borrowed” unlocked bicycles from locals.
Claire had long suspected that Josef and Gaston were as guilty as any of the Windermere Boys of such exploits.
Now that the war was over by a full year and they’d received word of the deaths of Aimee’s parents, Claire and David’s adoption proceedings had begun. The older children also remained with open offers of adoption if they wanted, and their home at Bluebell Wood was assured forever, even as schooling and searches for their parents continued.
Within the last month, a telegram had come from Paris, indicating that Gaston and Bertram’s mother may have survived the war. The woman had collapsed after making her way from a labor camp in Poland, across Germany to France, and was now in convalescence in a hospital near Lyo
n. Identification was not yet certain. Each day all at Bluebell Wood prayed for the woman who’d survived the cruelties of concentration camp life and whatever horrors she’d endured on the road as a displaced woman alone. Each day Claire prayed for the Lord to sustain them all, come what may. She hoped with all her heart that the boys’ mother was alive and could once again be well and hold her beloved sons. She saw that hope and also fear of the unknown in Gaston’s eyes, doubt in Bertram’s that it could be so. He’d seen too much of war and insisted on going to see the woman himself before he would believe she was their mother.
At the same time, Claire knew that her own heart would break to say good-bye to the young Frenchmen. They’d become as younger brothers—no, as sons to her. But she knew this time that she would not be left alone, that the God who had brought her beyond the darkest of her own demons would see her through the uncertain future. She was developing a history with this God, and knew she could trust Him. His mercies were truly new each morning, and great was His faithfulness.
Weeks after the wedding, Claire arched and rubbed her back. It ached more than usual these days. She pulled her journal and pen from her trench coat pocket and gingerly sat down on a wooden bench recently placed beneath Christopher’s tree in the secret garden. She was no longer in condition to climb to her beloved tree house, even if the muse visited more clearly there.
In another month the new Dr. and Mrs. MacDonald would return from their prolonged honeymoon. Claire caressed her belly, hoping they’d come in time for the arrival of the next little resident of Bluebell Wood. Though the older refugee children may have temporarily outgrown the secret garden, this new baby guaranteed that the garden would ring with childish laughter for years to come.
There was, of course, no worry that the house itself would ever be empty or still. That was a covenant she and David, Aunt Miranda and Dr. MacDonald had made together. It would always welcome their wartime children home, and their children’s children.