Tom's Midnight Garden Read Online Free PDF

whispered ginger beard. ‘Coming to wind up her precious clock. You don’t want to run into her. There’ve never been children here, and she might not like it.’
    Tom drew back out of sight into the doorway. His arm was still up to his face to hide the tears, but his eyes now looked over the top.
    The shuffling steps came nearer; the figure of Mrs Bartholomew appeared. She was old, small and bowed; she was dressed all in black.
    When she reached the clock, Mrs Bartholomew took from her purse a key, and opened the door of the pendulum case with it. She reached inside the case and brought out something small and polished that looked like the starting-handle of some tiny car. She reached up inside the case again, and must have pressed a lever that latched the glass front of the clock-dial: the front swung open at her touch.
    She took what had looked like a miniature starting-handle and fitted it into a slot on the right-hand side of the dial, and turned and turned it. As she wound, there was a gentle whirring sound. Then she wound on the other side of the dial.
    Finally, she latched the dial-front again, put the winding-key back inside the pendulum-case, locked the case-door, and shuffled away with the key. Her footsteps climbed the stairs and died away.
    While he was watching the clock being wound, Tom had had time to calm himself. He began to reason about the garden. It was true that there was no garden this morning, but there certainly had been last night—hyacinths and all. He turned back to look again at what was outside, searching for some link between last night and this morning. Up to the fence of the back-yard ran strips of garden that belonged to the pink brick, semi-detached houses beyond. In one of the garden strips stood an old yew-tree. Once, certainly, the tree had been clipped to a shape.
    Tom stared at it with a kind of hope.
    ‘What’s bitten you now?’ said the man.
    ‘Nothing,’ said Tom. ‘Thank you for warning me about Mrs Bartholomew. Good-bye.’
    He went slowly down the hall, thinking. The tree was perhaps a link; but it was out of his reach, in another garden. The big house itself was a link, of course; but it would tell him nothing. He had already taken the turn to the stairway when the voice of the grandfather clock behind him reminded him: the clock was a link.
    He went back to the grandfather clock and studied it intently. The clock-case was plain. The dial bore only twelve numbers, after all; but it was decorated with a design that now struck Tom as peculiar and interesting. In the semicircular arch above the dial itself stood a creature like a man but with enormous, sweeping wings. His body was wound about with something white. His face was a round of gold, and his feet were of the same colour and were planted on either side of the clock-dial. One foot seemed to stand on a piece of grassy land: the other went into the sea—Tom saw painted fishes that swam round the creature’s foot, and seaweed. In one hand he held a book, opened towards himself.
    If Tom had been able to look over that winged shoulder, what might he have read in that book?
    What the clock told him, Tom could not yet understand, and his mind turned away from it. He was back at thinking of the yew-tree he had seen over the yard-fence. ‘That fence looked easy to climb,’ Tom said to himself.
    During the rest of the day, Tom matured his plan. He also wrote to Peter—the first of an important series of reports. He told Peter, as well as he was able, what had happened last night; he told him of his intentions tonight. He meant to climb into the next-door garden and examine the yew-tree there, because—surely—it was one of the trees that he had seen in his garden. He would go all round it; he would climb it; he would search it for any clue.
    When he had finished his letter, Tom wrote across the top the initials: B.A.R. They stood for Burn After Reading. All Tom’s letters to Peter, from now on, bore that direction.