COVER

About the Author

Alexandra Bell was born in 1986. She studied Law at university and signed her first book deal at nineteen. Since then, she has written books for both adults and young people, including the Polar Bear Explorers’ Club series and Frozen Charlotte, which was a Zoella bookclub pick, under the name Alex Bell.

She lives in Hampshire in a house ruled by Siamese cats.

Website: alex-bell.co.uk

Twitter: @Alex_Bell86

Instagram: @Alex_bell86

ALSO BY ALEXANDRA BELL

ALSO BY ALEXANDRA BELL

Frozen Charlotte

Frozen Charlotte

Charlotte Says

Lex Trent

Lex Trent Versus the Gods

Lex Trent Fighting with Fire

The Polar Bear Explorers’ Club series

The Polar Bear Explorers’ Club

Explorers of Witch Mountain

Explorers of Black Ice Bridge

The Ocean Squid Explorers’ Club

The Ninth Circle

Jasmyn

The Haunting

Music and Malice in Hurricane Town

A Most Peculiar Toy Factory

DEDICATION

For my cousin, Hayley Switzer-Willrich.

Becoming mothers in 2020 may have had its challenges, but we weathered the storm with our beautiful little boys.

Prologue

They say gardens are good for the soul, and the magical Winter Garden most of all. You’ll never find it in one place for long. It goes where it is needed, appearing from nothing and vanishing just as quickly. Some days you might spot it high in the mountains of Nepal; on others it will materialise in the mists of Mongolia. During the summer it may choose to settle for a spell in the rolling green fields of England, or shrink down for the winter to squeeze into the inside of a teacup.

The garden is a place of wonder and magic in a world that often has so little of both. Full of strange birds and impossible flowers, mushrooms that dance with you and trees that whisper secrets, frog music and frosted fairies in their finest fur coats.

Nobody knows how it came to be – only that it belongs to the elusive Spider Queen, about whom almost as little is known as about the garden itself. She decides where the garden should go and who should be invited to see it. By all accounts she has an affinity for the lost and the lonely, the misfits and the misunderstood, the broken and the bereft, the heartsore and the hurting.

Certainly those who claim to have seen the garden say that it appeared to them in their darkest, bleakest moments, when they were most in need of its soft lights and scented delights, its compassion and kindness for all lost souls. Beatrice Anne Sitwell was eight years old the first time she discovered the garden. Or, more accurately, when it discovered her. It was already a day to remember, because it was the day her mother died.

‘Do you understand what I’m telling you, Beatrice?’ her father had said that morning in the parlour. The circles beneath his eyes looked like bruises, the smallest sound made him wince, as if he were the one who was ill, and he gazed through her with raw, unseeing eyes. ‘Your mother is at the end,’ he went on. ‘She wishes to see you. To say goodbye.’

Beatrice did not understand, not truly, but thanks to her recent operation, she could not utter a word and so the questions piled up in a smouldering heap at the end of her useless tongue. The end of what?

She wished she could simply remain in the parlour, playing with her mother’s key collection. Beatrice loved the keys. Some were larger than the palm of her hand, whilst others were tiny enough to open a fairy door. They were made of brass, and silver, and iron, and gold. Her mother had said she liked to imagine there was a story that went with each key, and that the key itself still knew what that was, even if everyone else had long since forgotten.

Instead, a maid was summoned and Beatrice was hurried away so quickly she did not even have time to replace the silver key she’d last been playing with. She slipped it into her pocket unnoticed. She was taken upstairs to have her hair combed, her hands cleaned and her dress brushed free of wrinkles. For some reason, it seemed to be important that she look her best before being presented to her mother.

After months of not being allowed anywhere near the sickroom, it felt fearsomely strange to be ushered over the threshold into the moist, sticky sickliness of its walls. Beatrice gripped the key in her pocket as a sort of talisman. The curtains were drawn and the windows tightly closed, so as not to allow in any harmful sunlight or fresh air. Beatrice suddenly longed to be outside, hunting for mushrooms. It was a pulsing hot day, and the smell within the room was dreadful. It reminded her of the time her nanny had shown her the sticky black stem-bleeds upon a majestic old oak’s trunk and told her it meant the tree was rotting from the inside out. Knowing that Beatrice had a fascination for plants and animals, her nanny probably thought she would find this interesting, but instead Beatrice had wept at the news, and grieved for the tree as it slowly declined.

‘Go on,’ her father said now, giving her a little push. ‘She’s waiting for you.’

Beatrice walked slowly towards the four-poster bed, which had all its curtains drawn. Her indoor shoes seemed to creak too loudly on the floorboards and the room appeared to stretch and stretch ahead of her, so that it took an eternity to reach the bed.

By the time she arrived, she’d forgotten her injured tongue and tried to say her mother’s name, but only a hoarse rasp came out.

‘Do not try to talk,’ her father said from the shadows behind her. ‘Your mother knows you are incapable.’

Beatrice wondered how she was supposed to say goodbye when she could not speak and might never do so again. It made her heart ache to think that speech could be a power forever consigned to her past. She had so many questions about the world – and if she couldn’t ask them, then how would she ever learn its many secrets? Yet, in spite of the circumstances, she longed to see her mother. It had been so long since she’d been permitted to visit. And even if she could not talk, at least she would be able to feel the warmth of her mother’s hand and the reassuring squeeze of her fingers. She could bury her face in her shoulder and breathe in the scent of her Otto of Roses perfume.

Her hand trembled with yearning as she reached out to draw back the drape. It slid aside on clanging rings – only to reveal an imposter in her mother’s place. The skeletal woman with waxy skin propped up against the pillows was not Beatrice’s lovely mama. The sinew stood out in her neck, and the bones showed through her skin, and her eyes were chasms that led somewhere dreadful.

Beatrice jerked back and looked to her father for an explanation as to who this stranger might be, but he was staring at the floor rather than at her. Her hand squeezed so tightly around the key in her pocket that it was in danger of piercing her skin.

‘It’s all right, Beatrice,’ the woman said.

Beatrice flinched. It was her mother’s voice, and yet how could it be coming from this wraith, this absolute nightmare of a person?

‘Come here, Beatrice.’ The imposter reached out her claw.

The truth was too dreadful to accept and Beatrice took a step back, shaking her head.

‘Oh, please, darling.’ Her mother’s face crumpled, like a paper doll abandoned in the rain. ‘Please …’

Beatrice turned on her heel and fled the room. She ducked her father’s outstretched hand but couldn’t avoid her mother’s cry of grief. It only spurred her on faster. She ran along the corridor, down the staircase, through another hallway and out into the freedom of the garden. She ran and ran, and kept on running until she reached her favourite oak tree and climbed up high into its branches where she wouldn’t be found, even if anyone came looking for her.

Nobody did. She stayed there by herself for hours, with nothing to do except listen to the birds singing, count the leaves on the nearby branches or gaze down at the bright-yellow spread of Exidia glandulosa – witches’ butter fungus – flourishing on a piece of rotting log below.

She wished she had brought her notebook. She could have jotted down notes and drawings and ideas for the garden then. When her mother was well again, they were going to design and build it together. It would be a special place, just for the two of them, full of the most beautiful climbing roses and blooming chrysanthemums and fragrant lilies. Beatrice hoped it might also have magical things in it like fairies, and her mother had said that if they made it pretty enough and welcoming enough, then they would surely come.

Beatrice loved to draw and had started sketching ideas for it already, but with her notebook back at the house, she had only the key from her mother’s collection to play with. She tried to imagine it was a magic key that might take her far away from her home and into a world where people did not get ill and die.

Finally she tired of the game and slipped the key back into her pocket. She wished that her father would come looking for her, that he would spot her up in the tree and speak gently to her from below, perhaps persuade her to come down so that he could wrap his arms around her and they could comfort one another. He had never done anything of the kind before, but she still hoped. Her mother was the only person who ever embraced her, and Beatrice knew, deep down, that this would not happen ever again. She shivered, despite the heat of the day.

An hour later someone finally came, but it wasn’t Lord Sitwell. Beatrice heard the rustling of leaves and the creaking of branches and looked down to see a dark-haired boy climbing nimbly up the tree. James Sheppard was a couple of years older than her and spent even more time outdoors than she did. His father was Half Moon House’s head gardener, and James was due to become his apprentice very soon. Beatrice’s nanny had explained that this meant they were not allowed to be friends, because one did not become friends with servants. And yet Beatrice liked James because he loved plants and animals as much as she did. He did not chastise Beatrice for being too strange, or too quiet, or getting the game wrong, or saying awkward things, as her cousins so often seemed to do. It didn’t appear to matter to him that she was not like other children.

Before the operation on her tongue, James had been the one person Beatrice could speak to without stammering. Of course the first time she had ever spoken to him she had stammered as badly as usual and had braced herself, waiting for his sneers and ridicule, but they never came. He simply waited patiently for her to get out whatever she was trying to say, and then responded normally, as if the stammer was nothing remarkable at all. Pretty quickly Beatrice had ceased to do so in front of him altogether, unless there was someone else around.

‘Hello, Beatrice,’ he said now, as he dragged himself up to her level.

She offered no reply, but James didn’t seem to mind as he wedged himself into the small gap beside her on the branch. He was a gangly shape, all knobbly knees and elbows. His skin was browned by the sun, since he had no nanny to be forever wrestling him into a sunhat or compelling him to stay within the shelter of the shadows.

They sat together in silence for a while before James said, ‘I’m sorry about your mama.’

Beatrice shrugged.

‘It’s all right if you don’t want to talk about it,’ he said. ‘Once your tongue heals, I mean. I wouldn’t, either. But if you ever do, then I’m here.’

It never seemed to occur to James that Beatrice’s tongue might never heal. Whenever she felt the cold fear that she might never utter another word again, James’s confidence that she would certainly recover made her feel just a little better.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I thought you might like to see this.’

He reached into his pocket and carefully drew out a small, pearly white snail. Beatrice’s nanny didn’t care for snails, but James thought they were more interesting than butterflies. He had told her that there were over a hundred different types in the United Kingdom alone, and more than forty thousand in the world. He intended to see every single one for himself one day.

‘I haven’t found this sort in the garden before,’ he said, carefully setting it down on a branch between them.

Beatrice hadn’t, either, and was pleased that he had come to show her. Her pleasure didn’t always show on her solemn face, though, and a moment later James said quietly, ‘I thought maybe you might like some company, but it’s all right if you don’t – just nod your head and I’ll go.’

Beatrice glanced at him. His brown eyes were the colour of chestnuts and normally held a look of mischief, but today they seemed serious and a little sad. The bare skin of his arm was warm where it brushed against her. His presence took some of the weight off the ache in her chest, so she shook her head and patted the tree, trying to indicate that she wanted him to stay.

‘Right you are,’ James said, leaning back against the trunk and crossing one booted foot over the other.

They sat together quietly for a while, watching the snail make its slow journey towards a leaf. Eventually the minutes turned into hours. James was not made for sitting still and fidgeted beside her, but he didn’t leave. Beatrice later wondered whether he would have stayed in the tree all night if she’d done so.

Finally, though, the light powdered into dusk and she needed to use the bathroom so badly that she knew she had no choice but to return to the house. She tapped James on the shoulder and pointed at the ground to indicate she was going down. He scrambled to help her, which she appreciated as her legs had gone to sleep. Soon they both stood beneath the tree, whereupon James dropped to one knee to retie a loose shoelace.

‘When my mama died,’ he said, without looking up, ‘the adults were always saying that it would get easier.’

Beatrice knew that James’s mother was dead, but he never talked about her and she was surprised to hear him do so now.

‘That was a while ago,’ he went on. ‘And it’s still … well, I miss her. And I hate that she’s not here. I feel like there’s a big central piece that’s been ripped out of me. I think the grown-ups lie to try to make you feel better, but it isn’t true. It doesn’t get easier. But you do get stronger. And that’s … well. It’s something.’

Beatrice nodded. She was grateful to him for telling the truth, and for staying with her. She wished she could remain in the garden with James and the snails forever, but it was time to return to the house and the reality of whatever had happened there over the last few hours. Beatrice knew it would be nothing good. So she raised her hand in goodbye and made her way back across the grounds. The flowers were closing up their petals for the evening and the purple sky became a vast ballroom for the bats.

As soon as she stepped inside, Beatrice knew that her mother was dead. The house was loud with the echoing silence of dozens of stopped clocks, and every mirror was covered or turned to face the walls. After using the bathroom, she tried to slip away to her bedroom, but the servants must have been told to keep watch for her because she was soon summoned to her father’s study.

‘I am ashamed to call you my daughter today, Beatrice,’ he said in a voice as cold and hard as iron. ‘Refusing to say goodbye to your own mother. You wicked child! Because of you, she left this earth broken-hearted. I hope you are pleased with yourself.’

Beatrice did not think it could be possible to feel more wretched. She suspected her wickedness had torn right through her soul, ripping her neatly in half – the final page of a story that no longer made sense and could never be finished.

‘She wrote a letter for you.’ Her father held out an envelope with Beatrice’s name written on it in her mother’s elegant handwriting. ‘Although why she should waste her final effort doing so, I cannot for the life of me fathom. Take it. And get out of my sight.’

Beatrice reluctantly took the letter, and the paper felt somehow hot beneath her fingers. Her father dismissed her into the care of a maid, who escorted her upstairs to change into one of the itchy new mourning gowns that had been waiting in the wardrobe for several months. How Beatrice loathed the sight of them. The letter was even worse. Beatrice felt suddenly furious with her mother. If she had wanted to tell her something, then she should not have died.

Once the maid had gone, Beatrice seized the letter, then ran down to the parlour to fetch her mother’s box of keys. Clutching them both close, she went out to the little wishing well in the grounds. It was dark by now, but Beatrice knew the way perfectly. She and her mother had come here often and it had always felt like a special place.

She emptied the keys into the well, listening to them clink and clang as they knocked against the mossed bricks all the way down. Then she looked at the letter still clutched in her hand and threw it in after the keys, as forcefully as she could. Tears filled her eyes as she watched it drift slowly down into the darkness, where she knew it would be swallowed up by the chilled water and would slowly disintegrate. Her heart overflowed with a miserable sense of grim satisfaction at the idea that she had punished her mother somehow.

She trudged back to the house to find that the servants had finished preparing it for mourning and had retreated to their other world below stairs – that boisterous, comforting place, full of busyness and chatter and squabbling and laughter. It was quite forbidden to Beatrice. For reasons she did not completely understand, her realm must forever be the chilly, lonely grandeur of the upstairs rooms – like a cursed princess continually doomed to her frozen tower.

Her nanny had recently returned home for a family emergency and so Beatrice was left quite alone. All of a sudden she found herself frightened by the strange, heavy silence that hung over the house like an angel’s broken wing. She was frightened of the room where her mother’s body lay. She was frightened she would go to hell for refusing to say goodbye to her. She was frightened that nothing would ever be the same again.

She went up to the day-nursery where her motley collection of pets waited. Her nanny did not approve of them at all, and Beatrice wondered with despair whether she would be allowed to keep them now that her mother was gone. There were three tame mice, a rabbit and a hedgehog with an injured foot – the only friends she had in the world, except for James.

Beatrice longed to talk to her animals, but her swollen tongue ached and ached inside her mouth. When she tried to whisper comforting words to the hedgehog, clots of blood dribbled out from between her lips. So she remained silent, and the rest of the house seemed to forget all about her until later that evening, when a maid brought up a dinner tray. They’d overlooked her ruined tongue, and the fact that she could only eat mashed food or soup, so Beatrice let the meal go cold upon its plate. Eventually she went to the night-nursery and lay in her petticoats upon the bed, trying to remain completely still in the hot, sticky August air. She was bone-tired but sleep wouldn’t come, eluding her as stubbornly as a sly-faced fox.

Her mind was ablaze with the worry that perhaps the servants might have missed one of the mirrors in the house and that her mother’s spirit would get trapped behind the glass. The thought of it appalled her beyond all reason. What a cold, strange world of nightmares it must be on the other side of a mirror, doomed to stare back forever at the life that had been taken from you. Certainly no place for her mother, with her beautiful gowns, and lustrous eyes, and joyful laugh.

She had been ill for some time but, still, it did not seem possible that she could be dead. It did not seem possible that Beatrice would never see her again. It did not seem possible that her mama would not sweep into her room at any moment to embrace her, uncover the mirror, start the clock and chuckle over how foolish everyone had been. But nobody came and the house echoed with the choked silence of all those suffocating clocks.

Finally, though, Beatrice must have slept because she awoke to the ringing of chimes. She gasped, dismayed that a clock had been missed and might prevent her mama’s spirit from moving on. And yet … as the chimes continued to ring, they seemed to be coming from outside, which made no sense – the only timepiece out there was the permanently silent sundial. Not only that, but she was sure she counted thirteen chimes.

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