Read The Humming Room Online

Authors: Ellen Potter

The Humming Room (13 page)

Acknowledgments

Sometimes it takes a village to write a book. In the case of
The Humming Room
, it was the village of Clayton, New York. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Star Carter, naturalist and Director of Land Conservation at Thousand Islands Land Trust, for connecting me to so many river folk, both human and otherwise. Thanks to Brian Parker, island mail carrier, who kindly let me hitch a ride on his green Starcraft. Thanks to the gracious Skip and Joan Tolette for introducing me to the beauty of Grindstone Island. Thanks are also due to Sue-Ryn Burns Hildebrand, wildlife rehabilitator and local heroine.

Many thanks to Neil Mattson, Assistant Professor of Horticulture at Cornell University, for his patient explanation of how an almost-dead garden could be resuscitated.

I am especially grateful to my editor, Jean Feiwel, who consistently knocks me out with her astute editorial suggestions and her faith in me. I appreciate it more than I can say. Thanks also to the wonderful Feiwel and Friends posse, Holly West, Rich Deas, and Jason Chan, whose cover art never fails to make me swoon with delight.

As always, I am forever and endlessly grateful to my extraordinary agent, Alice Tasman.

Special thanks to my dear friend Anne Mazer. This book could not have been written without her wise counsel. Thanks also to friends Megan Shull, Mollie Futterman, and Mary Waterman, and to my two favorite guys, Adam and Ian.

And of course, the greatest debt of gratitude belongs to Frances Hodgson Burnett, whose garden continues to bloom in readers' hearts one hundred years later.

Thank you for reading this FEIWEL
AND
FRIENDS book.

The Friends who made

Jean Feiwel

publisher

Liz Szabla

editor-in-chief

Rich Deas

creative director

Elizabeth Fithian

marketing director

Holly West

assistant to the publisher

Dave Barrett

managing editor

Nicole Liebowitz Moulaison

production manager

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publishing associate

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designer

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OUR BOOKS ARE FRIENDS FOR LIFE

A F
EIWEL AND
F
RIENDS
B
OOK

THE HUMMING ROOM
. Copyright © 2012 by Ellen Potter. All rights reserved. For information, address Feiwel and Friends, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Potter, Ellen,
The humming room / Ellen Potter.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Summary: Twelve-year-old orphan Roo Fanshaw is sent to live with an uncle she never knew in a largely uninhabited mansion on Cough Rock Island and discovers a wild river boy, an invalid cousin, and the mysteries of a hidden garden.

ISBN: 978-1-4668-0275-9

[1. Orphans—Fiction. 2. Gardens—Fiction. 3. Islands—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.P8518Hum 2012

[Fic]—dc23

2011033583

Feiwel and Friends logo designed by Filomena Tuosto

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THERE ARE TWO STORIES TOLD ABOUT FRANCES HODGSON Burnett's original garden.
The first is about a dreamy little girl whose father dies suddenly. The family is forced to move into a shabbier neighborhood. One afternoon little Frances leans out of the window in this new home and spies a deserted garden in an unoccupied house next door. At once her imagination goes to work making up stories.
The second, which her son Lionel Burnett told, is about the mature Frances, now an established writer, who briefly owns an estate in Kent. The estate, Maytham Hall, has a walled and private garden which Frances uses as a retreat. Every lovely day, she takes her pen and a tablet of paper and sits in the garden, which is planted round with roses, writing the romantic novels for which she is famous.
Whether the original garden was in a shabby Manchester neighborhood or in a manor house in Kent does not matter. The garden that Frances Hodgson Burnett transplanted to the colder, windier Yorkshire moors was a literary garden that can blossom in any weather.
English book gardens have a hardy tradition of their own. Before Mrs. Burnett's famous garden, there were such wonderful flowery enchantments as the garden in
Through the Looking Glass
with the talking flowers Tiger-lily, Daisy, and Rose. And the very real vegetable garden in
Peter Rabbit.
But there is a special mythic quality in
The Secret Garden
, in which Mrs. Sowerby, mother of twelve children, is a kind of Earth Mother. And her son Dickon, whom we first see sitting under a tree, playing on a rude pipe and surrounded by animals, is a kind of Pan. And old Ben, the keeper of the garden, is an intermediary between the old gods and the new.
Mrs. Burnett loved gardens. In her autobiography,
The One I Knew Best of All
, she remembers several beloved edens where she played as a child and planted as an adult. She wrote a book
In the Garden
just before she died describing her experience as a gardener. Her son Vivian called her “the Passionate Gardener,” especially in the years from 1898 to her death.
There are a number of fascinating characters in
The Secret Garden:
cantankerous Mary, sickly Colin, the sprightly Dickon, the unhappy Mr. Craven, crabby Mrs. Medlock, nurturing Mrs. Sowerby, and the rest. But the most fascinating of all is neither human nor animal. It is the garden itself. It is as sick as Colin, as closed-in as Mary. It is as dormant and in need of reinvigoration as they. As surely as Mary is an orphan, that garden is orphaned. And it blossoms with care and love as does Mary, as does Colin. It
quickens
and it
wakens
along with the children. The garden, like Colin, like this wonderful, satisfying book itself will, in Colin's words, “live for ever and ever and ever!”
 
—JANE YOLEN
There Is No One Left
WHEN MARY LENNOX WAS SENT TO MISSELTHWAITE MANOR to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another. Her father had held a position under the English Government and had always been busy and ill himself, and her mother had been a great beauty who cared only to go to parties and amuse herself with gay people. She had not wanted a little girl at all, and when Mary was born she handed her over to the care of an Ayah, who was made to understand that if she wished to please the Mem Sahib she must keep the child out of sight as much as possible. So when she was a sickly, fretful, ugly little baby she was kept out of the way, and when she became a sickly, fretful, toddling thing she was kept out of the way also. She never remembered seeing familiarly anything but the dark faces of her Ayah and the other native servants, and as they
always obeyed her and gave her her own way in everything, because the Mem Sahib would be angry if she was disturbed by her crying, by the time she was six years old she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived. The young English governess who came to teach her to read and write disliked her so much that she gave up her place in three months, and when other governesses came to try to fill it they always went away in a shorter time than the first one. So if Mary had not chosen to really want to know how to read books she would never have learned her letters at all.
One frightfully hot morning, when she was about nine years old, she awakened feeling very cross, and she became crosser still when she saw that the servant who stood by her bedside was not her Ayah.
“Why did you come?” she said to the strange woman. “I will not let you stay. Send my Ayah to me.”
The woman looked frightened, but she only stammered that the Ayah could not come, and when Mary threw herself into a passion and beat and kicked her, she looked only more frightened and repeated that it was not possible for the Ayah to come to Missie Sahib.
There was something mysterious in the air that morning. Nothing was done in its regular order and several of the native servants seemed missing, while those whom Mary saw slunk or hurried about with ashy and scared faces. But no one would tell her anything, and her Ayah did not come. She was actually left alone as the morning went on, and at last she wandered out into the garden and began to play by herself under a tree near the veranda. She pretended that she was making a flower-bed, and she stuck big scarlet hibiscus blossoms into little heaps of earth, all the time growing more and more angry and muttering to herself the things she would say and the names she would call Saidie when she returned.
“Pig! Pig! Daughter of Pigs!” she said, because to call a native a pig is the worst insult of all.
She was grinding her teeth and saying this over and over again when she heard her mother come out on the veranda with someone. She was with a fair young man and they stood talking together in low strange voices. Mary knew the fair young man who looked like a boy. She had heard that he was a very young officer who had just come from England. The child stared at him, but she stared most at her mother. She always did this when she had a chance to see her, because the Mem Sahib—Mary used to call her that oftener than anything else—was such a tall, slim, pretty person and wore such lovely clothes. Her hair was like curly silk and she had a delicate little nose which seemed to be disdaining things, and she had large laughing eyes. All her clothes were thin and floating, and Mary said they were “full of lace.” They looked fuller of lace than ever this morning, but her eyes were not laughing at all. They were large and scared and lifted imploringly to the fair boy officer's face.
“Is it so very bad? Oh, is it?” Mary heard her say.
“Awfully,” the young man answered in a trembling voice. “Awfully, Mrs. Lennox. You ought to have gone to the hills two weeks ago.”
The Mem Sahib wrung her hands.
“Oh, I know I ought!” she cried. “I only stayed to go to that silly dinner party. What a fool I was!”
At that very moment such a loud sound of wailing broke out from the servants' quarters that she clutched the young man's arm, and Mary stood shivering from head to foot. The wailing grew wilder and wilder.
“What is it? What is it?” Mrs. Lennox gasped.
“Someone has died,” answered the boy officer. “You did not say it had broken out among your servants.”
“I did not know!” the Mem Sahib cried. “Come with
me! Come with me!” and she turned and ran into the house.
After that, appalling things happened, and the mysteriousness of the morning was explained to Mary. The cholera had broken out in its most fatal form and people were dying like flies. The Ayah had been taken ill in the night, and it was because she had just died that the servants had wailed in the huts. Before the next day three other servants were dead and others had run away in terror. There was panic on every side, and dying people in all the bungalows.
During the confusion and bewilderment of the second day Mary hid herself in the nursery and was forgotten by everyone. Nobody thought of her, nobody wanted her, and strange things happened of which she knew nothing. Mary alternately cried and slept through the hours. She only knew that people were ill and that she heard mysterious and frightening sounds. Once she crept into the dining-room and found it empty, though a partly finished meal was on the table and chairs and plates looked as if they had been hastily pushed back when the diners rose suddenly for some reason. The child ate some fruit and biscuits, and being thirsty she drank a glass of wine which stood nearly filled. It was sweet, and she did not know how strong it was. Very soon it made her intensely drowsy, and she went back to her nursery and shut herself in again, frightened by cries she heard in the huts and by the hurrying sound of feet. The wine made her so sleepy that she could scarcely keep her eyes open and she lay down on her bed and knew nothing more for a long time.
Many things happened during the hours in which she slept so heavily, but she was not disturbed by the wails and the sound of things being carried in and out of the bungalow.
When she awakened she lay and stared at the wall.
The house was perfectly still. She had never known it to be so silent before. She heard neither voices nor footsteps, and wondered if everybody had got well of the cholera and all the trouble was over. She wondered also who would take care of her now her Ayah was dead. There would be a new Ayah, and perhaps she would know some new stories. Mary had been rather tired of the old ones. She did not cry because her nurse had died. She was not an affectionate child and had never cared much for anyone. The noise and hurrying about and wailing over the cholera had frightened her, and she had been angry because no one seemed to remember that she was alive. Everyone was too panic-stricken to think of a little girl no one was fond of. When people had the cholera it seemed that they remembered nothing but themselves. But if everyone had got well again, surely someone would remember and come to look for her.
But no one came, and as she lay waiting the house seemed to grow more and more silent. She heard something rustling on the matting and when she looked down she saw a little snake gliding along and watching her with eyes like jewels. She was not frightened, because he was a harmless little thing who would not hurt her and he seemed in a hurry to get out of the room. He slipped under the door as she watched him.
“How queer and quiet it is,” she said. “It sounds as if there was no one in the bungalow but me and the snake.”
Almost the next minute she heard footsteps in the compound, and then on the veranda. They were men's footsteps, and the men entered the bungalow and talked in low voices. No one went to meet or speak to them and they seemed to open doors and look into rooms.
“What desolation!” she heard one voice say. “That pretty, pretty woman! I suppose the child, too. I heard there was a child, though no one ever saw her.”
Mary was standing in the middle of the nursery when they opened the door a few minutes later. She looked an ugly, cross little thing and was frowning because she was beginning to be hungry and feel disgracefully neglected. The first man who came in was a large officer she had once seen talking to her father. He looked tired and troubled, but when he saw her he was so startled that he almost jumped back.
“Barney!” he cried out. “There is a child here! A child alone! In a place like this! Mercy on us, who is she?”
“I am Mary Lennox,” the little girl said, drawing herself up stiffly. She thought the man was very rude to call her father's bungalow “A place like this!” “I fell asleep when everyone had the cholera and I have only just wakened up. Why does nobody come?”
“It is the child no one ever saw!” exclaimed the man, turning to his companions. “She has actually been forgotten!”
“Why was I forgotten?” Mary said, stamping her foot. “Why does nobody come?”
The young man whose name was Barney looked at her very sadly. Mary even thought she saw him wink his eyes as if to wink tears away.
“Poor little kid!” he said. “There is nobody left to come.”
It was in that strange and sudden way that Mary found out that she had neither father nor mother left; that they had died and been carried away in the night, and that the few native servants who had not died also had left the house as quickly as they could get out of it, none of them even remembering that there was a Missie Sahib. That was why the place was so quiet. It was true that there was no one in the bungalow but herself and the little rustling snake.

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