The Boggart and the Monster by Susan Cooper

Author:Susan Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Children/Young Adult Trade
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Published: 2001-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

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WHEN THE RANGE ROVER turned into the parking lot of the little cafe along the road back to Castle Urquhart, it was Tommy and Jessup who were detailed to go in and buy sandwiches. Mr. Maconochie had caught sight of a nursery on the opposite side of the road, with a discreet noticeboard reading FLOWERS, SHRUBS, HEATHS AND HEATHERS. His eyes lit up.

“Look!” he said. “Just what I need!”

Emily had a quick mental image of the windswept rocky islet on which Castle Keep stood. “But you haven’t got a garden,” she said.

“There are little pockets of soil here and there,” said Mr. Maconochie defensively. “Heather is very hardy, heather would be just the thing. I shall go and enquire.”

“I’ll come too,” Emily said.

“Lunch!” said Jessup plaintively.

Mr. Maconochie pulled some bills from his wallet and thrust them at him. “You and Tommy can go buy us a picnic — we shan’t be long.”

The boys scrambled out of the car, and Mr. Maconochie performed some elaborate turning maneuvers and roared across the road and up the nursery’s curving unpaved driveway When he turned off the engine, silence swallowed them so completely that Emily found herself trying to open and shut the car door without making a sound. Suddenly they were in a very peaceful place: a haven of green and growing things, without a human being to be seen anywhere. Racks of plants and flowers stretched all around, and beyond them a small wood of shrubs and trees, some growing in pots, some anchored to the ground by roots that had grown out of ancient, long-undisturbed sacking. Somewhere a solitary bird was singing, a long sweet chirruping trill. Looking around, Emily felt that she was in somebody’s garden, a private refuge; that if this were a shop, it was the shop of someone who could never bear anything to be sold.

Neither she nor Mr. Maconochie spoke. They drifted among the rows of plants, separate yet together, in a daze of peacefulness. Emily thought of her father, on the rare days when he had time to work in their little city garden in Toronto; he would seem to spend hours, sometimes, on one small job like pruning a rosebush. Slowly and dreamily he would take hold of a stem and stare at its buds and leaves, waiting until he seemed to have learned its whole length by heart before he carefully raised the clippers and made one small gentle cut. It was as though time moved at a different speed, for gardeners.

She gazed at an array of small pots of heathers, and tried to choose one of them to take back to Toronto to remind Robert Volnik of Scotland. Their tiny leaves ranged through every shade of green from dark olive to almost-yellow, and of those that were in flower, the blossoms were pink or purple or any of twenty colors in between. Mr. Maconochie, moving very slowly and carefully, was picking out a pot here, a pot there, and setting them in a little line on the ground.

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