Mistress of Misselthwaite

Chapter 1

June 1917

Mr. Craven sent a car to pick Mary Lennox up at the train station. 

Mary had never ridden in a car. She had seen them, of course, as they drove past the window of her bedroom at the finishing school in London. 

But she had not had the luxury of sitting in one. Nor had she known her uncle owned a car. Although, as she stood in the pouring rain at the station and stared at its wide black body while the chauffeur opened the door for her, Mary decided she was not surprised.

For all her uncle complained about money, he could still afford a car. Even in the middle of a war.

Her lips twitched at the grim reminder of why she'd returned to the moor. It was not for a friendly visit as it once might have been. It was because London was no longer safe. It was because of that bloody war, the one that had started when she was thirteen and was still being fought three years later. The one her beloved friend, Dickon, had been drafted to fight in.

She hated that war.

Mary took the chauffeur's hand and let him help her into the seat of the car. She adjusted her skirt and glanced out the window at the fat raindrops rolling down the glass like tears. 

It was a perfectly dreadful day. Enough to make her feel even more contrary than she had on the train. Mary had not wanted to leave her life in London, but as the car groaned and puttered, traveling swiftly along the road through the moor, she couldn't help but remember the first time she'd been brought to Misselthwaite Manor. 

Orphaned and quite alone she had been. She had been tired and contrary then, too, after her long travels from India to a very large, strange house out on the moor. 

Then she'd hated the moor. Now she couldn't help but love the wide expanse around her. The heather had bowed low in the rain, but once it stopped it would shine bright again with purple flowers that made the wide open land look like the kind of sea the poets wrote about, shimmering purple and blue and green. 

It had always seemed to Mary that, logically, things should feel smaller as you got older because you grew and took up more space. In everything that had been true for her, except now. She wearily gazed out across the scraggly rocks, remembering how she and Dickon had explored it with her cousin, Colin, in tow when they were children. 

As a child she'd believed that one day she would have explored every inch of the moor, but now she knew better. That impossible feat had been a childhood dream. It was the reason why now her logic had switched. The moor was bigger than ever, and Mary found some strange sense of comfort in it. 

The moor was so large and so open that nothing could surprise her here. Nothing could steal upon them and shock her as she had been shocked in London. Mary was safe here, surrounded by the moor, where not even the war could touch her. If only Dickon would come back, then they could be safe and happy again as they had once been. 

The car didn't rock like a carriage, yet Mary still found herself dozing as they traversed the lonely road to Misselthwaite. She had traveled all day and had planned to sleep on the train, but was instead seated near two women, whose conversation had kept her awake. 

They had looked only a few years older than her, but had sour, grave faces, wrinkled with stress. The two had huddled so close together that the brims of their plain cloth hats brushed against one another from time to time. 

"My mother-in-law was most insistent that I come to stay with her," said the first. 

Mary imagined she had been quite beautiful like a pear blossom in bloom when she'd first been married, but now dark circles rimmed her eyes and she was terribly thin.