The Forgotten Garden

The scene shifts to Brisbane, Australia, in 1930. A man named Hugh is contemplating his daughter Nell’s upcoming birthday party. She’s the oldest of five and is planning to marry her sweetheart, Danny. Hugh feels it’s time to tell Nell an important secret. He “transferred the secret he and her mother had kept for seventeen years […] Watched as the bottom fell out of her world and the person she had been vanished in an instant” (11).

The story leaps forward in time to 2005 in Brisbane. A young woman named Cassandra is keeping watch beside her grandmother Nell’s hospital bed. The old woman is dying. Nell begins confusing the present with the past: “Why, as she neared her life’s end, her grandmother’s head should ring with the voices of people long since gone” (14). Nell insists that she can’t leave because the Authoress told her to wait. A few minutes after making this cryptic statement, she passes away

Cassandra and her four great-aunts entertain mourners at Nell’s house after the funeral. When Cassandra asks about the Authoress, Aunt Phyllis discloses a family secret. Nell had been found by their father, Hugh, on the Maryborough Dock after a London ship made port. Nell was only four at the time, and her sole possession was a little white suitcase. Hugh told Nell about her secret past on her 21st birthday. She didn’t take the news well and cut ties with her fiancé. Cassandra suddenly understands Nell much better: “Her isolation, her independence, her prickliness. ‘She must have felt so alone when she realized she wasn’t who she’d thought she was’” (25). 

The narrative now shifts back in time to Brisbane in 1976. Ten-year-old Cassandra is driving with her mother, Lesley, to visit Nell. Cassandra thinks Nell’s house looks like a witch’s cottage from a storybook. Nell herself is as forbidding as a witch. She offers only a grudging welcome when they arrive. Cassandra is told to go and play while the adults talk. She can hear them arguing as Nell accuses Lesley of being a bad mother. To block out the noise, Cassandra flees to the lower level of the house, where she finds a child’s white suitcase tucked under a bed.

Inside is a book called Magical Tales for Girls and Boys by Eliza Makepeace. Cassandra dives into the stories, but her reading is interrupted when Nell and Lesley arrive to give her some news. She is going to stay with Nell until her mother returns. Lesley is vague about when she’ll come back. During her first night in Nell’s house, Cassandra is frightened by a thunderstorm and begins weeping. Nell reassures her by saying that the girl is a survivor: “Something in her grandmother’s voice suggested that Nell understood. That she knew just how frightening it was to spend a stormy night alone in an unfamiliar place” (43). 

The story skips back to Maryborough, Australia in 1913. Hugh has found Nell on the dock and decides to bring her home where he and his wife, Lil, can look after her until the girl’s family is found. When they ask her name, the girl claims she can’t remember. The couple decides to call her Nell. As the weeks pass and no one comes forward to claim her, Hugh and Lil tell people that Nell is a niece visiting from up north. Nell’s presence helps heal the tension between Hugh and Lil, who have failed to produce a child of their own. They need to move to a place where they can pass off Nell as their daughter without arousing suspicion: “The three of them needed to make a fresh start somewhere they weren’t already known. A big city where people wouldn’t ask questions” (48). 

The story shifts to Cassandra’s point of view in 2005. A week has passed since her grandmother’s funeral. Cassandra receives a visit from an older man named Ben, who has been a father figure to her over the years. As a former lawyer, Ben drafted Nell’s will. Because Nell and Cassandra were partners in an antique business, Nell has left everything to her granddaughter. Ben informs Cassandra that Nell owned another piece of property in England, which now belongs to Cassandra as well. In 1975, Nell bought Cliff Cottage in the village of Tregenna in Cornwall. No one knew about this transaction. Stapled to the deed is a note from Nell: “For Cassandra, it said, who will understand why” (59). 

The story shifts to Nell’s point of view in 1975 as she prepares to fly from Brisbane to London. While riding in a taxi to the airport, Nell thinks back to her earlier years: “Over the course of a few months, a life that had been twenty-one years in the making was systematically dismantled” (63). After her father’s confession, Nell broke her engagement to Danny, married an American GI named Al, and moved to Chicago. Her daughter was born there, but Nell never warmed to Lesley. Nell transfers her attention to the little white suitcase, which only came back into her possession after her father’s death that year. Her father had placed a note inside expressing guilt and asking for her forgiveness. Nell has no idea what Hugh felt guilty about. She then contemplates the storybook written by Eliza Makepeace. Convinced that Eliza must hold the key to her unknown past, Nell is determined to uncover the truth, even if she has to fly to London to do so.

The story shifts to Maryborough in 1914. Nell has been living with Hugh and Lil for six months when Hugh intercepts a letter at the port office from an Englishman searching for the child. That evening, Hugh plans to tell Lil that they will need to give Nell up. On seeing his happy family together, Hugh doesn’t have the heart to separate them, so he tosses the letter in the fireplace: “It sizzled as it caught, burned a brief reproach on his peripheral vision. But he didn’t stop, he just kept walking and never looked back” (73).

In Brisbane in 2005, Cassandra tends the resale stall she operated with Nell at the antique mall. Her friend Ben shows up with some information about Nell’s English cottage. The property was once owned by an American artist named Nathaniel Walker. Because Cassandra studied art history, she recognizes the name. Walker’s art jogs Cassandra’s memory about the illustrations in Nell’s storybook. She decides to ransack the house to find the white suitcase in which she first discovered the book. The next morning, she spies it peeking out of the top shelf of a wardrobe

This chapter is told from Nell’s point of view as a four-year-old in 1913 while traveling on the ship that would carry her to Australia. The Authoress never returned, but Nell has been befriended by a band of children from the lower-class cabins in steerage. A boy named Will takes her to meet his mother. The mother searches Nell’s suitcase and pockets all the money it contains but agrees to look after her. Unfortunately, the mother falls ill and dies just as Nell, herself, is stricken with a fever. The girl collapses, hitting her head on the wooden deck.

When she awakens days later after the fever has broken, she’s lost her memory. Will comes to collect her and hands her the white suitcase: “‘You’ve been guarding it with your life the whole trip, just about tore us apart if any of us so much as looked at it. Didn’t want to upset your precious Authoress.’ The strange word rustled between them and the little girl felt an odd prickling beneath her skin” (88). Even though Nell can’t remember the Authoress, she studies the illustrations in the book of fairy tales and realizes that she somehow knows all the stories. While she’s engrossed in the book, the ship reaches the dock at Maryborough.