Authors: Kerstin Gier
“Please,
Leo
,” I said, sounding as friendly as I could.
“I’m sorry, but you won’t learn any more from me.” The
heavy door latched behind us. Mr. Marley let go of my arm to lock it, which seemed to take a good ten minutes, while I tried to save a bit of time by taking a firm step forward, not too easy with my eyes blindfolded. Mr. Marley had grabbed my arm again, and a good thing, because without a pilot, I could have run straight into a wall down here. I decided to try flattering him. It couldn’t hurt. Maybe
he’d be prepared to come out with more information later.
“Did you know that I’ve met your ancestor in person?” In fact I’d even taken a photograph of him, but unfortunately I couldn’t show it to Mr. Marley. He’d have told tales of me for bringing forbidden objects back from the past.
“Really? I envy you. The baron must have been an impressive personality.”
“Er, yes, very impressive.” You bet
he was! That creepy old junkie! “He asked me about Transylvania, but unfortunately there wasn’t much I could tell him about it.”
“Yes, living in exile must have been hard for him,” said Mr. Marley. Next moment, he let out a shrill “eek!”
A rat
, I thought, and in panic I snatched the blindfold off. But it wasn’t a rat that had made Mr. Marley squeal. It was Gideon. Still as unshaven as this afternoon,
in fact more so, but with his eyes extremely bright and watchful. And looking so incredibly, outrageously, impossibly good.
“Only me,” he said, smiling.
“I can see that,” groused Mr. Marley. “You scared me stiff.”
Me too. My lower lip began trembling again, and I dug my teeth into it to keep the stupid thing still.
“You can go home now. I’ll escort Gwyneth to the car,” said Gideon, holding
out his hand to me as if I was sure to take it.
I looked as haughty as you can with your front teeth digging into your lower lip—probably I just looked like a beaver, if a haughty beaver—and ignored his hand.
“You can’t,” said Mr. Marley. “It’s my job to escort Miss Gwyneth to the—aargh!” He was staring at me in horror. “Oh, Miss Gwyneth, why did you take the scarf off? That’s against the rules.”
“I thought it was a rat you’d seen,” I said, casting a dark glance at Gideon. “And I wasn’t all that wrong, either.”
“Now look what you’ve done!” said Mr. Marley accusingly to Gideon. “I don’t know what I can … the rules say that … and if we—”
“Don’t be so uptight, Marley. Come on, Gwen, let’s go.”
“But you can’t.… I must insist that…,” stammered Mr. Marley. “And … and … and you have no right
to tell me what to do—”
“Then go tell tales of me.” Gideon took my arm and simply hauled me on. I thought of resisting, but then I realized that would only lose me even more time. We’d probably still be standing here arguing tomorrow morning. So I let him lead me away, glancing back apologetically at Mr. Marley. “See you, Leo.”
“Yes, exactly. See you, Leo,” said Gideon.
“You … you haven’t heard
the last of this,” stammered Mr. Marley, behind us. His face was shining like a beacon in the dark corridor.
“No, sure, we’re trembling with fright already.” Gideon didn’t seem to mind that Mr. Marley could still hear him as he added, “Stupid show-off.”
I waited until we had turned the next corner and then shook myself free of his hand and quickened my pace until I was almost running.
“Ambitious
to compete in the Olympic Games?” inquired Gideon.
I spun around to face him. “What do you want?” Lesley would have been proud of the way I spat that at him. “I’m in a hurry.”
“I only wanted to make sure you understood my apology this afternoon.” All the mockery had gone out of his voice now.
But not out of mine. “Yup, I did,” I snorted. “Which doesn’t mean I accepted it.”
“Gwen—”
“Okay,
you don’t have to say you really like me again. Guess what, I liked you too. In fact, I liked you a lot. But that’s all over now.” I was running up the spiral staircase as fast as I could go, with the result that by the time I reached the top, I was right out of breath. I felt like hanging over the banisters gasping for air. But I wasn’t going to expose my weakness like that. Particularly as Gideon
didn’t seem to have been exerting himself at all to keep up. So I hurried on, until he grabbed my wrist and made me stand still. I winced as his fingers pressed on my cut. It started bleeding again.
“It’s okay for you to hate me, really, I don’t have any problem with that,” said Gideon, looking seriously into my eyes. “But I’ve discovered things that make it necessary for you and me to work together.
So that you … so that we’ll get out of all this alive.”
I tried to free myself, but he only held my wrist more firmly. “What sort of things?” I asked, although I would rather have shrieked, “Ouch!”
“I don’t know exactly, not yet. But it could turn out that I was wrong about Lucy and Paul and their intentions. So it’s important for you to—” He stopped, let go of me, and looked at the palm of
his hand. “Is that
blood
?”
Damn. I mustn’t look guilty. “Nothing to speak of. I cut myself on the edge of a piece of paper at school this morning. So to stick to the subject. Until you can be more specific”—I felt really proud of coming out with that phrase!—“I’m definitely not working with you on anything.”
Gideon tried to take my arm again. “Here, that cut looks nasty. Let me look.… We’d better
go to see Dr. White. He may still be in the building.”
“You probably mean you don’t want to say anything more precise about what you claim to have discovered.” I had my arm stretched right out, to keep him away and so that he couldn’t examine my wound.
“Because I’m not quite sure myself what to make of it yet,” said Gideon. And like Lucas just now, he added in a rather desperate tone of voice,
“I need more time!”
“Who doesn’t?” I started off again. We had already reached Madame Rossini’s studio, and it wasn’t far from there to the front door. “Good-bye, Gideon. See you tomorrow—unfortunately.”
I was secretly waiting for him to grab me and hold me back again, but he didn’t. He didn’t follow me, either. I’d have loved to see the expression on his face, but I didn’t turn back to look
at him. Anyway, that would have been a silly thing to do, because then he’d have seen the tears pouring down my cheeks once more.
* * *
NICK WAS WAITING
at the front door of our house for me. “At last!” he said. “I wanted us to start without you, but Mr. Bernard said we ought to wait. He’s made sure the flush of the toilet in the blue bathroom is out of order, so no one can use it, and he
says he’ll have to take out the tiles there to dismantle the cistern. We’ve bolted the secret door on the inside. Clever, eh?”
“Very clever.”
“But Lady Arista and Aunt Glenda will be home in an hour’s time, and they’re sure to say he’d better put off the repair work until tomorrow.”
“Then we’ll have to hurry.” I gave him a quick hug and dropped a kiss on his untidy red hair. There had to be
time for that! “You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”
Nick looked a little guilty. “Only Caroline. She was so … oh, well, you know how she always knows when there’s something in the air, and she asked lots of questions. But she’ll keep quiet and help us to throw Mum, Aunt Maddy, and Charlotte off the scent.”
“Particularly Charlotte,” I said, talking more to myself than Nick.
“They’re all still
upstairs in the dining room. Mum invited Lesley to stay to supper.”
In the dining room, they were just leaving the table. Which meant that Aunt Maddy moved to her armchair by the fireplace and put her feet up while Mr. Bernard and Mum cleared the supper things away. They were all pleased to see me, all but Charlotte, that is. Oh, well, maybe she was just very good at hiding her delight.
Xemerius
came down from the chandelier and cried, “There you are at last! I was nearly dying of boredom.”
Although there was still a delicious smell of supper and Mum said she was keeping something hot for me, I heroically claimed that I wasn’t hungry because I’d already had supper at the Temple. My stomach cramped indignantly at this shocking lie, but I couldn’t possibly waste time satisfying its demands.
Lesley grinned at me. “It was a wonderful curry. I could hardly stop eating. My mum is in one of her terrible experimental phases right now. Even our dog won’t eat the macrobiotic stuff she cooks these days.”
“All the same, you look quite … well, let’s say well nourished,” said Charlotte sharply. She’d braided her hair and pinned it up again, but a few little locks had come loose and were framing
her face very prettily. How could anyone look so beautiful and be so mean?
“You’re lucky. I wish I had a dog, too,” said Caroline. “Or any kind of pet.”
“Never mind. We have Nick,” said Charlotte. “That’s almost like having a monkey.”
“Not forgetting you, you nasty, poisonous spider!” said Nick.
“Well said, young man!” crowed Xemerius, back up on the chandelier. He clapped his paws.
Mum was
helping Mr. Bernard to stack the dirty dishes in the dumbwaiter. “You know you can’t have a pet because Aunt Glenda’s allergic to animals, Caroline.”
“We could get a naked mole rat,” said Caroline. “That would be better than nothing.”
Charlotte opened her mouth and then shut it again, obviously because she couldn’t think of anything nasty to say about naked mole rats.
Aunt Maddy had made herself
comfortable in her chair. She pointed sleepily to her round, rosy cheek. “Give your old great-aunt a kiss, Gwyneth. It’s a shame we see so little of you these days. Last night I had another dream about you, and I have to say it wasn’t a nice dream.…”
“Could you tell me about it later?” As I kissed her, I whispered in her ear, “And could you please help to keep Charlotte away from the blue bathroom?”
Aunt Maddy’s dimples deepened, and she winked at me. All of a sudden, she looked wide awake again.
Mum, who had a date to meet a friend of hers, was in a much better mood today than for the last few days. No worried expression, no exaggerated sighing when she looked at me. To my surprise, she even said Lesley could stay a bit longer and spared us the usual lecture on the dangers of traveling
by bus at night. Even better, she said Nick could help Mr. Bernard to repair the lavatory cistern that was supposed to have gone wrong, however long it took. Caroline was the only one out of luck. She was sent to bed. “But I want to be there when they discover the tr—when they dismantle the cistern,” she begged, holding back a tear when she couldn’t soften Mum’s heart.
“I’m going to bed now too,”
Charlotte told Caroline. “With a good book.”
“
In the Shadow of Vampire Mountain
,” said Xemerius. “She’s reached page 413, where the young, although also undead, Christopher St. Ives finally gets beautiful Mary Lou into bed.”
I looked at him with amusement, and to my surprise, he suddenly seemed slightly embarrassed. “I only peeked at it, honest,” he said, jumping off the chandelier and down
to the windowsill.
Aunt Maddy quickly moved in on Charlotte’s announcement. “Oh, my dear, I thought you might keep me company in the music room for a while,” she said. “I’d love a game of Scrabble.”
Charlotte rolled her eyes. “Last time we had to throw you out of the game because you insisted that there was such a word as
earcat.
”
“And so there is. It’s a cat with ears.” Aunt Maddy got up and
took Charlotte’s arm. “But I don’t mind if you say it doesn’t count today.”
“Nor do
springbird
and
cowjuice
,” said Charlotte.
“Oh, but there’s definitely a springbird, darling,” said Aunt Maddy, winking at me again.
I hugged my mum before going up to my room with Lesley. “And by the way, I’m to give you regards from Falk de Villiers. He wanted to know if you have a steady boyfriend.”
I’d have
done better to keep this message until Charlotte and Aunt Maddy had left the room, because they both stopped dead, rooted to the spot, and looked at Mum with great interest.
“What?” Mum blushed slightly. “And what did you tell him?”
“Well, I said it was ages since you’d been out with a man, and the last guy you did see regularly was always scratching himself when he thought no one was looking.”
“You never said that!”
I laughed. “No, I didn’t.”
“Oh, are you two talking about that good-looking banker Arista wanted to marry you off to, Grace? Mr. Itchman,” said Aunt Maddy. “Bet you he had lice or something.”
Lesley giggled.
“His name was Hitchman, Aunt Maddy.” My mother rubbed her arms, shivering. “A good thing I never got to find out for sure about the lice or whatever he had. What
did you really tell him, then? Falk, I mean.”
“Nothing,” I said. “Want me to ask him next time I get the chance whether
he
has a steady girlfriend?”
“Don’t you dare,” said Mum. Then she grinned and added, “He doesn’t. I happen to know that from a friend. She has a friend who knows him quite well … not that I’d be interested in any of that.”
“No, of course not!” said Xemerius. He flew off the
windowsill and settled in the middle of the dining table. “Can we finally get a move on?”
* * *
HALF AN HOUR
later, Lesley was up to date with the latest developments, and Caroline was the owner of a genuine vintage pink crochet piglet from the year 1929. When I told her where it came from, she was very impressed and said she was going to call her pig Margaret in honor of Lady Tilney. She
dropped happily off to sleep cuddling the piglet when everything was quiet again.
Except for Mr. Bernard’s hammering and chiseling, of course. That could be heard all over the house. We’d never have managed to get any bricks out of the wall in secret. And Mr. Bernard and Nick didn’t get the little chest up to my room in secret either. Aunt Maddy came in right behind them.
“She caught us on the
stairs,” said Nick apologetically.
“And she recognized that little chest at once,” said Aunt Maddy. She sounded excited. “Oh, it belonged to my brother Lucas! It stood in the library for years, and then—just before his death—it suddenly disappeared. So I think I have a right to know what you’re planning to do with it.”