Authors: Kerstin Gier
“It was stupid of you to think we
wouldn’t find out the truth.” Dr. White’s grumpy voice.
Not another squeak out of Mum.
“We went on a little excursion to the Cotswolds yesterday to visit a Mrs. Dawn Heller,” said Falk. “That name means something to you, doesn’t it?”
When Mum still said nothing, he went on, “She’s the midwife who helped to bring Gwyneth into the world. Since you paid the rent of her holiday cottage with your
credit card not so long ago, I’d really have expected you to remember her better.”
“Dear heaven, what have you done to the poor woman?” exclaimed Mum.
“Nothing, of course. What in the world are you thinking of?” That was Mr. George.
And Mr. Whitman, his voice dripping with sarcasm, added, “But she seemed to think we wanted to involve her in Satanic rites of some kind. She threw a fit of hysterics,
crossing herself the whole time. And when she saw Jake, she almost fell down in a faint.”
“I was only going to give her a tranquilizing injection,” grumbled Dr. White.
“In the end, however, she calmed down enough for us to have a reasonably sensible conversation with her.” That was Falk de Villiers again. “And she told us the very interesting story of the night when Gwyneth was born. It sounded
like something out of a cross between a fairy tale and a horror story. An honest but credulous midwife is called out to a young girl in labor. The girl has been living in a small terraced house in Durham, hiding away from a Satanic sect. The cruel sect, fixated on numerological rituals, is after not only the girl but also her baby. The midwife doesn’t know exactly what the Satanists plan to do
with the poor little thing, but her imagination obviously works overtime. She has such a kind heart, and she is also being paid such a considerable sum of money—you can tell me how you came by it sometime, Grace—that after helping the baby into the world in a home birth, she falsifies the date on the child’s birth certificate. And she promises never to tell anyone a word about the deal.”
There
was silence for some time. Then Mum said, a little defiantly, “Well, what about it? That’s exactly what I’ve already told you.”
“And so we thought ourselves, at first,” said Mr. Whitman. “But then we found that a few details of Mrs. Heller’s story surprised us.”
“You were almost twenty-eight in 1994—but yes, admittedly in the midwife’s eyes you could still have been considered a
young girl
,”
Falk went on. “In that case, however, who was the anxious, red-haired sister of the mother-to-be whom Mrs. Heller mentioned?”
“She was getting on in years at the time,” said Mum quietly. “Sounds as if she’s senile by now.”
“Possibly. But she had no difficulty at all in recognizing the young girl in a photograph,” said Mr. Whitman. “The young girl who had a baby daughter that night.”
“It was
a photograph of
Lucy
,” said Falk.
His words hit me like a punch in the stomach. As an icy silence spread in the Dragon Hall, my knees gave way, and I slowly slid down the wall to the floor.
“That’s … that’s a mistake,” I finally heard Mum whisper. Footsteps were coming toward me along the corridor, but I was unable to turn my head. Only when he bent over me did I realize that it was Gideon.
“What’s going on?” he whispered, crouching down on the floor in front of me.
“A mistake, Grace?” I could hear Falk de Villiers quite clearly. “The woman also recognized
you
in a photograph, as the supposed big sister who handed her an envelope with an extraordinarily large sum of money in it. And she recognized the man who held Lucy’s hand while she was giving birth! My brother!”
And as if it
hadn’t quite gone home to me yet, he added, “Gwyneth is the child of Paul and Lucy.”
I let out an odd sort of whimper. Gideon, who had turned very pale, took my hands.
Inside the Dragon Hall, my mum began crying.
Except that she wasn’t my mum.
“None of it would have been necessary if you’d all of you left them alone,” she sobbed. “If you hadn’t pursued them so mercilessly.”
“No one knew that
Lucy and Paul were expecting a baby,” said Falk heatedly.
“They’d committed theft,” snorted Dr. White. “They had stolen the Lodge’s most precious possession, and they were about to destroy everything that, in the course of the centuries—”
“Oh, shut up, for heaven’s sake!” cried Mum. “You forced those young people to abandon the daughter they loved so much, only two days after her birth!”
It
was at that point that I jumped up—I don’t know how—and got to my feet again. I couldn’t listen to this for a second longer.
“Gwenny!” said Gideon urgently, but I shook off his hands and ran. “Where are you going?” After a few steps, he caught up with me.
“Away from here, that’s all.” I ran even faster. The porcelain in the glass cases clinked softly as we passed.
Gideon grabbed my hand. “I’m
coming with you,” he said. “I’m not leaving you alone now.”
Somewhere or other in the corridors behind us, someone called our names.
“I don’t want…,” I gasped, “I don’t want to talk to anyone.”
Gideon tightened his grip on my hand. “I know where no one will find us for the next few hours. Come along!”
27 June 1542.
Without my knowledge, M. persuaded Father Dominic of the Third Order, a man of extremely dubious reputation, to perform an exorcism on his daughter Elisabetta, of a kind intended to cure her of what he claims is demonic possession. By the time news of this wicked project reached me, it was too late. Although I gained access to the chapel in which the disgraceful procedure was
being carried out, I could not prevent certain substances of a questionable nature from being administered to the girl, causing her to foam at the mouth, roll her eyes, and speak confusedly in tongues, while Father Dominic sprinkled her with holy water. As a result of this treatment, which I do not hesitate to describe as torture, Elisabetta lost the fruit of her womb that same night. Before he left,
her father showed no remorse, but was triumphant at the supposed exorcism of the demon. He carefully recorded Elisabetta’s confession, made under the influence of pain and the aforesaid substances, and had it written down as evidence of her deranged state of mind. I declined the offer of a copy—my report to the head of the Congregation will meet with a lack of understanding in any case, that much
is certain. I only wish that my report may contribute to causing M. to fall into disfavor with his patrons, but I do not feel very hopeful in that respect.
F
ROM THE RECORDS OF THE
I
NQUISITION AS DRAWN UP BY
F
ATHER
G
IAN
P
ETRO
B
ARIBI
OF THE
D
OMINICAN
O
RDER
A
RCHIVES OF THE
U
NIVERSITY
L
IBRARY,
P
ADUA
(DECIPHERED, TRANSLATED, AND EDITED BY
D
R.
M. G
IORDANO)
TWELVE
MR. MARLEY FROWNED
as we burst into the chronograph room.
“Didn’t you blindfold her—” he started to say, but Gideon gave him no chance to finish the sentence.
“I’ll be elapsing to 1953 with Gwenny today,” he said.
Mr. Marley put his hands on his hips. “You can’t,” he said. “You need your time-travel quota for Operation Black Tourmaline forward slash Sapphire. And in case you’ve forgotten,
that takes place at the same time.” The chronograph was on the table in front of Mr. Marley, with its jewels sparkling in the artificial light.
“Change of plan,” said Gideon briefly, and squeezed my hand.
“I don’t know anything about any change of plan. And I don’t believe you.” Mr. Marley’s mouth twisted in annoyance. “My last orders say clearly that—”
“Call them upstairs, then, and find out
for yourself,” Gideon interrupted him, pointing to the telephone on the wall.
“I’ll do just that!” With his ears scarlet, Mr. Marley made for the phone. Gideon let go of me and bent over the chronograph, while I stood by the door like a store-window dummy. Now that we were here, I was rooted to the spot, feeling like a music box that had run down. I seemed to be slowly turning to stone. The thoughts
ought really to have been going around and around in my head, but they weren’t. I felt nothing but a dull pain.
“Gwenny, it’s already set for you. Come over here.” Gideon didn’t wait for me to do as he said, and he took no notice of Mr. Marley’s protests (“Stop that! That’s my job!”), but drew me to him, took my limp hand, and placed one finger carefully in the little compartment under the ruby.
“I’ll be right there with you in a moment.”
“You don’t have permission to use the chronograph on your own,” said Mr. Marley angrily, picking up the receiver of the phone. “I’m going to tell your uncle, this minute, about your high-handed disregard for the rules.” I just had time to see him dial a number, and then I was floating away in a flurry of red light.
I landed in pitch-darkness and automatically
groped my way toward the place where I thought I’d find the light switch.
“Let me do that,” I heard Gideon say. He had landed behind me without a sound. Two seconds later, the electric lightbulb hanging from the ceiling flickered on.
“That was quick,” I murmured.
Gideon turned to me. “Oh, Gwenny,” he said gently. “I’m so sorry about all that.”
When I neither moved nor answered him, he was
beside me in two long strides, taking me in his arms. He drew my head down to rest on his shoulder, laid his chin on my hair, and whispered, “It will be all right. I promise you. Everything will be all right again.”
I don’t know how long we stood there like that. Maybe it was his words, and the way he kept repeating them, or maybe the warmth of his body, but gradually I began to thaw out. At
least, I finally managed to whisper something. “My mum … isn’t my mum,” I said helplessly.
Gideon steered me over to the green sofa in the middle of the room and sat down beside me. “I wish I’d known,” he said, distressed. “Then I could have warned you. Are you cold? Your teeth are chattering.”
I shook my head, leaned against him, and closed my eyes. For a moment, I wished that time would stand
still, here in 1953 on this green sofa, where there were no problems, no questions, no lies, only Gideon and his comforting presence beside me, enveloping me.
But unfortunately, as I knew from bitter experience, my wishes didn’t usually come true.
I opened my eyes again and looked sideways at Gideon. “You were right,” I said miserably. “This is probably the only place where they can’t bother
us. But you’re going to be in trouble!”
“I certainly am.” Gideon smiled slightly. “Particularly because I had to be … well, rather rough with Marley to keep him from snatching the chronograph away from me.” His smile was a grim one. “Operation Black Tourmaline and Sapphire will just have to wait for another day. Although there are even more questions I’d like to ask Lucy and Paul now, and a meeting
with them is exactly what we could do with at the moment.”
I thought of our last meeting with Lucy and Paul at Lady Tilney’s house, and my teeth chattered when I remembered how Lucy had looked at me and whispered my name. My God, and I’d had no idea!
“If Lucy and Paul are my parents, does that mean you and I are related?” I asked.
Gideon smiled again. “That was the first thing that crossed
my own mind,” he said. “But Falk and Paul are only distant relatives of mine—uncles twice removed, I think. They’re descended from one of the Carnelian twins; I’m descended from the other.”
The cogwheels in my brain were beginning to turn and engage with each other again. Suddenly I had a lump in my throat. “Before Dad got so sick, he always sang us something in the evening and played the guitar.
Nick and I really loved that,” I said quietly. “He used to say I’d inherited my musical talent from him. But he wasn’t even related to me. I get my black hair from Paul.” I swallowed.
Gideon said nothing, but I saw the sympathy in his face.
“If Lucy isn’t my cousin, but my mother, then my mother is … is my great-aunt!” I went on. “And my grandmother is really my great-grandmother. And Grandpa’s
not my grandfather; Uncle Harry is.” That was the last straw. I began crying my eyes out. “I can’t stand Uncle Harry! I don’t want him to be my grandfather! And I don’t want Nick and Caroline not to be my brother and sister. I love them so much.”
Gideon let me cry for a while, and then he began stroking my hair and making soothing sounds. “Hey, it’s okay, Gwenny. None of that makes any difference.
They’re the same people, never mind exactly how they’re related to you!”
But I went on sobbing inconsolably. I hardly noticed Gideon gently drawing me toward him. He put both arms around me and held me tight.
“She ought to have told me,” I finally managed to say. Gideon’s T-shirt was all wet with my tears. “Mum … Mum ought to have told me.”
“Maybe she would have told you sometime. But put yourself
in her position: she loves you, so she knew very well that the truth would hurt you. She probably couldn’t bring herself to do it.” Gideon’s hand was stroking my back. “It must have been terrible for all of them, particularly Lucy and Paul.”
My tears started flowing again. “But why did they leave me behind on my own? The Guardians would never have done me any harm! Why didn’t they simply take
me with them?”
Gideon didn’t answer at once. Then he said, slowly, “I would guess that they tried to. Probably when Lucy found out that she was pregnant, and they realized that you would be the Ruby.” He cleared his throat. “But at the time, they still had no proof of their theories about the count. Their stories were dismissed as childish attempts to excuse their unauthorized time travel. It
even says so in the
Annals.
Marley’s grandfather in particular got terribly angry about their accusations. According to his account of it, they had dragged the sacred memory of the count through the dirt.”