Authors: Kerstin Gier
“But my … grandfather!” My mind refused to think of Lucas as anyone but my grandpa. “He knew everything that was going on, and he, for one, believed Lucy and Paul! Why didn’t he stop them running
away?”
“I’ve no idea.” Gideon shrugged a shoulder wet with my tears. “Without evidence, even he couldn’t have done very much. He couldn’t endanger his position in the Inner Circle. And who knows whether he could trust all the Guardians of the time? We can’t rule out the possibility that there was someone there in his own day who knew about the count’s real plans.”
Someone who may even have murdered
my grandfather in the end.
I shook my head. This was all too much for me, but Gideon hadn’t finished with his theories yet.
“Whatever made him do it, maybe it was your grandfather’s idea to send Lucy and Paul back into the past, taking the chronograph with them. Sounds like he supported them.”
I sobbed. “They could have taken me with them too,” I said. “Before I was born, I mean.”
“To bring
you into the world of 1912 and bring you up under a false name? Just before the First World War?” He shook his head. “Who’d have looked after you if anything happened to them?” He stroked my hair. “I can’t come anywhere near imagining how much it must hurt to discover a thing like this, Gwen. But I can understand Lucy and Paul. They knew for certain that your mother was someone who would love you
like her own child and bring you up in safety.”
I bit my lower lip. “I don’t know.” Feeling exhausted, I sat up. “I don’t know anything anymore. I wish I could turn time back. A few weeks ago, maybe I wasn’t the happiest girl in the world, but I was kind of normal! Not a time traveler! Not immortal! And definitely not the child of … of two
teenagers
who live in the year 1912.”
Gideon smiled
at me. “Yes, but look at it this way: there are a few positive things as well.” He carefully ran his thumb under my eyes, probably wiping up a huge puddle full of mascara. “I think you’re very brave. And … and I do love you!”
That washed the dull pain out of my heart. I put my arms around his neck. “Could you say that again, please? And then kiss me? So hard that I forget everything else?”
Gideon let his eyes wander down from my eyes to my lips. “I can always try,” he murmured.
* * *
GIDEON’S EFFORTS
were crowned by success, if you like to put it that way. At least, I for one wouldn’t have minded spending the rest of the day or maybe my whole life here in his arms on the green sofa in 1953.
But after a while, he moved a little way away from me, propped himself on his elbows,
and looked down at me. “I guess we’d better stop this now, or I can’t answer for myself,” he said rather breathlessly.
I didn’t say anything. Why would he feel any different from me? Except that I couldn’t have stopped just like that. I wondered whether I ought to feel slightly offended that he did. But I didn’t have long to think about it, because Gideon glanced at the time and suddenly sat
up very straight. “Hey, Gwen,” he said hastily, “time’s nearly up. You’d better do something to your hair. They’re probably all gathered around the chronograph in a circle, waiting to haul us over the coals when we travel back.”
I sighed. “Oh, God,” I said unhappily. “But first we must discuss what to do next.”
Gideon frowned. “They’ll have to postpone the operation, of course, but maybe I can
persuade them at least to send me back to 1912 for the two hours left of my time quota. We really do urgently need to talk to Lucy and Paul!”
“We could visit them together this evening,” I said, although for a moment my stomach churned at the idea.
Hi, nice to meet you, Mum and Dad.
“Forget it, Gwen. They’re never going to let you go to 1912 with me again, not unless it’s on the count’s express
orders.” Gideon put his hand out, pulled me to my feet, and then rather clumsily tried smoothing down the hair at the back of my head. He’d got it into that untidy state himself.
“What a good thing that I just happen to have a chronograph of my own hidden at home, then,” I said as casually as I could. “And by the way, it works perfectly.”
Gideon stared at me. “You
what
?”
“Oh, come on! Surely
you knew! How else could I have met Lucas so often?” I put one hand on my stomach. It was already beginning to give me that roller-coaster feeling.
“I thought you’d found some way to meet him while you were elapsing, and—” Gideon dissolved into thin air before my eyes. I followed him a few seconds later, after running my hands over my hair once again.
I’d been sure that the chronograph room
would be teeming with Guardians when we came back, all of them furious with Gideon for his unauthorized action (and secretly I expected to see Mr. Marley, with a black eye, standing in a corner and insisting that Gideon must be taken away in handcuffs), but all was quiet.
There was only Falk de Villiers in the room—and my mum. She was sitting on a chair, a picture of misery, wringing her hands,
and she gave me a tearful look. Her mascara and eye shadow made an irregular pattern of stripes on her cheeks.
“Ah, so there you two are,” said Falk. His voice and expression were neutral, but I thought it perfectly possible that beneath that façade, he was seething with rage. There was a strange gleam in his amber-colored wolf’s eyes. Beside me, Gideon instinctively stood up very straight and
raised his chin slightly, as if bracing himself for a lecture.
I quickly reached for his hand. “It’s not his fault—I didn’t want to elapse on my own,” I said quickly. “Gideon didn’t mean to spoil the plan—”
“That’s all right, Gwyneth.” Falk gave me a weary smile. “Right now various things aren’t going according to plan.” He passed his hand over his forehead and cast Mum a brief sidelong glance.
“I’m very sorry that when we were talking at midday … you had to learn the facts like that. It certainly wasn’t intentional.” He looked at Mum again. “News of that kind ought to be broken more gently.”
Mum said nothing, just tried hard to hold back her tears. Gideon squeezed my hand.
Falk sighed. “I guess you and Grace will have a good deal to talk about. We’d better leave you alone,” he said.
“There’s an adept waiting outside the door to escort you upstairs when you’re ready. Coming, Gideon?”
Reluctantly, Gideon let go of my hand and kissed me on the cheek. As he did so, he whispered in my ear, “You’ll do fine, Gwen. And later we’ll talk about what you have in hiding at home.”
It took all my self-control not to cling to him and say, “Oh, please stay with me.”
I waited in silence
until he and Falk had left, closing the door behind them. Then I turned to Mum and tried to smile. “I’m surprised they let you into their holy of holies here.”
Mum got up—tottering like an old lady—and gave me a wry smile in return. “They blindfolded me. Well, that boy with the face like a moon did. He had a split lip, and I expect that’s why he tied the knot so tight. It tweaked my hair horribly,
but I didn’t dare to complain.”
“I know all about that.” I couldn’t summon up much sympathy for Mr. Marley’s split lip. “Mum—”
“I know you must hate me now.” Mum didn’t let me finish. “And I absolutely understand that.”
“Mum, I—”
“I’m so dreadfully sorry about it all! I ought never to have let it go so far.” She took a step toward me and put out her arms, only to let them fall helplessly to
her sides again. “I’ve always been terrified of this day! I knew it would happen sometime or other, and the older you grew, the more afraid I was. Your grandfather…” She stopped, then took a deep breath, and went on, “My father and I were going to tell you together, once you were old enough to understand the facts and come to terms with them.”
“So Lucas knew?”
“Of course! He hid Lucy and Paul
in Durham with us, and it was his idea for me to make out I was pregnant so that I could pretend the baby—that was you—was mine. Lucy went for medical checkups in Durham under my name. She and Paul spent almost four months with us, while Dad was busy laying false trails over half of Europe. It was really the perfect hiding place. No one cared about my pregnancy. We said the baby would be born in
December, so that meant you weren’t of any interest to the Guardians and the family.” Mum looked past me at the tapestry on the wall, and her eyes were glazed. “Up to the end, we hoped it wouldn’t be necessary for Lucy and Paul to travel back into the past with the chronograph. But a private detective hired by the Guardians was watching our house.…” She shuddered at the memory. “My father managed
to warn us just in time. Lucy and Paul had no other option—they had to run for it and leave you with us—a tiny baby with a funny little tuft of hair on your head and big blue eyes.” Now the tears were running down her cheeks. “Nicholas and I swore to keep you safe, and we loved you like our own child from the very first second.”
Without noticing it, I’d begun to cry again myself. “Oh, Mum—”
“You see, we’d never wanted to have children. There was so much poor health in Nicholas’s family, and I always thought I wasn’t the maternal type. But all that changed when Lucy and Paul had entrusted you to us.” Mum’s tears were unstoppable now. “You made us so … so
happy.
You changed our lives and showed us how wonderful children are. But for you, Nick and Caroline would never have been born.”
She was sobbing so hard that she was unable to go on. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I flung myself into her arms.
“It’s all right, Mum!” I tried to say, but only a kind of snorkeling sound like a gurgle came out. Mum seemed to understand it, all the same. She wound her arms around me and hugged me, and for quite a long time, we weren’t in any position to talk or to stop crying.
Until Xemerius
put his head through the wall and said, “Oh, here you are!” He squeezed the rest of himself through into the room, flew over to the table, and settled there, staring curiously at us. “Oh, no!
Two
indoor fountains now. The Niagara Falls model must have been on special offer.”
I gently moved away from Mum. “Mum, we must go! Do you have any tissues on you?”
“If we’re lucky!” She rummaged in her
bag and handed me one. “Why isn’t your mascara all over your face?” she asked with a faint grin.
I blew my nose noisily. “I’m afraid I already left it all over Gideon’s T-shirt.”
“He does seem to be a nice boy. Although I ought to warn you against him—those de Villiers men are nothing but bad news for us Montrose women.” Mum opened her powder compact, looked in the little mirror, and sighed.
“Oh, mercy! I look like Frankenstein’s mother.”
“Yup, nothing but soap and water will do the job there,” said Xemerius. He hopped off the table, settled on a chest in the corner, and put his head to one side. “Looks like I’ve missed out on a lot! By the way, they’re all in an uproar upstairs. Lots of terribly important men in black suits and that useless Marley looking like someone punched him
in the face. And, Gwyneth, they’re all going on at your
nice boy
—he obviously turned their plans upside down. Also, he’s infuriating every last one of them by grinning to himself like an idiot the whole time.”
And although I suppose there was absolutely no reason for it, all of a sudden I was doing exactly the same, grinning to myself like another idiot.
Mum looked at me over the edge of her
compact. “Can you forgive me?” she asked quietly.
“Dear Mum!” I hugged her so hard that she dropped everything she was holding. “I do love you so much!”
“Oh, please!” groaned Xemerius. “Here we go again! Isn’t it damp enough in here already?”
* * *
“
THIS IS MY IDEA
of heaven,” said Lesley, pivoting on her own axis so as to take in the atmosphere of Madame Rossini’s stocks of costumes.
Her eyes wandered over the shelves of boots and shoes from all periods, then went on to the hats, from there to the apparently endless racks with clothes hanging from them, and finally back to Madame Rossini, who had opened the door of this paradise to us. “And you’re God in person!”
“You’re so sweet!” Madame Rossini beamed at her.
“My own opinion entirely,” said Raphael. Gideon cast him a glance
of amusement. I didn’t know how, after all that fuss this afternoon, he’d managed to get Falk to agree (maybe Gideon’s uncle was more of a sheep in wolf’s clothing than the other way around), but we and Lesley and Raphael really did have official permission to borrow costumes for Cynthia’s party from the Guardians’ stocks, under Madame Rossini’s supervision. It was early evening when we met
outside her stockrooms, and Lesley was so excited at being allowed into the headquarters of the Lodge that she could hardly keep still. Although she didn’t get to see any of the other rooms that I’d described to her and was led only along an ordinary corridor to the stockroom, she was bubbling with enthusiasm.
“Have you noticed?” she whispered to me. “This place positively reeks of puzzles and
mysteries. Oh, God, I just love it!”
Once in the stockroom with the costumes, she was practically hyperventilating. In other circumstances, I expect it would have been the same with me. Up to now, I’d thought of Madame Rossini’s studio as the Garden of Eden, but this was even better, much better.
But first, by now I was pretty well used to all the clothes, and second, my head and heart were
busy with very different things.
“Of course I ’ave not made all ze costumes zat are in ’ere. It is ze Guardians’ collection. Zey began it two ’undred years ago, and zey added to it in ze course of time.” Madame Rossini took a slightly yellowing lace dress off one of the racks, and Lesley and I sighed, enchanted. “Many of ze ’istorical dresses are very lovely, but zey cannot be used for time travel
zese days.” She carefully hung the dress up again. “And ze costumes made for ze last but one generation are not up to ze standard of today.”
“You mean all these wonderful dresses are slowly rotting away here?” Lesley stroked the lace dress sympathetically.
Madame Rossini shrugged her plump shoulders. “It ees valuable material for illustrating ze ’istorical styles, even for me. But you are right,
it ees a shame zat so few see it. All ze better that you are ’ere zis evening. You will be ze loveliest ladies at ze ball,
mes petites
!”