Authors: Kerstin Gier
Mr. George laughed. “Falk’s right, it really
is late. If Gwyneth is to get any homework done this evening, we have to send her back into the past now. What year shall we pick, Gwyneth?”
As I’d agreed with Lesley, I said as indifferently as possible, “I don’t mind. It was 1956 the other day—am I right, was it 1956? There were no rats in the cellar then. It was even quite comfortable.” Of course I didn’t breathe a word about meeting my grandfather
in secret in the comfort of the rat-free cellar. “I managed to learn my French vocabulary there without trembling with fright the whole time.”
“No problem,” said Mr. George. He opened a thick journal, while Mr. Marley pushed aside the wall hanging that hid the safe containing the chronograph.
I tried to peer over Mr. George’s shoulder as he leafed through the journal, but his broad back got
in the way.
“Let’s see. That was 24 July 1956,” said Mr. George. “You spent all afternoon there and came back at six thirty in the evening.”
“Six thirty would be a good time,” I said, crossing my fingers that our plan would work out. If I could go back to the exact time when I had left the room on that visit, my grandfather would still be down there, and I wouldn’t have to waste any time looking
for him.
“I think we’d better make it six thirty-one,” said Mr. George. “We don’t want you colliding with yourself.”
Mr. Marley, who had put the chest containing the chronograph on the table and was now taking the device, which was about the size of a mantelpiece clock, out of its velvet wrappings, murmured, “But strictly speaking, it’s not night there yet. Mr. Whitman said—”
“Yes, we know
that Mr. Whitman is a stickler for the rules,” said Mr. George, as he fiddled with the little cogwheels. In between delicate colored drawings of patterns, planets, animals, and plants, there were gemstones set into the surface of the strange machine, so big and bright that you felt they must be imitations—like the interlinking beads that my little sister liked to play with. All the time travelers
in the Circle of Twelve had different jewels allotted to them. Mine was the ruby, and the diamond, so big that it was probably worth the price of a whole apartment block in the West End of London, “belonged” to Gideon. “However, I think we are gentlemen enough not to leave a young lady sitting on her own in a vaulted cellar at night, don’t you agree, Leo?”
Mr. Marley nodded uncertainly.
“Leo?”
I said. “That’s a nice name.”
“Short for Leopold,” said Mr. Marley, his ears shining like the rear lights of a car. He sat down at the table, put the journal in front of him, and took the top off a fountain pen. The small, neat handwriting in which a long series of dates, times, and names had been recorded there was obviously his. “My mother thinks it’s a terrible name, but it’s traditional to
call every eldest son in our family Leopold.”
“Leo is a direct descendant of Baron Miroslav Alexander Leopold Rakoczy,” explained Mr. George, turning around for a moment and looking me in the eye. “You know—Count Saint-Germain’s legendary traveling companion, known in the
Annals
as the Black Leopard.”
I was baffled. “Oh, really?”
In my mind, I was comparing Mr. Marley with the thin, pale figure
of Rakoczy, whose black eyes had terrified me so badly. But I didn’t really know whether I ought to tell him he was lucky not to look like his shady ancestor, or whether maybe it was even worse to be red-haired, freckled, and moonfaced.
“You see, my paternal grandfather—” Mr. Marley was beginning, but Mr. George quickly interrupted him. “I am sure your grandfather would be very proud of you,”
he said firmly. “Particularly if he knew how well you have passed your exams.”
“Except in the Use of Traditional Weapons,” said Mr. Marley. “I was marked only satisfactory there.”
“Oh, well, no one needs that these days. Use of traditional weapons is an outmoded subject.” Mr. George put his hand out to me. “Here we are, Gwyneth. Off to 1956 you go. I have set the chronograph to exactly three
and a half hours. Keep a tight hold on your bag and be sure not to leave anything lying around in the cellar when you travel back, remember? Mr. Marley will be waiting for you here.”
I clutched my schoolbag with one arm and gave Mr. George my free hand. He put my forefinger into one of the tiny compartments behind flaps in the chronograph. A needle went into it, and the magnificent ruby lit up
and filled the whole room with red light. I closed my eyes while I let the usual dizzy feeling carry me away. When I opened them a second later, Mr. Marley and Mr. George had disappeared, and so had the table.
It was darker, the room was lit by only a single electric bulb, and my grandfather Lucas was standing in the light of it looking at me, puzzled.
“You … you—didn’t it work, then?” he cried,
alarmed. In 1956, he was thirty-two years old, and he didn’t look much like the old man of eighty I’d known when I was a little girl. “You disappeared over there, and now here you are again.”
“Yes,” I said proudly, suppressing my instinct to hug him. It was the same as at our other meetings: the sight of him brought a lump to my throat. My grandfather had died when I was ten years old, and it
was both wonderful and sad to see him again six years after his funeral. Sad not because when we met in the past he wasn’t the grandfather I had known, but a kind of unfinished version of him, but because I was a complete stranger to him. He hadn’t the faintest idea how often I had sat on his lap or that, when my father died, he was the person who comforted me by telling me stories, and we always
used to say good night in a secret language of our own invention that no one else understood. He didn’t know how much I had loved him, and I couldn’t tell him. No one likes to hear that kind of thing from someone after spending only a few hours with her. I ignored the lump in my throat as well as I could. “For you, only about a minute has probably passed, so I’ll forgive you for not shaving that
mustache off yet. But for me it’s been a few days, and all kinds of things have happened.”
Lucas stroked his mustache and grinned. “So you simply … Well, that was very clever of you, granddaughter.”
“Yes, wasn’t it? But to be honest, it was my friend Lesley’s idea. So that we could be sure I’d meet you and then we wouldn’t have to waste any time.”
“And I haven’t had a moment to wonder what
to do next. I was just beginning to get over your visit and thinking about it all.” He examined me with his head to one side. “Yes, you do look different. You didn’t have that barrette in your hair earlier, and somehow you seem thinner.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“It wasn’t a compliment. You look as if you were in rather a bad way.” He came a little closer and scrutinized me critically. “Is everything
all right?” he asked gently.
“Everything’s fine,” I meant to say cheerfully, but to my horror, I burst into tears. “Everything’s fine,” I sobbed.
“Oh, dear,” said Lucas, patting me clumsily on the back. “As bad as all that?”
For several minutes, I couldn’t do anything but let the tears flow. And I’d thought I was back in control of myself! Fury at the way Gideon had behaved seemed the right
reaction—very brave and adult. And it would look much better in a film than all this crying. I’m afraid Xemerius was only too right to compare me to an indoor fountain.
“Friends!” I finally sniffed, because my grandfather had a right to an explanation. “He wants us to be friends. And for me to trust him.”
Lucas hunched his head down and frowned, looking baffled. “And that makes you cry because…?”
“Because yesterday he said he loved me!”
If possible Lucas looked even more puzzled than before. “Well, that doesn’t necessarily seem a bad way to start a friendship.”
My tears dried up as if someone had turned off the electricity powering the indoor fountain. “Grandpa! Don’t be so dim!” I cried. “First he kisses me, then I find out that it was all just tactics and manipulation, and then he
comes out with that let’s-be-friends stuff!”
“Oh. I see. What a … what a scoundrel!” Lucas still didn’t look entirely convinced. “Forgive me for asking silly questions, but I hope we’re not talking about that de Villiers boy, are we? Number Eleven, the Diamond?”
“Yes, we are,” I said. “That’s exactly who we’re talking about.”
My grandfather groaned. “Oh, really! Teenagers! As if all this weren’t
complicated enough already!” He threw me a fabric handkerchief, took my schoolbag out of my hand, and said firmly, “That’s enough crying. How much time do we have?”
“The chronograph’s set for me to travel back at ten
P.M.
your time.” Funnily enough, crying had been good for me, much better than the adult, being-furious variant. “Do you have anything to eat? I’m feeling a bit peckish.”
That made
Lucas laugh. “In that case we’d better go upstairs, little chicken, and find you something to peck at. It’s claustrophobic down here. And I’ll have to call home and say I’ll be late back.” He opened the door. “Come along, and you can tell me all about it on the way. And if anyone sees you, don’t forget that you’re my cousin Hazel from the country.”
* * *
ALMOST AN HOUR LATER,
we were sitting
in Lucas’s office, thinking so hard that the steam was practically coming out of our ears. In front of us we had piles of paper with scribbled notes, mostly consisting of dates, circles, arrows, and question marks, as well as thick leather-bound folio volumes (the
Annals of the Guardians
for several decades back) and the usual plate of biscuits. All through the ages, the Guardians seemed to have
ample stocks of those.
“Too little information to go on, too little time,” Lucas kept saying. He was prowling restlessly up and down the room, ruffling his hair. In spite of the stuff he put on it to keep it smooth, it was beginning to stick out in all directions. “What do you think I can have hidden in that chest?”
“Maybe a book containing all the information I need,” I said. We had passed
the young man on guard by the stairs without any difficulty. He had been asleep, the same as on my last visit, and the fumes of alcohol he gave off were enough to make any passerby feel drowsy too. In fact the Guardians seemed to be much less strict than I’d have expected in 1956. No one thought it odd for Lucas to be working late or for his cousin Hazel from the country to be keeping him company.
Not that there were many people left in the building at this time of the evening. Young Mr. George had obviously gone home, which was a pity. I’d have liked to see him again.
“A book—well, maybe,” said Lucas, thoughtfully munching a biscuit. He had been about to light a cigarette three times, but I’d taken it out of his hand. I didn’t want to be smelling of cigarette smoke again when I traveled
back. “The code and the coordinates make sense, I like that bit, and it sounds like me. I’ve always had a weakness for codes. Only how did Lucy and Paul know it was in the thingy … in the
Yellow Horse
book?”
“
Green Rider
, Grandpa,” I said patiently. “The book was in your library, and the piece of paper with the code was between its pages. Maybe Lucy and Paul left it there.”
“But that’s not logical.
If they disappear into the past in 1994, then why do I leave a chest walled up in my own house so many years later?” He stopped prowling and bent over the books. “This is driving me crazy! Do you know what it’s like to feel the solution is within reach? I wish travel into the future by chronograph were possible. Then you could interview me in person.”
Suddenly I had an idea, and it was such a
good one that I was tempted to pat myself spontaneously on the back. I thought of what Grandpa had told me last time we met. According to him, Lucy and Paul, getting bored with the time they spent elapsing here, had traveled farther back in the past and seen exciting things, like a performance of
Hamlet
in 1602, in Shakespeare’s own lifetime.
“I know!” I cried, doing a little dance for joy.
My grandfather frowned. “You know what exactly?” he asked, intrigued.
“Suppose you send me farther back into the past with
your
chronograph?” I said excitedly. “Then I could meet Lucy and Paul and simply ask them.”
Lucas raised his head. “And
when
would you meet them? We don’t know what time they’re hiding in.”
“But we do know when they visited you here. If I joined them then, we could all discuss
it together—”
My grandfather interrupted me. “But at the time of their visits here in 1948 and 1949, when they arrived from the years 1992 and 1993”—at the mention of each date, he tapped our notes and ran his forefinger along several lines with arrows pointing to them—“at those times, Lucy and Paul didn’t know enough either, and they told me everything that they did know then. No, if you meet
them at all it would have to be after they ran away with the chronograph.” Once again he tapped our notes. “That would make sense. Anything else would just add to the confusion.”
“Then … then I’ll travel to the year 1912, when I met them once before, at Lady Tilney’s house in Eaton Place.”
“That would be a possibility, but it doesn’t work out in terms of time.” Lucas looked gloomily at the clock
on the wall. “You weren’t even sure of the exact date, let alone the time of day. Not forgetting that we’d have to read your blood into the chronograph first, otherwise you couldn’t use it for time travel.” He ruffled his hair up again. “And finally you’d have to get from here to Belgravia on your own, and that’s probably not so simple in 1912 … oh, and we’d need a costume … no, with the best
will in the world, it can’t be done in such a short time span. We’ll have to think of something else. The solution’s on the tip of my tongue. I just need more time to think it over, and maybe a cigarette.…”
I shook my head. I wasn’t giving up so easily. I knew it was a good idea. “We could take the chronograph to just outside Lady Tilney’s house in
this
time, and then I’d travel straight back
to 1912—that would save a lot of time, wouldn’t it? And as for the costume … why are you staring at me like that?”