Sapphire Blue (The Ruby Red Trilogy) (3 page)

When exactly pistols were drawn was something I’d suppressed out of sheer fright, but at some point, Gideon had held a gun to Lucy’s head, a pistol that, strictly speaking, he ought not to have brought with him at all. (Like me when I took my mobile phone into the past, but at least you can’t shoot anyone dead with a mobile!) Then we ran for it and took shelter in the church. But all the time I’d been unable to shake off a feeling that the Lucy and Paul situation wasn’t quite as black and white as the de Villiers family liked to paint it.

“What are we going to say about Lady Tilney?” I asked.

“Hm.” Gideon rubbed his forehead wearily. “I’m not suggesting we should actually lie, but maybe, just this once, it would be a good idea to edit a few things out. You’d better leave the talking to me.”

There it was again, that familiar tone of command. “Oh, sure,” I said. “I’ll just nod and keep my mouth shut, the way a nice girl should.”

I instinctively, defiantly, crossed my arms. Why couldn’t Gideon act normal? First he kissed me (more than once, at that!), then he was back talking like a lordly Grand Master of the Guardians’ Lodge again. What was the idea?

We concentrated on looking out of our respective windows.

It was Gideon who finally broke the silence, which gave me a certain satisfaction. “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?” The way he asked, he sounded almost embarrassed.

“What?”

“It’s what my mother always used to say when I was little. If I was looking straight ahead and saying nothing, like you right at this moment.”

“You have a
mother
?” Only when I’d said it did I realize what a silly question it was! Oh, for heaven’s sake!

Gideon raised one eyebrow. “What did you expect?” he asked, amused. “You thought I was an android put together by Uncle Falk and Mr. George?”

“Well, it’s not such an outlandish idea. Do you have photos of yourself as a baby?” Trying to imagine a baby Gideon with a round, soft, plump-cheeked face and a bald head made me grin. “Where are your mum and dad, then? Do they live in London too?”

Gideon shook his head. “My father’s dead, and my mother lives in Antibes in the south of France.” For a brief moment, he pressed his lips together, and I was just thinking he’d retreat into silence when he went on. “With my little brother and her new husband, Monsieur
Do-Call-Me-Papa
Bertelin. He owns a company making platinum and copper microparts for electronic devices, and obviously the cash is rolling in. At least, he called his showy yacht the
Croesus
.”

I was really surprised. So much personal information all at once—it wasn’t a bit like Gideon. “Oh, but it must be cool going on holiday there, right?”

“Of course,” he said with derision. “They have a pool the size of three tennis courts, and the stupid yacht has gold-plated faucets.”

“Sounds better than a cottage without any heating in Peebles, anyway.” My family usually spent the summer up in Scotland. “If I were you, and I had a family in the south of France, I’d be off there like a shot every weekend. Even if they didn’t have any pool or any yacht.”

Gideon looked at me, shaking his head. “Oh, yes? And how would you manage that if you had to travel back to the past every few hours? Not so thrilling if you happen to be driving along the motorway at seventy miles an hour when it happens.”

“Oh.” Somehow this time-travel business was still too new for me to have thought out all the consequences. There were only twelve carriers of the gene—scattered over several centuries—and I couldn’t yet fully grasp that I was one of them. My cousin Charlotte was supposed to have been the time traveler, and she’d prepared herself for the part with gusto. But for reasons that no one could understand, my mother had faked the date of my birth, and now we were in a real mess. Just like Gideon, I had the choice between controlled time travel with the aid of the chronograph or traveling back to the past unexpectedly at any time and from anywhere. And from my own recent experience, I knew that was not much fun.

“Of course you’d have to take the chronograph with you, so that you could always elapse to a safe year now and then,” I said, thinking aloud.

Gideon uttered a joyless snort. “Yes, that would make nice relaxed travel possible, and I could get to know all sorts of historic places at the same time. But apart from the fact that I’d never be allowed to go around the country with the chronograph in my backpack, what would
you
do without it while I was away?” He was looking past me and out of the window. “Thanks to Lucy and Paul, there’s only that one chronograph, remember?” His voice was heated again, as always when Lucy and Paul were mentioned.

I shrugged my shoulders and looked out of my own window. The taxi was making for Piccadilly at a snail’s pace. Rush hour in the city, great. It would probably have been quicker for us to walk.

“You obviously don’t quite realize that you won’t have many chances to leave these islands in the future, Gwyneth.” There was a touch of bitterness in Gideon’s voice. “Or even this city. Your family ought to have shown you the whole wide world, not just Scotland. It’s too late now. You’ll have to accept the fact that the only way you can see all the places you dream of is on Google Earth.”

The taxi driver reached for a well-worn paperback, leaned back in his seat and began to read, unmoved.

“But … but you’ve been to Belgium and Paris,” I said. “To travel back to the past from there and get some of what’s-his-name’s blood, and put it into the—”

“Yes, sure,” he interrupted me. “Along with my uncle, three Guardians, and a
costume designer
. What a fun trip! Apart from the fact that Belgium is such a wildly exotic country. Don’t we all just dream of spending three days in
Belgium
sometime?”

Intimidated by his sudden bitterness, I asked quietly, “Where would you like to go, then, if you could choose?”

“You mean if I wasn’t cursed with this time-travel gene? Oh, my God—I wouldn’t know where to begin. Chile, Brazil, Peru. Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Canada, Alaska, Vietnam, Nepal, Australia, New Zealand…” He grinned faintly. “Well, just about everywhere except the moon. But it’s no use thinking about the things you can never do. We just have to reconcile ourselves to our rather boring lives without the chance to travel.”

“Except for time travel.” I went red, because he had said “our lives,” and somehow that sounded so … so intimate.

“At least that’s something like fair compensation for all this control and being shut up here,” said Gideon. “If it wasn’t for the time travel, I’d have died of boredom long ago. Paradoxical but true.”

“Watching an exciting film now and then would be enough of a kick for me. Honest.”

Wistfully, I watched a cyclist weaving his way through the traffic jam. I wanted to get home! The cars ahead of us weren’t moving an inch, which seemed to be fine by our cabby, who was deep in his book.

“If your family lives in the south of France, then where do
you
live?” I asked Gideon.

“In an apartment in Chelsea now, but I’m hardly there at all except to shower and sleep. If that.” He sighed. Over the last three days, he’d obviously had as little sleep as me. Maybe even less. “Before I got my own place, I lived with Uncle Falk in Greenwich since I was eleven. When my mother met Monsieur Po-Face and wanted to leave this country, of course the Guardians objected. After all, there were only a few years to go until my initiation journey, and I still had a lot to learn.”

“And your mother left you alone?” My mum could never have brought herself to do such a thing, I was sure of that.

Gideon shrugged his shoulders. “I like my uncle. He’s okay when he’s not putting on airs as Grand Master of the Lodge. Anyway, I’d a thousand times sooner be with him than my so-called stepfather.”

“But…” I hardly dared to ask, so I just whispered it. “But don’t you miss her?”

Another shrug of the shoulders. “Until I was fifteen, when I could still go away safely, I always spent the holidays in France with her. And my mother comes to London at least twice a year, officially to see me, but to spend Monsieur Bertelin’s money is more like it. She has a weakness for clothes and shoes and antique jewelry. And four-star macrobiotic restaurants.”

The woman sounded like a real cozy, picture-book mum. “What about your brother?”

“Raphael? He’s a real little Frenchman now. Calls Po-Face
Papa
and is going to inherit the platinum-parts empire someday. Although right now it looks as if he won’t even pass his final school exams, lazy kid. He’d rather hang out with girls than study.” Gideon put an arm on the back of the seat behind me, and my breathing frequency instantly stepped up. “Why are you looking so shocked? Not feeling sorry for me or anything, are you?”

“A bit,” I said honestly, thinking of an eleven-year-old boy left behind on his own in England. With mystery mongers who made him take fencing lessons and learn to play the violin. And
polo
! “Falk isn’t even your real uncle, just a distant relation.”

There was an angry hoot behind us. The taxi driver looked up only briefly to move the car on a yard or so, without taking much of his attention away from his book. I just hoped he wasn’t in the middle of a really exciting chapter.

Gideon seemed to take no notice of him. “Falk’s always been like a father to me,” he said. He looked sideways at me with a wry smile. “Really, you don’t have to look at me as if I were David Copperfield.”

What was that all about? Why would I think he was David Copperfield?

Gideon groaned. “I mean the character out of the Dickens novel, not the magician. Don’t you ever read a book?”

There he went again, the old supercilious Gideon. My head had been reeling with all those friendly confidences. Oddly enough, I was almost relieved to have my obnoxious traveling companion back. I looked as haughty as possible and moved slightly away from him. “To be honest, I prefer modern literature.”

“You do?” Gideon’s eyes were bright with amusement. “Like what, for example?”

He wasn’t to know that my cousin Charlotte had been regularly asking me the same question for years, and just as arrogantly. In fact I read quite a lot of books, and I’m always ready to talk about them, but as Charlotte always dismissed with contempt whatever I was reading as “undemanding” or “stupid girly stuff,” the time came when I’d had enough, and once and for all, I spoilt her fun. Sometimes you have to turn people’s own weapons against them. The trick of it is not to show any hesitation at all as you speak, and to weave in the name of at least one genuine, well-known, bestselling author, preferably if you’ve really read that author’s book. Oh, and in addition, the more exotic and outlandish the names, the better.

I raised my chin and looked Gideon right in the eye. “Well, for instance I like George Matussek, Wally Lamb, Pyotr Selvyeniki, Liisa Tikaanen—in fact, I think Finnish writers are great, they have their own special brand of humor—and then I read everything by Jack August Merrywether, although I was a little disappointed by his last book. I like Helen Marundi, of course, Tahuro Yashamoto, Lawrence Delaney, and then there’s Grimphood, Tcherkovsky, Maland, Pitt.…”

Gideon was looking totally taken aback.

I rolled my eyes. “
Rudolf
Pitt, of course, not Brad.”

The corners of his mouth were twitching slightly.

“Although I have to say I really didn’t much care for
Amethyst Snow
,” I quickly went on. “Too many high-flown metaphors, don’t you agree? All the time I was reading it, I kept thinking someone must have ghosted it for him.”

“
Amethyst Snow
?” repeated Gideon, and now he was definitely smiling. “Yes, right, I thought it was terribly pompous too. Although I considered
The Amber Avalanche
remarkably good.”

I couldn’t help it—I had to smile back. “Yes, he definitely deserved the Austrian State Prize for Literature for
The Amber Avalanche
. What do you think of Takoshi Mahuro?”

“His early work is okay, but I get rather tired of the way he keeps going back to his childhood traumas,” said Gideon. “When it comes to Japanese writers, I prefer Yamamoto Kawasaki or Haruki Murakami.”

I was giggling helplessly now. “But Murakami is real!”

“I know,” said Gideon. “Charlotte gave me one of his books. Next time we’re discussing literature, I’ll recommend her to read
Amethyst Snow
, by … what was his name again?”

“Rudolf Pitt.” So Charlotte had given him a book? How—er, how nice of her. Fancy thinking of that. And what else did they do together, besides discuss literature? My fit of the giggles had evaporated, just like that. How could I simply sit here talking away to Gideon as if nothing had happened between us? There were a few basic points we ought to have cleared up first. I stared at him and took a deep breath, without knowing exactly what I wanted to ask him.

Why did you kiss me?

“Here we are,” said Gideon.

Put off my stroke, I looked out of the window. Sure enough, at some point during our verbal fencing match, the taxi driver had obviously put his book down and gone on with the journey, and now he was about to turn into Crown Office Row in the Temple district, where the secret society of the Guardians had its headquarters. A little later, he was parking the car in one of the reserved slots next to a gleaming Bentley.

“Sure we’re allowed to stop here, are you?”

“It’ll be okay,” Gideon assured him, and got out. “No, Gwyneth, you stay in the taxi while I get the money,” he said as I started climbing out after him. “And don’t forget, whatever they ask us, leave me to do the talking. I’ll be right back.”

“The meter’s still running,” said the taxi driver morosely.

He and I watched Gideon disappear among the venerable buildings of the Temple, and only now did I realize that I’d been left behind as a pledge that the driver would get his fare.

“Are you from the theater?” he asked.

“What?” What was that shadow fluttering overhead?

“I only mean because of the funny costumes.”