Sapphire Blue (The Ruby Red Trilogy) (31 page)

“Hm,” I said. All I remembered, vaguely, was Mum taking all four hundred thousand hairpins out of my hair, and how I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. But I wasn’t going to tell him that. After all, he’d gone off to have a good time with Charlotte, Raphael, and the spaghetti.

Gideon stopped so suddenly that I collided with him and promptly forgot to breathe.

He turned to face me. “Listen,” he murmured. “I didn’t want to say this yesterday, because I thought you were too drunk, but now that you’re sober again and as prickly as ever…” His fingers carefully stroked my forehead, and I was about to hyperventilate. Instead of going on, he kissed me. I had closed my eyes before his lips touched mine. The kiss was more intoxicating than yesterday evening’s punch. It left me weak at the knees, and with a thousand butterflies in my stomach.

When Gideon let go of me again, he seemed to have forgotten what he wanted to say. He propped one arm on the wall beside my head and looked at me seriously. “We can’t go on like this.”

I tried to get my breath under control.

“Gwen…”

There were footsteps in the corridor behind us. Gideon quickly withdrew his arm and turned around. A moment later Mr. George was standing in front of us. “So there you are. We’ve been waiting for you. Why isn’t Gwyneth blindfolded?”

“I quite forgot. You do it, please,” said Gideon, giving Mr. George the black scarf. “I’ll … I’ll go on ahead.”

Mr. George sighed as Gideon walked off. Then he looked at me and sighed again. “I thought I’d warned you, Gwyneth,” he said as he tied the cloth in front of my eyes. “You ought to be careful where your emotions are concerned.”

“Hm,” I said, touching my treacherously burning cheeks. “Then you shouldn’t let me spend so much time with him.…”

Typical Guardians’ logic again! If they’d wanted me not to fall in love with Gideon, they should have made sure he was an unattractive idiot with a silly quiff of hair, grubby fingernails, and a speech impediment. And they could have left out the violin stuff.

Mr. George led me through the darkness. “Maybe it’s just too long ago that I was sixteen years old. But I do remember how easily one is impressed at your age.”

“Mr. George, have you told anyone that I can see ghosts?”

“No,” said Mr. George. “That’s to say, I did try, but no one would listen to me. You see, the Guardians are scientists and mystics, but they won’t meddle with parapsychology. Careful, there’s a step here.”

“Lesley—she’s my best friend, but you probably know that—well, Lesley thinks that my … my ability is the magic of the raven.”

Mr. George said nothing for a while. Then he replied, “Yes. I think so, too.”

“And how exactly is the magic of the raven supposed to help me?”

“My dear child, if only I could tell you. I wish you’d rely more on sound human reason, but…”

“But I’m a hopeless case, you were going to say?” I couldn’t help laughing. “You’re probably right.”

Gideon was waiting for us in the chronograph room, with Falk de Villiers, who paid me a rather absentminded compliment on my dress as he set the little cogwheels of the chronograph moving.

“Right, Gwyneth, today your conversation with Count Saint-Germain takes place. It’s afternoon, the day before the soirée.”

“I know,” I said, with a surreptitious glance at Gideon.

“It’s not a particularly arduous task,” said Falk. “Gideon will take you up to the count’s rooms and collect you again.”

That had to mean I was to be left alone with the count. I began to feel anxious at once.

“Don’t worry. You were getting on so well yesterday, remember?” Gideon put his finger into the chronograph and smiled at me. “Ready?”

“Ready when you are,” I said softly, while the room filled with white light and Gideon disappeared before my eyes.

I stepped forward and gave Falk my hand.

“Today’s password is
qui nescit dissimulare nescit regnare
,” said Falk, as he pressed the needle into my finger. The ruby lit up, and everything went around in a swirl of red.

When I landed, I had forgotten the password again.

“Everything’s all right,” said Gideon’s voice right beside me.

“Why is it so dark here? The count’s expecting us. He might have been kind enough to light us a candle.”

“Yes, but he doesn’t know exactly where we land,” said Gideon.

“Why not?”

I couldn’t see him, but I felt that he was shrugging his shoulders. “He’s never asked, and I have a vague feeling he wouldn’t be very happy to think of us using his beloved alchemical laboratory as a runway for taking off and landing. Go carefully—this place is full of fragile objects.”

We groped our way to the door. Out in the corridor, Gideon lit a torch and took it out of its holder. It cast eerie, moving shadows on the wall, and I instinctively moved a step closer to Gideon. “What was that wretched password again? Just in case anyone hits you on the head.”

“
Qui nescit dissimulare nescit regnare.
”

“Why Nessie swims Loch Ness in the rain?”

He laughed and put the torch back in its holder.

“What are you doing?”

“I only wanted to … I mean, just now, when Mr. George interrupted us, there was something very important I wanted to say to you.”

“Is it about what I told you in the church yesterday? I mean, I can understand that you may think me crazy because I see these beings, but a psychiatrist wouldn’t make any difference.”

Gideon frowned. “Just keep quiet for a moment, would you? I have to pluck up all my courage to make you a declaration of love.… I’ve had absolutely no practice in this kind of thing.”

“What?”

“Gwyneth,” he said, perfectly seriously, “I’ve fallen in love with you.”

My stomach muscles contracted as if I’d had a shock. But it was joy. “
Really?
”

“Yes,
really
!” In the light of the torch I saw Gideon smile. “I do realize we’ve known each other for less than a week, and at first I thought you were rather … childish, and I probably behaved badly to you. But you’re terribly complicated, I never know what you’ll do next, and in some ways you really are terrifyingly … er … naive. Sometimes I just want to shake you.”

“Okay, I can see you were right about having no practice in making declarations of love,” I agreed.

“But then you’re so amusing, and clever, and amazingly sweet,” Gideon went on, as if he hadn’t heard me. “And the worst of it is, you only have to be in the same room and I need to touch you and kiss you.…”

“Yes, that’s really too bad,” I whispered, and my heart turned over as Gideon took the hatpin out of my hair, tossed the feathered monstrosity into the air to fall on the floor, drew me close, and kissed me. About three minutes later, I was leaning against the wall, totally breathless, making an effort to stay upright.

“Hey, Gwyneth, try breathing in and out in the normal way,” said Gideon, amused.

I gave him a little push. “Stop that! I can’t believe how conceited you are!”

“Sorry. It’s just such a … a heady feeling to think you’d forget to breathe on my account.” He took the torch out of the holder again. “Come on. I’m sure the count is waiting for us.”

Only when we turned into the next corridor did I remember my hat, but I didn’t feel like going back for it.

“It’s funny, but I was just thinking I wouldn’t mind a repeat of that boring evening when we elapsed to 1953,” said Gideon. “Just you and me and Cousin Sofa.”

Our footsteps echoed through the long corridors, and I gradually emerged from my rose-tinted sense of walking on air, reminding myself where we were. Or rather,
when
we were. “If I took the torch, you could draw your sword, just to be on the safe side,” I suggested. “You never know. What year was it when you got hit on the head?” (This was one of the many questions that Lesley had written down for me to drop into the conversation when the state of my hormones allowed it.)

“I’ve just noticed that I made you a declaration of love, but you didn’t make me one,” said Gideon.

“Didn’t I?”

“Not in words, at least, and I’m not sure if anything else counts. Shh!”

I had squealed, because right ahead of us a fat, dark brown rat was crossing our path at its leisure, looking not in the least afraid of us. Its eyes glowed red in the torchlight. “Have we been immunized against the plague?” I asked, and as we walked on, I clutched Gideon’s hand more tightly.

*   *   *

THE ROOM
on the first floor chosen by Count Saint-Germain as his office in the Temple was small and looked decidedly unassuming for the Grand Master of the Guardians’ Lodge, even if he didn’t spend much time in London. One wall was entirely covered by shelves of leather-bound books reaching to the ceiling, and in front of those stood a desk with two armchairs upholstered in the same fabric used for the curtains. There was no other furniture. Outside, the September sun was shining, and there was no fire in the hearth. Even without one, the room was warm enough. The window looked out on the small inner courtyard with the fountain that was still there in our own time. Both the window seat and the desk were covered with papers, quill pens, candles for melting sealing wax, and books, some of them stacked dangerously high. If the piles toppled, they would knock over the inkwells standing so confidently amidst the confusion. It was a comfortable little room, and there wasn’t a soul in it, yet when I entered it, for some reason the fine hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

A morose secretary in a white Mozart-style wig had brought me here, and with the words “I am sure the count won’t keep you waiting long,” he had closed the door behind me. I hadn’t liked being separated from Gideon, but after handing me over to the grumpy secretary, he had gone off through the nearest door looking cheerful and like someone who knew his way around here very well.

I went over to the window and looked out into the quiet inner courtyard. It all seemed very peaceful, but I couldn’t shake off the uncomfortable feeling that I wasn’t alone. Maybe, I thought, someone was watching me through the wall behind the books. Or the mirror over the mantelpiece was a window on the other side, like police detectives have in their interrogation rooms.

For a while, I just stood there feeling uncomfortable, but then I thought if I just stood around looking unnaturally awkward, the secret observer might notice that I felt I was being watched. So I took the top book off one of the piles on the wide window seat and opened it. Marcellus,
De Medicamentis.
Aha. Marcellus—whoever he had been—had obviously discovered some unusual medical treatments, and they’d been collected in this little book. I found a nice passage telling you how to cure liver disease. All you had to do was catch a green lizard, remove its liver, tie the liver to a red cloth or a naturally black rag (what did he mean, naturally black?), and hang the rag or the cloth on the right-hand side of the sick person. Then if you let the lizard run away, saying
ecce dimitto te vivam
and some other Latin words like that, the invalid would be cured. The only question, I thought, was whether the lizard
could
run away once you’d removed its liver. I closed the book again. This Marcellus must have lost his marbles. The book next to it on top of the pile was bound in dark brown leather, and very fat and heavy, so I let it lie where it was as I leafed through it. Gold lettering on the cover told me that it was
Of All Manner of Demons, and How They May Render Assistance to Both the Magician and the Common Man.
Although I wasn’t a magician, or a “common man” either, I felt curious, and opened it somewhere in the middle. The picture of an ugly dog looked at me out of the page, with a caption underneath saying that this was Jestan, a demon of the Hindu Kush, who brought disease, death, and war. I disliked Jestan at sight, so I went on leafing through the book. A strange distorted face with horny growths on its skull (rather like one of the Klingons in the Star Trek films), stared at me from the next page, and as I was staring back, repelled, the Klingon closed its eyes, rose off the paper like smoke from a chimney, and swiftly solidified into a complete figure entirely clad in red. The figure towered up and glared down at me with glowing eyes. “Who dares to summon the great and mighty Berith?” it called.

Naturally I felt a little queasy, but experience had taught me that while ghosts might look dangerous and utter nasty threats, as a rule, they couldn’t touch and move anything, not even a breath of air. And I very much hoped that this Berith was nothing but a ghost, a copy of the real demon trapped between the covers of this book, and the real demon, as it was also to be hoped, wasn’t around anymore.

So I said politely, but unimpressed, “No one summoned you.”

“Berith, demon of lies, Grand Duke of Hell,” Berith introduced himself in a ringing voice. “Otherwise known as Bolfri.”

“Yes, that’s what it says here,” I agreed, looking at the book again. “You also improve the voices of singers.” A nice gift, that one. However, once you’d summoned him with an invocation (which looked tricky, since it was obviously written in ancient Babylonian), if you wanted him to improve your voice, you had to make him assorted sacrifices, including aborted monstrosities, preferably still alive. And that was nothing compared with what you had to do to get him to turn other metals into gold, which he could also do. As a result, the Sichemites—whoever they were—had worshipped Berith. Until Jacob and his sons came along and “put all the men of Sichem to death by the sword, torturing them most horribly.” So far, so good.

“Berith commands twenty-six legions,” he announced grandly.

But he hadn’t done anything to me so far, and I felt even braver. “I think people who talk about themselves in the third person are peculiar,” I said, and turned the page. Just as I’d hoped, Berith disappeared back into the book like smoke blown away by the wind. I breathed a sigh of relief.

“An interesting choice of reading matter,” said a quiet voice behind me. I spun around. Count Saint-Germain, unnoticed, had entered the room. He was leaning on a stick with an elaborately carved handle, his tall, lean figure was as impressive as ever, and his dark eyes were bright and watchful.