Sapphire Blue

  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.”

  “No. The museum.” There were strange scratching noises on the roof of the car. As if a bird had come down on it. A large bird. “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?” asked the taxi driver.

  “I thought I heard a crow or something land on the car,” I said hopefully. But of course it wasn’t a crow dangling head down from the car roof and looking in at the window. It was the little gargoyle from Belgravia. When he saw my horrified expression, his catlike face twisted into a triumphant smile, and he spewed a torrent of water over the windshield.

  True love knows no constraints, no locks or bars.

  Past every obstacle it makes its way.

  It spreads its wings to soar toward the stars,

  No earthly power will make it stop or stay.

  MATTHIAS CLAUDIUS

  TWO

  “SURPRISE, SURPRISE!” cried the little gargoyle. He’d been talking nonstop ever since I got out of the taxi. “You don’t get to shake me off so easily!”

  “Yes, okay, I know. Listen…” I looked nervously back at the taxi. I’d told the driver I urgently needed fresh air because I didn’t feel well, and now he was glaring suspiciously our way, wondering why I was talking to a blank wall. There was still no sign of Gideon.

  “And I can fly too!” To prove it, the gargoyle spread his wings. “I can fly like a bat. Faster than any taxi.”

  “Do please listen. Just because I can see you doesn’t mean that—”

  “See me and hear me!” the gargoyle interrupted. “Do you know how rare that is? The last person who could see and hear me was Madame Tussaud, and I’m sorry to say she didn’t appreciate my company. She usually just sprinkled me with holy water and started praying. Poor dear, she was rather sensitive.” He rolled his eyes. “Well, you can understand why, after seeing all those heads sliced off by the guillotine.…” He spouted another jet of water. It landed right in front of my feet.

  “Stop that!”

  “Sorry, just excitement! Harking back to when I was a gutter carrying rainwater away.”

  My chances of shaking him off again were slim, but at least it was worth a try. I’d adopt a friendly tone. So I bent down to him until our eyes were level. “I’m sure you’re a really nice guy, but you can’t possibly stick around here with me! My life is complicated enough already, and to tell you the truth, the ghosts I already know are as much as I can take. So would you please go away again?”

  “I am not a ghost,” said the gargoyle, offended. “I’m a demon. Or what’s left of a demon.”

  “What’s the difference?” I asked desperately. “I can’t do with any more ghosts or demons right now, understand? You’ll just have to go back to your church.”

  “What’s the difference? Oh, really! Ghosts are only reflections of dead people who for some reason or other don’t want to leave this world. But I was a demon when I was alive. You can’t just lump me in with ordinary ghosts. Anyway, it’s not my church. I simply like to hang out there.”

  The taxi driver was staring at me with his mouth wide open. Presumably he could hear every word through the car window—every word that I said.

  I rubbed my forehead. “I couldn’t care less about tha
t. You can’t stay here with me, anyway.”

  “What are you afraid of?” The gargoyle came closer, putting his head on one side in a confidential way. “These days no one gets burnt as a witch just for seeing and knowing a bit more than ordinary people.”

  “But these days people who talk to ghosts—er, and demons—get sent to mental hospitals,” I said. “Can’t you understand that—” I broke off. There was no point in this. Taking a friendly line with him wasn’t going to get me anywhere. So I frowned and said as brusquely as possible, “I may be able to see you, that’s just my bad luck, but it doesn’t mean you have any claim on my company.”

  The gargoyle didn’t seem in the least impressed. “But you have a claim on mine, you lucky—”

  “Let me make this perfectly clear: you’re a nuisance! So please go away!” I hissed.

  “Won’t! And you’d be sorry later. Here comes your boyfriend, by the way. Kissy kissy!” And he pursed his lips and made loud kissing noises.

  “Oh, shut up.” I saw Gideon striding around the corner. “And go away.” I said that last bit without moving my lips, like a ventriloquist. But of course the gargoyle still wasn’t impressed.

  “No need to take that tone, young lady!” he said, sounding satisfied. “Don’t forget that when you shout the echo comes back the same.”

  Gideon wasn’t alone. I saw the stout figure of Mr. George puffing along after him. He had to run to keep up. But even from a distance, I could see him beaming at me.

  I straightened up and smoothed down my dress.

  “Gwyneth, thank God!” said Mr. George as he mopped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. “Everything all right, my dear?”

  “Fatso there is right out of breath,” said the gargoyle.

  “Fine, thanks, Mr. George. We just had a few … er, problems…”

  Gideon, who was giving the taxi driver several banknotes, cast me a warning glance across the car roof.

  “… with timing,” I murmured, watching the taxi driver turn out into the street, shaking his head, and drive away.

  “Yes, Gideon’s told me there were complications. That’s extraordinary. There’s a loophole in the system somewhere. We’ll have to analyze it thoroughly, and maybe do some rethinking. But what really matters is that nothing happened to you two.” Mr. George offered me his arm, which looked a little odd because I was a few inches taller than him. “Come along, my dear. There are things we have to do.”

  “I’d really like to get home as soon as possible,” I said. The gargoyle shinned up a drainpipe and made his way along the gutter toward us, hand over hand, singing “Friends Will Be Friends” at the top of his voice.

  “Yes, of course you would,” said Mr. George. “But you’ve only spent three hours in the past today. To be on the safe side until tomorrow afternoon, you’ll have to elapse for another couple of hours now. Don’t worry, it won’t be any trouble. A nice comfortable room in the cellars where you can do your homework.”

  “But—my mum is sure to be waiting for me and worrying!” What was more, this was Wednesday, and Wednesday was our day for roast chicken and french fries. Not to mention the fact that a bathtub and my bed were waiting for me at home!

  And pestering me with homework too, in a situation like this, was really too much! Someone ought just to write the school a note. Since Gwyneth is away on important time-travel missions these days, she must be excused homework in future.

  The gargoyle was still warbling away on top of the roof, and I had to make a great effort not to put him right. Thanks to SingStar and karaoke afternoons at my friend Lesley’s place, I knew the lyrics to all of Queen’s greatest hits, and I knew for a fact that there were no gherkins in that song.

  “Two hours will be enough,” said Gideon, once again taking such long strides that Mr. George and I could hardly keep up. “Then she can go home and have a good sleep.”

  I hated it when he talked about me in the third person in front of me. “Yes, and she’ll be glad of that,” I said, “because she really is very tired.”

  “We’ll call your mother and explain that you’ll be brought home by ten at the latest,” said Mr. George.

  By ten? So long, roast chicken, it’s been good to know you. I’d bet anything my greedy little brother would have guzzled up mine by then.

  “When you’re through with life and all hope is lost,” sang the gargoyle, coming down the brick wall half-flying, half-climbing, to land neatly on the pavement beside me.

  “We’ll say you still have lessons,” said Mr. George, more to himself than to me. “Maybe you’d better not mention your trip to the year 1912. She thought you’d been sent to elapse in 1956.”

  We’d reached the headquarters of the Guardians. Time travel had been controlled from here for centuries. The de Villiers family was apparently directly descended from Count Saint-Germain, one of the most famous time travelers. We Montroses were the female line, which as the de Villiers men saw it, meant that we didn’t really matter.

  It was Count Saint-Germain who had discovered how to control time travel by using the chronograph, and he had also given the crazy order for all twelve time travelers to be read into the wretched thing.

  By now the only travelers missing were Lucy, Paul, Lady Tilney, and some other female, a court lady whose name I could never remember. We still had to fix it for those four to give a few drops of their blood.

  And the ultimate question was, What exactly was going to happen when all twelve time travelers really had been read into the chronograph, and the Circle of Twelve was closed? No one seemed to know for certain. As for the Guardians, they were like a lot of lemmings where the count was concerned. Blind devotion was a mild description of their attitude.

  My own throat tightened up at the mere thought of Saint-Germain, because my only meeting with him in the past had been anything but pleasant.

  Mr. George was puffing and blowing as he went up the steps to the house ahead of me. His small, round form always had something comforting about it. At least, he was just about the only one of the whole bunch I trusted an inch. Apart from Gideon—although, no, you couldn’t actually say I trusted Gideon.

  Outside, the Lodge building looked just like the other buildings in the narrow streets around Temple Church, most of them lawyers’ chambers or offices occupied by professors of law. But I knew that the place was much bigger and a great deal grander than it seemed from the street, and there was a huge amount of space in it, particularly below ground level.

  Gideon held me back just as we reached the door and hissed into my ear, “I said you were terribly scared, so look a bit upset if you want to get home early this evening.”

  “I thought I was looking upset already,” I murmured.

  “They’re waiting for you in the Dragon Hall,” panted Mr. George at the top of the steps. “You’d better go straight in, and I’ll find Mrs. Jenkins and get her to bring you something to eat. You must be hungry by now. Anything special you’d like?”

  Before I could tell him, Gideon had taken my arm and was leading me on. “Lots of everything, please!” I called back to Mr. George over my shoulder, before Gideon hauled me through a doorway and into a wide corridor. I was having difficulty not stumbling over the hem of my ankle-length skirt.

  The gargoyle skipped nimbly along beside us. “I don’t think your boyfriend has very good manners,” he remarked. “This is more the way you’d drag a goat to market.”

  “Slow down a bit, can’t you?” I asked Gideon.

  “Look, the sooner we get this over with, the sooner you can go home.” Was there a touch of concern in his voice, or did he simply want to get rid of me?

  “Yes, but … maybe I’d like to be in on this whole meeting too—did you ever think of that? I have a lot of questions, and I’m sick and tired of no one ever giving me any answers.”

  Gideon slackened his pace slightly. “No one would give you answers today anyway. All they’ll want to know is how Lucy and Paul came to be lyi
ng in wait for us there. And I’m afraid you’re still our prime suspect.”

  That our cut me to the heart. I resented it.

  “But I’m the only one who doesn’t know anything about all this!”

  Gideon sighed. “I’ve already tried to explain. Now you may be totally ignorant and … and innocent, but no one knows what you may do in the future. Don’t forget, you can travel to the past yourself, and that way you could tell them about our visit.” He stopped short. “Well—you would be able to tell them.”

  I rolled my eyes. “So would you! Anyway, why does it have to be one of us? Couldn’t Margaret Tilney herself have left a message behind in the past? Or the Guardians? They could give one of the time travelers a letter to take from any time to any other time—”

  “Eh?” asked the gargoyle. “Can you explain what you’re talking about? I can’t make head or tail of it.”

  “Of course there are various possible explanations,” said Gideon, definitely slowing his pace now. “But I had a feeling today that Lucy and Paul somehow or other … let’s say impressed you.” He stopped, let go of my arm, and looked at me seriously. “You could have talked to them, you could have listened to their lies, maybe you’d even have given them your blood for the stolen chronograph voluntarily if I hadn’t been there.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” I said. “But I really would have liked to hear what they wanted to say to us. They didn’t seem all that evil to me.”

  Gideon nodded. “You see, that’s exactly what I mean. Gwyneth, those two are out to destroy a secret that’s been safely guarded for hundreds of years. They want something that isn’t theirs. And for that they need our blood. I don’t think they’d shrink from anything to lay hands on it.” He pushed a curly strand of brown hair back from his forehead, and I instinctively held my breath.

  Oh, God, he looked terrific! Those green eyes, the curve of his lips, the pale skin—everything about him was just perfect. And he smelled so good that for a split second I toyed with the idea of simply leaning my head against his chest. Of course I didn’t.