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“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” said Aunt Maddy, sitting down on the edge of my bed. Xemerius was only just in time to roll out of her way. “What are we going to do now? I’m sure they’ll come for you when they’ve opened the chest, and they won’t be gentle. ” She fished her bag of sherbet lemons out of her pocket and put five in her mouth at once. “I can’t bear it. ”
“Take it easy, Aunt Maddy!” I ran the fingers of both hands through my hair and grinned at her. “When they get inside the chest, they’ll find my school atlas and the Collected Works of Jane Austen that you gave me for Christmas. ”
“Oh. ” Aunt Maddy rubbed her nose and heaved a sigh of relief. “I thought it would be something like that, of course,” she said, sucking sherbet lemons vigorously. “Then where…?”
“In a safe place, I hope. ” Sighing deeply myself, I swung my legs over the edge of the bed. “But in case they do happen to come back again—with a warrant to search the house or something—maybe I’d better go and shower. By the way, thanks very much for your advice yesterday. So all the rooms up here were empty in 1993, were they? I landed right in Aunt Glenda and ex-Uncle Charlie’s bedroom!”
“Oops,” said Aunt Maddy, almost choking on a sherbet lemon in alarm.
* * *
I DIDN’T SEE Charlotte and my grandmother anymore that morning. The phone rang on the lower floors a couple of times, and once it rang up on our floor, but it was only Mum wanting to know how I was.
Later in the day, Aunt Maddy’s friend Mrs. Purpleplum came to see her, and I heard the pair of them giggling like two little girls. Otherwise all was quiet. Before I was collected and driven to the Temple at midday, Xemerius and I had been able to read some of Anna Karenina, or rather the part of it that Tolstoy hadn’t written. Pages 300 to 500 were mostly full of texts copied from the Chronicles and Annals of the Guardians. Lucas had written These are only the interesting parts, dear granddaughter, but to be honest, I didn’t think any of it very interesting at first. “The General Laws of Time Travel,” written by Count Saint-Germain himself, was too much of a strain on my brain from the first sentence. Although, in the present, the past has already happened, one must take the greatest care not to allow the past to endanger the present by making it the present.
“Do you understand that?” I asked Xemerius. “On the one hand, everything has already happened anyway, so it’s going to happen the way it did happen; on the other hand, you mustn’t risk infecting anyone with a flu virus. Or what does it mean?”
Xemerius shook his head. “Let’s just skip that bit, okay?”
But even the essay by a certain Dr. M. Giordano (surely that couldn’t be a coincidence?) entitled “Count Saint-Germain—Time Traveler and Visionary—Analysis of the Sources from Records of the Inquisition and Letters,” published in a journal of historical research in 1992, began with a sentence that took up eight lines and looked like going on forever, which didn’t exactly make you want to read more.
Xemerius seemed to feel the same. “Boring, boring, boring!” he complained, and I skipped to the place where Lucas had collected all the rhymes and verses. I knew some of them already, but those new to me were confused and full of symbolism, and you could interpret them as meaning all sorts of things, depending how you looked at them, just like Aunt Maddy’s visions. The words blood and ever kept coming up, often rhyming with flood and never.
“Well, they’re not by Shakespeare, anyway,” Xemerius agreed with me. “Sounds like a couple of drunks got together to think up some rhymes to sound as cryptic as possible. Hey, folks, let’s think what rhymes with fox of jade. Marmalade, wade, made? No, let’s try masquerade, sounds—hic!—much more mysterious. ”
I couldn’t help laughing. Those verses really were the end! But I knew Lesley would fall on them gleefully. She loved anything cryptic, and she was firmly convinced that reading Anna Karenina would get us a whole lot farther.
“Today is the beginning of a new era!” she had announced dramatically early that morning, waving the book in the air. “Knowledge is power!” She stopped short for a moment. “I heard that in some film, but I can’t remember straight off which it was. Never mind, now we can finally get to the bottom of the mystery. ”
Maybe she was right. But later, when I was sitting on the green sofa in the year 1953, I didn’t feel in the least powerful or knowledgeable, I just felt terribly alone. How I wished Lesley could be with me. Or at least Xemerius.
Leafing aimlessly through Lucas’s special edition of the book, I stumbled on the passage that Mr. Marley had mentioned. In October 1782, there was indeed an entry in the Annals which ran as follows: Before leaving, the count impressed it upon us again that, in future, points of contact between the power of the mysteries and the female time travelers, in particular the last-born, the Ruby, must be kept as slight as possible and also that we must never underestimate the destructive force of feminine curiosity. Hm, yes. I could well believe the count had said that. In fact, I could almost hear his tone of voice. “Destructive force of feminine curiosity”—huh!
However, that didn’t help me much over the ball, which unfortunately was only postponed, not canceled, quite apart from the fact that all this garbage from the Guardians didn’t make me exactly keen to face the count again.
With a certain uneasiness, I turned to the study of the Golden Rules. There was a lot about honor and conscience here, and the duty of not doing anything in the past that could change the future. I’d probably broken Rule Four—no objects must be transported from one period to another—on every single one of my journeys through time. And the same with Rule Five, about never influencing the fate of people in the past. I put the book on my lap and thoughtfully chewed my lower lip. Maybe Charlotte was right, and I was hopelessly addicted to breaking rules on principle. Were the Guardians searching my room at this very moment? Or even the whole house—with tracker dogs and metal detectors? A little while ago, anyway, it hadn’t seemed as if our little deception had been enough to shake Charlotte’s credibility.
Although when Mr. Marley came to collect me from the house, he did seem slightly shaken. He could hardly look me in the eye, even though he was trying to act as if nothing had happened.
“Probably ashamed of himself,” suggested Xemerius. “I’d love to have seen his silly face when he opened the chest. I hope he got such a fright that he dropped the crowbar on his foot. ”
It certainly must have been an embarrassing moment for Mr. Marley when he found my books in the chest. And for Charlotte, of course. But she certainly wasn’t about to give up in a hurry.
Mr. Marley was now apparently trying to make light conversation, probably to hide his guilt feelings as he held a black umbrella over me on the way from the car to the headquarters of the Lodge. “Very cool today, don’t you think?” he said briskly.
That was really too much for me, so I answered him back just as briskly. “Yes, and when do I get my chest back?”
He couldn’t think of any answer to that; he just went red as a lobster again.
“Can I at least have my books back, or are they still being searched for fingerprints?” No, I wasn’t feeling sorry for him today.
“We … regrettably … maybe … a mistake,” he stammered, and Xemerius and I went “Uh?” in unison.
Mr. Marley was visibly relieved to meet Mr. Whitman at the entrance to the building. Once again, he looked like a film star on the red carpet. He had obviously just arrived, like us, because he was taking off his coat with great elegance and shaking raindrops out of his thick hair. He smiled at us with his perfect white teeth. All we needed was a storm of camera flashes. If I’d been Cynthia, I’m sure I’d have been slobbering over him, but I was totally immune to his good looks and charm, not that he often switched on the charm for me, anyway. Also Xemerius was fooling around behind his back, making faces.
“Gwyneth, so I hear you’re feeling better?” asked Mr. Whitman.
Who’d
told him that?
“A bit. ” To take his mind off my nonexistent flu and because I was in full swing anyway, I quickly went right on. “I was just asking Mr. Marley about my chest. Maybe you can tell me when I’m getting it back and why you had it taken away in the first place. ”
“That’s the spirit! Attack is the best form of defense,” Xemerius encouraged me. “I can see you’re going to manage here just fine without me, so I’ll fly off home to read some—er, to see everything’s okay. See you later, alligator! Teehee!”
“I … we … misinformed,” Mr. Marley went on stammering.
Mr. Whitman clicked his tongue in annoyance. Beside him, Mr. Marley looked even more awkward. “Marley, you can take a break for lunch now. ”
“Yes, sir. Take a break for lunch, sir. ” Mr. Marley almost clicked his heels in military style.
“Gwyneth, your cousin suspects that you are in possession of an item that doesn’t belong to you,” said Mr. Whitman when Mr. Marley had hurried off. He was looking at me hard. Lesley had nicknamed him Squirrel because of his lovely brown eyes, but with the best will in the world, I couldn’t see anything cute about them now, and none of the warmth you’re always supposed to sense in brown eyes. Under that gaze, my spirit of contradiction slipped away to the farthest corner of my mind. Suddenly I wished Mr. Marley had stayed. I had much more fun arguing with him than with Mr. Whitman. It was difficult lying to Mr. Whitman, maybe because of his experience as a teacher, but all the same, I tried.
“Charlotte probably feels a bit left out,” I murmured, looking down. “She’s not having an easy time right now, so it could be that she invents things to … er … get herself a little attention again. ”
“Yes, the others think so too,” said Mr. Whitman thoughtfully. “But I consider Charlotte a well-balanced character, who doesn’t need that kind of thing. ” He bent his head so close to my face that I could smell his aftershave. “If her suspicion should, after all, be confirmed … well, I’m not sure whether you are really aware of the consequences of your actions. ”
That made two of us. It cost me a great effort to look into his eyes again. “May I at least ask what item you’re talking about?” I tentatively inquired.
Mr. Whitman raised one eyebrow and then, surprisingly, smiled. “It is quite possible that I have underestimated you, Gwyneth. But that’s no reason for you to overestimate yourself. ”
For a few seconds, we stared into each other’s eyes, and I suddenly felt exhausted. What was the point of all this playacting? Suppose I simply handed the chronograph over to the Guardians and let things take their course? Somewhere at the back of my mind, I heard Lesley saying Pull yourself together, for goodness’ sake! But why bother? I was groping about in the dark and getting no further anyway. Mr. Whitman was right. I could be massively overestimating myself and just making everything even worse. I didn’t even know exactly why I landed myself with such nerve-racking situations. Wouldn’t it feel good to hand over responsibility, leaving it to other people to make the decisions?