“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.”
“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 that. 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.”