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 lying 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.
“Maybe you’ve forgotten that we wanted their blood as well. And it was you who put a pistol to Lucy’s head, not the other way around,” I said. “She didn’t have a gun.”
An angry line showed between Gideon’s eyebrows. “Gwyneth, please don’t be so naive. We’d been lured into a trap—as usual. Lucy and Paul had armed reinforcements. It was at least four to one!”
“Two!” I snapped. “I was there too!”
“Five if we count Lady Tilney. But for my pistol, we could be dead by now. Or at least they could have taken blood from us by force, because that’s exactly what they were there for. And you wanted to talk to them?”
I bit my lip.
“Hello?” said the gargoyle. “Anyone got a thought to spare for me? Because I don’t understand this one little bit!”
“I can see why you’re confused,” said Gideon, much more gently now, but you couldn’t miss the patronizing note in his voice. “You’ve had too many new experiences over these last few days. And you were totally unprepared. How could you understand what it’s all about? You ought to be at home in bed. So let’s get this over and done with, fast.” He reached for my arm again and made me go on. “I’ll do the talking, and you confirm my story, right?”
“Yes, so you’ve said at least twenty times already!” I replied, annoyed, stopping when I saw a brass plate outside the door saying LADIES and bracing my legs. “You can all start without me. I’ve been needing to go to the loo since June 1912.”