Page 3
I looked up at the church façade. I guessed it was Victorian architecture, with stained-glass windows and two elaborate, pretty towers. Brickwork alternated with cream-colored plaster, making a pattern of stripes. But however high I looked, I couldn’t see a single statue on the entire building, let alone another gargoyle. Odd that the ghost was haunting it all the same.
“Here I am!” called the gargoyle, clinging to the masonry right in front of my nose. He could climb like a lizard, of course—they all can. I stared at the brick next to his head for a second and turned away.
The gargoyle wasn’t so sure that I really could see him now. “Oh, please,” he said. “It would be so nice to talk to someone else for once, not just the ghost of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. ”
Quite ingenious of him, but I wasn’t falling for that one. I did feel sorry for him, but I knew what a nuisance those little pests could be. What’s more, he’d disturbed me in mid-kiss, and all because of him, Gideon now probably thought I was a silly girl who didn’t know her own mind.
“Please, please, pleeeeease!” begged the gargoyle.
I went on ignoring him as hard as I could. As if I didn’t have enough problems already!
Gideon had gone to the edge of the pavement and was looking out for a taxi to hail. Of course a free one came along at once. Some people have all the luck. Or call it something like natural authority. My grandmother Lady Arista, for instance. She only had to stand at the roadside looking stern, and taxi drivers squealed to a halt right away.
“Coming, Gwyneth?”
“You can’t just walk away like that!” The hoarse, childlike voice sounded tearful, heartrending. “When we’ve only just this minute found each other. ”
Very likely if we’d been on our own, I’d have let him persuade me to talk to him. In spite of his pointed fangs and clawlike feet, he was kind of cute, and he probably didn’t get much company. (I’d bet the ghost of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had more interesting things to do than talk to gargoyles. What was Sir Arthur’s ghost up to in London anyway?) But if you start talking to ghosts and so on in front of other people, they think you’re a liar or just showing off. That’s if you’re lucky. If you aren’t, which is most of the time, they think you’re totally crazy. Besides, the last gargoyle I talked to had been so affectionate and clinging that I could hardly even go to the toilet alone.
So I got into the taxi with a stony expression and stared straight ahead as we set off, with Gideon sitting next to me and looking out of the window. The taxi driver raised his eyebrows as he examined our costumes in the rearview mirror, but much to his credit, he made no comment.
“It’s nearly six thirty,” said Gideon, obviously trying to strike up a normal conversation. “No wonder I’m dying of starvation. ”
Once he’d said it, I realized that I felt the same. I’d hardly managed to get half my breakfast down because of the edgy atmosphere around the family breakfast table, and as usual school lunch had been inedible. I thought rather wistfully of the appetizing sandwiches and scones on Lady Tilney’s tea table. We’d missed out on them as well.
Lady Tilney! Only now did it strike me that Gideon and I had better discuss our adventures in the year 1912. After all, our visit to her had gone wildly off course, and I had no idea what the Guardians, who considered time travel no joking matter, were going to think of that. Gideon and I had traveled back to 1912 on a mission to read Lady Tilney into the chronograph. (To be honest, I still didn’t entirely understand the reasons for that, but the whole thing seemed to be enormously important. As far as I could make it out, the safety of the world itself was at stake, at the very least. ) But before we could do anything about that my cousin Lucy and Paul de Villiers came barging in. They were the villains of the piece, or anyway that’s how Gideon’s family and Gideon himself saw it. Apparently Lucy and Paul had stolen the other chronograph and hidden in the past with it. No one had heard of them for years—until they turned up at Lady Tilney’s house and wrecked our little tea party.
When exactly pistols were drawn was something I’d suppressed out of sheer fright, but at some point, Gideon had held a gun to Lucy’s head, a pistol that, strictly speaking, he ought not to have brought with him at all. (Like me when I took my mobile phone into the past, but at least you can’t shoot anyone dead with a mobile!) Then we ran for it and took shelter in the church. But all the time I’d been unable to shake off a feeling that the Lucy and Paul situation wasn’t quite as black and white as the de Villiers family liked to paint it.
“What are we going to say about Lady Tilney?” I asked.
“Hm. ” Gideon rubbed his forehead wearily. “I’m not suggesting we should actually lie, but maybe, just this once, it would be a good idea to edit a few things out. You’d better leave the talking to me. ”
There it was again, that familiar tone of command. “Oh, sure,” I said. “I’ll just nod and keep my mouth shut, the way a nice girl should. ”
I instinctively, defiantly, crossed my arms. Why couldn’t Gideon act normal? First he kissed me (more than once, at that!), then he was back talking like a lordly Grand Master of the Guardians’ Lodge again. What was the idea?
We concentrated on looking out of our respective windows.
It was Gideon who finally broke the silence, which gave me a certain satisfaction. “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?” The way he asked, he sounded almost embarrassed.
“What?”
“It’s what my mother always used to say when I was little. If I was looking straight ahead and saying nothing, like you right at this moment. ”
“You have a mother?” Only when I’d said it did I realize what a silly question it was! Oh, for heaven’s sake!
Gideon raised one eyebrow. “What did you expect?” he asked, amused. “You thought I was an android put together by Uncle Falk and Mr. George?”
“Well, it’s not such an outlandish idea. Do you have photos of yourself as a baby?” Trying to imagine a baby Gideon with a round, soft, plump-cheeked face and a bald head made me grin. “Where are your mum and dad, then? Do they live in London too?”
Gideon shook his head. “My father’s dead, and my mother lives in Antibes in the south of France. ” For a brief moment, he pressed his lips together, and I was just thinking he’d retreat into silence when he went on. “With my little brother and her new husband, Monsieur Do-Call-Me-Papa Bertelin. He owns a company making platinum and copper microparts for electronic devices, and obviously the cash is rolling in. At least, he called his showy yacht the Croesus. ”
I was really surprised. So much personal information all at once—it wasn’t a bit like Gideon. “Oh, but it must be cool going on holiday there, right?”
“Of course,” he said with derision. “They have a pool the size of three tennis courts, and the stupid yacht has gold-plated faucets. ”
“Sounds better than a cottage without any heating in Peebles, anyway. ” My family usually spent the summer up in Scotland. “If I were you, and I had a family in the south of France, I’d be off there like a shot every weekend. Even if they didn’t have any pool or any yacht. ”
Gideon looked at me, shaking his head. “Oh, yes? And how would you manage that if you had to travel back to the past every few hours? Not so thrilling if you happen to be driving along the motorway at seventy miles an hour when it happens. ”
“Oh. ” Somehow this time-travel business was still too new for me to have thought out all the consequences. There were only twelve carriers of the gene—scattered over several centuries—and I couldn’t yet fully grasp that I was one of them. My cousin Charlotte was supposed to have been the time traveler, and she’d prepared herself for the part with gusto. But for reasons that no one could understand, my mother had faked the date of my birth, and now we were in a real mess. Just like Gideon, I had the choice between controlled time travel with the aid of the chronograph or traveling back to the past unexpectedly at any time and from anywh
ere. And from my own recent experience, I knew that was not much fun.
“Of course you’d have to take the chronograph with you, so that you could always elapse to a safe year now and then,” I said, thinking aloud.
Gideon uttered a joyless snort. “Yes, that would make nice relaxed travel possible, and I could get to know all sorts of historic places at the same time. But apart from the fact that I’d never be allowed to go around the country with the chronograph in my backpack, what would you do without it while I was away?” He was looking past me and out of the window. “Thanks to Lucy and Paul, there’s only that one chronograph, remember?” His voice was heated again, as always when Lucy and Paul were mentioned.
I shrugged my shoulders and looked out of my own window. The taxi was making for Piccadilly at a snail’s pace. Rush hour in the city, great. It would probably have been quicker for us to walk.
“You obviously don’t quite realize that you won’t have many chances to leave these islands in the future, Gwyneth. ” There was a touch of bitterness in Gideon’s voice. “Or even this city. Your family ought to have shown you the whole wide world, not just Scotland. It’s too late now. You’ll have to accept the fact that the only way you can see all the places you dream of is on Google Earth. ”
The taxi driver reached for a well-worn paperback, leaned back in his seat and began to read, unmoved.
“But … but you’ve been to Belgium and Paris,” I said. “To travel back to the past from there and get some of what’s-his-name’s blood, and put it into the—”
“Yes, sure,” he interrupted me. “Along with my uncle, three Guardians, and a costume designer. What a fun trip! Apart from the fact that Belgium is such a wildly exotic country. Don’t we all just dream of spending three days in Belgium sometime?”
Intimidated by his sudden bitterness, I asked quietly, “Where would you like to go, then, if you could choose?”
“You mean if I wasn’t cursed with this time-travel gene? Oh, my God—I wouldn’t know where to begin. Chile, Brazil, Peru. Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Canada, Alaska, Vietnam, Nepal, Australia, New Zealand…” He grinned faintly. “Well, just about everywhere except the moon. But it’s no use thinking about the things you can never do. We just have to reconcile ourselves to our rather boring lives without the chance to travel. ”
“Except for time travel. ” I went red, because he had said “our lives,” and somehow that sounded so … so intimate.
“At least that’s something like fair compensation for all this control and being shut up here,” said Gideon. “If it wasn’t for the time travel, I’d have died of boredom long ago. Paradoxical but true. ”
“Watching an exciting film now and then would be enough of a kick for me. Honest. ”
Wistfully, I watched a cyclist weaving his way through the traffic jam. I wanted to get home! The cars ahead of us weren’t moving an inch, which seemed to be fine by our cabby, who was deep in his book.