Ruby Red (4 page)

I folded our blankets neatly, swept cookie crumbs off the sofa, plumped up the cushions, and put a set of chessmen scattered about the place back into their box. I even watered the azalea standing in a pot on the bureau in the corner and wiped down the coffee table with a damp cloth. Then I looked around the now spotlessly tidy room, wondering what to do next. Just ten minutes had passed, and I wanted company even more than before.

Was Charlotte having a dizzy spell again down in the music room? What actually happened if you traveled from the first floor of a house in twenty-first century Mayfair to the Mayfair of, let’s say, the fifteenth century, when there weren’t any houses here yet, or only very few? Did you arrive in midair and drop to the ground from a height of twenty feet or so? Maybe landing on top of an anthill? Poor Charlotte. But I supposed they could be teaching her to fly in her secret instruction in the mysteries, so maybe she wouldn’t end up with ants in her pants.

Speaking of mysteries, I suddenly thought of something to take my mind off it all. I went into Mum’s room and looked down at the street. Yes, the man in black was still down there outside number 18. I could see his legs and part of his trench coat. The distance three floors down had never seemed so great. I tried working out how far it was from here to the ground.

Could you actually survive a fall from so far up? Well, maybe, if you were lucky and landed in the middle of a marsh. Apparently all London had once been marshland, or that’s what Mrs. Counter, our geography teacher, said. A marsh was okay—at least you’d have a soft landing. But only to drown horribly in mud.

I swallowed. I didn’t like the turn my own thoughts were taking.

I really, really didn’t want to be on my own any longer, so I decided to pay a visit to my family down in the music room, even if I risked being sent straight out again because there were top-secret discussions going on.

*   *   *

WHEN I WENT IN
, Great-aunt Maddy was sitting in her favorite armchair by the window, and Charlotte was standing near the other window with her hands flat on the Louis Quatorze desk, although we weren’t supposed to touch its colorfully lacquered and gilded surface with any part of the body at all. (How anything as hideous as that desk could be as valuable as Lady Arista always said I didn’t know. It didn’t even have any secret drawers. Lesley and I had checked that out years ago.) Charlotte had gotten changed, and instead of her school uniform, she was wearing a dress that looked like a cross between a nightie, a dressing gown, and a nun’s habit.

“I’m still here,” she said. “As you can see.”

“Well … well, that’s nice,” I said, trying not to stare at her dress with a noticeable expression of horror.

“This is intolerable,” said Aunt Glenda, who was pacing up and down between the windows. Like Charlotte, she was tall and slender and had bright red, curly hair. My mum had the same curly hair, and my grandmother’s hair had once been red too. Caroline and Nick had inherited the red hair as well, leaving me as the only one with dark, straight hair like my father’s.

I used to long for red hair, but Lesley had convinced me that my black hair was a striking contrast to my blue eyes and fair skin. Lesley also managed to persuade me that the little crescent-shaped birthmark on my temple—the one Aunt Glenda always called my “funny little banana”—was intriguingly mysterious and chic. These days I thought I looked quite pretty, especially now that I no longer had braces, which had put my front teeth back where they ought to be and stopped me looking like a rabbit. Although of course I wasn’t nearly such a “delightful vision of beguiling charm” as Charlotte, which was how James would have put it. Ha, ha. I wished he could see her in that shapeless sack of a dress.

“Gwyneth, my angel, would you like a sherbet lemon?” Great-aunt Maddy patted the stool next to her chair. “Sit down here and take my mind off all this a bit. Glenda is getting on my nerves, pacing up and down like that.”

“You have no idea of a mother’s feelings, Maddy,” said Aunt Glenda.

“No, I don’t suppose I do,” sighed Great-aunt Maddy. Maddy was a plump little person with cheerful, blue, childlike eyes and hair dyed golden blond. There was often a forgotten roller left in it.

“Where’s Lady Arista?” I asked, taking a sherbet lemon.

“Next door on the phone,” said Great-aunt Maddy. “But she’s speaking softly, so I’m afraid you can’t make out a word of it. By the way, those were the last sherbet lemons. You wouldn’t by any chance have time to pop around to Selfridges and get some more, would you?”

“Of course I’ll go,” I said.

Charlotte shifted her weight from one leg to the other, and Aunt Glenda instantly spun around.

“Charlotte?”

“No, it’s nothing,” said Charlotte.

Aunt Glenda’s lips tightened.

“Shouldn’t you be waiting on the ground floor?” I asked Charlotte. “Then you wouldn’t have so far to fall.”

“Shouldn’t you just shut up when you’ve no idea what this is all about?” Charlotte snapped back.

“Really, the last thing Charlotte can do with right now is silly remarks,” said Aunt Glenda.

I was already beginning to regret coming downstairs.

“On the first occasion the gene carrier never travels back farther than a hundred and fifty years,” explained Great-aunt Maddy kindly. “This house was finished in 1781, so Charlotte is perfectly safe here in the music room. At worst she might scare a couple of ladies playing the harpsichord.”

“You bet she would, in that dress,” I said, so quietly that only my great-aunt could hear me. She giggled.

The door swung open and Lady Arista came in. As usual, she looked as if she’d swallowed a ramrod. Or several. One for each arm, one for each leg, and one holding it all together in the middle. Her white hair was combed severely back from her face and pinned into a bun at the back of her neck, like a ballet teacher. The strict sort you wouldn’t want to tangle with. “There’s a driver on his way. The de Villiers family are expecting us at the Temple. Then Charlotte can be read into the chronograph the moment she returns.”

I didn’t understand a word of this.

“But suppose it doesn’t happen today after all?” asked Charlotte.

“Charlotte, darling, you’ve felt dizzy three times already,” said Aunt Glenda.

“It
will
happen sooner or later,” said Lady Arista. “Come along, the driver will be here any minute now.”

Aunt Glenda took Charlotte’s arm, and together with Lady Arista, they left the room. As the door closed behind them, Great-aunt Maddy and I looked at each other.

“Some people might think a person was invisible, don’t you agree?” said Great-aunt Maddy. “At least a good-bye or hello now and then would be nice. Or something really clever, like
Dear Maddy, did you by any chance have one of those visions of yours that might help us?
”

“And did you?”

“No,” said Great-aunt Maddy. “Thank God, I didn’t. I’m always ravenously hungry after those visions, and I need to lose weight as it is.” She patted her middle.

“Who are these de Villiers people?” I asked.

“A bunch of arrogant show-offs, if you ask me,” said Great-aunt Maddy. “All of them lawyers and bankers. They own the de Villiers private bank in the city. That’s where we have our accounts.”

That didn’t sound particularly mystical.

“So what do they have to do with Charlotte?”

“Well, let’s say they have problems like ours.”

“Meaning what?” Did they have to live under the same roof as a tyrannical grandmother, a frightful aunt, and a cousin who thought herself something special?

“The time-travel gene,” said Great-aunt Maddy. “It’s passed down through the male line in the de Villiers family.”

“You mean they have a Charlotte as well?”

“The male counterpart. His name’s Gideon, as far as I know.”

“And he’s waiting to feel dizzy too?”

“He’s already over that part of it. He’s two years older than Charlotte.”

“So he’s been time traveling for the last two years?”

“That’s what I assume.”

I tried to reconcile this new information with the little I already knew. But since Great-aunt Maddy was being so talkative today I allowed myself only a couple of seconds for that. “And what’s a chroni … a chrono-thingummy?”

“Chronograph.” Great-aunt Maddy rolled her round blue eyes. “It’s a kind of apparatus that can be used to send the gene carriers—only them, no one else!—back to a specific time. It’s something to do with blood.”

“A
time machine
?” Fueled by blood? Good heavens!

Great-aunt Maddy shrugged. “I’ve no idea how the thing works. You’re forgetting, I know only what I’ve overheard, same as you, sitting here acting as if butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth. It’s all a deadly secret.”

“Yup. And very complicated,” I said. “How do they know Charlotte has the gene, anyway? I mean, why her and not … well, let’s say
you
?”

“I can’t have it, thank goodness,” she said. “We Montroses were always a funny lot, but the gene came into our family through your grandmother. Because my brother just had to go and marry her.” Aunt Maddy grinned. She was my late grandfather Lucas’s sister. Never having been married herself, she’d moved in to keep house for him when they were quite young. “The first time I heard about this gene was after Lucas’s wedding. The last gene carrier in Charlotte’s hereditary line was a lady called Margaret Tilney, and she in her turn was the grandmother of your grandmother Arista.”

“So Charlotte inherited the gene from this Margaret?”

“Well, in between Lucy inherited it. Poor girl.”

“Lucy? What Lucy?”

“Your cousin Lucy. Harry’s eldest daughter.”

“Oh,
that
Lucy,” My uncle Harry, the one in Gloucestershire, was a good deal older than Glenda and my mum. His three children had grown up ages ago. David, the youngest, was a twenty-eight-year-old British Airways pilot. Which unfortunately didn’t mean we got a discount on flights. And Janet, the middle one, had children of her own, pains in the neck, both of them, Poppy and Daisy by name. I’d never met Lucy, the eldest. I didn’t know much about her either. The Montroses never said a thing about Lucy. She was kind of the black sheep of the family. She’d run away from home at the age of seventeen, and nothing had been heard of her since.

“Lucy’s a gene carrier too?”

“Oh, yes,” said Great-aunt Maddy. “All hell broke loose here when she disappeared. Your grandmother practically had a heart attack. It was the most shocking scandal.” She shook her head so vigorously that her golden curls got all tangled up.

“I can just imagine it.” I thought of what would happen if Charlotte simply packed her cases and made for the wide blue yonder.

“No, you can’t. You don’t know the circumstances in which she disappeared, and it was all to do with that young man—Gwyneth! Take your finger out of your mouth this minute! That’s a disgusting habit.”

“Sorry.” I really hadn’t noticed myself beginning to bite my fingernails. “It’s just there’s so much going on—so much I don’t understand.”

“Same here,” Great-aunt Maddy assured me. “And I’ve been listening to all this stuff since I was fifteen. What’s more, I have what you might call a natural talent for mystery. All the Montroses love secrets. They always have. That’s the only reason my poor brother married your grandmother in the first place, if you ask me. It can’t have been her alluring charms, anyway, because she didn’t have any.” She reached into the box of sherbet lemons, and sighed when her fingers met empty air. “Oh, dear, I’m afraid I must be addicted to these things.”

“I’ll run to Selfridges and get you some more,” I offered.

“You’re my darling child, you always will be. Give me a kiss and put your coat on, it’s raining. And never bite your nails again, all right?”

My coat was still in my locker at school, so I borrowed Mum’s raincoat and pulled the hood over my head as I stepped out of the front door. The man in the entrance of number 18 was just lighting himself a cigarette. On a sudden impulse I waved to him as I ran down the steps.

He didn’t wave back, of course.

“Weirdo,” I muttered as I hurried off toward Oxford Street. It was raining cats and dogs, and I wished I’d put on my wellies. The flowers on my favorite magnolia tree on the corner were drooping in a melancholy way. Before I reached it, I’d already splashed through three puddles. Just as I was trying to steer my way around a fourth, I was swept suddenly off my soggy feet. My stomach flip-flopped, and before my eyes the street blurred into a gray river.

Ex hoc momento pendet aeternitas.

(Eternity hangs from this moment.)

I
NSCRIPTION ON A SUNDIAL IN THE
M
IDDLE
T
EMPLE
, L
ONDON

THREE

WHEN I COULD SEE
properly again, I noticed a car was coming around the corner—a real old-timer—and I was kneeling on the pavement shaking with fear.