Sapphire Blue (17 page)

With a jerk, he disappeared through the roof of the car and flew away. It was a dreadful hour and a half before he finally came back. An hour and a half in which I imagined the most terrible things, feeling more dead than alive. It made matters no better that meanwhile we had arrived at the Temple, where the implacable Giordano was waiting for me. But I was in no fit state to take in what he was saying about colonial policy in the eighteenth century or to imitate Charlotte’s dance steps either. Suppose Gideon had been attacked by swordsmen again, and this time he hadn’t been able to defend himself? When I wasn’t seeing him lying on the ground covered with blood, I imagined him hooked up to thousands of tubes in intensive care, looking whiter than the sheets on his bed. Why wasn’t there anyone here to tell me how he was?

Then, at last, Xemerius came flying straight through the wall and into the Old Refectory.

“Well?” I asked, ignoring Giordano and Charlotte. They were in the middle of teaching me how to clap when you were applauding something in the eighteenth century. Not the way I did it, of course.

“You’re playing
pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man
, you stupid creature,” Giordano was saying. “That’s the way toddlers clap in the sandbox when they’re pleased—oh, what’s she looking at
now
? I am going right out of my mind.”

“Nothing to worry about, haystack girl,” said Xemerius, grinning cheerfully. “Something came down
boing
on your friend’s head, put him out of action for an hour or so, but his skull must be hard as diamond itself—he didn’t even get concussion. And the wound on his forehead makes him look kind of … er … oh, no, don’t go all pale again. I told you he’s all right.”

I took a deep breath. I felt dizzy with relief.

“That’s better,” said Xemerius. “No need to hyperventilate. Lover boy still has all his nice white teeth. And he’s cursing under his breath nonstop, which I guess is a good sign.”

Thank God. Thank God. Thank God.

In fact the person about to hyperventilate was Giordano. Go ahead, I thought, why don’t you? Suddenly his screeching didn’t bother me anymore. Far from it—it was very amusing to watch his complexion turning from dark pink to purple in between those crisscross lines of beard.

Mr. George arrived just in time to prevent the furious Puffylips from slapping my face.

“It was even worse today, if that’s possible.” Giordano sank down on a delicate little chair and mopped the sweat from his face with a handkerchief as purple as his present skin color. “She just stared ahead with glazed eyes all the time—if I didn’t know better, I’d have thought she was on drugs!”

“Giordano, please!” said Mr. George. “We have none of us had a particularly good day today—”

“How is …
he
doing?” asked Charlotte quietly, with a sideways glance at me.

“As you might expect in the circumstances,” replied Mr. George gravely.

Once again Charlotte cast me a brief, searching glance. I stared darkly back. Did it give her some kind of sick satisfaction to know something I didn’t know, although she thought it would be of burning interest to me?

“Oh, nonsense,” said Xemerius. “He’s doing fine, trust me, darling! He just ate an enormous veal schnitzel with French fries and green vegetables. Does that sound like
as you might expect in the circumstances
?”

Giordano was getting cross because no one was listening to him. “I just hope I won’t be held to blame!” he said shrilly, pushing his little chair aside. “I have worked with unacknowledged talents, I have worked with the truly great men of this world, but never, never in my life has anything like
this
come my way.”

“My dear Giordano, you know how much we esteem you here. And no one would have been more suitable to teach Gwyneth the…” Here Mr. George fell silent, because Giordano had pushed his lower lip forward in a sulky pout, throwing his head with its cement hairdo right back.

“Just don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he snapped. “That’s all I ask.”

“Very well,” said Mr. George, sighing. “I … yes, well, I’ll pass the message on. Coming, Gwyneth?”

I’d already taken off the hooped skirt and hung it up over the piano stool. “See you sometime,” I said to Giordano.

He was still pouting. “I am afraid there will be no avoiding that.”

*   *   *

ON THE WAY
down to the old alchemical laboratory, which I knew almost by heart now, even blindfolded, Mr. George told me what had happened in the morning. He was a little surprised that Mr. Marley hadn’t passed the news on to me, and I didn’t go to the trouble of explaining.

They had sent Gideon back to the past by chronograph (Mr. George wasn’t telling me what year), to carry out a little errand (Mr. George didn’t say just what that was either), and two hours later, they’d found him unconscious in a corridor not far from the chronograph room. With a lacerated wound on his forehead, obviously made by something hard and heavy. Gideon couldn’t remember anything about it, but the attacker must have been lying in wait for him.

“But who…?”

“We don’t know. It’s worrying, particularly in the present situation. We had him thoroughly examined, and there was no sign of any puncture on him to suggest that his blood had been taken—”

“Wouldn’t the blood from his forehead have been enough?” I asked, shuddering slightly.

“Possibly,” agreed Mr. George. “But if someone had … well, wanted to make sure, that’s not how he’d have gone about getting Gideon’s blood. There are countless explanations. No one knew Gideon was going to be there that evening, so it’s unlikely that someone was lying in wait for him on purpose. It’s much more likely to have been a chance meeting. In certain years, these cellars were swarming with subversive, lowlife characters—smugglers, criminals, creatures of the underworld in every sense. My own belief is that it was an unfortunate coincidence.…” He cleared his throat. “In any case, Gideon seems to have survived the adventure pretty well—at least, Dr. White found no serious injuries. So the two of you will be able to set off on Sunday at midday as planned, to attend that soirée.” He laughed a little. “Funny idea: a soirée in the middle of the day on Sunday.”

Yes, ha ha, hilarious. “Where’s Gideon now?” I asked impatiently. “In hospital?”

“No, he’s resting—at least, I hope so. He only went to hospital for a scan, and as it found nothing, thank God, he discharged himself. The fact is, he had an unexpected visit from his brother yesterday evening.”

“I know,” I said. “Mr. Whitman registered Raphael at my school today.”

I heard Mr. George sigh heavily. “The boy ran away from home after getting into some kind of trouble along with his friends. Falk has this crazy idea of keeping Raphael in England. In these turbulent times, we all have better things to do—Gideon in particular—than bother about difficult boys, but Falk could never refuse Selina anything, and it seems this is Raphael’s only chance of finishing high school with some kind of certificate, away from the friends who have such a bad influence on him.”

“Selina … is that Gideon and Raphael’s mother?”

“Yes,” said Mr. George. “They both inherited those striking green eyes from her. Here we are. You can take the blindfold off now.”

This time we were alone in the chronograph room.

“Charlotte said that in the circumstances you’d be calling off our planned visit to the eighteenth century,” I suggested hopefully. “Or postponing it? Just to give Gideon time to recover, and maybe I could practice a bit more—”

Mr. George shook his head. “No, we won’t be doing that. The timing of your visits was very important to the count. Gideon and you will go to the soirée the day after tomorrow—that’s definite. Any particular year you’d like to elapse to today?”

“No,” I said, taking care to sound indifferent. “I don’t suppose it makes any difference if I’m shut up in a cellar, does it?”

Mr. George was carefully taking the chronograph out of its velvet wrapping. “No, it doesn’t. We usually send Gideon to the year 1953, a nice quiet year. We just have to take care he doesn’t meet himself.” He smiled. “I imagine it would feel rather eerie to be shut up somewhere with your double.” He patted his round little paunch and looked thoughtful. “How about 1956? Another quiet year.”

“Sounds perfect,” I said.

Mr. George handed me the flashlight and took his ring off. “Just in case … but don’t worry, there won’t be anyone around in the small hours, not at two thirty
A.M.
”

“Two thirty
A.M.
?” I repeated, horrified. How was I going to find my grandfather in the middle of the night? No one was going to believe I’d lost my way down in the cellars at two thirty
A.M.
There might not be anyone at all in the building. Then our plan would fall through! “Oh, Mr. George, please don’t send me into those eerie catacombs in the middle of the night all by myself!”

“Gwyneth, it makes no difference when you’re in a locked room deep underground.”

“But I … I get scared at night! Please, don’t send me off all alone in the dark.” I was so desperate that tears came to my eyes of their own accord; I didn’t have to help them along.

“Very well,” said Mr. George, his little eyes looking at me indulgently. “I was forgetting that you … well, let’s just pick another time of day. How about three in the afternoon?”

“That’s better,” I said. “Thank you, Mr. George.”

“There’s nothing to thank me for.” Mr. George looked up from the chronograph for a moment and smiled at me. “We really do ask a lot of you—I think in your place I’d feel rather uneasy alone in a cellar myself. Particularly as you sometimes see things that other people don’t.…”

“Yes, thanks for reminding me,” I said. Xemerius wasn’t with us. He’d probably have been very cross at being described as a “thing.” “What about all those tombs full of bones and skulls just around the corner?”

“Oh, dear,” said Mr. George. “I didn’t mean to add to your worries.”

“I’m not worried,” I said. “I’m not afraid of the dead. In my experience, they can’t hurt you—unlike the living.” I saw Mr. George raise his eyebrows and added quickly, “Though of course I think they’re dreadfully uncanny, and I certainly wouldn’t like to be sitting around here at night next to a lot of catacombs.” I gave him my hand, clutching my school bag with the other one. “Try the fourth finger this time, please. That one hasn’t been punctured yet.”

*   *   *

MY HEART
was pounding like crazy as I took the key out of its hiding place behind the bricks and unfolded the note that Lucas had left there with it. The password for the day seemed to me unusually long, and I didn’t even try to memorize it; I took a ballpoint out of my bag and wrote it on the palm of my hand. Lucas had also drawn me a plan of the cellar vaults. According to his diagram, I had to turn right once I was outside the door and then turn left three times running until I came to the big staircase where the first guards would be stationed. The door opened easily when I turned the key in the lock. I thought for a moment and then decided not to lock it again, just in case I was in a hurry on the way back. There was a musty smell down here, and the walls clearly showed how old these vaults were. The ceiling was low and the passages very narrow. Every few yards, another corridor branched off or a door was let into the wall. Without my flashlight and Lucas’s plan, I’d probably have been lost, even though it felt oddly familiar down here. As I turned left in the last corridor before the staircase, I heard voices. I took a deep breath.

Now I had to convince the guards that there was a really good reason for letting me through. Unlike the guards in the eighteenth century, this couple didn’t look at all dangerous. They were sitting at the foot of the stairs playing cards. I marched firmly up to them. When they saw me, one of them dropped his cards; the other jumped up and looked frantically around for his sword, which was propped against the wall.

“Good afternoon,” I said bravely. “Don’t let me disturb you.”

“What … who … how?” stammered the first guard. The second guard had picked up his sword and was staring at me undecidedly.

“Isn’t a sword rather an exotic weapon for the twentieth century?” I asked, baffled. “What are you going to do if someone comes this way with a hand grenade? Or a machine gun?”

“People don’t come this way at all much,” said the guard with the sword. He grinned awkwardly. “It’s more a kind of a traditional weapon that…” He shook his head, as if calling himself to order, then pulled himself together and stood up very straight. “Password?”

I glanced at the palm of my hand. “
Nam quod in iuventus non discitur, in matura aetate nescitur.
”

“That’s right,” said the guard still sitting on the stairs. “But where do you come from, may I ask?”

“The Royal Courts of Justice,” I said. “There’s this useful shortcut through to here from them. I can show you sometime if you like. But now I have a very important appointment with Lucas Montrose.”

“Mr. Montrose? I don’t know if he’s in the building today,” said the guard with the sword.

The other one said, “We’ll take you up, Miss…? You’ll have to tell us your name first. For the records.”

I told them the first name to come into my mind. Maybe I was a little too quick about it.

“Violet Purpleplum?” repeated the guard with the sword incredulously, while the other guard stared at my legs. I guessed the skirt length of our school uniform wasn’t fashionable in 1956. Never mind, he’d have to put up with it.

“Yes,” I said, in a slightly aggressive tone of voice, because I was annoyed with myself. “No need to grin like that. Not everyone can be called Smith or Jones. Can we get on with this?”

The two men had a brief argument over which one was going to escort me up, then the guard with the sword said his friend could go, and made himself comfortable at the foot of the stairs again. On the way, the other guard asked if I had ever been here before. I said yes, several times, and wasn’t the Dragon Hall beautiful? Half my family were members of the Guardians, I added, and then the guard thought he suddenly remembered seeing me at the last garden party here in the Temple.