“Change of plan,” said Gideon briefly, and squeezed my hand.
“I don’t know anything about any change of plan. And I don’t believe you.” Mr. Marley’s mouth twisted in annoyance. “My last orders say clearly that—”
“Call them upstairs, then, and find out for yourself,” Gideon interrupted him, pointing to the telephone on the wall.
“I’ll do just that!” With his ears scarlet, Mr. Marley made for the phone. Gideon let go of me and bent over the chronograph, while I stood by the door like a store-window dummy. Now that we were here, I was rooted to the spot, feeling like a music box that had run down. I seemed to be slowly turning to stone. The thoughts ought really to have been going around and around in my head, but they weren’t. I felt nothing but a dull pain.
“Gwenny, it’s already set for you. Come over here.” Gideon didn’t wait for me to do as he said, and he took no notice of Mr. Marley’s protests (“Stop that! That’s my job!”), but drew me to him, took my limp hand, and placed one finger carefully in the little compartment under the ruby. “I’ll be right there with you in a moment.”
“You don’t have permission to use the chronograph on your own,” said Mr. Marley angrily, picking up the receiver of the phone. “I’m going to tell your uncle, this minute, about your high-handed disregard for the rules.” I just had time to see him dial a number, and then I was floating away in a flurry of red light.
I landed in pitch-darkness and automatically groped my way toward the place where I thought I’d find the light switch.
“Let me do that,” I heard Gideon say. He had landed behind me without a sound. Two seconds later, the electric lightbulb hanging from the ceiling flickered on.
“That was quick,” I murmured.
Gideon turned to me. “Oh, Gwenny,” he said gently. “I’m so sorry about all that.”
When I neither moved nor answered him, he was beside me in two long strides, taking me in his arms. He drew my head down to rest on his shoulder, laid his chin on my hair, and whispered, “It will be all right. I promise you. Everything will be all right again.”
I don’t know how long we stood there like that. Maybe it was his words, and the way he kept repeating them, or maybe the warmth of his body, but gradually I began to thaw out. At least, I finally managed to whisper something. “My mum … isn’t my mum,” I said helplessly.
Gideon steered me over to the green sofa in the middle of the room and sat down beside me. “I wish I’d known,” he said, distressed. “Then I could have warned you. Are you cold? Your teeth are chattering.”
I shook my head, leaned against him, and closed my eyes. For a moment, I wished that time would stand still, here in 1953 on this green sofa, where there were no problems, no questions, no lies, only Gideon and his comforting presence beside me, enveloping me.
But unfortunately, as I knew from bitter experience, my wishes didn’t usually come true.
I opened my eyes again and looked sideways at Gideon. “You were right,” I said miserably. “This is probably the only place where they can’t bother us. But you’re going to be in trouble!”
“I certainly am.” Gideon smiled slightly. “Particularly because I had to be … well, rather rough with Marley to keep him from snatching the chronograph away from me.” His smile was a grim one. “Operation Black Tourmaline and Sapphire will just have to wait for another day. Although there are even more questions I’d like to ask Lucy and Paul now, and a meeting with them is exactly what we could do with at the moment.”
I thought of our last meeting with Lucy and Paul at Lady Tilney’s house, and my teeth chattered when I remembered how Lucy had looked at me and whispered my name. My God, and I’d had no idea!
“If Lucy and Paul are my parents, does that mean you and I are related?” I asked.
Gideon smiled again. “That was the first thing that crossed my own mind,” he said. “But Falk and Paul are only distant relatives of mine—uncles twice removed, I think. They’re descended from one of the Carnelian twins; I’m descended from the other.”
The cogwheels in my brain were beginning to turn and engage with each other again. Suddenly I had a lump in my throat. “Before Dad got so sick, he always sang us something in the evening and played the guitar. Nick and I really loved that,” I said quietly. “He used to say I’d inherited my musical talent from him. But he wasn’t even related to me. I get my black hair from Paul.” I swallowed.
Gideon said nothing, but I saw the sympathy in his face.
“If Lucy isn’t my cousin, but my mother, then my mother is … is my great-aunt!” I went on. “And my grandmother is really my great-grandmother. And Grandpa’s not my grandfather; Uncle Harry is.” That was the last straw. I began crying my eyes out. “I can’t stand Uncle Harry! I don’t want him to be my grandfather! And I don’t want Nick and Caroline not to be my brother and sister. I love them so much.”
Gideon let me cry for a while, and then he began stroking my hair and making soothing sounds. “Hey, it’s okay, Gwenny. None of that makes any difference. They’re the same people, never mind exactly how they’re related to you!”
But I went on sobbing inconsolably. I hardly noticed Gideon gently drawing me toward him. He put both arms around me and held me tight.
“She ought to have told me,” I finally managed to say. Gideon’s T-shirt was all wet with my tears. “Mum … Mum ought to have told me.”
“Maybe she would have told you sometime. But put yourself in her position: she loves you, so she knew very well that the truth would hurt you. She probably couldn’t bring herself to do it.” Gideon’s hand was stroking my back. “It must have been terrible for all of them, particularly Lucy and Paul.”
My tears started flowing again. “But why did they leave me behind on my own? The Guardians would never have done me any harm! Why didn’t they simply take me with them?”
Gideon didn’t answer at once. Then he said, slowly, “I would guess that they tried to. Probably when Lucy found out that she was pregnant, and they realized that you would be the Ruby.” He cleared his throat. “But at the time, they still had no proof of their theories about the count. Their stories were dismissed as childish attempts to excuse their unauthorized time travel. It even says so in the Annals. Marley’s grandfather in particular got terribly angry about their accusations. According to his account of it, they had dragged the sacred memory of the count through the dirt.”
“But my … grandfather!” My mind refused to think of Lucas as anyone but my grandpa. “He knew everything that was going on, and he, for one, believed Lucy and Paul! Why didn’t he stop them running away?”
“I’ve no idea.” Gideon shrugged a shoulder wet with my tears. “Without evidence, even he couldn’t have done very much. He couldn’t endanger his position in the Inner Circle. And who knows whether he could trust all the Guardians of the time? We can’t rule out the possibility that there was someone there in his own day who knew about the count’s real plans.”
Someone who may even have murdered my grandfather in the end. I shook my head. This was all too much for me, but Gideon hadn’t finished with his theories yet.
“Whatever made him do it, maybe it was your grandfather’s idea to send Lucy and Paul back into the past, taking the chronograph with them. Sounds like he supported them.”
I sobbed. “They could have taken me with them too,” I said. “Before I was born, I mean.”
“To bring you into the world of 1912 and bring you up under a false name? Just before the First World War?” He shook his head. “Who’d have looked after you if anything happened to them?” He stroked my hair. “I can’t come anywhere near imagining how much it must hurt to discover a thing like this, Gwen. But I can understand Lucy and Paul. They knew for certain that your mother was someone who would love you like her own child and bring you up in safety.”
I bit my lower lip. “I don’t know.” Feeling exhausted, I sat up. “I don’t know anything anymore. I wish I could turn time back. A few weeks ago, maybe I wasn’t the happiest girl in the world, but I was kind of normal! Not a time traveler! Not immortal! And definitely not the child of … of two teenagers who live in the year 1912.”
Gideon smiled at me. “Yes, but look at it this way: there are a few positive things as well.” He carefully ran his thumb under my eyes, probably wiping up a huge puddle full of mascara. “I think you’re very brave. And … and I do love you!”
That washed the dull pain out of my heart. I put my arms around his neck. “Could you say that again, please? And then kiss me? So hard that I forget everything else?”
Gideon let his eyes wander down from my eyes to my lips. “I can always try,” he murmured.
* * *
GIDEON’S EFFORTS were crowned by success, if you like to put it that way. At least, I for one wouldn’t have minded spending the rest of the day or maybe my whole life here in his arms on the green sofa in 1953.
But after a while, he moved a little way away from me, propped himself on his elbows, and looked down at me. “I guess we’d better stop this now, or I can’t answer for myself,” he said rather breathlessly.
I didn’t say anything. Why would he feel any different from me? Except that I couldn’t have stopped just like that. I wondered whether I ought to feel slightly offended that he did. But I didn’t have long to think about it, because Gideon glanced at the time and suddenly sat up very straight. “Hey, Gwen,” he said hastily, “time’s nearly up. You’d better do something to your hair. They’re probably all gathered around the chronograph in a circle, waiting to haul us over the coals when we travel back.”
I sighed. “Oh, God,” I said unhappily. “But first we must discuss what to do next.”
Gideon frowned. “They’ll have to postpone the operation, of course, but maybe I can persuade them at least to send me back to 1912 for the two hours left of my time quota. We really do urgently need to talk to Lucy and Paul!”
“We could visit them together this evening,” I said, although for a moment my stomach churned at the idea. Hi, nice to meet you, Mum and Dad.
“Forget it, Gwen. They’re never going to let you go to 1912 with me again, not unless it’s on the count’s express orders.” Gideon put his hand out, pulled me to my feet, and then rather clumsily tried smoothing down the hair at the back of my head. He’d got it into that untidy state himself.
“What a good thing that I just happen to have a chronograph of my own hidden at home, then,” I said as casually as I could. “And by the way, it works perfectly.”
Gideon stared at me. “You what?”
“Oh, come on! Surely you knew! How else could I have met Lucas so often?” I put one hand on my stomach. It was already beginning to give me that roller-coaster feeling.