“Ruby red, with G major, the magic of the raven, brings the Circle of Twelve home into safe haven,” murmured Lucas.
“Yes, well, there you are—magic of the raven, blah blah blah. But I’m the wrong person. Count Saint-Germain throttled me even though he was standing several yards away, and I could hear his voice in my head, and then there were those men with pistols and swords in Hyde Park, and I had to run a sword into one of them because otherwise he’d have killed Gideon, who is … who’s such a…” I took a deep breath, only to go headlong on the next minute. “Gideon is a pain in the neck, he acts as if I were a millstone around his neck, and this morning he kissed Charlotte, well, only on the cheek, but maybe it meant something, I never ought to have kissed him without asking about that first, after all, I’ve only known him a day or so, but suddenly he was so nice and then … oh, it all happened so fast … and everyone thinks I told Lucy and Paul when we were visiting Lady Tilney because we need her blood, and we need some of Lucy and Paul’s blood too, but they need Gideon’s blood and mine because that’s still missing from their chronograph. And no one tells me what’s going to happen when everyone’s blood has been read into the chronograph, and sometimes I think they don’t know for certain themselves. And Lucy said I ought to ask you about the Green Rider.”
Lucas had half closed his eyes behind his glasses and was obviously trying desperately to make sense of my torrent of words. “I have no idea what this Green Rider could mean,” he said. “I’m sorry, but it’s the first time I ever heard of him. Maybe it’s the title of a film? Why don’t you ask … I know, you could simply ask me in the year 2011.”
I looked at him, horrified.
“Oh, dear, I see,” said Lucas quickly. “You can’t, because I’ll be dead by then, or old and blind and deaf drowsing away in some senior citizens’ home.… No, no, please, I really don’t want to know.”
This time I couldn’t hold back my tears. I sobbed for at least half a minute because—strange as it sounds—I suddenly missed my grandfather dreadfully. “I loved you very much,” I said at last.
Lucas gave me a handkerchief and looked at me sympathetically. “Are you sure? I don’t even like children. Little pests, if you ask me.… But maybe you were a particularly nice child. In fact, I’m sure you were.”
“Yes, I was. But you were nice to all us kids.” I blew my nose noisily. “Even Charlotte.”
We said nothing for a little while. Then Lucas took a watch out of his pocket and said, “How much time do we have?”
“They sent me here for exactly two hours.”
“Not very long, then. We’ve wasted far too much time already.” He got up. “I’ll get pens and paper, and we’ll try to find some kind of system in all this chaos. You’d better stay here. Don’t move from the spot.”
I just nodded. When Lucas had left, I stared into nothing with my face buried in my hands. He was right. It was important to keep a clear head now.
Who knew when I’d meet my grandfather again? Which things that hadn’t happened yet ought I to tell him about, which should I hush up? And looking at it the other way around, I was desperately anxious for any information he could give me that might come in useful. Basically, he was my only ally. But living in the wrong time. And how could he cast light, from here, on any of the dark riddles facing me?
Lucas stayed away for some time, and as the minutes passed, I began to doubt my own feelings. Maybe he’d been lying, and any moment now he’d be back with Lucy and Paul and a big knife, to get blood out of me. Finally, feeling worried, I stood up and looked around for something I could use as a weapon. There was a board with a rusty nail in it lying in a corner, but when I picked it up, it crumbled apart in my fingers. At that very moment, the door opened again, and my young grandfather came back with a notepad under his arm and a banana in one hand.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Here, to stave off hunger pangs.” Lucas tossed me the banana, took a third chair off the pile, placed it between us, and put the notepad on it. “Sorry I was so long. That idiot Kenneth de Villiers was upstairs getting in my way. I can’t stand the de Villiers family. Always sticking their long noses into everything, wanting to be in control and make the decisions and always thinking they know best!”
“How right you are,” I murmured.
Lucas shook his wrist to loosen it up. “Then here goes—granddaughter. You’re the Ruby, the twelfth in the Circle. The Diamond, from the de Villiers family, was born two years before you. So he’d be around nineteen in your time. What’s his name again?”
“Gideon,” I said, and just saying it out loud made me feel warm. “Gideon de Villiers.”
Lucas’s pen was hurrying over the paper. “And he’s a pain in the neck, like all of them, but you still kissed him, if I caught the drift of what you were saying just now. Aren’t you rather young for that kind of thing?”
“Goodness me, no,” I said. “Far from it—I’m a late developer. All the girls in our class are on the pill but me.”
Well, all except Aishani, Maggie, and Cassie Clarke, but Aishani’s parents were conservative Indians and would murder Aishani if she so much as looked at a boy, Maggie fancied girls, and as for Cassie—one day I was sure those spots would go away of their own accord, and then she’d be nicer to other people and stop snapping, “What do you think you’re gawping at in that silly way?” when anyone even glanced in her direction.
“Oh, and of course Charlotte won’t have anything to do with sex either. That’s why Gordon Gelderman calls her the Ice Queen. But now I’m not so sure if that’s really right for her.…” I ground my teeth, because I was thinking how Charlotte had looked at Gideon—and vice versa. If you stopped to think how quickly Gideon had thought up the idea of kissing me, on only the second day after we met, I couldn’t even imagine what had been going on between him and Charlotte over all the years they’d known each other.
“What kind of pill?” asked Lucas.
“How do you mean?” Oh, my God, in the year 1948 they probably had nothing but cow-gut condoms, if that. I didn’t really want to know. “Honestly, I’d rather not talk to you about sex, Grandpa.”
Lucas looked at me, shaking his head. “And I’d rather not hear that word in your mouth. I don’t mean Grandpa.”
“Okay.” I peeled the banana as Lucas went on making notes. “What do you say instead?”
“Instead of what?”
“Instead of sex.”
“We don’t talk about it,” said Lucas, concentrating on his notepad. “Or anyway, not to girls of sixteen. So let’s go on. The chronograph was stolen by Lucy and Paul before the blood of the last two time travelers could be read into it. Then the second chronograph came into use, but of course the blood of all the other time travelers is missing from that one.”
“Not anymore. Gideon has found nearly all of them, and they gave him some of their blood. There’s only Lady Tilney to go, and the Opal, Elise something-or-other.”
“Elaine Burghley,” said Lucas. “A lady-in-waiting at the court of Queen Elizabeth. She died in childbirth aged eighteen.”
“Right. And Lucy and Paul’s blood too, of course. So we’re after their blood, and they’re after ours. Or that’s how I understand it, anyway.”
“And now there are two chronographs which might complete the Circle? This is really incredible!”
“What will happen when the Circle is complete?”
“Then the secret will be revealed,” said Lucas solemnly.
“Oh, no, not you too!” I shook my head angrily. “Isn’t there any more concrete information available, just for once?”
“Well, the prophesies speak of the rise of the eagle, the victory of mankind over disease and death, and the dawn of a new age.”
“Oh,” I said, no wiser than before. “So it’s a good thing, is it?”
“A very good thing. Something of benefit to the entire human race. That’s why Count Saint-Germain founded the Society of the Guardians. That’s why the most brilliant and powerful men in the world joined our ranks. We all want to keep the secret so that it can be revealed at the right time and save the world.”
Okay. A clear statement for once. Or at least the clearest anyone had yet given me since I got mixed up in all this mysterious secret stuff. “But why don’t Lucy and Paul want the Circle to be closed?”
Lucas sighed. “I’ve no idea. When did you say you met them?”
“In the year 1912,” I said. “June. June the twenty-second, I think. Or the twenty-fourth. I didn’t notice exactly.” The more I tried to remember, the less certain I was. “Or maybe the twelfth? It was an even number, I do remember that. The eighteenth? Anyway, sometime in the afternoon. Lady Tilney had the table laid for tea.” Then it dawned on me what I’d just said, and I clapped my hand over my mouth. “Oh, no!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Now I’ve gone and told you, and you’ll tell Lucy and Paul, and that’s why they can lie in wait for us there. So really you are the one who gives us away, not me. Mind you, I suppose it all comes to the same thing in the end.”
“What? No, no!” Lucas shook his head energetically. “I won’t do that. I won’t tell them anything at all about you—that would be crazy! If I tell them tomorrow that they’re going to steal the chronograph someday and disappear into the past with it, they’ll fall down dead of shock on the spot. You have to think very, very carefully what you’re going to tell anyone about the future, understand?”
“Well, no, maybe you won’t tell them tomorrow, but there are years and years ahead when you could do it.” I thoughtfully munched my banana. “On the other hand, what time did they travel back to with the chronograph? Why not this period? They’d always have a friend here in you. Maybe you’re lying to me and they’ve been waiting right outside that door for ages to get a few drops of my blood.”
“I haven’t the slightest idea where they could have gone.” Lucas sighed. “I can’t even imagine them ever doing anything so crazy. Or why they’d do it!” He added, sounding discouraged, “I’ve no idea of anything at all!”
“So neither of us has any idea at this moment,” I said, just as discouraged.
Lucas wrote down Green Rider, second chronograph, and Lady Tilney on his notepad, and added large question marks to all of them. “What we need is to meet again later. By then I could find out a good deal.…”
I had a bright idea. “Originally I was supposed to be sent to the year 1956 to elapse. Maybe we could meet again tomorrow evening.”
“Ha, ha!” said Lucas. “1956 may be tomorrow to you—for me it’s— But yes, let’s think. If you get sent to elapse to a time after this, will it be to this room?”
