“I thought you’d found some way to meet him while you were elapsing, and—” Gideon dissolved into thin air before my eyes. I followed him a few seconds later, after running my hands over my hair once again.
I’d been sure that the chronograph room would be teeming with Guardians when we came back, all of them furious with Gideon for his unauthorized action (and secretly I expected to see Mr. Marley, with a black eye, standing in a corner and insisting that Gideon must be taken away in handcuffs), but all was quiet.
There was only Falk de Villiers in the room—and my mum. She was sitting on a chair, a picture of misery, wringing her hands, and she gave me a tearful look. Her mascara and eye shadow made an irregular pattern of stripes on her cheeks.
“Ah, so there you two are,” said Falk. His voice and expression were neutral, but I thought it perfectly possible that beneath that façade, he was seething with rage. There was a strange gleam in his amber-colored wolf’s eyes. Beside me, Gideon instinctively stood up very straight and raised his chin slightly, as if bracing himself for a lecture.
I quickly reached for his hand. “It’s not his fault—I didn’t want to elapse on my own,” I said quickly. “Gideon didn’t mean to spoil the plan—”
“That’s all right, Gwyneth.” Falk gave me a weary smile. “Right now various things aren’t going according to plan.” He passed his hand over his forehead and cast Mum a brief sidelong glance. “I’m very sorry that when we were talking at midday … you had to learn the facts like that. It certainly wasn’t intentional.” He looked at Mum again. “News of that kind ought to be broken more gently.”
Mum said nothing, just tried hard to hold back her tears. Gideon squeezed my hand.
Falk sighed. “I guess you and Grace will have a good deal to talk about. We’d better leave you alone,” he said. “There’s an adept waiting outside the door to escort you upstairs when you’re ready. Coming, Gideon?”
Reluctantly, Gideon let go of my hand and kissed me on the cheek. As he did so, he whispered in my ear, “You’ll do fine, Gwen. And later we’ll talk about what you have in hiding at home.”
It took all my self-control not to cling to him and say, “Oh, please stay with me.”
I waited in silence until he and Falk had left, closing the door behind them. Then I turned to Mum and tried to smile. “I’m surprised they let you into their holy of holies here.”
Mum got up—tottering like an old lady—and gave me a wry smile in return. “They blindfolded me. Well, that boy with the face like a moon did. He had a split lip, and I expect that’s why he tied the knot so tight. It tweaked my hair horribly, but I didn’t dare to complain.”
“I know all about that.” I couldn’t summon up much sympathy for Mr. Marley’s split lip. “Mum—”
“I know you must hate me now.” Mum didn’t let me finish. “And I absolutely understand that.”
“Mum, I—”
“I’m so dreadfully sorry about it all! I ought never to have let it go so far.” She took a step toward me and put out her arms, only to let them fall helplessly to her sides again. “I’ve always been terrified of this day! I knew it would happen sometime or other, and the older you grew, the more afraid I was. Your grandfather…” She stopped, then took a deep breath, and went on, “My father and I were going to tell you together, once you were old enough to understand the facts and come to terms with them.”
“So Lucas knew?”
“Of course! He hid Lucy and Paul in Durham with us, and it was his idea for me to make out I was pregnant so that I could pretend the baby—that was you—was mine. Lucy went for medical checkups in Durham under my name. She and Paul spent almost four months with us, while Dad was busy laying false trails over half of Europe. It was really the perfect hiding place. No one cared about my pregnancy. We said the baby would be born in December, so that meant you weren’t of any interest to the Guardians and the family.” Mum looked past me at the tapestry on the wall, and her eyes were glazed. “Up to the end, we hoped it wouldn’t be necessary for Lucy and Paul to travel back into the past with the chronograph. But a private detective hired by the Guardians was watching our house.…” She shuddered at the memory. “My father managed to warn us just in time. Lucy and Paul had no other option—they had to run for it and leave you with us—a tiny baby with a funny little tuft of hair on your head and big blue eyes.” Now the tears were running down her cheeks. “Nicholas and I swore to keep you safe, and we loved you like our own child from the very first second.”
Without noticing it, I’d begun to cry again myself. “Oh, Mum—”
“You see, we’d never wanted to have children. There was so much poor health in Nicholas’s family, and I always thought I wasn’t the maternal type. But all that changed when Lucy and Paul had entrusted you to us.” Mum’s tears were unstoppable now. “You made us so … so happy. You changed our lives and showed us how wonderful children are. But for you, Nick and Caroline would never have been born.” She was sobbing so hard that she was unable to go on. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I flung myself into her arms.
“It’s all right, Mum!” I tried to say, but only a kind of snorkeling sound like a gurgle came out. Mum seemed to understand it, all the same. She wound her arms around me and hugged me, and for quite a long time, we weren’t in any position to talk or to stop crying.
Until Xemerius put his head through the wall and said, “Oh, here you are!” He squeezed the rest of himself through into the room, flew over to the table, and settled there, staring curiously at us. “Oh, no! Two indoor fountains now. The Niagara Falls model must have been on special offer.”
I gently moved away from Mum. “Mum, we must go! Do you have any tissues on you?”
“If we’re lucky!” She rummaged in her bag and handed me one. “Why isn’t your mascara all over your face?” she asked with a faint grin.
I blew my nose noisily. “I’m afraid I already left it all over Gideon’s T-shirt.”
“He does seem to be a nice boy. Although I ought to warn you against him—those de Villiers men are nothing but bad news for us Montrose women.” Mum opened her powder compact, looked in the little mirror, and sighed. “Oh, mercy! I look like Frankenstein’s mother.”
“Yup, nothing but soap and water will do the job there,” said Xemerius. He hopped off the table, settled on a chest in the corner, and put his head to one side. “Looks like I’ve missed out on a lot! By the way, they’re all in an uproar upstairs. Lots of terribly important men in black suits and that useless Marley looking like someone punched him in the face. And, Gwyneth, they’re all going on at your nice boy—he obviously turned their plans upside down. Also, he’s infuriating every last one of them by grinning to himself like an idiot the whole time.”
And although I suppose there was absolutely no reason for it, all of a sudden I was doing exactly the same, grinning to myself like another idiot.
Mum looked at me over the edge of her compact. “Can you forgive me?” she asked quietly.
“Dear Mum!” I hugged her so hard that she dropped everything she was holding. “I do love you so much!”
“Oh, please!” groaned Xemerius. “Here we go again! Isn’t it damp enough in here already?”
* * *
“THIS IS MY IDEA of heaven,” said Lesley, pivoting on her own axis so as to take in the atmosphere of Madame Rossini’s stocks of costumes. Her eyes wandered over the shelves of boots and shoes from all periods, then went on to the hats, from there to the apparently endless racks with clothes hanging from them, and finally back to Madame Rossini, who had opened the door of this paradise to us. “And you’re God in person!”
“You’re so sweet!” Madame Rossini beamed at her.
“My own opinion entirely,” said Raphael. Gideon cast him a glance of amusement. I didn’t know how, after all that fuss this afternoon, he’d managed to get Falk to agree (maybe Gideon’s uncle was more of a sheep in wolf’s clothing than the other way around), but we and Lesley and Raphael really did have official permission to borrow costumes for Cynthia’s party from the Guardians’ stocks, under Madame Rossini’s supervision. It was early evening when we met outside her stockrooms, and Lesley was so excited at being allowed into the headquarters of the Lodge that she could hardly keep still. Although she didn’t get to see any of the other rooms that I’d described to her and was led only along an ordinary corridor to the stockroom, she was bubbling with enthusiasm.
“Have you noticed?” she whispered to me. “This place positively reeks of puzzles and mysteries. Oh, God, I just love it!”
Once in the stockroom with the costumes, she was practically hyperventilating. In other circumstances, I expect it would have been the same with me. Up to now, I’d thought of Madame Rossini’s studio as the Garden of Eden, but this was even better, much better.
But first, by now I was pretty well used to all the clothes, and second, my head and heart were busy with very different things.
“Of course I ’ave not made all ze costumes zat are in ’ere. It is ze Guardians’ collection. Zey began it two ’undred years ago, and zey added to it in ze course of time.” Madame Rossini took a slightly yellowing lace dress off one of the racks, and Lesley and I sighed, enchanted. “Many of ze ’istorical dresses are very lovely, but zey cannot be used for time travel zese days.” She carefully hung the dress up again. “And ze costumes made for ze last but one generation are not up to ze standard of today.”
“You mean all these wonderful dresses are slowly rotting away here?” Lesley stroked the lace dress sympathetically.
Madame Rossini shrugged her plump shoulders. “It ees valuable material for illustrating ze ’istorical styles, even for me. But you are right, it ees a shame zat so few see it. All ze better that you are ’ere zis evening. You will be ze loveliest ladies at ze ball, mes petites!”
“It isn’t a ball, Madame Rossini, just a rather boring party,” said Lesley.
“A party ees only as boring as ze guests,” said Madame Rossini firmly.
“That’s what I say too,” said Raphael, giving Lesley a sidelong look. “How about we two go as Robin Hood and Maid Marian? They went around in Lincoln green.” He perched a small ladies’ hat with a feather in it on his head. “Then everyone will see that we’re together.”
“Hm,” said Lesley.
Madame Rossini walked along the racks, cheerfully commenting, “Oh, zis is fun! Such fun! Four young people and une fête déguisée—what can be better?”
“I can think of a few things,” whispered Gideon, with his mouth close to my ear. “Listen, you girls must distract her attention to give me a chance to find clothes for our visit to 1912.” Out loud, he said, “I’ll wear that green thing I had on yesterday, Madame Rossini, if I may.”