“Mr. George?” I asked incredulously.
“Have we met?” Young Mr. George had risen to his feet.
“Yes, of course. At … at the last garden party,” I stammered, while a jumble of ideas went around in my head. “I was the girl pouring the … but where’s my grand … where’s Lucas? Didn’t he tell you we had an appointment today?”
“I’m his assistant, but I haven’t been here very long,” said Mr. George, shyly. “No, he didn’t say anything about an appointment, but he ought to be back any time now. Would you like to sit down and wait for him, Miss—er…”
“Purpleplum!”
“Of course. Can I get them to bring you a coffee?” He came around the desk and pulled out a chair for me. I was very glad of it; my legs felt quite wobbly.
“No, thank you, no coffee,” I said.
He looked at me undecidedly. I stared silently back.
“Are you … are you in the Girl Guides?”
“What?”
“I mean … because of the uniform.”
“No.” I couldn’t help it, I just had to keep staring at Mr. George. It was unmistakably him! He was still very much the same when he was fifty-five years older, except for having no hair left, wearing glasses, and being as broad as he was tall.
Young Mr. George, on the contrary, had plenty of hair, neatly parted and kept in place with some kind of hair cream, and he was positively slender. Obviously he didn’t like being stared at, because he went red, sat down at the desk again, and leafed through some papers. I wondered what he would say if I took his signet ring out of my pocket and showed it to him.
We sat in silence like that for at least fifteen minutes before the office door opened and my grandfather came in. When he saw me, his eyes almost popped out of his head for a split second, before he had control over himself again and said, “Well, look who’s here—my dear little cousin!”
I jumped up. Since our last meeting, Lucas Montrose had definitely grown older. He was wearing an elegant suit and a bow tie, and he had a mustache that didn’t really suit him. The mustache tickled when he kissed me on both cheeks.
“How good to see you, Hazel! How long are you going to be in town? Have your dear parents come with you?”
“N-no,” I stammered. Was I going to have to pretend I was horrible Hazel? “They’re at home, with the cats.…”
“By the way, this is my new assistant, Thomas George. Thomas, this is Hazel Montrose from Gloucestershire. I told you she was probably going to visit me sometime.”
“I thought her name was Purpleplum,” said Mr. George.
“Yes,” I said. “So it is. Part of my name. Hazel Violet Montrose Purpleplum, but who can possibly remember all that rigmarole?”
Lucas looked at me, frowning. Then, turning to Mr. George, he said, “I’m going for a little walk with Hazel. All right? If anyone wants me, say I’m in a meeting with a client.”
“Yes, Mr. Montrose, sir,” said Mr. George, trying to keep an indifferent expression on his face.
“See you later,” I told him.
Lucas took my arm and led me out of the room. We both kept strained grins on our faces, and it wasn’t until we had closed the heavy front door of the building behind us and were out in the sunny road that we spoke again.
“I don’t want to be horrible Hazel,” I said reproachfully, looking around. The Temple didn’t seem to have changed much in fifty-five years, if you ignored the cars. “Do I look like someone who picks up cats by their tails and swings them in the air?”
“Purpleplum!” said Lucas, just as reproachfully. “I suppose you couldn’t think of anything even more striking?” Then he took me by the shoulders and examined my face. “Let’s take a look at you, granddaughter! Why, you look just the same as you did eight years ago.”
“Yes, but for me that was only the day before yesterday.”
“Amazing,” said Lucas. “And all these years I thought I might just have been dreaming the whole thing.”
“I elapsed to 1953 yesterday,” I said, “but I wasn’t on my own.”
“How long do we have today?”
“I arrived at three o’clock your time, so I’ll be traveling back at six thirty.”
“Then at least we have a little time to talk. Come along. There’s a café where we can get a cup of tea around the corner.” Lucas took my arm, and we walked toward the Strand. “You won’t believe it, but I’m a father now!” he said as we walked on. “The baby was born three months ago. I must say it’s a nice feeling. And I think Arista was a good choice. Claudine Seymour has rather lost her figure, and they say she drinks. Even in the morning.” We went down a small alley and then out of the arched gateway into the street. I stood there staring. Traffic was roaring up and down the Strand as usual, but all the cars were vintage models. Even the noisy red double-decker buses looked like museum pieces, and most of the people on the sidewalk wore hats—men, women, even children! There was a film poster on the wall of the building over the road, advertising High Society, starring wonderfully beautiful Grace Kelly and incredibly ugly Frank Sinatra. I looked left and right with my mouth open and could hardly take a step. It all looked like something out of a nostalgia picture postcard in the retro style, only much more colorful.
Lucas took me to a pretty corner café and ordered tea and scones. “You were hungry last time,” he remembered. “They make good sandwiches here, too.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “Grandpa, about Mr. George! In the year 2011, he acts as if he’d never seen me before!”
Lucas shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t worry about the boy. It’s going to be another fifty-five years before he meets you again. He’ll probably have simply forgotten you by then.”
“Yes, maybe,” I said, looking around, irritated, at all the smokers here. Right beside us a fat man was sitting at a kidney-shaped table with an ashtray the size of a skull on it, smoking a cigar. Hadn’t they heard of lung cancer yet in 1956? “Have you found out anything about the Green Rider since we last met?”
“No, but I can tell you something much more important. Now I know why Paul and Lucy will steal the chronograph.” Lucas looked briefly around and moved his chair a little closer to mine. “Since your first visit, Lucy and Paul have been here several times to elapse, and nothing special happened. We drank tea together, I tested them on their French verbs, and we spent four boring hours. They couldn’t leave the building, that was the rule, and that sneak Kenneth de Villiers made sure we kept it. I did once smuggle Lucy and Paul out so that they could see a film and look around for a while, but the stupid thing was that we were caught at it. Oh, why pretend? Kenneth caught us at it. There was a terrible row. I was disciplined, and for the next six months, a guard was always posted outside the Dragon Hall when Paul and Lucy were with us. That went on until I’d reached the rank of Adept Third Degree. Oh, thank you very much.” That was to the waitress, who looked just like Doris Day in The Man Who Knew Too Much. Her tinted blond hair was short, and she wore a pretty, floaty dress with a full skirt. She put our order down in front of us with a beaming smile, and I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if she’d burst out singing “Que Sera, Sera.”
Lucas waited until she was out of earshot and then went on. “Of course, at first I wanted to find out what kind of reason they could possibly have for going off with the chronograph, but I was on the wrong track. Their only problem was that they were madly in love with each other. Obviously no one looked kindly on that connection in their own time, so they kept it secret. According to them, only a few people did know about it, apparently including me and your mother, Grace.”
“Then they escaped into the past because they couldn’t be together? Like Romeo and Juliet! Wow, how romantic!”
“No,” said Lucas. “No, that wasn’t the reason.” He stirred his tea, while I looked greedily at the little basket of warm scones lying under a cloth napkin, smelling very tempting.
“I was the reason,” Lucas went on.
“What, you?”
“Well, not directly. But it was my fault. One day, you see, I got the crackbrained idea of sending Lucy and Paul a little farther back into the past.”
“With the chronograph? But how…”
“I told you it was a crackbrained idea. But there we were, shut up for four hours a day in that wretched Dragon Hall, along with the chronograph. So it’s hardly surprising if such crazy thoughts occurred to me. I looked at old maps, I studied the count’s secret writings and the Annals thoroughly, and then I borrowed costumes from the stock, and finally we read Paul and Lucy’s blood into the chronograph here. Then I sent them back on a two-hour trial journey to the year 1590. It worked without a hitch. When the two hours were up, they traveled back to me in 1948, and no one had noticed that they’d ever been gone. And half an hour later, they traveled back again to their own year, 1992. It went perfectly smoothly.”
I put a scone heavily laden with clotted cream into my mouth. I could think better if I was munching. A whole lot of questions came into my mind, and I tackled the first of them. “But 1590—there weren’t any Guardians at that time, were there?”
“Exactly,” said Lucas. “Even the building didn’t yet exist. And that was our good luck. Or bad luck, depending how you look at it.” He sipped more tea. He still hadn’t eaten a thing, and I was beginning to wonder how he was ever going to put on those extra pounds that I remembered. “Looking at the old maps, I’d found out that the building with the Dragon Hall would go up on a site which, from the late sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, was a small square with a fountain in the middle of it.”
“I don’t quite understand.”
“Hang on a minute. This discovery was our ticket to ride. Lucy and Paul could travel from the Dragon Hall to that square further back in the past, and then they only had to find their way back to it in good time to travel automatically back to the Dragon Hall. Are you still with me?”
“But suppose they landed in the square in broad daylight? Wouldn’t they have been arrested and burnt for witchcraft?”
“It was a quiet little place; they usually passed entirely unnoticed. And if anyone did see them, they probably just rubbed their eyes in surprise and thought they hadn’t been attending for a split second. Of course it was still very dangerous, but we thought it was a positively brilliant idea. We congratulated ourselves on thinking it up and tricking everyone, and Lucy and Paul had a great time. So did I, even if I was always on tenterhooks in the Dragon Hall waiting for them to come back. Imagine if someone had come in just then—”
“It was very brave,” I said.
“Yes,” admitted Lucas, looking a little guilty. “You only do that kind of thing when you’re young. I certainly wouldn’t do it today. But I thought if it really turned dangerous, then my wise old self from the future would intervene, do you see?”