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I didn’t do anything. No one had taught me how to manage a curtsey in a hooped skirt, and curtseying didn’t feel natural anyway.
“I didn’t expect to see you back so soon, my young friend,” said the man I took to be Count Saint-Germain. He was smiling broadly. “Lord Brompton, may I introduce my great-great-great grandson’s great-great-great-grandson to you? Gideon de Villiers.”
“Lord Brompton!” Another little bow. Obviously shaking hands wasn’t the fashion yet.
“Visually at least, I consider that my line has turned out extremely well,” said the count. “I obviously had luck in choosing the lady of my heart. The tendency to a large hooked nose has entirely died out.”
“Now, now, my dear Count, there you go trying to impress me with your tall tales again,” said Lord Brompton, dropping back into his chair. The chair was so tiny that I was afraid it might collapse under him there and then. His lordship wasn’t just a bit plump, like Mr. George—he was really huge!
“But I have no objection,” he went on, with his little piggy eyes twinkling cheerfully. “Your company is always so very entertaining. A new surprise every few seconds!”
The count laughed and turned to the younger, bare-headed man. “Lord Brompton is and always will be skeptical, my dear Miro! We must think a little harder to find some way of convincing him of our cause.”
The man replied in a harsh, clipped foreign language, and the count smiled again. He turned to Gideon. “This, my dear grandson, is my good friend and companion Miro Rakoczy, better known in The Annals of the Guardians as the Black Leopard.”
“Delighted to meet you,” said Gideon.
More bows all round.
Rakoczy—why did that name seem familiar to me? And why did the sight of him make me feel so uncomfortable?
A smile curled the count’s lips as his eyes slowly moved down over my figure. I automatically looked for some resemblance in him to Gideon or Falk de Villiers, but I couldn’t find one. The count’s eyes were very dark, and his gaze was penetrating. It immediately made me think again of what my mother had said.
Think! No, don’t! But my mind had to have something to occupy it, so I sang “God Save the Queen” in my head.
The count switched to French, which I didn’t understand at first (particularly as inside my head I was busy singing the national anthem at the top of my imaginary voice), but which, with some hesitation and leaving gaps on account of my poor command of French vocabulary, I translated as “And so you, pretty girl, are a [gap] of the good [gap] Jeanne d’Urfé. I was told you had red hair.”
Yikes! It was probably a fact that learning vocabulary was actually essential to understanding a foreign language, like our French teacher had always said. And sadly I didn’t know anyone called Jeanne d’Urfé, so I really couldn’t understand what he was talking about anyway.
“She doesn’t know French,” said Gideon, also in French. “And she isn’t the girl you were expecting.”
“But how can that be?” The count shook his head. “All this is extremely [gap].”
“Unfortunately, the wrong girl was prepared for the [gap].”
Yes, unfortunately.
“A mistake?”
“This is Gwyneth Shepherd, a cousin of the Charlotte Montrose I mentioned to you yesterday.”
“Ah, another granddaughter of Lord Montrose, the last [gap]. And thus a cousin of the [gap]?” Count Saint-Germain’s dark eyes were resting on me, and I began singing in my mind again.
Send her victorious, happy and glorious …
“It’s the [gap, gap] that I simply do not understand.”
“Our scientists say that it is perfectly possible for a genetic [gap] to—”
The count raised his hand to interrupt Gideon. “I know, I know! That may be so, according to the laws of science, but nonetheless, I do not feel happy about it.”
I shared his feelings.
“No French, then?” he asked, switching to German. I was a little better at German, or at least, my mark had been a regular B for four years now, but once again there were those annoying gaps in my vocabulary. “Why has she been so poorly prepared?”
“She hasn’t been prepared at all, sir. She speaks no foreign languages.” Gideon was speaking German too now. “And in every other respect, she is also entirely [gap]. Charlotte and Gwyneth were born on the same day. But everyone mistakenly assumed that Gwyneth was born a day later.”
“How could such a thing be overlooked?” Ah, at last I could understand every word again. They’d switched back to English, which the count spoke without a trace of foreign accent. “Why, I wonder, do I begin to feel that the Guardians of your time no longer take their work entirely seriously?”
