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I got to my feet. “Thanks for answering my questions, anyway,” I said. “You’ve been a great help.”
“I don’t think so. I have a dreadfully guilty conscience. I really shouldn’t be satisfying your curiosity, particularly since I’m not supposed to know about any of it myself. In the old days, when I used to ask my brother—that’s your dear grandfather—about all these secrets, he always told me the same thing. The less you know, he said, the better for your health. Now, are you going to get me my sherbet lemons? And not the sugar-free kind, remember!”
Great-aunt Maddy waved as I left.
How could secrets be bad for anyone’s health? And how much had my grandfather known about it all?
* * *
“SIR ISAAC NEWTON?” repeated Lesley, baffled. “Wasn’t that the force of gravity guy?”
“That’s him, all right. But he also calculated the date of Charlotte’s birth.” I was standing in front of the yogurts in Selfridges Food Hall, holding my mobile to one ear with my right hand and covering the other ear with my left hand. “Only the crazy thing is that no one will believe he made a mistake. Who’d expect Newton to get his sums wrong? But he must have been wrong, Lesley. I was born one day after Charlotte, and I traveled back in time. Not her.”
“That’s more than mysterious. Oh, this stupid thing is taking forever to start up. Come on, will you?” Lesley shouted at her computer.
“Lesley, it was so—so weird! I almost spoke to one of my ancestors! Maybe that fat man on the painting in front of the secret door, Great-great-great-great-great-uncle Hugh, for instance. Well, if it was in his time and not some other period. They could have had me sent off to a loony bin.”
“I hate to think what could have happened to you,” said Lesley. “I still can’t get my mind around this! So much fuss made of Charlotte all these years, and now this happens! Look, you have to tell your mum right away. You’d better go straight back home. It could happen again any moment!”
“Scary, right?”
“Very. Okay, I’m online now. First off I’ll Google Newton. And you just go home! Any idea how long Selfridges has been there in Oxford Street? Could have been a deep pit in the old days, and you’d fall twelve yards down!”
“My grandmother will freak right out when she hears about this,” I said.
“Yes, and then there’s poor Charlotte … well, just think, all these years she’s had to give up everything, and now she gets nothing in return. Ah, here we are. Newton. Born 1643 in Woolsthorpe—where on earth is that?—died 1727 in London. Blah blah blah. Nothing about time travel here, just stuff about infinitesimal calculus—never heard of it, how about you? Transcendence of all spirals.… Quadratics, optics, sky mechanics, blah blah—ah, here we are, here’s the law of gravity.… Tell you what, that bit about transcendental spirals sounds kind of closest to time travel, don’t you think?”
“To be honest, no,” I said.
A couple standing next to me were discussing the yogurt variety they were going to buy at the tops of their voices.
“Are you by any chance still in Selfridges?” shouted Lesley, who had obviously overheard the yogurt orders. “Go home!”
“On my way,” I said, waving the yellow paper bag containing Great-aunt Maddy’s sherbet lemons in the direction of the exit. “But, Lesley, I can’t tell them this at home. They’ll think I’m crazy.”
Lesley spluttered down the phone. “Gwen! Any other family might well send you to the loony bin, but not yours! They’re always talking about time-travel genes and chronometers and instruction in mysteries.”
“It’s a chronograph,” I corrected her. “The thing runs on blood! Is that gross or what?”
“Chro—no—graph! Okay, I’ve Googled it.”
I made my way through the crowds in Oxford Street to the next traffic lights. “Aunt Glenda will say I’m just making it all up to look important and steal the show from Charlotte.”
“So? When you next travel back in time, at the very latest, she’s going to notice that there’s been a mistake.”
“And suppose I never travel back again? Suppose it was just the once?”
“You don’t believe that yourself, do you? Okay, here we are, a chronograph seems to be a perfectly normal wristwatch. You can get them by the ton on eBay, ten pounds and upward. Oh, damn … wait, I’ll Google Isaac Newton plus chronograph plus time travel plus blood.”
“Well?”
“Nothing that helps us. At least I don’t think so.” Lesley sighed. “I wish we’d looked all this up earlier. The first thing I’m going to do is find some books about it. Anything I can dig up on time travel. Where did I put that stupid library card? Where are you now?”
“Crossing Oxford Street, then turning down Duke Street.” Suddenly I had to giggle. “Why? Are you planning to come here and draw a chalk circle just in case our connection suddenly breaks? But now I’m wondering what good the silly chalk circle was supposed to do Charlotte.”
“Maybe they’d have sent that other time traveler after her—what was his name again?”
“Gideon de Villiers.”
