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“Let me make this perfectly clear: you’re a nuisance! So please go away!” I hissed.
“Won’t! And you’d be sorry later. Here comes your boyfriend, by the way. Kissy kissy!” And he pursed his lips and made loud kissing noises.
“Oh, shut up.” I saw Gideon striding around the corner. “And go away.” I said that last bit without moving my lips, like a ventriloquist. But of course the gargoyle still wasn’t impressed.
“No need to take that tone, young lady!” he said, sounding satisfied. “Don’t forget that when you shout the echo comes back the same.”
Gideon wasn’t alone. I saw the stout figure of Mr. George puffing along after him. He had to run to keep up. But even from a distance, I could see him beaming at me.
I straightened up and smoothed down my dress.
“Gwyneth, thank God!” said Mr. George as he mopped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. “Everything all right, my dear?”
“Fatso there is right out of breath,” said the gargoyle.
“Fine, thanks, Mr. George. We just had a few … er, problems…”
Gideon, who was giving the taxi driver several banknotes, cast me a warning glance across the car roof.
“… with timing,” I murmured, watching the taxi driver turn out into the street, shaking his head, and drive away.
“Yes, Gideon’s told me there were complications. That’s extraordinary. There’s a loophole in the system somewhere. We’ll have to analyze it thoroughly, and maybe do some rethinking. But what really matters is that nothing happened to you two.” Mr. George offered me his arm, which looked a little odd because I was a few inches taller than him. “Come along, my dear. There are things we have to do.”
“I’d really like to get home as soon as possible,” I said. The gargoyle shinned up a drainpipe and made his way along the gutter toward us, hand over hand, singing “Friends Will Be Friends” at the top of his voice.
“Yes, of course you would,” said Mr. George. “But you’ve only spent three hours in the past today. To be on the safe side until tomorrow afternoon, you’ll have to elapse for another couple of hours now. Don’t worry, it won’t be any trouble. A nice comfortable room in the cellars where you can do your homework.”
“But—my mum is sure to be waiting for me and worrying!” What was more, this was Wednesday, and Wednesday was our day for roast chicken and french fries. Not to mention the fact that a bathtub and my bed were waiting for me at home!
And pestering me with homework too, in a situation like this, was really too much! Someone ought just to write the school a note. Since Gwyneth is away on important time-travel missions these days, she must be excused homework in future.
The gargoyle was still warbling away on top of the roof, and I had to make a great effort not to put him right. Thanks to SingStar and karaoke afternoons at my friend Lesley’s place, I knew the lyrics to all of Queen’s greatest hits, and I knew for a fact that there were no gherkins in that song.
“Two hours will be enough,” said Gideon, once again taking such long strides that Mr. George and I could hardly keep up. “Then she can go home and have a good sleep.”
I hated it when he talked about me in the third person in front of me. “Yes, and she’ll be glad of that,” I said, “because she really is very tired.”
“We’ll call your mother and explain that you’ll be brought home by ten at the latest,” said Mr. George.
By ten? So long, roast chicken, it’s been good to know you. I’d bet anything my greedy little brother would have guzzled up mine by then.
“When you’re through with life and all hope is lost,” sang the gargoyle, coming down the brick wall half-flying, half-climbing, to land neatly on the pavement beside me.
“We’ll say you still have lessons,” said Mr. George, more to himself than to me. “Maybe you’d better not mention your trip to the year 1912. She thought you’d been sent to elapse in 1956.”
We’d reached the headquarters of the Guardians. Time travel had been controlled from here for centuries. The de Villiers family was apparently directly descended from Count Saint-Germain, one of the most famous time travelers. We Montroses were the female line, which as the de Villiers men saw it, meant that we didn’t really matter.
It was Count Saint-Germain who had discovered how to control time travel by using the chronograph, and he had also given the crazy order for all twelve time travelers to be read into the wretched thing.
By now the only travelers missing were Lucy, Paul, Lady Tilney, and some other female, a court lady whose name I could never remember. We still had to fix it for those four to give a few drops of their blood.
And the ultimate question was, What exactly was going to happen when all twelve time travelers really had been read into the chronograph, and the Circle of Twelve was closed? No one seemed to know for certain. As for the Guardians, they were like a lot of lemmings where the count was concerned. Blind devotion was a mild description of their attitude.
My own throat tightened up at the mere thought of Saint-Germain, because my only meeting with him in the past had been anything but pleasant.
Mr. George was puffing and blowing as he went up the steps to the house ahead of me. His small, round form always had something comforting about it. At least, he was just about the only one of the whole bunch I trusted an inch. Apart from Gideon—although, no, you couldn’t actually say I trusted Gideon.
Outside, the Lodge building looked just like the other buildings in the narrow streets around Temple Church, most of them lawyers’ chambers or offices occupied by professors of law. But I knew that the place was much bigger and a great deal grander than it seemed from the street, and there was a huge amount of space in it, particularly below ground level.
