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I spun around. The room was full of a jumble of crates and pieces of furniture, and a pale young man was leaning against the wall by the door.
“Not to Win but to T-take Part,” I stammered.
“Gwyneth Shepherd?” he stammered back.
I nodded. “How do you know?”
The young man took a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and held it out to me. He looked just as excited as I felt. He was wearing suspenders and a small pair of round-rimmed glasses; his fair hair had a side parting and was combed back with a lot of hair cream. He could have been in one of those old gangster films as the precociously clever but harmless assistant to the hard-boiled chain-smoking detective who falls for the gangster’s moll, the girl with all those feather boas who always gets shot in the end.
o;Of course.” Mr. Whitman waved the scarf cheerfully in the air as he walked along. “In fact, you can change your clothes there. You won’t be meeting anyone in the past. What year shall we send you to?”
“Makes no difference if I’m shut up in a cellar, does it?” I said.
“Let’s see, it has to be a year when you can land in … er, in the aforesaid cellar without any problems. That’s all right after 1945—for a few years before that, the cellars were used as air raid shelters. How about 1974? The year when I was born, a good year.” He laughed. “Or shall we try 30 July 1966? That’s when England beat Germany in the World Cup final. But I don’t suppose you’re very interested in football, are you?”
“Particularly not when I’m holed up in a cellar without any windows, a long way below ground level,” I said wearily.
“It’s all done for your own safety.” Mr. Whitman sighed.
“Hold on a moment,” said Xemerius, who was flying along beside me. “I can’t quite keep up with all this. Does it mean you’re going to get into a time machine now and disappear into the past?”
“Yes, exactly,” I told him.
“Then let’s go for the year 1948,” said Mr. Whitman happily. “The year of the London Olympic Games.”
He was walking ahead, so he couldn’t see me roll my eyes.
“Time travel! Wow! Interesting girlfriend I’ve found myself!” said Xemerius, and for the first time I thought I detected a note of respect in his voice.
* * *
THE ROOM where the chronograph was kept was deep underground, and although I’d always been brought down here and led up again blindfolded, by now I had some idea where it was. If only because in both 1912 and 1782 I’d been allowed to leave the room without a blindfold. When Mr. Whitman led me, blindfolded now, away from Madame Rossini’s sewing room and along the corridors and staircases, the way began to seem quite familiar, and it was only at the end of it that I felt Mr. Whitman was taking an extra detour to confuse me.
“He really piles on the suspense, doesn’t he?” said Xemerius. “Why did they hide this time machine down in a deep, dark cellar?”
I heard Mr. Whitman talking to someone, then a heavy door opened and latched again behind us, and Mr. Whitman took off my blindfold.
I blinked at the light. A red-haired young man in a black suit was standing beside Mr. Whitman. He looked slightly nervous and was sweating with excitement. I glanced around for Xemerius. He was putting his head back through the closed door, just for fun, while the rest of him was here in the room with us.
“Thickest walls I ever saw,” he said when he reappeared. “So thick they could have walled up a bull elephant here sideways, if you see what I mean.”
“Gwyneth, this is Mr. Marley, Adept First Degree,” said Mr. Whitman. “He’ll wait here for you to come back and then take you up again. Mr. Marley, this is Gwyneth Shepherd, the Ruby.”
“It’s an honor to meet you, Miss Shepherd.” The redhead made me a little bow.
I smiled at him, feeling a bit embarrassed. “Er … pleased to meet you, too.”
Mr. Whitman was doing something to an ultramodern safe with a display of flashing lights. I hadn’t noticed it on my last two visits to this room. It was hidden behind a tapestry on the wall embroidered with what looked like scenes out of medieval fairy tales—knights on horseback with plumed helmets, ladies with pointy hats and veils obviously admiring a half-naked young man who had killed a dragon. As Mr. Whitman tapped a sequence of numbers into the keypad of the safe, Mr. Marley discreetly looked down at the floor, but you couldn’t make anything out anyway, because Mr. Whitman’s broad back hid the display from our eyes. The safe door swung open gently, and Mr. Whitman took out the chronograph in its red velvet wrapping and put it on the table.
Mr. Marley held his breath in surprise.
“This is Mr. Marley’s first sight of the chronograph in action,” said Mr. Whitman, eyes twinkling at me. With his chin, he indicated a flashlight lying on the table. “Take that just in case there’s any problem with the electric light. So you needn’t be afraid of the dark.”
“Thanks.” I wondered whether to ask for an insecticide spray as well. An old cellar was bound to be full of creepy-crawlies—and what about rats? It wasn’t fair, sending me off all on my own. “Please could I have a stout stick too?”
“A stick? Gwyneth, you’re not going to meet anyone there.”
“But there could be rats—”
