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“Oh, dear, I see,” said Lucas quickly. “You can’t, because I’ll be dead by then, or old and blind and deaf drowsing away in some senior citizens’ home.… No, no, please, I really don’t want to know.”
This time I couldn’t hold back my tears. I sobbed for at least half a minute because—strange as it sounds—I suddenly missed my grandfather dreadfully. “I loved you very much,” I said at last.
Lucas gave me a handkerchief and looked at me sympathetically. “Are you sure? I don’t even like children. Little pests, if you ask me.… But maybe you were a particularly nice child. In fact, I’m sure you were.”
“Yes, I was. But you were nice to all us kids.” I blew my nose noisily. “Even Charlotte.”
We said nothing for a little while. Then Lucas took a watch out of his pocket and said, “How much time do we have?”
“They sent me here for exactly two hours.”
“Not very long, then. We’ve wasted far too much time already.” He got up. “I’ll get pens and paper, and we’ll try to find some kind of system in all this chaos. You’d better stay here. Don’t move from the spot.”
I just nodded. When Lucas had left, I stared into nothing with my face buried in my hands. He was right. It was important to keep a clear head now.
Who knew when I’d meet my grandfather again? Which things that hadn’t happened yet ought I to tell him about, which should I hush up? And looking at it the other way around, I was desperately anxious for any information he could give me that might come in useful. Basically, he was my only ally. But living in the wrong time. And how could he cast light, from here, on any of the dark riddles facing me?
Lucas stayed away for some time, and as the minutes passed, I began to doubt my own feelings. Maybe he’d been lying, and any moment now he’d be back with Lucy and Paul and a big knife, to get blood out of me. Finally, feeling worried, I stood up and looked around for something I could use as a weapon. There was a board with a rusty nail in it lying in a corner, but when I picked it up, it crumbled apart in my fingers. At that very moment, the door opened again, and my young grandfather came back with a notepad under his arm and a banana in one hand.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Here, to stave off hunger pangs.” Lucas tossed me the banana, took a third chair off the pile, placed it between us, and put the notepad on it. “Sorry I was so long. That idiot Kenneth de Villiers was upstairs getting in my way. I can’t stand the de Villiers family. Always sticking their long noses into everything, wanting to be in control and make the decisions and always thinking they know best!”
“How right you are,” I murmured.
Lucas shook his wrist to loosen it up. “Then here goes—granddaughter. You’re the Ruby, the twelfth in the Circle. The Diamond, from the de Villiers family, was born two years before you. So he’d be around nineteen in your time. What’s his name again?”
“Gideon,” I said, and just saying it out loud made me feel warm. “Gideon de Villiers.”
Lucas’s pen was hurrying over the paper. “And he’s a pain in the neck, like all of them, but you still kissed him, if I caught the drift of what you were saying just now. Aren’t you rather young for that kind of thing?”
“Goodness me, no,” I said. “Far from it—I’m a late developer. All the girls in our class are on the pill but me.”
Well, all except Aishani, Maggie, and Cassie Clarke, but Aishani’s parents were conservative Indians and would murder Aishani if she so much as looked at a boy, Maggie fancied girls, and as for Cassie—one day I was sure those spots would go away of their own accord, and then she’d be nicer to other people and stop snapping, “What do you think you’re gawping at in that silly way?” when anyone even glanced in her direction.
“Oh, and of course Charlotte won’t have anything to do with sex either. That’s why Gordon Gelderman calls her the Ice Queen. But now I’m not so sure if that’s really right for her.…” I ground my teeth, because I was thinking how Charlotte had looked at Gideon—and vice versa. If you stopped to think how quickly Gideon had thought up the idea of kissing me, on only the second day after we met, I couldn’t even imagine what had been going on between him and Charlotte over all the years they’d known each other.
“What kind of pill?” asked Lucas.
“How do you mean?” Oh, my God, in the year 1948 they probably had nothing but cow-gut condoms, if that. I didn’t really want to know. “Honestly, I’d rather not talk to you about sex, Grandpa.”
Lucas looked at me, shaking his head. “And I’d rather not hear that word in your mouth. I don’t mean Grandpa.”
“Okay.” I peeled the banana as Lucas went on making notes. “What do you say instead?”
“Instead of what?”
“Instead of sex.”
“We don’t talk about it,” said Lucas, concentrating on his notepad. “Or anyway, not to girls of sixteen. So let’s go on. The chronograph was stolen by Lucy and Paul before the blood of the last two time travelers could be read into it. Then the second chronograph came into use, but of course the blood of all the other time travelers is missing from that one.”
“Not anymore. Gideon has found nearly all of them, and they gave him some of their blood. There’s only Lady Tilney to go, and the Opal, Elise something-or-other.”
“Elaine Burghley,” said Lucas. “A lady-in-waiting at the court of Queen Elizabeth. She died in childbirth aged eighteen.”
“Right. And Lucy and Paul’s blood too, of course. So we’re after their blood, and they’re after ours. Or that’s how I understand it, anyway.”
“And now there are two chronographs which might complete the Circle? This is really incredible!”
