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“No, but I can tell you something much more important. Now I know why Paul and Lucy will steal the chronograph.” Lucas looked briefly around and moved his chair a little closer to mine. “Since your first visit, Lucy and Paul have been here several times to elapse, and nothing special happened. We drank tea together, I tested them on their French verbs, and we spent four boring hours. They couldn’t leave the building, that was the rule, and that sneak Kenneth de Villiers made sure we kept it. I did once smuggle Lucy and Paul out so that they could see a film and look around for a while, but the stupid thing was that we were caught at it. Oh, why pretend? Kenneth caught us at it. There was a terrible row. I was disciplined, and for the next six months, a guard was always posted outside the Dragon Hall when Paul and Lucy were with us. That went on until I’d reached the rank of Adept Third Degree. Oh, thank you very much.” That was to the waitress, who looked just like Doris Day in The Man Who Knew Too Much. Her tinted blond hair was short, and she wore a pretty, floaty dress with a full skirt. She put our order down in front of us with a beaming smile, and I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if she’d burst out singing “Que Sera, Sera.”
Lucas waited until she was out of earshot and then went on. “Of course, at first I wanted to find out what kind of reason they could possibly have for going off with the chronograph, but I was on the wrong track. Their only problem was that they were madly in love with each other. Obviously no one looked kindly on that connection in their own time, so they kept it secret. According to them, only a few people did know about it, apparently including me and your mother, Grace.”
“Then they escaped into the past because they couldn’t be together? Like Romeo and Juliet! Wow, how romantic!”
“No,” said Lucas. “No, that wasn’t the reason.” He stirred his tea, while I looked greedily at the little basket of warm scones lying under a cloth napkin, smelling very tempting.
“I was the reason,” Lucas went on.
“What, you?”
“Well, not directly. But it was my fault. One day, you see, I got the crackbrained idea of sending Lucy and Paul a little farther back into the past.”
“With the chronograph? But how…”
“I told you it was a crackbrained idea. But there we were, shut up for four hours a day in that wretched Dragon Hall, along with the chronograph. So it’s hardly surprising if such crazy thoughts occurred to me. I looked at old maps, I studied the count’s secret writings and the Annals thoroughly, and then I borrowed costumes from the stock, and finally we read Paul and Lucy’s blood into the chronograph here. Then I sent them back on a two-hour trial journey to the year 1590. It worked without a hitch. When the two hours were up, they traveled back to me in 1948, and no one had noticed that they’d ever been gone. And half an hour later, they traveled back again to their own year, 1992. It went perfectly smoothly.”
I put a scone heavily laden with clotted cream into my mouth. I could think better if I was munching. A whole lot of questions came into my mind, and I tackled the first of them. “But 1590—there weren’t any Guardians at that time, were there?”
“Exactly,” said Lucas. “Even the building didn’t yet exist. And that was our good luck. Or bad luck, depending how you look at it.” He sipped more tea. He still hadn’t eaten a thing, and I was beginning to wonder how he was ever going to put on those extra pounds that I remembered. “Looking at the old maps, I’d found out that the building with the Dragon Hall would go up on a site which, from the late sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, was a small square with a fountain in the middle of it.”
“I don’t quite understand.”
“Hang on a minute. This discovery was our ticket to ride. Lucy and Paul could travel from the Dragon Hall to that square further back in the past, and then they only had to find their way back to it in good time to travel automatically back to the Dragon Hall. Are you still with me?”
“But suppose they landed in the square in broad daylight? Wouldn’t they have been arrested and burnt for witchcraft?”
“It was a quiet little place; they usually passed entirely unnoticed. And if anyone did see them, they probably just rubbed their eyes in surprise and thought they hadn’t been attending for a split second. Of course it was still very dangerous, but we thought it was a positively brilliant idea. We congratulated ourselves on thinking it up and tricking everyone, and Lucy and Paul had a great time. So did I, even if I was always on tenterhooks in the Dragon Hall waiting for them to come back. Imagine if someone had come in just then—”
“It was very brave,” I said.
“Yes,” admitted Lucas, looking a little guilty. “You only do that kind of thing when you’re young. I certainly wouldn’t do it today. But I thought if it really turned dangerous, then my wise old self from the future would intervene, do you see?”
o;Mr. George?” I asked incredulously.
“Have we met?” Young Mr. George had risen to his feet.
“Yes, of course. At … at the last garden party,” I stammered, while a jumble of ideas went around in my head. “I was the girl pouring the … but where’s my grand … where’s Lucas? Didn’t he tell you we had an appointment today?”
“I’m his assistant, but I haven’t been here very long,” said Mr. George, shyly. “No, he didn’t say anything about an appointment, but he ought to be back any time now. Would you like to sit down and wait for him, Miss—er…”
“Purpleplum!”
“Of course. Can I get them to bring you a coffee?” He came around the desk and pulled out a chair for me. I was very glad of it; my legs felt quite wobbly.
“No, thank you, no coffee,” I said.
He looked at me undecidedly. I stared silently back.
“Are you … are you in the Girl Guides?”
“What?”
“I mean … because of the uniform.”
“No.” I couldn’t help it, I just had to keep staring at Mr. George. It was unmistakably him! He was still very much the same when he was fifty-five years older, except for having no hair left, wearing glasses, and being as broad as he was tall.
Young Mr. George, on the contrary, had plenty of hair, neatly parted and kept in place with some kind of hair cream, and he was positively slender. Obviously he didn’t like being stared at, because he went red, sat down at the desk again, and leafed through some papers. I wondered what he would say if I took his signet ring out of my pocket and showed it to him.
