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I looked up at the church façade. I guessed it was Victorian architecture, with stained-glass windows and two elaborate, pretty towers. Brickwork alternated with cream-colored plaster, making a pattern of stripes. But however high I looked, I couldn’t see a single statue on the entire building, let alone another gargoyle. Odd that the ghost was haunting it all the same.
“Here I am!” called the gargoyle, clinging to the masonry right in front of my nose. He could climb like a lizard, of course—they all can. I stared at the brick next to his head for a second and turned away.
The gargoyle wasn’t so sure that I really could see him now. “Oh, please,” he said. “It would be so nice to talk to someone else for once, not just the ghost of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.”
Quite ingenious of him, but I wasn’t falling for that one. I did feel sorry for him, but I knew what a nuisance those little pests could be. What’s more, he’d disturbed me in mid-kiss, and all because of him, Gideon now probably thought I was a silly girl who didn’t know her own mind.
“Please, please, pleeeeease!” begged the gargoyle.
I went on ignoring him as hard as I could. As if I didn’t have enough problems already!
Gideon had gone to the edge of the pavement and was looking out for a taxi to hail. Of course a free one came along at once. Some people have all the luck. Or call it something like natural authority. My grandmother Lady Arista, for instance. She only had to stand at the roadside looking stern, and taxi drivers squealed to a halt right away.
“Coming, Gwyneth?”
“You can’t just walk away like that!” The hoarse, childlike voice sounded tearful, heartrending. “When we’ve only just this minute found each other.”
Very likely if we’d been on our own, I’d have let him persuade me to talk to him. In spite of his pointed fangs and clawlike feet, he was kind of cute, and he probably didn’t get much company. (I’d bet the ghost of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had more interesting things to do than talk to gargoyles. What was Sir Arthur’s ghost up to in London anyway?) But if you start talking to ghosts and so on in front of other people, they think you’re a liar or just showing off. That’s if you’re lucky. If you aren’t, which is most of the time, they think you’re totally crazy. Besides, the last gargoyle I talked to had been so affectionate and clinging that I could hardly even go to the toilet alone.
So I got into the taxi with a stony expression and stared straight ahead as we set off, with Gideon sitting next to me and looking out of the window. The taxi driver raised his eyebrows as he examined our costumes in the rearview mirror, but much to his credit, he made no comment.
“It’s nearly six thirty,” said Gideon, obviously trying to strike up a normal conversation. “No wonder I’m dying of starvation.”
Once he’d said it, I realized that I felt the same. I’d hardly managed to get half my breakfast down because of the edgy atmosphere around the family breakfast table, and as usual school lunch had been inedible. I thought rather wistfully of the appetizing sandwiches and scones on Lady Tilney’s tea table. We’d missed out on them as well.
Lady Tilney! Only now did it strike me that Gideon and I had better discuss our adventures in the year 1912. After all, our visit to her had gone wildly off course, and I had no idea what the Guardians, who considered time travel no joking matter, were going to think of that. Gideon and I had traveled back to 1912 on a mission to read Lady Tilney into the chronograph. (To be honest, I still didn’t entirely understand the reasons for that, but the whole thing seemed to be enormously important. As far as I could make it out, the safety of the world itself was at stake, at the very least.) But before we could do anything about that my cousin Lucy and Paul de Villiers came barging in. They were the villains of the piece, or anyway that’s how Gideon’s family and Gideon himself saw it. Apparently Lucy and Paul had stolen the other chronograph and hidden in the past with it. No one had heard of them for years—until they turned up at Lady Tilney’s house and wrecked our little tea party.
When exactly pistols were drawn was something I’d suppressed out of sheer fright, but at some point, Gideon had held a gun to Lucy’s head, a pistol that, strictly speaking, he ought not to have brought with him at all. (Like me when I took my mobile phone into the past, but at least you can’t shoot anyone dead with a mobile!) Then we ran for it and took shelter in the church. But all the time I’d been unable to shake off a feeling that the Lucy and Paul situation wasn’t quite as black and white as the de Villiers family liked to paint it.
“What are we going to say about Lady Tilney?” I asked.
“Hm.” Gideon rubbed his forehead wearily. “I’m not suggesting we should actually lie, but maybe, just this once, it would be a good idea to edit a few things out. You’d better leave the talking to me.”
There it was again, that familiar tone of command. “Oh, sure,” I said. “I’ll just nod and keep my mouth shut, the way a nice girl should.”
I instinctively, defiantly, crossed my arms. Why couldn’t Gideon act normal? First he kissed me (more than once, at that!), then he was back talking like a lordly Grand Master of the Guardians’ Lodge again. What was the idea?
We concentrated on looking out of our respective windows.
It was Gideon who finally broke the silence, which gave me a certain satisfaction. “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?” The way he asked, he sounded almost embarrassed.
“What?”
“It’s what my mother always used to say when I was little. If I was looking straight ahead and saying nothing, like you right at this moment.”
“You have a mother?” Only when I’d said it did I realize what a silly question it was! Oh, for heaven’s sake!
Gideon raised one eyebrow. “What did you expect?” he asked, amused. “You thought I was an android put together by Uncle Falk and Mr. George?”
“Well, it’s not such an outlandish idea. Do you have photos of yourself as a baby?” Trying to imagine a baby Gideon with a round, soft, plump-cheeked face and a bald head made me grin. “Where are your mum and dad, then? Do they live in London too?”
Gideon shook his head. “My father’s dead, and my mother lives in Antibes in the south of France.” For a brief moment, he pressed his lips together, and I was just thinking he’d retreat into silence when he went on. “With my little brother and her new husband, Monsieur Do-Call-Me-Papa Bertelin. He owns a company making platinum and copper microparts for electronic devices, and obviously the cash is rolling in. At least, he called his showy yacht the Croesus.”
I was really surprised. So much personal information all at once—it wasn’t a bit like Gideon. “Oh, but it must be cool going on holiday there, right?”
“Of course,” he said with derision. “They have a pool the size of three tennis courts, and the stupid yacht has gold-plated faucets.”
“Sounds better than a cottage without any heating in Peebles, anyway.” My family usually spent the summer up in Scotland. “If I were you, and I had a family in the south of France, I’d be off there like a shot every weekend. Even if they didn’t have any pool or any yacht.”
