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“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?”
“What wise old self from the future?”
“Well, me!” Lucas cried, and immediately lowered his voice again. “I mean, I thought that in 1992 I’d still remember what Lucy and Paul and I had been up to in 1948, and then, if it had gone wrong, I could have warned them to ignore my reckless younger self … or so I thought.”
“Okay,” I said slowly, helping myself to another scone. Good food for the brain. “But you didn’t?”
Lucas shook his head. “Evidently not, fool that I was. And so we got more and more reckless. When Lucy was studying Hamlet at school, I sent them off to the year 1602. Over three days in succession, they saw the premiere of the play by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe Theatre.”
“In Southwark?”
Lucas nodded. “Yes, it was quite tricky. They had to cross London Bridge to get to the south bank of the Thames, try to see as much of the play as possible in one go, and be back before they were due to travel forward in time. It worked well for the first two days, but on the third day, there was an accident on London Bridge, and Lucy and Paul were witnesses to a crime. They didn’t make it to the north bank in time, so they landed in Southwark in the year 1948 still half in the river, while I was going out of my mind with worry.” He obviously still remembered that vividly, because he went pale around the nostrils. “They reached the Temple just for a moment, dripping wet in their seventeenth-century costumes, before traveling on again to 1992. I didn’t hear what had happened until their next visit.”
My head was spinning with all these different dates. “What kind of a crime did they witness?”
Lucas moved his chair a little closer still. Behind his glasses, his eyes were dark and serious. “That’s the point! Lucy and Paul saw Count Saint-Germain murder someone.”
“The count?”
“Lucy and Paul had met the count only twice before, but they were sure it was him. After their initiation journey, they’d been introduced to him in the year 1784. The count himself decided on that date; he didn’t want to meet the time travelers who would be born after him until near the end of his own life. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the same with you.” He cleared his throat. “Will be the same with you. Whatever way around it is. Anyway, the Guardians traveled with Lucy and Paul and the chronograph specially to north Germany, where the count spent the last years of his life. I was with them myself. Will be with them. As Grand Master of the Lodge, would you believe it?”
I frowned. “Could we maybe…?”
“I’m trying to think of too many things all at once, right? It’s still more than I can grasp, knowing that these things are still going to happen although they took place long ago. Where were we?”
“How could the count commit a murder in 1602 … oh, I see! He did it on one of his own journeys back in time!”
“Yes, exactly. And when he was a very much younger man. It was an amazing coincidence that Lucy and Paul happened to be in just the same place at just the same time. If you can talk about coincidences at all in this connection. The count himself writes, in one of his many books, Those who believe in coincidence have not understood the forces of destiny.”
“Who did he murder? And why?”
Lucas looked around the café again. “That, my dear granddaughter, is something that we ourselves didn’t know at first. It was weeks before we found out. His victim was none other than Lancelot de Villiers. Amber. The first time traveler in the Circle.”
“He murdered his own ancestor? But why?”
“Lancelot de Villiers was a Flemish baron who moved to England with his whole family in 1602. The chronicles, and the writings of Count Saint-Germain that he left for the Guardians, say that Lancelot died in 1607, which threw us off the track for a while. But the fact is—I’ll spare you the details of our detective work—the baron’s throat was cut as he sat in his own coach in the year 1602.…”
“I don’t understand,” I murmured.
“I haven’t been able to fit all the pieces of the jigsaw together myself yet,” said Lucas, taking a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lighting one. “In addition, there’s the fact that I never saw Lucy and Paul again after 24 September 1949. I suspect that they went back to a time before my own, taking the chronograph with them, or they’d have visited me by now. Oh, damn … don’t look that way!”
