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“Forget it, Gwen. They’re never going to let you go to 1912 with me again, not unless it’s on the count’s express orders.” Gideon put his hand out, pulled me to my feet, and then rather clumsily tried smoothing down the hair at the back of my head. He’d got it into that untidy state himself.
“What a good thing that I just happen to have a chronograph of my own hidden at home, then,” I said as casually as I could. “And by the way, it works perfectly.”
Gideon stared at me. “You what?”
“Oh, come on! Surely you knew! How else could I have met Lucas so often?” I put one hand on my stomach. It was already beginning to give me that roller-coaster feeling.
“I thought you’d found some way to meet him while you were elapsing, and—” Gideon dissolved into thin air before my eyes. I followed him a few seconds later, after running my hands over my hair once again.
I’d been sure that the chronograph room would be teeming with Guardians when we came back, all of them furious with Gideon for his unauthorized action (and secretly I expected to see Mr. Marley, with a black eye, standing in a corner and insisting that Gideon must be taken away in handcuffs), but all was quiet.
There was only Falk de Villiers in the room—and my mum. She was sitting on a chair, a picture of misery, wringing her hands, and she gave me a tearful look. Her mascara and eye shadow made an irregular pattern of stripes on her cheeks.
“Ah, so there you two are,” said Falk. His voice and expression were neutral, but I thought it perfectly possible that beneath that façade, he was seething with rage. There was a strange gleam in his amber-colored wolf’s eyes. Beside me, Gideon instinctively stood up very straight and raised his chin slightly, as if bracing himself for a lecture.
I quickly reached for his hand. “It’s not his fault—I didn’t want to elapse on my own,” I said quickly. “Gideon didn’t mean to spoil the plan—”
“That’s all right, Gwyneth.” Falk gave me a weary smile. “Right now various things aren’t going according to plan.” He passed his hand over his forehead and cast Mum a brief sidelong glance. “I’m very sorry that when we were talking at midday … you had to learn the facts like that. It certainly wasn’t intentional.” He looked at Mum again. “News of that kind ought to be broken more gently.”
Mum said nothing, just tried hard to hold back her tears. Gideon squeezed my hand.
Falk sighed. “I guess you and Grace will have a good deal to talk about. We’d better leave you alone,” he said. “There’s an adept waiting outside the door to escort you upstairs when you’re ready. Coming, Gideon?”
Reluctantly, Gideon let go of my hand and kissed me on the cheek. As he did so, he whispered in my ear, “You’ll do fine, Gwen. And later we’ll talk about what you have in hiding at home.”
It took all my self-control not to cling to him and say, “Oh, please stay with me.”
I waited in silence until he and Falk had left, closing the door behind them. Then I turned to Mum and tried to smile. “I’m surprised they let you into their holy of holies here.”
Mum got up—tottering like an old lady—and gave me a wry smile in return. “They blindfolded me. Well, that boy with the face like a moon did. He had a split lip, and I expect that’s why he tied the knot so tight. It tweaked my hair horribly, but I didn’t dare to complain.”
“I know all about that.” I couldn’t summon up much sympathy for Mr. Marley’s split lip. “Mum—”
“I know you must hate me now.” Mum didn’t let me finish. “And I absolutely understand that.”
“Mum, I—”
“I’m so dreadfully sorry about it all! I ought never to have let it go so far.” She took a step toward me and put out her arms, only to let them fall helplessly to her sides again. “I’ve always been terrified of this day! I knew it would happen sometime or other, and the older you grew, the more afraid I was. Your grandfather…” She stopped, then took a deep breath, and went on, “My father and I were going to tell you together, once you were old enough to understand the facts and come to terms with them.”
“So Lucas knew?”
“Of course! He hid Lucy and Paul in Durham with us, and it was his idea for me to make out I was pregnant so that I could pretend the baby—that was you—was mine. Lucy went for medical checkups in Durham under my name. She and Paul spent almost four months with us, while Dad was busy laying false trails over half of Europe. It was really the perfect hiding place. No one cared about my pregnancy. We said the baby would be born in December, so that meant you weren’t of any interest to the Guardians and the family.” Mum looked past me at the tapestry on the wall, and her eyes were glazed. “Up to the end, we hoped it wouldn’t be necessary for Lucy and Paul to travel back into the past with the chronograph. But a private detective hired by the Guardians was watching our house.…” She shuddered at the memory. “My father managed to warn us just in time. Lucy and Paul had no other option—they had to run for it and leave you with us—a tiny baby with a funny little tuft of hair on your head and big blue eyes.” Now the tears were running down her cheeks. “Nicholas and I swore to keep you safe, and we loved you like our own child from the very first second.”
Without noticing it, I’d begun to cry again myself. “Oh, Mum—”
“You see, we’d never wanted to have children. There was so much poor health in Nicholas’s family, and I always thought I wasn’t the maternal type. But all that changed when Lucy and Paul had entrusted you to us.” Mum’s tears were unstoppable now. “You made us so … so happy. You changed our lives and showed us how wonderful children are. But for you, Nick and Caroline would never have been born.” She was sobbing so hard that she was unable to go on. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I flung myself into her arms.
“It’s all right, Mum!” I tried to say, but only a kind of snorkeling sound like a gurgle came out. Mum seemed to understand it, all the same. She wound her arms around me and hugged me, and for quite a long time, we weren’t in any position to talk or to stop crying.
Until Xemerius put his head through the wall and said, “Oh, here you are!” He squeezed the rest of himself through into the room, flew over to the table, and settled there, staring curiously at us. “Oh, no! Two indoor fountains now. The Niagara Falls model must have been on special offer.”
I gently moved away from Mum. “Mum, we must go! Do you have any tissues on you?”
“If we’re lucky!” She rummaged in her bag and handed me one. “Why isn’t your mascara all over your face?” she asked with a faint grin.
I blew my nose noisily. “I’m afraid I already left it all over Gideon’s T-shirt.”
“He does seem to be a nice boy. Although I ought to warn you against him—those de Villiers men are nothing but bad news for us Montrose women.” Mum opened her powder compact, looked in the little mirror, and sighed. “Oh, mercy! I look like Frankenstein’s mother.”
