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“Well, I thought the pair of you might have taken a break from making plans after Raphael and I left.” She rubbed her nose. “Particularly as I spent ages saying good night to Raphael, on purpose to give you time to move from the sofa to the bedroom.”
“On purpose?” I asked slowly. “Wow, how self-sacrificing of you!”
Lesley grinned. “Yes, wasn’t it?” She didn’t even blush. “But don’t change the subject. You could have told your mum you were sleeping over with me.”
I smiled wryly. “To be honest, I’d have done just that. But Gideon insisted on calling a taxi for me.” I added, a little unhappily, “I obviously can’t have looked as seductive as I thought.”
“It’s only that he has a sense of—er—responsibility,” Lesley consoled me.
“You could call it that,” said Xemerius, who had finished flying the slalom. Breathing hard, he came down on the floor beside me. “Or you could call him a bore, slow off the mark, a scaredy-cat”—he stopped to get his breath back—“a shirker, a guy with no guts, just plain chickening out.…”
Lesley looked at her watch. She had to shout to be heard above the noise of an incoming Central Line train. “And he’s apparently not particularly punctual. It’s already twenty past.” She looked at the few passengers getting out of the train. Then, all of a sudden, her eyes lit up. “Oh, there they are.”
“That morning, the two eagerly awaited fairy-tale princes had left their white horses in the stable for once and traveled by Tube,” declaimed Xemerius unctuously. “At the sight of them, the eyes of the two princesses shone, and when the two concentrated sets of young hormones collided, expressing themselves in the form of embarrassed kisses and silly grins, the clever and incomparably handsome demon unfortunately had to throw up in a garbage bin.”
He was exaggerating outrageously—we none of us had silly grins on our faces. At the most, we were smiling blissfully. And no one was embarrassed, except perhaps me, because I remembered how Gideon had unwound my arms from around his neck last night, saying, “I’d better call you a taxi now. We’re going to have a strenuous day tomorrow.” I felt a bit like a burr that had to be picked off a pullover. And the worst of it was that at that very moment, I’d been getting ready to say “I love you.” Not that he hadn’t known that for ages, but … well, I hadn’t actually said it yet. And now I wasn’t quite sure whether he really wanted to hear it.
Gideon briefly caressed my cheek. “Gwenny, I can do this on my own, you know. I only have to intercept the Guardian on duty while he’s on his way to the Lodge and get the letter away from him again.”
“Only is good,” said Lesley. Although we were still far from having any really brilliant ideas up our sleeves, the four of us had worked out what Lesley called “a rough plan of action.” In any event, we had to see Lucy and Paul again, and we had to do it before we met the count this afternoon. We also had to do something about the letter that Gideon had taken last week to the year 1912, saying where Lucy and Paul were hiding. On no account must it fall into the hands of the Grand Master of the time and the de Villiers twins. As the time we could spare for secret travel by private chronograph was, we calculated, an hour and a half, maximum, if we didn’t want to risk doing ourselves physical damage (for instance imitating Xemerius and throwing up), how to make good use of every minute was going to be a problem.
At first Raphael had seriously suggested that we could smuggle the chronograph into the Guardians’ headquarters and travel straight back from there, but even his big brother didn’t have nerves strong enough for that.
As an alternative suggestion, Gideon had taken some rolled-up papers out of one of his bookshelves, and from between The Anatomy of Man in 3-D and Structural System of the Human Hand, he conjured up a map of the underground passages running through the Temple district. That map was why we were now meeting at the Tube station.
“You want to do it without us?” I frowned. “But we agreed that in future we’d do everything together.”
“Exactly,” said Raphael. “Otherwise you’ll end up saying you saved the world all by yourself.” He and Lesley were to stand guard over the chronograph, and although Xemerius, slightly offended, had said he could do the job just as well, it was comforting to know that they could pick it up and take it away with them if we were forced to travel back to somewhere else.
“Anyway, you’re sure to be in deep trouble without us!” Lesley snapped at Gideon.
Gideon raised his hands in the air. “Okay, okay, I get the idea.” He picked up my traveling bag and looked at the time. “Right, pay attention. The next train arrives at seven thirty-three. After that, we have exactly four minutes to reach the first passage before another train comes through. Don’t switch your flashlights on until I say so.”
“You’re right,” Lesley whispered to me. “He’s addicted to ordering people about.”
* * *
“MERDE!” Raphael’s curse was heartfelt. “That was close.”
I could only agree. The beams of our flashlights passed over the tiled walls and lit up our pale faces. The carriages of the train were rattling through the tunnel behind us.
Four minutes, we now knew, was a very small window of time to climb over the barrier at the end of the platform, jump down, and run along the tunnel, keeping well away from the electrified track. Not forgetting the time spent as we caught up with Gideon after the last fifty yards and stood gasping for breath and helpless in front of the iron door that let into the right-hand wall of the tunnel, while he took a kind of skeleton key out of his pocket and set about picking the lock. That was the moment when Lesley, Xemerius, and I had begun screeching in chorus, “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up!” to the accompaniment of the noise of the approaching train.
“It looked closer on the map,” said Gideon, glancing at us apologetically.
Lesley was the first to pull herself together. She shone the beam of her flashlight into the darkness ahead, lighting up the wall where the passage came to a sudden end four yards farther on. “Okay, this is the right place.” She checked the map. “That wall hadn’t been built yet in 1912. The passage goes on beyond it.”
As Gideon knelt down, unwrapped the chronograph, and entered the settings, I took our 1912 clothes out of the bag and prepared to take my jeans off.
“What’s the idea?” Gideon looked up at me, obviously preoccupied. “Are you planning to run along these passages in a long dress?”
“I just thought … I mean, on account of authenticity—”
“The hell with authenticity,” said Gideon.
Xemerius clapped his claws. “Too right, the hell with it!” he said enthusiastically. Then he turned to me. “Keeping bad company rubs off on you. And about time too.”
“You first, Gwenny.” Gideon nodded at me.
