“You’re not allowed to—” Mr. Marley began, but suddenly all the friendliness had disappeared from Gideon’s eyes, and they looked so chilly that Mr. Marley ducked his head.
“But you mustn’t forget to blindfold her,” he said, and then he handed Gideon the black scarf and hurried away.
Gideon didn’t wait for him to be out of sight—he put his arms around me and kissed me hard on the mouth. “I’ve missed you so much.”
I was very glad Xemerius wasn’t there when I whispered, “Missed you too,” put my arms around his neck, and kissed him passionately back. Gideon pressed me against the wall, and we didn’t let go of each other until a picture fell down. An oil painting of a four-master sailing ship in a storm at sea. Breathlessly, I tried to hang it back on its nail.
Gideon helped me. “I was going to call you yesterday evening, but then I thought your mother was right—you badly needed some sleep.”
“Yes, I did.” I leaned back against the wall again and grinned at him. “I hear we’re going to a party together this evening.”
Gideon laughed. “Yes, a foursome, with my little brother. Raphael was very keen to go, especially when he heard that it was Lesley’s idea.” He stroked my cheek with his fingertips. “I somehow didn’t imagine our first date quite like that, but your friend can be very convincing.”
“Did she tell you it’s a costume party?”
Gideon shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing shocks me anymore.” His fingertips wandered down my cheeks to my throat. “We had so much … er … so much to talk about yesterday evening.” He cleared his throat. “I’d love to hear all about your grandfather, and how on earth you managed to meet him. Or rather when you managed to meet him. And what does the book that Lesley kept holding up like the Holy Grail have to do with it?”
“Oh, Anna Karenina! I brought it with me, although Lesley thought we ought to wait a little longer, until we could be really sure you were on our side.” I was about to pick up my bag, but it wasn’t there. I clicked my tongue, annoyed. “Oh, no, my mum took it with her when we got out of the car.”
The tune of “Nice Guys Finish Last” was playing somewhere. I couldn’t help laughing. “Isn’t that kind of—?”
“Er … maybe. Unsuitable?” Gideon fished his mobile out of his jeans pocket. “If that’s Marley, I’m going to—oh! My mother.” He sighed. “Seems like she’s found a boarding school for Raphael and wants me to persuade him to go to it. I’ll call her back later.”
The mobile went on ringing.
“It’s okay. Go ahead and answer it,” I said. “Meanwhile I’ll just run back and collect that book.”
I sprinted away without waiting for him to reply. Down in the cellar, Mr. Marley was probably freaked out, but who cared?
The door to the Dragon Hall was open just a crack, and even from a distance, I could hear my mum’s agitated voice.
“What’s this meant to be, an interrogation? I’ve told you my reasons already. I wanted to protect my daughter, and I hoped Charlotte would be the one to inherit the gene. That’s all there is to it.”
“Sit down again.” That was unmistakably Mr. Whitman, in the tone he used for troublesome students.
Chairs were shifted. Several people cleared their throats. I slowly stole closer.
“We did warn you, Grace.” Falk de Villiers spoke in icy tones. Mum was probably staring at her shoes and wondering why the hell she’d taken so much trouble with her outfit. I leaned back against the wall by the door, so that I could hear them better.
“It was stupid of you to think we wouldn’t find out the truth.” Dr. White’s grumpy voice.
Not another squeak out of Mum.
“We went on a little excursion to the Cotswolds yesterday to visit a Mrs. Dawn Heller,” said Falk. “That name means something to you, doesn’t it?”
When Mum still said nothing, he went on, “She’s the midwife who helped to bring Gwyneth into the world. Since you paid the rent of her holiday cottage with your credit card not so long ago, I’d really have expected you to remember her better.”
“Dear heaven, what have you done to the poor woman?” exclaimed Mum.
“Nothing, of course. What in the world are you thinking of?” That was Mr. George.
And Mr. Whitman, his voice dripping with sarcasm, added, “But she seemed to think we wanted to involve her in Satanic rites of some kind. She threw a fit of hysterics, crossing herself the whole time. And when she saw Jake, she almost fell down in a faint.”
“I was only going to give her a tranquilizing injection,” grumbled Dr. White.
“In the end, however, she calmed down enough for us to have a reasonably sensible conversation with her.” That was Falk de Villiers again. “And she told us the very interesting story of the night when Gwyneth was born. It sounded like something out of a cross between a fairy tale and a horror story. An honest but credulous midwife is called out to a young girl in labor. The girl has been living in a small terraced house in Durham, hiding away from a Satanic sect. The cruel sect, fixated on numerological rituals, is after not only the girl but also her baby. The midwife doesn’t know exactly what the Satanists plan to do with the poor little thing, but her imagination obviously works overtime. She has such a kind heart, and she is also being paid such a considerable sum of money—you can tell me how you came by it sometime, Grace—that after helping the baby into the world in a home birth, she falsifies the date on the child’s birth certificate. And she promises never to tell anyone a word about the deal.”
There was silence for some time. Then Mum said, a little defiantly, “Well, what about it? That’s exactly what I’ve already told you.”
“And so we thought ourselves, at first,” said Mr. Whitman. “But then we found that a few details of Mrs. Heller’s story surprised us.”
“You were almost twenty-eight in 1994—but yes, admittedly in the midwife’s eyes you could still have been considered a young girl,” Falk went on. “In that case, however, who was the anxious, red-haired sister of the mother-to-be whom Mrs. Heller mentioned?”
“She was getting on in years at the time,” said Mum quietly. “Sounds as if she’s senile by now.”
“Possibly. But she had no difficulty at all in recognizing the young girl in a photograph,” said Mr. Whitman. “The young girl who had a baby daughter that night.”
“It was a photograph of Lucy,” said Falk.
His words hit me like a punch in the stomach. As an icy silence spread in the Dragon Hall, my knees gave way, and I slowly slid down the wall to the floor.
“That’s … that’s a mistake,” I finally heard Mum whisper. Footsteps were coming toward me along the corridor, but I was unable to turn my head. Only when he bent over me did I realize that it was Gideon.
“What’s going on?” he whispered, crouching down on the floor in front of me.
“A mistake, Grace?” I could hear Falk de Villiers quite clearly. “The woman also recognized you in a photograph, as the supposed big sister who handed her an envelope with an extraordinarily large sum of money in it. And she recognized the man who held Lucy’s hand while she was giving birth! My brother!”
And as if it hadn’t quite gone home to me yet, he added, “Gwyneth is the child of Paul and Lucy.”
I let out an odd sort of whimper. Gideon, who had turned very pale, took my hands.
Inside the Dragon Hall, my mum began crying.
Except that she wasn’t my mum.
“None of it would have been necessary if you’d all of you left them alone,” she sobbed. “If you hadn’t pursued them so mercilessly.”
“No one knew that Lucy and Paul were expecting a baby,” said Falk heatedly.
“They’d committed theft,” snorted Dr. White. “They had stolen the Lodge’s most precious possession, and they were about to destroy everything that, in the course of the centuries—”
“Oh, shut up, for heaven’s sake!” cried Mum. “You forced those young people to abandon the daughter they loved so much, only two days after her birth!”
It was at that point that I jumped up—I don’t know how—and got to my feet again. I couldn’t listen to this for a second longer.
“Gwenny!” said Gideon urgently, but I shook off his hands and ran. “Where are you going?” After a few steps, he caught up with me.
“Away from here, that’s all.” I ran even faster. The porcelain in the glass cases clinked softly as we passed.
Gideon grabbed my hand. “I’m coming with you,” he said. “I’m not leaving you alone now.”
Somewhere or other in the corridors behind us, someone called our names.
“I don’t want…,” I gasped, “I don’t want to talk to anyone.”
Gideon tightened his grip on my hand. “I know where no one will find us for the next few hours. Come along!”
27 June 1542. Without my knowledge, M. persuaded Father Dominic of the Third Order, a man of extremely dubious reputation, to perform an exorcism on his daughter Elisabetta, of a kind intended to cure her of what he claims is demonic possession. By the time news of this wicked project reached me, it was too late. Although I gained access to the chapel in which the disgraceful procedure was being carried out, I could not prevent certain substances of a questionable nature from being administered to the girl, causing her to foam at the mouth, roll her eyes, and speak confusedly in tongues, while Father Dominic sprinkled her with holy water. As a result of this treatment, which I do not hesitate to describe as torture, Elisabetta lost the fruit of her womb that same night. Before he left, her father showed no remorse, but was triumphant at the supposed exorcism of the demon. He carefully recorded Elisabetta’s confession, made under the influence of pain and the aforesaid substances, and had it written down as evidence of her deranged state of mind. I declined the offer of a copy—my report to the head of the Congregation will meet with a lack of understanding in any case, that much is certain. I only wish that my report may contribute to causing M. to fall into disfavor with his patrons, but I do not feel very hopeful in that respect.
FROM THE RECORDS OF THE INQUISITION AS DRAWN UP BY FATHER GIAN PETRO BARIBI
OF THE DOMINICAN ORDER
ARCHIVES OF THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, PADUA
(DECIPHERED, TRANSLATED, AND EDITED BY DR. M. GIORDANO)
TWELVE
MR. MARLEY FROWNED as we burst into the chronograph room.
“Didn’t you blindfold her—” he started to say, but Gideon gave him no chance to finish the sentence.
“I’ll be elapsing to 1953 with Gwenny today,” he said.
Mr. Marley put his hands on his hips. “You can’t,” he said. “You need your time-travel quota for Operation Black Tourmaline forward slash Sapphire. And in case you’ve forgotten, that takes place at the same time.” The chronograph was on the table in front of Mr. Marley, with its jewels sparkling in the artificial light.