The crowd roared as she threw the glove and Gordon caught it.
“Go on!” they all shouted, and Charlotte turned her attention to the other glove. But then she suddenly stopped. She’d seen Gideon in the doorway, and her eyes narrowed. “Well, well, look who’s here!” she said into the mike, and her glance moved on over the heads of all the guests until it stopped at me. “And my little cousin, too … of course! Listen, did you know that Gwyneth’s really a time traveler? It was supposed to be me, but that’s not how things turned out. And suddenly here I am like one of Cinderella’s stupid sisters.”
“Go on singing!” shouted her bewildered groupies.
“Get ’em off!” shouted Gordon.
Charlotte put her head on one side, and her burning eyes fixed on Gideon. “But I won’t stop until that boy is mine!” she sang. “Ha, ha, that’s a joke! I wouldn’t stoop so low.” She pointed her forefinger at Gideon, and called, “He can travel in time as well. And soon he’ll be healing all the diseases in the world.”
“Oh, shit,” muttered Lesley.
“Someone must get her down from there,” I said.
“Yes, but how? She’s a fighting machine. Maybe we could simply throw something heavy at her,” suggested Raphael.
Charlotte’s audience wasn’t sure what was going on. Somehow people seemed to notice that she was in anything but a relaxed mood. Only Gordon went on shouting cheerfully, “Get ’em off!”
I tried to make eye contact with Gideon, but he was looking at Charlotte. He slowly made his way to the table on which she was standing.
She took a deep breath, and the microphone broadcast her sigh to every corner of the conservatory. “He and I … we know all about history. We studied time travel together. You should just see him dancing a minuet. Or fencing. Or playing the piano.”
Gideon had almost reached her.
“He’s eerily good at everything he does. Oh, and he can make declarations of love in eight languages,” said Charlotte dreamily, and for the first time in my life, I saw tears come into her eyes. “Not that he’d ever have made one to me—oh, no! He has eyes for no one but my silly cousin.”
I bit my lip. That sounded like a broken heart, and no one in the world understood broken hearts better than me. Who’d have thought Charlotte even had a heart? Once again, I hoped that Lesley’s marzipan theory was right. Although my own heart felt a painful pang, and I had to work hard at suppressing the waves of jealousy that threatened to submerge me.
Gideon reached his hand up to Charlotte. “Time to go home.”
“Booo!” shouted Gordon, who was about as sensitive as a combine harvester, but all the other guests were holding their breath in suspense.
“Leave me alone,” Charlotte told Gideon. She was swaying slightly. “I’m not through with what I have to say yet.”
With one bound, Gideon was up on the table himself, and next moment, he had wrestled the microphone from her grasp. “The show’s over,” he announced. “Come along, Charlotte, I’ll take you home.”
Charlotte spat at him like a furious cat. “If you touch me, I’ll break your neck. I can do Krav Maga, you know!”
“So can I, remember?” He held out his hand to her again. Hesitantly, Charlotte took it, and even let him lift her down from the table, a tired, tipsy elf who could hardly keep on her feet any longer.
Gideon put an arm around her waist and turned to us. As so often, his expression didn’t tell you what he was thinking. “I’ll just deal with this. You girls go to my place with Raphael,” he said briefly. “We’ll meet there.”
For a moment our eyes met.
“See you soon,” he told me.
I nodded. “See you soon.”
Charlotte didn’t say another word.
And I wondered whether, maybe, when Cinderella had ridden away with the prince on his white horse, she too had a few tiny little guilt feelings.
Forever—is composed of Nows—
EMILY DICKINSON
FOURTEEN
“ONE MORE REASON to stay on the wagon,” groaned Lesley. “Look at it any way you like, when you’ve had too much to drink and made an exhibition of yourself, you feel a real idiot. I wouldn’t like to be in Charlotte’s shoes at school on Monday.”
“Or Cynthia’s,” I said. As we left the house, we’d seen the birthday girl necking in the cloakroom with a boy two years younger than our class. (In the circumstances, I hadn’t bothered to say good-bye to Cynthia, particularly as we hadn’t even said hello.)
“And I wouldn’t like to be the poor guy who threw up all over Mr. Dale’s funny froggy feet,” said Raphael.
We turned into Chelsea Manor Street. “But Charlotte really took the cake.” Lesley stopped outside the window of a furnishing fabrics store, not to look at the display but to admire her own reflection. “I hardly like to say it, but I did feel really sorry for her.”
“Me too,” I said quietly. After all, I knew exactly what being in love with Gideon felt like. And unfortunately I also knew what it felt like to make an exhibition of myself in front of everyone.
“With luck, she’ll have forgotten all about it in the morning.” Raphael unlocked the front door of Gideon’s apartment in a large red brick building. The Dales’ house in Flood Street was very close, so it had seemed sensible to change at Gideon’s place for the party.
Only now did I take a closer look at it. Earlier, I’d been in too much of an emotional state after my meeting with Lucy and Paul in 1912 to notice anything. I’d been sure that Gideon lived in one of those ultra-hip apartments, a hundred square yards of yawning void, all chrome and glass and a flat-screen TV the size of a football field. But I’d been wrong. A narrow hall led from the door past a small staircase to a living room flooded with light; its back wall was a huge window. The other walls were lined with shelves up to the ceiling, with books, DVDs, and a few files stacked on them, all jumbled up together, and in front of the windowsill there was a large gray sofa with a lot of cushions.
But the heart of the room was an open grand piano, although an ironing board propped casually against it made it look slightly less impressive. And the three-cornered hat slung over one corner of the piano lid didn’t quite fit the picture either. Madame Rossini was probably searching desperately for that ’at. Still, maybe this was Gideon’s idea of Homes & Gardens.
“What would you like to drink?” said Raphael, acting the perfect host.
“What is there?” Lesley asked, looking suspiciously at the open door to the kitchen, where the sink was piled high with dishes and plates encrusted with what had presumably once been tomato sauce. Or maybe it was a medical experiment and part of Gideon’s studies.
Raphael opened the fridge. “Hm. Let’s see. There’s some milk, but its use-by date was last Wednesday. Orange juice … oh. Can orange juice solidify? It kind of rattles inside the carton. Ah, this looks hopeful, could be some kind of lemonade. If we mix it with—”
“I’d just like some water, please.” Lesley was about to drop on the huge gray sofa, but remembered at the last minute that the Grace Kelly dress wasn’t suitable for lounging in and sat primly on the edge of the seat instead. I flopped down beside her with a huge sigh.
“Poor Gwenny.” She patted my cheek lovingly. “What a day! You must be worn out. Is it any consolation if I say you don’t look it?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “A bit.”
Raphael came back with glasses and a bottle of water, and swept a few magazines and books off the coffee table, including an illustrated volume about men in the Rococo period.
“Can you move a few square yards of those skirts aside to make room for me on this sofa?” He grinned down at me.
“Oh, never mind that, just sit on the dress,” I said, letting my head drop back and closing my eyes.
Lesley jumped up. “No, no, don’t! We’ll tear something, and then we’ll never be allowed to borrow any clothes from Madame Rossini again. Come on, get up and I’ll unlace the top.” She pulled me to my feet again and started helping me out of the Queen Alexandra dress. “You look somewhere else while we do this, Raphael.”
Raphael stretched out full length on the sofa and stared at the ceiling. “Okay like this?”
Once I was back in jeans and T-shirt, and I’d drunk a few sips of water, I felt rather better.
“What was it like meeting your … I mean, meeting Lucy and Paul?” asked Lesley quietly when we were sitting on the sofa again.
Raphael looked sympathetically at me. “Must be gross to have your own parents basically the same age as yourself.”
I nodded. “It was rather … weird and … and upsetting.” And then I told them all about it, beginning with the butler’s greeting, going on to our confession that we’d already closed the Circle of Blood with the stolen chronograph. “It left them reeling to know that we actually had the philosopher’s stone in our hands—or the glittery salt, as my gargoyle friend Xemerius calls it. They got terribly worked up, and when she’s worked up, Lucy talks even more than I do, can you believe it? They didn’t stop saying what a dreadful thing we’d done until I told them I knew about the … er, the exact way we were related.”
Lesley’s eyes were wide. “So?”
“So then they shut up. Until we all burst into tears again a moment later,” I said, rubbing my tired eyes. “I guess all the tears I’ve shed over the last few days would irrigate a drought-stricken field in Africa.”
“Oh, Gwenny.” Helplessly, Lesley stroked my arm.
I tried to grin. “Yes, and then we gave them the good news that, as it happens, the count can’t kill me because it seems I’m immortal. Of course they couldn’t believe it, and time was running short, so we couldn’t prove it to them by getting Stillman to try a quick strangling act on me or something. We had to leave them looking stunned and run, if we were to get back to the church in time to travel back.”
“So now what?”
“Tomorrow morning we’re going to meet them again, and then Gideon will tell them his brilliant plan,” I said. “The only trouble is that he still has to work it out overnight. And if he’s half as exhausted as I am, he won’t even be able to think straight.”
“Well, that’s what coffee is for. And what I’m for as well—the brilliant Lesley Hay.” Lesley gave me an encouraging smile. Then she sighed. “But you’re right, it’s not that simple. I mean, it’s great that you two have a chronograph for traveling in time under your own steam, but there are limits to the amount you can use it. Especially when we remember that you have to go and see the count again tomorrow, and that’ll leave you only two hours or less of your quota of time for elapsing.”
“What?” I said blankly.
Lesley sighed. “Didn’t you read that bit in Anna Karenina? You can’t elapse for more than five and a half hours a day, or there are side effects.” Lesley acted as if she didn’t notice Raphael’s admiring expression. “And I don’t know that I like you having that salty stuff. It’s … it’s dangerous. I hope at least you’ve hidden it somewhere no one can find it.”