Emerald Green

“Aunt Maddy! You haven’t gone and told Violet anything about the chronograph, have you?” cried Nick.

Aunt Maddy’s friend Violet Purpleplum was much what Lesley was to me.

“Of course not!” She looked at him indignantly. “I swore by my life not to breathe a word! I told her the light is better for needlework up here, and Arista can’t disturb us. Although one of your window frames needs repairing, Gwyneth dear. There’s a draft coming from somewhere. I could feel a breath of cold air all the time.”

Xemerius looked guilty. “I don’t do it on purpose,” he said. “But the book was so exciting.”

My thoughts were already busy with the coming night. “Aunt Maddy, who was sleeping in my room in November 1993?”

My great-aunt frowned thoughtfully. “Let me think—1993? Was Margaret Thatcher still prime minister? If so, then … oh, what was her name?”

“Oh, dear! Your old auntie is getting it all confused,” said Xemerius. “You’d do better to ask me! That was the year Groundhog Day hit cinema screens—I’ve seen it fourteen times—and the affair between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles went public, and the name of the prime minister was—”

“It doesn’t really matter,” I interrupted him. “I only want to know if I can travel back from here safely to 1993.” I suspected that Charlotte might have dug out a black combat suit and was now lurking in the corridor all around the clock. “Was anyone sleeping in this room at the time or not, Aunt Maddy?”

“Lanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch,” cried Aunt Maddy. Xemerius, Nick, and I stared at her, baffled.

“Now she’s gone right off her rocker,” said Xemerius. “I thought as much this afternoon, when she kept laughing at the wrong places in her book.”

“Lanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch,” repeated Aunt Maddy, beaming happily and popping a sherbet lemon into her mouth. “That’s the name of our housekeeper’s hometown in Wales. No one can say I don’t have a good memory.”

“Aunt Maddy, I only want to know whether—”

“Yes, yes, yes. Our housekeeper at the time was called Gladiola Langdon, and at the beginning of the nineties, she slept in what is now your mother’s room,” Aunt Maddy interrupted me. “Surprised, are you? Contrary to general opinion, your great-aunt has a fully functioning brain. At the time, the other rooms up here were used only occasionally, as guestrooms; the rest of the time they were empty. Gladiola was rather hard of hearing, so you can get into your time machine and climb out of it again in 1993. There’s nothing to worry about.” She giggled. “Gladiola Langdon—I don’t think we’ll ever forget her apple pie. Poor soul, it never occurred to her to core the apples and throw the cores and pips away.”

* * *

MUM HAD A RATHER guilty conscience about the flu I’d claimed to have. Falk de Villiers himself had called her in the afternoon and passed on Dr. White’s prescription of bed rest and plenty of hot drinks. She told me about a hundred times how sorry she was she hadn’t listened to me, and she squeezed me three lemons with her own hands. Then she sat beside my bed for half an hour to make sure I finished the hot lemon drink. I must have made my teeth chatter rather too convincingly, because she wrapped me in two extra blankets and put a hot-water bottle down at my feet.

“I’m a terrible mother,” she said, stroking my head. “And you’re having such a difficult time at the moment anyway!”

She was right about that, and not just because I felt like I was in a sauna. You could probably have fried eggs on my tummy. For a few seconds, I allowed myself to wallow in self-pity. But then I said, “You’re not a terrible mother at all, Mum.”

Mum looked, if anything, even more upset. “I do hope those old men won’t make you do anything dangerous. They’re so obsessed with all their mysteries.”

I quickly drank four mouthfuls of my hot lemon straight off. As usual, I was torn both ways: should I tell Mum everything or not? It wasn’t a good feeling to be telling her lies, or at least concealing such important things from her. But then again, I didn’t want her worrying about me or picking a fight with the Guardians. And she probably wouldn’t be very happy to know I was hiding the stolen chronograph here and traveling back in time with it unsupervised.

“Falk assured me that all you do in the past is sit in a cellar getting your homework done,” she said. “He said I had nothing to worry about except making sure that you saw enough daylight.”

I hesitated for a second again, and then I smiled wryly. “He’s right. It’s dark and dead boring down there.”

“Good. I’d hate it if anything like what happened to Lucy back in the past also happened to you.”

“Mum, what exactly did happen back then?” It wasn’t the first time I had asked that question in the last two weeks, and she still hadn’t given me a satisfactory answer.

“You know what happened.” Mum stroked my forehead again. “Oh, my poor little mousie! You’re burning with fever.”

I gently pushed her hand away. I was burning all right, but not with fever.

“Mum, I really do want to know just what happened to Lucy,” I said.

She hesitated for a moment, and then she told me all over again what I already knew: Lucy and Paul thought the Circle of Blood ought not to be closed, so they had stolen the chronograph and gone into hiding with it, because the Guardians didn’t see things the same way.

“And since it was totally impossible to escape the Guardians and their network—you can bet they had eyes and ears everywhere, people planted in Scotland Yard and the Secret Service—in the end, all Lucy and Paul could do was travel into the past with the chronograph,” I said, unobtrusively loosening the bedclothes over my feet to get a bit of cool air. “You just don’t know what year they went to.”

“That’s right. Believe me, it wasn’t easy for them to go away, leaving everything here behind them.” Mum looked as if she were fighting back tears.

“Yes, but why did they think the Circle of Blood ought not to be closed?” Heavens above, I was boiling hot! Why had I ever claimed to be having shivering fits?

Mum stared past me into space. “All I know is that they didn’t trust Count Saint-Germain’s motives, and they were convinced that the secret of the Guardians was built on a foundation of lies. I’m sorry now that I didn’t ask more questions at the time … but I think Lucy was glad of that. She didn’t want to put me in danger too.”

“The Guardians think the secret of the Circle of Blood is some kind of miracle-working medicine. A cure for all the diseases of mankind,” I said, and I could tell from Mum’s expression that this information wasn’t news to her. “Why would Lucy and Paul want to keep this miraculous cure from being found? Why would they be against it?”

“Because … because they thought the price to be paid was too high.” Mum whispered those words. A tear ran out of the corner of her eye and down her cheek. She quickly wiped it away with the back of her hand and stood up. “Try to get some sleep, darling,” she said in her normal voice. “I’m sure you’ll soon feel warmer. Sleep is always the best medicine.”

“Good night, Mum.” In other circumstances, I’d certainly have bombarded her with more questions, but I could hardly wait for her to close my bedroom door. I flung the blankets off with great relief and opened the window so suddenly that I scared two pigeons (or were they the ghosts of pigeons?) off the sill where they had settled down for the night. By the time Xemerius came back from his flight around the house, checking up on everything, I had changed my sweat-drenched pajamas for a clean, dry pair.

“Everyone in bed, including Charlotte,” reported Xemerius. “Although she’s staring at the ceiling with her eyes wide open and doing stretching exercises for her calves. You look like a lobster.”

“I feel like a lobster.” Sighing, I bolted the door. I didn’t want anyone, least of all Charlotte, coming into this room while I was gone. Whatever she planned to do with her well-stretched calves, she wasn’t getting in to do it here.

I opened the wardrobe and took a deep breath. It was difficult clambering through the hole and crawling over to the crocodile with the chronograph hidden inside it. My clean pajamas were soon dirty gray all down the front, and any number of cobwebs were clinging to me. Disgusting.

“You have a … a little something there,” said Xemerius as I crawled out again with the chronograph under my arm. The little something turned out to be a spider the size of Caroline’s hand. (Well, almost, anyway.) It cost me enormous self-control to hold back a scream that would have woken up not only everyone in the house but the whole of this part of town. Once I’d shaken it off, the spider scuttled under my bed. (It’s amazing how fast something with eight legs can run.)

I stood there gasping for about a minute. Then I shook myself again with disgust as I set the chronograph.

“Don’t carry on like that,” said Xemerius. “Some spiders are easily twenty times that big.”

“Where? On Planet Zog? There, that should be okay.” I lifted the chronograph up on its little chest in the wardrobe and put my finger into the compartment under the ruby. “I’ll be back in an hour and a half. And keep an eye on Tarantula there, will you?” Holding Nick’s flashlight, I waved to Xemerius and took a deep breath.

With a dramatic flourish, he put a hand to his breast. “Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day.…”

“Oh, shut up, Juliet,” I said, pressing my finger firmly down on the needle.

When I took my next breath, my mouth was full of flannel. I hastily spat it out and switched on the flashlight. It was a bathrobe, right in front of my face. The wardrobe was crammed full of clothes hanging in two rows, and it took me some time to scramble to my feet in there among them.

“Did you hear that?” asked a woman’s voice outside the wardrobe.

Oh, no. Please not!

“What is it, darling?” That was a man’s voice. It sounded very, very hesitant.

I was transfixed with fright.

“There’s a light in the wardrobe,” said the woman’s voice. It sounded the opposite of hesitant. In fact, to be precise, it sounded very much like my aunt Glenda.

Hell! I switched off the flashlight and cautiously retreated behind the second row of clothes until I could feel the wall at my back.

“Perhaps you—”

“No, Charles!” The voice was more imperious than ever. “I am not imagining things, if that’s what you were going to say.”

“But I—”

“There was a light in the wardrobe, and you will now kindly get up and investigate it. Or else you can spend the night in the sewing room.” Charlotte had obviously inherited her mother’s way of hissing. “Or no—wait! You’d better not—if Mrs. Langdon sees you there in the morning, Mother will ask me whether our marriage is going through a bad patch, which is the last thing I want, because our marriage is not going through a bad patch, or not my marriage anyway, even if you only married me because your father wanted to be related to the aristocracy.”