Ruby Red: Edelstein Trilogie 01 (9 page)

“Stop telling lies!” cried Aunt Glenda. “You did it on purpose! Your baby wasn’t supposed to be born until December, but you manipulated the pregnancy and risked a premature birth just to have her born on the same day as Charlotte. It didn’t work out, though! Your daughter was born a day later.”

“It ought to be fairly easy to prove what you say. We must have the name and address of the midwife in our files,” said Mr. George, turning to Mrs. Jenkins. “It’s important to find her.”

“There’s no need,” said Mum. “You can leave the poor woman alone. She only took a little money from us.”

“We just want to ask her a few questions,” said Mr. George. “Mrs. Jenkins, please find out where she lives today.”

“I’m on my way,” said Mrs. Jenkins, disappearing through the side door again.

“Who else knows about this?” asked Mr. George.

“Only my husband knew,” said Mum, and now there was a tinge of defiance and triumph in her tone of voice. “And you can’t cross-examine him, because I’m afraid he’s dead.”

“I know,” said Mr. George. “Leukemia, wasn’t it? Tragic.” He began pacing up and down the room. “When did this start, did you say?”

“Yesterday,” I replied.

“Three times in the last twenty hours,” said Mum. “I’m afraid for her.”

“Three times already!” Mr. George stopped pacing. “And when was the last?”

“About an hour ago,” I said. “I think.” Since these events had begun coming so thick and fast, I’d lost all sense of time.

“Then we have a little while to prepare for everything.”

“You can’t possibly believe this, Mr. George,” said Aunt Glenda. “You know Charlotte. Now look at this girl and compare her with my Charlotte—do you seriously believe that Number Twelve is standing before you?
Ruby red, with G major, the magic of the raven, brings the Circle of Twelve home into safe haven.
Do you believe that?”

“Well, there’s always the possibility,” said Mr. George. “Although your motives strike me as more than mixed, Mrs. Shepherd.”

“That’s your problem,” said Mum coolly.

“If you really wanted to protect your child, then you ought not to have left her in ignorance for so many years. Time traveling without preparation is very dangerous.”

Mum bit her lip. “I just hoped it would be Charlotte who—”

“And so it is!” cried Aunt Glenda. “She’s had obvious symptoms for the last two days. It could happen any time now. Perhaps it’s happening at this very moment while we waste our time here listening to my jealous little sister’s totally outrageous stories.”

“Maybe you could switch your brain into gear for a change, Glenda,” said Mum. Suddenly she sounded tired. “Why on earth would we invent such a thing? Who but you would willingly wish something of this kind on her own daughter?”

“I insist on…” But Aunt Glenda left whatever she insisted on hanging in the air. “This will all turn out to be a wicked deception. There’s already been sabotage, and we know where that led, Mr. George. And now that we’re so close to achieving our aims, we really can’t make such a terrible mistake again.”

“I don’t think that’s for us to decide,” said Mr. George. “Please follow me, Mrs. Shepherd. You too, Gwyneth.” He added, with a little smile, “Don’t worry, those fanatical mystery mongers and pseudoscientists obsessed with esoteric subjects don’t bite.”

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,

And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;

Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,

And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood.

W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE
, S
ONNET XIX

SEVEN

WE WERE LED UP
a staircase and down a long corridor with sharp angles at every turn, and now and then went up or down a couple of steps. The view from the few windows we passed was different every time. Sometimes we looked out into a large garden, sometimes at another building or a small dark alley. It seemed like an endless journey over wooden parquet and mosaic stone floors, past closed doors, and along lines of chairs, framed oil paintings, and glass-fronted cases full of leather-bound books and porcelain figurines, with statues and suits of armor standing just about everywhere. It was like being in a museum.

Aunt Glenda kept casting venomous glances at Mum. As for Mum, she ignored her sister as best she could. Mum was pale and looked extremely tense. I wanted to take her hand, but then Aunt Glenda would have seen how frightened I was, and that was the last thing I wanted.

We couldn’t possibly still have been in the same building. I felt that we’d been through at least three more by the time Mr. George finally stopped and knocked at an enormous wooden door.

The large room we entered was paneled in dark wood, like our dining room at home. The ceiling was dark wood as well. But here everything was almost entirely covered with elaborate carvings, some of them painted. The furniture was dark and massive. The atmosphere ought to have been gloomy and sinister, but daylight was streaming into the room through the tall windows, and you looked out at a garden full of flowers. I could even see the Thames shimmering in the sunlight where the garden ended.

But it wasn’t just the view and the light that brightened the place, there was something cheerful about the carvings, in spite of a few ugly grimaces and skulls. It was as if the walls were alive. Lesley would have loved feeling the real-looking rosebuds, the archaic patterns, and the amusing animal heads and searching them for secret mechanisms. There were winged lions, falcons, stars, suns and planets, dragons, unicorns, elves, fairies, trees, and ships, each carving more lifelike than the one before it.

Most impressive of all was the dragon, which seemed to be flying across the ceiling above us. He must have been at least seven yards long from the tip of his wedge-shaped tail to his large, scaly head, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. What a wonderful dragon! I was so spellbound that I almost forgot why we were there … or that we weren’t alone. Everyone seemed completely surprised to see us.

“It looks as if there are some complications,” said Mr. George.

Lady Arista, standing stiff as a board by one of the windows, said, “Grace! Oughtn’t you to be at work? And Gwyneth should be at school!”

“There’s nowhere we’d sooner be, Mother,” said Mum.

Charlotte was sitting on a sofa right under a beautiful mermaid. Each scale in the mermaid’s tail was finely carved and painted in every imaginable shade of blue and turquoise. A man in an elegant black suit, wearing black-framed glasses, was leaning against a broad mantelpiece. Even his tie was black. He was examining us with a distinctly gloomy expression, and there was a little boy of about seven clinging to his jacket.

“Grace!” A tall man rose from the desk. He had gray, wavy hair that fell to his broad shoulders like a lion’s mane. His eyes were a strikingly light brown, almost the color of amber. His face was much younger than you might have expected from the gray hair that framed it. There was something fascinating about him—once seen, never forgotten, I felt sure. When the man smiled, you could see his regular white teeth. “Grace. It’s been a long time.” He came around the desk and offered Mum his hand. “You haven’t changed at all.”

To my astonishment, Mum blushed. “Thanks. I could say the same of you, Falk.”

“I’ve gone gray.” The man made a dismissive gesture.

“I’d say it suits you,” said Mum.

Hello? Was she by any chance flirting with this guy?

His smile broadened a little and then his amber gaze moved from Mum to me. Once again, I felt I was being inspected uncomfortably closely.

Those eyes were really strange. They could have been the eyes of a wolf, or one of the big cats. He held out his hand. “I’m Falk de Villiers. And you must be Grace’s daughter Gwyneth.” His handshake was firm and warm. “The first Montrose girl I’ve ever known not to have red hair.”

“I get my hair from my father,” I said shyly.

“Could we perhaps come to the point?” asked the man in black by the mantelpiece.

Mr. de Villiers let go of my hand and looked at me with a twinkle in his eyes. “Go ahead.”

“My sister’s come up with an absolutely monstrous story,” said Aunt Glenda. You could tell what an effort it cost her not to shout. “And Mr. George wouldn’t listen to me! She claims that Gwyneth—
Gwyneth!
—has already traveled back in time. And not just once, three times already. Of course, as she knows perfectly well, she can’t prove it, so she’s thought up another fairy tale to explain the fact that the girl’s date of birth is wrong. I’d like to remind you what happened seventeen years ago. Grace did not play a very admirable part in those events. Now that we’re so close to success, I’m not surprised to see her turning up here to sabotage our plans.”

Leaving her place by the window, Lady Arista had come closer. “Is this true, Grace?” Her expression, as always, was stern and unyielding. Sometimes I wondered whether her hair, combed back so severely from her face, was the reason her features were so rigid. Maybe the muscles were simply held in one place and stuck there. At the very most, a slight widening of her eyes showed when she was upset. Like now.

“Mrs. Shepherd says she and her husband paid the midwife to enter the wrong date on the birth certificate,” Mr. George interjected. “So that no one would find out that Gwyneth was a potential gene carrier.”

“But why would she have done such a thing?” asked Lady Arista.

“She says she wanted to protect the child, and anyway she hoped that Charlotte had inherited the gene.”

“
Hoped!
You must be joking!” cried Aunt Glenda.

“I think it sounds perfectly logical,” said Mr. George.

I glanced at Charlotte, who was sitting on the sofa looking pale, her eyes moving from one to another of us. When they met mine, she quickly turned her head away.

“I simply can’t see any logic in it,” said Lady Arista.

“We’re having the story checked,” said Mr. George. “Mrs. Jenkins will track down the midwife.”

“Just out of interest, Grace, how much did you pay her?” asked Falk de Villiers. His eyes had narrowed more and more over the last minute, and now, as he turned to Mum, there was something very wolflike about him.

“I … I can’t remember,” said Mum.

Mr. de Villiers raised his eyebrows. “Well, it can’t have been a large sum. As far as I recall, your husband’s income was rather … modest.”

“How true!” said Aunt Glenda venomously.

“If you all say so, then it can’t have been much,” replied Mum. The uncertainty that had suddenly come over her disappeared just as suddenly. So had the tinge of pink in her face.

“Then why did the midwife do as you wanted?” asked Mr. de Villiers. “After all, she was falsifying an official document. That’s not a small offense.”

Mum tilted her chin. “We told her our family belonged to a satanic cult with a pathological belief in horoscopes. We said a child born on the seventh of October would be subject to severe reprisals and we’d have to give her up to the cult for use in satanic rituals. She believed us. And as she had a soft heart, and what you might call a prejudice against Satanists, she entered the wrong birth date on the certificate.”

“Satanic rituals! What impertinence!” The man by the mantelpiece hissed the words like a snake, and the little boy clung even closer to him.

Mr. de Villiers smiled appreciatively. “Not a bad story. We’ll see if the midwife tells the same tale.”

“I see little point in wasting our time checking such details,” Lady Arista remarked.

“Quite right,” said Aunt Glenda. “Charlotte could travel back in time any moment now. Then we’ll know that Grace’s story is a pack of lies devised to hold us up.”

“Why couldn’t they both have inherited the gene?” asked Mr. George. “That happened once before.”

“Ah, but Timothy and Jonathan de Villiers were identical twins,” pointed out Mr. de Villiers. “And they’d been foretold in the prophesies.”

“Yes, the chronograph contains two carnelians for them, two pipettes of blood, duplicate compartments for the twelve elements, and two cogwheels going around,” said the man by the mantelpiece. “The Ruby stands alone.”

“True,” said Mr. George. His round face suddenly became anxious.

“I should have thought it more important to look into the reason why my sister is telling these lies.” Aunt Glenda was glaring at Mum with positive hatred. “If your idea is to get Gwyneth’s blood read into the chronograph so that the device will never be of any use again, you’re more naive than I thought.”

“How can she expect us to believe a word of what she says anyway?” asked the man by the mantelpiece. I thought his way of acting as if Mum and I weren’t even in the room was very arrogant. “I have the clearest recollections of the lies Grace told to protect Lucy and Paul at that time. It was her fault they got away from us. If it hadn’t been for her, we might have been able to avert the disaster.”

“Jake!” said Mr. de Villiers.

“What disaster?” I asked. And who was Paul?

“I consider that even the presence of this person in the room with us is monstrous,” said the man by the mantelpiece.

“And who may you be?” Mum’s voice and the look she gave him were decidedly chilly. I was impressed to see she wasn’t going to be intimidated.

“That’s nothing to do with the case.” The man didn’t even deign to look at her. The little fair-haired boy peered cautiously out from behind his back and looked at me. With the freckles on his nose, he reminded me a bit of Nick when he was younger, so I smiled at him. Poor little thing—he probably had to put up with this creep for a grandfather. His eyes widening in surprise, he returned my smile and then went back into cover behind the man’s black jacket.

“This is Dr. Jacob White,” said Falk de Villiers, with an unmistakable tone of amusement in his voice. “A genius in the fields of medicine and biochemistry. He’s usually a bit more civil.”

Jacob Gray would have suited him better. Even his face was the color of dishwater.

Mr. de Villiers looked at me and then his eyes went back to Mum. “Well, one way or another, we have to come to a decision. Are we to believe you, Grace, or do you really have some ulterior motive?”

For a few seconds Mum stared at him angrily. Then she looked down and said quietly, “I’m not here to prevent you all from carrying out your wonderful, mysterious mission. I’m here to keep my daughter out of harm’s way. With the help of the chronograph, she can travel in time without danger while still leading a reasonably normal life. That’s all I want.”

“Oh, yes,
of course!
” said Aunt Glenda. She went over to the sofa and sat down beside Charlotte. I’d have liked to sit too. My legs were beginning to feel tired. But no one offered me a chair, so there was nothing for it but to stay on my feet.

“What I did at that time had nothing to do with your …
mission
,” Mum went on. “To be honest, I hardly know anything about it, and I understand only about half of what I’ve picked up over the years.”

“I can’t imagine,” said the gloomy Dr. White, “what gave you the audacity to interfere in such a way with matters of which you know nothing.”

“I only wanted to help Lucy,” said Mum. “She was my darling little niece. I’d looked after her since she was a baby, and she asked for my help. What would you have done in my place? For goodness’ sake, the pair of them were so young, so much in love, and … I simply didn’t want anything to happen to them.”

“Well, a fine way you chose to go about it!”

“I loved Lucy like a sister.” Mum glanced at Aunt Glenda. “
More
than a sister,” she added.

Aunt Glenda took Charlotte’s hand and patted it. Charlotte stared at the floor.

“We
all
loved Lucy dearly,” said Lady Arista. “That made it all the more important to keep her away from that boy and his outlandish opinions, rather than encouraging her to indulge her feelings.”

“Outlandish opinions, indeed! It was that red-haired little wretch who put those silly conspiracy theories into Paul’s head!” said Dr. White. “She persuaded him to commit the theft!”

“That’s not true!” protested Lady Arista. “Lucy would never have done such a thing. It was Paul who took advantage of her youthful naivety and led her astray.”

“Naivety! You must be joking!” snapped Dr. White.

Falk de Villiers raised his hand. “We’ve had this discussion often enough already, and it never gets us anywhere. I think we all know one another’s views.” He looked at the time. “Gideon will be back any moment now, and before that we ought to decide what to do next. Charlotte, how are you feeling?”

“I still have a headache,” said Charlotte, without looking up from the floor.

“There, you see?” Aunt Glenda gave a venomous smile.