I felt like skipping breakfast, but I knew I had to face Charlotte and Aunt Glenda sooner or later. I could get it over and done with now.
I heard them talking as I came down to the first floor, long before I reached the dining room.
“The big bird is a symbol of misfortune,” I heard Great-aunt Maddy saying. She was never up before ten. She loved a good sleep and thought breakfast the only unnecessary meal in the day. “I do wish someone would listen to me.”
“Oh, really, Maddy! No one can make anything of this vision of yours. And we’ve had to listen to you going on about it at least ten times.” That was Lady Arista.
“Very true,” said Aunt Glenda. “If I hear another word about sapphire eggs, I shall scream.”
“Good morning,” I interrupted.
There was a brief silence in which they all gaped at me as if I were a little green man from Planet Zog.
“Good morning, child,” said Lady Arista. “I hope you slept well.”
“Fine, thank you. I was very tired.”
“I’m sure it was all rather too much for you,” said Aunt Glenda patronizingly.
But she was right—it had been. I sat down in my usual place opposite Charlotte, who obviously hadn’t touched her toast. She looked as if the sight of me had spoilt her appetite.
Mum and Nick were smiling at me in a conspiratorial way, and Caroline pushed a bowl of cornflakes and milk over to me. At the other end of the table, Great-aunt Maddy waved to me. “My little angel! I’m so glad to see you! You’ll cast some light on all this confusion. What with all the shouting yesterday evening, no one could get a clear idea of anything. Glenda was digging up ancient history from back when our Lucy ran off with that handsome de Villiers boy. I never did understand why everyone kicked up such a fuss because Grace let them stay with her for a few days. You’d think that would have been forgotten long ago. But no, no sooner has a little grass grown over it than some clumsy camel comes along and rakes it all up again.”
Caroline giggled. She was probably imagining Aunt Glenda as a camel.
“This is not a TV series, Maddy,” said Lady Arista sharply.
“Thank goodness, no, it isn’t,” said Great-aunt Maddy. “If it were, I’d have lost track of the plot ages ago.”
“It’s perfectly simple,” said Charlotte in a chilly voice. “Everyone thought I’d have the gene, but Gwyneth has it instead.” She pushed her plate away from her and stood up. “So now she’ll just have to see if she can manage.”
“Charlotte, wait!” But Aunt Glenda was not in time to keep Charlotte from storming out of the room. Before she followed her, she gave Mum a nasty look. “You should be ashamed of yourself, Grace!”
“She’s in a dangerous mood,” said Nick.
Lady Arista heaved a deep sigh.
Mum sighed as well. “I have to go to work now. Gwyneth, I agreed with Mr. George that he will pick you up from school today. You’ll be sent to elapse to the year 1956, in a nice safe cellar where you can get on with your homework in peace.”
“Bummer!” said Nick.
I was thinking just the same.
“And after that, you will come straight home,” said Lady Arista.
“But the day will be over by then,” I said. Was this going to be my routine from now on? Going to the Temple to elapse after school, sitting about in a boring cellar doing homework, then going home to dinner? What a nightmare!
Great-aunt Maddy swore under her breath because the sleeve of her dressing gown had landed in the marmalade on her toast. “This is no time of day to be up and about, that’s what I always say.”
“So you do,” said Nick.
Mum kissed him, Caroline, and me good-bye, like every morning. Then she put a hand on my shoulder and said quietly, “If by any chance you happen to see my dad, give him a kiss from me.”
Lady Arista jumped slightly at these words. She sipped her tea in silence, then looked at her watch and said, “You must hurry if you’re going to be at school on time.”
“I’M DEFINITELY GOING to open a detective agency someday,” said Lesley. We were bunking off geography with Mrs. Counter and had squeezed into one of the cubicles in the girls’ toilets. Lesley was sitting on the loo lid with a fat folder on her knees. I was leaning against the door, which was scribbled all over in ballpoint and color pen. JENNY LOVES ADAM, MALCOLM IS AN ASS, LIFE IS CRAP, and other, similar remarks.
“Investigating mysteries must be in my blood,” said Lesley. “Maybe I’ll study history too and specialize in old myths and ancient writings. And then I’ll be like Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code. I’ll look better, of course, and I’ll hire a really hot guy to be my assistant.”
“You do that,” I said. “Sounds exciting. Whereas I’m going to spend the rest of my life hanging about in a cellar without any windows in the year 1956.”
“Only for three hours a day,” said Lesley. I’d brought her right up to date, and it looked as if she had a much better grasp of all these complications than I did. She’d heard it all, up to my story about the men in the park and my guilty conscience. “Better to fight back than get sliced up like a cake yourself” was her comment on that. Oddly enough, that made me feel better than any of Mr. George’s or Gideon’s reassurances.
Telekinesis was the word Lesley used for the count’s ability to strangle me even from several yards away. Through telekinesis, she said, you could also communicate with other people without opening your mouth. She promised to find out more about it this afternoon.
She’d spent the day yesterday and half the night searching the Internet for Count Saint-Germain and all the other stuff I’d passed on to her. She dismissed my gratitude, saying it was all terrific fun.
“Anyway, this Count Saint-Germain is a rather enigmatic historical character. Even his date of birth isn’t known for certain. Much mystery surrounds his origins,” she said, and her face was positively glowing with enthusiasm. “Apparently he didn’t age. Some people put that down to magic, others to a balanced diet.”
“He was old,” I said. “Maybe he was well preserved and looked after himself, but he was definitely old.”
“Well, you’ve proved that bit wrong, then,” said Lesley. “He must have had a fascinating personality, because he comes into a great many novels, and in some esoteric circles he was seen as a kind of guru, an Ascended Master, whatever that means. He was a member of many secret societies—the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians and several more—he was an outstanding musician, he played the violin and composed music, he spoke a dozen languages fluently, and he could apparently—listen to this!—he could apparently travel in time. Anyway, he claimed to have been present at various events when he couldn’t possibly have been there.”
“Except he could.”
“Yes. Crazy. He was also keen on alchemy. He had an alchemist’s tower of his own in Germany for doing his experiments—not sure what sort they were.”
“Alchemy, that’s something to do with the philosopher’s stone, right?”
“Exactly. And with magic. Though the philosopher’s stone means something different to everyone. Some just tried to make gold with it, so there were all sorts of odd developments. All the old kings and princes were after people who said they were alchemists, because of course they all wanted gold. It’s true that attempts to make gold led, among other things, to making porcelain, but most of the time, nothing at all happened, so the alchemists were put in prison as heretics and frauds or had their heads chopped off.”
“Their own fault,” I said. “They ought to have paid more attention in chemistry classes.”
“But the alchemists weren’t really interested in gold at all. That was just camouflage for their real experiments. The philosopher’s stone is more like a synonym for immortality. The alchemists thought if they could only get the right ingredients—toad’s eyes, the blood of a virgin, hairs from a black cat’s tail, no, ha, ha, only joking—well, if they could get the right ingredients and mix them in the right chemical process, they’d end up with a substance that made you immortal if you drank it. The followers of Count Saint-Germain claim he had the recipe, so he was immortal. There are sources saying he died in Germany in 1784—but there are other records of people meeting him alive and well many years after that.”
“Hm,” I said. “I don’t think he’s immortal. But maybe he’d like to be? Maybe that’s the secret behind the secret. It’s what will happen when the Circle closes.…”
“Well, could be. But that’s only one side of the coin, put forward by enthusiastic supporters of cryptic conspiracy theories manipulating the sources for their own purposes. Critics of such theories assume that the legends accumulating around the count are most of them pure fantasy on the part of his fans, all because of his own clever presentation of himself.” As Lesley came out with all this stuff from the Internet, she reeled it off so fluently and with such enthusiasm of her own that I couldn’t help laughing.
“Why not ask Mr. Whitman if you can write an essay on the subject for homework?” I suggested. “You’ve done so much research, I should think you could write a whole book about it.”
“I don’t think the squirrel would really appreciate my efforts,” said Lesley. “After all, he’s one of Saint-Germain’s fans himself—I mean, if he’s a Guardian, he has to be. As I see it he’s the villain of the piece—Count Saint-Germain, I mean, not Mr. Squirrel. He threatened you and nearly strangled you, didn’t he? And your mother said you were to beware of him. So she knows more than she’s admitting. And I tell you what, she can only know it from this Lucy.”
“I think they all know more than they’re admitting,” I sighed. “Or anyway, they all know more than me. Even you do!”
Lesley laughed. “Just consider me an external part of your own brain. The count always made a great secret of his origins. That name and title were invented, anyhow. He may have been the illegitimate son of Maria Anna von Habsburg, widow of King Charles II of Spain. Several people could have been his father. Or according to another theory, he was the son of a Transylvanian prince and was brought up in Italy at the court of the last Medici duke. One way or another, none of it can really be proved, so everyone’s just groping around in the dark. But now the two of us have a new theory.”
“Do we?”
Lesley rolled her eyes. “Of course we do! We now know that one of his parents must have come from the de Villiers family, anyway.”
“How do we know that?”
“Oh, Gwen! You said yourself that the first time traveler was a de Villiers, so the count must have been a member of that family, whether or not he was born in wedlock. You understand that, don’t you? Otherwise his descendants wouldn’t have the same surname.”