“Yup,” said Lesley. “You look like a steward on a cruise ship. Never mind. You’ll get used to it.”
Raphael’s grin widened.
“You just have to take care the school tie doesn’t dip into your soup,” I said. “Happens to me all the time.”
Lesley nodded.
“And by the way, school lunches usually taste frightful. Apart from that, it’s not so bad here. I’m sure you’ll soon feel at home.”
“Never been in the south of France, have you?” asked Raphael, with a touch of bitterness.
“No,” said Lesley.
“I can tell. I’ll never feel at home in a country where it rains for twenty-four hours on end.”
“We Brits don’t really like it when people talk about our weather like that,” said Lesley. “Oh, look, here comes Mrs. Counter. You’re in luck—she’s a Francophile, and if you mix a few French words into your essays by mistake, she’ll love you.”
“Tu es mignonne,” said Raphael.
“I know,” said Lesley, “but I’m not a Francophile.”
“He fancies you,” I said, putting my books down on our table.
“Maybe,” said Lesley, “but I’m afraid he’s not my type.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “No, of course not!”
“Oh, come on, Gwenny. It’s bad enough for one of us to lose her mind. I know his sort. They just give you trouble. Anyway, he’s only interested because Charlotte told him I was a pushover.”
“And because you look like your dog, Bertie,” I said.
“Yes, exactly, because of that, too.” Lesley laughed. “Anyway, he’ll forget all about me the moment Cynthia throws herself at him. Look, she’s been to the hairdresser specially to have highlights done.”
But Lesley was wrong. Raphael obviously wasn’t interested in talking to Cynthia. When we were sitting on the bench under the chestnut tree at break and Lesley was studying the note with the Green Rider code on it yet again, Raphael came strolling over, sat down beside us uninvited, and said, “Oh, cool. Geocaching.”
“What?” Lesley looked at him with annoyance.
Raphael pointed to the note. “Don’t you know about geocaching? It’s a kind of modern treasure hunt using GPS navigational devices. Those numbers look like geographical coordinates.”
“No, they’re only … oh! Do they really?”
“Let me see.” Raphael took the note from her. “Yes, assuming a few of the zeros are superscript zeros so they mean degree, and the strokes are minutes and seconds.”
A shrill sound came over the yard to us. Cynthia was standing on the steps, gesticulating wildly as she talked to Charlotte, and that made Charlotte look our way with a nasty expression.
“Oh, my God.” Lesley was all excited. “Then it means 51 degrees, 30 minutes, 41.78 seconds north, and 0 degrees, 08 minutes, 49.91 seconds west?”
Raphael nodded.
“So it’s the description of a place?” I asked.
“That’s right,” said Raphael. “Rather a small place, measuring about four and a half square yards. So what do you find there? A cache?”
“If only we knew,” said Lesley. “We don’t even know where the place is.”
Raphael shrugged his shoulders. “Well, that’s easy to find out.”
“How? Do we need one of these GPS things? How do they work? I’ve no idea about them at all,” said Lesley excitedly.
“I do, though. I could help you,” said Raphael. “Mignonne.”
I glanced at the steps again. Sarah had now joined Cynthia and Charlotte, and all three were looking daggers at us. Lesley didn’t notice.
“Okay. But it’ll have to be this afternoon,” she said. “We have no time to lose.”
“Same here,” said Raphael. “Let’s just meet in the park at four. I’ll have shaken Charlotte off somehow by then.”
“Better not expect it to be easy.” I looked at him sympathetically.
Raphael grinned. “I think you underestimate me, little time-travel girl.”
The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb—for we have no word to speak about it.
THOMAS CARLYE
TWELVE
“I COULD JUST HAVE worn last week’s dress,” I said, as Madame Rossini put a little girl’s dream of a dress over my head. It was lavishly embroidered with cream and wine-red flowers. “The blue flowered dress, I mean. It’s hanging in the wardrobe at home—you only had to say.”
“Shh, my leetle swan-necked beauty,” said Madame Rossini. “What do you think zey pay me for ’ere? For you to wear ze same dress twice?” She concentrated on doing up the little buttons at the back. “I am only sorry you ’ave ruined ze ’airstyle. In ze Rococo age, a work of art like that ’ad to last for days. Ze ladies slept sitting up on purpose.”
“Well, I could hardly have gone to school with it piled up like that,” I said. I’d probably have got stuck in the door of the bus. “Is Giordano helping Gideon to get dressed?”
Madame Rossini clicked her tongue. “Huh! Zat boy say ’e does not need ’elp. Meaning ’e will wear dull colors again and take no care with ’is cravat. But I ’ave given ’im up! Now, what can we do with your ’air? I will get ze curling wand, and zen we will simply put a ribbon in it, et bien!”
While Madame Rossini worked on my hair with the curling wand, I had a text message from Lesley. “Will wait another two minutes. If le petit français isn’t here then, he can forget about mignonne.”
I texted back. “Your date isn’t for another fifteen minutes. At least give him ten!”
But I didn’t get an answer back, because Madame Rossini took the mobile away from me to take the now-obligatory souvenir photos. The pink suited me better than I’d expected (it wasn’t my color at all in real life), but my hair looked as if I’d spent the night with my fingers plugged into an electric socket. The pink ribbon threaded through it looked like a vain attempt to tame my exploding curls. When Gideon arrived to collect me, he burst out laughing.
“You can stop zat! We might just as well laugh at you!” Madame Rossini snapped at him. “Ha! What do you zink you look like?”
Oh, wow, what did he look like? There ought to be a law against looking so good—even in silly dark knee-breeches and an embroidered bottle-green coat that made his eyes shine.
“You ’ave no idea of fashion, young man! Or you would ’ave put on ze emerald brooch zat go with zat outfit. And zat sword—you are supposed to be a gentleman, not a soldier!”
“I’m sure you’re right,” said Gideon, still laughing. “But at least my hair doesn’t look like those wire-wool pads I use to scour my pans.”
I did my best to look haughty. “The wire-wool pads you use to scour your pans? Aren’t you mixing yourself up with Charlotte?”
“What?”
“I thought she was cleaning up your apartment these days.”
Gideon looked a little embarrassed. “That’s … that’s not quite correct,” he muttered.
“Huh! In your place I’d feel bad about it too,” I said. “Give me the hat, please, Madame Rossini.” The hat, a monstrous creation crowned with pale pink feathers, would at least look better than that hair. Or so I thought. A glance in the mirror showed that I’d made an unfortunate mistake.
Gideon was still laughing.
“Can we get moving now?” I asked crossly.
“Take care of my leetle swan-necked beauty, do you ’ear me?”
“Don’t I always, Madame Rossini?”
“You must be joking,” I said, out in the corridor. I pointed to the black scarf he was holding. “No blindfold today?”
“No, we can do without that. For reasons we both know,” Gideon replied. “And because of the hat.”
“Do you still think I’m about to lure you around a corner and hit you over the head with something?” I straightened my hat. “And by the way, I’ve been thinking about that again, and it’s my belief that there’s a perfectly simple explanation for the whole thing.”
“Which is?” Gideon raised his eyebrows.
“You imagined it all after the event. While you were lying unconscious, you were dreaming about me, and so you decided later that it was all my fault.”
“Yes, that possibility has occurred to me, too,” he said, to my surprise. Then he took my hand and made me walk on. “But, no, I know what I saw.”
“So why didn’t you tell anyone that—apparently—I had lured you into a trap?”
“I didn’t want them to think even worse of you than they do already.” He grinned. “Well … do you have a headache?”
“I didn’t really drink all that much,” I said.
Gideon laughed. “No, sure. Basically you were stone cold sober.”
I shook his hand off. “Could we please talk about something else?”
“Oh, come on! Surely I’m allowed to wind you up a bit! You were so sweet yesterday evening. Mr. George really thought you were totally exhausted when you went to sleep in the limousine.”
“For two minutes at the most,” I said, feeling embarrassed. I’d probably dribbled or done something else terrible.
“I hope you went straight to bed.”
“Hm,” I said. All I remembered, vaguely, was Mum taking all four hundred thousand hairpins out of my hair, and how I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. But I wasn’t going to tell him that. After all, he’d gone off to have a good time with Charlotte, Raphael, and the spaghetti.
Gideon stopped so suddenly that I collided with him and promptly forgot to breathe.
He turned to face me. “Listen,” he murmured. “I didn’t want to say this yesterday, because I thought you were too drunk, but now that you’re sober again and as prickly as ever…” His fingers carefully stroked my forehead, and I was about to hyperventilate. Instead of going on, he kissed me. I had closed my eyes before his lips touched mine. The kiss was more intoxicating than yesterday evening’s punch. It left me weak at the knees, and with a thousand butterflies in my stomach.
When Gideon let go of me again, he seemed to have forgotten what he wanted to say. He propped one arm on the wall beside my head and looked at me seriously. “We can’t go on like this.”
I tried to get my breath under control.
“Gwen…”
There were footsteps in the corridor behind us. Gideon quickly withdrew his arm and turned around. A moment later Mr. George was standing in front of us. “So there you are. We’ve been waiting for you. Why isn’t Gwyneth blindfolded?”