Page 101 of Ruby Red (The Ruby Red Trilogy 1)

I sank onto the bench beside her. “Yes. I hardly know what to make of it. Yesterday morning everything was still the same as ever and then suddenly … I feel as if my head’s splitting, having to take so much in all at once—thousands of scraps of information that won’t fit together properly.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Mum. “I hoped to spare you all this.”

“What was it you once did to make them all so cross with you?”

“I helped Lucy and Paul to get away,” said Mum. She glanced around briefly as if to make sure no one was listening to us. “They hid with us in Durham for a while, but of course they found out. And Lucy and Paul had to go on the run.”

I thought about all I’d learnt today. And suddenly I realized where my cousin was.

The black sheep of the family wasn’t living among the Amazonian Indians or hidden in a convent of nuns in Ireland, as Lesley and I had always imagined when we were little.

Lucy and Paul were somewhere entirely different.

“They disappeared into the past with the chronograph?”

My mother nodded. “In the end they had no choice. But it wasn’t an easy decision for them.”

“Why?”

“It’s forbidden to take the chronograph out of your own time. If you do that, you can never travel back home again. Anyone who takes the chronograph into the past has to stay there.”

I swallowed. “But why would anyone decide to do that?” I asked quietly.

“They realized there’d be no safe hiding place for them in the present with the chronograph. Sooner or later the Guardians would have tracked them down.”

“But why did they steal it, Mum?”

“They wanted to keep the … the Circle of Blood from closing.”

“What will happen when the Circle of Blood closes?” Good heavens, I heard myself talking just like one of them. Circle of Blood. Next thing I knew, I’d start speaking in verse.

“Listen, darling, we don’t have much time. Even if they say the opposite now, they’re going to try to get you involved in their mission. They need you to close the Circle and reveal the secret.”

“What is the secret, Mum?” I felt as if I’d asked that question a thousand times already. And inside me I was almost yelling it.

“I don’t know any more than the others. I can only make some assumptions. It’s powerful, and it will give great power to anyone who knows how to make use of it. But power in the wrong hands is very dangerous. So Lucy and Paul believed it would be better if the secret was never revealed. With that in mind, they made great sacrifices.”

o;Correct,” said Mr. George, smiling. “That’s one of the advantages of traveling in time. You can make friends in the past as well as the present.”

“And what’s the secret behind the secret?” I asked.

“The Secret of the Twelve will be revealed when the blood of all twelve time travelers has been read into the chronograph,” said Mr. George solemnly. “That’s why the Circle has to be closed. It is the great task that we must perform.”

“But I’m the last of the Twelve, right? So this Circle should be complete with me.”

“And so it would be,” said Dr. White, “if your cousin Lucy hadn’t taken it into her head to steal the chronograph seventeen years ago.”

“Paul stole the chronograph,” said Lady Arista. “Lucy only—”

Mr. de Villiers raised his hand. “Yes, well, let’s just say they stole it together. Two children who had been led astray. They wrecked the work of five hundred years. The mission was on the point of failing, and the legacy of Count Saint-Germain would have been lost forever.”

“So this legacy is the secret?”

“Luckily there was a second chronograph within these walls,” said Mr. George. “It wasn’t expected ever to be used. It came into the hands of the Guardians in 1757. After centuries of neglect, it was defective, and the valuable jewels had been stolen from it. But after two hundred years of laborious work, the Guardians succeeded in—”

Impatiently, Dr. White interrupted him. “To cut a long story short, it was repaired, and it really was capable of working, although we couldn’t check that until the eleventh time traveler, Gideon here, reached the age of initiation. We’d lost the first chronograph and with it the blood of ten time travelers. Now we had to start all over again with the second.”

“So as to—er—get at the Secret of the Twelve,” I said. I’d almost said “reveal.” I was beginning to feel as if I’d been brainwashed.

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