Page 85 of Emerald Green (The Ruby Red Trilogy 3)

“I don’t have it.” My voice was muffled by the quilt. “And I don’t see what—”

“Don’t be so stubborn,” Lady Arista interrupted me. But as the key was back on its chain around Lesley’s neck, there was nothing I could do but keep on being stubborn.

Charlotte began searching the drawers of my desk, and Aunt Maddy slapped her fingers. “You should be ashamed of yourself!”

Mr. Marley cleared his throat. “With respect, Lady Montrose, at the Temple we have ways and means of opening locks without a key.…”

“Ways and means,” said Xemerius, imitating his mysterious tone of voice. “As if there is anything magical about a crowbar!”

“Very well, you had better take the chest away with you,” said Lady Arista. She turned to the door. “Mr. Bernard,” I heard her call, “please show these gentlemen downstairs.”

“You’d have thought the Guardians had enough antiques already,” said Xemerius. “A greedy bunch, if you ask me.”

“I want to make a formal protest again,” said Aunt Maddy, while Mr. Marley and the other man carried the chest out of my room without so much as a civil good-bye. “This is … is trespassing. When Grace hears that people have been simply marching into her apartment, she’ll be furious.”

“This is still my house,” said Lady Arista coolly. She was already turning to go. “And my rules apply here. One may perhaps ascribe the fact that Gwyneth is unaware of her duties and unfortunately shows that she is unworthy of the Montrose family to her youth and lack of training, but you, Madeleine, ought to know what your brother was working for all his life! I would have expected more of a sense of the honor of the Montroses from you. I am severely disappointed. By you both.”

“And I’m disappointed too!” Aunt Maddy put her hands on her h*ps and stared angrily at the retreating figure of Lady Arista. “By you both. After all, we’re a family!” And as Lady Arista couldn’t hear her anymore, she turned to Charlotte. “Little bunny! Oh, how could you?”

Charlotte went red. For a moment she looked like the unspeakable Mr. Marley, and I wondered where my mobile was. I’d have loved to take a photo for posterity. Or maybe for purposes of blackmail later.

“I couldn’t allow Gwyneth to sabotage something that she doesn’t even understand,” said Charlotte. Her voice shook slightly. “Simply because she always wants to be the center of attention. She … she has no respect for the mysteries! She doesn’t deserve to be linked to them.” She gave me a nasty look, which seemed to help her to recover her self-control. “You brought it on yourself!” she spat, with new venom. “And I even offered to help you! But no, you just have to go around breaking rules the whole time.” With those words, she was her old self again, doing what she did best: tossing her head and marching out.

“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” said Aunt Maddy, sitting down on the edge of my bed. Xemerius was only just in time to roll out of her way. “What are we going to do now? I’m sure they’ll come for you when they’ve opened the chest, and they won’t be gentle.” She fished her bag of sherbet lemons out of her pocket and put five in her mouth at once. “I can’t bear it.”

“Take it easy, Aunt Maddy!” I ran the fingers of both hands through my hair and grinned at her. “When they get inside the chest, they’ll find my school atlas and the Collected Works of Jane Austen that you gave me for Christmas.”

“Oh.” Aunt Maddy rubbed her nose and heaved a sigh of relief. “I thought it would be something like that, of course,” she said, sucking sherbet lemons vigorously. “Then where…?”

“In a safe place, I hope.” Sighing deeply myself, I swung my legs over the edge of the bed. “But in case they do happen to come back again—with a warrant to search the house or something—maybe I’d better go and shower. By the way, thanks very much for your advice yesterday. So all the rooms up here were empty in 1993, were they? I landed right in Aunt Glenda and ex-Uncle Charlie’s bedroom!”

“Oops,” said Aunt Maddy, almost choking on a sherbet lemon in alarm.

* * *

I DIDN’T SEE Charlotte and my grandmother anymore that morning. The phone rang on the lower floors a couple of times, and once it rang up on our floor, but it was only Mum wanting to know how I was.

Later in the day, Aunt Maddy’s friend Mrs. Purpleplum came to see her, and I heard the pair of them giggling like two little girls. Otherwise all was quiet. Before I was collected and driven to the Temple at midday, Xemerius and I had been able to read some of Anna Karenina, or rather the part of it that Tolstoy hadn’t written. Pages 300 to 500 were mostly full of texts copied from the Chronicles and Annals of the Guardians. Lucas had written These are only the interesting parts, dear granddaughter, but to be honest, I didn’t think any of it very interesting at first. “The General Laws of Time Travel,” written by Count Saint-Germain himself, was too much of a strain on my brain from the first sentence. Although, in the present, the past has already happened, one must take the greatest care not to allow the past to endanger the present by making it the present.

“Do you understand that?” I asked Xemerius. “On the one hand, everything has already happened anyway, so it’s going to happen the way it did happen; on the other hand, you mustn’t risk infecting anyone with a flu virus. Or what does it mean?”

Xemerius shook his head. “Let’s just skip that bit, okay?”

But even the essay by a certain Dr. M. Giordano (surely that couldn’t be a coincidence?) entitled “Count Saint-Germain—Time Traveler and Visionary—Analysis of the Sources from Records of the Inquisition and Letters,” published in a journal of historical research in 1992, began with a sentence that took up eight lines and looked like going on forever, which didn’t exactly make you want to read more.

Xemerius seemed to feel the same. “Boring, boring, boring!” he complained, and I skipped to the place where Lucas had collected all the rhymes and verses. I knew some of them already, but those new to me were confused and full of symbolism, and you could interpret them as meaning all sorts of things, depending how you looked at them, just like Aunt Maddy’s visions. The words blood and ever kept coming up, often rhyming with flood and never.

“Well, they’re not by Shakespeare, anyway,” Xemerius agreed with me. “Sounds like a couple of drunks got together to think up some rhymes to sound as cryptic as possible. Hey, folks, let’s think what rhymes with fox of jade. Marmalade, wade, made? No, let’s try masquerade, sounds—hic!—much more mysterious.”

I couldn’t help laughing. Those verses really were the end! But I knew Lesley would fall on them gleefully. She loved anything cryptic, and she was firmly convinced that reading Anna Karenina would get us a whole lot farther.

“Today is the beginning of a new era!” she had announced dramatically early that morning, waving the book in the air. “Knowledge is power!” She stopped short for a moment. “I heard that in some film, but I can’t remember straight off which it was. Never mind, now we can finally get to the bottom of the mystery.”

Maybe she was right. But later, when I was sitting on the green sofa in the year 1953, I didn’t feel in the least powerful or knowledgeable, I just felt terribly alone. How I wished Lesley could be with me. Or at least Xemerius.

Leafing aimlessly through Lucas’s special edition of the book, I stumbled on the passage that Mr. Marley had mentioned. In October 1782, there was indeed an entry in the Annals which ran as follows: Before leaving, the count impressed it upon us again that, in future, points of contact between the power of the mysteries and the female time travelers, in particular the last-born, the Ruby, must be kept as slight as possible and also that we must never underestimate the destructive force of feminine curiosity. Hm, yes. I could well believe the count had said that. In fact, I could almost hear his tone of voice. “Destructive force of feminine curiosity”—huh!

However, that didn’t help me much over the ball, which unfortunately was only postponed, not canceled, quite apart from the fact that all this garbage from the Guardians didn’t make me exactly keen to face the count again.

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