by Kerstin Gier
“See you tomorrow, Gwyneth,” Falk called after us. “And … er … see you sometime, Grace.”
“See you,” I muttered. Mum muttered something too, but I couldn’t make out what it was.
“If you ask me, haystacks again,” said Xemerius. “They don’t fool me with their quarrels. I know people who fancy rolling in the hay when I see them.”
I sighed. Mum sighed as well, and held me closer to her as we went the last of the way to the front door. I stiffened slightly, but then I put my head on her shoulder. “You don’t have to quarrel with Falk over me. You’re worrying too much, Mum.”
“Easy for you to say so.… It’s not a nice feeling, thinking you’ve done everything wrong. I can tell you’re angry with me.” She sighed again. “And you’re right, really.”
“But I love you all the same,” I said.
Mum was fighting back tears. “And I love you more than you can imagine.” She murmured. We had reached the street outside the house, and she was looking around as if she was afraid of someone lying in wait for us in the dark. “I’d give anything for us to be a perfectly normal family living a perfectly ordinary life.”
“What exactly is normal?” I said.
“Not us, anyway.”
“It’s all a question of attitude. So how was your day?” I asked with a touch of irony.
“Oh, the usual.” Mum grinned faintly. “First a little argument with my mother, then a bigger argument with my sister, a bit of an argument with my boss at work, and finally another argument with my … former boyfriend, who just happens to be Grand Master of that amazingly secret Secret Lodge.”
“Told you so,” said Xemerius cheerfully. “Rolling in the hay!”
“There, you see, Mum. Perfectly normal.”
Mum smiled, all the same. “And how was your day, darling?”
“Oh, nothing special worth mentioning. Some trouble with Mr. Squirrel at school, next some dancing and etiquette lessons with that obscure secret society that goes in for time travel, and then, just before I got around to strangling my dear cousin, a little excursion to the year 1953 to do my homework in peace and quiet, so as to avoid more trouble with Mr. Squirrel at school tomorrow.”
“Doesn’t sound too bad.” Mum’s heels were clicking on the sidewalk. She looked around again.
“I really don’t think there’s anyone following us,” I reassured her. “They’re all too busy. The place is swarming with amazingly secret people.”
“The Inner Circle is meeting—that doesn’t often happen. They last all met when Lucy and Paul stole the chronograph. Usually they’re distributed all over the world.”
“Mum. Don’t you think it’s about time to tell me what you know? It does no one any good to keep me in the dark.”
“In every sense of the word,” said Xemerius.
Mum stopped. “You’re overestimating me! The little I do know wouldn’t be any use to you. It would probably just confuse you even more. Or worse—it might actually put you in danger.”
I shook my head. I wasn’t giving up that easily. “Who or what is the Green Rider? And why don’t Lucy and Paul want the Circle to close? Or do they want it to close, but only because they want to make use of the secret themselves?”
Mum rubbed her forehead. “Today’s the first I heard of any Green Rider. And as for Lucy and Paul, I’m sure their motives weren’t selfish. You’ve met Count Saint-Germain. He has ways and means of—” She stopped. “Oh, darling, believe me, nothing I could say would be any use to you.”
“Please, Mum! It’s bad enough with those men acting so mysterious and not trusting me, but you’re my mother!”
“Yes,” she said, and there were tears in her eyes again. “Yes, I am.” But obviously that argument wasn’t going to get me anywhere. “Come along, the taxi’s been waiting half an hour. It’s probably going to cost me half this month’s salary.”
I sighed, and followed her down the street. “We could go by Tube.”
“No, you need something hot inside you as soon as possible. And Nick and Caroline miss you terribly. They’d hate to have supper without you yet again.”
* * *
SURPRISINGLY, it was a peaceful, comfortable evening, because my grandmother and Aunt Glenda and Charlotte had gone to the opera.
“Tosca,” said Great-aunt Maddy, sounding pleased, and she shook her blond curls. “Let’s hope they come home feeling edified.” She gave me a mischievous wink. “Good thing Violet had the tickets available.”
I looked inquiringly around at everyone. It turned out that Great-aunt Maddy’s friend (a nice old lady by the beautiful name of Mrs. Violet Purpleplum, who always knitted us scarves and socks for Christmas) had been going to the opera with her son and her future daughter-in-law, but now it turned out that the future daughter-in-law was going to be someone else’s future daughter-in-law instead.
We all immediately relaxed, as usual when Lady Arista and Aunt Glenda were out of the house. It was a bit like being in elementary school when the teacher leaves the classroom. Even in the middle of supper, I had to jump up and show my brother and sister, Great-aunt Maddy, Mum, and Mr. Bernard how Puffylips and Charlotte had taught me to dance the minuet and flutter a fan, and Xemerius prompted me if I forgot anything. Looking back, I thought it was more comic than tragic myself, and I could see why the others were so amused. After a while, they were all dancing (except for Mr. Bernard, and even he was tapping the toe of his shoe in time to our rhythm), talking through their noses like Mr. Giordano, and telling each other, “Stupid thing! See how Charlotte does it!” and “Right! No, right is where your thumb is on the left!” and “I can see your teeth! That’s unpatriotic!”
Nick demonstrated twenty-three ways of communicating without words by fanning himself with a napkin. “This one means oops, your fly is open, sir, and if you lower the fan a little and look at someone over the top of it, it means wow, I’d like to marry you. But if you do it the other way around, it means ha ha, we are now at war with Spain.”
Nick showed a lot of acting talent, you had to give him that. Finally Caroline kicked her legs so high while she was dancing—it was more of a cancan than a minuet—that one of her shoes flew off and landed in what was left of the Bavarian cream we’d had for pudding.
That sobered us up a little, until Mr. Bernard fished the shoe out the dish, put it on Caroline’s plate, and said with a perfectly straight face, “I’m glad there’s plenty of that pudding left. Miss Charlotte and the ladies are sure to want a little something to eat when they get home from the opera.”
My great-aunt beamed at him. “You’re always so thoughtful, dear Mr. Bernard!”
“It is my duty to look after you all,” said Mr. Bernard. “I promised your brother I would before his death.”
I looked thoughtfully at the two of them. “I wonder if Grandpa ever told you anything about a Green Rider, Mr. Bernard? Or you, Aunt Maddy?”
Aunt Maddy shook her head. “Green Rider? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’ve no idea,” I said. “I know I have to find him, that’s all.”
“If I want to look for something, I usually go to your grandfather’s library,” said Mr. Bernard, and his owlish brown eyes looked very bright behind his glasses. “I have always found what I want there. If you need help, I know my way around the library very well, because I’m the one who dusts the books.”
“That’s a good idea, dear Mr. Bernard,” said Great-aunt Maddy.
“Always at your service, ma’am.” Mr. Bernard put more wood on the fire before wishing us good night.
Xemerius followed him. “I want to see if he takes his glasses off when he goes to sleep,” he said. “And I’ll tell you if he steals out of the house at night to play bass in a heavy-metal band.”
My brother and sister were really supposed to go to bed early during the week, but today my mother let them stay up. After laughing till we were worn out, we settled down in front of the fire. Caroline cuddled up in M
um’s arms, Nick nestled against me, and Great-aunt Maddy sat in Lady Arista’s wing chair, blew a blond curl away from her face, and looked at us contentedly.
“Will you tell us about the old days, Aunt Maddy?” asked Caroline. “When you were a little girl, and you had to visit your horrible cousin Hazel in the country?”
“Oh, you’ve heard that so often already,” said Aunt Maddy, putting her pink felt slippers on the footstool. But she didn’t take much persuading. All her stories about her horrible cousin Hazel began “Hazel was about the most conceited girl you can imagine,” and then we would say in chorus, “Just like Charlotte!” and Great-aunt Maddy would shake her head and say, “No, Hazel was much, much worse. She picked up cats by their tails and swung them around her head.”
As I rested my chin on Nick’s hair and listened to the story, in which Aunt Maddy, aged ten, avenged all the tortured cats in Gloucestershire by tipping Cousin Hazel into a pool of liquid manure, my thoughts went to Gideon. Where was he now? What was he doing? Who was with him? And was he maybe thinking of me, too—with that odd, warm feeling somewhere deep inside? Probably not.
I suppressed a deep sigh, with difficulty, as I thought of the moment when we parted outside Madame Rossini’s sewing room. Gideon hadn’t so much as looked at me again, even though only a few minutes earlier, we’d been kissing.
Again. Although I’d sworn over the phone to Lesley last night that it would never happen again. “Not until we’ve finally decided just what’s going on between us.”
Lesley had only laughed. “Oh, come on, who do you think you’re kidding? It’s obvious what’s going on. You’re head over heels in love with the guy!”
But how could I be in love with a boy I’d only known for a few days? A boy whose behavior was impossible most of the time? Although at those moments when it wasn’t he was just so … so … so incredibly—
“Here I am!” crowed Xemerius, landing in sweeping style on the dining-room table next to the candle. Caroline, who was sitting on Mum’s lap, gave a small start of surprise and stared his way.
“What’s the matter, Caroline?” I asked quietly.
“Oh, nothing,” she said. “I thought I saw a shadow, that’s all.”
“Really?” I looked at Xemerius in surprise.
He just shrugged one shoulder and grinned. “It’s nearly full moon. Sensitive people can sometimes see us then, usually just out of the corners of their eyes. Then if they look more closely, we’re not there at all.” Now he was dangling from the chandelier again. “That old lady with the golden curls sees and senses more than she’s letting on. When I put a claw on her shoulder, just to find out what would happen, she reached up to the place … not that that surprises me, in your family.”
I looked lovingly at Caroline. A sensitive child—not that she’d inherited Great-aunt Maddy’s talent for seeing visions.
“Now comes my favorite bit,” said Caroline, her eyes shining, and Great-aunt Maddy threw herself into the story of sadistic Hazel with her best Sunday dress on, standing up to her neck in the liquid manure, screeching, “Just you wait, Madeleine, I’ll pay you back for this!”
“And so she did, too,” said Great-aunt Maddy. “More than once.”
“But we’ll listen to that story another time,” said Mum firmly. “You children must go to bed. You have school in the morning.”
We all sighed, Great-aunt Maddy loudest of all.
* * *
FRIDAY WAS PIZZA DAY, and no one skipped school lunch. Pizza was about the only edible dish the school ever served. I knew that Lesley would die for that pizza, so I didn’t let her stay in the classroom with me. I had a date with James there.
“Go and have lunch,” I said. “I’d hate for you to miss pizza on my account.”
“But then there’ll be no one here to act as lookout for you. And I want to hear more about yesterday, with you and Gideon and the green sofa—”
“Look, with the best will in the world, I can’t tell you any more than I already did,” I said.
“Then tell me again. It’s so romantic!”
“Go eat that pizza!”
“You absolutely must get his mobile number,” said Lesley. “I mean, it’s a golden rule: never kiss a boy if you don’t have his phone number.”
“Delicious cheese and pepperoni…,” I said.
“But—”
“Xemerius is here with me,” I said, pointing to the windowsill where he was sitting, chewing the end of his pointy tail and looking bored.
Lesley caved in. “Okay. But make sure you get something to eat today. All that waving Mrs. Counter’s pointer about does no one any good! And if anyone sees what you’re up to, you’ll be carted off to the loony bin in short order, remember that.”
“Oh, go away,” I said, pushing her out of the doorway just as James was coming through it.
James was glad we’d be on our own this time. “That freckled girl gets on my nerves, always butting in! She treats me like thin air.”
“That’s because so far as she’s concerned you are … oh, forget it!”
“Well, so how can I help you today?”
“I thought maybe you could tell me how to say hello at a soirée in the eighteenth century.”
“Hello?”
“Yes. Hello. Hi. Good evening. You must know what people used to say when they met. And what they did. Shaking hands, kissing hands, a bow, a curtsey, Your Highness, Your Serene Highness … it’s all so complicated, and there’s so much I could do wrong.”
James had a self-satisfied expression on his face. “Not if you do as I tell you. The first thing you should know is how to curtsey to a gentleman of the same social rank as your own.”
“Oh, wonderful,” said Xemerius. “The only problem is, how will Gwyneth know what his social rank is?”
James stared at him. “What’s that? Shoo, kitty, shoo! Go away!”
Xemerius snorted disbelievingly. “What did you say?”
“Oh, James, take a closer look,” I said. “This is my friend Xemerius, the gargoyle demon. Xemerius, this is James, another friend of mine.”
James shook a handkerchief out of his sleeve, and the scent of lilies of the valley wafted through the air. “Whatever it is, I want it to go away. It reminds me that I’m in the middle of a terrible nightmare, a feverish dream in which I have to teach a pert minx how to behave.”
I sighed. “James, when are you going to face the facts? Over two hundred years ago, you may have had a feverish dream, but since then you’ve been … well, you and Xemerius are both … you’re—”
“Dead,” said Xemerius. “Strictly speaking.” He put his head on one side. “It’s true, you know. Why won’t you face it, like she said?”
James flicked his handkerchief. “I don’t want to hear this. Cats can’t talk.”
“Do I look like a cat, you stupid ghost?” cried Xemerius.
“You do, rather,” said James, without looking. “Except for the ears, maybe. And the horns. And the wings. And the funny tail. Oh, how I hate these fevered fantasies!”
Xemerius planted himself in front of James. His tail was lashing furiously. “I am not a fantasy. I’m a demon,” he said, and in his annoyance, he spat out a torrent of water on the floor. “A powerful demon. Conjured up by magicians and architects in the eleventh century, as you reckon time, to protect the tower of a church that isn’t standing anymore these days. When my sandstone body was destroyed, hundreds of years ago, this was all that was left of me—a shadow of my former self, so to speak, condemned to wander this earth until the world falls apart. Which could take another few million years, I should think.”
“Tralala, I’m not listening,” said James.
“You’re pathetic,” said Xemerius. “Unlike you, I have no choice—I’m bound to this earth by a magician’s curse. But you could give up your pitiful ghostly existence and go wherever human beings do go when they’re dead.”
“I’m not dead, you stupid kitty cat!” cried
James. “I’m only sick in bed with horrible feverish hallucinations. And if we don’t change the subject this minute, I’m leaving!”
“Okay,” I said, trying to use the board eraser to mop up the puddle Xemerius had made. “Let’s go on. Curtseying to a gentleman of the same social rank…”
Xemerius shook his head and flew away over our heads to the door. “I’ll stand guard for you. Think how embarrassing it’d be if anyone found you here curtseying.”
The lunch break wasn’t long enough to learn all the tricks James wanted to teach me, but in the end, I could curtsey in three different ways and hold out my hand to be kissed. (A good thing that custom has died out, if you ask me.) When the other students came back, James bowed to me and left, while I whispered a quick word of thanks.
“So?” asked Lesley.
“James thinks Xemerius is a funny kind of cat, part of his fevered fantasies,” I told her. “I can only hope that what he’s taught me isn’t also distorted by the fever. If not, then now I know what to do if I’m introduced to the Duke of Devonshire.”
“Oh, good,” said Lesley. “So what do you do?”
“Sink into a deep curtsey and stay there for a long time,” I said. “Almost as long as before the king, and for longer than if I was curtseying to a marquis or a count. It’s quite simple, really. And I always have to hold out my hand to be kissed like a good girl and keep on smiling.”
“Well, fancy that! I’d never have expected James to come in useful.” Lesley looked around appreciatively. “You’ll wow them in the eighteenth century.”
“Let’s hope so,” I said. But nothing could cloud my good mood for the rest of the classes. Charlotte and stupid Puffylips would be amazed to find out that I even knew the difference between a Serene Highness and an Illustrious Highness, although they’d done their level best to make it sound as complicated as possible.
“And by the way, I’ve worked out a theory about the magic of the raven,” said Lesley after school, on the way from the classroom to our lockers. “It’s so simple that no one’s thought of it yet. Let’s meet tomorrow morning at your house, and I’ll bring everything I’ve found out. So long as my mum hasn’t decided it’s house-cleaning day again and handed out rubber gloves to everyone—”