“Well, now I can imagine how you felt at the time. And I suddenly understand why you wished you were dead.”
“How stupid could I get! You sat with me the whole time telling me Max wasn’t worth another thought, not after the way he’d behaved. And you told me to brush my teeth—”
“Yes, and we were listening to Abba’s ‘The Winner Takes It All’ played in an endless loop.”
“I can play that song for you,” offered Lesley, “if it’d make you feel any better.”
“It wouldn’t. But you can hand me the Japanese vegetable knife. Then I can commit hara-kiri.” I let myself drop on my bed, and closed my eyes.
“Girls always have to be so dramatic!” said Xemerius. “The boy’s in a bad temper, looks grouchy because someone hit him on the head, and you think it’s the end of the world.”
“It’s because he doesn’t love me,” I said despairingly.
“You can’t know that,” said Lesley. “With Max, unfortunately, I did know, because half an hour after he dumped me, he was seen snogging in the cinema with that Anna. You can’t accuse Gideon of doing a thing like that. He’s rather … changeable, that’s all.”
“But why? You should have seen the way he looked at me! Kind of repelled. As if I was a … a woodlouse! I can’t bear it.”
“A moment ago, you said you were a chair.” Lesley shook her head. “Come on, pull yourself together. Mr. George is right: love comes in at the window and common sense flies out. Listen, we’re on the point of making a tremendous breakthrough!”
Earlier that morning, when she had just arrived and we were sitting comfortably on my bed together, Mr. Bernard had knocked at my bedroom door—something he never usually did—and put a tea tray down on my desk.
“A little refreshment for you young ladies,” he had said.
I’d looked at him in astonishment. I couldn’t remember ever having seen him up on this floor of the house before.
“Since you were asking about it recently, I took the liberty of searching in the library,” Mr. Bernard had gone on, studying us gravely with his owlish eyes above the rim of his glasses. “And as I expected, I found what I wanted.”
“What is it?” I’d asked.
Mr. Bernard had lifted the napkin on the tray to reveal a book lying there. “The Green Rider,” he had said. “If I remember correctly, this is what you were looking for.”
Lesley had jumped to her feet and picked up the book. “Oh, but I’ve already looked at this in the public library,” she said. “It’s nothing special.”
Mr. Bernard had smiled indulgently. “The reason you say that, I think, is that the copy you found in the public library was never the property of Lord Montrose. However, this one may interest you.” Then he left the room, with a little bow, and Lesley and I had fallen on the book at once. A piece of paper on which someone had written masses of numbers in tiny handwriting had fluttered to the floor. Lesley’s cheeks had turned red with excitement.
“Oh, my God, it’s a code!” she had exclaimed. “How absolutely wonderful! I always wanted to find something like this. Now all we have to do is find out what it means.”
“Right,” said Xemerius, who was dangling from my curtain rail. “I’ve heard that before. I think it fits the category of famous last words.…”
But it hadn’t taken Lesley five minutes to crack the code and work out that the figures related to separate letters in the text. “The first number is always the page, the second is the line, the third is the word, the fourth is the letter, get it? Fourteen, twenty-two, six, three—that’s page fourteen, line twenty-two, word six, and the third letter in that word.” She shook her head. “What a cheap trick! People use this code in every other kids’ book, as far as I remember. Never mind, that means the first letter is an f.”
Impressed, Xemerius had nodded. “Listen to your friend.”
“Don’t forget, this is a matter of life and death,” said Lesley. “You think I want to lose my best friend just because she couldn’t think straight after a bit of snogging?”
“My own opinion exactly!” That was Xemerius.
“This is important. You must stop crying and find out what Lucy and Paul discovered instead,” Lesley went on forcefully. “If you get sent to elapse to 1956 again today—and you’ll only have to ask Mr. George to fix that—you must insist on a private talk with your grandfather! What a crackpot idea to go out to a café! And this time you must write down all he tells you, every last little detail, understand?” She sighed. “Are you sure he said Florentine Alliance? I couldn’t find anything useful online about that. We just have to get a look at those secret writings left to the Guardians by Count Saint-Germain. If only Xemerius could move objects, he could search the archives—he’d simply have to go through the wall and read everything.”
“That’s right, so I’m useless. Go ahead and rub it in, why don’t you?” said Xemerius, offended. “It’s only taken me seven centuries to get used to not even being able to turn the pages of a book.”
There was a knock at my door, and Caroline looked into the room. “Lunch is ready! Gwenny, you and Charlotte are being collected in an hour’s time.”
I groaned. “Charlotte as well?”
“Yes, that’s what Aunt Glenda said. They’re imposing on poor Charlotte, she said, making her coach people with no talent at all. Or something like that.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
“We’ll be right down,” said Lesley, digging me in the ribs. “Come along, Gwenny. You can wallow in self-pity later. Right now you need something to eat!”
I sat up and blew my nose. “My nerves aren’t strong enough to listen to Aunt Glenda’s nasty remarks. And we only just got started on the code!”
“I’ll keep working on it, don’t worry. Meanwhile, you’re going to need strong nerves in the immediate future.” Lesley pulled me to my feet. “Charlotte and your aunt will be good practice for when the going gets tough. If you survive lunch, you can get through that soirée, no problem.”
“And if not, you can always commit hara-kiri,” said Xemerius.
* * *
MADAME ROSSINI clasped me to her ample bosom when I arrived. “My leetle swan-necked beauty, ’ere you are at last. I ’ave missed you.”
“I’ve missed you, too,” I said, and I meant it. The mere presence of Madame Rossini, with her overflowing kindness and her wonderful French accent (leetle swan-necked beauty! If only Gideon could hear that!), was invigorating and reassuring at the same time. She was balm to my wounded self-esteem.
“You will be enchantée when you see what I ’ave made for you. Monsieur Giordano, ’e almost wept when ’e saw your clothes, zey are so beautiful.”
“I believe you,” I said. Giordano would have been weeping because he couldn’t wear the clothes himself. Still, he’d been reasonably friendly today, not least because I did rather well with the dancing this time—and thanks to being prompted by Xemerius, I’d been able to say which great lords of the time supported the Tories and which the Whigs. (Xemerius had simply looked over Charlotte’s shoulder from behind and read her list.) Also thanks to Xemerius, I was word-perfect in my own cover story—Penelope Mary Gray, born 1765—including all the first names of my dead parents. I was still not much good with a fan, but Charlotte had made the constructive suggestion that I didn’t need to carry one at all.
At the end of the lesson, Giordano had handed me another list full of words that I mustn’t under any circumstances use. “Learn those by heart for tomorrow,” he had said in his nasal voice. “Remember, there are no buses in the eighteenth century, no news anchormen, no Hoovers, nothing is super, wicked, or cool, they knew nothing about splitting the atom, colllagen skin creams, or holes in the ozone layer.”
Who’d have thought it? I tried to imagine why on earth, when I was at an eighteenth-century soirée, I’d want to come out with a sentence about anchormen, holes in the ozone layer, and collagen skin creams. However, I politely said, “Okay,” which had Giordano screeching, “Nooo! Not okay. There was no okay in the eighteenth century, you stupid girl.”
Madame Rossini laced the corset behind my back. Once again I was surprised to find how comfortable it was. You automatically stood up straight wearing something like that. She strapped a padded wire framework around my hips (the eighteenth century must have been a very relaxing time for women with big bums and broad hips), and then put a dark red dress over my head. She did up a long row of little hooks and buttons behind me, while I stroked the heavy, embroidered silk, admiring it. Wow, it was so amazing!
Madame Rossini walked slowly around me, and a satisfied smile spread over her face. “Entrancing. Magnifique.”
“Is this the ball dress?” I asked.
“No, it is ze gown for ze soirée.” Madame Rossini pinned tiny, perfectly formed silk roses in place around the deep décolletage. As her mouth was full of pins, she spoke indistinctly through her teeth. “Zere, you can wear your ’air unpowdered, and ze dark color will look fantastic with ze red. Just as I thought!” She winked at me mischievously. “You will attract attention, my swan-necked beauty, n’est-ce pas—although zat is not ze idea, but what can I do?” She wrung her hands, but unlike Giordano when he was wringing his, dumpy little Madame Rossini looked cute. “You are a leetle beauty, zere is no denying it, putting you in neutral colors would not ’elp. Zere we are, little swan neck, and now for ze ball dress.”
The ball dress was pale blue with cream embroidery and frills, and it fitted as perfectly as the red dress. It had, if possible, an even more spectacularly plunging neckline than the red dress, and the skirt swung around me for what looked like yards. Madame Rossini weighed up my hair, which was in a braid today, in both hands, looking worried. “I am not sure ’ow we should do ze ’air. A wig is not comfortable, not with all that ’air of your own ’idden underneath. But your ’air is so dark, with powder it will probably be a ’ideous gray. Quelle catastrophe!” She frowned. “Never mind. With powder you would be à la mode—but dear ’eaven, what a ’orrible mode!”
For the first time that day, I couldn’t help smiling. ’Ideous! ’Orrible! Oh, how right she was. It wasn’t just the fashionable hair powder, Gideon was ’ideous and ’orrible as well, so far as I was concerned, and from now on, I was going to look at him that way, so there!
Madame Rossini didn’t seem to realize how good she was for my peace of mind. She was still getting indignant about the eighteenth century. “Boys, girls, ’aving to powder their ’air to look like their grandmères—’orrible. Now try on zese shoes. You must dance in zem, remember, but we still ’ave time to get zem altered.”
