“Hey, I look like a cross between Marie Antoinette and my grandmother,” I said. And because of my black eyebrows, I also looked a little bit like Groucho Marx, if he’d dressed up as a woman.
“Nonsense,” said Madame Rossini, fixing the wig with large hairpins. They looked like little daggers, with glittering artificial jewels at the ends that stuck out of the structure of white curls like blue stars. “It is ze contrasts zat matter, my leetle swan-necked beauty. Ze contrasts are important.” She pointed to the makeup box lying open on the dressing table. “And ze makeup—smoky eyes were in vogue by candlelight in ze eighteenth century. Now, a little powder, et c’est parfait! You will be ze loveliest lady at ze ball!”
Not that she would ever know, because of course she wouldn’t be there. I smiled at her. “You’re so sweet to me! You’re the nicest of them all. And you deserve an Oscar for your costumes.”
“I know,” said Madame Rossini modestly.
* * *
“IT IS IMPORTANT zat ze ’ead go into ze car first and out of it first when you get out. Always ze ’ead first, sweet’eart!” Madame Rossini had accompanied me to the limousine and was helping me to get in. I felt rather like Marge Simpson, except that my towering pile of hair was white and not blue, and luckily there was room for it in the car.
“Who’d have thought such a slender girl could take up so much space!” said Mr. George, laughing, as I finally got my skirts neatly spread out on the seat.
“Too true. I really need a postcode all to myself in these clothes.”
Madame Rossini blew me a cheerful good-bye kiss. She was such a darling! When I was with her, I always entirely forgot how horrible my life was at the moment.
The car started moving off. At that moment, the front door of the Guardians’ headquarters flew open, and out came Giordano in a hurry. His plucked eyebrows were raised, and I was sure he was deathly pale under his fake tan. His mouth with its puffy lips was opening and closing, making him look like a deep-sea fish on the verge of extinction. Luckily I couldn’t make out what he was saying to Madame Rossini, but I could well imagine it. Stupid thing. No idea of history and dancing the minuet. She’ll put us all to shame with her ignorance. A disgrace to the human race.
Madame Rossini gave him a sugary sweet smile and said something that made his fishy mouth close abruptly. But then I lost sight of them both as the driver turned into the street leading to the Strand.
I leaned back, grinning, but my good mood quickly went away again during the drive, giving way to alarm and anxiety. I was afraid of just about everything: the uncertainty of it all, the people, the looks, the questions, the dancing, and most of all, of course, I was afraid of another meeting with the count. My fears had followed me into my dreams yesterday, although I was glad I had at least slept through the night. Just before waking up, I had a particularly confused dream in which I stumbled over my own skirts and then fell down a huge staircase to land in front of Count Saint-Germain, who helped me to my feet, hauling me upright by my throat without touching me. As he did so, he snapped, oddly enough in Charlotte’s voice, “You are a disgrace to the whole family.” And Mr. Marley stood beside him, holding up Lesley’s backpack and saying reproachfully, “There’s only one pound twenty left on the Oyster card.”
“How unfair! When I’d only just topped it up!” Lesley had laughed herself silly over my dream this morning. Although it hadn’t really been so far-fetched: her backpack had been stolen after school yesterday just as she was about to get into the bus, roughly snatched off her back by a young man who, according to Lesley, could run faster than Dwain Chambers.
By now we were fairly well used to the Guardians and what they might do. And we wouldn’t have expected anything else of Charlotte, who must have been behind the theft (indirectly, anyway). All the same, we thought those methods a little, well, crude. If we’d needed further evidence, it was the fact that the woman next to Lesley had been carrying a Hermès bag. I mean, honestly! What thief worth his salt would steal a shabby old rucksack instead of that?
According to Xemerius, as soon as I’d left the house yesterday, Charlotte had combed my room for the chronograph, searching every nook and cranny. She’d even looked under my pillow—what an original idea for a hiding place! After her meticulous exploration of my wardrobe, she had finally discovered the place where I had loosened the plasterboard and then crawled through into the lumber room beyond with a triumphant grin on her face (so Xemerius said). Not even the sister of my little spider friend had been able to scare her. She didn’t hesitate to reach right inside the crocodile, either.
Of course, if she’d done that a day earlier … but the early bird catches the worm, as Lady Arista was always saying, and only the early bird. After Charlotte had crawled out of the lumber room and the wardrobe, frustrated, she had set her sights on Lesley, and that cost my friend her rucksack. So now the Guardians were in possession of a recently topped-up Oyster card, a pencil case, and a lip gloss (cherry tint), as well as a couple of books from the school library about the extent of the eastern delta of the river Ganges—but that was all.
Not even Charlotte could hide this setback behind the usual arrogant expression on her face when she appeared at the breakfast table this morning. Lady Arista, on the other hand, had the decency to admit that she had been wrong.
“The chest is on its way back to us,” she said coolly. “Charlotte’s nerves are obviously rather on edge, and I must admit that I was mistaken in believing what she said. Let us now consider the matter closed and turn to other subjects.”
That was a genuine apology, at least by Lady Arista’s standards. While Charlotte, on hearing these words, stared intently at her plate, the rest of us exchanged glances of astonishment and then obediently turned to the only other subject that occurred to us in a hurry, the weather.
Only Aunt Glenda, who had red blotches on her throat, wasn’t taking anything that reflected badly on her daughter. She couldn’t help saying, “I’d have thought we ought to be grateful to Charlotte for retaining a sense of responsibility and keeping her eyes open, instead of saying she was wrong. But there we are, ingratitude is only too widespread. I am sure that—”
However, we never found out what Aunt Glenda was sure of, because Lady Arista said, in icy tones, “If you don’t want to change the subject, Glenda, you are of course at liberty to leave the table.” Which Aunt Glenda did, along with Charlotte, who said she wasn’t hungry anymore.
“Everything all right?” Mr. George, who was sitting opposite me—or diagonally opposite me, because my skirts were so huge that they filled half the car—and so far had left me to my thoughts, was smiling at me. “Did Dr. White give you something to help with your stage fright?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I was too scared of seeing double in the eighteenth century.” Or worse, but I wasn’t going to say so to Mr. George. At the soirée last Sunday, I had needed Lady Brompton’s special punch to help me keep calm—and it was the same punch that had made me perform “Memory” from Cats to the astonished guests, about two hundred years before Andrew Lloyd Webber composed it. I’d also had a conversation out loud with a ghost in front of everyone, which I certainly wouldn’t have done entirely sober.
I’d hoped I could have at least a few minutes alone with Dr. White, so that I could ask why he had helped me out, but he had examined me in front of Falk de Villiers and pronounced me better, to everyone’s delight. When I gave him a conspiratorial wink as we parted, Dr. White only frowned and asked whether I had something in my eye. Remembering that, I sighed.
“Don’t worry,” said Mr. George sympathetically. “It won’t last long, and you’ll soon be back. You’ll be through with the whole occasion before supper.”
“But I can do all sorts of things wrong in that time. I might even cause an international crisis. Just ask Giordano. The wrong sort of smile, the wrong sort of curtsey, saying the wrong thing—and wow! The whole eighteenth century goes up in flames.”
Mr. George laughed. “Oh, Giordano is just envious. He’d commit murder for a chance to travel in time.”
I stroked the soft silk of my skirts, running my fingers over the embroidered outlines of the pattern. “Seriously, I still don’t understand why the ball is so important. And what I have to do there.”
“You mean as well as dancing and amusing yourself and enjoying the privilege of meeting the famous Duchess of Devonshire in person?” When I didn’t smile back, Mr. George suddenly turned serious, took a handkerchief out of his breast pocket, and dabbed his forehead with it. “My dear girl, the day is of the utmost importance, because at that ball it will be discovered which of the Guardians of the time is the traitor who has been passing on information to the Florentine Alliance. Through your presence, the count hopes to induce both Lord Alastair and the traitor to give themselves away.”
Ah. Well, at least that was more specific than the mysterious stuff in the middle of Anna Karenina.
“So strictly speaking, we’re decoys?” I frowned. “But … er … wouldn’t you have found out ages ago whether the plan worked? And who the traitor was? I mean, it all happened two hundred and thirty years ago.”
“Yes and no,” replied Mr. George. “For some reason, the reports on those days and weeks in the Annals are extremely vague. In addition, a whole section is missing. There are several references to the traitor who has been dismissed from his high office, but his name is never given. Four weeks later, there is a brief mention, almost by the way, saying that no one honored the traitor by attending his last rites, because he had earned no honor.”
I had goose bumps again. “You mean the traitor was dead four weeks after being thrown out of the Lodge? How … practical.”
Mr. George wasn’t listening to me anymore. He tapped on the window between us and the driver. “I’m afraid the gateway will be too narrow for the limousine. You’d better drive into the school yard through the side entrance.” He smiled at me. “Here we are! And you look lovely—I’ve been wanting to say so all this time. As if you’d stepped straight out of an old painting.”
The car stopped in front of the steps up to the school building.
“Only much, much more beautiful,” said Mr. George.
“Thank you.” I felt so embarrassed that I quite forgot what Madame Rossini had said—Always ze ’ead first, sweet’eart!—and I made the mistake of trying to get out of the car in the same way as usual, with the result that I got hopelessly entangled in my skirts and felt like an angry little bee caught in a spider’s web. As I cursed and Mr. George had a fit of helpless giggles, two hands were reached out to me, and since I had no other option, I took them both and let them pull me out and set me on my feet.
One hand belonged to Gideon; the other to Mr. Whitman. I dropped them as if I’d burnt myself.