“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.

Dr. White and Mr. George nodded solemnly by way of an answer.

“Okay, so what sort of a secret is it?”

Mum began to laugh. It was totally out of place, but she laughed with a gurgle, like Caroline when Mr. Bean is on TV.

“Grace!” hissed Lady Arista. “Pull yourself together!”

But Mum just laughed even more. “A secret is a secret is a secret,” she got out between two bursts of laughter. “That’s always the way.”

“Just as I said: hysterical females, the whole bunch of them!” growled Dr. White.

“I’m glad you can see a funny side to all this,” said Mr. de Villiers.

Mum wiped the tears of laughter from her eyes. “I’m sorry. It just suddenly came over me. To be honest, I feel more like crying, I really do.”

I realized that I wasn’t going to get any closer to the nature of the secret by asking questions about it.

“What’s so dangerous about this count that I’m not supposed to meet him?” I asked instead.

Mum just shook her head. She was suddenly deadly serious again. I was getting worried about her. These mood swings weren’t like her at all.

“Nothing,” replied Dr. White. “Your mother is simply afraid you might come into contact with intellectual ideas that don’t agree with her own. But she’s not the one who makes the decisions here.”

“Intellectual ideas,” repeated my mother, and this time it was her voice dripping irony.

“Why don’t we leave it to Gwyneth to decide if she wants to meet the count?” suggested Mr. de Villiers.

“Just for a conversation? Back in the past?” I looked inquiringly from Mr. de Villiers to Mr. George and back again. “Will he be able to answer my question about the secret?”

“If he wants to,” said Mr. George. “You’ll meet him in the year 1782. The count was a very old man then, but conveniently for our purposes, he was making a visit to London. On a strictly secret mission, the nature of which is unknown to historians and his biographers. He spent the night here in this house. So it will be very easy to arrange a meeting between you. Gideon will escort you, of course.”

Gideon muttered something indistinct to himself, in which I caught the words “idiots” and “babysitter.” How I loathed this guy!

“Mum?”

“Say no, darling.”

“But why?”

“You’re not ready for it yet.”

“Not ready for what yet? Why aren’t I supposed to meet this count? What’s so dangerous about him? Oh, come on, Mum, tell me.”

“Yes, tell her, Grace,” said Mr. de Villiers. “She hates all this mystery mongering. I should think it hurts her, coming from her own mother in particular.”

Mum did not reply.

“As you see, it’s difficult extracting any really useful information from us,” said Mr. de Villiers, his amber eyes studying me seriously.

My mum still didn’t say anything.

I could have shaken her. Falk de Villiers was right. All these stupid hints weren’t getting me anywhere.

“Then I’ll have to find out for myself,” I said. “Yes, I want to meet him.” I don’t know what had suddenly come over me, but I no longer felt like a five-year-old who wanted to run home and hide under the bed.

Gideon groaned.

“You heard what she said, Grace,” said Mr. de Villiers. “I suggest you get a taxi back to Mayfair and take a tranquilizer. We’ll take Gwyneth home when we’ve … finished with her.”

“I’m not leaving her alone,” whispered Mum.

“Caroline and Nick will soon be home from school, Mum. It’s all right for you to go. I can look after myself.”

“No, you can’t,” Mum whispered.

“I’ll come with you, Grace,” said Lady Arista in a surprisingly gentle voice. “I’ve been here for two days without a break, and my head hurts. Things have taken a really unexpected turn. But now … well, it’s out of our hands.”

“Very wise,” said Dr. White.

Mum looked as if she might burst into tears any moment. “Very well,” she said. “I’ll go. I’m trusting you to make sure that no harm comes to Gwyneth.”

“And that she will be at school on time tomorrow morning,” said Lady Arista. “She shouldn’t miss too many lessons. She’s not like Charlotte.”

I looked at her in surprise. I’d forgotten all about school.

“Where are my hat and coat?” asked Lady Arista. There was a kind of collective sigh of relief from the men in the room. You couldn’t hear it, but you could sense it.

“Mrs. Jenkins will take care of everything, Lady Arista,” said Mr. de Villiers.

“Come along, my child,” Lady Arista told Mum.

“Grace.” Falk de Villiers took her hand and raised it to his lips. “It’s been a great pleasure to see you again after so many years.”

“It hasn’t been all that long,” said Mum.

“Seventeen.”

“Six,” said Mum, sounding slightly hurt. “We saw each other at my husband’s funeral, but you’ve probably forgotten.” She looked at Mr. George. “Will you take care of her?”

“Mrs. Shepherd, I promise you that Gwyneth will be safe with us,” said Mr. George. “Trust me.”

“I don’t seem to have any other option.” Mum withdrew her hand from Mr. de Villiers’s and slung her bag over her shoulder. “Can I have a word with my daughter in private?”

“Of course,” said Falk de Villiers. “You’ll be undisturbed in the room next door.”

“I’d prefer to be outside with her,” said Mum.

Mr. de Villiers raised his eyebrows. “Afraid we’ll eavesdrop on you? Watch you through peepholes in the portraits?” He laughed.

“I need a little fresh air, that’s all,” said Mum.

* * *

THE GARDEN WASN’T open to the public at this time of day. A few tourists—you could tell they were tourists from the big cameras around their necks—watched enviously as Mum opened an ornate wrought-iron gate six feet high and bolted it again behind us.

I was captivated by all the flowers in the beds, the lush green turf, and the fragrance in the air. “This was a good idea,” I said. “I was beginning to feel like a cave salamander.” I turned my face to the sunlight longingly. It was remarkably strong for early April.

Mum sat down on a teak bench and rubbed her hand over her forehead in the same way as Lady Arista, except that it didn’t make Mum look as old as the hills. “This is a nightmare,” she said.

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.”