Sapphire Blue (The Ruby Red Trilogy) (35 page)

Mr. Bernard
, butler in the Montrose household

Xemerius
, ghost of a demon in the form of a stone gargoyle

AT ST. LENNOX HIGH SCHOOL:

Lesley Hay
, Gwyneth’s best friend

James Augustus Peregrine Pympoole-Bothame
, the school ghost

Cynthia Dale
, in Gwyneth’s class

Gordon Gelderman
, in Gwyneth’s class

AT THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE GUARDIANS IN THE TEMPLE:

Gideon de Villiers
, like Gwyneth, can travel in time

Raphael de Villiers
, Gideon’s younger brother

Falk de Villiers
, Gideon’s uncle twice removed, Grand Master of the Lodge of Count Saint-Germain, to which the Guardians belong

Thomas George
, member of the Inner Circle of the Lodge

Mr. William Whitman
, member of the Inner Circle of the Lodge, teacher of English and history at St. Lennox

Dr. Jacob White
, medical doctor and member of the Inner Circle of the Lodge

Mrs. Jenkins
, secretary

Madame Rossini
, dress designer and wardrobe mistress

IN THE PAST

Count Saint-Germain
, time traveler and founder of the Guardians

Miro Rakoczy
, his close friend, also known as the Black Leopard

Lord Brompton
, acquaintance and patron of the count’s

Lady Brompton
, his lively wife

Margaret Tilney
, time traveler, Gwyneth’s great-great-grandmother, Lady Arista’s grandmother

Paul de Villiers
, time traveler, younger brother of Falk de Villiers

Lucy Montrose
, time traveler, niece of Grace, daughter of Grace and Glenda’s elder brother, Harry

Lucas Montrose
, later Lord Lucas Montrose, Lucy’s grandfather, Glenda and Grace’s father, Grand Master of the Lodge until his death

Mr. Merchant, Lady Lavinia Rutland
, guests at Lady Brompton’s soirée

Lord Alastair
, English peer descended from Italian forefathers, head of the Florentine Alliance in the eighteenth century

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“When you change, everything around you changes. That’s magic!”

While I was writing this book, an amazing number of wonderful things happened, and I met more delightful people than I can count. Let me just say how extremely grateful I am for all the magical events that brought me together with them. And no—I don’t believe in coincidences.

My thanks to all the readers—your approval and your enthusiasm were incredibly helpful in motivating me.

Thanks to Daniela Kern, Eva Schöffmann-Davidoff, Thomas Frotz—you are the very best!

Thanks to all those who have been so patient with me this year—I’ve been really lucky with you.

For reasons of time, I will thank only four people by name: my wonderful agent Petra Hermanns, my excellent editor Christiane Düring, my dear friend Eva, and my tireless little mama.

Thanks for everything, Mama, including the way you read these books with the enthusiasm of a fourteen-year-old. Eva, without your moral support, there would have been many days when I didn’t write a word. Petra, I am sure you were sent to me by heaven! Christiane, I don’t know how you do it, but in the end I always think the ideas were all my own, although the best of them were yours! Thank you both, too, for those wonderful days in London.

HERE IS A SNEAK PEEK AT

E
MERALD
G
REEN

AVAILABLE FALL 2013!

THE END OF THE SWORD
was pointing straight at my heart, and my murderer’s eyes were like black holes threatening to swallow up everything that came too close to them. I knew I couldn’t get away. With difficulty, I stumbled a few steps back.

The man followed me. “I will wipe that which is displeasing to God off the face of the earth!” he boomed. “The ground will soak up your blood!”

I had at least two smart retorts to these sinister words on the tip of my tongue. (Soak up my blood? Oh, come off it, this was a tiled floor.) But I was in such a panic that I couldn’t get a word out. The man didn’t look as if he’d appreciate my little joke at this moment anyway. In fact he didn’t look as if he had a sense of humor at all.

I took another step back, and came up against a wall. The killer laughed out loud. Okay, so maybe he did have a sense of humor, but it wasn’t much like mine.

“Die, demon!” he cried, plunging his sword into my breast without any more ado.

I woke up, screaming. I was wet with sweat, and my heart hurt as if a blade really had pierced it. What a horrible dream! But was that really surprising?

My experiences of yesterday (and the day before) weren’t exactly likely to make me nestle down comfortably in bed and sleep the sleep of the just. Unwanted thoughts were writhing around in my mind like flesh-eating plants gone crazy.
Gideon was only pretending
, I thought
. He doesn’t really love me.

“He hardly has to do anything to attract girls,” I heard Count Saint-Germain saying in his soft, deep voice, again and again. And, “Nothing is easier to calculate than the reactions of a woman in love.”

Oh yeah? So how does a woman in love react when she finds out that someone’s been lying to her and manipulating her? She spends hours on the phone to her best friend, that’s how, then she sits about in the dark, unable to get to sleep, asking herself why the hell she ever fell for the guy in the first place, crying her eyes out at the same time because she wants him so much … right, so it doesn’t take a genius to calculate that.

The lighted numbers on the alarm clock beside my bed said 3:10, so I must have nodded off after all. I’d even slept for more than two hours. And someone—my mum?—must have come in to cover me up, because all I could remember was huddling on the bed with my arms around my knees, listening to my heart beating much too fast.

Odd that a broken heart can beat at all, come to think of it.

“It feels like it’s made of red splinters with sharp edges, and they’re slicing me up from inside so that I’ll bleed to death,” I’d said, trying to describe the state of my heart to Lesley (okay, so it sounds at least as corny as the stuff the character in my dream was saying, but sometimes the truth
is
corny). And Lesley had said sympathetically, “I know just how you feel. When Max dumped me I thought at first I’d die of grief. Grief and multiple organ failure. Because there’s a grain of truth in all those things they say about love: it goes to your kidneys, it punches you in the stomach, it breaks your heart and … er … it scurries over your liver like a louse. But first, that will all pass off; second, it’s not as hopeless as it looks to you; and third, your heart isn’t made of glass.”

“Stone, not glass,” I corrected her, sobbing. “My heart is a gemstone, and Gideon’s broken it into thousands of pieces, just like in Aunt Maddy’s vision.”

“Sounds kind of cool—but no! Hearts are really made of very different stuff, you take my word for it.” Lesley cleared her throat, and her tone of voice got positively solemn, as if she were revealing the greatest secret in the history of the world. “Hearts are made of something much tougher, it’s unbreakable, you can reshape it any time you like. Hearts are made to a secret formula.”

More throat-clearing to heighten the suspense. I instinctively held my breath. “They’re made of stuff like
marzipan
!” Lesley announced.

“Marzipan?” For a moment I stopped sobbing and smiled instead.

“That’s right, marzipan,” Lesley repeated in deadly earnest. “The best sort, with lots of real ground almonds in it.”

I almost giggled. But then I remembered that I was the unhappiest girl in the world. I sniffed, and said, “If that’s so, then Gideon has
bitten off
a piece of my heart! And he’s nibbled away the chocolate coating around it too! You ought to have seen the way he looked when…”

But before I could start crying all over again, Lesley sighed audibly.

“Gwenny, I hate to say so, but all this miserable weeping and wailing does no one any good. You have to stop it!”

“I’m not doing it on purpose,” I told her. “It just keeps on breaking out of me. One moment I’m still the happiest girl in the world, and then he tells me he…”

“Okay, so Gideon behaved like a bastard,” Lesley interrupted me. “Although it’s hard to understand why. I mean,
hello
? Why on earth would girls in love be easier to manipulate? I’d have thought it was just the opposite. Girls in love are like ticking time bombs. You never know what they’ll do next. Gideon and his male chauvinist friend the count have made a big mistake.”

PRAISE FOR
R
UBY
R
ED

“Humorous, romantic and suspenseful, the plot is fast-paced and impossible to put down.”—
Justine
magazine

“Gier succeeds on her own terms, keeping the reader moving along, forward and backward in time, and ending with a revelation and a cliffhanger. Both will leave readers anticipating the publication of the next installment,
Sapphire Blue
.”
 
—
The New York Times Book Review

“What makes this such a standout is the intriguingly drawn cast, stars and supporting players both, beginning with Gwen, whose key feature is her utter normality.… Adventure, humor, and mystery all have satisfying roles here.” —
Booklist
, starred review

“The characters in Kerstin Gier’s stellar story come fully to life, and veteran translator Anthea Bell (who translated Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart books) preserves the book’s abundant humor.… There’s something here for everyone.” —
Shelf Awareness

“
Ruby Red
is a wonderfully intriguing adventure filled with mysterious time travel, breath-catching action and heart-fluttering romance.” —
TeenReads.com

“A page-turner.” —
ChannelOne.com

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Text copyright © 2012 by Kerstin Gier

Translation copyright © 2012 by Anthea Bell

All rights reserved.

First published in the United States in 2012 by Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Original title: Kerstin Gier,
Saphirblau—Liebe geht durch alle Zeiten
copyright © 2010 Arena Verlag GmbH, Wurzburg, Germany, published by arrangement with Rights People.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gier, Kerstin.

[Saphirblau. English]

Sapphire blue / Kerstin Gier ; translated from the German
by Anthea Bell.—1st American ed.

p.        cm.

“Originally published in Germany in 2010 by Arena Verlag GmbH under the title Saphirblau: Liebe geht durch alle Zeiten.”—Copyright p.

Sequel to: Ruby red.

Summary: Sixteen-year-old Gwen, the newest and final member of the secret time-traveling Circle of Twelve, searches through history for the other time-travelers, aided by friend Lesley, James the ghost, Xemerius the gargoyle demon, and Gideon, the Diamond, whose fate seems bound with hers.

ISBN 978-0-8050-9266-0 (hc)

[1.  Time travel—Fiction.   2.  Family life—London (England)—Fiction.   3.  Secret societies—Fiction.   4.  London (England)—Fiction.   5.  England—Fiction.   6.  Great Britain—History—Fiction.]   I.  Bell, Anthea.   II.  Title.

PZ7.G3523Sap 2012          [Fic]—dc23          2011034011

eISBN 978-0-8050-9635-4

First American Edition—2012

¹
We may assume, with probability verging on certainty, that the initial denotes Giovanni Alessandro, Conte di Madrone, 1502–1572, cf. also Lamory,
Noble Italian Families of the Sixteenth Century
, Bologna 1997, p. 112 ff.

²
Here, child of demonic origin.

³
The conte may have invented the cloud of smoke and the smell of sulphur to lend greater credibility to this story.

⁴
R.M.: probably Rudolfo, a member of the Medici family, who created a great stir with his spectacular suicide in the year 1559, see Pavani,
Legends of the Forgotten Medici
, Florence 1988, p. 212 ff.