Ruby Red: Edelstein Trilogie 01 Read Online Free PDF

middle.
    “Who are these de Villiers people?” I asked.
    “A bunch of arrogant show-offs, if you ask me,” said Great-aunt Maddy. “All of them lawyers and bankers. They own the de Villiers private bank in the city. That’s where we have our accounts.”
    That didn’t sound particularly mystical.
    “So what do they have to do with Charlotte?”
    “Well, let’s say they have problems like ours.”
    “Meaning what?” Did they have to live under the same roof as a tyrannical grandmother, a frightful aunt, and a cousin who thought herself something special?
    “The time-travel gene,” said Great-aunt Maddy. “It’s passed down through the male line in the de Villiers family.”
    “You mean they have a Charlotte as well?”
    “The male counterpart. His name’s Gideon, as far as I know.”
    “And he’s waiting to feel dizzy too?”
    “He’s already over that part of it. He’s two years older than Charlotte.”
    “So he’s been time traveling for the last two years?”
    “That’s what I assume.”
    I tried to reconcile this new information with the little I already knew. But since Great-aunt Maddy was being so talkative today I allowed myself only a couple of seconds for that. “And what’s a chroni … a chrono-thingummy?”
    “Chronograph.” Great-aunt Maddy rolled her round blue eyes. “It’s a kind of apparatus that can be used to send the gene carriers—only them, no one else!—back to a specific time. It’s something to do with blood.”
    “A time machine ?” Fueled by blood? Good heavens!
    Great-aunt Maddy shrugged. “I’ve no idea how the thing works. You’re forgetting, I know only what I’ve overheard, same as you, sitting here acting as if butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth. It’s all a deadly secret.”
    “Yup. And very complicated,” I said. “How do they know Charlotte has the gene, anyway? I mean, why her and not … well, let’s say you ?”
    “I can’t have it, thank goodness,” she said. “We Montroses were always a funny lot, but the gene came into our family through your grandmother. Because my brother just had to go and marry her.” Aunt Maddy grinned. She was my late grandfather Lucas’s sister. Never having been married herself, she’d moved in to keep house for him when they were quite young. “The first time I heard about this gene was after Lucas’s wedding. The last gene carrier in Charlotte’s hereditary line was a lady called Margaret Tilney, and she in her turn was the grandmother of your grandmother Arista.”
    “So Charlotte inherited the gene from this Margaret?”
    “Well, in between Lucy inherited it. Poor girl.”
    “Lucy? What Lucy?”
    “Your cousin Lucy. Harry’s eldest daughter.”
    “Oh, that Lucy,” My uncle Harry, the one in Gloucestershire, was a good deal older than Glenda and my mum. His three children had grown up ages ago. David, the youngest, was a twenty-eight-year-old British Airways pilot. Which unfortunately didn’t mean we got a discount on flights. And Janet, the middle one, had children of her own, pains in the neck, both of them, Poppy and Daisy by name. I’d never met Lucy, the eldest. I didn’t know much about her either. The Montroses never said a thing about Lucy. She was kind of the black sheep of the family. She’d run away from home at the age of seventeen, and nothing had been heard of her since.
    “Lucy’s a gene carrier too?”
    “Oh, yes,” said Great-aunt Maddy. “All hell broke loose here when she disappeared. Your grandmother practically had a heart attack. It was the most shocking scandal.” She shook her head so vigorously that her golden curls got all tangled up.
    “I can just imagine it.” I thought of what would happen if Charlotte simply packed her cases and made for the wide blue yonder.
    “No, you can’t. You don’t know the circumstances in which she disappeared, and it was all to do with that young man—Gwyneth! Take your finger out of your mouth this minute! That’s a