The Safekeepers

Chapter One

FRENCH RIVIERA JULY 2012

Kaylee carefully picked up her ice-cold martini from the side table next to the cream sun lounger she had sunk into, pulling down the brim of her floppy black hat to shield her eyes from the scorching, Mediterranean sun. The wind smelled of delicate Felicia roses, ginger lily and lemongrass, and, somewhere between the rim of her hat and that of her sweetly salted martini glass, she could see the transparent blue infinity pool and beach beyond. She sighed, reclining more comfortably and removing her towel to display her bikini-clad body to the sun’s bronzing rays.

“Kaylee?”

“Mmm” she murmured in reply, slightly annoyed to notice that Gargoyle’s wide figure was casting a shadow over her. “Your Latin class?”

 “Already?” she groaned, tilting her head and squinting to look up into Gargoyle’s graven face. “What happened to free time?”

“Has it ever existed?” He replied with his usual mix of humour and sarcasm, holding out the white dress to her that she’d flung over a nearby chair.

Kaylee plonked her martini glass down and snatched the dress from him irritably. Who else her age learnt Latin in July? Who else was home-schooled for that matter?

“Fine – I will go to my Latin class. Tell me, have you ever had to govern someone so obedient?”

Gargoyle rolled his eyes, “Obedient? Prove it: run along and don’t keep James waiting.”

“Oh don’t worry, he’ll make up for the lost time with even more verbs to learn. Honestly, I don’t get it, why can’t I learn Swahili instead? Even that is more useful, who knows, I might actually get a chance to use it.”

Gargoyle’s nose twitched, the only sign of discomfort the man allowed himself, “Latin is one of the most valuable skills you will ever need.” He reminded her lightly that she did speak other languages as well: Spanish, French, Russian and Mandarin.

Kaylee snorted, “Then why do I spend a disproportionate amount of my time studying Latin? Latin” she retorted “is a dead language.”

Pulling her dress over her head she reached out to gather up the stack of Latin texts she had left by the poolside and made her way back into the house and through the numerous white corridors with their curved windows looking out to the sea.

James, a small, bald-headed man with spectacles like two gleaming half-moons, was sitting in the bay window in the library, looking down onto the whitewashed rose garden. Unlike most of the academics that taught and researched at her Guardian’s home, James had no interest in outdoor pursuits of any description and insisted on wearing shirts and woolen pullovers when most people were in shorts and flip flops. A thick, dusty manual was rapidly consuming him and Kaylee had to call his name twice before he took any notice of her. Even then, after acknowledging her presence, he continued reading for another five minutes before slowly looking at his watch.

“You’re fifteen minutes late.”

“Ten” she pointed out, “for five of those minutes I was present but you were reading.”

‘Fifteen” he corrected, “So that will be fifteen extra verbs to learn tonight, in all their forms. You waste my time, I’ll waste yours.”

Kaylee nodded resentfully, not even poking fun, as she usually did, at the look of smug satisfaction that crept into James’s face whenever she’d done something to upset the balance, the look that said I knew I could never make anything of her, they all expect too much.

“So, Latin?” she asked, removing an orange folder and textbook from a bag.

“Yes, yes” James replied, immediately down to business. The manual he’d been reading closed with a thud, releasing a cloud of dust mites.