The Strange Visitation at Wolffe Hall Read online

  Pip was right. No matter what time of the day or night he wrote the last line, he toasted himself with champagne. “We can’t wake up Haddock—”

  Pip pulled his thumb out of his mouth. “Mr. Haddock says he has to sleep eight hours to grow his hair.”

  Since Haddock was blessed with more hair than he deserved, Grayson couldn’t argue with the eight hours a night. “Maybe Mrs. Elvan left a bottle of champagne in the icebox. I told her about my champagne tradition, and she knew I was getting close to the end of the book. Let’s go to the kitchen and see.”

  Grayson carried the candle branch in one hand, Pip pressed against his shoulder with the other. The house groaned with its night sounds as he walked along the wide corridor, boards creaking beneath his booted feet, and the air hung quiet as a crypt, musty, choking—but wait, he heard something. Something close, too close, maybe in the wall, a muffled moan, not a human moan, no—

  Grayson shook his head at himself. His mind always went to the macabre, to the potentially terrifying. Hmmm, Thomas was carrying the small son—or daughter—of the house to safety, not knowing what lay waiting ahead, but the sounds he’d heard were deep in the wall, or perhaps behind the wall, trying to punch through—

  Belhaven House kitchen sported a brand-new icebox, an experimental invention by Mr. Hubalto Custer of York, who’d asked Grayson to give it a try, which he’d agreed to even though Mrs. Elvin believed the monstrosity to be the work of Satan. Imagine, a box with a huge block of ice in it that melted all over everything and dripped on the floor and made a body slip and slide—no Christian would be responsible for that.

  He unlatched the wooden box door and raised the candle. The once-big block of ice was melting, true, but it was a slow drip, most of it caught in a pan set in the bottom. And because Mr. Custer had stuffed sawdust in the inside doors, the interior remained cold. Mrs. Elvan hadn’t complained about that. It was an amazing invention. Yet another remarkable invention by a man named Fox-Talbot was photography, not a painting or drawing, it was a recording of what you actually saw. One of Grayson’s good friends, Murdoch Tynes, said it was time someone finally developed a cure for baldness. And train cars were becoming more widespread, and, of course, his icebox. Grayson leaned in and saw the two lower shelves of the icebox held three covered dishes and a single bottle of Legrandier’s finest champagne. The bottle was cold to the touch. Should he give Pip a sip? He could see Lorelei smiling, and so he did, a very small sip after they toasted his completion of The Evil Within.

  He heard a noise, not a house sound, something else entirely, and it wasn’t from his imagination. “Pip,” he whispered against his son’s ear. “Don’t say a word. I’m putting you down. Don’t move.”

  The sound came again, a scraping sound. Someone was trying to open the locked door at the back of the kitchen.

  Grayson lightly squeezed his son’s arm, said again, “Don’t move.”

  Grayson left the candle on a tabletop and carried the champagne bottle by its neck toward the back door.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Grayson silently unfastened the lock, turned the knob, and jerked the door open. A boy no more than ten tumbled in headfirst, squealing as he hit the floor. He rolled onto his back and stared up at Grayson. “Lawks, don’t ye kill me, yer lordship! I only be ‘ere because me mistress be in a revoltin’ way.”

  Grayson set the champagne bottle on the floor and came down beside the boy. “Are you hurt?”

  “Me buttocks took a fair knock.”

  “Knocks are good for buttocks, especially young boys’ buttocks. Any place else on your person that took a knock?”

  There was thought about this, then a shaggy head shake.

  Grayson took in his small intruder. He was as skinny as a walking stick, with dark-red hair curling all over his head atop a pale face with a small scattering of freckles. Grayson looked directly into very nearly Sherbrooke blue eyes. He saw no pain. “Who are you?”

  “Barnaby, yer lordship.”

  Pip crowded in behind his father. “It’s late, Barnaby, you should be at home in bed.”

  “See ‘ere now, nipper, so should ye. I’m an old man compared to ye. Besides, I’m on a mission, I am, to ‘elp me mistress.”

  “And your mistress would be?”

  “P.C., yer lordship.”

  Grayson cudgeled his brain for a neighbor with the initials P.C. but couldn’t come up with a single name. “What does P.C. stand for, Barnaby? And I’m not a lordship.”

  “I can’t tell ye, ah—yer grace, she’d pull my innards out through my nose. But P.C. said she really needed ye, had me repeat yer name three times so’s I wouldn’t forgets, and I ‘eard her say, ‘I really need Thomas Straithmore or next time it will come and everything will fall off the earth into the abyss.’ Aye, that’s exactly what she said. I don’t know what this abyss is, but I figure it’s gots to be really bad. She said to tell ye she needed ye to come right away so she can tell ye what happened and ye can fix things like ye always do, Mr. Straithmore, yer grace.”

  “I’m not a grace either, Barnaby. If I hadn’t been in the kitchen, what would you have done if you’d managed to break the door open? Searched out my bedchamber and tapped me on the shoulder?”

  “I ‘ad to light me candle first, yer chancellorship—I ain’t no idjut.” Barnaby pulled a stub of a candle from his jacket pocket, a nicely made jacket, Grayson saw. “I needs me a Lucifer. I sees a box of ‘em over there on the counter.”

  “Then you would have found the stairs and climbed up and begun your search for me?”

  Pip leaned close. “I know where Papa’s room is, Barnaby. I could take you to him so he could be a hero for P.C. Papa’s not a chancel-ship. I never heard of that sort of boat.”

  “Yer a smart nipper, ain’t ye?” Barnaby gave Pip an approving look, then sat up, wrapped his arms around his bent knees, and looked up at Grayson. “But yer right ‘ere, so I don’t gots to do no lookin’ around for ye. Will ye come wit’ me now, yer worship?”

  Grayson started to tell the boy Thomas Straithmore was a fictional hero, but he realized the boy’s eyes were no longer on his face, rather focused on the bottle of champagne on the floor not three feet away.

  “Ye be drinking the bubbly? Wit’ the nipper? Fer shame, yer worship. If ye wants a drinking companion, me mistress likes to tip the bubbly. She stole some once, fair to set her ma’s hair on fire.”

  “Only a tiny sip for the nipper. How far away is your mistress? I’m not a worship.”

  “She’s down by the ‘ollow, jest where yer land leaves off, all crouched down behind a willow tree by the edge of the little lake the Great built back in the time of Noah, she told me, said she’d wait there fer ye. Will ye come now, yer princeship?”

  Was Barnaby talking about Colonel Lord Josiah Wolffe, Baron Cudlow? The old curmudgeon who reputedly hated all his neighbors and sat in his library polishing his Waterloo medals? Grayson had heard his wife had passed on some twenty years ago, but his widowed daughter-in-law lived with him. He’d also heard a widowed granddaughter-in-law lived there now, but he knew nothing about her. Grayson had lived at Belhaven House for only four months, and all his neighbors had visited to welcome him, invited him to dinner and to small parties, but not the Wolffes of Wolffe Hall. The vicar, Mr. Elijah Harkness, had told him in a lowered voice that he and Mrs. Harkness were invited to dinner once a quarter when the baron paid his employees’ wages because he wanted a witness, a man of God, to attest to his probity.

  Was Barnaby’s P.C. the widowed granddaughter-in-law’s daughter? Hard to sort through that. Grayson asked Barnaby, “Is P.C.’s last name Wolffe?”

  Barnaby looked distressed. “Sorry, yer guvnorship, I can’t tell ye else P.C.’d burn off me toes and stick ‘em in me ears since she told me to fetch ye and keep me clapper shut.”

  An abyss? Not a child’s word, an adult’s word. His interest and curiosity were near to brimming over. He knew he wanted to know what was going on, and so he s
aid, “Barnaby, give me a moment. Pip, it’s time you were in bed. Barnaby, wait here, I’ll be right back.”

  “What be that big wooden thing?”

  “It’s called an icebox. And no, do not even think of opening the handle. You never know what might jump out at you. Stay right where you are or I won’t go with you to P.C.”

  Barnaby’s attention turned back to the champagne, so Grayson picked up the bottle in one hand, Pip in the other, and went upstairs to the nursery. “Papa, I want to help save P.C.”

  “Not this time, Pip.”

  “But I’m nearly five, Papa, well, maybe four and a half, but I’m tall, way past your knees, I could—”

  And on and on. How had Pip learned so many words? Grayson would have gray hair by the time his son ran out of arguments, and P.C. would have fallen off the earth into the abyss. Bribery, no hope for it. “I’ll take you into York to Mr. Hebbert’s Viking Marvels, but only if you get into bed now and sleep.”

  Finally, a nod. Visions of brutal Viking axes and shields and helmets won out, this time. “When?”

  The second-most-asked question. “As soon as I take care of P.C.’s trouble.” Grayson wasn’t surprised to see Pip’s nanny, Mary Beth, sound asleep.

  He tiptoed to Pip’s bed, settled him under the covers, kissed him, and heard his son whisper, “Save P.C., Papa. Take her the champagne, to calm her lady’s nerves.”

  Grayson, now warm in his greatcoat, followed Barnaby, a lantern in one hand, his dueling pistol stuck in his belt. He said to the boy leading him, “How did you find your way to Belhaven House without any light?”

  Barnaby turned to grin up at him, showing a mouthful of very nice white teeth. “I gots me superior eyesight, yer—” He stopped, blinked, and shook his head. “I can’t think of another title, guv, can ye help me out?”

  “I could be His Holiness.”

  “Oh niver, me ma’d skin me alive iffen she were still here on our worldly plane, which she ain’t. Ye can’t be no ‘oliness, that’s against the law.”

  “Very well, you may call me—” Grayson paused, then smiled. “You may call me Mr. Straithmore.”

  And so they continued in the cold, calm night, a three-quarter moon overhead, clouds scattering in front of it to very nearly obliterate the narrow path. “Barnaby, it’s time you told me P.C.’s last name. After all, we’re going directly to Colonel Wolffe’s property. Is she P.C. Wolffe?”

  “Sorry, yer amazingness, but me mistress also told me to keep mum since ye might ‘ave over’eard stories about Lord Great and might not want to get yerself near him. I don’t mean he ain’t a nice old codger, ‘cause he is, but I don’t want to take no chances. Iffen ye didn’t like ‘im, then ye wouldn’t want to come save P.C. from the abyss, whatever that be.”

  “Lord Great? This is Colonel Wolffe, Baron Cudlow?”

  Barnaby nodded. “The Great—that’s what me mistress calls him, her ma too. He likes it, she told me. He thinks it fits since he thwacked Napoleon but good way back in the time of the Crusades.”

  Barnaby turned back to the path and jogged forward, whistling a very graphic ditty written years before by the Duchess of Wyndham. Barnaby did indeed have fine night vision. After ten minutes they reached the edge of Sherbrooke land and the small pond that divided the two properties.

  Grayson automatically began looking about for a willow tree with a female named P.C. sitting beneath it. He heard an owl hoot.

  Barnaby stopped in his tracks, raised his head, and hooted back. It wasn’t badly done, if the owl were in severe distress.

  Grayson didn’t know what to expect, but when he saw the small figure run from tree to tree, then finally emerge to look about, then trot up to him, he knew this wasn’t it. He supposed he should have expected another child, but this one—she looked younger than Barnaby. This was P.C.? This infant tipped the bubbly? She’d pull Barnaby’s innards out through his nose? She was worried about falling into the abyss?

  She stopped three feet from him and said in a proper little lady’s well-bred voice, “Please, sir, hold up the lantern so I can see your face clearly. I must know you are indeed Thomas Straithmore. His picture is on the back of my favorite book, you see, so I can’t be fooled.” She was right about his picture. His publisher, Benjamin Hawkes, knowing Grayson Sherbrooke was very well connected—his uncle, after all, was the Earl of Northcliff—had a drawing of Grayson’s likeness put on the back of one of his novels, knowing every influential person would recognize him and most likely buy the book. Beneath the drawing was the name Thomas Straithmore. From that book on, Grayson remembered, Thomas Straithmore fast became a household name.

  “I am he,” Grayson said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The little girl walked up to him and stuck out her hand. He leaned over, took the small hand in his, and shook it. “And you are P.C.? What might P.C. stand for?”

  She leaned close. “A revolting name, sir—I will never say it aloud until I am breathing my final breath, and then I’ll speak it aloud and horrify my great-great-grandchildren because they’ll doubtless deserve it.”

  All that out of the mouth of a what? Eight-year-old? “Why did your parents give you a revolting name?”

  “It was Papa, not Mama. She said he had fire in his eyes when he said it, impassioned fire, she said, so what could she do?”

  “Are you Baron Cudlow’s great-granddaughter?”

  She nodded. “I call him the Great, but he prefers Lord Great, which sounds quite silly to me. He says he’s so old his gout’s forgotten how to flare up. He doesn’t mind that I’m a girl and not a boy and his heir. But he tells me it isn’t my fault. I think he believes it’s my mama’s fault, but he doesn’t say that out loud. I pour his tea and he pats my head and has me sit at his feet, and he talks about his glory days, whatever those are. He talks about Waterloo when men were men, and young, and earned medals, and died for glory, not like all the fops today. He has a lot of medals. He saw me pick up one of his medals once and I thought he would expire, but he didn’t, of course.”

  “I can understand your great-grandfather would be very fond of his medals, not at all surprising since he was a hero at the Battle of Waterloo, so the vicar told me. Why are you going to fall off the earth and into the abyss, P.C.?”

  “Mr. Straithmore, sir.” She leaned close and Grayson obligingly bent over so she could whisper in his ear, and she told him about the two dreams that had come to both her and her mother, and the voice, always the voice, whispering, yelling, but you couldn’t understand it, and then the horrible earthquake. And how they’d jumped out of the front window and run to the barn. And there was Barnaby—she poked him in the arm—sound asleep with Musgrave Jr., and he didn’t wake up until she nearly shook him to death.

  Grayson asked questions until he thought he had the gist of the fantastical tale. It was beyond believable, he thought, surely the child was exaggerating, but something deep inside him sparked.

  “You said that no one else in the house—not the Great or Lord Great, not your grandmother, not the servants—heard or felt a thing.”

  “We banged on their doors, but no one seemed to be there. Even the servants, we yelled up at them, but nothing. It was like we were alone. But how could that be, Mr. Straithmore? It was a horrible racket, and the house nearly lifted off the ground.” She began shaking from the memory of it, and Grayson brought her up close, gave her comfort and his warmth. “It sounds like both you and your mama were very brave and very resourceful. You escaped from the house.”

  “Mama threw a chair through the window. I didn’t know she was so strong. And then both Mama and me recognized a bit of what the voice said. It sounded like hoos.”

  “Like house, you mean?”

  P.C. shook her head. “No, like whooss, that’s closer. Mama didn’t make that out, so I can’t be sure.”

  Barnaby patted P.C.’s shoulder. “‘Ere now, P.C., yer bein’ a waterin’ pot. Ain’t like you to be a girl.”

  P.C. gu
lped and pulled away from Grayson. “You’re right, Barnaby. I’m sorry.”

  Grayson marveled at both of them. “I can’t imagine your mother wants to remain at Wolffe Hall.”

  “She wants to leave right now, but she says we need to know what the Great thinks about this first, and depending on what he says—” P.C. shrugged. “She kept saying over and over she couldn’t take a chance on this thing, whatever it is, could hurt me. And then she’d say bad words and look toward the Great’s locked library door. She thinks the Great knows what this is all about. I heard her mutter to herself that he was so bloody old, he knew about everything both good and rotten that happened on this earth. Then she said ‘the abyss’ out loud and started to shake until she saw me. I looked up abyss in the dictionary, and it took me a long time because it’s spelled funny. I asked her why she didn’t call it the voice, but she said it was worse than that, what with that black whirling hole in the floor, and she thought it was angry at us because we couldn’t understand.”

  “Me, I niver seen nothin’.”

  P.C. gave Barnaby a good shove. “That’s because you were snoring and didn’t wake up.”

  “Nobody else woke up either, P.C.”

  “I know. To be honest, sir, only Mama and I have heard it in dreams, and then it came and shook the house and nearly killed us. Only us. I asked Mama how the Great could know anything—it didn’t shake him out of his bed.”

  “Maybe it did and he just didn’t tell you. Now, you said you went to the barn. And all was calm?”

  She nodded. “This morning when we went back to the house, we heard the Great yelling about who broke the bloody window and broke his favorite bloody vase from China. Mama says when she told the Great the voice came again and it could have killed us, he turned pale and had to lean on the desk so he wouldn’t fall onto the floor. He told her he hadn’t heard a thing, didn’t know a thing, and she and I had to leave Wolffe Hall, that she had to take me to Scarborough where his younger sister lives. That’s Great-Aunt Clorinda. He said we’d be safe there until he could figure this out.