The Strange Visitation at Wolffe Hall Read Free Page B

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