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.