The Strange Visitation at Wolffe Hall (Sherbrooke Brides 11.50)

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.

“Safe from what exactly I don’t know since he didn’t know anything, but he only shook his head and patted her cheek. She told me she wasn’t about to take any chances with me, so we have to go.