She nodded. “Yes, as in placating me quite nicely.”
Grayson was charmed. She took off her glasses and cleaned them on her sleeve. He saw her eyes were indeed as blue as her daughter’s, beautiful, clear, and yes, brimming with intelligence. But her face was too thin. Understandable with a huge swirling black hole in the middle of the entrance hall. “Thank you, ma’am. Since I am here, you might as well make use of me. I smell roses. Won’t you show them to me? And your vegetable patch where Barnaby got the carrots for Albert?”
Miranda nodded as she eyed her daughter. P.C. had doubtless knocked on the poor man’s door and invited herself and her problems in. “I have always admired Belhaven House, Mr. Sherbrooke.”
“Please call him Mr. Straithmore, Mama,” P.C. said, crowding in. “His other name isn’t the one that will help us.”
“Very well, then. Mr. Straithmore, come and admire my roses and carrots.”
“Mama, please call him Thomas. And he can call you Miranda since you’re grown-ups.”
“Grown-ups don’t immediately leap to familiar names, P.C., they are more careful, more formal. Isn’t that right, Mr. Sherbrooke—Mr. Straithmore?”
“In some dire, possibly dangerous situations, I’d have to say that formality tends to fall by the wayside.”
“What does that mean?” Barnaby asked.
“It means, bacon-brain, that he wants Mama to call him Thomas. Now, be quiet and watch out for Bickle.”
Miranda chewed on her lower lip. “Why did you move to Belhaven House, Mr. Sher—Mr. Straithmore?”
He shrugged. “I fell in love at first sight. I moved myself and Pip here from London four months ago.”
“His wife didn’t come with him,” P.C. said. “She’s in heaven, but he has Pip. Mama, I feel it, the Great is on the edge. He’s afraid, and not just for us. Mr. Straithmore will make him pop right open. We only have fifteen minutes before he goes back into the hall and wrings out the Great.” She patted her mother’s arm. “It’s all right that he’s a man, Mama. Like he said, we can make use of him.”
“Actually, twelve and a half minutes,” Grayson said.
Miranda was fingering a velvet rose petal, a particularly vibrant shade of pink. She straightened. “P.C., you have told everything to Mr. Sher—ah, Mr. Straithmore?”
“Yes’m, she did that,” Barnaby said, “but ma’am, don’t lock her up with bread and water. She didn’t know what to do and she doesn’t want to leave, so she asked me and I agreed, so I’ll take the bread and water. She wants his smartness to save us all from the abyss. Not that yer not smart yerself, ma’am, but he’s an extra smartness with lots of experience with strange sorts of otherworldly things.”
“That is an interesting way of explaining it, Barnaby.” Grayson turned to Miranda. “What or who do you think this voice is, Mrs. Wolffe?”
“I don’t like melodrama, sir, but it seems to me the voice has to be a malignant spirit, but as P.C. told you, we can’t understand what it’s saying. Well, P.C. said she clearly heard hoos, but it does sound more like whooss. When we got downstairs, there was this giant maw, black and deep, swirling around and around, trying to suck us in, and I know there was no bottom. The abyss.”
She should write novels.
CHAPTER NINE
There was a moment of stark silence, then Pip said with no hesitation, “This sounds very scary, ma’am, but my papa is a hero. He will beat up this bad spirit, he will hurl him back into this abyss. He will protect both you and P.C.” And his precious son patted Miranda’s hand.
She looked down at the beautiful little boy and gave him a shaky smile.
“Thank you, Pip. Now, let’s all sit down.”
“Nine minutes,” P.C. said.
It was really eight minutes.
Grayson asked, “Is there anything you know that P.C. doesn’t know, ma’am, that would assist me?”
Miranda said slowly, “Mama-in-law doesn’t want us to leave. She was very upset that she didn’t hear a thing last night, but what she admitted to me this morning made me absolutely certain the Great knows what’s going on here.” She shot a look at the children. “It’s disturbing.”
“Go ahead, Mama, we can take it.”
“Very well. About a month ago, your grandmother was in the library with the Great, trying to speak to him about restoring some portraits in the gallery. This is very difficult to believe, but here is what she told me. A huge black funnel burst through the open window and roared right at him, twisted and turned around him, then went straight through him, she said, at least a part of it did. It blasted all his medals from the wall, made them fly out of the frames, shattering the glass covering them, and then went flying. Then those medals the Great collects and polishes, the ones in the big basket—the basket itself was thrown into the air, scattering the medals everywhere. Then, Mama-in-law said, the black funnel whooshed back out the window again and was gone. Nothing more happened, she said. She said she nearly fainted, but the Great only stood there, his mouth working, but he didn’t say anything. He told her to keep her mouth shut because no one would believe her, and so she had.
“She said she eventually convinced herself that it had been a shared hallucination. She said to think anything else would give her a heart seizure. But after what I told her happened last night, she knew she had to warn me.”