The Ancient Spirits of Sedgwick House (Grayson Sherbrooke's Otherworldly Adventures Book 3)

by Catherine Coulter

  Grayson breathed in the sweet warm air as he watched them. A month of rest and exploration and play with the children here in Bowness-on-Windermere. No writing, he’d promised Miranda. Then, unbidden, he thought of what Lucy, Lady Lyle, had said about the sarcophagus: “I wonder if what is within was placed there by the mighty Seti, father of Ramses II, or perhaps by Amun-Ra himself. Whatever is inside must remain locked away.”

  Grayson once again felt the familiar leap of excitement.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Papa, you won’t forget, will you?”

  Grayson looked down at his boy’s dirty face and muddy clothes. “No, Pip, I won’t forget. Ah, forget what, exactly?”

  “Papa, in four weeks and three days it’s my birthday. I’ll be five—I counted. I’ll be a grown-up boy, and you won’t need to hold my hand anymore.”

  Grayson strongly doubted when Pip attained his fifth year he would magically no longer want to run headlong into Lake Windemere, both P.C. and Barnaby racing behind him, screaming for him to hurry before anyone could stop them. Then he saw himself between his father and his uncle Douglas, and each held one of his small hands, and they were racing over the beach, naked and shouting, running full-tilt into the Channel, yelling and cursing as they splashed into the frigid water. What a wonderful day that had been. How old had he been? Pip’s age? Lake Windemere wasn’t as cold as the English Channel, so maybe—

  He looked up when he heard Barnaby give a loud whistle. Again, Grayson felt a tug of familiarity looking at the boy. He must ask the vicar if he knew anything at all about Barnaby’s origins. Barnaby was ten years old, red-headed, but during the summer months his hair had begun to lighten to blondish-brown. He was a handsome boy who liked being called a barn cat, proud of it he was. He continued to refuse to move into Wolffe Hall, content to live in the stable and help take care of the horses, despite P.C.’s arguments and rants. “Sir,” P.C. had told him the day before, “Barnaby needs a last name. If we are to marry in the distant future when we are old like you and Mama, he must have a proper last name.” And he’d promised to provide a list for her perusal. He did not doubt P.C. would make the decision since it would be her last name as well.

  “Let’s meet Miranda halfway,” Grayson said to Pip, and off they went, Pip kicking pebbles with his toe as he skipped beside his father. “Manu said it doesn’t stop raining even in the summer because the gods in the lake don’t like foreign bodies swimming in their kitchen.”

  Grayson said slowly, “You mean like us?”

  “Oh no, not us, Papa. We’re special. Manu said we were supposed to come here. He said it was divined, whatever that means. I promised him we wouldn’t swim in their kitchen.”

  “Pip, did Manu tell you why we were supposed to come to Bowness-on-Windemere? Why it was divined?”

  “No, Papa, but I could tell he really believed it.”

  Grayson swallowed a laugh at the serious look on his son’s face. They were supposed to come to Sedgwick Hall? Somehow they’d been meant to come?

  Pip said, “Manu said most of the gods aren’t here in September because they go on holiday. That’s why there’s not as much rain.”

  “Did he tell you where they go on holiday?”

  “To London, to see where all the people got their heads chopped off at the Tower of London.”

  The lake gods sounded like a bloodthirsty lot. He said, “All right, Pip, now you must attend me. There are no gods in Lake Windemere.” He saw this didn’t go over well, so he added, “All right, say there are a few gods still hanging about now.. Maybe they didn’t want to go to London. How does Manu know it’s their kitchen and not their drawing room or their water closet, which seems the most likely to me?”

  Pip’s face screwed up. “I don’t know, Papa. All Manu wanted to talk about was all the rain here. It never stops, he said.”

  Grayson said, “But no rain today, Pip. Have you ever seen a brighter morning sun?”

  Pip gave this due consideration. “It hasn’t rained for two days. Manu said I must be magic.” He preened.

  You are magic, Grayson wanted to tell him.

  “Manu says water is special where he comes from. That’s Egypt, Papa, a place very far away. There’s a lot of sand, and you can dig your toes in. I don’t want to swim in a water closet.”

  Grayson laughed. “I don’t either.” Grayson couldn’t begin to guess Manu’s age, anywhere from forty to one hundred. He spoke perfect English and was watchful. To make certain they didn’t filch the silver? Grayson was quickly learning Manu was a master at avoiding answering a question. And Lord Lyle was right—he’d heard Manu refer to himself as Mr. George.

  Pip pulled away from his father and shouted, “P.C., Barnaby! Mr. Manu said after we feed the swans, we have to try to find a god in the lake. He said there may be enough gods for all of us, but probably not since most of them are in London.”

  Grayson rolled his eyes. Gods in Lake Windermere or in London. Oh well, why not? He saw Miranda Wolffe waving an umbrella at him. She’d told him, “I was duly warned by Lord Lyle’s housekeeper, Mrs. Moon, never to trust a sun-filled sky.” He saw her beautiful white-toothed smile as he came near. How was it, he wondered, that she became more beautiful every time he saw her? She threw her head back and breathed in deeply. “Smell the air, Grayson. It’s sweet, like apples ready to be picked.”

  The air was sweet, but not with the smell of apples. No, it was jasmine. There were miles of the stuff, draped over stone fences, climbing up the sides of houses, some even twined around the oldest gravestones in the church cemetery. He looked at the children laughing and shouting at the honking swans swarming around them. Miranda gave the children chunks of bread and told them, “Don’t forget, only a little bit at a time so every swan gets some, all right?”

  The children began to run away from the swans, throwing the bread behind them, the swans soon in furious pursuit, white wings flapping.

  Grayson shouted, “Do not go beyond that stone wall!” He turned back to Miranda, lifted a hank of hair, and put it behind her ear, beautiful thick stuff, the color of rich Somerset honey. “I spent two days in close quarters with Barnaby on our trip here. Do you agree his hair isn’t as red, more brown and blond?”

  “I hadn’t noticed, but I think you’re right. He will be eleven soon, according to the vicar. Only a month now I’ve been giving him lessons. Soon he will read and write as well as a little Etonian, so smart he is.”

  “You’re an excellent teacher. Those blue eyes of his, Miranda, I’m sure I know him from somewhere. I’ll think I’ve grasped it, but then it’s gone. Even some of his mannerisms—the way he cocks his head to one side and stares at you, expecting you to divulge the secrets of the universe?”

  “I know that look well. If he’s upset and curses up a storm, he gives it to me. It works, most of the time.”

  “I’ve heard him spout out animal body parts I’ve never considered,” Grayson said, and they both laughed.

  Miranda heard her daughter shout, and turned to see P.C. running away from three swans, laughing like a hyena. She said, “I must give most of the credit to P.C. She smacks him whenever he falls back into stable cant or curses, then counsels him to keep his goal in mind, namely her as his wife, and she can’t marry a boy who talks like a barn cat. Yes, yes, I’m coming to accept my precious daughter one day marrying an orphan with no family who calls himself a barn cat.” She gave him a crooked smile.

  He took her fine-boned white hand with its long, graceful fingers and lightly squeezed. “I would like to kiss you, but I fear P.C. would attack me with a broom.”

  Miranda patted his cheek, laughed again, and skipped away. She was pulling more bread out of another skirt pocket.

  Grayson stood watching her play with the children, all of them throwing bread to the dozen swans honking and flapping around them. In that moment, he thought the air did smell like apples and another smell he couldn’t identify. Pomegranates?

  CHAPTER SEVEN


  Sunday

  It was Sunday morning, and it wasn’t raining. It was pouring.

  “I told the mistress,” Manu said in his soft, precise monotone as he poured Grayson his coffee, “the few remaining lake gods, those not on holiday in London, are angry. They have pumped themselves up and are pouring buckets of tears on us.”

  “But why would they cry if they’re angry?” Pip asked Manu as Grayson buttered his toast. “Why wouldn’t they spit on us? Or raise their leg like Otis?” He added, “Otis is our housekeeper’s dog.”

  “The gods do not spit,” Manu said. “They weep or smite you dead.” He turned and left the entrance hall, a tall straight-shouldered man with a narrow band of white hair around an otherwise perfectly bald head. He always wore a white jacket over black trousers. Lord Lyle had told Grayson he could trust Manu implicitly.. Manu could solve any problem, deal with any tradesman. As for the other servants—the cook, Mrs. Minor; the housekeeper, Mrs. Moon; and two housemaids, Glynis and Marigold—they all appeared to be a jolly lot and not at all put out by an invasion of two adults and three children. Grayson saw they treated Manu with great deference.

  After breakfast, P.C. suffered her mother tucking her braids beneath a wide-brimmed bonnet. “Mr. Manu doesn’t make any sense, Mama. I think he likes to speak in riddles. I’d smite him if I were one of his weeping lake gods.”

  Barnaby said, “When Mr. Manu shook me awake this morning he crossed himself. Mr. Manu’s not Catholic, he’s a heathen, so why would he do that? No, ma’am, don’t blight me. I heard Lord Lyle say he was a heathen. Since Mr. Manu lives with Lord Lyle, he must know what he is.” He leaned up and whispered, “Mr. Manu said me and P.C. and Pip had to be careful or we’d be washed away, dead and gone, and taken to the underworld where Anubis would bring us to this bloke Osiris to see if me and P.C. were worthy of passing on to the good place. I told Mr. Manu I didn’t want to pass to any place, good or nasty, until I was old and wrinkled and didn’t have any teeth.”

  “I, not me,” Miranda said automatically. “I know it sounds funny when you put yourself first, Barnaby—‘P.C. and Pip and I.’ Now doesn’t that sound better?”

  Barnaby would have rolled his eyes, but he wasn’t stupid. “Yes, ma’am.”

  P.C. punched him on his bony arm. “You hear, you looby? Listen to Mama. She knows everything.”

  The five of them, each with a black umbrella, walked from where Manu had stopped the carriage across the road from Saint Martin’s church on Farfallow Road. They went through the open gate with a score of other worshipers and got into the long line of black umbrellas on the stone path weaving through the cemetery to the old church door.

  Grayson saw Barnaby wave around at the headstones, heard him whisper to P.C., “I don’t like this, P.C. Cozying up to moldy skeletons while you sing hymns? It bain’t right.”

  And since it was Sunday and they were on the very steps of the church door, P.C. didn’t smack him, merely whispered, “Isn’t right, Barnaby, isn’t. I don’t like it either.” She gave a little shudder.

  It seemed the swans and ducks had their territories, the swans by Lake Windemere and the ducks in town. The town ducks accompanied the worshippers all the way from the road to the church door, then fanned out around them, oddly silent, waiting. There was a sign on the church door: Ducks Do Not Enter God’s House.

  Miranda whispered to Grayson, “Do you think there should be a comma after Ducks?”

  A lady at Miranda’s elbow smiled. “I have wondered the same thing, but no one, including Reverend Masters, knows the answer. Did you know the ducks are rewarded for their good behavior after services?”

  Reverend John Masters, Church of England, rector of Saint Martin’s, no older than fifty, was tall and straight, looked vigorous, and was blessed with a rich baritone that reached every pew clearly over the pounding rain on the roof. His rich head of gold hair shone under the spear of sun that somehow magically beamed into the church for three seconds during his homily involving sin in general and exhortations to the ladies present to honor and obey their husbands.

  Grayson patted Miranda’s hand and gave her a solemn nod. She whispered, “I wonder what Reverend Masters’s wife has to say about this admonition? Ha, I say.”

  The three children occupied themselves with looking for leaks in the high wooden roof overhead, hopeful since the rain continued to pound hard. But they couldn’t find any leaks, so they were soon squirming in their seats, poking each other.

  Miranda breathed a sigh of relief when Reverend Masters gave his final blessing to the worshippers and announced the final hymn, “Now the Shining Day Is Past.” Grayson wondered if Reverend Masters was indulging in irony. The congregation flung their hearts into the hymn, gave their all to sing louder than the hammering rain.

  At the end of the service, Reverend Masters stood in the vestibule and introduced Grayson to the local gentry in attendance, saying with every introduction, “Mr. Sherbrooke is, of course, one of the Sherbrookes, the nephew of the Earl of Northcliffe.” He didn’t mention Grayson was a noted novelist, considering that métier, Grayson supposed, unworthy of a nephew of a peer of the realm. As for Miranda and the children, Reverend Masters was all smiles and welcome since they were, after all, guests of Lord Lyle, a local philanthropist who kept the church coffers filled, when he remembered, and more, the blessed man had promised a new organ, a promise he would keep if reminded often enough. Reverend Masters knew some believed Lord Lyle eccentric, which he probably was, and some believed him dangerous, which Reverend Masters doubted, even with all his heathen statuary from faraway Egypt he kept in that special room of his, a room always locked, it was said in a whisper, mayhap to keep the malevolent spirits within.

  If Reverend Masters wondered, in whispered conversation with his dutiful wife, Joanna, under the bedcovers at night, if Miranda was Grayson’s mistress, the three children bastards, the whispers never left his bedchamber. The Sherbrooke family cast a large, very long shadow, and he considered it an honor he and his obedient Joanna were invited to dine at Sedgwick House the following Wednesday.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Once Miranda and Grayson were settled into the carriage opposite the children, the drenched umbrellas at their respective feet, rain slashing at the closed windows, the children had their heads together, whispering and laughing. Miranda said to Grayson, “We knew when I accepted your kind invitation to spend a month here in Bowness-on-Windemere there could be talk about my position in the household, particularly since I’m not chaperoned, even though I’m a widow of long-standing and no longer a young miss with a reputation to guard.”

  Grayson laughed at her. “That’s you, long in the tooth, an affliction on the eyes, so ancient you’ve lost most of your teeth. Come on, Miranda, you know the rules. It’s a pity your mother-in-law did not want to be separated from Alphonse.”

  “She told me Alphonse pined for her when she was gone for very long, and a month simply wasn’t possible.”

  He gave her a crooked grin, thinking about how Miranda’s mother-in-law adored Alphonse, a sixteenth-century gentleman who resided in a painting at Wolffe Hall. “I wonder how a man in a painting could pine? No, never mind. When I first met P.C., she told me your mother-in-law was a floater, and I discovered I agreed with her. She does sort of float, as if her small feet don’t touch the ground.”

  P.C. called out, “I crawled behind Grandmama once without her knowing I was there, and I raised her skirt. Her slippers were on the ground. I was disappointed.” She turned immediately back to Pip, who was tugging on her sleeve.

  Miranda lowered her voice to a near whisper. “Remember how you reassured me we would be accepted, what with Lord Lyle’s patronage and your illustrious antecedents? And still I doubted, people being what they are, particularly in a village. Today in church was the test.” She gave him a huge grin. “We passed.”

  Barnaby called out, “Everybody smiled at us. Nobody thinks we’re from the other side of the blanket.”
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  “What blanket?” Pip asked.

  P.C. poked Barnaby and said to Pip, “Barnaby is making a jest, which isn’t at all funny. Barnaby, I told you no one would think we weren’t proper. We’re with Mr. Thomas Straithmore, a hero.” She shot a look at Grayson. “Why didn’t Reverend Masters tell everyone you are a hero, sir?”

  Grayson smiled. “My dear P.C., my antecedents are far more impressive than my heroism.”

  “What’s antecedent mean?” the three children asked at once.

  “You all know my uncle is the Earl of Northcliffe. He is a very important fellow, a peer of the realm, renowned even amongst other very important fellows. The good reverend is far too smart to insult a Sherbrooke. I suspect most will follow his lead. My uncle is an excellent antecedent, and that means he was born before me and I carry his blood.”

  “I don’t have no antecedents,” Barnaby said. “I guess I don’t have blood from anybody.”

  “I don’t have any antecedents, not no antecedents. Of course you have blood from someone,” P.C. said. “Remember when I punched you in the nose and you gushed out blood?”

  “I smeared some on your face,” Barnaby said with satisfaction.

  “Yes, you did, and I hurt you, didn’t I? But, Barnaby, we’ll find out whose blood you have. We’ll find out who your antecedents are.” She looked over at Grayson. “Mr. Straithmore will find out, won’t you, sir?”

  Grayson said, “Yes, we will discover your antecedents, Barnaby.” He wondered as he did often, Who are you, Barnaby? Why are you familiar to me?

  Miranda leaned close and whispered, “I will do my part too, Grayson, to bolster our good names. A certain Lady Chivers and Mrs. Thurgood are evidently two of the local society mavens here in Bowness-on-Windemere, and they always have tea at Tilly’s Tea Shop promptly at two o’clock on Saturdays. We met them briefly after Reverend Masters’s service, do you remember?”