The Midnight Peacock by Katherine Woodfine

Author:Katherine Woodfine [Woodfine, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Egmont

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

As the footsteps of the two girls faded into the distance, Jack set out boldly along the right-hand passage. He found that he was rather enjoying himself. All right, so this wasn’t quite what he had expected from a country house party – but he had always enjoyed an adventure. All in all, it had been a jolly interesting Christmas, he reflected. Winter Hall was such a strange place – and as for the people, they were stranger still. He’d come across plenty of well-off upper-crust chaps before, but they’d mostly been good sorts – whereas you couldn’t say that of scowling, sulky-faced Vincent. He’d managed to draw him out a little, chatting about Oxford and one or two fellows they both knew there, but it was obvious he looked down on artists. He sneered at his guests and barely had a word to say to his own sister. Jack certainly wouldn’t fancy spending much time with him.

Mr Pendleton was a different kettle of fish: he seemed a decent sort for a fellow who wouldn’t know one side of a painting from the other; and he rather thought Miss Whiteley might turn out to be quite good fun if she had the chance to relax and let her hair down. As for Lady Tremayne, she had been jolly kind. It was obvious that she knew more than a bit about art, and Jack was practical enough to realise that having a few wealthy patrons like her could be beneficial to his career.

Then there had been all this business about ghosts, and hauntings, and secret passages, and mysterious murders in libraries. Jack grinned to himself, thinking that things did always seem to become rather eventful when Sophie and Lil were around. He didn’t mind that; in fact he rather liked it. He thought of the determined look on Sophie’s face whenever she was getting her teeth into a problem. He had never known a girl quite like her before. She might be small and dainty, but she was strong enough to handle anything – even the shock of discovering Colonel Fairley’s death.

Now he turned his mind to the task at hand, shining the lamp before him. He noticed that the passage, which had at first seemed to curve to the right, was now curling back on itself, twisting towards the left. Was it carrying him back towards the house itself, he wondered? Or towards some other secret spot of Walsingham’s?

For a moment, he cast himself into the role of the Elizabethan spymaster, dressed in a long, swirling cloak, a dashing sort of hat with a feather in it, and possibly a moustache. He tried to imagine what it would have been like to go creeping down the passageway on a secret mission to protect the Queen from treachery . . . In reality, of course, Queen Elizabeth had had red hair but in Jack’s version of events she had suddenly become small and fair – and rather determined-looking.

Just then, he became aware of faint sounds in the tunnel ahead of him and stiffened.

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