Free The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken Page B

said. She was reading the document carefully. ‘What a good thing Sir Willoughby was careless enough to leave his will at home instead of keeping it with Mr Gripe. It has saved us a deal of trouble.’
    ‘Indeed, yes,’ said Mr Grimshaw comfortably. ‘And is it as you thought – does he leave everything to the child?’
    ‘Almost everything,’ said Miss Slighcarp. She read on with compressed lips. ‘There is a legacy of twenty thousand pounds a year to his niece, a few hundred to me in gratitude for my services – pah! – and some trifling bequests to servants. Mention, too, of his sister Jane, my distant cousin. Is she likely to come poking her nose and being troublesome?’
    ‘Not a fear of it,’ Mr Grimshaw answered. ‘I made inquiries about her when I was in London. She is extremely elderly and unworldly; moreover, she is frail and unlikely to last long. She will never interfere with our management of the estate.’
    ‘Excellent. I will burn this will then – there, on the fire it goes – and you must set to work at once to forge another, leaving
everything
to me. Have you practised the signature sufficiently?’
    ‘I could do it with my left hand,’ Mr Grimshaw said. ‘I have copied it from every document in this room.’ He drew a chair to a table at a little distance, pulled a piece of parchment towards him, and began slowly and carefully writing on it.
    Miss Slighcarp, meanwhile, was tearing up and burning a great many other documents. ‘The more confusion his affairs are found to be in, the better,’ she observed. ‘It will give us the more time to make our plans.’
    ‘You sound very certain that he – that
the event
will take place. Suppose he should, after all, return?’
    ‘My dear Josiah,’ said Miss Slighcarp meaningfully, ‘the master to whom I spoke was very certain about the state of the vessel. He said she could not last another voyage. But even if that plan should miscarry, what then! Sir W. cannot be back before a year is up. We shall have ample warning of his return and can be clear away and embarked for the colonies before he arrives. We shall never be caught.’
    ‘What of the children? You will not keep them here?’
    ‘Not for long. They can go to Gertrude,’ said Miss Slighcarp ominously. ‘She will soon knock the nonsense out of them. Now, do not disturb me. I must master the details of this deed.’ She picked up another document and began studying it absorbedly.
    The children tiptoed on.
    ‘Bonnie,’ said Sylvia rather fearfully after a few moments, when she judged that they were well out of earshot of the library and its inmates. ‘what did Miss Slighcarp mean when she referred to the
event
? And why was she burning my uncle’s will?’
    ‘I am not certain,’ confessed Bonnie, who was pale and frowning over this new evidence of Miss Slighcarp’s knavery, ‘but it is plain that she means nothing but wickedness.’
    Sylvia glanced in a troubled way at her cousin. It was evident that Bonnie did not wish to pursue the matter, and they went on in silence for a while. They came to another spyhole, which looked on to a passage, and then they found themselves up against a blank wall. The secret corridor appeared to have come to a dead end.
    Even Bonnie’s heart sank, for the candles were perilously low, when they heard the clink of dishes, and a familiar voice, that of James, broke into song so close beside them that they might have been touching him.
    ‘As I was a walking one morning for pleasure, I spied a young—’
    ‘Knock on the wall!’ Bonnie whispered to Sylvia, and both children began banging on the panel as hard as they could. The song broke off abruptly.
    ‘James! James! It’s us, in here behind the panel! Can you let us out?’
    ‘Laws, miss, you gave me a fright,’ James’s voice said. ‘I thought it was the hobgoblin for sure.’
    They heard him fumbling on the wall, and tapped again, to show him where they were. Suddenly there came a click,