They were not nieces and nephews. They were orphans of disparate parentage. Which meant none of them was related to the old woman seated across from him.
He narrowed his eyes at her. “Are you even a Wynchester?”
“I told you he would start to suspect,” Chloe crowed.
“He got partway there,” Graham admitted grudgingly.
Jacob waved a hand. “Go on, Tommy. Help him out.”
Who was Tommy? Lawrence glanced over his shoulders, but no other siblings had entered the room.
“Oh, all right.” Great-Aunt Wynchester set down her meat pasty with an aggrieved sigh, reached her liver-spotted hands up to her thin white hair…and pulled it off her head.
Lawrence dropped his fork with a clatter. “What in the…”
She ran her fingers through a shock of short brown hair, then pulled a stoppered glass bottle from her reticule. After dousing her serviette with some sort of fragrant oil, she swiped the wet cloth down one side of her face.
The age spots and wrinkles smudged onto the linen.
“You’re…not…” His voice failed him.
Great-Aunt Wynchester added more drops of oil from her vial and proceeded to erase every trace of age from her face, neck, and hands.
A lad of perhaps five and twenty years grinned cheekily back at him.
Lawrence could not breathe. Had he thought discovering “poor orphans” living in luxury to be humiliating? There was no brash, clueless Great-Aunt Wynchester. It was just another lie his self-important, unfounded assumptions had let him believe without question.
“Tommy?” he said hoarsely.
“Thomasina,” the lad said, and Lawrence revised his opinion yet again.
Not a lad but a young woman. With sharp cheekbones, a stylish male coiffure, and laughing brown eyes.
“But you can call me Tommy,” she said. “Everyone who knows me does.”
He gaped at her. “I can’t believe my eyes.”
“Wigs and cosmetics,” she explained. “It’s a bother to keep long hair pinned up against one’s head, so the practical thing was to lop it off.”
“Also it’s easier to sneak into the reporters’ gallery as a man,” Elizabeth murmured.
Belatedly, Lawrence remembered Great-Aunt Wynchester saying she’d never stuff herself into a dusty attic. He now realized why: she didn’t have to.
“Absolutely,” Tommy agreed. “Being a man is the best part.”
“I want to die,” Lawrence mumbled into his palms.
“You gammoned yourself,” Jacob pointed out. “The ruse would never have worked if you didn’t have such abysmal preconceived notions about the elderly and us.”
Tommy nodded. “You believed me to be frail and helpless, so I was. You believed Wynchesters to be ill-mannered, embarrassing bumpkins, so we were. What say you to that, impertinent pup?”
“God save me.” He sank deeper into his plush, expertly carved chair. “I let you call me that in front of witnesses.”
She patted his hand. “Never underestimate an old lady.”
Ears burning, he lifted his face from his hands. “You let me ply you with compliments and fish for family stories about Chloe.”
“All lies,” Tommy agreed cheerfully.
