Lord of Darkness

Megs nodded. She’d met Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton briefly at one of the ubiquitous country dinners, though she hadn’t made the connection before now. The Hamiltons were solid country gentry.

“I knew her all her life,” Godric said, and the thread of pain in his voice was all the more terrible for being so carefully repressed, “though I didn’t really notice her until I returned from university. I attended a soiree and she was there with her friends, wearing a pale blue dress that made her hair shine. I took one look at her and knew—knew absolutely—that she was the woman I was meant to spend the rest of my life with.”

He paused and the fire crackled in the silence, for of course he hadn’t spent the rest of his life with poor Clara.

She knew about loss, knew about true love shattered. “Godric—”

His fingers let go of the dish and curled into a fist on the dresser. “Just … let me finish.”

She nodded, though he couldn’t see the small acknowledgment of his pain.

She saw his shoulders rise and fall as he took a deep breath. “When she became ill, I prayed to God—begged him. I offered hideous bargains. Anything, just so she wouldn’t feel the pain. Had the Devil stood before me, I would’ve gladly sold my soul to exchange my body and life for hers.”

She made a low sound of protest and he turned his head, almost but not quite looking at her.

Dear God. His face was etched, as if the agony of his wife’s loss had touched him with acid.

He grimaced horribly. A single tear escaped from beneath his lashes, trailing down one lean cheek.

Then his countenance was still once more.

“I agreed to Griffin’s mad plan,” he rasped, his voice like gravel, “only because it was more than obvious that you would never have any interest in me or a real marriage.”

“But—” she said, realizing suddenly how this was going to end. She took a step forward, her hands reaching for him, fruitlessly clutching empty air in front of her.

“No.” The word was grimly final. “I haven’t lain with another woman since I married Clara, and I never intend to do so. I had my love. Anything else would be a parody of intimacy. So, no, Margaret, I am sorry, but I will not lie with you to make a baby.”

GODRIC WATCHED THE door between his and Margaret’s room close behind her. He shot the bolt, just to make sure, though no doubt it was rubbing salt in her wounds.

He ran both hands over his head, feeling his shorn hair beneath his palms. Dear Lord! How could he have guessed what she’d come to London for? He winced as he remembered again the hurt in her face as he’d rejected her.

“Damnation,” he muttered under his breath, and crossed to the small table to pour himself a glass of wine.

He gulped a mouthful of the tart liquid and sighed. Why had she made these demands now? He’d thought her settled and provided for. He’d thought her happy.

His gaze strayed to the dresser. He tossed down the rest of the glass of wine and went to it. The key to unlock the top drawer hung on a silver chain about his neck—he’d trust Moulder with his life, but not with the things inside that drawer. The wood creaked as he opened it. Godric inhaled and looked inside. Clara’s letters were wrapped neatly in a black ribbon. They’d seldom been parted once married, so the stack was sadly thin. Beside it was a small enameled box. Inside, he knew, were two locks of her hair. The first, taken when they’d been courting, was a lustrous dark brown, shot with gold. The second was a funerary memento, the hair thin, brittle, and streaked with gray.

Well.

He touched the hair at his temple. He was gray now, too, unlike his too-young second wife. They were supposed to age together, he and Clara, step in step, man and wife, a lifetime of love and friendship.

Instead, she was in the ground and he was left with half a life at best.

A life that was now permanently entangled with Margaret’s.

At the front of the drawer, directly beneath his fingers, was an untidy pile of letters. He hesitated, then picked one up, unfolding it. Scrawled inside—both horizontally and vertically—was a large, exuberant hand, as if Margaret had hardly been able to write fast enough to keep up with the flow of words from her brain. He tilted the sheet of paper and read.

18 September 1739

Dear Godric,

You will not credit it, but the population of stable cats has simply grown out of all proportions here at Laurelwood Manor! Both the gray tabby and the black-, orange-, and white-spotted were delivered of kittens this spring, and then the calico—that sly jade—fell pregnant again. Now whenever I go to visit Minerva (you remember the little bay mare I earlier wrote you I acquired of Squire Thompson?), I’m followed by a parade of cats. Black ones, gray tabbies, an abundance of spotted ones (invariably female, I’m assured by Toby, the lame stable boy), and even a single entirely orange miss, follow me about with inquiring, raised tails. Toby says I must quit feeding them the fatty bits left over from last night’s joint, but I ask you, is that kind? After all, they’ve come to expect their little snack and—

He had to turn the paper to continue reading.

—if I quit now, I think they’ll take an awful dislike to me and perhaps seek me out in the house!

Sarah is over her head cold, by the way, and has quit speaking in such a low, stuffy voice, which I find a pity (the voice, not the recovery!) because she did sound so very amusing when she spoke—rather like an aged intemperate uncle, if I had an uncle, which I do not.

Do you remember the leaky ceiling in the washroom? Last sennight it rained cats and dogs, and what do you think? The ceiling fell entirely in. Quite frightened Cook, I’m told (by Daniels) because it fell in the middle of the night and apparently Cook mistook the crash for the Second Coming. (A religious sort is Cook, everyone says so.) Anyway, Cook spent the rest of the night in prayer, which is why we had cold biscuits for breakfast that morning. Cook says it wasn’t her fault. She’d been expecting the dead to rise, but only old Battlefield the butler greeted her at dawn. (Though I did hear Sarah mutter that Battlefield could easily be mistaken for the dead.)

Bother! I’ve run out of paper, so I must remain

Affectionately Yours,

Megs

A typical missive from her: quick, witty, full of the life she’d made for herself at his country estate.

Full of life itself.

Carefully, he folded the letter and placed it back with its brethren. He couldn’t betray Clara and the memory of their love, but that didn’t stop the fact that he was lying by omission to Margaret. The truth was that he’d not been unmoved by her embrace. Her kiss had been so essentially her: unplanned, reckless, without studied skill—and all the more erotic because of it.

She made something deep inside of him wake and stir as if he still lived and had hope for this life.

Godric closed the drawer and carefully locked it before pulling off his banyan and nightshirt. He blew out the candles and climbed into his cold bed nude, turning on his side to stare at the dying fire.

No matter how seductive Margaret’s offer of life was, it was an illusion.

He’d died the night Clara last drew breath.

“THAT THERE TREE is dead, m’lady,” Higgins the gardener said with absolute certainty the next morning. To emphasize his point, he spat into the decayed leaf litter that blanketed Saint House’s garden.

Or what was left of its garden.

Megs regarded the tree. It was without a doubt one of the ugliest specimens she’d ever seen. At one point it had been some type of fruit tree, but age and neglect had twisted the heavy lower branches. At the same time, thin, whiplike water sprouts had shot up all over the limbs and suckers crowded the base.

“It might not be dead,” she said with very little conviction. “It’s been a cold spring.”

Higgins grunted with patent disbelief.

The tree stood in the center of the garden. Without it, there would be no vertical interest.

She took a twig and bent it. It came off with a snap and she examined the center. Brown. The tree certainly looked dead.

Megs tossed aside the broken twig with a grimace. Dead. Well, she was tired of dead. Tired of a certain someone refusing to help her produce life. If she couldn’t convince him—yet—to fall in with her plans, well then she’d occupy herself with other matters in the meantime.

“Cut away all these suckers and water sprouts,” she ordered Higgins, ignoring the gardener’s ominous throat clearing. Megs fingered a brown, twisting vine wrapped around the tree’s trunk. “And cut away whatever this is.”

“M’lady …,” Higgins began.

“Please?” She glanced at him. “I know I’m being silly, but even if it’s dead, we can grow a … a climbing rose up it. Or something similar. I just don’t want to give up quite yet.”

Higgins heaved a deep sigh. He was a bandy-legged man of fifty or so, his upper chest and shoulders heavy and slightly bent forward as if his lower half had trouble carrying the weight of the upper. Higgins had quite definite ideas of garden care—ideas that had meant he’d been let go from more than one position. In fact, he’d been without work when Upper Hornsfield’s vicar had reluctantly given his name to Megs. She’d been looking for an experienced gardener to oversee the renovations at Laurelwood, and though she’d never once seen Higgins smile, she’d always been glad of the impulse that had made her hire him. He might be blunt, but he knew his plants.

“It’s a fool idea, right enough, but I’ll do it, m’lady,” he muttered now.

“Thank you, Higgins.” She smiled at him, feeling affectionate.

He couldn’t help being an old curmudgeon, and she rather thought the fact that in a year and a half of employment he hadn’t yet threatened to quit meant he must like her as well.

Or at least it was nice to think so.

“What about that bed there?” She pointed and soon Higgins was scratching his head and giving his blunt opinion of the rather scraggly looking boxwoods lining the garden.

Megs nodded and looked thoughtful as she half listened. The day was sunny and a bit brisk, and really, meandering around a tumbledown garden was a wonderful way to spend a morning. She’d suffered a setback with her baby plans last night, it was true, but that didn’t mean she was finished by a long shot. Somehow she’d find a way to work around Godric’s reluctance or—

Well, she could have an affair, she supposed. That was what some women in her position—assuming there was anyone else in a position like hers—would do.

But as soon as the notion entered her mind, she rejected it out of hand. No matter her great urge to have a child, she simply couldn’t do that to Godric. It was one thing to marry because of an unwed pregnancy; it was quite another to deliberately cuckold a man she’d pledged herself to in front of friends and family. Even if that man was being quite pigheaded.

Megs’s shoulders slumped. She was being unfair to Godric, she knew. The hard thing was that she understood. She, too, had loved someone desperately, had felt half dead when he’d died. For a moment, the thought brought her up short: Was she betraying Roger by wanting to create life without him? By wanting to do that with another man?

Except it was the baby she wanted, not the bedsport. If she could have one without the other, she would. Besides, she didn’t expect to actually enjoy the physical act with Godric—how could she, after all? She’d loved Roger, not her dry older husband. In any case it didn’t matter—the drive to have a child was simply too overwhelming to ignore.

But thoughts of Roger reminded her that she’d neglected what she’d owed him too long. She’d come to London not only to consummate her marriage, but also to find the Ghost of St. Giles and make him pay for his crime. If she’d been stymied at one goal, well then she could just pursue the other with more vigor. And as she watched Higgins uncover a yellow crocus and grunt with satisfaction, a thought occurred. Her first confrontation with the Ghost had not been exactly successful. Perhaps she should do a bit of information gathering before she tried again.