Lord of Darkness (Maiden Lane #5)(6)
Author: Elizabeth Hoyt

Well. He had been living alone and lonely for years now.

But the small delight of a letter was a far cry from the lady herself invading his domain.

“Never seen the like, I haven’t,” Moulder muttered as he entered the library, shutting the door behind him. “Might as well’ve been a traveling fair, the bunch o’ them.”

“What are you talking about?” Godric asked as he stood and doffed the banyan.

Underneath he still wore the Ghost’s motley. It’d been a near thing. Both carriages had been drawn up outside his house when he’d slunk in the back. Godric had heard Moulder trying to hold off the occupants even as he’d run up the hidden back stairs that led from his study to the library. Saint House was so old it had a myriad of secret passages and hidey-holes—a boon to his Ghostly activities. He’d reached the library, pulled off his boots, thrown his swords, cape, and mask behind one of the bookshelves, and had just tugged the soft turban onto his head and wound the banyan about his waist when he’d heard the doorknob turn.

It’d been close—too damn close.

“M’lady and all she brought with her.” Moulder waved both hands as if to encompass a multitude.

Godric arched an eyebrow. “Ladies do usually travel with maids and such.”

“’Tisn’t just such,” Moulder muttered as he helped Godric from the Ghost’s tunic. In addition to his other vague duties, Moulder served as valet when needed. “There’s a gardener and bootblack boy and a snorty sort o’ dog that belongs to Lady Margaret’s great-aunt, and she’s here too.”

Godric squinted, trying to work through that sentence. “The dog or the aunt?”

“Both.” Moulder shook out the Ghost’s tunic, eyeing it for tears and stains. A sly expression crossed his face just before he glanced up innocently at Godric. “’Tis a pity, though.”

“What?” Godric asked as he stripped the Ghost’s leggings off and donned his nightshirt.

“Won’t be able to go out gallivanting at all hours o’ the night now, will you?” Moulder said as he folded the tunic and leggings. He shook his head sorrowfully. “Right shame, but there ’tis. Your days as the Ghost are over, I’m feared, now that your missus has arrived to live with you.”

“I suppose you’d be right”—he took off the silly turban and ran a hand over his tightly cropped hair—“if Lady Margaret were actually going to live with me permanently.”

Moulder looked doubtful. “She sure brought enough people and luggage to take up residence.”

“No matter. I don’t intend to give up being the Ghost of St. Giles. Which means”—Godric strode to the door—“my wife and all her accouterments will be gone by next week at the outside.”

And when she was gone, Godric promised himself, he could go back to his business of saving the poor of St. Giles and forget that Lady Margaret had ever disrupted his lonely life.

Chapter Two

Now mind me well: the Hellequin is the Devil’s right-hand man. He roams the world, mounted on a great black horse, in search of the wicked dead and those who die unshriven. And when the Hellequin finds them, he drags their souls to hell. His companions are tiny imps, naked, scarlet, and ugly. Their names are Despair, Grief, and Loss. The Hellequin himself is as black as night and his heart—what is left of it—is nothing but a lump of hard coal. …

—From The Legend of the Hellequin

Godric woke the next morning to the sounds of feminine voices in the room next to his. He lay in bed, blinking for a moment, thinking how foreign it was to hear activity from that direction.

He slept in the ancient master’s bedroom, of course, and the mistress of the house had the connecting room. But Clara had occupied the rooms for only the first year or two of their marriage. After that, the disease that had eventually eaten away at her body had begun to grow. The doctors had recommended complete quiet, so Clara had been moved to the old nursery a floor above. There she had suffered for nine long years before she’d died.

Godric shook his head and climbed from his bed, his bare feet hitting the cold floor. Such maudlin thoughts wouldn’t bring Clara back. If they could, she would’ve sprung alive, dancing and free from her terrible pain, thousands of times in the years since her death.

He dressed swiftly, in a simple brown suit and gray wig, and left his room while the female voices were still chattering indistinctly next door. The realization that Lady Margaret had slept so close to him sent a frisson along his nerves. It wasn’t that he ran from such signs of life, but it was only natural to be unused to the presence of others—female others—in his gloomy old house.

Godric descended the stairs to the lower level. Normally he broke his fast at a coffeehouse, both to hear the latest news and because the meals at his own home were somewhat erratic. Today, however, he squared his shoulders and ventured into the little-used dining room at the back of the house.

Only to find it occupied.

“Sarah.”

For a disconcerting second, he hadn’t recognized her, this self-possessed lady, dressed in a sedate dove-gray costume. How many years had it been since he’d last seen her?

She turned at her name, and her calm face lit with a smile of welcome. His chest warmed and it caught him off guard. They’d never been close—he was a full dozen years older than she—and he’d not even known that he’d missed her.

Apparently he had.

“Godric!”

She rose, moving around the long, battered table where she’d been seated alone. She hugged him, swift and hard, her touch a shock to his frame. He’d been in solitude so very long.

She moved back before he could remember to respond and eyed him with disconcertingly perceptive brown eyes. “How are you?”

“Fine.” He shrugged and turned away. After nearly three years, he was used to the concerned looks, the gentle inquiries, especially from women. Sadly, though, he hadn’t become any more comfortable with them. “Have you already eaten?”

“As of yet, I haven’t seen anything to eat,” she observed drily. “Your man, Moulder, promised me breakfast and then disappeared. That was nearly half an hour ago.”

“Ah.” He wished he could feign surprise, but the fact was he wasn’t even sure there was anything edible in the house. “Er … perhaps we should decamp to an inn or—”

Moulder burst through the door, carrying a heavy tray. “Here we are, then.”