Lord of Darkness (9 page)

“The urge toward motherhood is natural.”

His voice had grown remote. She was losing him and she didn’t even know why.

She faced him, her hands outstretched toward him, the little dish still in her hand. “Yes, it is. I want a baby, Godric. I know it’s not part of our original bargain.” She stopped, laughing bitterly. “Actually, I’m not sure what the original bargain you made with Griffin was.”

He
looked up at that, his face closed and detached. “Don’t you? Didn’t Griffin tell you?”

She glanced away, feeling too exposed. She’d been so shamed, so embarrassed, and so grief-stricken that she’d not even been able to look Griffin in the face when he’d told her. Asking any questions had been quite beyond her. And since then …

She realized now that she’d been avoiding her beloved older brother for years. She closed her eyes. “No.”

His voice rasped low. “Consummating—or not consummating—the marriage wasn’t mentioned.”

Megs’s eyes snapped open as she stared at him, this stranger who was her husband.
It hadn’t been mentioned?
Belatedly—
very
belatedly—and for the first time, she wondered why, exactly, Godric had agreed to marry her. At the time she’d been near mad with grief and terrified of being pregnant out of wedlock. She’d only had the strength to follow Griffin’s firm management. Now, though, she wondered …
why?
Had her baby survived, the child would’ve become Godric’s heir. Hadn’t he cared that he would’ve sheltered a cuckoo in his ancient familial nest? Money was the obvious answer—the Readings had enough to bribe a man to overlook the provenience of his heir. But Megs knew that Godric must not’ve been swayed by wealth. He had enough of it himself. Besides Laurelwood Manor—and its extensive property—he had land in both Oxfordshire and Essex, and although Saint House hadn’t been in the best shape on her arrival, he hadn’t blinked when she’d cited the sum needed to hire the new staff and redecorate. If anything, he’d seemed
bored
by the conversation.

Her eyes dropped to her hands, absently turning the
little dish over and over. He certainly hadn’t agreed to marry her because of friendship for her brother—before the night Griffin had informed her of his arrangement, he’d never mentioned the name Godric St. John.

If Godric hadn’t married her for money or friendship, then why?

“Margaret.”

She glanced up from her puzzled musing to find him watching her.

He held her gaze as he came toward her and gently took the dish out of her hands. “You know, don’t you, that I was married before?”

She swallowed. The tale of Clara St. John, both her devastating disease and her husband’s unflinching fidelity, were well known in London society. “Yes.”

He inclined his head and turned away, crossing to the dresser. He placed the dish back in its place—neither too far nor too close to the pitcher, and remained there, his back to her, as his long elegant fingers rested on the dish’s edge. “I loved Clara very much. Our estates adjoined in Cheshire, you know. Her people are the Hamiltons. Her brother and his family live on the Hamilton estate now, I believe.”

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.”

G
ODRIC 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.

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.

“T
HAT 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.