Now she examined him with a bold, bright curiosity that made him want to check that his banyan was still tightly wrapped.

"What?" Godric started as if surprised by her presence.

She swiftly pasted on a broad, guileless smile that might as well have shouted, I'm up to something! "Oh, hello."

Hello? After two years' absence? Hello?

"Ah ... Margaret, is it?" Godric repressed a wince. Not that he was doing much better.

"Yes!" She beamed at him as if he were a senile old man who'd had a sudden spark of reason. "I've come to visit you."

"Have you?" He sat a little straighter in the chair. "How ... unexpected."

His tone might've been a trifle dry.

She darted a nervous glance at him and turned to aimlessly wander the room. "Yes, and I've brought Sarah, your sister." She inhaled and peered at a tiny medieval etching propped on the mantel. Impossible that she could make out the subject matter in the room's dimness. "Well, of course you know she's your sister. She's thrilled for the opportunity to shop, and see the sights, and go to the theater and perhaps an opera or even a pleasure garden, and ... and ..."

She'd picked up an ancient leather-bound book of Van Oosten's commentary on Catullus and now she waved it vaguely. "And ..."

"Shop some more, perhaps?" Godric raised his brows. "I may not have seen Sarah for an age, but I do remember her fondness for shopping."

"Quite." She looked somewhat subdued as she thumbed the crumbling pages of the book.

"And you?"

"What?"

"Why have you come to London?" he inquired.

Van Oosten exploded in her hands.

"Oh!" She dropped to her knees and frantically began gathering the fragile pages. "Oh, I'm so sorry!"

Godric repressed a sigh as he watched her. Half the pages were disintegrating as fast as she picked them up. That particular tome had cost him five guineas at Warwick and Sons and was, as far as he knew, the last of its kind. "No matter. The book was in need of rebinding anyway."

"Was it?" She looked dubiously at the pages in her hands before gently laying the mess in his lap. "Well, that's a relief, isn't it?"

Her face was tilted up toward his, her brown eyes large and somehow pleading, and she'd forgotten to take her hands away again. They lay, quite circumspectly, on top of the remains of the book in his lap, but something about her position, kneeling beside him, made him catch his breath. A strange, ethereal feeling squeezed his chest, even as a thoroughly rude and earthly one warmed his loins. Good Lord. That was inconvenient.

He cleared his throat. "Margaret?"

She blinked slowly, almost seductively. Idiot. She must be sleepy. That was why her eyelids looked so heavy and languid. Was it even possible to blink seductively?

"Yes?"

"How long do you plan to stay in London?"

"Oh ..." She lowered her head as she fumbled with the demolished book. Presumably she meant to gather the papers together, but all she succeeded in doing was crumbling them further. "Oh, well, there's so much to do here, isn't there? And ... and I have several dear, dear friends to call on-"

"Margaret-"

She jumped to her feet, still holding Van Oosten's battered back cover. "It simply wouldn't do to snub anyone." She aimed a brilliant smile somewhere over his right shoulder.

"Margaret."

She yawned widely. "Do forgive me. I'm afraid the trip has quite fatigued me. Oh, Daniels"-she turned in what looked like relief as a petite lady's maid appeared at the doorway-"is my room readied?"

The maid curtsied even as her gaze darted about the library curiously. "Yes, my lady. As ready as ever it can be tonight anyway. You'll never credit the cobwebs we-"

"Yes, well, I'm sure it's fine." Lady Margaret whirled and nodded at him. "Good night, er ... husband. I'll see you on the morrow, shall I?"

And she darted from the room, the back cover of poor Van Oosten still held captive.

The maid closed the door behind her.

Godric eyed the solid oak of his library door. The room without her spinning, brilliant presence seemed all of a sudden hollow and tomblike. Strange. He'd always thought his library a comfortable place before.

Godric shook his head irritably. What is she about? Why has she come to London?

Theirs had been a marriage of convenience-at least on her part. She'd needed a name for the babe in her belly. It'd been a marriage of blackmail via her ass of a brother, Griffin, on his part, for Godric had not fathered the child. Indeed, he'd never spoken to Lady Margaret before the day of their wedding. Afterward, when she'd retired to his neglected country estate, he'd resumed his life-such as it was-in London.

For a year there'd been no communication at all, save for the odd secondhand bit of information from his stepmother or one of his half sisters. Then, suddenly, a letter out of the blue, from Lady Margaret herself, asking if he would mind if she cut down the overgrown grapevine in the garden. What overgrown grapevine? He hadn't seen Laurelwood Manor, the house on his Cheshire estate, since the early years of his marriage to his beloved Clara. He'd written back and told her politely but tersely that she could do as she wished with the grapevine and anything else she had the mind to in the garden.

That should've been the end to it, but his stranger bride had continued to write him once or twice a month for the last year. Long, chatty letters about the garden; the eldest of his half sisters, Sarah, who had come to live with Margaret; the travails of repairing and redecorating the rather decrepit house; and the petty arguments and gossip from the nearby village. He hadn't known quite how to respond to such a flurry of information, so in general he simply hadn't. But as the months had gone by, he'd become oddly taken with her missives. Finding one of her letters beside his morning coffee gave him a feeling of lightness. He'd even been impatient when her letter was a day or two late.

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."

He thumped the tray down in the center of the table and stepped back in pride.

Godric examined the tray. A teapot stood in the center with one cup. Beside it were a half-dozen or so burned pieces of toast, a pot of butter, and five eggs on a plate. Hopefully they'd been boiled.

Godric arched an eyebrow at his manservant. "Cook is ... er ... indisposed, I perceive."

Moulder snorted. "Cook is gone. And so is that nice wheel o' cheese, the silver saltcellar, and half the plate. Didn't seem too happy when he heard last night that we had so many guests."

"Just as well, I'm afraid, considering the unfortunate way he handled a joint."

"He was overfamiliar with your wine stock, too, if you don't mind me saying so, sir," Moulder said. "I'll go see if we have any more teacups, shall I?"

"Thank you, Moulder." Godric waited until the butler left the room before turning to his sister. "I apologize for the paucity of my table."

He held out a chair for her.

"Please don't worry," Sarah said as she sat. "We did descend on you without any notice."

She reached for the teapot.

"Mmm," Godric murmured as he lowered himself to a chair across from her. "I wondered about that."

"I was under the impression that Megs had written to you." His sister lifted an eyebrow at him.

He merely shook his head as he took a piece of toast.

"I wonder why she didn't tell you of our arrival?" she asked softly as she buttered her own toast. "We'd planned the trip for weeks. Do you think she was fearful that you'd turn her away?"

He nearly choked on his toast. "I wouldn't do that. Whatever gave you the notion?"

She shrugged elegant shoulders. "You've been separated since your marriage. You hardly write her or me. Or, for that matter, Mama, Charlotte, or Jane."

Godric's lips firmed. He was on cordial terms with his stepmother and younger half sisters, but they'd never been especially close. "Ours wasn't a love match."

"Obviously." Sarah took a cautious nibble of her toast. "Mama worries for you, you know. As do I."

He poured her tea without answering. What could he say? Oh, I'm all right. Lost the love of my life, don't you know, but the pain's quite bearable, considering. To pretend that he was whole, that rising every day wasn't a chore, became exhausting. Why did they ask, anyway? Couldn't they see that he was so broken nothing would fix him?

"Godric?" Her voice was gentle.

He made the corners of his mouth twitch upward as he pushed the cup of tea across the table to her. "How are my stepmother and sisters?"

She pursed her lips as if she wanted to prod him more, but in the end she took a sip of tea instead. "Mama is well. She's in the midst of preparations for Jane's coming-out. They plan to stay with Mama's bosom-bow, Lady Hartford, for the season in the fall."