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“Such as?”
“Theater. He owned a theater at one time and even wrote some plays.”
“Really?” She couldn’t see what this had to do with the Ghost of St. Giles, but she forced herself to sink into a chair at right angles to his, laying her hands decorously one atop the other. Fidgeting was, sadly, a particular failing of hers. “What are their titles? Perhaps I’ve seen one.”
“I very much doubt it.” His look was wry. “I loved Sir Stanley like a father, but his playwriting skills were terrible. I’m not sure any of his plays saw a stage beyond the first one, The Romance of the Porpoise and the Hedgehog.”
Megs felt her eyebrows lift, interested despite herself. “The … porpoise?”
He nodded. “And the hedgehog. As I said, simply terrible, but I’ve gotten off track.” He leaned forward, wincing a little, and set his elbows on his knees, staring at his hands clasped in front of him. “I don’t know if you know this, but my mother died when I was ten.”
She’d known his mother must be dead since Sarah’s mother was his stepmother, but she hadn’t realized how young he’d been when his mother died. Ten was such a delicate age. “I’m sorry.”
He didn’t look up. “I was close to her and took her death rather hard. Then, three years later, my father remarried. I did not react well.”
His tone was dry, unemotional, but somehow she knew that he hadn’t been nearly so stoic as a young boy. He must’ve suffered horrible inner turmoil. “What happened?”
“My father sent me away to school,” he said, “and then at the vacation, Sir Stanley Gilpin offered to let me stay with him.”
Her brows knit. “You didn’t go home to see your family?”
“No.” His lips pursed very slightly, drawing her eye. The rest of him might be hard, but his mouth, particularly the lower lip, looked soft.
Was soft. She remembered suddenly his mouth on her breast, the tug of his teeth, the brush of his lips. His lips had been gentle on her breast, but those same soft lips had been unyielding on her mouth.
Megs swallowed, beating down the image. What was happening to her? She plucked at a thread on her skirts. “That … that must’ve been hard, to be separated from your father.”
“It was for the best,” he said. “We fought often and it was my fault. I was unreasonable, blaming him for my mother’s death, for his remarriage. I behaved atrociously to my stepmother.”
“You were only thirteen,” she said softly, her heart contracting. “I’m sure she understood your grief, your confusion.”
He frowned and shook his head, and she knew somehow that he didn’t believe her. “In any case, that became the pattern for the next several years. When I wasn’t at school, I lived with Sir Stanley. And while I lived with Sir Stanley, he taught me.”
She frowned, inadvertently tugging hard on the thread. “Taught you what?”
“How to be the Ghost of St. Giles, I suppose.” He spread his hands. “Although at the time I merely thought it was exercise. He had a kind of practice room set aside with sawdust dummies, targets, and the like. There he taught me tumbling, swordsmanship, and hand fighting.”
“Tumbling? Like an acrobat at a traveling fair?” She leaned forward in delight, imagining Godric turning somersaults.
“Yes, like a comic actor.” He glanced up at her, his eyes crinkled at the corners. “It sounds absurd, I know, but the movements are actually difficult to master, and for a boy with too much anger within himself …”
She bit her lip, thinking of that lost boy, cut off from his family, angry and alone. She had a sudden warm gratitude toward the late Sir Stanley Gilpin. He might’ve been an eccentric, but he also obviously knew much about young men and their needs.
His eyes drifted to her mouth and then down to his hands, again clasped between his knees. “We continued thus for several years. It wasn’t until I was eighteen that we figured out, from signs and odd comings and goings, that Sir Stanley was the Ghost of St. Giles and—”
“What? Wait.” Megs jerked up her hands, snapping the thread on her dress, but she was too eager to care. “Sir Stanley was the original Ghost of St. Giles?”
“Yes. Well”—Godric’s lips quirked and he tilted his head—“at least he’s the only one I know about. The legend of the Ghost of St. Giles has been around for years, perhaps centuries. Who is to say that some other man in some other time didn’t don the costume?”
Megs’s lips parted slowly as she imagined a parade of men, year after year, pretending to be the Ghost of St. Giles. Who would do such a thing? She looked at Godric, the question on her lips, but she didn’t want to forget another pressing question.
“Who is ‘we’?”
“Ah.” Godric straightened in his chair, his hand absently rising to his left shoulder before he apparently remembered and let it drop to his lap. “As to that …”
Why was he stalling? “Yes?”
He inhaled deeply and looked her in the eye. “There’s more than me.”
