The Devil Earl

“My dear Prudence,” Mrs. Bates began, once they had settled themselves down with some tea and Cook’s seed biscuits. “I am afraid that I am here today not simply for a pleasant visit.”

“Oh?” Prudence was not surprised, for she would not describe any of Mrs. Bates’s visits as pleasant.

“Yes. I have heard some distressing news—so distressing that I can hardly countenance it.”

“Oh?” Prudence said again. Since Mrs. Bates seemed to be distressed quite often, Prudence could not summon up any concern for the matron. She listened with all appearance of attention, while her mind wandered back to her work.

“Yes,” Mrs. Bates replied with a frown. She settled her rather large bulk back in her chair, her voluminous hat nodding in time with her double chins. “It has come to my ears that you have entertained a single gentleman here at the cottage, unchaperoned!”

Prudence thought back over the past few days. She remembered that Clarence Fitzwater had been to the house, mending the fence for them, but good old Clarence, of plain farmer’s stock, would surely bristle at being labeled a gentleman. The vicar had been by earlier in the week, just at suppertime, forcing them to feed him, but the vicar was well-known for his habit of inviting himself for meals everywhere in the parish.

The only other visitor had been Phoebe’s young man. “Do you mean Penhurst?” Prudence asked, nonplussed.

“Of course I mean the Honorable James Penhurst, younger brother to the earl of Ravenscar!” Mrs. Bates said with a huff. “Surely you have not entertained any other single gentlemen of late?”

“Well—” Prudence began, but she was cut off by a noise of disapproval from the matron.

“Really, Prudence, I am quite shocked to hear you admit to it so readily!”

“Well, I—” Prudence tried again, but her next words were quickly trampled by the formidable Mrs. Bates.

“It is time someone took you two girls in hand, I must say. Living here all alone, with no supervision whatsoever, you are leaving yourselves open to scandal.”

Prudence listened with some small measure of surprise to this rebuke, since she and Phoebe had shared the cottage with their cook—Mary coming in for days only—since the death of their grandmother four years ago. But Mrs. Bates was obviously in a taking about something, and nothing would do but that she continue.

Prudence let the woman drone on while her mind drifted to a particularly difficult point in her book, where her heroine confronted the villain. It was the villain, Prudence decided, who was causing most of her problems. He was simply not distinctive enough…

“And, so, I have been moved finally to protest, my dear. You are not old enough to set up housekeeping without a chaperone!”

Prudence blinked behind her spectacles, drawn out of her reverie by Mrs. Bates’s forceful comment. Surely, the woman could not be serious! Prudence had long ago given up any dreams of marriage. If, indeed, she had ever entertained any, they would have been difficult to fulfill in such an isolated part of Cornwall, where eligible gentlemen were few.

Oh, had she been determined, she could surely have made a match with some shopkeeper or farmer or even one of the more successful fishermen, but since her earliest years she had borne responsibilities that claimed her attention above all else. Caring for her elderly grandmother and her younger sister and balancing their small budget had kept her too busy for frivolous pursuits. Then, burying grandmama and officially taking the reins of the household had occupied her, and by the time Phoebe was old enough to do for herself, Prudence had found herself a spinster.

“I am twenty-four years old, and firmly on the shelf,” she protested wryly.

Mrs. Bates answered with one of her frequent sounds of indignation. “Humph! You are still young enough to catch a man’s eye, and although you are a sensible girl, you are hardly of an age to chaperone a taking thing like Phoebe, or keep her within bounds.”

“Nonsense,” Prudence said. “Phoebe is of a vivacious nature, that is all. There is no harm in her.”

“The gel’s flighty, Prudence, and you know it. We all love her, but I have seen her kind before. She needs a husband, and quickly, before she gets herself into any mischief. She will not be satisfied to shut herself up here with her books and her scribblings, like you, Prudence, nor should she. The gel is a rare beauty, and could make a fine catch, if she were able. If only she could have a London season…”

Mrs. Bates sighed heavily, her chins jiggling in succession. “Have you no relatives in town who might be willing to sponsor her?”

“No,” Prudence answered simply. “We have only a male cousin in London. Nor are we situated comfortably enough to afford an extended visit.”

Some sort of sound, half groan and half snort of disgust, came rumbling out of Mrs. Bates’s throat. “Well, you must get the gel out more, perhaps to the dances over in Mullion, and you simply must get a chaperone! Have you no relations but a…male cousin?” Mrs. Bates uttered the words as if they were positively distasteful.

“No,” Prudence said, more forcefully.

“Well! Perhaps someone of my acquaintance could be induced to stay with you. Goodness, but there are always impoverished females who need a place to live. I shall ask the vicar.”

Prudence, who had listened but absently to most of the matron’s speech, drew the line at this alarming turn. “Oh, no, Mrs. Bates, I am afraid that you must not.”

The matron fixed her formidable dark gaze on Prudence and shook her pudgy finger in warning. “I tell you, you simply cannot go on here, with no one but two young girls and two female servants in the household. Such an arrangement might have been viewed with indulgence by the villagers, but society at large would look askance. What kind of impression do you think it gave your gentleman caller?”

Prudence considered young Penhurst’s behavior and could see nothing odd or untoward in it, with the exception of his intriguing uneasiness about the abbey. “I hardly think Mr. Penhurst even marked our situation, Mrs. Bates,” she answered bluntly. “He was the soul of propriety. He did not attack either one of us, nor did he treat us as if we were two lightskirts setting up shop along the cliffs.”

While Prudence watched calmly, Mrs. Bates turned red in the face and sought to catch her breath. When she finally did, she released it in various loud noises, indicating her affront. “Prudence Lancaster! I cannot like your plain speaking, nor have I ever. You may think it amusing, but I do not. There! I will leave you to your own devices, but mark my words, you had better keep an eye on your sister. The gel needs a firm hand. And you are most certainly not the one to guide her!”

With several outraged harrumphs, Mrs. Bates took her leave, but Prudence did not spare a thought to the woman’s displeasure. Only one part of Mrs. Bates’s speech had bothered her, and that was the stricture against so-called gentlemen visitors.

“Drat!” she muttered aloud. If she was not free to invite young Penhurst back to the cottage, how was she ever going to secure an invitation to Wolfinger?

When two more days passed without any sign of the abbey’s current resident, Prudence reached the end of her patience. Without renewed inspiration to guide her, it seemed that she did little but stare at a blank piece of paper. Finally, she glanced up at the fog-enshrouded abbey, threw down her pen and called for her sister.

She had already donned her cloak when Phoebe reached her. “What is it?”

“I am afraid I can no longer wait for Mr. Penhurst to call upon us,” Prudence replied. “Who knows bow long he will remain in Cornwall? He said he did not plan upon a lengthy stay, and I cannot let him go without seeing Wolfinger, a goal which I have held dear most of my life. No, I simply cannot trust to fate to bring us together again,” she added with grim determination, missing the look of alarm on her sister’s normally serene features.

“But, Prudence!” Phoebe protested. “Surely you cannot intend to march right up to his door! Mrs. Bates would have an apoplexy should she hear of it! And Mr. Penhurst… Why, I am sure that he would not like it above half. He hates that gloomy old place, and does not want people traipsing through it. Why, he himself is only staying there because he is forced to by…by…”

“By what?” Prudence halted suddenly, her fingers resting on the latch, and eyed her sister with curiosity.

“By…circumstances,” Phoebe said, before she turned and groped for her own wrap.

“What circumstances?”

“I am sure I do not know the whole, Mr. Penhurst having not taken me into his confidence,” Phoebe replied. She seemed inordinately interested in the way her garment was situated upon the sturdy peg by the rear entrance.

Watching her, Prudence felt a strange uneasiness. “And when did he tell you all of this?”

“When…we were visiting together, of course. Silly!” Phoebe whirled around, with a too-bright smile upon her face. “I cannot approve of your scheme, Prudence, but if you wish to go for a walk, I shall join you,” she added, putting on her cloak. “It looks like the weather might turn, and I would not have you caught out in it alone.”

Prudence felt a strange niggling, as if a thought were tapping at the corner of her mind, trying to gain her attention, but Phoebe was already leaving the cottage, and she had to hurry to catch up with her sister.

The air was damp and cool and the sky gray—not the best day for a climb along the cliffs, but the Lancasters were hardy girls and they followed the well-worn paths with ease. Phoebe chatted in her usual companionable way, but Prudence was intent upon one thing—reaching the abbey.

She had never put much stock in convention, so it mattered little to her if she strained the bounds of propriety a bit by showing up uninvited at a bachelor’s establishment. It was not as if young Penhurst were a desperate character intent upon ravishing them. He was an aristocrat, a neighbor, a well-mannered gentleman, and she did not plan on a lengthy stay. A peek—just a look at the famed building’s interior—was all she wanted.

If Phoebe noticed that they were gradually working their way toward the abbey, she did not mention it. However, it was not long before she tried to coax Prudence to return home. “Perhaps we had better go back, Prudence,” she said, frowning thoughtfully. “The weather has turned, as I knew it would, and I have no wish to be caught by a storm!”

Prudence looked up, rather surprised to see how the sky had darkened. When she was lost in thought, she often became oblivious of all else, and this was not the first time she had been startled by a sudden change in her circumstances.

The wind had picked up alarmingly, too, flapping their cloaks and whipping their hair about their faces. Although Prudence was well aware of the dangers of such sudden storms, they were already on the grounds of Wolfinger. She could see the rear of the tall structure towering above them, like a beacon calling to her, and she was loath to surrender her scheme after coming so far.

“Nonsense!” she answered. “Look, Phoebe, we are nearly to Mr. Penhurst’s. Perhaps he will be about. It would be a shame to leave without passing by.” With brisk motions, Prudence urged her sister on, determined to take the quickest route to her goal.

Without a thought to her grim surroundings, she opened the wrought-iron entrance to the ancient graveyard that lay in the shadow of the abbey and picked her way through the overgrown stones. She heard Phoebe following, murmuring a protest, and then the gate slammed shut with a loud clang that made her sister jump and squeak.

“Prudence—” she began in a high, anxious voice. “Mr. Penhurst will not be about. No one is out in this weather! I want to go home!”

“Nonsense,” Prudence repeated.

“Prudence! Oh, I don’t know why I let you drag me here,” Phoebe wailed. “I despise this horrid, ghastly place!”

Ignoring her sister’s words, most of which were lost upon the wildly gusting breeze anyway, Prudence climbed over the crumbling stone wall that marked the edge of the cemetery and stepped toward the long, curving drive that led to the imposing abbey. The wind was positively howling now, rattling shutters and setting the graveyard gate to banging like a clock striking the hour.

A breathless Phoebe reached Prudence’s side and pulled rather frantically on her arm. “Come, Prudence, let us go home before we are drowned or washed into the sea.” Following her sister’s gaze, Prudence found it was not the slippery cliffs that drew Phoebe’s look of horror, but Wolfinger itself, tall and black and menacing in the dim light. As she viewed the formidable edifice with admiration, Prudence noticed a figure hurrying toward the great stone steps that marched toward the arched entrance.

“Hello!” Prudence called, moving forward. “Hello, there!” The man halted and gazed in her direction, and to Prudence’s delight, she realized it was young Penhurst himself. With high hopes, she strode toward him eagerly, ignoring the dismay that was quite apparent on the boy’s face.

“Mr. Penhurst! How nice that we should run into you!” Prudence said, speaking louder than usual, so that she might be heard over the roaring of the wind. “We were just out for our walk, and I said to Phoebe, we simply must look in on Mr. Penhurst.”

If Mr. Penhurst saw anything unusual in the two girls’ strolling about on such a ferocious day, he was too well-bred to say so, but he did not appear pleased to see them. He looked anxiously over his shoulder, as if torn between inviting them in, which, apparently, he did not want to do, and leaving them to the mercy of the elements, which would hardly mark him as a gentleman.

Although his face brightened at the arrival of Phoebe, who had hurried to join them, he nonetheless appeared troubled as he glanced around. Seen against the backdrop of his ancestral home, and stricken by some sort of nervous energy, he seemed more of a Penhurst, but Prudence still found him sadly lacking. The gathering clouds muted the brilliance of his blond hair, yet he could hardly be called mysterious, and he was obviously uncomfortable in his surroundings.

While she listened absently to the young people’s chatter, Prudence brooded. When it became clear, from his peculiar manner, that young Penhurst was not going to invite them inside, she suspected that she would have to think of some way to politely force him to do so. She was just on the point of manufacturing a swollen ankle when the decision was taken away from them all.

Thunder had been growing in the distance, so at first no one took note of a low rumbling, and the sky had become so dark as to make seeing any great distance an impossibility. But suddenly a great flash of lightning lit the area as bright as day, illuminating a coach and four that appeared over the rise in the drive.

Prudence was immediately struck by the funereal aspect of the scene. It seemed apocalyptic: the black horses, their hooves pounding in their headlong race toward the abbey, and the shiny, midnight-colored carriage, with its driver wrapped so well against the weather as to be completely unrecognizable.

She sucked in a breath, trying to absorb the majesty of the vision as the animals rushed forward against a bleak, stormtossed sky, the wind whipping and howling around them like a banshee.

This was the stuff of her dreams, and Prudence was suddenly filled with a sort of wild exhilaration that she had never known before, her blood pumping fresh and fast within her veins. Never in her quiet, sensible existence, or even in the silent splendor of her own imagination, had Prudence known such a moment, and she felt giddy with the force of it.

She was aware of Mr. Penhurst pulling Phoebe back, closer to the steps, but she remained where she was, thrilled by the thunder and clatter of the magnificent vehicle’s approach. It rolled to a halt but a few feet from where the three of them stood watching, and with breathless excitement, Prudence recognized the Ravenscar coat of arms, gleaming in the shadowy light.

Then the door was thrown open, and a man stepped out. Tall and lean and swathed in a dark cloak, he looked like some phantom from hell, and Prudence saw Phoebe inch closer to her neighbor. The Honorable James Penhurst had paled considerably himself, and his interesting reaction made Prudence eye the new arrival more closely.

The wind whipped hair as black as night away from his rather gaunt face, and his mouth curled in a sardonic smile as he spoke in a deep—and oddly disturbing—voice. “Well, James, have you no welcome for your brother?”

Young Penhurst’s soft reply barely reached her ears above the roar of the oncoming storm, but she caught one word, a bitterly whispered “Ravenscar.”

With a start of surprise, Prudence stared openly at the mysterious earl she had so often conjured in her imaginings. He was tall, far taller than she had first thought, and dark. His raven hair was a little longer than fashion dictated, and if it had ever been combed into a dandy’s perfect coiffure, the effect was lost to the gusting air.

He had a high forehead, a hawklike nose, and strangely slanted brows that gave him a devilish look, heightened by the inch-long scar under one of his steel gray eyes. His very masculine mouth curled contemptuously as he eyed his brother, and Prudence heard Phoebe draw a sharp breath of dismay. In all fairness, Prudence acknowledged that to some, Ravenscar’s face might appear too harsh; to others, he might even look menacing.

To Prudence, he was the handsomest man she had ever seen.

The earl of Ravenscar not only was a fitting custodian for the abbey, he surpassed even her wildest dreams. He appeared to be the embodiment of the elemental forces around them, his features as mysterious and stony as Wolfinger itself.

The exhilaration that had been gripping Prudence since she had first noted the coach’s approach soared now to a new level. For the first time in her life, she felt as if her legs might fail her. Words did. Instead of seeking an invitation into the abbey, she simply stared, along with her sister and young Penhurst, at the man before them, while the coach rattled away.

“Have you nothing to say for yourself, James?” Ravenscar asked, in a chilling tone that sent a shiver up Prudence’s spine. When Penhurst did not answer, the earl laughed coldly. “Well, you will, I expect. I wish to speak to you inside. Now. Alone,” he added, his gaze flitting to the girls and dismissing them with obvious uninterest.

Instead of bristling at the rude slight, Prudence felt her awe of the man redouble. Oh, my! He was a worthy heir to the title, as arrogant and wicked as the cursed line’s reputation. She gazed at him in open admiration, while Phoebe shrunk back against his brother, just as if the earl might suddenly swoop down and swallow her whole.

Young Penhurst, finally moved to action, cleared his throat. “Ravenscar,” he said haltingly. “I would like you to meet two of our neighbors, the sisters Lancaster. Their cottage—”

“Good afternoon, ladies,” Ravenscar said, without even looking at them. “Now, if you will excuse us, I have business that I must attend to with my brother—in private.”

Whatever protests young Penhurst might have made at this peremptory order were drowned out by a huge clap of thunder that shook the air with deafening intensity. With a soft shriek, Phoebe abandoned Penhurst for her sister, grabbing at Prudence’s cloak and pulling her toward home.

“But could we not—” Prudence began, finally jolted from her dazed admiration of the earl.

“Sebastian, I hardly think—” Penhurst started to argue at the same moment.

Ignoring their feeble entreaties, Ravenscar strode up the stone stairs that fronted the abbey and called for his brother. With one last look of apology, mixed in with a healthy dose of anxiety, young Penhurst turned to follow his brother, leaving the two sisters to stand in the driveway, their wraps whipping frantically about them while the first heavy drops of rain finally appeared.

Knowing when to quit the game, Prudence did not linger, but glanced up at the opening skies and shouted to her sister. “Run!” she yelled and, grasping hands, they rushed for the path in a headlong race against the oncoming deluge.

Unfortunately, they did not win, and by the time they reached the cottage, they were soaked to the skin and shivering, their clothes spattered with mud and their spirits dampened.

“What a horrid man!” Phoebe moaned for the millionth time as she wrung out her stockings and hung them up to dry in front of the fire. “Rude, ghastly creature! I can well understand why Mr. Penhurst does not wish to see him. Why, he looked as evil as…” Obviously, having seen nothing as scary as Ravenscar in all her sheltered sixteen years, Phoebe was at a loss for words. Finally, she gave up and conceded that even the abbey itself was not half so frightful as its owner.

Prudence listened absently to Phoebe’s complaints as she finished with her own toilet. She had hung out her wet clothes and changed into a warm gown, but she refused the hot soup that Cook was pushing upon them. She was too eager to get back to her desk and begin writing.

For, despite the failure of her scheme to enter Wolfinger, Prudence had been rewarded with new inspiration—Ravenscar himself. To her, he was not frightening or gruesome, but thrilling and alluring beyond anything she had ever known. After meeting him, she knew just how her villain would look and act, and she could not wait to put him to paper.

Her pulse leaping with excitement, Prudence sat down to pattern him after the Devil Earl’s descendant.

Chapter Three

“Well, you have cut quite a swath, have you not?” Sebastian asked, in that cool, detached tone of his, and James cringed.

The earl had barely taken the time to remove his greatcoat and nod to the housekeeper before dragging James after him into the library with that imperious gaze of his. As long as James could remember, his brother had dictated to him in that cold manner, and, lately, he felt he had stomached quite enough of it.

“Please interrupt me, if I fail to include all your exploits in my recitation,” Sebastian said, in a sarcastic tone that set James’s blood to boiling. “Let’s see…You were turned out of Oxford Then, instead of coming home to Yorkshire to inform me of this turn of events, you went to London and fell in with companions I can only describe as creatures of the lowest sort. You spent several weeks wenching and drinking and gaming in the worst of hells, losing all your money, totting up bills of every imaginable variety, and finally handing your vowels to the basest of moneylenders, thereby compounding your problems tenfold.”

Sebastian paused long enough to pin him with a piercing gray stare, and James had to resist the urge to squirm. “Am I giving a fair account?”

“Yes, sir,” James muttered through gritted teeth. Why did his brother always seem so deadly and yet so controlled? It was wholly unfair. He had gone to London with the hopes of acquiring a dash and sophistication that would put him on a footing with Sebastian. Instead…

“And then, rather than notify me of these new doings, since I might well be expected to foot the bills for your wild extravagances and your gambling losses, you turn tail and run to hide out here in Cornwall—” Sebastian’s hard gaze bored into him, while James swallowed thickly, for he had never meant to “—like a coward.”

The accusation made James’s temper snap. “I am not a coward!” he shouted. “I came here to think, to decide what to do! I only expected to stay a day or two before…” he finished lamely.

“Before what, James? I am curious to see just how you planned to extricate yourself from this mess,” Sebastian said, and James realized that his arrogant brother was not so composed as he seemed. A muscle in the earl’s cheek jumped, giving away his anger.

Swamped with remorse at the enormity of mistakes so grave as to make Sebastian’s legendary control slip, James hung his head. “I…I thought I might…join the army—”