The Passion of an Angel

“I’ve been trying to turn the foal,” the female he hoped was not Prudence MacAfee told him as they entered the dark stable and headed for the last stall on the right. “Molly’s already down, and has been for hours—too many hours—but if I hold her head, and talk to her, you should be able to do the trick. I’m Angel, by the way,” she added, sticking out one blood-slick hand as if to give him a formal greeting, then quickly seeming to think better of it. “You took a damned long time in remembering that I’m alive, Daventry, but at least now you might be of some use to me. Let’s move!”

Silently cursing one Colonel Henry MacAfee, who had already gone to his heavenly reward and was probably perched on some silver-lined cloud right now, sipping nectar and laughing at him, Banning forcibly pushed his murderous thoughts to one side as he entered the stall and took in the sight of the obviously frightened, tortured mare. Molly’s great brown eyes were rolling in her head, her belly distorted almost beyond belief, her razor-sharp hooves a danger to both Prudence and himself.

“She’s beginning to give up. We don’t have much time,” he said tersely as he tore off his signet ring and threw it into a mound of straw. “Hold her head tight or we’ll both be kicked to death.”

“I know what to do,” Prudence snapped back at him as she dropped to her knees beside the mare’s head. “I’m just not strong enough to do it all myself, damn it all to blazes!”

And then her tone changed, and her small features softened. She leaned close against Molly’s head, crooning to the mare in a low, singsong voice that had an instantly calming effect on the animal. She had the touch of a natural horsewoman, and Banning took a moment to be impressed before he, too, went to his knees, taking up his position directly behind those dangerous rear hooves.

There was no time to wash off his road dirt, and no need to worry about greasing his arms to make for an easier entry, for there was more than enough blood to make his skin slick as he took a steadying breath and plunged both hands deep inside the mare, almost immediately coming in contact with precisely the wrong end of the foal.

“Sweet Christ!” he exclaimed, pressing one side of his head up against the mare’s rump, every muscle in his body straining as he struggled to turn the foal. His heart pounded, and his breathing grew short and ragged as the heat of the day and the heat and sickening sweet smell of Molly’s blood combined to make him nearly giddy. He could hear Prudence MacAfee crooning to the mare, promising that everything was going to be all right, her voice seemingly coming to him from somewhere far away.

But it wasn’t going to be all right.

Too much blood.

Too little time.

It wasn’t going to work. It simply wasn’t going to work. Not for the mare, who was already too weak to help herself. And if he didn’t get the foal turned quickly, he would have been too late all round.

The thought of failure galvanized Banning, who had never been the sort to show grace in defeat. Redoubling his efforts, and nearly coming to grief when Molly gave out with a halfhearted kick of her left rear leg, he whispered a quick prayer and plunged his arms deeper inside the mare’s twitching body.

“I’ve got him!” he shouted a moment later, relief singing through his body as he gave a mighty pull and watched as his arms reappeared, followed closely by the thin, wet face of the foal he held clasped by its front legs. Molly’s body gave a long, shuddering heave, and the foal slipped completely free of her, landing heavily on Banning’s chest as he fell back on the dirt floor of the stall.

He pushed the foal gently to one side and rose to his knees once more, stripping off his waistcoat and shirt so that he could wipe at the animal’s wet face, urging it to breathe. Swiftly, expertly, he did for the foal what Molly could not do, concentrating his efforts on the animal that still could be saved.

Long, heart-clutching moments later, as the newborn pushed itself erect on its spindly legs, he found himself nose to nose with the foal and looking into two big, unblinking brown eyes that were seeing the world for the first time.

Banning heard a sound, realized it was himself he heard, laughing, and he reached forward to give the animal a smacking great kiss squarely on the white blaze that tore a streak of lightning down the red foal’s narrow face.

“Oh, Molly, you did it! You did it!” he heard Prudence exclaim, and he looked up to see Prudence, still kneeling beside the mare’s head, tears streaming down her dirty cheeks as she smiled widely enough that he believed he could see her perfect molars. “Daventry, you aren’t such a pig after all! My brother wrote that you were the best of his chums, and now I believe him again.”

As praise, it was fairly backhanded, but Banning decided to accept it in the manner it was given, for he was feeling rather good about himself at the moment. He even spared a moment to feel good about Henry MacAfee, who had been thorough enough in his roguery to smooth the way for Prudence’s new guardian.

This pleasant, charitable, all’s well with the world sensation lasted only until the marquess took a good look at Molly, who seemed to be mutely asking his assistance even as Prudence continued to croon in her ear.

I know. I know. But, damn it, Molly, his brain begged silently, don’t look at me that way. Don’t make me believe that you know, too.

“Step away from her, Miss MacAfee,” Banning intoned quietly as the foal, standing more firmly on his feet with every passing moment, nudged at his mother’s flank with his velvety nose. “She has to get up. She has to get up now, or it will be too late.”

Prudence pressed the back of one bloody hand to her mouth, her golden eyes wide in her grimy face. “No,” she said softly, shaking her head with such vehemence that the cloth she had wrapped around her head came free, exposing a long tumble of thick, honey-dark gold hair. “Don’t you say that! She’ll get up. You’ll see. She’ll get up. Oh, please, Molly, please get up!”

Banning understood Prudence’s pain, but he also knew that the mare was already past saving, what was left of her life oozing from her, turning the sweet golden hay she lay in a sticky red. He couldn’t let Prudence, his new charge, fall into pieces now, not when she had been so brave until this point.

“Please leave the stall, Miss MacAfee,” he ordered her quietly, but sternly, already retracing his steps to fetch the pistol from his saddle.

She chased after him, pounding on his back with her small fists, screaming invectives at him that would have done a foot soldier proud, her blows and her words having no impact on him other than to make him feel more weary, more heartsick than he had done when Molly had looked up at him with a single, pleading eye.

He took the long pistol from its specially made holster strapped to his saddle and turned to face his young ward. He didn’t like losing the mare any more than she did, but he had to make her see reason. To do that, he went on the attack. “How old are you?” he asked sharply.

She paused in the act of delivering yet another punch to his person. “Eighteen. I’m eighteen!” she exclaimed after only a slight hesitation, her expression challenging him to treat her as an hysterical child. “Old enough to run this farm, old enough to live on my own, and old enough to decide what to do with my own mare!”

He held out the pistol, which she stared at as if he might shoot her with it. Yet she still stood her ground. He admired her for her courage, but he had to do something that would make her leave.

When he spoke again, it was with the conviction that what he said would serve to make her run away. “All right, Miss MacAfee. Prove it. The mare must be put down. She’s hurting, and she’s slowly bleeding to death, and she shouldn’t be made to suffer any more than she already has. Show me the adult you claim to be. Put Molly out of her pain.”

He didn’t know anyone could cry such great, glistening tears as the ones now running down the girl’s filthy cheeks. He hadn’t known that the sight of a small, quivering chin could make his knees turn to mush even as his heart died inside him.

He found himself caught between wanting to push her to one side and go to the mare and pulling Prudence MacAfee hard against his chest and holding her while she sobbed.

“Oh Christ, I’ll do it,” he said at last, just as she surprised him by raising a shaky hand and trying to grasp the pistol. The sight of their two hands, stained with the blood of the dying mare, each of them clasping one end of the pistol, brought him back to his senses. “I never meant for you to do it. And I’m sorry it has to be done at all. I’m truly, truly sorry.”

“Go to blazes, Daventry,” she shot back, sniffling as she yanked the pistol from his hand and began slowly walking toward the stable, her step slow, her shoulders squared, her chin high. Dressed in her stained breeches, and without the evidence of her long hair to prove the image wrong, she could have been a young man going off to his first battle, terrified that he might show his terror.

“Prudence,” he called after her. “Angel,” he said when she failed to heed him. “You don’t have to do this.”

She kept walking, and he wondered why he didn’t chase after her, wrest the pistol from her hand, and have done with it. But he couldn’t move. He had put down his own horse when he was twelve, a mare he had raised from a foal, and he knew the pain, was familiar with the anguish of doing what was for the best and then living with the result of that fatal mercy. Molly was Prudence’s horse. She was Prudence’s pain.

The stable yard was silent for several minutes, so that when the report of the pistol blasted that silence, Banning flinched in the act of sluicing cold water from the pump over his face and head. His hands stilled as his head remained bowed, and then he went on with his rudimentary ablutions, keeping his head averted as Prudence MacAfee exited the stable, the pistol still in her hand. She returned the spent weapon to him, then placed his signet ring in his hand.

He felt uncomfortable in her presence—stripped to the waist and dripping wet—hardly the competent London gentleman who had come to rescue an innocent child from an uncaring grandparent. He felt useless, no more than an unwelcome intruder, a reluctant witness to a pain so real, so personal, that his intrusion on the scene could almost be considered criminal.

And, with her next words, Prudence MacAfee confirmed that she shared that opinion.

“If you’ll assist me with settling the foal in a clean stall, I would appreciate it, as I can’t seem to get it to move away from…from the body,” she said stonily, and he noticed that her cheeks, although smudged, were now dry, and sadly pale. “And then, my lord Daventry, I would appreciate it even more if you would remount your horse and take yourself the bloody hell out of my life.”

CHAPTER TWO

A mere madness,

to live like a wretch and die rich.

Robert Burton

BANNING SAT BENEATH AN ancient, half-dead tree, his waistcoat and jacket draped over his bare shoulders as he rested his straightened elbows on his bent knees, and watched his traveling coach pull into the stable yard.

The forbidding expression on his lordship’s face gave pause to the driver who had seemed about to venture a comment on his employer’s ramshackle appearance, so that it was left to the valet, Rexford, to explain, within a heartbeat of descending from the coach and rubbing at his afflicted posterior in a surreptitious way, “Milord! You are a shambles!”

“Noticed that, did you? You can’t know how that comforts me, as I’ve always thought you a veritable master of the obvious,” Banning said, remaining where he was as Miss Honoria Prentice joined Rexford in the dirt-packed stable yard, her purse-lipped countenance wordlessly condemning her surroundings and her mistress’s brother, all in one dismissive sweep of her narrowed, watery blue eyes.

“Lady Wendover most distinctly promised me that you had sworn off strong drink since Waterloo, my lord,” Miss Prentice intoned reprovingly as she touched the corners of her thin lips with her ever-present handkerchief. “I see now that she is not as conversant with your vices as she has supposed. Now, where is the child? Heaven help us if she has seen you in this state. Such a shock might scar an innocent infant for life, you know.”

Banning, feeling evil, and more than a little justified in seeking a thimbleful of revenge on his sister’s condemning companion, reached into his pocket, drew out a cheroot, and stuck it, unlit, between his even white teeth. “Miss MacAfee has retired to the house after our brief meeting, Miss Prentice. She rushed off without informing me of her intentions, but I am convinced she is even now ordering tea for her guests, fine young specimen of all the feminine virtues that she is. Why don’t you just trot on up there and introduce yourself? I’d wager she’ll fall on your neck, grateful to see another female.”

“I should imagine so!” Her chin high, her skirts lifted precisely one inch above the dirt of the stable yard, Miss Prentice began the short, uphill trek toward the small, shabby manor house, leaving Rexford behind to hasten to his master’s side, clucking his tongue like a mother hen berating her wandering chick.

“The coachman is even now unloading the valise holding your shirts, my lord, as well as my supply of toiletries. Good God! Is that blood on that rag which was once your second-best shirt? You’ve been fighting, my lord, have you not? I knew it. I just knew it! You were set upon by ruffians, weren’t you? Oh, this vile countryside! If we return to London alive to tell of this horrific journey it will be a miracle!”

“If we can discover a way to travel back to London, dead, to relate our tale, I should be even more astonished, Rexford,” Banning said as he allowed his valet to assist him to his feet and divest him of his waistcoat and jacket for, in truth, he wanted very much to stick his arms into a clean shirt.

“Now stop fussing, if you please,” he ordered, “and restrict yourself to unearthing a clean shirt so that I can present myself at the front door of the house in time to watch our dear Miss Prunes and Prisms Prentice being tossed out on her pointed ear. At the moment, the thought of that scene is the only hope I have of recovering even a small portion of my usual good mood.”

“Sir?” Rexford questioned him, looking up from the opened valise, a fresh neck cloth in his hands. “I don’t understand.”

“Give it a moment, my good man, and you will.”

A few seconds later, as Banning allowed his valet to button his shirt for him, true to his prediction, Miss Honoria Prentice’s tall, painfully thin figure abruptly reappeared on the narrow front porch of the manor house a heartbeat before the echoing slam of the house’s front door reached their ears.

“Ah, dear me, yes,” the marquess breathed almost happily, snatching the neck cloth from Rexford’s hands and tying it haphazardly about his throat, “she’s an angel, all right. Unfortunately, however, I believe she is also one of Lucifer’s own. Come along, my long-suffering companion, we might as well get this over with all in the same afternoon. As I awaited your arrival, I thought I saw some hint of activity just beyond that stand of trees. Let us go and search out this grandfather, this Shadwell, and discover for ourselves what sort of fanciful lies the dear, dead Colonel MacAfee wove about this last member of his family.”

“Over there? Into that stand of trees? With you?” Rexford, who prided himself in never having been farther from London than Richmond Park—and then only this once, and under duress—swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down above his tightly tied cravat. “There will be bugs, milord. Spiders. Possibly even bees. I do not at all care for insects, milord, as well you know. Better I should remain here, repacking the valise, and praying for a swift remove to the nearest inn.”

Banning looked down his nose at the quivering, shivering valet. “You know, Rexford,” he commented entirely without malice, the unlit cheroot still clamped between his teeth, “if you didn’t possess such a fine hand with the pressing iron, and if the mere thought of finding a suitable replacement were not so fatiguing, I’d dismiss you right now and leave you here to discover your own way back to civilization.”

“Coming right along behind you, milord!” Rexford exclaimed, skipping to catch up with his rapidly striding employer as the two crossed the yard and entered the stand of trees.

The marquess’s eyes had just begun to become accustomed to the shade beneath the cooling canopy of leaves when he found himself stepping out into the sun once more, so that at first he disbelieved what he was seeing. It took Rexford, nearly fainting into his employer’s arms, to convince Banning that his eyes were not deceiving him.

Not that he could be censured for wondering if he had succumbed to hallucination, for the sight that greeted them in the small, round clearing, an area completely encircled by trees, was enough to give any man pause.

There were two people inhabiting the clearing, one of them buried up to his chin in dirt, the other standing nearby, waving flies away from the first with an ancient, bedraggled fan of ostrich plumes. The latter man Banning dismissed as a servant, but the other—with his baldpated, no-eyebrows, gargantuan, bulbous head resembling nothing more than a gigantic maggot with raisin-pudding eyes—commanded his full attention.

“Let me guess,” he drawled, removing the cheroot from his mouth and taking a step closer, then retreating as a vile stench reached his nostrils. “You’d be Mister Shadwell MacAfee, wouldn’t you? And you’re a disciple of dirt baths, I presume—a practice of which I’ve heard, but never before witnessed. Water is an anathema to those who indulge, as I recall, and as my sense of smell verifies. First the Angel who is nothing of the sort, and now the grandfather who is more than described. I’m beginning to believe Colonel Henry MacAfee had a pleasant release, dying in battle.”

“Eh? What? Did someone speak? Hatcher! I told you not to pile the dirt so high. It’s in m’ears, damn your hide, so that now I’m hearing things.” Shadwell MacAfee twisted his large, hairless head from side to side, using his chin to plow a furrow into the dirt in front of him, then looked up at Banning, who grinned and waved down at him. “By God! I’m not hearing things after all. Hatcher! Dig me out! We’ve got company.”

“Hold a moment, Hatcher, if you please,” Banning suggested quickly. “If your employer is as naked under that dirt as I believe him to be, I would consider it a boon if you were to leave him where he is for the nonce. Although we all might consider it a small mercy if you could wave that horsefly away from his nose.”

MacAfee’s cackling laugh brought into evidence the sight of three rotting teeth, all the man seemed to have left in his mouth, and the marquess nodded his silent approval as Rexford moaned a request to vacate the area before he became physically ill, “if it please you that I cast up my accounts elsewhere, milord.”

“You’d be Daventry, wouldn’t you, boy?” MacAfee bellowed in a deep, booming voice once he had done with chortling. “Have to be, seeing as how nobody ever comes here unless they’re forced. Been waiting on your for nearly a year now, you know. Damned decent of you to send that allowance, not that Pru would have known what to do with a groat of it, which is why she hasn’t seen any. Only waste it on what she calls ‘improvements,’ anyways. Bank’s the only place for money, I keep telling her. Put it somewheres where it can grow. Pride m’self on not having spent more’ an hundred pounds a year these past two score and more years. So, you thinking of taking my Pru away?”

Banning believed he could hear the beginnings of a painful ringing in his ears, and he was suddenly thirsty for what would be his first drink of anything more potent than the odd snifter of brandy since Waterloo. “I’d just as soon leave her,” he answered honestly, brutally banishing the memory of those huge, heart-tugging tears he’d witnessed not two hours previously, “but I have promised your late grandson that I would do my possible to care for his sister. As my sister, Lady Wendover, has agreed to give the child a roof over her head until it is time for her Come-out, I have come to collect her, not knowing that she is already grown, and must therefore be whipped into some sort of shape to partake in this particular season. Would you care to give me odds on my sister’s chances of success?”

MacAfee laughed again, and Banning turned his head, reluctant to take another peek into the black cavern of the man’s mouth. MacAfee continued, “I’d as soon place odds on her chances of turning Hatcher here into a coach and four. My wife had the gel to herself for a half-dozen or so years before she kicked off, teachin’ her how to talk and act and the like, but the child’s gone wild since then. Now, go away, Daventry. Been standing in this pit long enough, I have, and it’s time for my man to dig me out. Wouldn’t want any worms taking a fancy to m’bare arse, now would we?”

“Not I, sir,” Banning answered coldly, turning on his heel, already planning to mount a frontal assault on the manor house, believing that, of the two unusual creatures he had encountered in the past hours, Prudence MacAfee seemed far and away the more reasonable of the pair. “After all, being a bit of an angler, I hold some faint affection for earthworms. Good-day, sir.”

PRUDENCE WAS A MASS of conflicting emotions. Sorrow over Molly. Anger over the injustice of it all. Fear caused by the appearance of the man Henry had named as her guardian. Outrage over her childish displays of sorrow, anger, and fear.

How dare the man arrive in the midst of tragedy? How dare he offer his assistance, then utter the damning words that had forced her into taking up that pistol, walking back into Molly’s stall, and…

Who had asked him, anyway? She certainly didn’t want him here, at MacAfee Farm, or anywhere else vaguely connected with her life.

All right, so Henry had picked the man. Picked him with some care, if she had read between the lines of her brother’s explanatory letter to her correctly. Well, wasn’t that above all things wonderful? And she was just supposed to go along with this unexpected change in plans, place herself in this Marquess of Daventry’s “sober, responsible, money-heavy hands?”

When Hell froze and the devil strapped on ice skates! Prudence shouted silently as she stuck her head out the kitchen door—checking to make sure lizard-woman wasn’t hovering somewhere about and ready to spit at her with her forked tongue again—then bounded across the herb garden, on her way to the stable yard once more.

She had bathed in her room, shivering as she stood in a small hip bath and sponged herself with harsh soap and cold water before changing into a clean facsimile of the shirt and breeches she had worn earlier, but she hadn’t done so in order to impress the high-and-mighty Marquess of Daventry.

Indeed, no. She had only done it to remove the sickly sweet stench of Molly’s blood from her person before tending to her mare’s foal. She didn’t care for spit what the marquess thought of her. Some responsible man he was, not so much as sending her a bent penny to live on, and then showing up here at MacAfee Farm, which was the last ting she had ever supposed he would do. Oh yes, Henry had picked himself a sure winner this time, he had. And pigs regularly spun their tails and flew to the moon!

Prudence slipped into the stable, keeping a careful eye on the two men standing beside a traveling coach not twenty yards in the distance, wondering if either one of them had the sense they were born with, to leave the horses in traces like that, and headed for the foal’s stall, armed with a make-shift teat she had loaded with her brother’s recipe for mother’s milk.

“Hello again, Miss MacAfee,” the Marquess of Daventry said from a darkened corner of the stall, and Prudence nearly jumped out of her skin before rounding on the man, a string of curses—more natural to her than any forced pleasantry—issuing, almost unthinkingly, from between her stiff lips.