The Passion of an Angel

“Please endeavor to curb this tendency toward profanity, Miss MacAfee,” Banning crooned, pushing himself away from the rough wall of the stall, “allowing me instead to continue to labor under the sweet delusion that you are but an unpolished gem. I had first thought to join you at the house, but quickly decided you would be more likely to show up here. How comforting to know that I am beginning to understand you, if only a little. Now, seeing that I am to be denied any offer of refreshment or other hospitality, perhaps you will favor me with some hint of your agenda? For instance, when will you be ready to depart this lovely oasis of refinement for the barbarity of London?”

Prudence felt her jaw drop, but recovered quickly, brushing past the man to offer the teat to the foal who, thankfully, began feeding greedily. “You actually intend to take me to London?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at the marquess, and wondering how on earth a man with silver hair could look so young. It had to be the eyes. Yes, that was it. Those laughing, mocking green eyes.

“I’d much rather leave you and all memory of this place behind me, but I have given my word to act as your guardian, even though it was wrenched from me under duress. Therefore, Miss MacAfee, yes, I intend for you to remove with me to London, preferably before I have to endure more than one additional interlude with dearest Shadwell.”

Prudence grinned in momentary amusement. “Met m’grandfather, did you? I’d have given my best whip to see that. Was he already in the dirt, or were you unlucky enough to catch him in the buff? He’s a wonder to see, you know. Especially in this last year, once he decided to pluck out all his hair in some new purification ritual he read about somewhere. He’s bald as a shaved peace. Not a single hair left anywhere on his body. No eyebrows, nothing on his brick-thick head, nor on his—”

“You will find, Miss MacAfee,” the marquess broke in just as she was about to do her best to shock him into a fit of apoplexy, “that I do not permit infants the luxury of attempting, however weakly, to make a May game of me. Now if you don’t wish to be turned over my knee, I suggest you dislodge that chip of resentment from your shoulder and give your full attention to impressing me with your finer attributes. I shall give you a moment, so that you may cudgel your brain into discovering at least one redeeming quality about yourself that I might employ to soothe my sister once she recovers from the swoon she will surely suffer the first time you open your mouth in her presence.”

“My brother told me you were a high-stickler,” Prudence grumbled, scratching at an itch on her stomach that could not be denied. “Very well, my lord, I’ll behave. But I won’t like it. I won’t like it above half.”

“Which, you might notice, is neither here nor there to me, Miss MacAfee. Now, when will you be ready to leave? I don’t believe it will take Miss Prentice long to pack up your things, if your current attire is representative of your wardrobe. Freddie will enjoy dressing you from the skin out, or so she told me. I do hope she has sufficient stamina, for she can have no idea of the height and breadth of the consequences of her impulsive commitment.”

“I liked you worlds better when you were helping me with Molly,” Prudence said, pushing her lower lip out in a pout. “Now you sound like some stern, impossibly stuffy schoolmaster, if my brother’s letters from school about his teachers are to be used as a measure of puffed-up consequence. And I go nowhere unless this foal goes with me—and until Molly is taken care of.”

“And what, exactly, do you propose to do with Molly?” the marquess asked, pulling a cheroot from his pocket and sticking it in between his teeth, exactly the way she was wont to jam a juicy bit of straw between hers. He looked very much the London gentleman again, as he had when first she’d seen him, and if he made so much as a single move to put a light to the end of the cheroot while they stood inside the stable, she’d toss a bucket of dirty water all over his urban sophistication.

“I intend to bury her, my lord,” Prudence declared flatly, praying her voice wouldn’t break as she fought back another explosion of tears, “and I shall do so, if it takes me a week to dig the grave.”

“A burial?” Banning Talbot’s grin, when it came, was so unexpected and so downright inspired, that Prudence felt herself hard put to maintain her dislike for him. “Ah, dear Angel, I believe I know precisely the spot, and with our work already about half done for us.”

It didn’t take more than a second for Prudence to deduce his meaning. “Shadwell’s pit?” Her large golden eyes widened appreciably as she contemplated this sacrilege. “He used it today, which means he won’t avail himself of it again until Friday, but—oh, no, it’s a lovely, marvelously naughty thought, and Molly would be sure to like it there, among the trees…but no. I can’t.”

“I’ve been sending you a quarterly allowance since I returned from the continent, Miss MacAfee. A very generous allowance meant to soothe my conscience for not having leapt immediately into a full guardianship. An allowance I understand you have yet to see?”

Prudence breathed deeply a time or two, remembering having to say goodbye to their only household servant save the totally useless Hatcher six months earlier because she could not pay her wages, remembering the leaks in the roof, the “small economies” her grandfather employed that invariably included large sacrifices on her part. Why if she could have afforded to send for the local blacksmith to assist her when Molly had first gone down, the mare might be standing here now, with her foal.

“I saw two men standing beside your traveling coach,” she said, reaching for the shovel she used to muck out the stalls. “If we all dig together, we can have the grave completed by nightfall.”

CHAPTER THREE

Diogenes struck the father

when the son swore.

Robert Burton

THE MARQUESS OF DAVENTRY would have racked up at a country inn if there had been one in the vicinity, but as the single hostelry near MacAfee Farm had burned to the ground some two months previously, and because the marquess had no intention of remaining in the area above a single night, he had dragged a quivering, weeping Rexford into the chamber allotted them by Shadwell MacAfee once the old man had waddled back to the manor house, his huge body swathed in what looked to be a Roman toga.

The chamber could have been worse, Banning supposed—if it had been located in the bowels of a volcano, for instance. Or if the bed had been of nails, rather than the ages-old, rock-hard mattress he had poked at with his fingertips, then sniffed at with his nose before ordering Rexford to take the coach and ride into the village to procure fresh bedding to replace the gray tatters that once, long ago, may have been sheets.

Banning then positioned a chair against the door, as there was no lock and he knew he might be prompted to violence if Miss Prentice barged in during his bath to continue her litany of complaints concerning her own bedchamber, a small box room in the attics, last inhabited by three generations of field mice.

Stripped to the buff, the marquess stood in front of the ancient dressing table, scrubbing himself free of the grime and stench associated with first digging a large pit, then employing an old field gate hitched to his coach horses as a funeral barge for the deceased Molly.

Rexford had, of course, cried off from the actual digging of the grave, citing his frail constitution, his propensity to sneeze when near straw, and his firm declaration that returning to the vicinity of MacAfee’s dirt bath would doubtless reduce him to another debilitating bout of intestinal distress.

That had left Banning, the coachman, Hatcher (who had been bribed into silence and compliance with a single gold piece), and—although he did his best to dissuade her—Miss Prudence MacAfee to act as both grave diggers and witnesses to Molly’s rather ignoble “roll” into the pit and subsequent interment.

Prudence hadn’t shed a single tear, nor spoken a single word, until the last shovelful of dirt had been tamped down, but worked quietly, and rather competently, side by side with the men. Only when Banning had been about to turn away, exhausted by his exertions and badly craving a private interlude with some soap and water, did she falter.

“I’m going to miss you so much, Molly,” he heard her whisper brokenly. “You were my only friend, after my brother. I’ll take good care of your baby, I promise, and I’ll tell him all about you. One day we’ll ride the fields together, and I’ll show him all our favorite places…and let him drink from that fresh stream you liked so well…and…and…oh, Molly, I love you!”

Banning was so affected by this simple speech, this acknowledgment that a horse had been Prudence’s only friend since her brother had died, that he forgot himself to the point of placing an avuncular, comforting arm around the young woman’s shoulders, murmuring, “There, there,” or some such drivel articulate men of the world such as he were invariably reduced to when presented with a weeping female.

The memory of the fact that this sympathetic gesture had earned him a swift punch in the stomach before Prudence ran off across the fields did nothing to improve Banning’s mood as he dressed himself in the clothes Rexford had laid out for him, pushed the chair to one side, and exited his chamber, intent on locating some sort of late supper and his ward, not necessarily in that order.

He walked down the hallway, past the faded, peeling wallpaper, skirting a small collection of pots sitting beneath a damp patch on the ceiling above them, and was just at the stairs when he espied a sliver of light beneath a door just to his left. Already knowing the location of MacAfee’s chamber, Banning deduced that his ward was secreted behind this particular door, probably plotting some way to make his life even more miserable than it was at this moment—if such a feat were actually possible, for the Marquess of Daventry was not a happy man.

His knock ignored, he impatiently counted to ten, then pushed open the door that lacked not only a lock, but a handle as well. He cautiously stepped into the room, on his guard against flying knickknacks, and espied Prudence MacAfee sitting, her back to him, at a small desk pushed up against the single window in the small chamber.

“Love notes from some local swain, I sincerely hope not?” he inquired as he approached the desk to see that she was reading a letter, a fairly thick stack of folded letters at her left elbow. “Freddie has visions of someday making you a spectacular, society-tweaking match with one of the finest families in England. But then, my sister was always one for dreaming.”

Prudence swiftly folded the single page she was reading and slipped it back inside the blue ribbon that held the rest of the letters. “Knocking is then not a part of proper social behavior, my lord?” she asked, turning to him with a sneer marring her rather lovely, golden features. “My late Grandmother MacAfee, who all but beat the social graces into my head until the day she died, would have most vigorously disagreed.”

“I did knock, Miss MacAfee,” he corrected her with a smile, then added, “but as my tutor’s teachings of etiquette did not extend to dealing with bad-tempered, rude termagants foisted upon one by conniving, opportunistic brothers, I then just pushed on, guided more by my inclinations than any notions of what is polite. Now, tell me, if you please. Does anyone in this household eat?”

Prudence opened the top drawer of the small writing desk and slid the packet of letters inside before turning back to Banning, a mischievous grin he had already learned to distrust lighting her features. “Grandfather eats nothing but goat’s milk pudding and mutton, my lord. If you are interested, I am sure Hatcher can serve you in the kitchens. As you may have noticed as you barged into the house, there is no longer any furniture in either the drawing or dining rooms. For myself, I have no appetite tonight, having just buried my horse.”

“You’re enjoying yourself immensely at my expense, aren’t you, Miss MacAfee?” Banning asked, not really needing her to answer. “Perhaps another visit from the redoubtable Miss Prentice is in order. She is most anxious to mount an inspection of your wardrobe before we depart for London in the morning.”

“Let her in here again and I’ll probably shoot her. Besides, I’m not going,” Prudence stated flatly, turning her back on him once more.

Resisting the impulse to grab hold of the young woman by her shoulders and shake her until her teeth rattled, Banning retrained himself enough to utter through his own tightly clenched teeth, “Then, Miss MacAfee, may I presume we may number lying among your other vices? Or was I incorrect in assuming that when you gave me your word you would leave with me after Molly was settled, you were intending to keep true to that word?”

She jumped up from her chair, still most distressingly, disturbingly dressed in a man’s shirt and a patched pair of breeches that clung much too closely to her hips, and rounded on him in a fury.

“You ignorant jackanapes!” she exploded. “Do you really believe I would want to stay here? That anyone with more brains than a doorstop would want to stay here? My God, man, I detest the place! This damned pile is falling down around my ears, I haven’t a penny for repairs to either the house or the land, my grandfather is a mean, miserly, to-let-in-the-attic nincompoop who hasn’t bathed since the day I was able to lock him outside in the rain two years ago. He picks his teeth with a penknife, sleeps on a mattress stuffed with receipts from his deposits in London banks, saves the clippings from his fingers and toes for luck, and bays at full moons. My brother swore he’d get me out of here since the day we first arrived after our parents’ funeral—get us both out of here—and by damn, Daventry, I would have to be a candidate for Bedlam myself to refuse to go. But I can’t. Not yet.”

Banning sat himself down in the chair Prudence had just vacated, pressed his elbows onto the desktop while making a steeple of his fingers, and looked out over the run-down grounds of MacAfee Farm, giving out with an occasional self-depreciating, closemouthed chuckle as he considered all that his new ward had just said.

“It’s the foal, isn’t it, Angel?” he remarked at last, slowly swiveling on the chair to look up at Prudence, who was still standing close beside him, her fists jammed onto her hips, her wild tangle of honey-dark blond hair giving her the appearance of a lioness with her fur ruffled. “You won’t leave without Molly’s foal.”

“Well, you can think! And here I was beginning to believe you were slow, as well as arrogant and supercilious and domineering and—”

“Yes, yes,” Banning interrupted, “I believe we both know how you view me. But remember. I am also your brother’s choice of savior. Thinking back on that evening, I begin to see why he would have traveled to such lengths to insure your future. You and Henry might have been your grandfather’s only heirs, but the scoundrel might live for years and years yet, a prospect Henry—and in his place, I myself—could not look to with much forbearance.”

“My brother escaped to the war,” Prudence told him, her voice soft as she spoke of Henry MacAfee. “He stole the money to buy his commission, sneaking the profit from the sale of the dining room furniture out from under Shadwell’s nose before he could ship it off to the banks. He is going to—was going to send for me once Boney was locked up again. Life here wasn’t easy for either of us, but it was especially difficult for my brother, who was a dozen years older and had known another life more so than had I, for I was still fairly steeped in the nursery when Mama and Papa died in that carriage accident.”

Beginning once more to feel as if he was not quite so put-upon, as if he had actually been selected to do what could only be considered a very good deed, Banning decided there and then that a week—no more—spent at MacAfee Farm couldn’t be considered too great a sacrifice, especially when he thought how he had heartlessly left poor little Prudence MacAfee to suffer here for the better part of a year longer than necessary.

He could make do on the farm for seven short days, long enough for the foal to gain strength and make arrangements for its transport to his stable in Mayfair. Why, he might even enjoy being in the Sussex countryside, as he had been confined to London since returning to England, recovering from his wounds, hovering over his ill sister—and then dancing the night away, gaming with his friends, attending the theater and other such indulgences for several months, he remembered with another fleeting pang of guilt.

Slapping his hands down hard onto his thighs, he rose to his feet, saying, “It’s settled then. I think a week in the country would do both Rexford and Miss Prentice a world of good.”

“I won’t let that lizard near me, you know, so you can ship her off any time it suits you,” Prudence pronounced, preceding Banning to the door. “She slithered in here earlier, to pack for me she said, and left with a flea in her ear after I listened to her going on and on about the fact that I don’t have any gowns. As if I’d be mucking stables in lace and satin! And she’s fair and far out if she thinks I’m going to put up my hair, or let her touch me with those cold white hands as she spits out something about clipping my nails and—”

Banning stopped just inside the doorway, putting out his hands to apply the brakes to Prudence’s tirade before she could grab the bit more firmly between her teeth. “Did you say you don’t own any gowns? Not even one in which to travel to Freddie’s? You’ve nothing but breeches?”

“Oh, close your mouth, Daventry, unless you’ve always longed to catch flies with your tongue. Of course I don’t have any gowns. I was only a child when I came here, and once Grandmother MacAfee was gone, Shadwell decided that my brother’s castoffs were more than sufficient for a growing female. And it’s not as if I go tripping off to church of a Sunday or receive visitors here at MacAfee’s Madhouse, which is what the locals have dubbed the place.”

Banning took a long, assessing look at Prudence as she stood in front of him in the dim candlelight. He had already noticed that her honey-dark hair was thick and lustrous, even if it did look as if she’d trimmed it with a sickle and combed it with a rake. Her huge, tip-tilted eyes, also more honey gold than everyday brown, were far and away her most appealing feature, although her complexion, also golden, and without so much as a single mole or freckle, was not to be scoffed at.

Of average height for a female, with an oval face, small skull, straight white teeth, and pleasantly even features, she might just clean up to advantage. If London held enough soap and water, he added, wishing she didn’t smell quite so much of horse and hay.

There wasn’t much he could tell about her figure beneath the large shirt, although he had already become aware that her lower limbs were straight, her derriere nicely rounded.

“You know something, Angel?” he announced at last, draping a companionable arm around her as they headed for the staircase, just as if she was one of his chums. “I think we’ll go easy on any efforts to coax you out of your cocoon until we’re safely in Mayfair. I wouldn’t want Shadwell to start thinking he’d be giving up an asset he could use to line his pockets.”

“I don’t understand,” Prudence admitted, frowning up at him. “Shadwell’s always said I am worthless.”

“Not on the marriage mart, you’re not,” Banning told her. “Now if we’ve cried friends, perhaps you could find a way to ferret out some food for me and my reluctant entourage before we all fade away, leaving you here alone to face Shadwell’s wrath on Friday when he discovers his dirt bath already occupied.”

“Oh Christ!” Prudence exclaimed, proving yet again that it would take more than a bit of silk and lace to make her close to presentable. “Bugger me if I didn’t forget that. We’ll have to clear out before Friday, won’t we?”

As they reached the bottom of the staircase, Prudence took her guardian’s hand, dragging him toward the kitchen and, he was soon to find out, her secret cache of country ham. “I suppose we could still leave tomorrow, if you find some way to bring Lightning with us.”

“Lightning being Molly’s foal,” Banning said, wondering if he had been born brilliant or had just grown into it. “I supposed it could be managed. My, my, how plans can change in a twinkling. I imagine I shall simply have to endure Rexford’s grateful weeping as we make our way back to London.”

THERE WERE ONLY A FEW things Banning wished to do before he departed for London, chief among them taking a torch to the bed he had tossed and turned in all night, unable to find a spot that did not possess a lump with a talent for digging into his back, but he decided to limit himself to indulging in only one small bit of personally satisfying revenge. He would inform MacAfee that his money supply had been turned off.

Dressed with care by a grumbling but always punctilious Rexford, and with his stomach pleasantly full thanks to Prudence’s offer to share a breakfast of fresh eggs and more country ham out of sight of her grandfather, the marquess took up his cane and set out to locate one Shadwell MacAfee.

Resisting the notion that all he would have to do was to “follow his nose,” Banning inquired his employer’s whereabouts of Hatcher, who was lounging against one peeled-paint post on the porch of the manor house, then set out in the direction the servant had indicated.

He discovered Shadwell sitting cross-legged beneath a tree some thirty yards behind the stable, his lower body draped by a yellowed sheet, his hairless upper body—a mass of folded layers of fat that convinced Banning he would never look at suet pudding in the same way again—exposed to the air. His eyes were closed as he held three oak leaves between his folded-in-prayer hands, and he was mumbling something that, in Banning’s opinion, was most thankfully unintelligible.

“A jewel stuck in your navel might add to the cachet of this little scene, although I doubt you’d spring for the expense, eh Shadwell?” Banning quipped, causing MacAfee to open his black-currant eyes.

“Come to say goodbye, have you, Daventry?” MacAfee asked, beginning to fan himself with the oak leaves. “But not before you poke fun at me, like the rest of them. I’ll outlive them all—you too. Have myself the last laugh. You’ll see. Purification is the answer, the only answer. Dirt baths, meditation, weekly purges. That’s the ticket! I’ll die all right, but not for years and years. And I’ll be rich as Golden Ball while I’m at it. Have everything I own in banks and with the four percenters. Yes, yes. It’ll be me who laughs in the end.”

Banning raised his cane, resting its length on his shoulder. “Dear me, yes, I can see how gratified you are. And all it cost you was the life of your grandson and the affection of your granddaughter. Henry went to war and to his death, to escape you, and Prudence can’t wait to see the back of you as she leaves this place. You’ve a fine legacy, MacAfee. I can see why you must be proud. And what a comfort all that money will be to you in your old age. Or are you planning to have your coffin lined with it?”

“Henry was a wastrel and a dreamer, like his father before him, and gels ain’t worth hen spit on a farm,” MacAfee stated calmly, moving from side to side, readjusting his layers of fat. “This land is no good anymore, Daventry, any fool can see that, even you. And a house is nothing more than a house. It is a man’s body that is his main domicile, his castle. Why, in the teachings of—”

“She’s been allowed to run wild,” Banning interrupted, not wishing to hear a treatise on dirt baths or purgatives. “She’s grown up no more than a hoyden, although at least your wife was with her long enough to give her something of a vocabulary and a sense of what is proper, for which I am grateful—even if the girl delights in her attempts to shock me. She’s lonely, bitter, mildly profane, purposely and most outrageously uncouth—and I lay the blame for all of it at your doorstep, Shadwell.”