The Passion of an Angel

“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.

“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.