Praise for USA TODAY bestselling author
KASEY MICHAELS

“[A] hilarious spoof of society wedding rituals wrapped around a sensual romance filled with crackling dialogue reminiscent of The Philadelphia Story.”

—Booklist on Everything’s Coming Up Rosie

“A cheerful, lighthearted read.”

—Publishers Weekly on Everything’s Coming Up Rosie

“Michaels continues to entertain readers with the verve of her appealing characters and their exciting predicaments.”

—Booklist on Beware of Virtuous Women

“Lively dialogue and characters make the plot’s suspense and pathos resonate.”

—Publishers Weekly on Beware of Virtuous Women

“A must-read for fans of historical romance and all who appreciate Michaels’ witty and sensuous style.”

—Booklist on The Dangerous Debutante

“Michaels is in her element in her latest historical romance, a tale filled with mystery, sexual tension, and steamy encounters, making this a gem from a true master of the genre.”

—Booklist on A Gentleman by Any Other Name

“Michaels can write everything from a lighthearted romp to a far more serious-themed romance. [Kasey] Michaels has outdone herself.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews, Top Pick, on A Gentleman by Any Other Name

“Nonstop action from start to finish! It seems that author Kasey Michaels does nothing halfway.”

—Huntress Reviews on A Gentleman by Any Other Name

“Michaels has done it again…. Witty dialogue peppers a plot full of delectable details exposing the foibles and follies of the age.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review, on The Butler Did It

“Michaels demonstrates her flair for creating likable protagonists who possess chemistry, charm and a penchant for getting into trouble. In addition, her dialogue and descriptions are full of humor.”

—Publishers Weekly on This Must Be Love

“Kasey Michaels aims for the heart and never misses.”

—New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts—New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts

Kasey Michaels
The Passion of an Angel

The Passion of an Angel

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: COVENANT

BOOK ONE:COMMITMENT

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

BOOK TWO:COMPROMISE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

BOOK THREE:COMMUNION

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

EPILOGUE: HEAVEN-SENT

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

COVENANT

There was a sound of revelry by night,

And Belgium’s capital had gather’d then

Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright

The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men.

A thousand hearts beat happily; and when

Music arose with its voluptuous swell,

Soft eyes look’d love to eyes which spake again,

And all went merry as a marriage bell.

But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes

like a rising knell!

George Noel Gordon,

Lord Byron

Never promise more than you can perform.

Publilius Syrus

“LOOK AT THAT ONE, WOULD YOU, Daventry? Think she’s ripe for the plucking? Ready to lie down in the soft grass outside and give comfort and solace to a soldier about to face the French horde? Or am I totally bosky, and seeing willing beauty in anything in skirts?”

Banning Talbot, Marquess of Daventry, who was more than two parts drunk himself, leaned forward to look in the direction of Colonel Henry MacAfee’s rudely pointing finger. “Harriet Mercer? God’s teeth, man, make your move. Steal a kiss, or more, with my blessings.” Even as he spoke, Miss Mercer could be seen deserting the dance with her red-coated escort, the two of them making for the doorway, and the darkened garden beyond. “Whoops! Yoicks, and away! Pick another one, old man. Lord knows this great barn of a place is packed to the rafters with willing females.”

MacAfee settled his shoulder against the pillar the two men were sharing, having strategically propped themselves alongside the dance floor more than an hour earlier, within good ogling distance of the young ladies going down the dance, and directly in the path the servants had to traverse between the pouring of drinks and the serving of those same libations to Lady Richmond’s thirsty guests. The choice had been a sterling one, as there had been no dearth of either shapely ankles or chilled wine glasses orbiting their small outpost in the midst of what appeared to be a grand celebration of idiots.

Daventry drained his glass, deftly depositing it on a passing tray and scooping up a full one all in one fluid motion. “You know something, MacAfee,” he commented to his friend—if their casual acquaintance of the past three days, combined with their bond of doing their best to drink themselves under the table together, could be considered a basis for friendship, “I’ve been thinking.”

“Never a good thing, thinking,” MacAfee said, sighing in a sorrowful way. “Try not to do it myself. Not with Boney running riot just outside our doors.”

The Marquess smiled, running a hand through the thick, startling silver-on-black mane of hair that looked so out of place above his sparkling green eyes and youthful, unlined face. “But that’s who I’ve been thinking of, MacAfee. Boney. I believe I’ve just now stumbled upon a way to defeat him. We’ll just gather up this lot of sots here, our beloved Iron Duke included, and collectively breathe on the man. Brandy. Port. Wine. Canary. Why, the fumes will be enough to evaporate the man and his entire Old Guard!”

Colonel MacAfee giggled into his wineglass, an action that caused him to inhale a bit of its contents, then snort them out his nose, a trick Daventry considered top-drawer, which only proved he was perhaps a bit too well-to-go for his own good.

Not that he didn’t have good reason to be seeking solace in the bottom of a glass. There was a battle coming, and coming soon. A possible apocalypse, if the rumors running rampant through the ranks were to be believed, with the evil Bonaparte being sent down to ignominious defeat at the hands of the Duke of Wellington, Blücher, and the rest of the allies.

And it would be Wellington, Blücher, and the allies who would take all the credit, garner all the glory, while the foot soldiers, the cavalry, and the junior officers did all the fighting, all the dying. Daventry was heartily sick of war, weary of the bloodshed, the screams, the sacrifice of individual lives in the name of the common good.

If only Bonaparte had been kept on his island. Had it been so bloody difficult to act the jailer to one defeated emperor? Apparently so, or else the man would still be penning wildly abridged histories in his journal rather than mounting an army and marching, even now, on a hastily assembled resistance and its hangers-on of society misses and brainless fops who believed the proper preparation for battle was a whacking good full-dress ball.

“Petticoat alert!” MacAfee exclaimed, nudging Daventry in the ribs as he inclined his head toward a blonde vision just coming down the dance with the Duke of Brunswick. “Hold me back, good milor’. I feel an imminent seduction coming over me.”

The Marquess felt the skin over his cheekbones tightening as he resisted the urge to dash the contents of his glass in the colonel’s leering face, for MacAfee had inadvertently reminded Daventry of the other reason he was finding the wine so irresistible tonight. “The young lady is Miss Althea Broughton, and you will kindly remove your lascivious gaze from her person,” he warned in crushing accents, painfully aware that the word “lascivious” had damn near knotted his tongue. “She is spoken for.”

“But not by you, I’ll wager,” MacAfee said, affably transferring his good-natured leer to a rather lackluster little pudding of a debutante who giggled, then attempted a reproving frown, and lastly blushed to the roots of her tightly curled hair. “Do I sense a story? And more to the point, is it a depressing story? Don’t think I want to hear it if it’s going to bring me down. Low enough, thank you, what with worrying about m’sister.”

“There’s no story, MacAfee,” the marquess said, bowing with exaggerated stiffness as Miss Broughton looked in his direction, then moved on. The beauteous Miss Broughton. The one great love of his life, Miss Broughton. The woman who had two years previously turned his proposal of marriage down flat, Miss Broughton. The woman betrothed these last nine months to a peer so wealthy it took two straining valets to heft his purse into his pocket, Miss Althea Broughton. “And why are you worrying about your sister?” he asked, eager to change the subject, when if the truth were told he couldn’t have cared a fig if MacAfee’s unknown sister was locked in a tower and besieged by fire-breathing dragons.

“Prudence?”

Daventry, who had been watching Miss Broughton’s progress out of the corner of his eye, swiveled his head to the left and repeated, aghast, “Prudence? Would that be a name or an affliction?”

Henry MacAfee grinned—he had a really pleasant grin, actually—and shook his head. “Ghastly name, ain’t it? But she’s the light of my life, Daventry. My Pru. My Angel.” His smile faded abruptly and he took another long drink of his wine. “Poor, innocent baby. It’s criminal how she is forced to live, Daventry. Criminal!”

“I’m sure,” the marquess agreed absently, for his attention was now on the Duke of Wellington, who seemed to be deep in conversation with a subaltern who had just entered the ballroom at a near run, holding his sword as it threatened to swing wide from his waist, which would most certainly have caused the nearby dancers to invent a few new steps to the country dance in progress.

“It’s true, my friend. You have no idea, none at all,” MacAfee continued as a wave of whispers washed across the ballroom. “We’re orphans, you know, and forced to live on the charity of our grandfather, Shadwell MacAfee—and the damndest pinch-penny ever hatched. Not that he’s my guardian, or Pru’s either, now that I’ve reached my majority. Are you listening to me, Daventry? Devil a bit, what’s going on?”

Daventry held up a hand, silencing the colonel. “Listen! Do you hear it? By God, I think the drums are beating to arms! Blücher must have failed!”

MacAfee threw down his glass, which shattered into a thousand pieces at his feet. “No! Not yet! I haven’t come this far just to—Daventry. Daventry!” he repeated, grabbing hold of the marquess’s arm. “Listen to me! If you’re right, if we’re to fight tomorrow, you have to promise me something tonight.”

Daventry watched as the circle of uniforms around Wellington deepened and a few of the ladies, those closest to the Duke, cried out in alarm, two of them swooning into nearby arms. “Not now, MacAfee,” he warned, shaking off the man’s hand as he willed himself back to sobriety. “We have to get to the Place Royale, remember? That’s where all the men have been warned to assemble at the first word of Bonaparte’s march.”

“I said, not yet!” MacAfee nearly shouted, so that Daventry turned to look at the man more closely, seeing the nearly feverish sparkle in the man’s eyes, the ashen gray of his cheeks.

“What is it?” the marquess asked, wondering if the younger man was going to be sick, or break out in tears. After all, he barely knew the fellow. He had laughed with him these past few days, drunk with him, but he didn’t know him. Not really. “Come on, man, you’ve seen battle before this. Think of your men.”

MacAfee shook his head. “I can’t help it, Daventry,” he said, lifting a shaking hand to his forehead. “And I’m not a coward, I swear it. But I have had a dream, a premonition if you will. I’m going to die in this battle, my lord. I have already seen my death.”

“You’ve seen the bottom of too many wineglasses, you mean,” Daventry chided, trying to raise the man’s mood while the musicians attempted to strike up another tune even as the ballroom turned from a small island of enjoyment to a morass of confusion and high emotions. “We’re all afraid.”

“No, no. This is more than fear,” MacAfee said fiercely, reaching into his uniform jacket and extracting a folded paper. “I’m going to die. I’ve even accepted it, save that I didn’t get to bed any of these willing creatures tonight. My only regret is my sister, my little Angel. Leaving a sweet child like her alone with our grandfather? How can I do that and die in peace? And so I have come up with a solution.”

Daventry eyed the unfolded paper with a wary eye. “I’m beginning not to like this, Colonel,” he said quietly, knowing he was honor-bound to listen to the man. That would teach him to drink with near strangers!

“I’ve been watching you these past weeks, Daventry,” MacAfee continued in a rush. “You’re a responsible sort, if a bit stiff—at least until tonight. Make a tolerably pleasant drunk you do, too, not that I haven’t had to help you along a bit, tipping the servants to be sure your glass stayed full as I dangled Miss Broughton under your lovelorn nose. You’ll be a perfect guardian for my Angel. Take the sweet little love under your wing, so to speak. See that she’s financially freed of Shadwell, given a season years from now, when the time is right—all that drivel that’s so important to a female. And she won’t give you a moment’s trouble, I swear it.”

If Daventry hadn’t been sobered by the prospect of the coming battle, MacAfee’s words served to push away the last of the wine-induced fog that blurred his senses. “Allow me a moment to reflect, if you will, MacAfee? You have investigated me these past weeks? You have deliberately sought me out in the last few days, ingratiated yourself to me—and all so that I might take your young sister as my ward if something were to happen to you? And that paper you’re holding? That would be some sort of legal transference of guardianship?”

“Already signed by the Iron Duke himself,” the colonel said, his grin now appearing much more calculating than friendly. “Old Arthur seemed very affected by my concern for my dear little Angel. He also said that you’re the best of men, and plump enough in the pocket since that rich-as-Croesus aunt of yours stuck her spoon in the wall, so that you could take on a half-dozen wards without putting even a small dent in your fortune.”

“I could kill you for this, MacAfee,” Daventry drawled as he took the paper and read it, “except that any such personally satisfying action would definitely saddle me with your unfortunate sibling. And if I don’t agree to sign, I’d be sending a distraught man into battle, wouldn’t I—or at least that’s what Wellington will believe. You’re a singularly vile, clever bastard, Colonel, and I believe I detest you almost as much as I do myself for having fallen prey to your scheme. What’s your sister’s name again? Patience?”

“Prudence,” MacAfee corrected him as he nearly succeeded in pushing Daventry into hysterical laughter by extracting both a pen and a small ink pot from his pocket. “My little Angel. You’ll adore the little mite, truly. And as I said, she won’t give you a moment’s worry. Sweet, biddable, amenable—trust me in this, a true Angel. Just make sure she has an allowance to keep her fed until she’s grown, that’s all I ask. You don’t even have to see her until she’s ready for her season. Just leave her in Sussex for now. Honestly! Then,” he added, pushing the quill at the marquess, “I can die in peace, having served king and country with the last drop of my soldier blood.”

“Oh, cut line, you shameless bastard. And don’t worry your head about dying, MacAfee,” the marquess said, using the colonel’s back as a makeshift desk as he scribbled his name and title at the bottom of the paper. “I don’t intend to let you out of my sight until the battle is over—at which point I shall personally blacken both your eyes and rid you of several of those lying, conniving teeth!”

BOOK ONE
COMMITMENT

Tis true, your budding Miss is very charming,

But shy and awkward at first coming out,

So much alarm’d, that she is quite alarming,

All Giggle, Blush; half Pertness and half Pout;

And glancing at Mamma, for fear there’s harm in

What you, she, it, or they, may be about,

The nursery still leaps out in all they utter—

Besides, they always smell of bread and butter.

George Noel Gordon,

Lord Byron

CHAPTER ONE

Might shake the saintship of an anchorite.

George Noel Gordon,

Lord Byron

“PRUDENCE MACAFEE, Prudence MacAfee,” the Marquess of Daventry grumbled beneath his breath as he reined his mount to a halt on the crest of a small hill that overlooked the MacAfee farm. “Was there ever a more prudish, miss-ish name, or a more reluctant guardian?”

He lifted his curly brimmed beaver to swipe at the sweat caused by the noon heat of this early April day, exposing his silvered black hair to the sun, then turned in the saddle to squint back down the roadway. His traveling coach, containing both his valet, Rexford, and his sister’s borrowed companion, the redoubtable Miss Honoria Prentice, was still not in sight, and he debated whether he should await their arrival or proceed on his own.

Not that either person would be of much use to him. Rexford was an old woman at thirty, too concerned with the condition of his lily-white rump as it was bounced over the spring-rain rutted roads to be a supporting prop to his reluctant-guardian employer. And Miss Prentice, whose pinched-lips countenance could send a delicate child like Prudence MacAfee into a spasm, was probably best not seen until arrangements to transport the young female to London had been settled.

Damn Henry MacAfee for being right! And damn him for so blatantly maneuvering his only-cursory friend into this ridiculous guardianship! He’d heard of the colonel’s bravery in battle, up until nearly the end, when his second horse had been shot out from under him and he had disappeared. If Daventry could have found Henry MacAfee’s body among the heaps of nameless, faceless dead, he would have slapped the man back to life if that were possible. Anything to be shed of this unwanted responsibility.

What was he, Banning Talbot, four and thirty years of age and struggling with this bachelorhood, going to do with an innocent young female? He had asked precisely that question of his sister, Frederica, who had nearly choked on her sherry before imploring her brother to never, ever repeat any such volatile, provocative question in public.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t already lived up to his commitment. Having been wounded himself at Waterloo, which delayed his return to London only in time to discover that Frederica, his only relative, was gravely ill, the marquess had still met with his solicitor to arrange for a generous allowance to be paid quarterly to one Miss Prudence MacAfee of MacAfee Farm. Contrary to what Henry MacAfee had said, he knew he should at least visit the child, but he buried that thought as he concentrated on taking care of his sister.

He had directed his solicitor to explain the impossibility of Daventry’s presence at the Sussex holding for some time, and had then dragged out that time, beyond his own recovery, beyond any hint of danger remaining in his sister’s condition. Past the Christmas holidays, and beyond.

He would still be in London, enjoying his first full season in two years, if it weren’t that Frederica, who had always been able to draw her older brother firmly round her thumb, had put forth the notion that she would “above all things” adore having a young female in the house whom she could “educate in the ways of society and pamper and dress in pretty clothes.”

Why, Frederica would even pop the girl off, when the time came to put up the child’s hair and push her out into the marriage mart. Her brother, Frederica had promised, would have to do nothing more than host a single ball, present his ward at court, and, of course, foot the bills which “will probably be prodigious, dearest Banning, for I do so adore fripperies.”

It all seemed most logical and personally untaxing, but Daventry still was the one left to beg Grandfather MacAfee to release his granddaughter, and he was the one who would have to face this young girl and explain why he had left this “rescue” of her so late if the grandfather was really the dead loss Henry MacAfee had described to him. But the colonel had said an allowance would be enough to get on with, so the marquess had chosen to ignore his real responsibility—until now.

Daventry jammed his hat back down onto his head, cursed a single time, and urged his mount forward and down the winding path to the run-down looking holding, wondering why he could not quite fight the feeling that he was riding into the jaws of, if not death, great personal danger.

No one came out into the stable yard after he had passed through the broken gate, or even after he had dismounted, leading his horse to a nearby water trough, giving himself time to look more closely at his surroundings, which were depressing as the tepid lemonade at Almack’s.

Daventry already knew that Henry, born of good lineage, had not been all that deep in the pocket, but he had envisioned a small country holding: neat, clean, and genteelly shabby. This place, however, was a shambles, a mess, a totally inappropriate place for any gentle young soul who could earn the affectionate name of “Angel.”

Beginning to feel better about his enforced good deed—rather like a heavenly benefactor about to do a favor for a grateful cherubim—the marquess raised a hand to his mouth and called out, “Hello! Anybody about?”

Several moments later he saw a head pop out from behind the stable door—a door that hung by only two of its three great hinges. The head, that of a remarkable dirty-looking urchin, was rapidly followed by the remainder of a fairly shapeless body clad in what looked to be bloody rags. As a matter of fact, the urchin’s arms were bloodred to the elbows, as if he had been interrupted in the midst of slaughtering a hog.

“I suppose I should be grateful to learn this place is not deserted. I am Daventry,” Banning Talbot said, wondering why he was bothering to introduce himself.

“Daventry, huh?” the youth repeated flatly, and obviously not impressed. “And you’re jolly pleased to be him, no doubt. Now get shed of that fancy jacket, roll up your sleeves, and follow me. Unless you’d rather stand put there, posing in the dirt, while Molly dies?”

The first shock to hit Banning was the bitingly superior tone of the urchin’s voice. The next was its pitch—which was obviously female. Lastly, he was startled to hear the anguished cry of an animal in pain.

He knew in an instant exactly what was afoot.

Leaving sorting out the identity of the rude, inappropriately clad female to later—and while lifting a silent prayer that she couldn’t possibly be who he was beginning to believe she might be, or as old as she looked to be—the marquess stripped off his riding jacket, throwing it over his saddle. “What is it—a breech?” he asked as he tossed his hat away, rolled up his sleeves, and began trotting toward the stable door.

Banning bred horses at Daventry Court, his seat near Leamington, and had long been a hands-on owner, raising the animals as much for his love of them as for any profit involved. The sound of the mare in pain was enough to turn a figurative knife in his gut.

“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.

“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.”

“She’s one thing more, Daventry,” MacAfee said, smiling his near-toothless grin. “She’s yours. Now, go away. Hatcher will be arriving shortly with my purgative. I prefer to evacuate any lower intestinal poisons out of doors, you understand.”

Longing to beat the man heavily about the head and shoulders, but adverse to touching him even with his cane, Banning turned on his heel to go, saying only, “I hope you’ve had joy of Prudence’s allowance, for you’ll not see another groat from me.”

“And that’s where you’re wrong, my boy. I will see it every quarter, like clockwork, if you hope for Prudence to inherit any of my considerable wealth,” MacAfee warned, causing Banning to halt in his tracks. “Ah, that stung, didn’t it, Daventry? So upright. So honest. So much the responsible guardian. But you hadn’t thought of that, had you? All that lovely money. It’s up to you now. I’m to cock up my toes someday, as we all must, and worthless little Prudence is now my only heir. Do I leave my lovely blunt, my security, to the chit, or do I give it all over to the Study for Purgative Restoration?”

His grin widened to disgusting dimensions. “What to do, Daventry, what to do?”

“I’ll want your solemn word as a gentleman,” Banning said, hating himself for bowing to the man’s demands but unable to cut Prudence off from funds that rightfully should be hers. “Now, this morning, before I take my leave of this hellhole.”

“Of course, Daventry. You have it,” MacAfee said soothingly as Hatcher appeared, carrying a large jug of some vile-smelling elixir and a single glass. “A small quarterly pittance now against a fortune in the future. It seems fair. Care for a sip? ’Course, I’d recommend unbuttoning your breeches first, as it works quickly.”

Unable to resist impulse any longer, Banning snatched the pitcher from the servant’s hand and dumped its contents over MacAfee’s plucked pate.

Three hours later, her pitifully small satchel of personal belongings tucked up with the luggage, Prudence, wearing her best pair of breeches, climbed into Banning’s traveling coach behind a pinch-lipped Miss Prentice, without so much as turning about for one last look at her childhood home.

CHAPTER FOUR

Ah! happy years!

Once more who would not be a boy?

George Noel Gordon,

Lord Byron

PRUDENCE HEARD THE KNOCK on her door, but ignored it, as she had a half hour earlier; just as she was prepared to ignore it for the remainder of the day.

How could anyone ask her to rise when she was so bloody comfortable? She could not recall ever feeling so clean, or lying against sheets so soft and sweet smelling. How long had it been since she had listened to a gentle rain hitting the windowpane without worrying that the roof might this time cave in on her? At least not since she had been a very young girl.

There was a small fire still burning in the grate across the room, her appetite was still comfortably soothed by the roast beef and pudding she had downed last night when first they had arrived at the inn, and if she felt a niggling urge to avail herself of the chamber pot, well, that could wait as well.

Giving out a soft, satisfied moan, she turned her face more firmly into the pillows and settled down for at least another hour’s sleep, a small smile curving her lips as her naked body sank deeper into the soft mattress….

“Rise and shine, slugabed! The sun’s shining, the air smells fresh as last night’s rain, and I’m in the mood for a picnic. It’s either that or I’ll have to hide out in the common room, away from Rexford’s incessant groaning now that I’ve told him we don’t travel again until tomorrow.”

Prudence sat bolt upright in the bed, clutching the sheets to her breasts, her eyes wide, her ears ringing from the slam of the door against the wall inside her room. “Daventry!” she exclaimed, pushing her badly tangled hair from her eyes and glaring impotently at the idiot who dared barge in on her just as if he were her brother Henry, come to tease her into a morning of adventure. “Are you daft, man? Go away!”

Banning turned around—not before taking just a smidgen more than a cursory peek at her bare back and shoulders, she noticed—and said, a chuckle evident in his voice, “Sleep in the buff, do you? Is this a natural inclination, or wouldn’t Shadwell spring for night rails, either? I suppose I should be grateful you have boots.”

“You’re a pig, Daventry,” Prudence spat out, tugging at the bedspread, pulling its length up and over the sheets in order to drape it around her shoulders. “And consider yourself fortunate I didn’t sleep with my pistol under my pillow, or you’d be spilling your claret all over the carpet now rather than making jokes at my expense.” And then her anger flew away as she leaned forward slightly, asking, “Did you say something about a picnic?”

Still with his back to her, he nodded, saying, “As long as we’re forced to make our progress to London in stages, taking time to find you some proper clothes and allowing Lightning to gather strength, I thought it might be amusing to indulge in a small round of local sight-seeing. I haven’t picnicked since I was little more than a boy, but for some reason I awoke this morning with the nearly irresistible urge to indulge in some simple, bucolic pleasures. However, if you’d rather play the layabout…”

“Give me ten minutes!” Prudence exclaimed, her feet already touching the floor as, the bedspread still around her, she lunged for her breeches. “I’ll meet you downstairs, and we can be off.”

“Agreed,” Banning said, heading for the door. “Only remember to tie back your hair and wear that atrocious straw hat you insisted upon bringing with you, or otherwise we’ll be forced to drag Miss Prentice along as chaperone, a prospect that leaves me unmoved. Dressed as a boy, you and I can tramp the countryside quite unencumbered, perhaps even dabble our bare feet in some cool stream while we lie on our backs and search out faces in the clouds. There will be time enough tomorrow to begin your metamorphosis.”

“There are moments I really could like that man,” Prudence told herself as she searched in her small valise for fresh underclothes. “Of course, he is still arrogant and overbearing, deucedly bossy, and takes this guardian business entirely too seriously,” she added, remembering that he had all but broken into her bedchamber. “Oh well, Angel. Think of it this way. It won’t be for all that long, and he has promised to buy you some gowns.”

“ACCORDING TO THE guidebook, and I dare to quote,” Banning told Prudence in a comically pompous tone some two hours later as she perched on a low pile of rubble, contemplating the ruin before her, “‘Cowdray House was erected in approximately 1530 by the Earl of Southampton.’”

“The earl wasn’t much of a housekeeper, was he?” Prudence asked facetiously as she pulled a length of sweet grass from between her teeth, looking up at the roofless structure, half its walls tumbled down, its windowpanes gone, the stone turrets that remained blackened and thick with moss.

They had already visited a stream and wriggled their toes in the water, had discovered a chariot and two white horses in a cloud formation, and she was feeling very much in charity with the world, and with the man who stood close by, reading to her from the guidebook he’d purchased at the inn. “Makes MacAfee Farm, although worlds smaller, seem almost comfortable.”

“Hush, Angel.” Banning scolded in his best imitation of a schoolmaster. “This is vastly educational and adds a modicum of moral tone to our outing. Let’s see, where was I? Oh yes, with the Earl of Southampton. Oh dear. It seems he left the picture in time for one Lord Montagu to take up residence. Lord Montagu? Isn’t he the fellow who drowned somewhere in Germany? Yes, yes, here it is. Montagu drowned only a week after Chowdray House mysteriously burned down in 1793. And all because of an ancient curse.”

“Rotten run of luck, I’d say,” Prudence put in, for she was not one to believe in curses, ancient or otherwise. “Go on, please. Are there ghosties and ghoulies here as well? Should I be making signs against the evil eye, or can we just spread out that blanket now and have our picnic? My belly’s thinking my throat’s been sliced.”

“Gowns, shoes, discovering a lotion that will remove the stain of manure from your fingernails, some ribbons for your hair—and intense lessons in speech and deportment,” Banning said pleasantly, sitting down beside her. “Freddie will certainly be able to keep herself busy. I can’t decide if I am the best or worst of brothers to have discovered for her such a challenging project.”

“Oh stubble it, Daventry,” Prudence groused good-humoredly, then hopped down from her perch, as the marquess was suddenly entirely too close for her comfort. Why couldn’t she keep thinking of him as her guardian, instead of seeing him as a man? “Tell me more about the curse while I unpack the basket.”

She kept her back to him while she worked, painfully aware of his proximity, and the fact that the two of them were distinctly isolated here among the ruins.

What was the matter with her? She couldn’t care less about the man, who was older than God, even if his face gave the lie to his silvered hair. Perhaps he dyed it? No. That was a ridiculous notion. Who would purposely dye more than half their hair a bright, glistening white, leaving the back of it still deeply black, with only a few silver threads layering the top of it, like sweet cream icing dribbling down over the sides of a dark plum pudding?

And would he stop staring at her? She could feel his eyes boring into her back, so that she deliberately sat down on her haunches, aware for the first time that her breeches fit her nearly like a second skin.

“Daventry?” she prompted when the only sound she could hear was the buzzing of some nearby bees. “If you’re still reading, your lips have stopped moving. You were going to tell me more about the curse.”

“Hum? Oh! Oh yes. The curse. Well, it says here that the curse was put upon the family by a monk.”

Prudence swiveled around to look up at him, her hands deep in the basket as she went about unearthing the roasted chicken the marquess had promised her she would find there. “That doesn’t seem very Christian.”

“Neither does Henry VIII’s edict dissolving the monasteries, but that’s what it says here. It seems the monk, who was driven out of Battle Abbey, was ejected quite personally by the first owner of Cowdray House. Obviously the monk wasn’t about to simply forgive the man and turn the other cheek. It took a few centuries, but the curse finally worked.”

“Well, I think that’s stupid,” Prudence declared, un-daintily but effectively ripping the legs off the roasted chicken and placing one on each of the two plates she had spread on the blanket. “More than two hundred years passed between the laying on of the curse and the destruction of this place. That would be the same as blaming the discovery of the American continent for the war that eventually severed the colonists’ ties with England.”

“Logic, from an infant. Angel, I am impressed.” Daventry came to join her on the blanket, kneeling beside her—too close beside her, for she could once again smell the cologne he wore, its scent tickling her nose and doing something extraordinarily strange to her insides.

“Have a chicken leg,” she ordered, picking up his plate and nearly jamming it against his nose. Damn her short-sighted brother! Didn’t he know he’d picked her a rutting old man for a guardian? And how could he have forgotten that she was no longer a child, but a woman, a woman who had seen precious little of handsome, charming men? Why couldn’t her brother have given her over to Wellington or some sympathetic peeress? But no. He had to pick the Marquess of Daventry. A worldly, witty, at times bitingly sarcastic, yards too self-assured man with entirely too-intriguing green eyes and a boyish smile that turned her knees to water…

First he shows up almost nine months too late to be of any help at all, and now he makes noises like he can barely abide me half the time, while he is not only being nice to me but is also near to drooling over me the other half of the time. Let him buy me gowns? Oh yes. But first I want a night rail—one that covers my toes and buttons all the way to my ears!

“Shall I continue to read as we eat?” Banning asked, removing himself and his plate to the far side of the blanket, his expression telling her that he was questioning why he had knelt down beside her in the first place. “I could tell you about the sadly mutilated carving of the arms of King Henry—who actually visited on this spot in 1538—that is still visible above the entrance arch of the hall porch. Or perhaps we could do as is advised on this page, and stroll down to Benbow Pond after our meal—there, to the east, along that footpath—and indulge in partaking of the delightful views visible across the valley of the Rother.”

“I’d rother not, thank you,” Prudence told him cheekily, pleased to see that he, too, was disconcerted by the events of the past few minutes—if she wasn’t totally overreacting to what she believed to be his very unguardian-like behavior. “I’d much prefer to sit here and listen to you tell me how long it will be before we reach London. Lightning is in no danger now that your man has found a mare to feed him, so I figure on three or four days and nights on the road, as the poor little thing still can’t be confined to the wagon for too many hours a day.”

“That’s about right, three days and two nights. We’ll pass the nights in Milford and Epsom, and arrive at Freddie’s by nightfall of the third day. It will be a slow progress, but we’ll get there eventually.”

“Each mile that takes me farther from MacAfee Farm is cause for rejoicing. Goodness, I’m thirsty!” She was feeling slightly more in control of herself now that the marquess was not so close, but watching him eat, delighting in gnawing at the chicken leg as if he were a schoolboy on holiday, was not making her attempts at general conversation easier.

Banning set down the chicken leg, wiped his greasy fingers on a linen serviette, and reached inside the basket for the bottle of wine she had seen there, nestled beside a small jug of lemonade she supposed he expected her to drink. She watched him struggle to uncork the bottle, then she quickly held out both glasses, daring him to deny her what he was taking for himself.

“You are too young for anything save watered wine,” he said, holding the bottle upright. “Or are you now going to tell me that Shadwell refused to clothe you yet kept you in strong spirits?”

“I drank what was to hand,” Prudence told him, feeling herself growing angry, and thankful for the feeling because it seemed easier to deal with the marquess from the position of adversary. “Ale, wine, port, brandy, even gin. Although I heartily dislike port, and too much ale makes my teeth numb and my nose itch. Still and all, plenty were the times it was safer than the water from the well. Come on, Daventry, pour me a glass. I won’t disgrace you by falling into my cups so that you have to fling me over your shoulder like a sack and haul me back to the inn. Besides, you’ve already broken one rule of guardianship by bringing me out here without a chaperone. What’s a little wine after that?”

Banning tipped his head to one side, his green eyes twinkling in a way that made her wonder if, perhaps, somewhere deep inside himself, he was as young as she. “Very well, Angel, if you promise to breathe most heavily directly in Miss Prentice’s face once we get back to the inn. I believe I’d rather enjoy watching her blanch.”

Prudence held out the glasses again, stubbornly keeping them there until he’d filled both of them to the brim. “Blanch, is it?” she said, giggling. “And how do you suppose we could tell? She’s already as sickly white as the underbelly of a fish. How does your sister abide such a dedicated pain in the rump? I’d had tossed the woman out dog’s years ago if she were mine.”

“You’d have to know my sister to understand. If there ever was a woman who should be called ‘angel,’ it’s Freddie. Rodney, Freddie’s late husband, had employed Miss Prentice as housekeeper before the wedding, and when Rodney died Miss Prentice saw the chance to move herself up a notch, to become Freddie’s companion. She doesn’t like the woman, and never did, but if Rodney chose her, then Freddie doesn’t believe she can get rid of her. My sister is sweet and loving and gentle—but if she were to develop a bit of a backbone, I wouldn’t complain.”

Prudence took a deep, satisfying sip of the still cool wine. “Put some starch in her spine? I’ll take care of it,” she said in all sincerity, believing she should offer something in return for her rescue from Shadwell. “It’s the least I can do, seeing as how your sister offered to take me in. And,” she added, feeling daring, “in return, you can take me to St. Bartholomew’s Fair. My brother says—said it’s magnificent, and would suit me to a cow’s thumb.”

“If you like crowds, the smell of unwashed flesh, gaudy trinkets, fakers, pickpockets, and rancid kidney pies, I suppose it is magnificent,” Banning said before sinking his white teeth into the glistening red flesh of an apple he’d pulled from the basket. “However,” he continued moments later, speaking around a mouthful of the fruit, “as your time is going to be filled with dancing lessons, fittings, morning visits, and the like, I believe we shall both simply have to forgo partaking of this particular delight. As your guardian, although I will not be in your company more than I have to be once I deliver you into Freddie’s hands, I cannot approve. Sorry.”

And with that single statement, Prudence felt all her enjoyment of the morning disappear.

“No, you’re not in the least bit sorry, so don’t lie to me! Leave it to a man to ruin everything—as men always do! Just when you start feeling comfortable, they take themselves off!” Prudence shot back at him, scrambling to her feet and giving the picnic basket a quick kick. She tossed off the remainder of her wine, just daring him to say something cutting about her manners, and ordered him to repack the basket, as she was anxious to get back to see if Lightning was faring well under the coachman’s care.

She had taken no more than three steps when she felt Daventry’s hands come down on her shoulders, halting her where she stood. “Let me go, my lord, before I do you an injury,” she warned, unshed tears stinging her eyes because she had begun to like him, just a little bit, and now he had gone and turned their picnic into yet another disappointment. Couldn’t wait to be shed of her, could he? Well, she was just as eager to see him walk out of her life!

He released her, saying, “In any other young woman, I would consider that to be an idle threat. In your case, however—”

“Oh, cut line!” she shouted, rounding on him, just to have him plop her wide-brimmed straw hat down hard on her head, nearly to her eyes, keeping his hand on top of her skull and her body at arm’s length.

“Can’t take the chance of freckles popping up on that pert nose, now can we?” he said by way of explanation, although she knew he was only saying that because he needed an excuse to keep her at a distance, which was probably a good thing because she would otherwise have sharply lifted her knee into his groin, as her brother had taught her to do after that leering traveling tinker had dared to corner her behind the stables four years ago.

“Why’d you have to ruin things by treating me like your unwanted ward again, instead of continuing on as the friends we were this morning, tramping here from the inn with the picnic basket swinging between us?” she asked him, her emotions a sudden jumble she did not wish to examine. “You gave a little, allowing me some wine, not saying a word when I deliberately ripped the chicken with my fingers, and I gave a little, promising to be a help to your sister. And then you took it all back, reminding me that you are dealing with me only because you have to, because my brother asked you to and you could find no way to wriggle out of your promise.”

Banning turned back to begin repacking the picnic basket. “That’s it, no more wine for the infant,” he said as if to himself. “And to think I’d worried that I’d find some simpering milk-and-water puss when I traveled to MacAfee Farm. Ha! What I would give now for a simple-headed die-away miss, rather than this bundle of contradictions I am saddled with. One moment the hoyden, a born temptress the next—but beneath it all the ragamuffin with the temper of a prodded ox!”

“I did not tempt you to anything!” Prudence corrected him heatedly. “I did not invite you into my bedchamber, you lascivious ogler, nor did I ask you to take me on this picnic, sans chaperone. But I came along with you, believing we could cry friends, putting myself on my excruciatingly best behavior, hoping that you might begin to believe that Henry’s request had not made you the most put-upon, persecuted person on earth. Hah! Fat lot of hope in any of that, is there, Daventry? You’re nothing more than a rutting old dog—as if I’d have you!”

He stopped in the midst of repacking the basket, one hand on the lid as he looked her up and down dismissively. “You wouldn’t know what to do with me,” he said coldly, “just as I haven’t the foggiest notion of what to do with you. Which, my dear Miss MacAfee, is precisely where I do believe we should both leave the matter.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Every man, as the saying is,

can tame a shrew but he that hath her.

Robert Burton

“STAND STILL, MISS MACAFEE. And you are to remember that you are now a young lady and stop swearing at once, if you please.”

“The bloody hell I will, you prune-faced old biddy. You stick me with one more pin and I’ll have your liver on a skewer!”

Banning took a moment to smile as he stood peeking around the slightly ajar door, then entered the room without knocking, feeling it best to intervene before Prudence, looking hot and flustered in a morning gown definitely designed with a much different female in mind, made good on her threat.

“Learning to rub along together fairly well, are you Miss Prentice, Miss MacAfee?” he inquired brightly, unable to hold back a satisfied grin at the sight of his ward in a temper. “How above everything wonderful, truly. I’m convinced of it—you’ll be bosom chums by tomorrow night, when we arrive in Park Lane to meet with my sister. I think this little stop in Epsom was just the ticket, although I can’t say, Miss Prentice, that I’m overfond of our ‘angel’ in that particular shade of pink.”

“It’s downright ugly, isn’t it,” Prudence declared, almost seeming in charity with him for the first time in days as she spread her hands and glared down at the gown Miss Prentice was still trying without notable success to pin more snugly around her left wrist. “All my life, I’ve been dreaming of beautiful gowns, of cutting a dash in society with my stylish wardrobe—and this is what that paperskulled ninny brings me. Pink!”

Banning hid a rather nasty smile as he bent his head and pretended an interest in adjusting his shirt cuffs. He had found, much to his amazement—considering the fact that he believed himself a gentleman—that he truly enjoyed baiting the child.

“I was speaking of your complexion, Miss MacAfee,” he then explained, hoping his expression was sober and very guardian-like, “which has a tendency to go nearly puce with temper, an unfortunately too common occurrence, considering the fact that you fly into the boughs almost hourly. As for the gown Miss Prentice purchased for you on my orders, it is passable enough, I believe.”

“How amusing you are, Daventry,” Prudence retorted, pulling her wrist free of Miss Prentice’s grasping fingers. “I’ll wager you launch yourself into hysterics three or more times a day, just reflecting on your own comic brilliance. Now, if you’re not going to be of any help to me—go away. Find yourself a monkey and a tambourine, and go perform downstairs in the common room, where there are doubtless enough drunken farmers eager to giggle at your cutting wit. I want to get back into my breeches, and I intend to do so in the next ten seconds. That’s ten… nine…eight…”

Miss Prentice walked to a corner of the room, picking up her almost always present glass of water and taking a sip before saying, “Lady Wendover has not sufficiently recovered her strength after her ordeal of last year, my lord, and should not be forced to deal with such an ill-mannered child. I beg that you rethink the matter, then go about discovering a suitable school for at least a year. I personally have heard of such an establishment in the north, somewhere near Edinburgh, I believe. Backboards, firmly administered corporal punishments for insubordination, thrice daily prayers—”

“Oh stubble it, Prentice. You’ve interrupted my counting. Besides, I know very well how a lady behaves—probably better than you, as a matter of fact. My grandmother was very particular that I should understand what it takes to be a lady. I just don’t like you, that’s all, and don’t give a fig what you think of me,” Prudence explained, turning her back on the woman.

“I’m not too taken with you, either, my lord Daventry,” she continued, smiling. “But you don’t have to worry about your sister. I know which side of my bread is buttered, and I’ll be good when I have to be. Now, where was I? Oh yes. Eight. Eight…seven…six…”

Banning inclined his head slightly in her direction. “How you soothe my troubled mind, Miss MacAfee,” he drawled, addressing her formally, as he had since entering the bedchamber here at the Cross and Battle, as he had done since their stormy interlude at the ruin—not that he had seen her above twice since then, as he had secreted himself in the private dining room at the inn just outside Milford and rode ahead of the coach during the day. “Just remember as you count down the numbers, and as you are playing the proper young miss around my sister, that I am the one footing the bill for your coming excursion into London society.”

“Don’t blame me for the promises you made, Daventry. Counting time is over, I fear. Don’t say I didn’t give you fair warning,” Prudence shot back, grinning as she began unbuttoning the unsuitable pink gown, starting with the buttons that seemed to climb halfway up the front of her slim throat. “Oh, look at me! The country bumpkin stripping down in front of the London gentleman. Quickly, Miss Prentice! Scream! Faint!”

“Angel, please,” Banning whispered in warning, unwilling to look away. Unable to look away. Good God! What was wrong with him, that he could not look away? How had he come to be so eager for the sight of a few inches of Prudence MacAfee’s sun-kissed skin, when he had just to walk into any ballroom in Mayfair to see yards and yards of bare, supple, creamy white female shoulders and bosoms.

Three more buttons were pushed free of their moorings, exposing several more inches of flawless, golden skin. “Please, my lord Daventry? Please what? Please stop? Please continue? Better run away, my lord, run away quickly—or else take another look, as your first one the other morning seemed to interest you so much.”

“His—your…your first, my lord?” Miss Prentice asked, her watery blue eyes rounded in question, in anticipated horror. “My lord, I fear I must insist you explain.”

“The bloody hell I will!” Banning exploded and bolted for the door, ushered on his way by the lilting trill of Angel MacAfee’s delighted laughter.

IT WAS DARK IN THE private dining room that adjoined his bedchamber at the Cross and Battle, but the Marquess of Daventry made no move to light more than one of the tapers stuck into the small branch of candles sitting at his elbow on the table.

After all, if he lit the remainder of the candles it would then be possible to see his reflection in the nearby windowpane, and he had seen more than enough of the man he was in the past two hours to wish to look himself in the eye just now.

It was depressing, believing himself to have turned, almost overnight, from a sober, upstanding man of the world, into a lech. A lusting, dirty-minded lech.

Yet here he was, a reasonably intelligent man of nearly five and thirty, reduced to drooling over a green goose of an eighteen-year-old woman-child with the come-hither body of a siren, the all-knowing eyes of a vixen, and the brash language and devil-take-the-hindmost attitude of a young buck first out on the town.

She had no shame, no wiles, no carefully cultivated airs, and no compunction about saying what she thought, doing what she wished, flaunting convention—not because she was being deliberately difficult, but just because she was Angel MacAfee, and Angel MacAfee didn’t give a flying pasty what anyone thought.

Flying pasty! Christ on a crutch, now he was being reduced to thieves’ cant, taken back to his own fairly rackety salad days—corrupted by a female barely old enough to be out of her leading strings!

Ah, what imp of mischief had entered Henry MacAfee’s mind that he would christen his sister with such a misnomer as Angel? Banning knew he would say that she had all the makings of a wanton, baiting him the way she had, except that he also knew she had acted more from anger that he would dare to look at her as a woman than she did from any longing to crawl into the nearest bed with him.

She had dared him with her lush, golden young body, successfully pushed him away by the simple tactic of pretending to draw him closer, made him embarrassed to be a man, ashamed to feel what could only be considered normal male desires, wants, needs.

Not that her daring warning had been necessary. He was certainly not about to do anything about his absurd attraction to her, save for possibly attempting to drown it tonight, and forever.

“Damn her for having seen the last thing I wanted her to see, the last thing I wanted to acknowledge, even to myself,” he grumbled aloud, reaching yet again for the wine bottle he had ordered sent up from the common room. It was his second bottle of the evening, and he might just order a third if this one didn’t do the trick.

Lusting, longing…and now a descent into spirits, a headfirst dive into a bottle. And all because of Angel MacAfee. It was lowering, distinctly lowering, and he filled his glass to the brim, just thinking about it, and ignoring the slight squeak of the door to the hallway as someone, probably Rexford, pushed it open.

“The lizard said you gave up drinking more than the occasional glass of wine ever since you got yourself so bosky you couldn’t think clearly enough to conjure up a way of slipping free of my brother’s request that you be my guardian. As far as I can see, the next time that woman’s right will be the first time, eh, Daventry?”

Banning swallowed the wine all at once, tossing it back as he would have done a stronger spirit, then glared at Prudence, who was still in the doorway, grinning at him across the darkness. “That large wooden contraption you are leaning against is called a door, Miss MacAfee. It is employed by civilized people as a method of ensuring privacy. It is also used to knock on, if a person of manners and breeding desires admittance to that place of privacy. Kindly close it behind you as you leave.”

“Certainly, my lord Grumpus,” Prudence said affably, leaving the door open as she crossed to the table plunking her shirt-and breeches-clad self down in the chair facing his, her forearms resting on the thick oaken arms, her legs splayed out in front of her in the way of a young buck settling in for a night of gaming and drinking. “But seeing as how I’m not planning on going anywhere just yet, maybe you’ll remind me again when I do leave. I’ve got the breeding, or so my brother assured me over and over, but my manners might still need a little work.”

“I suppose this unexpected visit to my private dining room means you no longer believe I have any designs on your virtue?” he asked, thankful his voice sounded light, teasing, and just a little condescending.

“Ah, Daventry,” she cooed, pushing the thick curtain of her hair up and away from her neck as she winked at him. “I’d be a damned fool to think an old man like you capable of even planning a seduction, let alone executing one. I was just trying to get your goat, that’s all, and I wanted to let you know you’d been looking. Guess it worked, huh?”

“You do enjoy baiting people, don’t you?” Banning asked, watching as she leaned forward and poured herself a glass of wine, then crossed her booted ankles in front of her on the table top, tipping her chair back slightly on its hind legs. “Or is it just that you take great pleasure in—you believe—shocking people with your uncouth behavior?”

She looked at him over the brim of her wineglass, then sighed in patently false impatience. “I’ve already demonstrated to you that I have a fine vocabulary, Daventry. I’ve already promised you that I will be a patterncard of all the finest and most stultifyingly boring virtues whenever I am with your sister. In truth,” she added, her smile as wide and innocent as a child’s, “I am by and large a most agreeable, friendly sort of person, really I am. But I’m afraid you probably will have to indulge me as I go about exacting a small spot of revenge aimed at punishing you for leaving me with Shadwell months longer than necessary. You cut it a slice too fine, so that I’ll have to rush myself into the season. Remembering that fact, I’m still fairly angry with you, but it’s a feeling that’s slowly wearing off as we draw closer to London. As to the lizard? Well, she just plain begs to be shocked.”

“All right,” Banning said, raising his glass as if in a toast, “I suppose I can withstand the slings and arrows of your childish tantrums for another day. As long as, in turn, you understand why I barely slow the coach as I deposit you at my sister’s doorstep.”

Prudence’s laugh was full-throated, not the simpering giggle of most society misses, and he found himself joining her in her amusement, feeling better than he had in several hours, several days.

“Just be sure to toss the lizard out first, so I can have the pleasure of landing on her. She wouldn’t be a soft cushion, God knows, but I have developed a nearly overwhelming longing to knock some of the bile out of her. I’m not used to having enemies, you know, and she has threatened to tell your sister that I’m incorrigible and past saving. The interfering bitch,” she ended quietly, taking a deep drink of her wine.

Banning sighed, wondering how he could be sitting here, fairly calmly, sharing the night with Prudence as if she were a young chum of his, listening to her swear, watching her drink, laughing with her. He was rather proud of himself and felt slightly foolish for his earlier thoughts, his earlier fears. It was remarkable. He felt no desire for her now, no longing to kiss her, run his hands along the tightly outlined sweep of her hips, press her body close against his own…molding her…shaping her…taking her…breathing in her fire, her vitality, her lust for life….

He sat forward and poured himself another drink, wondering whether the wine would be of any real benefit to him in merely sliding down his throat as he swallowed the lie he was trying to tell his better self, or if he would be better served to dash the contents of the glass in his slowly heating face, shocking his system back under some semblance of control, of sanity.

“This patterncard of all the finest virtues soon to be delivered on my sister’s doorstep,” he said after a moment’s internal battle, having reminded himself that he really didn’t have a single thing in common with Prudence MacAfee. “Will she likewise treat me with the respect and consideration owed one’s legal guardian? Or should I be watching my shins, on the lookout for childish kicks, whenever my sister isn’t in the room? Not that I’m worried, mind you. I just would appreciate having the rules laid out, so that we both know where we stand.”

Prudence unfolded her long legs and dropped her booted feet hard against the floor, tipping the chair to an upright position once more as she plunked the empty wineglass on the table, all in a single masculine, yet deceptively feminine, graceful moment.

Leaning forward so that she ended with her elbows propped on her knees, close enough now that, just for a moment, Banning thought he could see the devil peeking out from behind her golden eyes, she said, “I really bother you, don’t I, Daventry? You can’t figure out who I am, what I am—or what I want.”

She sat back against the wooden slats of the chair and began counting off on her fingers as she spoke. “Well, let me set your mind at rest. One: who am I? That should be obvious enough. I’m an innocent, hapless, helpless, penniless orphan, a sweet young bud doing her best to bloom in a cold, cruel, uncaring world.”

“I could argue with you on the helpless part of that statement,” Banning said, beginning to relax once more. She was a child. A precocious, faintly amusing child. “As for being sweet, well, I won’t even bother to refute such an obvious crammer. Please, go on.”

She nodded solemnly, her only acknowledgment that he had spoken, then went on, as if doing him a personal favor by speaking, “Two: what am I? Ah, the answer now becomes more involved, more difficult, as you perhaps have already figured out on your own, much to your chagrin. Care to count along with me this time?”

She needs a good spanking, that’s what she needs, Banning decided, finding himself caught up in her brashness, while feeling himself fascinated with her brutal honesty, her bald admonition that she was not in the least ordinary or even acceptable.

When he didn’t answer her facetious questions she shrugged, then held up four fingers, touching them one at a time as she spoke. “I am, my Lord Daventry, the sum total of all my parts. Part child of long-forgotten doting parents, part product of a stern and socially conscious grandmother, part victim of a half-crazed grandfather who values money and his pathetic rituals more than he does his own flesh and blood, and part sister of a devoted but frequently absent, much older brother who loved me enough to see that I’d be taken care of, but not enough to make the effort of taking care of me himself.”

Her regal demeanor evaporated even as he watched, and all at once she looked very young, and very insecure. “And, now, lastly—what do I want? I don’t know, Daventry!” she exclaimed after a moment, grinning brightly again. “Not yet. But when I do, I’ll let you know. All right?” That said, she slapped her palms against the arms of the chair, then stood, obviously ready to leave the room.

Stung by her honesty, and once more feeling sorry for her and the bizarre, almost unnatural life she had led, he called out toward her retreating back: “I convinced your grandfather to make me a solemn promise before we left him to wallow in his purgatives. I agreed to continue paying him the quarterly allowance I’d been sending to you, and he gave his solemn word that he would will you his fortune. You’ll be a rich orphan one day—one day soon, if Shadwell also ambles about in that toga of his in mid-winter.”

His words stopped her just as she got to the door, and she turned to look at him intently, her hand frozen on the tarnished brass door latch.

Compassion hastily shoved to one side and delight at his good deed forgotten, he suddenly realized the full import of what he had accomplished in his gentleman’s agreement with Shadwell MacAfee. No wonder Prudence couldn’t think of a thing to say. He had her now. She was in his debt now, just as he was bound to the promise he had made to be guardian.

They were, finally, on an even footing. His guilt over leaving her in the country, locked away at that hellhole of a farm, and his second, worse guilt—that of coveting her, seeing her as a woman to be desired rather than a responsibility to be discharged—was no more.

It had been just this moment replaced by the sure knowledge that he had rescued her from that hellhole, and was about to launch her into society—into, he hoped, a quick, advantageous marriage with the promise of a fortune as an added fillip to the dowry he would bestow on her.

He had no reason to drink, to chastise himself. The scales he had been seeing in his mind, scales so recently tipped in favor of this comely ragamuffin, had just evened out, balanced by his maturity, his sense of duty, his intelligent, measured approach to what could, if he had let it, have disintegrated into a never-ending battle of wills.

He was, at last, established as her guardian. She was, at last, firmly in the position of grateful ward.

Though perhaps, as Prudence’s next words, dipped in vitriol and delivered in sharp, staccato jabs, those scales were still sadly out of kilter.

“You know, Daventry,” she said, shaking her head, “just when I thought you and I had come to some sort of agreement, just when I thought I could begin to be open with you, explain myself to you, prepare you, you went and proved to me that you have no understanding at all. None. But then, that’s why my brother picked you, isn’t it? You’re just the sort of honest, responsible, upstanding, gullible gentleman who believes in the value of promises, aren’t you? And I hate you for making me feel sorry for you!”

And with that, the enigma, the chameleon that was Angel MacAfee was gone, the door left open behind her, not because she had forgotten to close it, Banning was sure, but because he had asked her to shut it, and she wasn’t about to do anything he asked of her, required of her. Not, at least, without a fight.

Mostly, she wasn’t going to leave his mind. Not when he could close his eyes and still see her as she roused, warm, tousled, and eminently touchable, from her bed.

Not when the memory of the way she had walked toward him, taunting him with her eyes as she slid open the buttons of her gown, still caused his throat to grow dry, proving to him that he was not above lusting after her, even while knowing that she was too young, too innocent, too unsuitable, too alien to the image of the woman he would choose as his wife.

Not when, even with his eyes open and his head reasonably clear, he could still see her sitting in this room, drinking and lounging with the assured nonchalance of an equal, yet never letting him forget that she was an exciting, vibrant, desirable, unconquerable creature of unending contradictions.

Lastly, he would never forget, waking or sleeping, that she was his ward, his sworn responsibility, and therefore totally beyond his reach.

She pitied him. Even as she teased him, deliberately tormented him, she still pitied him, as if she were the adult and he the child. Perhaps she even despised him, believing him to be simple beyond belief in having put credence into Shadwell’s assurances as to the disposition of his wealth.

With the clear eyes of youth, she seemed to see all the vices, lies, and cynicism of the ages, making him the young one, the naive one. Still he wondered to himself why he seemed to lamentably unknowing to her when he was accustomed to believing himself a mature man of the world.

Perhaps she’s right, Banning thought, pushing the cork back into the wine bottle. All right. It didn’t seem that farfetched. Perhaps Shadwell wasn’t going to live up to his side of their agreement. Prudence must know her grandfather better than he did, having lived with him, witnessed his crushing economies in the name of fortune firsthand.

The man was an abomination, a miserable excuse for a human being, consumed by his eccentric rituals and a mad desire to amass wealth at the expense of his estate, his grandchildren, his own creature comforts.

But Shadwell had promised, and Banning knew that he had given his promise in return. And that, in Prudence’s mind, had branded him as an irredeemable fool.

What had she said to him earlier, flinging the words at him? Oh yes. He remembered now. Don’t blame me for the promises you made.

And he had been making a plethora of promises in recent years.

He had promised her brother that he would care for his “angel.”

He had promised his sister he would fetch that same unwanted ward to Mayfair where she could mold her into a simpering, giggling, die-away debutante.

He had promised Shadwell MacAfee a quarterly allowance against the fortune Prudence deserved.

He had promised his father that he would put away the silliness of youth when it came time to take on the family title, and would behave with the circumspection and sobriety befitting that title.

He had promised a multitude of things to people he could neither contact nor refuse.

But the real trick of the thing, the promise he would find most difficult to keep, was the one he made now to himself late on this quiet night in Epsom—his personal vow to stay as removed from the life of Prudence MacAfee as possible. To banish the image of this obstinate, headstrong, willful, profane, smudged-face “angel” from his mind, and—if he was very, very lucky—from even the fringes of his heart….

CHAPTER SIX

I stood

Among them, but not of them; in a shroud

Of thoughts which were not their thoughts.

George Noel Gordon,

Lord Byron

IT WAS JUST COMING ON TO dusk when Daventry’s coach entered the city, Miss Prentice snoring rather loudly in the shadows after being pushed into a corner by Rexford, who had squealed in disgust when the slumbering woman’s angular body had listed in his direction, her wide-brimmed purple bonnet slamming into the bridge of his nose.

Prudence, who had been sitting squarely in the center of the facing seat ever since reentering the coach at the last posting inn—stubbornly refusing to move to one side to allow Miss Prentice to sit beside her as she had done since leaving Epsom that morning—scooted to one of the windows and dropped the leather curtain, eager for her first sight of the metropolis.

“Do not look, Miss MacAfee,” Rexford warned unexpectedly, raising a snow white handkerchief to his nose. “And, whatever you do, do not drop the window. We will be past this unfortunate area shortly, and into more civilized territory.”

Rexford’s warning was all Prudence needed. Where she had been interested in seeing London, she was now avid to take in all its sights and sounds and even its smells. “I have lived with a man who bathes in dirt,” she said, reaching for the latches that would lower the glass. “I doubt that I—oh my God!” She slammed the glass back to its closed position, turning to Rexford to exclaim in disgust, “Do they use the streets for latrines?’

“Among other things,” the valet told her, reaching into his pocket and withdrawing a small bottle of scent. He then pulled out the stopper and handed the perfume to a grateful Prudence, who quickly waved it beneath her nostrils. “As Prentice is a dead loss,” he went on, his rather high-pitched voice holding the tone of an indulgent, wiser adult speaking to a child, “and as Lady Wendover, although a lovely creature, is not known for her mental profundity, I suggest you listen carefully to what I have to say as we near the end of our journey.”

Prudence grinned, for the man had barely opened his mouth all the way from MacAfee Farm, unless it was to bemoan his fate at having been sent into the country in the first place.

“Feeling more the thing now that you’re closer to home, are you, Rexford?” she asked, passing the scent bottle back to him and watching as he dripped some of its contents on his handkerchief then breathed in deeply. “I didn’t think Daventry would keep you if whining and retching were your only fortes. And I must say, I do admire the way you dress his lordship. He is a credit to your art. Please, anything you might say that could be helpful in easing my way into Lady Wendover’s world would be most appreciated by this country bumpkin.”

Rexford inclined his head to her, the ghost of a smile visible behind the handkerchief, and Prudence knew she had made her first conquest. Finally. She had begun to believe she had lost her touch! Not that her brother had said she was all that lovable. It was, according to him, just her wide, golden eyes and “innocent angel” expression that had everyone from dairy maid to Squire tripping all over themselves to help her, to confide in her, to—simply—like her.

“We don’t have much time,” Rexford pointed out, “and I won’t be seeing you on a regular basis, I imagine, but I believe you would be best served by keeping your mouth firmly shut when you are unsure of yourself, restrain the impulse to scratch at any covered areas of your body, imitate Lady Wendover’s manners at table and in the drawing room, and lastly, find some way to get yourself shed of—as I have noticed you have so aptly dubbed her—the lizard.”

“Rexford! How naughty of you!” Prudence exclaimed, liking the valet more with each passing moment. “I am ashamed to admit to not paying attention to you these last days. I now know that it is entirely my loss.”

“Yes, it is,” Rexford said matter-of-factly, slipping his handkerchief back into his pocket. The coach accelerated slightly as it ran over smoother cobbles, hinting that they were leaving both the congestion and rough streets of the poorer district behind them. “But I have been observing you, Miss MacAfee, and I believe you have some promise. Now, listen closely. With your coloring—those strangely pleasing dark golden tones—you are not to wear white. Never. Not at all.”

Prudence was confused as well as fascinated. “But white is the color of debutantes, isn’t it, Rexford? You wouldn’t be trying to coax me into making a cake of myself, would you? That wouldn’t be nice, you know.”

His eloquent shrug was barely perceptible inside the rapidly darkening coach. “There are shades of white, Miss MacAfee. Try for materials with a slight sheen to them for evening, muslins for daytime. You may wear ivory—if it has a golden cast. Ecru. Any shade that has either a golden or beige cast to it—even a hint of peach, which would, now that I think on it, be a particularly outstanding choice.”

“Rather the shade of aged linen?” Prudence offered, remembering her sheets at MacAfee Farm.

“Exactly. You may also, in your day dresses, spencers, riding habits, cloaks, and the like, gravitate to carefully chosen shades of faded green, lightest yellow—and more of a soft gold, actually—dusky rose, and even the most delicate lilac. No pinks, Miss MacAfee, as I believe you have already discovered. No clear colors, no whites, and nothing that could be considered in the least bit bright. Select nothing that is not muted, subdued, almost colorless—and always be sure the color has a hint of drabness to it, of beige. This is most important, for your complexion must be made to be a part of your ensemble. I want you to appear all of a piece, a vision of honey and cream. My, I am becoming almost poetic. It has been a long journey, hasn’t it?”

Prudence bit her lip, trying not to giggle even as she longed to reach across the space that separated them and give the valet a hug. “Rexford, you amaze me. Truly.”

“Yes, well, I do have my master to consider, now don’t I? It wouldn’t do, wouldn’t do at all, for his ward to be an embarrassment to him—to us. I have hopes that Lady Wendover will have some sense when it comes to the dressing of you, but as she has this most lamentable tendency to bow to the wishes of the person closest to her, and as I have already been a reluctant witness to Miss Prentice’s notion of fashion, I felt it my duty to step in. Besides, impossible as this might seem, I believe you just might be beautiful in an odd, as yet unfashionable way. If you behave yourself, smooth your rougher edges without losing any of your fire and wit—well, with care, we could create a sensation, a true Original. Now, as to the cut of your gowns—”

Prudence did kiss him then for, if truth be told, she had been worried that she was totally friendless as she embarked upon her new life. Daventry barely tolerated her when he wasn’t sneaking looks at her, Rexford had been silent and staring, and Miss Prentice—well, it wasn’t as if the lizard counted one way or another, really.

But Prudence liked people, truly enjoyed them, thrilled in making them happy, and longed to make new friends. Before Shadwell’s descent into the most outrageous of his rituals, when he had been regarded by their near neighbors as merely eccentric, Prudence and her grandmother had been welcome everywhere.

It was only after her grandmother’s death, as Shadwell had begun dirt baths and purgatives, and serving goat’s milk puddings to visitors, that her friends had distanced themselves from her on orders from their elders.

Or, she had sometimes wondered, had it been more than that? For the near shunning of her had also coincided with the summer her body had blossomed rather alarmingly beneath her shirts and breeches, the same summer that Squire Barrington’s oldest son, James, had brought her a fistful of wild flowers, and asked to touch her. No longer in the girlish gowns, she may have been seen as a threat—and who in their right mind would want to see their son married to the wild granddaughter of that madman, Shadwell MacAfee?

But none of that mattered now, as she leaned forward and kissed Rexford’s cheek, delighting in his horrified, yet pleased expression.

“Miss MacAfee!” the valet exclaimed as Prudence sat back against the velvet squabs once more, grinning as she rubbed the sleeve of her horrible pink gown across her tear-filled eyes. “That is not done!”

“I will attempt to restrain myself in future, my new friend,” she promised, “if you will help me find some way of having you by my side as, together, we assemble the wardrobe that will captivate the ton.”

“And my lord Daventry?” Rexford questioned her, his knowing tone hinting that he had seen her looking at the marquess as he rode out of the inn yard each morning.

“I couldn’t care less what that high-nosed stickler thinks of me!” she countered, bristling even as her smile froze on her lips.

Rexford wagged a finger at her. “If we are to rub along together with any ease, Miss MacAfee, I suggest you be honest with me. You are interested in his lordship, and he is intrigued by you. Not wishing to expend my energies in assaulting my eyes with visions of trees, or grass-chewing animals with a propensity for doing entirely private things very much in the public eye, I have concentrated my attention on both of you these past days. He will fight the inevitable, and you will doubtless exasperate him mightily until you come to a compromise, but I can see my future when I look at the two of you. And I will not allow my employer’s marchioness to become an embarrassment to me. I do have my reputation to consider, after all.”

“Me? Daventry’s marchioness? You haven’t been chewing on any of the local plants, have you, Rexford? A rather darkish green one out near Shadwell’s dirt bath, perhaps, a tall grass with little white flowers? I saw one of the goats doing that last spring, and he acted silly for days,” she replied teasingly, doing her best to cover her sudden embarrassment. Rexford was deep, deeper than he gave any indication of being as he strutted around like a hen in stubble, fussing over his accommodations, or all but weeping as he complained about the food he was served, or loudly lamenting over the occasional drift of horsy scent that wafted his way as he stood balanced on a flat stone in a muddy stable yard, waiting for the coach that was, in all too lengthy stages, bearing him back to London and civilization.

“And, Miss MacAfee,” he continued, rolling his eyes at her last statement as the coach slowed to a stop, “you must promise to never, never drag the marquess or his most loyal servant to any location within fifteen miles of Shadwell MacAfee or his farm. Do we have a deal, Miss MacAfee?”

“About the gowns, yes, we do,” Prudence told him quickly, straining to peek out the coach window, but not able to see much more than the brightly lit flambeaux on either side of a wide white door. “But you’re wrong about the marquess, my friend and kind co-conspirator. He barely tolerates me, and I find him dull and disappointingly unintelligent. And he’s old. I’ll find my own husband, if you don’t mind—for that is supposedly why I am here—and he won’t be anyone who thinks he owes me anything.”

With that, and hoping she hadn’t said too much, Prudence smiled to the coachman who had opened the door and pulled down the stairs, holding her ugly pink skirts out of her way as she descended to the flagway. She then took a deep breath as Daventry, who had chosen to ride his horse into London just ahead of the coach, appeared beside her to stiffly offer her his arm, and she took her first steps into her new, devious life.

NUMBER NINETY-SIX Park Lane, home of the widowed Lady Wendover, was set back from the street in a way not considered especially fashionable, although Prudence couldn’t know this as she stood, delighted, looking up at the beautiful four-story structure.

As the coach pulled away, she turned and could see the outline of a high brick wall on the opposite side of the street, a wall, Daventry told her, that enclosed Hyde Park and should, in his opinion, be replaced by iron railings or some such improvement that would afford those in Park Lane a view of the park.

“Freddie would sell tomorrow,” he told her as she did her best to keep her mouth from dropping to half-mast at the sight of all this grandeur, “except that I have assured her that soon hers will be one of the most sought after addresses in London. Somerset has already bought here, and Breadalbane is just a short distance away. Having one’s town home set back from the curb is a modern notion I much admire, and I am willing to believe those houses now having their entrances facing Norfolk Street will soon be constructing new entrances facing Park Lane.”

“So you’re thinking of your sister’s happiness,” Prudence asked at last, wishing to begin the necessary distancing of herself from her guardian now that she was safely in London, “and the thought of any monies to be gained when this land becomes more valuable is of little concern? Why do I doubt that, my lord?”

“You doubt it because you are a rude, underbred, malicious, ungrateful little beast, I should imagine,” Banning returned quite evenly, obviously refusing to be baited by her now that he was so near to being shed of her. “Now, if you’ve spent your budget of nastiness at my expense, perhaps you can dredge up some of those marvelous manners you’ve promised me you possess so that we can go inside and meet my sister. She’s probably waiting to welcome you with open arms, and if you do anything to disabuse her of the notion that she is taking a sweet, simple country miss under her protection I shall most probably boil you in oil.”

Prudence held tightly to his arm and deliberately gifted him with her most amenable smile. “La, sir, how you do go on. I vow, you must be the most droll creature on earth,” she trilled, simpering in a way that her brother Henry had said debutantes on the lookout for rich husbands mastered in their cradles. Of course, as Henry had added that such obviously false effusions inevitably had the power to set his teeth on edge as he looked for a way out of the room, she was pleased to feel the muscles of Lord Daventry’s arm turn to steel beneath her clinging fingers.

The large white door opened before they could ascend to the topmost step and the wide half-circle of porch punctuated by thick Ionic pillars on either side, and Prudence was immediately dazzled by the sight of an enormous crystal chandelier ablaze with more candles than she would think to burn in a month. There was light spilling from everywhere, warmth and welcome permeated the very air as she stepped into the black and white marble tiled foyer, and Prudence knew that if she did not control herself she must might burst into tears.

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