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