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