LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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