She stood and went to him, standing at his back, ignoring the three other men in the room. “Please say you won’t tell anyone about this. We can manage for a little bit longer.”
“What would you have done today if we hadn’t come along?” he asked, still not facing her but talking to her all the same.
“I had a gun. They wouldn’t have made it inside the house. And the children know how to hide and escape if they need to.”
His humourless laugh filled the room as he turned once again to face her. She stepped back when she glimpsed the burning intent in his eyes. “The gun with no bullets? Would you have swung it at their heads? You could barely hold it up!”
“You knew it wasn’t loaded?” she said at the same time the men behind her exclaimed their own disbelief with grunts and groans.
“I had a feeling,” he admitted with a grimace. “But mine is and I would have shot them both where they stood had they harmed you.”
Touching sentiment but then he would have finished the day hanging from his neck. “You should not have involved yourself or your men.”
When Darius’s hands closed around her arms, it wasn’t comfort he offered. Instead, he squeezed. “You cannot do this on your own, Eliza. You’re daft if you think you can. Wickham will be back and he’ll bring more men next time. A fool could see you were outmatched. You had no footmen, no butler, no one at your back.”
“I have been taking care of my family for seven long years and I will continue to do so until my brother is duke.” Struggling to be free of his grip and, more importantly, his reason, she tried to pull away.
“And then what?” Darius launched his words at her and accompanied them with a shake. “You will continue to sleep in here? All together? Where will you find the money to buy food let alone repair a roof about to blow off in the next storm? Just because that boy becomes a duke does not mean your problems will be behind you.”
“We’ll figure it out. We still have some jewels we will borrow against when the time comes and there is a London house entailed so we can go there. We don’t need your help.”
He finally let her go and then began to pace the room. “Move to London with no servants? Tongues will wag when you arrive in a hired hack and cannot pay the driver. You obviously know nothing about life or London if you honestly think you can see this through and emerge unscathed.”
She hadn’t thought of any of that. Once Nathanial inherited, they were going to sell one of the unentailed properties up north, starting with their father’s hunting lodge and grounds, and then see about their next step. It was something they couldn’t do until her brother could make legal decisions and sign his name to the documents. Only two more months and they would have been free from the deceits and dangers.
“Does anyone else know of your father’s death?” Darius asked.
She shook her head, fearing more tears if she argued with him further. She didn’t have the strength to fight and even though she wasn’t normally overset quite so easily, the past months and her current anxiety over her acting skills had stretched her nerves to the upper limits.
“How did he die?” one of Darius’s men asked.
She still remembered the sound of the shot. The smell of blood and sulphur as she’d burst into the room had stung her nose and left water in her eyes. Gabriella’s hysterical screams had pierced the night. Pieces of his brain had slid through Eliza’s fingers as she’d cleaned it off the estate ledgers where before only the tears of her ancestors had stained the page. Inhale. Exhale. “He shot himself in the head.”
Eliza had spent hours scrubbing the room before rolling the body in a bedspread, after calming her sister and sending her off to keep Ethan occupied. God, she’d retched and retched but she’d got it done. Then she, Nathanial and Gabriella had carried him to the family plot, took turns digging a shallow hole and then had dumped their father in it and covered the corpse with the dark soil of their heritage. It had taken a whole month to clean the mud from beneath her fingernails. She would never remove the image from her memory. Not ever.
“How are you going to prove how he died, that one of you didn’t shoot him?”
Her stomach dipped and she had to reach for the sharp bite of the mantel to stop herself from falling. If this stranger was already asking the question, how soon until more did? “We loved our father. What gain would we have from his death?”
“That’s not how the public will see it, Eliza. The magistrate will ask questions and he will demand answers.”
“Please stop.” She couldn’t keep talking about it. Eliza would have been happy to never think of the past and only move towards the future. She wanted to bury her head in the snow and emerge in a few years once they were settled and more secure. Once the dirtiest of the deeds were done and forgotten.
“It won’t work,” one of the other of Darius’s men commented in a quiet voice.
“We can’t get involved in this, Cap’n.”
Eliza heard Darius’s sigh and felt the regret right down to her soul as he said, “We already are involved. It’s too late to bow out now.”
*
Why was it that whenever he came across a female in need of rescue, Darius always donned his knight’s helmet and jumped right into the fray? He had never started the fray. He’d never intended to finish the fray either yet there he was, kicking up his heels in a poor excuse for a sitting room while Eliza spoke to her siblings about what
