This time Eliza shook her head. “I doubt that will happen. Who would be riding about out there anyway?”
“I don’t know but I don’t like it. We should have burned the body like the Vikings as Mother told us in her stories. Made a pyre and burned the rotter to ashes.”
“We are not Vikings, Nathanial. And I for one would not have liked to see him burn despite his many flaws.”
“Well, now we will be undone. And for what? You would have sold yourself for nothing.”
Eliza’s palm itched with the urge to slap her brother for his speaking to her like that but he was right. Damn him, he was right. “We cannot dig up a rotting corpse. Even if he does somehow surface, surely by now he would be unrecognizable?”
“There was a story in a scientific journal in Father’s study that said a body lying in the ice could be preserved for thousands of years. Perfectly, without a hair out of place.”
She huffed out a foggy breath. “I knew I should have monitored your reading material more closely. Anyway, the ground around the estate is hardly ice.” But it did raise the question. The what ifs. “What do you suggest we do?”
“Dig him up and burn the body. Get rid of him once and for all.”
“And when you take the title? How do you propose to prove his death? To prove that he won’t be coming back?”
Nathanial stared at her for a moment, hesitation, confusion, wariness, all mirrored in his expression. “We were never going to be able to dig him up for proof and you know it.”
She did. God, the mess they were in seemed too deep to wade out of. Why hadn’t she seen any of the flaws in the plan? Why hadn’t she called for the magistrate and then dealt with the consequences as best she could at the time? First she’d panicked and then together the three eldest of them had come up with, at the time, a plausible plan of action to save all their necks. Now it all seemed quite ridiculous. And illegal. Someone would likely hang for what they’d done.
“You two can’t possibly be speaking of desecrating the final resting place of your beloved, if misguided, father, could you?”
Eliza jumped and whirled at the unexpected sound of Darius’s voice. The question came across calm enough but the storm of emotion in her husband’s eyes spoke volumes about what he had heard and his thoughts on the subject.
He didn’t wait for an answer before speaking again. “Have either of you ever seen or smelled a dead body?” He gave them no time to answer before his temper exploded. “Of course you haven’t! Just how deep was the hole you tossed him into?”
Nathanial bristled beside her as he answered. “As deep as we could dig it with a broken spade and hard earth.” He gestured with his hands the depth he thought it might have been.
Eliza wanted the ground to open up and swallow her too at that moment. What he must think of them to sound so callous, so scheming. When needs must, she’d stepped up and taken control, but this wasn’t her. This wasn’t a version of Eliza Penfold that she liked or wanted to see or hear. Darius was right when he’d said she should have been waltzing the ballrooms of London.
There were a million things better for a gently bred lady to be doing than discussing dead bodies and rotting corpses. But as she lifted her gaze to meet Darius’s dangerously glittering eyes, the fury and disgust there plainly obvious to any casual observer, she couldn’t think of a single one.
Chapter Fifteen
Darius shook his head as he switched his hopefully unnerving gaze between the two. Here he’d thought them reasonably innocent pawns in the games of powerful men but the conversation between Eliza and Nathanial made him reconsider his observations.
“Not even deep enough to escape the notice of scavenger animals,” Darius commented as he leaned a shoulder against the side of the house, the cold stone uncomfortable but welcome as he tried to calm his thoughts into some sort of plan. You would have sold yourself for nothing, rang over and over in his mind. She hadn’t even disputed her brother’s words.
“We were scarcely thinking straight,” Eliza told him, her cheeks awash with colour, her eyes sparkling with…something. Defiance maybe? Guilt? Only the once had he seen genuine sorrow over her father’s death and Darius began to wonder again what kind of man the duke had been.
The men he’d questioned so far had told stories of a hard but fair gentleman. No mention of his relationship with his family or his gambling. The village proper hadn’t seen the Penfold children in at least a year, the innkeeper had told him. The scandal involving Eliza and Harold was still a great piece of gossip but Darius thought maybe it was all the villagers had to talk about. Rich and entitled folk were usually the bane and ridicule of the poor.
“If his body is discovered, it will cause untold trouble,” Nathanial said, stating the obvious.
Darius sighed. “Yes, it will.”
“You’ll help us?” Nathanial asked.
“I already am,” Darius said in a quiet voice. He wanted to roar at the sky, at the two standing before him, at the Fates’ ridiculous idea of a joke. More than anything, he wanted to step forward and straighten out the crease between Eliza’s eyebrows. With his tongue. Here they were discussing dead bodies and he wanted to carry her to his room and lay her down and lick her all over, erase all other feeling in her so that only pleasure remained. There wasn’t enough distance or cold propriety in the world to stop her affecting him. He’d tried these past days but he was failing miserably.
“What will you do?” Eliza came to him and rested her hand on his forearm where it was crossed over his chest. The warmth from her touch travelled
