He blinked down at her. “I beg your pardon? I don’t believe I heard you correctly.”
“We have a body to dispose of,” she repeated, enunciating the words, as if saying them more slowly would make them more socially acceptable. “Now are you going to help me, or must I drag it to the midden myself?” She didn’t wait for his answer; she turned and walked a few paces down the street toward a house where there was indeed a bodylike heap on the porch.
He had no doubts that after all was said and done, she’d still cast him as the villain of her life in her head. But he wasn’t a mustachioed, plotting malefactor, bent on destroying everything good. He wasn’t a blackguard. He wasn’t an evildoer. He was the sort of villain who made jokes and tried to do the right thing, damn it.
No battle plan survived first contact with the enemy, so it was imperative that Christian kept his objectives in mind. He had just one: If she was going to hate him, the least she could do was hate him accurately.
“How exciting,” he said to her back. “Hiding corpses. My favorite activity; how did you ever know? I always said that if I wanted to become an accomplice to murder, I’d do it on a public street in broad daylight. How kind you are to oblige me in this.”
She looked upward, raising her hands in supplication. “I don’t have time for explanation. There isn’t a minute to spare.”
“Of course not,” Christian said. “If you wait too long, your next victim might get away. By all means, let me not delay my initiation into a life of crime.”
She turned to him. “Oh, for the sake of cygnets.”
Christian blinked for a moment at that turn of phrase until he remembered that Judith had started swearing on waterfowl at the age of eleven. He was never exactly sure how that had started, but now that he’d heard her say it, he couldn’t imagine how he’d forgotten.
“If I had killed anyone,” she went on, “do you think I would tell you, of all people? Have you eyes in your head? I’m talking about that.” She gestured at an indistinct lump lying on the somewhat rickety steps leading up to a dismal-appearing house.
He squinted and let out a covert breath. It was not, thank God, a real body. It was a set of clothes stuffed with straw, a beige-ish-something-colored scarf trailing behind it.
“Here,” she said. “Help me with it, and quickly.”
“It’s lovely to see you, too,” he said dryly. “My, it has been years since we last spoke.”
“Goodness.” She pronounced that word with a hint of venom, touching her fingers to her forehead.
For a moment—just a moment—he had the sense of how much must have changed in the years since he’d seen her. For that second, Judith looked…
Old was not the right word. Neither was haggard; that last implied a loss of beauty, and he did not think that Judith could ever be anything but beautiful. But she was no longer a young girl on the verge of her first Season. She would have been…he subtracted from his own age…twenty-six last March, on the fifteenth, and the fact that he still recalled the date of her birth was not lost on him. But for one second, there was something about the way her lips pressed together, the way her eyes shivered shut, that made him think that Judith had very clearly become an adult, and not just because of the passage of time. She had responsibilities. She was, perhaps, weighed down by them.
She shook her head. “Might we defer the social niceties, if you please?”
He’d prepared himself for this. There was enough history between the two of them that given the opportunity, they’d descend into mutual sniping. He’d steeled himself to rise above the fray. He was not going to snap at her. He was going to be polite and kind. He was going to be himself, and if part of him thought that being kind was a weapon—a weapon of the see what you’re missing variety—then, well, all the better.
“Body or no,” Christian heard himself say with all the stiff, kind politeness he could muster, “I do not consider myself to be a complete savage.”
“There is no time to not be savage,” Judith said.
While he was working out that double negative, she bulled on.
“I promise you, in ten minutes, we shall go in the house and I shall make tea and we will ask after each other’s families. We shall stare at each other with all the awkwardness that our situation entails, and if you like, we shall call that being civilized. But we haven’t time for this now.”
“You know,” Christian said, “one of the reasons we always did get on so smashingly well is that we were both utter shite at etiquette. Very well. We can pretend later.”
“This particular situation is difficult.” She glanced at him. “Can you carry the entire…thing…or must I assist?”
Standing that close to Judith? He was too aware of her as it was. He looked over at her. He thought of her hands overlapping his, her body pressing against his.
“That would be entirely unnecessary,” he said on a growl. Christian leaned down and gathered the straw figure in his arms. It was awkward and ungainly; the limbs kept trying to straighten. Judith was smaller than he was, and she’d likely not had the arm span to encompass the thing. He barely managed.
“I have it.” He lifted. “When you say this particular situation is difficult, did you mean needing to dispose of this fellow here, or were you referring to the fact that we were going to get married until I proved your father and brother were traitors?”
She looked up at him with wide, outraged eyes, and stared ahead with compressed lips.
Better. If she was going to hate him, she’d best do so for the right reasons. “I see we’re not discussing that,” he said. “Never fear. Let’s talk about…” He rustled the thing in his arms. Little bits of straw poked out from the clothing. “…George here. Thank you for him. This is an extremely convenient gift on your part. A straw man? For me? With Parliament sitting next month? I always say the House of Lords can never have too many.”
She gave him a pointed look. “This way.”
He followed her down the street. “Technically,” he explained as they walked, “that’s untrue. One can have too many straw men. ‘Try another logical fallacy,’ I’m always saying. ‘Exclude more middles. Go for the ad hominem attack—I’m always hoping for some real insults, you know. But alas. It’s straw men, straw men, straw men, nothing but straw men all session long.”
Once, that would have made her laugh. Now her eyes flicked to him briefly. “I understood your jest the first time,” she said. “There was no need to explain it.”
“Right.” He wasn’t going to stop being himself simply because she hated him. “Uncomfortable silence it is, then. Don’t mind me; I’m used to uncomfortable silences. Why, I annoy my mother twice daily, just so she can look at me reproachfully.”
“The refuse heap is just ahead,” she said. “To the right, and then turn into the alley immediately on your left after that.”
“Just think,” he continued. “If you’d married me after all, you, too, could be an expert in uncomfortable silences.”
Judith inhaled sharply.
Good. He’d come all this way because she’d asked for his help—well, and technically, because he wanted something in return. If he was going to be made to feel uncomfortable, she should have to as well.
“If I’d married you after all,” she said, “I would have had a real body to dispose of before now.”
“How sweet.” Christian hoisted the straw man higher onto his shoulder. “I knew you cared.”
They turned the corner and found themselves standing almost face to face with a boy.
No. Not just a boy. For a moment, Christian felt light-headed. The boy was maybe twelve years old; his hair, somewhere between a dirty blond and a sandy brown, was badly in need of cutting. His hands were in fists at his side, and he looked down as he strode ahead.
The boy paid so little attention to his surroundings that he almost walked headfirst into Christian.
Christian almost let him do it. For one second, Christian thought he was lo
oking at Anthony—at his onetime best friend, the boy with whom he had climbed trees and argued Aristotle and spent all his summers.
It was almost as if he had walked into one of his own nightmares. He couldn’t breathe. God, he missed Anthony. Nothing in the world had gone right since his friend had been transported. Nothing.
But this boy was not Anthony. He was too young, and Anthony was too dead.
This must be…
“Benedict,” Judith said, moving forward.
Benedict. The youngest child in the Worth family. He’d known Benedict first as a squalling baby, then as a precocious toddler, and finally, eight years ago, as a cherubic child with fat cheeks, dimples, and an eternal smile.
Benedict had neither dimples nor smiles now. Once Christian’s mind was shaken of the terrible suggestion that Anthony had returned, he could see all the differences between this boy and his friend.
Benedict Worth was thin, too thin. His wrists were just bones underneath those wide cuffs. There were dark shadows under his eyes and a fading yellow bruise across his cheek. A scab across his lip spoke of more fights. He looked up at the two of them.
He didn’t blink. He didn’t frown in question. He simply saw the thing that Christian was carrying and he blew out a long, resigned breath.
Judith stepped in front of Christian. “Benedict,” she repeated, reaching for him. “It’s so good to see you.”
He brushed off her embrace, stepped around her, and stared at the thing that Christian was carrying. He didn’t say anything; he just quietly unknotted the scarf.
That was when Christian realized what he should have seen from the first. This was no straw man. It was a straw boy wearing an Eton uniform.
The scarf was likely that odd shade that everyone called Eton blue, claimed was green, and looked basically beige to him. Christian felt sick.
He’d given advice during her father’s trial in the House of Lords. He had known when he uncovered the evidence that his best friend would be implicated in the process. But he’d been right, damn it. What was he supposed to have done? Looked the other way from their treason?