She kissed his cheek. “You will do no such thing. The gentleman had dropped his receipt. I handed it back to him and pointed out that the total was off by one shilling and tuppence. He asked me how I’d seen that mistake at a glance, and I hadn’t an answer for him.”

“You thought everybody did math without thinking about it.”

“Most of my family can, and they’d certainly never seen my ability as remarkable. Numbers behave in a predictable and orderly fashion, and I grasped those rules without much effort.”

While life on the street was predictable only insofar as it involved suffering. The sitting room was toasty, but Rex draped a crocheted afghan around Eleanora’s shoulders.

“He spotted your talent, this gentleman?”

“He spotted the talent of a grubby boy and offered to article me as a clerk. For the first year, I had to maintain the fiction of boyhood.”

And thus did a girl learn to spot every detail of dress, every nuance of gait and expression. “You were able to shed that fiction?”

“I was lucky. My employer was both kind and shrewd. He realized within a month that I did not need instruction regarding the keeping of books or the management of accounts. He was a cloth merchant who also owned mills, and he caught me one day with the silk inventory.”

“Caught you?” Not stealing. Eleanora would no more steal from an employer than Rex would get roaring drunk in the middle of a Mayfair avenue.

“I had never touched silk before, and the feel of it was magic. Nothing is as soft, as smooth and warm, and the way silk loves the light…I was enraptured, and my mannerisms gave me away.”

After a year, in an unguarded moment, she’d faltered in her disguise. “Did he keep you on anyway?”

“I was indispensable by then, and hiding my gender was becoming more and more difficult. He told me to stay home for two weeks, then to apply as a girl for work at his offices. On the Continent, women can be clerks, and my employer traveled back to Hanover frequently. He explained hiring me to his junior managers as a favor he must do for a fellow merchant, and besides, that unreliable Naylor boy had run off, hadn’t he?”

Naylor. Her family name was Naylor. Mr. Hatfield had been a fiction in more than one sense of the word.

“You were soon running his business.”

“I had already been running his business, but in the two weeks that I’d been absent, one of the other clerks had instituted a three-for-five scheme. That was my first audit, and I’ve been auditing ever since.”

This recitation left enormous gaps in Eleanora’s history, but it also explained how she’d climbed from destitution into a relatively comfortable profession.