“You were raised in the country,” he said.

“Yorkshire.” She regretted that admission as soon as she’d made it. “How many other properties do you have, Your Grace?”

“In England? That’s the lot of them, as far as I know.”

In the name of fractions, decimals, and ratios…He’d listed a dozen pieces of real estate, all of them income-producing, all of them staffed year-round except a fishing cottage with twelve bedrooms near Sunderland that had only a couple as caretaker.

“You have foreign properties as well, Your Grace?”

He waved a languid hand. “Vineyards in France and Portugal, a villa in Italy I’ve never laid eyes on, a forest in Bavaria. My progenitors believed that if the family had need of something—wool, lumber, brandy—we had best have the means to secure it. Hence, the dukedom developed a tendency to sprawl.”

Sprawl. He referred to a small kingdom as a tendency to sprawl and did so in a tone between apologetic and disgruntled.

“Various cousins help oversee the foreign bits,” Elsmore went on. “Cousin James occasionally jaunts up to Scotland for me—he’s the nominal heir, hence my willingness to impose upon him—and he stops in at the fishing cottage en route.”

“And across all of the properties, investments, businesses, and what not, how much money would you say has gone missing?”

Elsmore looked around the room, as if he’d misplaced his hat. “Not much, a few thousand pounds? All I know is, this year’s harvests were good, my tenants pay their rents on time, seed and feed prices have dropped since Waterloo, and yet my expenses grew while my income declined, even after I account for fluctuations in corn prices. The discrepancy is five thousand pounds at most, but I cannot justify it.”

Long practice allowed Ellie to jot that figure down as if all those zeros were commonplace. “That’s in total, or this year?”

“In the past twelve months. I was hoping you might be able to take a peek at what happened prior to that.” He sounded so hopeful, so…charming.

I will kill Quinn Wentworth. Ellie put down her pencil, tidied her notes into a stack, and chose her words carefully.

“Your Grace, while I understand the delicacy of your position, and I wish I could help you, this task exceeds my abilities. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I really must decline the assignment.”

He rose, braced his hands on the table, and leaned close. “No, Mrs. Hatfield, you really must not.”

She got to her feet and went nose-to-nose with him. “Yes, I must. I absolutely must decline this assignment.”

*  *  *

Joshua Penrose ambled into Quinn’s office. If the door was open, anybody was welcome to intrude on Quinn, provided they came on bank business. If the door was closed, the angel Gabriel would have been taken severely to task for interrupting.