Ellie withstood a drowning tide of pain, until Elsmore’s fingers closed around hers. If he let her go, she’d sink and never surface. And for what? Ledgers and accounts? Years toiling over books that any half-awake clerk could put to rights? Family that had never needed her in any real sense?

“We’ll go to France,” Elsmore said, stepping closer, “if that’s what you want. We’ll live in obscurity at Ambledown. I’ll deed it to you and we’ll live there in sin. We’ll set up a household in York, but twelve estates, thirty-two near relations, a ducal title, a bloody box in Drury Lane, and shares in a damned bank mean nothing, Eleanora, if you force me to muddle on without you. I love you.”

He enfolded her in a careful embrace that by degrees became more secure. In Elsmore’s arms, Ellie found every comfort she’d ever needed, every joy she’d aspired to, every dream she’d cherished in secret.

Also the courage to say the hard words.

“Papa was a counterfeiter. He was hanged before a jeering mob on a pretty Monday morning.” And then, at long last, she began to cry.

*  *  *

“Somebody is upset,” Jane, Duchess of Walden, muttered, pacing before the door of the family parlor. Across the corridor, the door to the library stood closed.

“Somebody is probably crying her heart out,” Walden replied. “We’ll be late for our outing if we eavesdrop much longer.”

“We are not eavesdropping. We are concerned for our guests. Was Eleanora angry?”

Walden took his duchess gently by the elbow and stilled her pacing. “I suspect she has been angry for much of her life.”

He and Jane wore the finery appropriate for strolling in the park. To appearances they would be very much the duke and duchess on display with their darling daughters in tow. Quinn liked parading about at Jane’s side, liked seeing polite society brought to heel by a poor minister’s daughter and a guttersnipe from York.

Arrogant of him, but a duke was expected to be a bit arrogant.

“Why would Eleanora be angry?” Jane asked. “She has an excellent post, one suited to her abilities, one very few women could hope for. Her wages are ample, and you and Joshua respect her for the asset she is.”

The weeping from the library grew softer.

Quinn recalled the day Eleanora Hatfield had marched into his bank, prepared to turn the place upside down over tuppence. “Anger can sit atop a world of hurt.”

Jane gave him the look, the one that said she was sparing him verbal acknowledgment of what he’d just admitted—about his own anger, about the world of hurt he’d been raised in.

“Eleanora’s path has been difficult,” she said, worrying a fingernail. “One doesn’t learn to spot every patch of boggy ground and every inaccurate sum while embroidering samplers in a rose garden.”