A prudent cease-fire on her part, and doubtless not the last time Rex would have to limit her zeal with an application of common sense.

“I applaud your thoroughness, Mrs. Hatfield, and your diplomacy. More tea?” The brew, the shortbread, and the passage of time had apparently routed his megrim.

She drew another outward arrow on his money chart and labeled it with yet another question mark. “Will you purloin my next cup too?”

What in creation was she—? Rex looked at the cup in his hand. Hers, the one he’d fixed with milk and sugar. Empty. He’d drunk from her cup and finished her tea without even noticing his error.

*  *  *

“What do you suppose Elsmore’s real problem is?” Lord Stephen Wentworth asked. “The situation must be serious, if he’s come to us for aid.”

Quinn passed his younger brother a glass of lemonade, an unusual choice for a day when autumn had turned up chilly, but then, for Stephen to navigate across Quinn’s family parlor with a cane in one hand and a hot drink in the other was perilous to himself and the carpets.

“His Grace did not come to us,” Quinn replied, pouring himself a glass. “I’ve sung Mrs. Hatfield’s praises from time to time, and Elsmore asked to hire her temporarily. I merely brokered the arrangement as a courtesy.”

Stephen hooked his cane on the arm of his chair. “Does Elsmore think she’ll share particulars about how you and Penrose run the bank?”

Stephen’s intellectual appetites were prodigious, a polite way of saying that he was curious about everybody and everything, sometimes obnoxiously so. That lively curiosity had saved his life, in Quinn’s opinion, and resulted in any number of mechanical inventions.

“Elsmore will soon learn better if he thinks to compromise Mrs. Hatfield’s loyalty, though I don’t take him for the underhanded kind. How was Paris?”

“Paris is redolent of cat piss, as usual. The French can create marvelous roads, exquisite art, and incomparable ladies’ fashions, but they cannot eradicate the stink of the alley from their fair city. What did darling Eleanora make of this temporary assignment?”

Only Stephen would dare refer to the lady so familiarly. “She was reluctant at first, but she cannot turn her back on sloppy account books. Enforcing order and accuracy are her passions.”

Stephen drew his finger around the rim of his glass. “A bloody boring ambition, if you ask me. Have you never wondered how she came by it?”

Quinn took the opposite armchair and weighed his obligation to a loyal employee against his obligation to an equally loyal—if inquisitive—brother. Stephen on the scent of a conundrum was a force of nature.

“I knew Eleanora Hatfield in York,” Quinn said. “She was Ellie Naylor then.”