The game Jack contemplated was uncomplicated: Have some urchin steal a lady’s purse when she was in a public location. Give dramatic chase, then return the purloined item on a cloud of selfless gallantry. Because returning stolen items was to be encouraged, a reward usually followed. What the scheme lacked in certainty it made up for in simplicity and immediacy of the benefit, if any benefit was to be had.

Best of all, the urchin took all the risk, and a very significant risk it was. Too often as children, the cousins had done the snatching, and Ellie had done the worrying.

“So Mick has departed this sceptered isle for the nonce?” she asked.

“He took a notion to travel, as restless young men sometimes do.”

“After he took a notion to work a rig on a Mr. Purcell Butterfield?”

The name had Jack stopping in the middle of the walkway. “How do you know about that?”

In the name of fractions, decimals, and irrational numbers. “Shall I share my suspicions with the magistrate?”

“Nora Naylor, for shame.” Genuine dismay colored Jack’s features, or as close to genuine dismay as he ever came. “A bank can stand to lose a few bob to an enterprising fellow with family to look after. Not like the old cove was out a single farthing.”

Despair and exasperation stole the last of Ellie’s self-restraint. “Some teller is likely without a job because of Mick’s scheme, and that man has family to feed too—family he worked hard to feed. If the bank doesn’t fire the teller for being too honest to sniff out your crooked scheme, then his pay will be docked until the day he dies, and all of his peers will hold him in contempt. He might well have been let go without a character, and then Mick with his little scheme is no better than the Earl of Winston, is he? Victimizing the blameless for his own gain, going merrily on his way and leaving other lives in ruins.”

In this neighborhood, nobody would pay attention to family members having a public spat, but Jack looked up and down the street anyway.

“Watch your mouth, Ellie. Mick works hard, but unless you’re respectable and you have all the pretty letters in your pocket, you cannot find decent work, not decent work that pays.”

“You’re saying you’d take honest work if it was offered? You, Jack?” Ellie resumed walking though she wanted to take off at a dead run.

“If the pay was fair. Too many want you to work yourself to death for nothing, then they hang you anyway when you poach a few rabbits.”

“I make good money at the bank,” Ellie said, “and I don’t have to cheat anybody or lie about who I am to earn it.”