A quality to be respected, most of the time. “I love working for Wentworth and Penrose,” Ellie said. “I love the smell of the beeswax polish on the wainscoting, love how sunlight comes through the windows because you insist they always be clean. I love…”

She loved the sense of safety here, of having a worthwhile place and knowing it well. Her family could cheerfully racket from one misadventure to another. Ellie had to have peace, order, and respectability.

“You love how the clerks live in dread of your raised eyebrow,” His Grace said. “Love knowing which messengers favor licorice candy and which prefer peppermint. We’re your family, so on behalf of that family, I ask you to extend a courtesy to another institution. If one bank fails, all banks suffer, and rumors about His Grace’s personal finances would send Dorset and Becker straight into the cesspit.”

He had her there. A bank might start the week solvent and, on the strength of nothing more than club gossip about a single bank director, end the week floundering.

“I don’t want to do this. Why can’t Elsmore’s solicitors manage this task?”

“I didn’t want to be a duke, Eleanora. Elsmore’s solicitors should already have seen any irregularities in the estate books. That they either failed to notice them or declined to mention them means the lawyers can’t be relied on. This project should be your idea of a holiday. Say you’ll do it, and I’ll introduce you to Elsmore.”

Wentworth and Penrose had given Ellie a job when most banks considered women fit only to scrub the floors after hours. There were exceptions of course. Lady Jersey ran Child’s Bank. Her Grace of St. Alban’s managed Coutts, but Ellie was neither a countess nor a duchess. Quinn Wentworth and Joshua Penrose had opened the door to respectability for her, and thus, Ellie would always be in their debt.

“I’ll have a look at Elsmore’s estate books,” she said, “and maintain my duties here. In the evenings, His Grace must make available to me any document I request.”

“Elsmore’s holdings are more complicated than my own, and a few hours of an evening won’t allow you to do justice to the task. I’ll inform Milton that you’ve taken a month’s leave to deal with a family matter.”

That Walden was willing to part with Ellie’s services for a month told her volumes about his sense of indebtedness to Elsmore. All that remained was to be introduced to the mincing fop who’d mucked up simple math relating to bales of wool and boxes of candles.

“Wentworth and Penrose cannot audit itself over the next month,” Ellie said. “Who will mind the books here while I’m gone?”

“You’ll be gone for only a month.”