Then he’d used his bootlaces to extend the duck’s leash—what need had a crippled boy for boots when he was barely able to walk?—and angled the leash around a table leg. He’d observed the duck’s progress by the hour, until his curiosity overcame his good sense, and he’d dismantled the toy in an effort to understand its workings.

The inner mechanisms of that childish amusement—pulleys, weights, levers, wires—had formed the basis for the first lift he’d designed and for a crane the Navy had commissioned for its shipyards. He’d been figuratively dismantling ducks ever since.

And now, a ducal duck was quacking about in Stephen’s building, a situation that demanded investigation.

“I can understand that Elsmore needs to tidy up his books,” Stephen said, “but what specifically about that exercise requires him to roost in Mrs. Hatfield’s rooms by the hour?”

Quinn took his time cutting a piece of steak, which Stephen had learned was not a tactic intended to control the conversation but, rather, the focus a man needed when polite manners had been learned later in life. Here at Quinn’s club, if his etiquette should falter, the lapse would be remarked.

“Eleanora is going through the dukedom’s estate books, property by property,” Quinn said. “I’m sure she has questions. Unless Elsmore wants to announce to all of London that his staff and womenfolk are robbing him blind, she can only put those questions to him in person. Pass the salt.”

Stephen first salted his own steak, then passed over the cellar. “Do these questions require regular infusions of hot soup, fresh bread, and roasted beef taken tête-à-tête with Elsmore?”

Quinn set down his knife and fork. “If you are spying, I will inform Jane.”

Stephen held two people in limitless respect. The first was his cousin Duncan Wentworth, who’d been his tutor and traveling companion through Stephen’s self-destructive adolescent years. Duncan had recently abandoned bachelorhood for the charms of the married state, and Stephen was happy for him.

Overjoyed, in fact. Very damned happy, indeed.

The other person whom Stephen held in unreserved esteem was Jane, Duchess of Walden. She’d married Quinn when he’d been a plain mister come to a very bad pass, and rescued not only Quinn but also his siblings in ways Stephen still had not dismantled to his own satisfaction.

“You’d tattle to Jane because I merely note the comings and goings outside my window?”

“You sit up in your apartment like an eagle in his eyrie, spinning tales about all the mice on the street below. Jane would be disappointed in you if you intruded on Mrs. Hatfield’s privacy.”