I am an idiot. But was she an idiot for declining what Elsmore offered or for craving it? Ellie stepped closer, pressed her mouth to his, and took one kiss to save against all the damned sensible pronouncements by which she was doomed to live.

*  *  *

“Our Eleanora knew Mick had played the Old Man at Dorset and Becker’s bank,” Jack said, bouncing the baby on his knee. The little bugger was quite solid, much to Jack’s relief. “Mick cashed out that account only last week, Pammie. He left town less than three days ago, and Ellie already has the details.”

“Give me that child.” Pamela plucked the infant into her arms, just as the little varmint began squalling. “You are an idiot, Jack Naylor. A purblind idiot.”

She put the baby to her shoulder and began a slow circuit of the little parlor. Elsewhere in the building, a talented tenor sang about wild geese who would never fly home.

Damn the Irish and their penchant for despair anyway. “Ellie knew the name of the old gent Mick impersonated, his first and last name. How does an auditor for Wentworth and Penrose know the details of a rig at a rival establishment? The old man tried to cash out just yesterday afternoon, and yet, she knew all about it this morning.”

The baby quieted, thank God. Jack could not abide a crying child. The lyrical Irishman wasn’t much more tolerable.

“Clerks and tellers doubtless gossip,” Pamela said. “They probably all drink at the same pubs and live in the same boardinghouses. When a bank is out two hundred pounds, word spreads.”

“Our Ellie doesn’t drink at those pubs or live in those boardinghouses.” She had a cozy two-room apartment in a handsome building right on the edge of a wealthy neighborhood.

“But she works with the clerks and tellers, and they go to the pubs. Maybe the bank suspected something before the old man came in yesterday.”

Jack was hungry and thirsty—cold weather always made him famished—but he wouldn’t ask for food or drink when Pamela and Clyde had three little mouths to feed.

“Mick was careful,” he retorted. Be careful or swing, that was Grandpapa’s first commandment. “He figured out which teller was most recently hired, he picked a wet, raw day to go to the bank, and he cashed out the smallest of Butterfield’s holdings. Ellie must be listening at keyholes.”

Pamela resumed her seat at the battered table. “She’s not like that—not like you. She notices details is all. We were all trained to notice details, and she remembers everything.”

Did Eleanora remember how to smile? Remember that her family had always kept her safe? “I know my own cousin, Pammie. We were close once.” They were actually cousins at some remove—first cousins twice removed or second cousins. Jack had never been sure which.