Elsmore looked more at home in this relatively rustic setting than he had amid the splendor of Wentworth and Penrose’s business offices. The ceiling here was a mere eight feet, both hearths held roaring fires, a rosy-cheeked young couple in powdered wigs smiled down from the portrait over the sideboard.

He also looked pensive.

“Something troubles you,” Ellie said. “Something beyond untidy books.”

He crossed his knife and fork over a half-empty plate. “All three of my sisters are now apparently keeping company with doting swains, two of them in contemplation of courtship. After years of being received everywhere but having few creditable offers, my womenfolk are now besieged. Why now? The Little Season is hardly when most matches are made, and I can think of nothing in the family circumstances that has altered to make the ladies more attractive to lonely bachelors.”

“You are correct that a pattern has abruptly changed, but I am hardly an authority on the passions of the human heart. Aren’t you having any potatoes?”

He served himself, and he obliged Ellie’s demand to discuss his extended family. She and Elsmore took their raspberry fool with them to the estate office, where Ellie drew the Dorset family tree, from the elders right down to the latest arrivals.

“How does your family tree compare to mine?” Elsmore asked, finishing his sweet. “Can you claim eleven male cousins? A trio of aunties named for famous battles?”

He clearly loved those aunties and was fiercely protective of his cousins. “My family is smaller,” Ellie said, trying to make her dessert last. “We aren’t as close-knit as your family is.” Grandmother kept track of everybody, passing along news in her tidy script. A pang of homesickness assailed Ellie, though surely not homesickness for godforsaken Yorkshire?

“What of parents?” Elsmore asked. “Do they post regular lectures to you about the perils of life in wicked old Londontowne?”

The homesickness became old, brittle sorrow. Dry as dust, sharp as glass. “Let us attend to the task at hand, Elsmore, rather than wander off into irrelevancies. Do not think to steal the last of my fool, either, or I will deal severely with you.”

“I live in hope. Did I mention a pair of elderly bachelor uncles? One suspects them of peculiar inclinations, but one doesn’t pry.” He cherished those eccentric uncles, clearly, just as he valued everybody from the current duchess down to the latest arrival born to a young cousin who held the living near Elsmore’s estate in Shropshire.

All of these people, several dozen in number, looked to Elsmore for support, security, and influence. And he never refused them, apparently, which only made the state of his accounts that much harder to explain.

Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten