Duncan flipped out his coattails and assumed the reading chair. “You interfered with the lawful progress of a public stagecoach, which is in itself a hanging offense, no robbery required. Miss Abbott, who has a very keen eye for details, noticed your horse, your voice, and your manner of moving.”

“She wasn’t on the coach,” Fleming retorted.

“She was dressed as a man,” Stephen said, gently, for Fleming was having a trying day. His day was in fact about to get worse. “And she knows you effected at least one occasion of housebreaking, so hush while we decide what your punishment is to be. Be glad that Miss Abbott frowns on violence.”

Fleming held his head in his hands, the picture of masculine despair. “I sought to offer Lady Harmonia an honorable union. I sought to safeguard the Stapleton legacy, I was only trying to be—”

“Tiresome,” Stephen interjected, stroking Hercules’s silky head. “Before the ladies return, we must resolve matters to their satisfaction. Stapleton, how do you propose to do that?”

Duncan looked bored, while Quinn had acquired a fascination for Stapleton’s collection of jeweled snuff boxes.

“How do I—? My lord, you overstep. I haven’t robbed any stagecoaches or broken into any houses, and as a peer of the realm, even if I had, the wheels of justice would not grind me under for such behavior, particularly not when undertaken to protect my family’s standing.”

Without turning away from the snuff boxes, Quinn muttered, “Don’t be too sure about that.”

Stephen rose, making certain to test his knee carefully before putting any weight on it. “Here is your dilemma, Stapleton. You have an illegitimate heir. This is of no great moment, despite the magnitude of the possible scandal. Legally, the boy’s right to the title is unassailable, and he would not be the first illegitimate heir born to a peer.

“The greater difficulty,” Stephen went on, “is that you have annoyed the child’s mother. Your son annoyed her too. Lord Fleming has seriously annoyed her, and I daresay I myself might have tried her patience on occasion. Lady Champlain doesn’t like you, she doesn’t trust you, and she would be within her rights to take that child and her settlements and banish you from the lad’s life. Is that what you want?”

Stapleton did not immediately reply, but then, he was not used to having to think of anybody but himself.

“My lord,” Duncan said, “you raised a dunderheaded son, you recruited a dunderheaded conspirator, you are uniformly disliked by your peers, and your mistress’s loyalty is to your coin rather than your person. Nobody would question Lady Champlain’s decision to quit this household and shield the child from your influence.”

“But the boy—” Stapleton began.

Quinn turned, a jeweled snuff box in his hand. “Is no relation to you. And a man who cheerfully sends six-year-olds into the mines, while bleating in the Lords about hard work being a Christian service to their exhausted, starving little souls, can hardly be expected to have much regard for children in general, can he?”