“Your son,” Stephen said, leaning across the desk, “failed to disclose to Miss Abbott that he already had a wife. He abused her trust sorely and led her to believe they’d share a castle of marital accord in Spain. When the inevitable occurred, he admitted his calumny and sent her a bank draft. She sent it back, and then nature denied her the infamy and heartache of raising his bastard. Do you still think the damned woman will be content with a bank draft?”

The marquess was old and small, but Stephen longed to land even a single blow anywhere on his person. A single, hard blow.

Stapleton sat back in his armchair. “Champlain would never…that is, he wasn’t any different from…” The marquess tipped his chin up and looked from Quinn, to Duncan, to Stephen. “She enticed him. Women of a certain class think nothing of tempting—”

“A humble Quaker shopkeeper’s daughter,” Stephen said, “not a breath of scandal attached to her name before or since, and your philandering, fucking, wastrel of a prick of a son couldn’t keep his filthy hands off her. And you—my lord—did nothing to stop him or hold him accountable. He broke Harmonia’s heart, he all but broke Miss Abbott’s spirit, and who knows how many other women suffered because you would not curb his excesses. Write out a big, fat bank draft to be sure, the fatter the better, but you are about to change your legislative priorities too.”

Stapleton’s hand shook as he tugged at his cravat. “Or else what?”

“Or else I will kill you.” The threat was, alas, all too sincere. Quinn and Duncan did Stephen the courtesy of allowing the words to hang in the air, or about Stapleton’s scrawny neck, without any polite retrenchments. Abigail frowned on violence, true enough, but Stephen frowned on nasty little men who raised their sons to be nasty, if charming, philanderers.

“He’d do it too,” Quinn said, sounding almost cheerful as he took the place at Stephen’s right and tugged Hercules’s leash from Stephen’s hand. “On the off chance that my brother required assistance, I’d happily serve. I frown on abusing the privileges of the peerage, but just the once, my duchess might overlook it. Duncan?”

“Pounding one aging windbag flat will hardly take three of us,” Duncan said from Stephen’s left, “but of course, I am ever available to my family when the law itself can’t be relied upon to keep the wheels of justice turning smoothly and in the correct direction.”

Marriage had agreed with Duncan, marriage to Matilda, anyway.

“His Grace of Walden,” Stephen said, “is sponsoring a bill to reform the use of child labor in the mines. You will vociferously support that measure and any other that His Grace tells you to support. A man who can look at his six-year-old grandson and commend children of the same age to twelve-hour shifts at hard labor is sorely in need of guidance.”

And a job crawling on his hands and knees through endless darkness in the mines.