Mrs. Hodges set her cup down silently. “Ivy might need that money to eat, to buy passage home from whatever colonial backwater you drag her to. She might need that money to avoid a very sorry end. You are mortal, Mr. Shaw. You are no stripling, and your ambitions could well result in Ivy being stranded halfway around the world in a place where women are too few in number.”

Mrs. Hodges rose and braced her hands on the desk. “If she has some money of her own, she will enjoy a measure of safety in this wicked world, safety women without means lack. Toss that sum back at the duke’s feet, and if Ivy is lucky, she might end up keeping house for a shortsighted fool who thinks only of his own ambitions. If she’s unlucky…you will have guaranteed her doom with your righteous, masculine pride, and she herself might soon be a mother without benefit of matrimony.”

Mrs. Hodges sat, lifted her teacup, then set it back on the saucer untasted. “I will not apologize for speaking my mind when Ivy has nobody else to talk sense to you. If you would allow me to stay on until you take ship, I would appreciate it. I won’t ask you for a character.”

“I have upset you.” That realization qualified as a revelation, a glimpse into a vast, dimly perceived array of possibilities, for Elizabeth Hodges was as stalwart a soul as ever donned an apron and cap.

“Ivy’s situation upsets me.” This time the teacup made it to Mrs. Hodges’s lips. “She’s writing to her mother, you know.”

“Writing to…her mother?”

“To Her Grace of Rothhaven. You did not forbid her from doing so, and Her Grace writes back.”

If Whitlock had boarded a ship and put out to sea in stormy weather, he could not feel more unbalanced.

“Ivy is corresponding with the Duchess of Rothhaven, and you are only now informing me?”

Mrs. Hodges finished her tea and put the cup and saucer on the tray. “You are a good man, Whitlock Shaw, but you need a wife to curb your excesses and explain to you the human side of life. Her Grace was here little more than a week past. It’s not as if Ivy has been penning her letters in secret for years. Read this.”

She passed over another folded piece of vellum, also watermarked with a coat of arms.

“We are abruptly awash in ducal correspondence.”

“Read it,” Mrs. Hodges said, “and then I will convey it to Ivy. She apparently asked her mother for coach fare so she can escape you once and for all. This is the duchess’s reply. It’s not the reply I would have penned to my only child, but then, I’m a penniless housekeeper.”