“Yes. Although I do realize a man doesn’t need to be married,” she said, “to have children.”

I said, “I would need to be.”

“Truly?”

“Yes. I would wish that any child of mine be legitimate, and bear my name.”

“Very honorable.” Fondly, she added, “I truly must find you a wife while you’re here. It’s the least I can do in return for this work you’ve agreed to do, saving my husband’s chance to earn the favor of Lord Grange.”

“It seems he does already have it.”

“The favor of such men is often haphazardly given and easily lost if one doesn’t stand in the right place,” she explained, with a keenness of insight that put me in mind of the fact she had told me her own father had been a man of the law. “I’m glad you were standing in my husband’s place today.”

I owed him much, so anything that I could do for Turnbull was but feeble payment for the debt I carried. When I told her this, her eyes held pride.

“I do hope,” she said, “the work itself will not be too unpleasant.”

I was hoping that as well, but I’d resigned myself to anything, so when Lord Grange’s clerk appeared at two o’clock precisely with a file of papers underneath one arm, I breathed more easily. The drudgery of paperwork was something I could bear.

The clerk was younger than me, too—a tall man in his later twenties with broad shoulders and a build that seemed more suited to the fields than to an office, but his voice was educated.

Gilroy was his name. “I will be with you every day,” he promised, “until we finish the inquiry.”

I tried to sound informed, and failed. “The inquiry?”

“You’ve not been told?” His mouth, for just a moment, made a line that I knew well. Mine did the same when I was forced to explain basic things to new recruits. He set the papers on the table by the window, which by now had been cleared of its breakfast things and sat in readiness, with four chairs stationed round it. “How much do you know of the business of the Commissioners of the Equivalent?”

I knew that since the Acts of Union had been passed between my own country of Scotland and the English this past spring, dissolving our parliament and creating one united nation, the government of Queen Anne now at Westminster had sent north an enormous sum of money to be managed as a fund designed to offset our assumption of a share of England’s debt, and for some other sundry purposes, and that this money was called the Equivalent, and those who had its charge were its Commissioners.

I said all this to Gilroy, who seemed satisfied. “That’s fairly it. Except a large part of what those commissioners are doing now is sorting through the claims of those owed money by our African Company, since one promise of the union was that everyone who lost by that adventure would be compensated out of the Equivalent.”