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“The Cochrane business. Eighteen fourteen. Unheard of to prosecute a peer for financial crimes. Everyone wanted the matter to go away. Not your father. His stance inspired me to take one of my own. Cochrane lost his seat, his rank, everything.”

He knew the source of the always dubious “compliment”—your father was good. But until now, no one had put his father’s struggle into words.

“My father,” Asquith said, “paid a great deal for that stance. In ways that didn’t appear in the papers.”

Hampton nodded. “His health never returned.” He turned slightly. “He was instrumentally brave, in the way that rarely gets remembered.”

Brave. Yes, he had been.

And like Asquith, he’d never spoken a damn word. At least not to his son.

“If,” Hampton continued, “he sometimes did not know when to stop the charge.”

Asquith’s stomach dropped, his chest tightened, and his hand tremored. All his attention focused on Hampton’s knowing gaze.

“One stops,” Asquith said, “when the greater good is served.”

Hampton studied Asquith for a long, silent moment. “Agreed. He told me once you were cut from the same cloth.”

If Asquith was, he now understood that cloth’s cost, the toll a “good” man paid. The constant examination of contradictions in deeply held principles, leading to resolutions not everyone would accept or understand.

His father had been a good man. And good was far from easy.

“This gentleman,” Hampton said carefully. “Is he a peer?”

“Not yet.”

Asquith read the calculation in Hampton’s eyes.

“And his father?”

Asquith didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. “Recall, if you will, that this man has brought many other fathers, some of them peers, to grief.”

“Like myself,” Hampton murmured. He inhaled. “I knew. A part of me knew. But Wi—” He stopped. “Allow me to take this from here.”

Asquith went still.

“The father concerned deserves the opportunity to discipline his own son.”

Asquith wasn’t sure. Then again, if Eltenham was involved, and Hampton was the one to involve him, justice would be served. Perhaps not through the courts, but served.

Eltenham was not a man to let a slight slide, even if the slight came from his own son.

“I’ll agree,” Asquith said, “on one condition.”

Hampton waited.

“Preston believes he can locate a document that proves the crimes—a forged bond, in fact. I don’t want that document destroyed, nor returned to the family.”

Hampton met his eyes. “Insurance?”

“Safekeeping.” Willard would not be able to “rehabilitate” again. And he would not dare toy with anyone close to Asquith.

The silence stretched.

“You don’t trust the matter will be fully resolved,” Hampton said. It wasn’t an accusation.

“I trust your intentions entirely,” Asquith replied. “But experience with this gentleman has taught me to take care.”