Page 15 of Rules for Ruin (The Crinoline Academy #1)

13

May was derby month and, with Epsom drawing closer, Gabriel had his hands full at the betting shop. It was there he could be found the day after the musicale, laying odds, calculating wins and losses, and dealing with the endless procession of men crowding the floor to examine the lists.

There was no help for it. Business must come first. But even as Gabriel dealt with the chaos that accompanied the spring racing meets, Effie Flite was never far from his mind.

On returning from his house in Sloane Street that morning, he summoned Bill Walsh to his office. Walsh was, like Murphy, one of Gabriel’s chief enforcers—a big, ugly bruiser of a fellow, accustomed to using his fists. But unlike Murphy, Walsh possessed a modicum of intelligence.

“I have a job for you,” Gabriel said from behind his desk, barely looking up from calculating figures in his ledger. “And I want no violence, only results.”

“Anything, Mr.Royce,” Walsh replied.

“Go to Church Lane. Go to Devil’s Acre. Find me a fair-haired woman by the name of Grace who lived above a rag-and-bone shop in the Rookery seventeen or eighteen years ago. If you can’t discover her outright, then find someone who remembers her. When you do, bring them to me.”

“Is that all, sir?”

Gabriel flicked him a cool glance through the lenses of his round, gold-rimmed spectacles. “For now.”

Effie had claimed that this Grace person was someone her family had known long ago. A servant, Gabriel suspected, or some old retainer whose fate was a matter of sentiment. Regardless of the person’s status, she was important enough that Effie had risked a visit to the Rookery to find her. Important enough that Effie had asked Gabriel for help.

He recalled the queer, lost look in her eyes that day when he’d told her the slum had been cleared and its residents scattered to the four winds. Her face had fallen and her footsteps had faltered. She’d stared about the alley with a vague expression of devastation.

This Grace woman meant something to Effie. She may not be a key in herself, but if she could provide the smallest insight into Effie’s past, or offer any illumination on her present aims, Gabriel planned to find her. And he intended to find her first.

It wasn’t the only action Gabriel had contemplated after his and Effie’s interlude in the garden. He’d seriously considered having her followed for a second time, if not by Ollie or Walsh, then by another of his men. He’d nearly done it, too, for no other reason than to ensure her safety. The devil only knew what mischief she might be getting herself into. Another venture into Compton’s bedchamber? Another balcony? Another roof, by God?

Gabriel had ultimately abandoned the idea. What would have been the point in having her followed again? She’d spied Ollie quickly enough. It stood to reason that she’d spot anyone else Gabriel sent just as easily.

In any event, the odds she’d ricocheted straight from her disastrous near miss on Compton’s terrace to another reckless attempt at whatever it was she was doing were slim to nothing. It had been—what? All of twelve hours since he’d rescued her? Hardly time to fall victim to another mishap.

Chances were, she was safe in Brook Street, still recovering from the episode at Compton’s. Either that or she was occupied with some tedious society event. The season was packed to bursting with balls, routs, picnics, and every other variety of fashionable party.

Gabriel didn’t like to think of her in company with the rich, blue-blooded gentlemen that populated Compton’s world. Still, it was some consolation to know she was out of danger as he attended to shop business.

He would find her in the coming days to have that talk he’d promised her. Tomorrow or the day after, perhaps. Then, he could confront her rationally, logically, without the vivid memory of that blasted kiss seeping in to rob him of his senses.

Until then, diversion was what he needed, and the betting shop offered plenty of it.

He was still there hours later, coatless and rumpled in the main room, discussing the lists with Murphy, when Miles Quincey surprised him with a visit.

Gabriel’s mouth curved into a smile to see his old friend. “Miles. Don’t say you’re looking to place a wager?”

Miles stood apart from the rough and unshaven fellows who crowded the shop. He’d never approved of the turn Gabriel’s life had taken. Indeed, clad all in black, with a frown darkening his brow, he looked more like a disapproving clergyman than an intrepid newspaperman known for employing daring methods to get his stories.

“I never wager with my money,” Miles said.

“Only with your life, is that it?” Gabriel was but half in jest. Despite appearances, Miles was no bookish, untried gentleman. He had been quite lethal in their youth, and even beyond that, if the tales about his adventures abroad held any truth.

“Rarely even that anymore,” Miles said. “May I have a word with you outside?”

Gabriel slapped Murphy on his brawny arm, dismissing him as he joined his friend. “The air inside not refined enough for you?” he asked, accompanying Miles to the alley. “You’ll find it worse out here.”

“It’s not fresh air I want, but privacy.” Miles peered up at the sagging buildings that lined the alley. One stood out among them. Unlike its dilapidated and decaying brethren, it showed signs of having lately been repaired. “Tindall’s Lodging House has a new roof, I see.”

“It needed one. There are more families living there now.”

“You paid for it, I gather.”

“I wouldn’t have had to if anyone else gave a damn.”

Miles walked with Gabriel to the end of the alley. “I understand you’re attempting to find a few who will.”

Gabriel flashed him a look.

“My sources tell me you’ve lately been in society, meeting with Lord Compton and Lord Haverford,” Miles said.

“Your sources,” Gabriel repeated flatly. “Do you have spies in Viscount Compton’s house, too?” Even Gabriel hadn’t gone that far.

“I’ve told you. I don’t need to resort to spies. But I do have my ways of learning things.” Miles returned his look. “Am I wrong?”

“I did speak to them both about reforming the Rookery,” Gabriel said. He relayed the substance of his conversation with the two men.

Miles didn’t appear impressed by Gabriel’s efforts. “You do realize that, if they rebuild the Rookery, it will no longer be the Rookery. Once there’s decent housing and adequate plumbing, a better class of people will move in. The ones you’re trying to save will end up even worse off than they are now.”

Gabriel regarded his friend without expression. “And here I thought you were the more optimistic of the two of us.”

“I would be if it were anything else.” Miles’s expression was somber. “What you’re trying to perform is akin to those fables my mother used to read to us from that old mythology book of hers. The one with Sisyphus.”

Gabriel’s brows lowered. “That poor chap with the boulder?”

“Exactly. Always attempting, never succeeding. You should take a lesson from it.”

Gabriel had never much liked morality lessons. “There are more improvements hereabouts than a new roof on a lodging house.”

“Yes, you mentioned them last time I came. There’s a school, isn’t there? Run by the publican’s widow?”

“She’s teaching the children to read, just as your mother taught us.”

“It’s admirable,” Miles said. “Still…you’ve set yourself an impossible task. If you do manage to accomplish sweeping change, it will sweep those people away in the bargain. You’d do better to chuck the place in altogether and start somewhere new. You surely have the coin now to set yourself up.”

Gabriel walked alongside his friend as they doubled back toward the betting shop. His already perilous mood was souring at a rapid rate.

Miles had been gone from the Rookery too long to ever understand. And even if he’d remained there as a lad instead of going to take up his apprenticeship, he’d still fail to grasp it. He’d had a mother. A family. An identity of his own.

Gabriel’s identity had, by contrast, been knitted entirely from the soiled and bloody threads of the slum. A borrowed slum at that. He hadn’t even been born here. He was a usurper. A cuckoo in the nest. What power he wielded here had been taken, not given to him by birth. Without it, he had nothing. He was nothing.

“Set myself up as what?” he asked in a voice of deceptive calm.

“I wouldn’t presume to tell you. All I know is that every time I see you, more of the life has gone from your eyes.”

Gabriel didn’t reply. He knew what he was. Knew what he saw in his shaving glass each morning. The hollowness. The emptiness. Miles wasn’t wrong. That didn’t mean Gabriel had to admit it to him.

“Go to that house of yours in Sloane Street,” Miles advised. “Find yourself a wife. Exert yourself toward teaching your own children to read. Generational change is the only kind of change we have any control over. The rest…” His gaze drifted over the Rookery. He shook his head. “This place killed my mother. It kills everyone in it eventually, if not from dissipation and disease, then from outright despair. Better it should shrink away to nothing, than have you attempt to revive it.”

Gabriel stopped outside of his betting shop. There was a guard on the door—a big brute of a man named Digby. He was still admitting men with regularity. “Is this what brought you here?” Gabriel asked Miles. “You felt the need to deliver a sermon? A waste of your time, I should’ve thought.”

Miles sighed. “No. That isn’t why I’m here. I came for another reason. You said to tell you if anyone came asking after those lines about Wingard in the Courant .”

Gabriel gave him a sharp look. “Someone came?”

It made no sense. Why the hell would Compton send someone inquiring when he already knew Gabriel was behind the threat?

“They did,” Miles said. “Or rather she did.”

Gabriel stilled. “She?”

“A woman. A lady, as it were. She visited the Courant not an hour ago. She had a little black poodle with her. My clerk made the mistake of admitting them into my office. My cats—”

“Never mind your bloody cats. What did the lady want?”

“The obvious. She wanted to know where I obtained my information. Asked if I knew how she could contact this Wingard fellow’s family. Claimed he was a relation of hers.”

Gabriel’s blood went cold as ice. This was a possibility he hadn’t considered, that Effie was connected in some way to Compton’s past. Not with Compton alone, but with Wingard and the fraud the two men had perpetrated against Wingard’s sister. “What the devil did you tell her?”

“What could I tell her? That dog of hers had my cats on the run. There was so much hissing and spitting it was all I could do to keep my office from being destroyed. I managed to get her out the door with the help of my clerk, muttering something about protecting my sources, and then—”

“And then you came here,” Gabriel concluded. His gaze shot to the entrance and exit of the alleyway. He half expected to see Effie emerge, triumphant, having successfully used Miles to make the connection between Wingard, Compton, and Gabriel. “Bloody fool. Did it not occur to you that you might have been followed?”

“By whom?”

“By her ,” Gabriel said.

“The lady with the poodle?” Miles looked at Gabriel as though he’d gone insane. “Let me guess, she and her little dog are a pair of dangerous villains?”

Gabriel didn’t know about the villainous aspect to Effie Flite, but he was beginning to suspect that dangerous was precisely what she was. If she was looking through Compton’s things, if she was asking about Wingard, she could only be after the documents that proved the two men’s crime.

Documents that Gabriel currently had under triple lock and key.

Was she truly a relation of Wingard and his ill-fated sister? If she was, her search could have but one purpose. She must want to bring Compton to justice. Little did she realize that she’d destroy Gabriel in the bargain. Without Compton’s support, neither Gabriel nor the Rookery had any future at all, only an unchecked free fall toward complete obliteration.

Gabriel stalked back to his shop. He had thought his and Effie’s positions at odds before, but this revelation put them squarely on opposite sides of the battlefield. Their interests were that diametrically opposed. There would be no reconciling them.

Miles followed after him. “Where are you going?”

“To fetch my coat,” Gabriel snarled. “And then to bleeding Mayfair.”