Page 5 of Rules for Ruin (The Crinoline Academy #1)

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Gabriel didn’t have a single residence in London. He had three altogether, each placed in locations strategic to his interests. There was the set of rooms he kept in the Rookery, above his betting shop. There were his lodgings by the docks. And there was his newly leased house in Sloane Street—a good-sized premises that had come furnished, and that kept Gabriel at the heart of his operations among the upper classes.

He didn’t spend more than a night or two at any given residence. He was a street rogue by birth, unused to having a home of his own, and bearing no attachment to any one place. His predilections were purely based on business.

Tonight, that business brought him to Sloane Street.

He’d staffed the house himself with people he could trust. His butler, Kilby, was chief among them. Born in the West Indies, Kilby had found his way to London in the service of a dissolute nobleman and from thence into the Rookery. He was discreet, loyal, and largely unshockable. Above all, he kept the household running smoothly.

Kilby opened the painted front door, admitting Gabriel into the gaslit hall. His face was dutifully blank as he took Gabriel’s hat, gloves, and overcoat. “Will you be requiring anything this evening, sir?”

“Privacy,” Gabriel said tersely. He headed for the stairs.

Kilby silently shut the door and locked it, uttering not another word. He and the others knew better than to badger Gabriel when he was in a foul mood. Only one among the small staff would dare.

Ollie O’Cleary was all of fifteen—scrawny, lank-haired, and notoriously incapable of holding his tongue. Newly elevated to the position of valet, he materialized in the hall within seconds of Gabriel’s arrival.

“You’re back early, Mr.Royce,” Ollie said. He trotted after Gabriel, up the central staircase and down the long corridor to Gabriel’s bedchamber.

It was a spacious room, sparsely furnished but comfortable, with a thick carpet, a carved four-poster bed, a low mahogany dressing bureau, and an attached bathing room with wood-paneled walls and a large, rolled-rim tub.

“How was the ball, sir?” Ollie asked, shutting the chamber door behind them. He quickly lit the oil lamps. “Did you meet those rich lords what’s going to help the Rookery?”

Gabriel stripped off his jacket. “No.”

He’d left the ball shortly after parting company with Miss Flite. There had been little point in remaining if Compton was only disposed to introduce Gabriel to aged lords and sirs. The men might well be rich, but the philosophies of Lord Trefusis, Sir Newton Cobble, and Lord Upton-Frye had been firmly entrenched in the past. They were entirely incapable of appreciating the changing landscape of London when it came to the poor and the working classes. Lord Upton-Frye hadn’t even been able to get over his aversion to trade.

It benefited those men to maintain the status quo. To keep everyone in their proper place, with none daring to upset the wealthy men’s gilded applecart.

Gabriel had a mind to do just that. To break off the wheels of that plump, golden cart entirely, and to smash all its perfect apples into the dirt.

One apple in particular.

He shrugged out of his waistcoat, tossing it onto the end of his bed. Crossing to his bureau, he unfasted his cuff links. His fingers lingered at the pulse point of his right wrist. He was, at once, vividly reminded of another of the difficulties that had plagued him this evening. A difficulty possessed of a lithe figure, with a generous bosom, and a perfect oval of a face, distinguished by elegantly sculpted cheeks, a lush, dusky rose mouth, and a pair of devastating blue eyes framed by thickly arching black brows.

Gabriel hadn’t recognized her for what she was when she’d entered the ballroom, but during those moonlit moments in the library, she had revealed herself to him in brilliant color.

“Perhaps I shall knock you down,” she’d said.

By God, but she’d been serious.

Ollie collected Gabriel’s discarded clothes. He took his new position seriously, despite his endless chatter. “But I thought as how you said they was gonna give you money for building new houses in St. Giles?”

“That was the plan.”

“Was?”

“I have another plan now.”

Ollie draped the coat and waistcoat over the leather-upholstered armchair beside the bed. “Whatever plan you come up with, Mr.Royce, it’s bound to be a good one. I’m keen to do my part.”

“You will,” Gabriel assured him. “And you’ll start at dawn tomorrow. I want you to follow someone.”

Ollie’s head jerked up. A flash of disappointment darkened his eyes. In his former position as a betting shop runner, he’d frequently been tasked with trailing people. “What about my promotion?”

Gabriel wasn’t unsympathetic. Naturally, the lad would rather be acting as a respectable servant than spying on strangers from behind tree trunks and lampposts. But needs must.

“It’s not permanent,” he said. “You’ll be done with the job within a week. After that, you can press all the trousers and brush all the top hats you want.”

Ollie’s brows knit with suspicion. “It ain’t another sporting fella with horses and such? Had the devil of a time keeping up with the last one.”

Gabriel inwardly grimaced at the unhappy reminder.

Two years ago, he’d sent Ollie to follow the nephew of another politician. That nephew had been a curricle-driving sporting gent in possession of secrets that could ruin his uncle’s career. Gabriel had hoped to use those secrets for his own benefit. He’d known even then it would be useful to have a politician in his corner. And the only way a man like Gabriel could gain such power was by foul means, not fair.

That first scheme had come to naught. The nephew in question had inoculated his uncle—and his family—by revealing his uncle’s secret to the world before Gabriel could act.

Fortunately, there was no danger of a similar outcome with Compton. His secret wasn’t an illicit love affair resulting in a crop of bastards. If what Gabriel knew about Compton were ever to get out, it wouldn’t only mean public scorn, it would mean the man’s complete and utter annihilation.

“Not a sporting gent this time,” Gabriel said. “It’s a lady.”

“What lady?” Ollie asked.

“Miss Flite.” Gabriel removed his shirt. The looking glass above his bureau reflected his image back at him in the lamplight. It wasn’t the face and figure of a gentleman. His features were too hard and hollow. His blue eyes too strangely pale. He appeared menacing, rather than modish.

Up to now, he’d preferred it that way. It was, after all, better to be feared than admired. But after this evening…

He ran a hand over the back of his neck. “I don’t know her given name.”

He’d been excoriating himself over that fact ever since she’d left the library. It didn’t seem right for him not to know. Not after he’d stared so deeply into her eyes. Not after he’d seen her. Truly seen her.

She may not be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but she was something in sheep’s clothing. An adventuress, he suspected. No other lady could have held his gaze so steadily, could have removed his hand from her throat and pressed his pulse, raising the stakes of his impudent touch with an impudent touch of her own.

He hadn’t expected it.

Nor had he expected his physical response.

“Shall we compare racing pulses?” he’d asked her.

Good thing they hadn’t. He’d have lost the contest spectacularly. His normally cold heart had been pumping at an extraordinary rate.

“How will I find her?” Ollie asked.

“She’s staying with Lady Belwood in Brook Street.”

“Not Mayfair again.” Ollie’s expression soured, recalling his fruitless pursuit of the sporting gentlemen. That fellow had also boasted a Mayfair address. “You sure she don’t drive a curricle?”

Gabriel shot the boy an ominous look. “Curricle or no, starting tomorrow morning, you’ll be her shadow. I want to know where she goes and who she sees.”

“Is that all, Mr.Royce?”

“For now.”

“What about them other gents?” Ollie wondered as he collected Gabriel’s shirt. “The viscount and his rich friends?”

A muscle ticked in Gabriel’s jaw. “I’ll deal with them myself.”

· · ·

The following morning, Gabriel set out to do just that.

It wouldn’t serve his interests to ruin Compton outright. What Gabriel required was a hint of a threat. Something only Compton would comprehend, and that would serve to shock him back into line.

There was only one gentleman Gabriel could trust with the task.

Miles Quincey was the editor of the London Courant , a smallish newspaper with offices in Fleet Street. It didn’t have the circulation of the Times or the Morning Post , and it wasn’t as popular as the Guardian , but Gabriel knew for a fact that fashionable people read it.

The Courant had made a name for itself in the late 1850s, exposing abuses in private asylums. In the years since, it had published several other highly regarded exposés on affairs both foreign and domestic. But the denizens of Mayfair didn’t read the Courant for its serious subjects. They read it for its uncannily accurate society column. It was that which kept the paper in business—a fact that infuriated the solemn, stone-faced Miles to no end.

“What the devil does that even mean?” he asked Gabriel.

Miles’s office was located at the end of a short hall on the second floor of the paper. Cluttered bookcases lined the wall behind an equally cluttered desk. Miles was seated behind it in his shirtsleeves, ink stains on his fingers and a pen in his hand. He’d been working on editing an article when Gabriel had interrupted him.

Straight-backed wooden chairs were arrayed opposite him, as though he’d just ended a meeting with his staff. A single tall window faced the busy street below. There was a portly black cat with golden eyes perched on the sill, idly swishing its tail.

Gabriel strolled across the office to give the complacent little beast a scratch. He didn’t know its name. Miles had too many felines to keep count of. They’d always been his weakness. “What does it matter?” Gabriel asked in return. “It’s a few sentences in your society column, not the front page of the paper.”

“It matters.” Miles sat back in his chair, frowning. He was a taller man than Gabriel, dark-haired and clean-shaven, with the solemn face and lean figure of an ascetic. “That column can be relied on for its accuracy. If I start reporting nonsense—”

“The circulation of the Courant will go down exactly zero percent.” Gabriel turned away from the cat to address his friend. “By the by, how are all those ladies’ maids and valets on your payroll? Brought you any exciting gossip lately?”

Miles’s expression was completely inscrutable. “What you’re suggesting would be a reprehensible breach of courtesy, not to mention journalistic malpractice.”

“I’m to believe that society scribe of yours finds out the gentry’s secrets by other means?”

“Yes. It’s called reporting. Now, if you’re quite finished impugning my paper and my staff—”

“I don’t judge.”

“How reassuring, coming from a man who puts his spies in private residences all over the city.”

Gabriel sank down in one of the chairs across from Miles with an unapologetic smile. “We can’t all be journalists.”

“What is it you’re playing at, Gabriel?” Miles asked. “We’re not two lads in St. Giles anymore, conspiring to steal apples from the costermonger. Those days are long past. You’ve since gone your way and I’ve gone mine.”

It was an apt assessment of their friendship. Though Miles had spent most of his youth in the Rookery, his mother, Rose, had ultimately found a way to get him out. She’d been a devout, hardworking woman, both whip-smart and determined, with the soul of an academic and the mind of a social reformer.

Gabriel had no mother of his own. None he’d ever known. But Rose Quincey had been something like a mother to him. She had frequently given him shelter as a boy. She’d even taught him to read—a kindness that had paid dividends toward Gabriel’s future success.

Rose’s aspirations for her own son had been that much greater. On Miles’s thirteenth birthday, she had arranged an apprenticeship for him with a printer in the West Country. It was there Miles had resided for the remainder of his childhood. He’d finally returned to London years later, a sober, educated gentleman determined to become a newspaperman.

He had come to see Gabriel then, the friendship of their youth unforgotten. As boys, they’d been as close as brothers. But there was no denying their differences as men. They had little in common anymore, save for memories of their past.

“I told you when I came to work at the Courant that I wouldn’t permit you to make use of it,” Miles reminded him.

“Always so cynical,” Gabriel said. “It’s not as if I’m asking you to divulge the secrets of the nation.”

“No, only that I print some dross about a man named Wingard who’s rumored to be in possession of important papers.” Miles tossed aside his pen in a rare burst of temper. “Who the hell is Wingard? And what papers? And why should anyone care?”

Gabriel had no intention of enmeshing straitlaced Miles in his web any more than was necessary. And to tell him the tale would be to ensnare him utterly. No one except Compton need know about that fateful day Tobias Wingard had stumbled into Gabriel’s betting shop, wasting with fever and desperate for coin to pay his debts.

Why Wingard hadn’t gone to Compton directly, Gabriel could only guess. He suspected it was because the two men’s lives had diverged so dramatically after their joint venture in defrauding Wingard’s vulnerable half sister.

Compton had used his part of the fortune they’d stolen to set himself up in London as a gentleman of means. There, he’d married a wealthy heiress, biding his time in luxury until his father and older brother had died and he’d inherited the title. From thence, a career in politics, and a lofty position in society, his slate wiped clean of any trace of the evil he had done.

Wingard had, meanwhile, squandered his portion of the fortune on gaming. Addicted to drink and drug, and ailing from a rotting liver, he’d had no position in society to speak of. No friends or connections he might turn to in his time of need. All he’d had were a few damning documents, and a handful of mightily compromising letters Compton had penned to Wingard’s half sister.

You must trust me to manage the funds for you, my sweet , Compton had written in one of them. Such things are a husband’s privilege. As we are to be married, and the right will soon be mine by law, there can be no objections in it, only the easing of a burden which I know has weighed too heavily on your delicate shoulders since the loss of your estimable father.

The letters had been stained with Wingard’s sister’s tears. To hear Wingard tell it, Compton had had everything from the girl—her fortune, her reputation, her heart. What had become of her afterward, Wingard hadn’t known. Gone abroad, he’d surmised, very probably determined to make an end of herself.

As for Wingard himself—

Gabriel stood. “Wingard’s dead. I have the papers. And only one man will care. That’s more than enough for me.” He pressed Miles’s shoulder hard before taking his leave. “Print it, old friend. And if anyone comes inquiring, send them to me.”