Page 57 of Rules for Ruin

“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—”