Page 21 of Rules for Ruin

“It’s not a problem in itself. The issue is that he’s set himself up as some manner of guardian at Compton’s gates. The night of the ball, he distinctly warned me off. That’s why I’m here today, to discover what’s to be done. Or, more to the point, what I’m permitted to do. For if I must get through him to bring down Compton, then Mr. Royce will need to be dealt with.”

“Then deal with him,” Nell said. “You’ve never had any difficulty before.”

“He’s not like the men I’ve met before,” Effie said. “He’s…I don’t know what he is.”

“Is he dangerous?” Nell asked.

Effie recalled the strangely detached look in Mr. Royce’s eyes. That cold way he had of surveying the room around him. Of surveying her. “I suspect so.”

“More dangerous than you are?”

Effie huffed. “I’m not so dangerous anymore.”

“Perhaps that’s the problem,” Nell said. “In all your efforts at refinement, you’ve forgotten who you are.”

Effie gave Nell a speaking look. “I’ve never forgotten who I am, or where I came from. It’s why Miss Corvus sent me away in the first place.”

“You’re forgetting it now.” Nell took Effie’s hand. She pressed it firmly. “You’re one of us.”

A rush of unexpected emotion caught Effie off her guard. “An Academy girl? It’s not an identity, Nell.”

“But it is! Far more than the facts of your parentage are. We none of us can be distilled to the circumstances of our birth.” Nell again squeezed Effie’s hand, taking the sting out of her words. “You’re too bitter, that’s the trouble. You persist in blaming Miss Corvus for the conditions that brought you here. And she’s accepted that blame—foolishly, I feel—in the mistaken belief that your anger would fuel you. Instead, all it’s done is cloud your judgment. It’s made you suspicious of everything you’ve learned. Perpetually dissatisfied, imagining there’s something better waiting just around the corner, if only you could be free of this place.”

A knot formed in Effie’s stomach. She hated that Nell could read her so easily.

“If you must be angry,” Nell said, “be angry at men like Lord Compton.”

Effie met Nell’s eyes. It was difficult to reconcile the picture Miss Corvus had painted of the viscount’s misdeeds with the gray-haired fatherly figure Effie had met at the ball. “What do you know about him?”

“I know of his opposition to reforming the women’s property law, and…I know he once callously destroyed the hopes and reputation of a vulnerable young lady.”

“Then it’s true, the things Miss Corvus told me?”

“Yes.” Releasing Effie’s hand, Nell stood from the bed. She limped to her desk. “I can’t be entirely certain, but…I suspect the young lady was Miss Corvus herself.”

Effie stared after her friend, stunned. “What?”

“It must have been decades ago,” Nell said. “Long before she started the school. Indeed, it may well be the reason she started it. Unless I’m mistaken, she went abroad for a time, her reputation in tatters, and came back quite another person. But she hasn’t forgotten what he did to her. And she won’t allow him to do the same to all women—to prevent us having our measure of security and independence in this world. It’s important someone stop him.”

Effie shook her head in reflexive disbelief. “How do you know all of that? Has Miss Corvus told you—”

“No. She keeps that part of herself a mystery. But since her illness has worsened, I’ve had to assume some of her duties. She was constrained to explain the fundamentals of the filing system in her study. I’ve seen things there which I daresay I was never meant to.”

“What things?”

“Old letters she wrote to her half brother, returned to her unread. They paint a damning picture. The rest of the tale I’ve pieced together myself.”

“Is it a very dreadful one?”

“As dreadful as it is commonplace. Men take advantage of women every day. The worst was that Miss Corvus had no one to defend or protect her. Only the same dissolute half brother who, from what I can discern, was all but complicit in Lord Compton’s crime. It was he who took the evidence away before she could use it. She said as much in one of her letters to him.”

“Her own brother betrayed her?” Effie was appalled.

Franc uttered a yip of complaint from across the room, interrupting their conversation. He had unwittingly wrapped his lead around the leg of the wardrobe. A frequent complaint of his. In Paris, he’d often tangled his lead on the cluttered furnishings in Madame Dalhousie’s apartment.

Effie had taught him a command for the purpose. “Faire le tour, Franc.”

The little poodle immediately obeyed, turning three times around the wardrobe leg in the opposite direction. His lead came free.