Page 8 of Rules for Ruin

Compton thrust his checkbook back into the desk drawer. He slammed the drawer shut. “Haven’t the good people of this city already done enough to clean up St. Giles? And succeeded, too. The slum is all but eradicated.”

It was a common misconception among the well-to-do. St. Giles was located in the heart of fashionable London, surrounded on all sides by the wealthiest communities. Many years prior, part of the slum had been cleared away to make room for the construction of New Oxford Street. But the wretches who had formerly occupied those long-removed lodging houses, gin shops, and prostitutes’ hovels hadn’t miraculously vanished into thin air. They had merely been pressed back into an even smaller area, the squalor of their living conditions now hidden from greater public view.

“Just because you can’t see us anymore, doesn’t mean we ceased existing,” Gabriel said. “The people of the Rookery are still there—only now they’re crowded one hundred to a cellar.”

Disgust crossed Compton’s face. “Such filth and depravity. I curse the day Tobias Wingard ever found his way there.”

“But he did find his way there,” Gabriel said. “And straight into my betting shop. Quite an impressive stack of papers he had with him, too.”

Compton flinched at the reminder. “Very well,” he said, coming forward. “I shall do what I can for you.” He stopped in front of Gabriel. “But I warn you, Royce. If you at any time expose me to even a hint of impropriety—”

“You’re warning me?” Gabriel took a step toward the viscount, bringing them face-to-face.

This time Compton held his ground. “Let it be mutual destruction, then.”

Gabriel met the viscount’s threat with a fleeting smile. “Don’t flatter yourself. You might destroy my business, but you could never destroy me. Street rats always survive, one way or another. While fine lords like you—” He gave a humorless chuckle. “There won’t be much welcome for Lord Solomon in Whitehall, will there, not once proven accusations of fraud are hung round his neck.”

The color drained from Compton’s face. “How dare you mention such despicable slander in my home, where my wife, or one of my servants might—”

“Rest easy, my lord.” Gabriel slapped him hard on the back. “I’ve no intention of speaking a word of it.” Again, he gestured for Compton to precede him. “Not so long as you behave.”

Compton glared at him with a flicker of unvarnished hatred before, at last, grudgingly opening the library door. Gabriel had him by the throat and Compton knew it.

Gabriel had no intention of letting him go, not now, nor at any point in future. The viscount’s support was too valuable. More valuable yet than Gabriel was willing to admit to the man. A politician in one’s pocket was a precious thing. It was in Gabriel’s interest that Compton’s reputation remained unblemished and intact. The survival of the Rookery depended on it, and Gabriel’s survival with it. There was no separating the two.

Together, he and Compton passed from the library to the house’s opulent marble-tiled entry hall. A sweeping Italianate staircase led to the first-floor ballroom above. Gabriel climbed the steps alongside his reluctant host.

Two young ladies in full-skirted pastel silk dresses passed them on the ascent. Seeing Gabriel, they blushed and giggled behind their fans, quickening their pace down the stairs. A balding manservant in a plain black suit followed not far behind them. The butler, Gabriel surmised. He was a brawny chap, and one who (judging by the crooked lump masquerading as his nose) wasn’t opposed to physical violence.

It was a good thing it had been a pliable young footman who had opened the door when Gabriel had come calling this evening and not this sinister-looking fellow. The outcome might have been very different.

“Do you require assistance, my lord?” the butler asked Compton.

“It’s no matter, Parker,” Compton said without breaking his stride. “A late-coming guest. I shall introduce him to the others myself.”

Parker fixed Gabriel with a suspicious frown as he passed.

Gabriel offered the man a sardonic wink in reply.

Like recognized like. It was a tenet Gabriel had never failed to see proven true, and one that had helped him tremendously in his rise from the slums. He’d learned to recognize a fellow wolf in lamb’s clothing.

The butler was one of them.

So was Compton.

Yes, despite the pomp and the pageantry, and the milk-faced young misses giggling behind their fans, Gabriel had every reason to feel at home here.

Upstairs, the ballroom’s entrance was marked by two towering marble columns. Footmen flanked the opened doors. They bowed to Gabriel and Compton as they entered.

There were too many couples dancing to count. They moved over the polished wood floor to the strains of the music in a twirl of tailcoats and impossibly wide ruffled skirts, the ladies’ jewels shining in the blaze of light produced from the gas wall sconces and the twin crystal gasoliers.

Compton guided Gabriel along the edge of the room, where spectators lined the walls, both sitting and standing. “That’s Lord Trefusis,” he said, jerking his chin in the direction of an elderly man seated by the bank of green velvet–draped windows. “A charitable gentleman by all accounts. His estates are in Northumberland. And that gentleman, there by the fern, is Sir Newton Cobble, a man of property from Cornwall.”

Gabriel registered the two men with immediate skepticism. Aged country gentlemen were something less than the rich London progressives he’d envisioned rallying to his cause.

Compton pointed out another fellow, even older than the first two. “That gentleman with the ear trumpet is Lord Upton-Frye, a Yorkshire baron of good family. If it’s alms for the poor you’re after, he’s the one to speak with.” He glanced back at Gabriel with barely veiled contempt. “Well, sir? Which of them shall I introduce you to? I presume they are all of them strangers.”

Gabriel coolly returned the viscount’s gaze. After their confrontation in the library, he had assumed Compton would fall into line. Instead, the viscount believed he could take Gabriel for a fool. Why else would he be attempting to fob him off on doddering men of little influence, rather than introducing him to those gentlemen with actual power?