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?”