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.”