“What is it you’re playing at, Gabriel?” Miles asked. “We’re not two lads in St. Giles anymore, conspiring to steal apples from the costermonger. Those days are long past. You’ve since gone your way and I’ve gone mine.”

It was an apt assessment of their friendship. Though Miles had spent most of his youth in the Rookery, his mother, Rose, had ultimately found a way to get him out. She’d been a devout, hardworking woman, both whip-smart and determined, with the soul of an academic and the mind of a social reformer.

Gabriel had no mother of his own. None he’d ever known. But Rose Quincey had been something like a mother to him. She had frequently given him shelter as a boy. She’d even taught him to read—a kindness that had paid dividends toward Gabriel’s future success.

Rose’s aspirations for her own son had been that much greater. On Miles’s thirteenth birthday, she had arranged an apprenticeship for him with a printer in the West Country. It was there Miles had resided for the remainder of his childhood. He’d finally returned to London years later, a sober, educated gentleman determined to become a newspaperman.

He had come to see Gabriel then, the friendship of their youth unforgotten. As boys, they’d been as close as brothers. But there was no denying their differences as men. They had little in common anymore, save for memories of their past.

“I told you when I came to work at the Courant that I wouldn’t permit you to make use of it,” Miles reminded him.

“Always so cynical,” Gabriel said. “It’s not as if I’m asking you to divulge the secrets of the nation.”

“No, only that I print some dross about a man named Wingard who’s rumored to be in possession of important papers.” Miles tossed aside his pen in a rare burst of temper. “Who the hell is Wingard? And what papers? And why should anyone care?”

Gabriel had no intention of enmeshing straitlaced Miles in his web any more than was necessary. And to tell him the tale would be to ensnare him utterly. No one except Compton need know about that fateful day Tobias Wingard had stumbled into Gabriel’s betting shop, wasting with fever and desperate for coin to pay his debts.

Why Wingard hadn’t gone to Compton directly, Gabriel could only guess. He suspected it was because the two men’s lives had diverged so dramatically after their joint venture in defrauding Wingard’s vulnerable half sister.