The Money Changers

In the chiaroscuro of a city whose gas lamps flicker like dying consciences, Lucy Hegan—saint of the slums, veiled in white idealism—moves through cobblestone corridors where the air is thick with ether and the sighs of the forgotten. Her betrothed, Hugh Gordon, glides beside her in patent-leather respectability, his smile a marble façade behind which whole dynasties of vice are franchised: opium dens that bloom like nightshade in the Chinese quarter, and white-slave auctions where innocence is weighed by the ounce. Into this cathedral of shadows strides Allan Martin, ink still wet on his fingertips, chasing the acrid perfume of morphine trails until he collides with Lucy’s radiance and is instantly scorched. Between them stands Monk Mullen, reformed pickpocket turned guardian angel, clutching a sheaf of ledgers that read like a hymn to human perdition—names, ships, girls, and tinctures—all tolling beneath Gordon’s signet. When the hour of reckoning clangs, it is not virtue but betrayal that unsheathes the blade: Ling Choo Fang, loyal dragon turned Prometheus, drives steel through the master he once served, and the tyrant’s blood spatters across the contracts of ownership, dissolving them into mere crimson ink. Dawn finds Lucy’s veil lifted by a humbler hand, the settlement house bell ringing in counterpoint to the pressroom’s drums, while in the alleyways the last wisps of smoke curl like question marks over whether any savior can truly be solvent in the economy of sin.