The Romance Promoters

A Gilded-Age labyrinth of marble corridors and gaslight whispers, The Romance Promoters drapes its ironies in velvet: Quentard Lorris, colossus of capital, strings purse-strings like trip-wires around his guileless heiress Betty, then looses a pack of bespoke wolves—trustees in morning coats, a secretary who signs cheques the way card-sharps palm aces, a Continental count whose titles are as rented as his diamonds. Enter Todfield King, civil engineer, sleeves rolled like a working stiff, blueprints under one arm and a stubborn moral compass in his breast pocket; he arrives to drain swamps and instead finds himself neck-deep in a swamp of fiduciary sin. Rumours are seeded, scaffolding collapses, a midnight abduction clatters across moonlit balustrades, and only after fists, vows and a confession of paternal theater does the curtain fall on a marriage that was, in truth, the final engineered structure—its foundations tested not by soil but by the tremors of greed.