I suppose it is inevitable. If two attractive unmarried ladies decide to run a boarding house, specialising in providing homely accommodation for single men; there will be gossip.

All the more so when the aforementioned ladies seemed to have plenty of time to lean out of the windows looking attractive and exchanging cheerful banter with passers-by.

Still to be honest they might have escaped my notice, after all Port Naain is a large city. But Raswil Muldecker the usurer brought the situation to my notice. His was not the outrage of a man worried about the damage loose morals might do to society; his was a more specific outrage. He had a number of clerks, men of undoubted integrity. Single and of sober habit they would live in respectable boarding houses. But over the previous months he’d noticed a worrying trend. One of his clerks would move into the ‘Home…