Mr. Ruggles

Ruggles lives by collecting and trading in other people's secrets, and he dislikes Christopher Tietjens precisely because Christopher never gossips. Commissioned by Mark and old Mr. Tietjens to find out what Christopher is doing — and whether he needs money — he works the drawing rooms and holy-of-holies of English society with a libeller's zeal. He matters because his dossier is the machinery by which private life becomes public ruin, and because he believes, wrongly, that he controls the book in which the doomed are written down.