A Crimson Warning

37

Mr. Barnes looked genuinely pleased to see us. He ushered us into his office in Westminster, offered us tea, and fluffed the cushion on my chair before he would let me sit down.

“Do you know, Lady Emily, I think you’ve begun to have a real impact on private discourse about women’s rights?” He gave me tea even though I’d refused the offer. “Not public discourse, yet, but one must start somewhere. I had a very prominent Conservative in here yesterday who brought up the subject to me. He’s not willing to support your agenda, of course, but just the fact that’s he’s talking is a real step forward.”

“Thank you, Mr. Barnes,” I said. “It’s important work.”

“It is,” he said. “And I’m rather impressed with the strategy you employed. I know Lady Carlisle well, and I know what the Women’s Liberal Federation has done in the past. Your idea of working on the men with the most open minds was a stroke of genius.”

“How did you know that’s what I’d done?”

“It was obvious to anyone paying attention. A brilliant move. They’re hardly aware of what you’re up to.” His desk was a model of organization, everything arranged in perfect right angles. Except his pen, which he straightened. “But you didn’t come here to discuss this, I don’t think? Has something happened?”

“You know the answer to that,” Colin said.

“You, too?” he asked, shaking his head. “This paint is like a curse. When will the monster stop?”

“I don’t know,” Colin said. “Why don’t you tell us?”

“Forgive me,” he said. “I don’t quite—”

Colin rose to his feet. “There will be no forgiveness, Barnes. What you’ve done is despicable.” He tossed the papers we’d brought from the museum onto the desk. Barnes’s face froze.

“Dillman.” He sat up very straight in his chair.

“Foster is your friend,” Colin said. “Why did you want to destroy him?”

Mr. Barnes remained very still. “No, you misunderstand completely. I would never destroy him. I’ve made him what he is.”

Colin picked up the papers and waved them in his face. “You have ruined him with corruption and rot. How did you think he would survive this?”

“He’ll never have to.”

“He’ll have to now,” I said. “I, for one, am not going to see this buried.”

“Foster doesn’t know anything about it,” Mr. Barnes said. “You can’t condemn him for it.”

“What do you think will happen when it’s all public?” I asked. “People aren’t going to believe he’s so naïve as you suggest.”

“Everything I have done is to ensure this stays quiet and unknown,” Mr. Barnes said.

“That’s a lie,” Colin said. “You’re the one who orchestrated it. All of it. It’s right here.” He flung the papers back onto the desk.

“If I hadn’t done all this, he wouldn’t have even a third of the power he does now.”

“So, I’m to believe you’re a public servant, is that it?” Colin was leaning forward, across the desk now. “What is your game, Barnes?”

Mr. Barnes clasped his hands, laid them on his lap, and said nothing.

“All this destruction. All this hatred. Where does it come from?” Colin was almost shouting. Then he lowered his voice. “You’re done now, you know that.”

“Stop,” I said. “The hatred. I know where it comes from. You’re more refined than most gentlemen, Mr. Barnes, and far more intelligent. Your manners are impeccable. You’re witty and considerate. Your fortune is nothing to sniff at. And yet, they’re not going to accept you, are they? Not all the way?”

He looked down.

“They invite you to their houses and let you dance with their daughters, but they don’t want you to marry them. Not really, even if Ivy can manage to find the youngest daughter of six with parents desperate to see her married. They’re happy to listen to your ideas—and probably to present them as their own. But they won’t let you in Parliament, won’t give you credit for any of the myriad initiatives you’ve set in motion.”

Now I stood up. “You’re not the sort of man who’s content to sit in the background, yet you’ve no choice but to accept it as your lot. Because your father wasn’t English. And half-English isn’t enough, not when it comes from your mother’s side.”

“Stop it,” he said. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

“They must have brutalized you at school, punished you for the accident of your birth—it was something for which they could never forgive you. But the further you went—to university and then here—the more you learned about their own shortcomings. They were dishonest and in debt and stupid and cruel. They didn’t value loyalty. But most of all, they didn’t care in private about the values they held so dear in public.”

“Stop!”

“And it didn’t matter for them, did it?” I asked. “Because while the accident of your birth can’t be forgiven, the accident of theirs guarantees them protection from all their hypocrisy. How could you be anything but angry?”

Now he started to wilt. His shoulders slumped, but he was still looking at the floor.

“So what happened?” Colin asked, pushing his head up and forcing him to meet his stare. “How did Dillman find you out?”

He didn’t answer. Colin shook him.

“How did he find you out?”

“I don’t know exactly,” he said. “He’d done some work for me—in one of the elections. I was very careful, I thought, to make sure no single person had a large-enough portion of the entire task to be able to identify what I was doing. But Dillman was curious. Started putting pieces together. I’ve been much more careful when picking associates since then.”

“I’ve met some of your associates,” I said, thinking of Dobson and Florence. “You’re exploiting them and laying the blame at Mr. Foster’s feet.”

“Dobson and Florence are being looked after.”

“By sending them to that heinous factory?” I asked. “They can’t even communicate with anyone else who lives there.”

“I use my associates once or twice, and have to be sure they’re individuals who cannot expose me. In this case, it made sense to turn to people already in my employ.”

“So you are behind the factory?” I asked.

“It’s Foster’s in name only,” he said. “When the deaf couple came to Majors, I told him to give them a place. They, and another worker who can’t hear, helped me with the paint and some other matters, and I planned that in a year or so, when enough time had passed to draw no suspicion, I would send them somewhere safe and comfortable. I had a nanny whose son was deaf and saw how she was able to communicate with him. The experience made it easy for me to do the same with them. There’s a school in France that could teach them sign language that would be understood more widely than the crude method I use with them. By getting them to France and providing them with some sort of education, I’m helping them survive in a world extremely cruel to their sort.”

“So you’re helping them, are you?” Colin asked. “Is that what you call it? So why did Dillman choose to go after you? Is he opposed to the fair treatment of the infirm?”

“Because—and I had no way of knowing this—one of the elections I helped push through destroyed his uncle’s career. Which in turn broke his mother’s heart. She died the following year, and he set off on a course to find out what had happened. The uncle had been a favorite to win, you see. But I’m very persuasive. It was early on in my role in the game, and I knew the right sort of unflattering information about a gent can compromise his political chances in an instant.”

“I remember that election,” Colin said. “Please refrain from speaking in front of my wife about the scandal you caused.”

“These little things can poison a person against you forever,” he said. “Dillman made it his private mission to destroy me. I didn’t even know he was trying. Not until he came to me.”

“This doesn’t explain why you were preparing to destroy the man you claim as your dearest friend,” Colin said.

“I would never do that,” Mr. Barnes said. “Can’t you see?”

“I see, Mr. Barnes,” I said. “It was your only way to real power. You get Mr. Foster made prime minister, and then you show him what you’ve done. He has two choices: let you be the power behind the throne, so to speak, or resign in disgrace after you expose your evidence.”

“I’d always wanted to be prime minister,” he said, his voice soft. “It was a crushing blow when I was eleven and my grandfather told me it could never happen. I was brought up to love this country, to serve it. But when I got here, I wasn’t allowed to do that.”

“So instead, you plot to betray your friend and tell yourself it’s all right because you have the country’s best interest at heart?” Colin spoke in a low tone, his words measured. He was angry. “And when you’re in danger of being exposed, you kill the man who dares try to stop you?”

“I didn’t want to kill him.”

“Irrelevant.” Colin did not take his eyes from the man’s face. “When you started to worry that wasn’t enough, that you might still be exposed, you kidnapped his fiancée and murdered her, too.” He picked the papers back up off the desk, rolled them up, and handed them to me.

Mr. Barnes dropped his head into his hands. “I never meant to hurt Miss Dalton,” he said. “I only wanted to get hold of the evidence Dillman had against me. She refused to help me find it. And when it became clear to me that no one else was going to find it, either, what choice did I have? There was no other way to secure her silence.”

“We found the evidence,” I said. “So you murdered her for nothing.”

“I’m all too well aware of that,” he said. “It was a misstep.”

“What about the paint?” I asked. “Didn’t it further increase your risk of exposure?”

“It was diversionary,” he said, meeting my eyes for the first time since we’d accused him. “It took the attention off Dillman altogether. No one at Scotland Yard spent much time looking into his connections, not once my campaign got under way.”

“You have destroyed so many lives,” I said.

“I only exposed sins these people decided to commit,” he said. “Now they have to live like I do—trapped by their pasts. At least they chose theirs.”

“That doesn’t make it right,” Colin said. “I’d always liked you, Barnes. I thought you were better than most of the louts in society. I never would have guessed someone like you—whom I held in such high esteem—could improve my opinion of them. I’m disappointed.”

“I’m sorry,” Mr. Barnes said. “It was my only chance. I had to try.”

“No, you didn’t.” Colin crossed his arms. “I’ll take you to Scotland Yard and we’ll get the rest of this settled.”

“Please, I can’t face it,” Mr. Barnes said. “All the laughing, the mocking. I know what they’ll say—that this is what they expected from someone like me.” He looked Colin straight in the face. “Could you not give me a moment?”

“Absolutely not. You will stand like a gentleman and face what you have done.”

Mr. Barnes nodded. Sweat glistened on his forehead. “May I at least write my confession at my desk instead of in a cell?”

“That I can allow,” Colin said.

And then it was like a flash. Mr. Barnes opened a drawer, presumably to pull out paper. But instead of paper, he lifted out a small pistol and raised it to his head. Colin moved so quickly I could hardly see what was happening. He wrenched the gun out of Mr. Barnes’s hand, knocked him onto the ground facedown, and pinned his arms behind his back.

“Don’t be in such a hurry, Barnes,” he said. “You will die, but not like this. I’m not about to let you take the coward’s way out.”

I could hardly keep my knees from banging together, I was shaking so hard. Colin had sent me to summon help, and I felt lost in the halls of Westminster. Almost without thinking, I went to Mr. Foster’s office.

“Something terrible has happened,” I said. “Mr. Barnes has been behind this red-paint business. We need Scotland Yard at once.”

“No,” he said. “No. It can’t be Barnes.”

“Please, Mr. Foster, we must hurry.”

He scrawled a note and handed it to his assistant, then turned back to me. “Now let’s go,” Mr. Foster said. “I must speak to him.”

I filled in the details for him on the way to the office. Mr. Foster looked ill by the time we entered the room. Colin was still holding the gun. Mr. Barnes was back in a chair, but not behind his desk.

“Simon—” Mr. Foster stepped towards his friend. “I don’t know what to say. Why?”

“It was the only way forward,” Mr. Barnes said. “The only way to bring this country into a new age of enlightenment.”

“Not like this, Simon, not like this. You wouldn’t have had to blackmail me.”

“That was just insurance,” Mr. Barnes said.

“You should have trusted me. Trusted me to reach these heights on my own,” Mr. Foster said. “And trusted me to keep you as my closest adviser.”

Mr. Foster sank into a chair, and they both sat, silent, until Scotland Yard arrived. After the usual sorts of administrative detail, they formally arrested Mr. Barnes and took him away. As I watched him go, I almost wished I’d asked what secret about Colin he’d meant to expose. But I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know.

“Excellent work, Hargreaves,” Mr. Foster said, slapping my husband on the back. “Capital job.” There was no enthusiasm in his voice.

“Sorry the result wasn’t happier for you,” Colin said.

“Nothing to be done,” Mr. Foster said. “Difficult to see one’s friend stoop to such levels.”

“Yes.” Colin put the gun on top of Mr. Barnes’s desk. “But there is something we need to discuss. This match factory.”

“Let me assure you I knew nothing about it.”

“I never suspected otherwise,” Colin said. “But you are the registered owner of it.”

“Would be deeply grateful if you could make it all go away,” Mr. Foster said.

“Shouldn’t pose a problem,” Colin said. “I’ll personally see to fixing the records. The rest the government will have no objection to burying. Emily has already begun organizing a better situation for the people working in the factory.”

“Do let me know if you require anything from me. I’ve money, whatever you need. I can’t tell you how distressed I am to have had my name associated with something like that.”

“Barnes knew you’d feel that way,” Colin said. “Which is why he thought it would give him power over you.”

“There’s something else,” I said. “All the rest of the fraud. You claim you knew nothing about it. Yet you were so jumpy when I broached the subject in my library.”

Mr. Foster sighed. “Barnes came to me some weeks ago. He told me he’d learned that there had been tampering in my first election and was worried I might be exposed for it, even though there was no proof of any involvement on my part. I swear to you I knew nothing about it at the time.”

“That was the beginning of his setting into motion the final part of his plan,” Colin said. “He was getting ready to exert his control over you.”

Mr. Foster bounced on his toes. “Is this likely to haunt me in the future?”

“I’ll make sure it doesn’t,” Colin said.

“I appreciate it more than you could ever know, Hargreaves,” he said. “Pity to have one’s career ruined for reasons beyond one’s control.”

“No one wants to see that happen,” Colin said.

“Thank you,” Mr. Foster said. “And Lady Emily, don’t be a stranger. I’ll soon be in a better position than ever to help forward your political agenda.”

Another smile, and he left us.

“Are you absolutely certain he knew nothing about what Barnes was doing?” I asked.

“As certain as I need to be,” Colin said.

“Shouldn’t his possible role in all of it be examined?”

“It would ruin him, even if in the end he was found innocent.”

“Don’t you want to know the truth?” I asked. “To be sure? This doesn’t seem right.”

“I understand how you feel, Emily, I do,” he said. “But there’s nothing more to be done. Take comfort in the fact he’s a decent man and will do good work for the empire. In the end, that’s all that matters.”

“I don’t agree, Colin.” I crossed my arms. “The means matter just as much.”

“In this case, we can’t have both,” Colin said. “And I’m willing to accept what’s best for England. You should be, too.”