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.”
