Tasha Alexander - A Crimson Warning

“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?”