Will Thomas - The Hellfire Conspiracy

“But he must be twice her age.”

“Some do not think that a liability. He is well established and popular. He may be prime minister one day. She could do worse.”

I shivered. Just the thought of her married to the man with his gimlet stare, monocle, and sharp manner made my flesh crawl. It seemed like a sentence of death.

Just then there was a sound on the stair and a streak of black shot into the room. Barker’s dog, Harm, had returned from his sojourn in the north of England. He ran circles about the room, between and around table legs and stuffed chairs, his black fur rippling. When he had gained enough momentum, he launched himself onto the high bed, walking up his master’s limbs until he sat on the Guv’s chest, sniffing at the iodine and plaster on his face.

“Nee hau, Da Mo.” He greeted the creature in Mandarin, the language in which the dog had been trained, and roughly patted him on the head with his bandaged fingers. The dog, like Barker himself, generally eschewed displays of affection, but had no trouble displaying them now. He rolled over onto his back in Barker’s lap and began kicking his paws and gurgling like a baby.

The big man with his little dog looked about the room with its books stacked in piles and its furnishings and the red walls bristling with all manner of weapons and spoke. “It is good to be home, Thomas.”

The next day, between us, Mac and I convinced the Guv not to go to service. I told him he must heal, that his body had suffered a shock, and that he didn’t realize how close he’d come to death, but it was only when Mac told him his appearance would frighten visitors away from the Baptist Tabernacle that he agreed not to go.

I went downstairs to my own bed. I’d had a most irregular schedule since the case had begun and needed rest myself. When one has been sleeping on a hard mattress on the floor for a week or so, a bed with crisp sheets, soft pillows, and a down counterpane is the closest thing to floating on a cloud. I tried reading MacDonald but fell asleep after the first few pages and dozed through lunch.

After another dinner brought in from the Elephant and Castle, I sat down at my small table and got out pencil and paper. I had a solemn duty ahead of me, one for which I did not feel equipped. I had decided to track down my late wife’s resting place to give her a proper burial. I had a satisfactory bank balance now and could afford to give her the funeral she had deserved. The cost meant nothing to me, but finding her was another story. I didn’t quite know where to begin other than to explore every cemetery in Oxford-shire. I would also have to go to Oxford, the place of my former disgrace, and speak with the very court system that had been responsible for my incarceration, as well as to hire a solicitor to search for Jenny’s mother. She was an avaricious creature, and smelling the money, would place hazards and injunctions in my path until she was bought off. Who knew how long that would take? Then there was the coffin to buy, the exhumation that I would not be there to oversee, and the service. A simple Methodist service was what I would prefer, and I hoped her mother would not cause a tempest over that. There was so much to do and so little hope it would all go as planned, but that didn’t matter. I would do it for Jenny. It was my duty. I only hoped Barker would not mind my taking a few days off.

After breakfast the next morning, I went upstairs, for Barker was not in his garden as usual. I found him at one of the tables in his garret with an open copy of the Pall Mall Gazette in his hand. This was the day Stead fired his salvo at the House of Commons. “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” screamed the headline. When I entered, the Guv motioned me into the chair and put the article into my hand before charging his thimble cup with another spoonful of tea.

I read. Stead admitted everything, which was the only way, really. He gave names of everyone involved, explained the depth to which the government had allowed this to go, and the numbers of the girls involved. He turned “white slave trade” into a phrase that everyone would use for the next several years and then forced it onto every breakfast table in the land between the toast rack and the Dundee marmalade.

“Good heavens,” I said when I finally finished. “The government shall not be able to sidestep this or play it down.”

“Precisely,” Barker said. “Stead knows how to provoke people as well as any sermon writer in England, but Hesketh’s people shall retaliate, you may be sure.”

Barker and I went to our chambers that morning, but my employer spent his time in the office receiving messages and telephone calls about the coming crisis. It appeared all of London was in an uproar over the special edition. Some were calling Stead a monster, and others naming him a hero. The Gazette editor had pulled back the grate on a stinking cesspool, and now London would have to acknowledge it and clean it up. The children of the East End owed much to William T. Stead, but I had learned enough in Barker’s employ to know what happened to those who pointed out the government’s faults. They usually received nothing but punishment.

The Guv sent me off to the charity to have a private word with Miss Potter. I was going to tell her that the case was over and her services were no longer required but that she had acted admirably. I also had things to discuss with her of a more private nature.

She was not at the charity, as it turned out. Some of the volunteers were away, for it appeared the government was going to speak upon the matter of the white slave trade, convened by Chamberlain himself, at a building in Whitechapel in Commercial Street. If I hurried, I could just make it. I sprinted out the door, thinking that perhaps now I could finally make sense of the connection between Beatrice Potter and Chamberlain.

When I arrived at the building, the meeting was already under way. The meeting hall was packed full of lower-class parents who had been upset by the morning’s article, which must have been dispersed and read far and wide. Her Majesty’s government must have been very concerned about Stead’s article to convene a hasty meeting just hours after publication. Joseph Chamberlain had been dispatched to clamp a lid down on the problem.

“The dangers in the Gazette have been exaggerated,” he told the crowd. “It was an incendiary headline produced solely to sell newspapers. The number of white slavers in England is very small, and they have always been caught and prosecuted.”

“Then why has Mr. Stead barricaded himself in his offices?” a man asked from the audience.

“No doubt because the scandalmonger fears arrest from Scotland Yard.”

I had to admire Chamberlain’s fearlessness. The crowd could quite easily turn into a mob.

“Why hasn’t there been a successful bill to raise the age of consent?” a woman asked. Her daughter was sitting beside her, obviously close to that age.

“We hope the bill will not be forced upon us,” Chamberlain explained. “It is not that Her Majesty’s government finds this unimportant. No one finds the slave trade more reprehensible than we. However, you must understand that there is a queue, and that bringing forward this bill shall push back badly needed funding or reform in other quarters.”

They would not allow him to pontificate but peppered him with questions. I was impressed by his calm demeanor and logical mind. No subject was brought up on which he was not fully informed. Perhaps the government was capable of handling this, one could see them thinking, but there were still skeptics and angry mothers who remained unappeased.

I looked through the mass of people and saw Miss Levy sitting beside Miss Hill, but Beatrice Potter was not with them. Scanning the faces of the crowd, I looked for her light hair and lovely face before finally spotting her in the back, half hidden by a pillar. She leaned forward, looking mesmerized. Chamberlain’s speech was not that enthralling. And then I realized what was happening. She and this man were lovers, despite the wide gap in their years. I had never stood a chance with her. When she had followed me from the British Museum, it had been merely to secure employment as a professional agent. I reached into my pocket for her check and, skirting the crowd, came up behind her. She started when I spoke.