Barnabas Fanshaw

Barnabas Fanshaw was a man of intellect, culture, and taste. He was also a man of rather bankrupt morals and scrupulous heart (if one could be called scrupulous for preferring oneself to all others, and even good morals for that matter) and he got and lost his first fortune by means hardly deserving of penny dreadfuls and gossip salons. A consummate talker, “Dandy” Fanshaw found himself quite by accident (he has told many) within the realm of high society, in a land where flesh was cheap and silk plentiful. Through quite a hefty dose of industry (and not a little hardship), he did ingratiate himself with those kinds of nobles who scarcely can bare to hear the hardships of their lessers (but who know those hardships must be continued in the name of *profit*). It was by this trade, of *fixing* problems that he came into the good graces of a…oh Mrs Such-and-such recently widowed, who (everyone agreed it was a terrible tragedy) passed away in unremarkable fashion and left her considerable enterprise in “the capable hands of darling Mr Fanshaw.” 

And so Barnabas found himself plyed by those very same ‘little people’ who hang about the ankles of real wealth and power, trying to make themselves indispensable, and wheedling their ways in with their betters. Distasteful business. Someone should really do something about them. Yet two in particular embedded themselves deep within the bronze heart of Mr Fanshaw. They were young, erudite, funny, *joyful*, and…well that is to say, so very strange. They had *ideas* of a type Mr Fanshaw could scarce endorse; ‘workers this, benefits that, slavery so-and-so’ all of it hogwash. But still, after months of intense pleading over coffee and upon his silken pillows of a night, he tried out their reforms. 

Perhaps the most remarkable tragedy that ever befell him (he would not say so now) is that Mr Fanshaw once tried to do the right thing, and he was so utterly disciplined for it that he found himself standing in a quite different world.