She clutched her dragon stick tighter with both hands. Pressed her lips against her knuckles, her lips trembling, her knuckles white. Here, where the West End became the City, where the flash and flicker of theaters gave way to the dimmer, narrower canyons of Fleet Street, she had her last notion of escape. She might rap on the cab’s windows, she thought. She might gesticulate at the thinning crowds of passersby, or at the other drivers edging along the clogged thoroughfare. It would be a long shot, given the noise of traffic, given the nature of cities. And it would be a risky business, given the death-rays of vengeance beaming out of the eyes that now and then glanced at her in the cab’s rearview mirror. She had no doubt the driver remembered that notch she had made upon his chin with her sword. He was just looking for an excuse to even the score.

But once they left the crowds behind, once they entered the deserted city streets, her last chance would be over. She would be at the mercy of her enemies. She knew it was now or never.

And she just sat there. Hunched over her stick. Lip-gnawing her knuckles. Afraid—melting inside with fear—but silent, unresisting.

The cab went on, towards the canyons.

What a stubborn old woman she was. She could’ve kicked herself for it. But the fact was she had to satisfy her curiosity. It was that more than anything that held her there. She had to know what was going to happen next.

Of all the questions left unanswered about Iago—of all the thousand questions—the greatest was this: Why hadn’t he killed her yet? Out of pique if nothing else. Or in his determination to keep her from finding the very manuscript she now had hidden inside her cape. Why the warnings, why the threats? Why not just snuff her out?Her own uncomfortable suspicions on the matter tantalized her. The desire to confirm or disprove them—the desire to discover any answer at all—the desire simply to know more—were such powerful drives in her that she felt there was no overcoming them. This imprisonment in a London cab, this drive to nowhere, to somewhere: it felt to her almost like fate.

An aggravating business. It angered her. Here she was, being sucked into a vortex, being carried down and down into certain danger, and her most powerful emotion—aside from this liquifying fear—her most powerful emotion was anticipation. Which was confused in her mind with that other, hateful anticipation: the anticipation she had felt in the old days at the prospect of seeing him again.

What a foolish old woman. She really could have kicked herself. She clutched her stick, gnawed her knuckles, angry. Afraid. Excited.