She does not need my help, thought Alice as she sat on the bench.

The first Alice was aware that something was happening was the muffled shout she heard from some distant part of the building. A shout, a scream, a cry—one followed the other, and whether man or woman or both was impossible to distinguish. And a disturbance—for such Alice took this to be—in a courthouse where so many wretched and desperate souls were confined must not be a rare occurrence, but Alice jumped up, she followed the sounds. Her heart beat a little faster.

She hastened from the courtyard, retracing her steps along the twisty-turny corridor. More shouts followed, urgent now rather than muffled, and Alice arrived back at the chamber she had started from and it became clear that the noises came from above, up the ancient staircase. She set off up two short flights and came almost at once to a bare and unfurnished waiting room and she understood that she had found the site of the disturbance, if not its cause.

And when it had seemed to Alice that the courthouse was utterly deserted and herself the only occupant, here now was a great and clamouring mob of persons—men and women of the common classes like herself—and all crowded in a doorway, pressing and pushing and creating the utmost commotion. The door, a solid affair with a frosted-glass panel, was wide open and beyond, though she could see only the high ceiling, was a courtroom—or what she took to be a courtroom, for she’d not had cause to view one before now. And she saw among the crowd a number of court officials and clerks pushing the people aside and cursing them and struggling to restore order, and a constable too, for she saw the top of his tall hat.

But what could be the cause of such excitement?

‘Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God! It is too late!’

‘Give the woman some air!’

‘It is not air the lass needs!’

‘Get these people away, for the love of God!’

‘She will die, like as not.’

‘Aye, they will both die.’

Words came tumbling one on top of another from a dozen mouths, so that Alice could perceive neither their sense nor their substance and her head buzzed with it all.

‘She is dead! ’Tis certain the lass is dead!’