She thrust both fists at the windowpane and for one teetering, blinding moment found she might pound on the window, might even break the window, stand at the broken pane, perhaps bloodied, screaming loudly like a madwoman. The impulse was gone in a moment, but it left her breathless, dismayed.

Alice tapped on the door and came into the room with hot water and a hasty, curtsied, ‘Morning, madam.’

Eleanor kept her face turned away. She stood very still and rigid as the maid moved about the room. She wished to tell the girl to leave at once but could not speak. Did not trust herself to sound quite normal. And so she waited.

‘Will there be anything else, madam?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. Still did not turn.

The door closed. The room became her bedroom once more and not simply a place where servants came and went.

Eleanor sat down. Alasdair had returned very late last night. Now he was gone out again before the hall clock had chimed the half-hour. She had not suggested, last night, that he might think about moving back into their shared bedroom. The dinner at Booker-Reid’s, the cab ride home, had not been favourable. And then he had ridden off into the night.

To find her, presumably.

It only now occurred to her that Alasdair might not know what had happened to the woman, Miss Trent. That he might go to her flat and find the police there. Or that the police had come and gone. The woman arrested. She realised she had shut her mind to it. To the possible implications, outcomes. Her own part was over and done. What happened now to this woman, her own husband’s part in it, no longer concerned her. It happened offstage. She stood at the window. The new beginning she had anticipated, had engineered even, had not eventuated.

‘Alice, I am arranging a small tea party today,’ she announced to the maid as she came downstairs a short time later.

There would be a tea party. It would be a simple affair but it required arranging. She began to make those arrangements.

But her plans were put into disarray when Adaline Jellicoe called.

Her friend’s presence was announced by a card on a tray handed to her in her room by Alice.

‘What does this mean?’ enquired Eleanor sharply of the servant.

But Alice, not comprehending the question nor, probably, the circumstances, could provide no answer.

And so, thought Eleanor, seated at her desk, all her efforts to avoid this had come to nothing. The object of her fear had come to her, was seated in her drawing room, or waited outside in a cab.

‘Very well,’ she said, standing up.