She seemed hardly to hear him, was half turned away, her jaw set tightly, but now she spun back to him, her eyes flashing furiously. ‘I understood it was not a vague threat at all but a most precise threat concerning our train journey today.’

And Alasdair damned his imbecilic and imprudent secretary.

‘I would not say so—’

‘Show it to me! The note: show me!’

It crossed his mind to refuse—it was his right to do so—but the absurdity of this was too great and so he retrieved it from his pocket and handed it to her.

She took the letter and opened it and her hand, he saw, shook a little. She read it quickly, for there was not much there other than the threat to their lives. And it proved her point, of course, that the threat was specific. She crushed the note in her hand and again turned away from him.

‘You would put all our lives in danger,’ she said quietly, but the fury had not gone; if anything, it was deeper now. ‘Not just yours and mine and James’s—’

James, was it!

‘—but everyone on that train, every man, woman and child.’

She did not look at him as she said this, but her fury was gone and he realised, finally, that his wife had been frightened.

Alasdair located spills and a box of matches and after a few false starts lit the fire in his study, watching as the coals finally caught and began to glow. The night was noticeably milder here on the coast than it had been at Penrith earlier in the day, but he needed this fire. Yet the coals seemed to emit no heat, he felt nothing, neither heat not cold, not the carpet beneath his feet nor the spent match in his hand. He crouched before the fire, a little mesmerised by it, and the maid’s absence, an annoyance at first, no longer seemed so. He wished this fire to be his alone and no one else’s.

After some little time, during which no thoughts disturbed him and his mind was still, he stood up. He rubbed his eyes.

Someone had laid a pylon on the railway line with the sole intention of wrecking a train, or at least derailing it. And not just any train either: his train. They had not succeeded, but for those few precious seconds when the driver had spotted the obstruction and had slammed on his brakes, as the train had screamed to a stop and life—his life—had been held in the balance, he had experienced a feeling almost of euphoria. He had thought, What if it is to end now, what of it?

But it had not. Life continued. His, Eleanor’s.