Like all moments of danger and excitement, everything happened very fast, and afterwards people found themselves in quite other parts of the chamber from where they had thought themselves, talking to someone quite different from whom they had been talking to a moment or two earlier. Alasdair found himself on the far side of the chamber, close to the dais where the man had jumped and where the discarded livery uniform lay, a button ripped off and rolled a short distance away. He did not recall how he had got there nor how he had reacted to the man’s presence. He had a sense he had moved with the crowd, had shouted and exclaimed, as they had. His heart was beating extremely fast. With whom had he been standing? What had he said? He had been badly frightened—of course, they all had—but the moment was past. The uniform lay on the floor, a button torn off, and he could not take his eyes from it and nor could he pick it up.

The lady who had fainted was being assisted to a chaise longue. A doctor had been called. And now a number of people were talking at him, among them the banker, Henry Rothe, who had helped various of the ladies and was now temporarily unemployed, and another was Charles Booker-Reid, who said, ‘Anarchists!’ and whose eyes bulged in his head as though he had been shot.

But where was Eleanor?

The image that presented itself to him was one he’d had over and over again in the early years of his marriage: his wife thrown from a carriage, still and pale and dead, or trampled beneath hooves, or bloodied and drained of life in their marriage bed, a nurse in the next room cradling a newborn in her sorrowful arms. None of these imagined events had ever happened, though he had feared them, almost daily, for a time. There had been no overturned carriage, no startled horse. There had been no newborn. His panic, the panic of a man consumed by love, had gradually been tempered.

The horror he felt at this moment, though it was dissipating now, was the horror of sudden death itself and not the horror of her death, his wife’s.

For, really, her death would simplify things.

The sense of wonder he had felt earlier returned to him. But it was a terrible wonder, no longer filled with joy.

He saw Eleanor on the far side of the chamber. She stood near the doorway and his secretary, Greensmith, was at her side. That annoyed him. Why, he wondered, had Greensmith gone to the wife and not to the minister—his employer—whose life, surely, it was his first priority to preserve?