But something momentous and not a little frightening had just happened and the politicians in the chamber now reacted in the only way they knew how—they all began talking a great deal and making speeches to one another. Charles Booker-Reid was making one now:

‘Good God, I am deadly serious, Rothe. If you indulged in a spot of newspaper reading you might be too. Complacency is rarely a sound policy.’

‘Certainly there is ill feeling and ignorance in some quarters, Booker-Reid, but anarchists?’ said Rothe, placing a foot on the fender and leaning back to survey him in a show of nonchalance that belied the shocking incident of a moment ago. ‘Too much newspaper reading clearly creates a tendency to jump at one’s own shadow.’

‘Were the Melbourne constabulary jumping at their own shadows when anarchists blew the front of a house off in Fitzroy last year?’ Charles Booker-Reid demanded.

‘Youths playing with detonators does not herald an anarchist uprising. Besides, that was Melbourne.’ Rothe produced a cigar and made some little performance of lighting it. His wealth was such that it surrounded and protected him so that a madman brandishing a pistol did not touch him.

‘And because it is Melbourne it might as well be on the moon? I am not simply talking about the anti-billites, Rothe; I am talking about the sort of militant, anti-establishment, anti-government types who throw bombs at the Czar and attempt to wreck trains for the sake of seeing the carnage it will bring.’

And Charles Booker-Reid, who could look on with wry indifference as his unlosable seat was lost to the Opposition, was, Alasdair saw, quite purple in the face.

Henry Rothe laughed. ‘My dear chap, we are not in Imperial Russia, we are in New South Wales, and so far as I am aware no trains have been wrecked and no bombs have been thrown. What do you say, Dunlevy?’

Alasdair remembered he’d been at a meeting earlier that evening, a triumphant meeting where men had slapped him on the back and shaken his hand, but he could no longer recall how that triumph had felt. ‘I would say a man has just invaded the innermost sanctum of Parliament House and brandished a pistol at a room full of ministers and the Premier himself.’

‘My point exactly!’ said Booker-Reid.

Henry Rothe laughed at them. ‘And no doubt tomorrow’s papers will describe the fellow as a deranged loner acting on his own, a madman with some petty grievance and a history of instability. It is hardly a revolution.’

Alasdair had nothing to say to this and he left them. Booker-Reid’s scaremongering was disturbingly compelling and he would have liked to laugh it off, as Rothe had, but he felt disinclined to laugh at anything.

The man had had a gun.

He pushed his way through the throng until he reached his wife, who had left the chamber and was now in the foyer beyond.