She hadn’t realized. “Sorry,” she said, and released her grip on him. She might have blushed, if she’d had the color to spare. The surgeon smiled briefly, to tell her he wasn’t serious. Then the smile was gone.

Sebastian pulled over a chair and sat beside them. She gripped his hand tightly, and squeezed it even tighter whenever the needle passed through her skin.

“Not much longer now,” the surgeon said.

Sebastian said, “What happened?”

Elisabeth said, “It was the father of the consumptive girl. He showed up drunk again and demanded his daughter. He evaded Mister Briggs and found me in the receiving office. I asked him to leave and he set off for the wards. I didn’t know his knife was out when I tried to stop him.”

“You should have called someone.”

“There wasn’t time. Who’d imagine a man would turn on a woman like that?”

The surgeon paused in his work and asked her to move her fingers. She managed to flex them just a little, at the cost of some considerable discomfort that she tried not to show. But Sebastian felt it in her grip. He could feel every transferred nuance of her pain as the procedure went on.

He said, “I don’t mean to question your treatment. But would this not be better carried out in the operating room?”

“It would,” said the surgeon without taking his eyes off his work, “if we had the use of it. But the man’s still in the building. They’ve got him trapped upstairs.”

Sebastian needed a moment or two to take that in.

“Trapped?”

“On one of the wards, I was told.”

Then Sebastian was on his feet, with Elisabeth still clutching his hand; and the Guy’s surgeon, who’d been about to pass his needle into the skin of her forearm where the line of the wound passed over the tendons of her wrist, drew back with an unintended oath.

“Forgive me,” Sebastian said, prizing himself free, “but I deal in madmen. I may be able to give advice to bring about a safe outcome.”

“Sebastian, no!” Elisabeth said. “Stay with me!”

“Let me make the offer,” Sebastian said. “For the truth of it is, I know it’s a necessary pain, but I can’t watch you suffer like this.”

“Let him go,” the surgeon said to her, adding, without rancor, “because frankly, Mister Becker, you’re being neither use nor ornament here. If you can help the situation, please do. But be warned. Two minutes after he attacked your wife, the man killed a nurse.”

FIRSTLY SEBASTIAN had to find a way up to the wards, avoiding the pandemonium of the entrance hall. Because of his wife’s employment he had a better knowledge of the building than a casual visitor might, but he didn’t know it well. Making a turn out of the dispensary, within a few strides he found himself witness to a scene of exodus via the hospital’s back ways; all of the hospital’s sick children were being ushered down service stairs and through kitchen corridors by policemen, nurses, and some of the hospital’s civilian staff. They shuffled in near-silence, like a night-marching army. The children were mostly in nightshirts with blankets thrown around their shoulders. Some were carrying toys, while many of the smaller ones were being carried themselves.

There was Mister Briggs, big, stern Mister Briggs, craggy as a statue with a cracked heart full of well-hidden love, standing before a doorway with a hospital screen across it.

To those looking frightened by this strange experience he added to the strangeness by booming, “Go on, now, boys and girls. Go with the nurses. They will look after you. There’s nothing here to see.”

Then he glanced back at the folding screen, saw that its coverage of the opening behind it was not complete, and moved to make a careful adjustment.

“Mister Briggs, I need to pass,” Sebastian said to him.

“I wouldn’t,” the old soldier advised.

“I’m afraid I have to.”

“How is Mrs. Becker?”

“Bearing up better than I would in her place.”

Briggs nodded, and turned away.

“Do as your nurses tell you,” he called out in a ringing tone, overlooking the fact that the nurses were urging the children to conduct themselves quietly. “Obey them as you would your own mother.”

Beyond the opening was a wide corridor with offices along one side of it. Chairs stood against the opposite wall for those awaiting their turn with physicians and dressers. The chairs had been pushed askew and some personal items abandoned when the area had been cleared.

Toward the corridor’s far end lay the body of a nurse. Beyond it stood policemen and white-faced members of the Evelina senior staff and at least one member of the governing board. Someone was sobbing, and Sebastian couldn’t immediately see who. The body was uncovered and a police artist was making a sketch of its position with measurements, stepping over and around the blood to get them. It was life’s blood, an enormous static pool of it under and about the body like the satin lining of an outspread opera cloak.

Sebastian tilted his head to see the dead woman’s face. He could not say that he knew her. She looked around nineteen years of age, but was perhaps older.

His heart, already chilled, grew even more cold.

A magnesium flash lit up the corridor’s far end. They were photographing the knife that had been used on her, and presumably upon Elisabeth. A scaled measuring rod lay on the floor alongside it. No one gave Sebastian a glance. He went no closer, but returned through the screen.

The service stairway was empty of children now, and he ascended without obstruction. On the next floor was a passageway running beside a long, high-ceilinged ward. The ward had four fireplaces so that it could be divided up as needed, and there were further side rooms for the smallest infants and the isolation of whooping cough cases.

As he walked the empty length of the building, Sebastian became aware of some slight, small noises. Then as he approached the end of the passageway he saw that the children who could not rise or walk had been rolled to safety on their beds, all of which were now marshaled in the infants’ room like ships in a crowded harbor. Two nurses were among them, and a policeman with a pistol guarded the door. All their eyes were on Sebastian, like those of frightened creatures in a burrow.

The armed man on the door first gave a warning signal for Sebastian to make no sound, and then waved for him to go back. But instead of turning around, Sebastian held up his Lord Chancellor’s papers with their visible crest. He made a silent face of inquiry.

The officer decided against a challenge to this stranger’s authority—though in truth, Sebastian had none to exercise—and pointed the way.

Treading softly, he entered the main stairwell. The noise from the entrance hall below drifted up, like echoes from a different world. He saw no one until he reached the next landing.

The floor above was a close counterpart of the one below. At this end of the passageway, the police had set up their siege base. The corridor’s windows looked into the ward. About half a dozen detectives and two sergeants were dug in at this spot, crouched low or pressed up against the walls, watching anxiously and craning to hear, trying to observe without drawing any attention to themselves.

Sebastian stood at the back and craned along with them. Right down at the far end of the ward he could see two men and a child, just about. Of the three, he could see the nurse-killer most clearly. The man was sitting on a bed with the child beside him, a controlling arm across her shoulders. The other man, whose back was toward Sebastian, was speaking earnestly to him.

The man holding the child was sallow and unshaven. The other, a well-dressed man, was silver-haired and broad-shouldered. They were too far away for Sebastian to make out anything of what was being said.

In a low voice he whispered to the nearest detective, “Is that his own child?”