Maybe it had been something really dreadful that he'd done, Sybil thought, rubbing her hands together inside her rabbit-skin muff. Maybe it was lady's-fever, that he'd given his own wife a case of the glue. Some types of glue were horrible, and could make you mad, or blind, or crippled. Maybe that was the secret. Mick might know. Very likely Mick knew all about it.

Houston explained that he had left the United States in disgust, and gone to Texas, and at the word a map appeared, a sprawl of land in the middle of the continent. Houston claimed he'd gone there seeking land for his poor suffering Cherokee Indians, but it was all a bit confusing.

Sybil asked the clerky fellow next to her for the time. Only an hour had passed. The speech was a third gone. Her moment was coming.

"You must envision a nation many times the size of your home islands," said Houston, "with no roads greater than the grassy tracks of Indians. Without, at that time, a single mile of British railroad, and lacking the telegraph, or, indeed, Engine resources of any kind. As commander-in-chief of the Texian national forces, my orders had no courier more swift or more reliable than the mounted scout, his way menaced by the Comanche and Karankawa, by Mexican raiding-parties, and by the thousand nameless hazards of the wilderness. Small wonder then that Colonel Travis should receive my orders too late; and place his confidence, tragically, in the reinforcing-party led by Colonel Fannin. Surrounded by an enemy force fifty times his own. Colonel Travis declared his objective to be Victory or Death—knowing full well that the latter was a surely fated outcome. The defenders of the Alamo perished to a man. The noble Travis, the fearless Colonel Bowie, and David Crockett, a very legend among frontiersmen"—Messrs. Travis, Bowie, and Crockett each had a third of the kino screen, their faces gone strangely square with the cramped scale of their depletion—"bought precious time for my Fabian strategy."

More soldier talk. Now he stepped back from the podium and pointed up at the kino with his heavy polished cane. "The forces of Lopez de Santa Anna were arrayed as you see them here, with the woods upon his left flank and the San Jacinto river-marshes at his back. His siege engineers had dug in around the baggage-train, with emplacements of sharpened timber, represented thusly. By a forced march through Burnham's Ford, however, my army of six hundred had seized the wooded banks of Buffalo Bayou, unbeknown to enemy intelligence. The assault began with a brisk cannon-fire from the Texian center… Now we can witness the movement of the Texian light-cavalry… The shock of the foot-charge sent the enemy reeling in confusion, throwing his artillery, which was not yet limbered, into utter disarray." The kinotrope's blue squares and lozenges slowly chased the buckling red Mexican regiments through the checkered greens and whites of woods and swamps. Sybil shifted in her seat, trying to ease the chafing of her hoop-skirt. Houston's bloodthirsty boasting was finally reaching a climax.

"The final count of the fallen numbered two Texian dead, six hundred and thirty of the invader. The massacres of Alamo and Goliad were avenged in Santanista blood! Two Mexican armies utterly defeated, with the capture of fourteen officers and twenty cannon."

Fourteen officers, twenty cannon—yes, that was her cue. Her moment had come. "Avenge us. General Houston!" Sybil shrieked, her throat constricted with stage-fright. She tried again, pulling herself to her feet, waving one arm, "Avenge us, General Houston!"

Houston halted, taken aback. Sybil shouted at him, shrilly. "Avenge our honor, sir! Avenge Britain's honor!" A babble of alarm rose—Sybil felt the eyes of the theatre crowd in upon her, shocked looks that people might give a lunatic. "My brother," she shouted, but fear had seized her, bad nerves. She hadn't expected it to be so frightening. This was worse than singing on stage, far worse.

Houston lifted both his arms, the striped blanket spreading behind him like a cloak. Somehow he calmed the crowd by the gesture, asserted command. Above his head, the kinotrope wound slowly down, its flickering domino-tricks whirring to a stop, leaving San Jacinto frozen in mid-victory. Houston fixed Sybil with a look of mingled sternness and resignation. "What is it, my dear young lady? What troubles you? Tell me."

Sybil gripped the back of the seat before her, closed her eyes tight, and sang it out. "Sir, my brother is in a Texian prison! We are British, but the Texians imprisoned him, sir! They seized his farm, and his cattle! They even stole the very railroad that he worked on, a British railroad, built for Texas… " Her voice was faltering, despite herself. Mick wouldn't like that, he would scold her performance… The thought put a jolt of vitality into her. She opened her eyes. "That regime, sir, the thieving Texian regime, they stole that British railroad! They robbed the workers in Texas, and the stockholders here in Britain, and paid us not a penny!"

With the loss of the kinotrope's bright play of images, the theatre's atmosphere had changed. Everything was quite different suddenly, oddly intimate and strange. It was as if she and the General were somehow framed together, two figures on a silvered daguerreotype. A young London woman, in her bonnet and elegant shawl, reaches up with eloquent distress to the old foreign hero; both part-players now, with the surprised eyes of the public silently fixed on them.

"You suffered because of the junta?" Houston said.

"Yes, sir!" Sybil cried, a practiced quaver stealing into her voice. Don't frighten them, Mick had said, but make them pity you. "Yes, the junta did it. They have flung my brother into their vile prison, for no crime, sir, but simply because my dear brother is a Houston man! He voted for you when you became President of Texas, sir! And he would vote for you today, although I fear very much they will kill him!" "What is your brother's name, my dear lady?" Houston asked.

"Jones, sir," Sybil quickly cried, "Edwin Jones of Nacogdoches, who worked for Hedgecoxe's Railway Company."

"I believe I know young Edward!" Houston declared, his surprise evident in his tone. He clutched his cane angrily and his heavy brows knotted.

"Listen to her, Sam!" came a sudden deep voice. Sybil, alarmed, turned to look. It was the man from the Argyll Rooms—the fat actor, with his red hair and brushed velvet waistcoat. "Those junta rascals appropriated the Hedgecoxe Railway! A pretty business, that, from a supposed British ally! Is this the gratitude they show, for years of British guidance and protection?" He sat back down.

"They're nothing but thieves and villains!" Sybil shouted alertly. She groped quickly in memory, picking up the thread. "General Houston! I'm a defenseless woman, but you're a man of destiny, a man of greatness! Can't there be justice for Texas, sir? Some redress for these affronts? Must my poor brother die there in misery, while cheats and tyrants steal our British property?"

But Mick's fine rhetoric was drowned; there were shouts from the audience, here and there, over a muttered undertone of surprise and approval. Loud boyish hooting came from the penny-gallery.

A bit of London fun, all told. Perhaps, Sybil thought, she had made some of them believe her story, and pity her. Most simply howled and joked a bit, pleased to see some unexpected liveliness.

"Sam Houston was always a true friend of Britain!" Sybil shrieked, into the crowd's upturned faces. The words half-lost, useless, she raised the back of her wrist to her damp forehead. Mick had given her no more lines, so she let the strength seep from her legs and fell back, eyes fluttering, half-sinking into her seat.

"Give Miss Jones air!" Houston commanded, an excited bellow. "The lady is overcome!" Sybil watched through half-closed lids as blurred figures haltingly gathered round her. Dark evening-jackets, a rustle of crinoline, gardenia perfume, and a masculine smell of tobacco—a man seized her wrist, and felt for a pulse there with pinching fingers. A woman fanned Sybil's face, clucking to herself. Oh heaven, Sybil thought, shrinking, the fat mama from the row before her, with that intolerable oily look of a good woman doing her moral duty. A little thrill of shame and disgust shot through her. For a moment she felt genuinely weak, sinking with a buttery ease into the warmth of their concern, a half-dozen busybodies muttering around her in a shared pretense of competence, while Houston thundered on above them, hoarse with indignation.