Chapter 2: Mr. Fennwick Consults His Footnotes

The difficulty with Mr. Grover Fennwick was not that he was an alarmist. It was that he was, by training and by temperament, a scholar, and scholars do not alarm—they document, annotate, and cross-reference, and if the resulting document happens to produce in its reader a sensation indistinguishable from alarm, that is a matter of epistemology rather than intention.

He arrived at half past eight in the morning, which was either unconscionably early for a social call or unconscionably late for a crisis, depending on which category the present situation occupied. He had not, apparently, slept.

Petra was in the small front parlour of their rented lodgings in Henrietta Street—a room that had been described by the letting agent as possessing a charming prospect and by Petra as possessing a window—when she heard Mrs. Beale, their landlady's girl, conduct someone upstairs with an alacrity suggesting the visitor had not paused to hand over his card in the conventional sequence. A moment later, the door opened.