"Oh, but where are you going?"

Hastings broke from scanning the sea of heads before him to turn to Sophia, who had trailed his steps all the way down from the balconies. She was now close behind him, readjusting her elaborate tiara.

"You can't just abandon me like that!" she cried, stamping her small foot.

"You would have been safer and much more comfortable had you remained in the box," he told her.

"Alone?"

Hastings rolled his eyes, then craned his neck to search the crowd again.

"Who are you looking for?"

"I'm just … trying to find …" he stammered, too focused to think up a suitable excuse.

"Well, there she is!" Sophia cried, close to his shoulder. He instinctively followed the direction of her wagging finger, but his irritation at being read like an open book was jarred by the scene that finally fixed his attention. "But who is that?" Sophia divined his thoughts.

A broad back, clad in a snug-fitting carmagnole and rough linen shirt, the sans culottes uniform uncomfortably familiar to Hastings, was bent over Marguerite's curved form, her vivid domino flapping back over the stranger's legs. He had her arms gripped tightly in his hands, and his scruffy brown head, topped with a dirty red Phrygian cap, was pressed close to her dark golden curls.

"What is he doing?" Sophia's voice, devoid of concern, twittered distantly beside Hastings, whose hearing was suddenly blanketed by the roar of blood rushing to his head. Some lout, dressed in the garb of the French mob, was manhandling the wife of his friend and chief! As he made to charge forward, Sophia coiled an arm about his elbow with surprising strength. "Wait!" she hissed.

Hastings spun round on the heel of his boot to face her, roughly shrugging free of her grasp. "For heaven's sake, Madame, your tenacity is not an admirable quality!"

"And your dedication to Lady Blakeney is purely chivalrous, I suppose?"

"You know nothing of the circumstances," he grumbled, glowering into her smirking green eyes, "Sir Percy is my friend."

"How loyal of you," she retorted.

He itched to slap her, but realised that she was distracting him from going to Lady Blakeney. Mouthing a choice oath, Hastings pushed away from Sophia and ploughed ahead through the mingling bodies. Some six strides forward, however, he realised that he had lost sight of Marguerite and the ungainly stranger. Stopping short, he quickly searched the faces around him, before deciding that she must have been taken outside. Roughly pushing people aside, Hastings ran for the west arch.