The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

saw him. It must have been him. Such a tall man, his back turned to her, standing still, in a thick cloud of his own manufacture, wearing that cape. She stood as still as she could, her heartbeats strong enough to unsteady her, absolutely at the edge of her life. Something had to happen soon. It had to.
    Abigail, bored and frustrated, ran into her with both arms outsretched and shoved at her bottom.
    ‘Don’t,’ Hannah span round and hissed. She caught hold of Abigail’s hand and tugged the child towards her. Abigail saw her sister’s face, bright with a flush of anger, swooping towards her. Her lips were trembling. She looked very ugly like that. Abigail tried to free herself from Hannah’s grasp, but Hannah shook her arm hard, standing up and looking away again.
    Uncertainly postured between cringing out of sight and standing up tall to see, Hannah tried to ascertain whether Alfred Tennyson had heard the commotion. As she did so she felt the warm wetness of Abigail’s small mouth close around her wrist and her little cat’s teeth bite in. She couldn’t help it, she cried out and definitely now Tennyson had heard. She bobbed up and saw his large shape turning. She ducked and ran, dragging a wailing Abigail after her. When they returned and had calmed down she could bribe the child with a chip of sugar not to tell.
     
    Alfred Tennyson did not try to comfort or even make contact with his brother, Septimus, sitting beside him. When he had tried, the little hits of familial concern seemed to hurt him, and he’d shrink away, raising a hand and trying, horribly, to smile. Instead, Tennyson stretched his long legs in front of him in a casual manner he permitted himself while the patients were still arriving but would be corrected when the evening prayers began.
    He looked vaguely towards Mrs Allen who played the organ, actually rather well. Her pale daughter, so thin and restless she flickered in his field of blurred vision, turned the pages. He closed his eyes and listened to the sound. It rose in regular crests of force as the treadle pump cycled air through the pipes and Tennyson saw the ridged sound abstractly, thought of the sea, of Mablethorpe, the heavy, low waves and hardened undulations of the sand after the tide had withdrawn.Words began. Waves. Rocks. Lashed . Or felt. Waters that feel the scraping rocks, scourging rocks. Waters that feel the scourging rocks as they rush.That feel the sharp rocks as they rush.
    Margaret watched the other poor souls take their seats to pray and again did not know what to think. She suspected that nothing there could be real, that when the doctor preached his watery sermons the Presence would swerve away, offended. She would. But then she lacked compassion, hating human weakness, so when they prayed was she the only one cut off, bogged down in sin, while the others prayed purely and were heard? God pitied them. And why pity her who was pitiless? She’d never liked the complications of joined prayer, all the human interference and distraction. She could only find her way alone. And in that solitude a part of her suspected she was lost, cut off, adrift.
    They all started singing now, all upright. John Clare stood and added his voice to the compound of mad voices without much fervour. Seated beside the fire, he was distracted by its blustering heat.The attendants sang evenly, watchfully. One of the idiots sang very loudly but Simon beside him sang without noise, just opening and closing his lips while he rubbed at his left eye. Clara, the witch, never sang. She stared around and tried, when people looked back at her, to laugh to herself.
    After they’d all stumbled down the short step of the two notes for ‘Amen’, Dr Allen patted them back into their seats with gently flapping hands and began this evening’s sermon.
    This was the seventh of his addresses on the Beatitudes and he cleared his throat before pronouncing, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the