Before the Quiet Threshold

The applause broke before Orla Wren reached the microphone. Not faded, not faltered, but broke, as if somebody had taken the room by both shoulders and shaken the manners out of it. One moment three hundred people were standing beneath the glass roof of the civic hall, clapping for the woman who had saved Threshold House from demolition; the next, a stranger in a green wool coat had lifted a brass strip from the ceremonial plinth and held it over her head like evidence at a trial.