Absurd on the face of it, she thought. It was patently obvious that no representative of the law had set foot in this square in years. She pushed her thick lensed spectacles more firmly up onto the bridge of her nose- Not only breakin' the law, roared the imaginary policeman, but ugly and four- eyed to boot!-slipped the picklocks and skeleton keys back into her handbag, and stepped through the door. It wouldn't be full dark until five. She was perfectly safe. The hall itself was much darker than she had expected, with the wide oak doors on either side closed. Trimmed with a carved balustrade, generous steps ascended carpetless to blindness above. The passage beside them to the rear of the house was an open grave.

There was, of course, no lamp.

Mildly berating herself for not having foreseen that contingency-of course there wouldn't be a lamp!- Lydia pushed open one of the side doors to admit a rinsed and cindery light. It showed her a key on the hall table, and turning, she closed the front door. For a time she stood undecided, debating whether to lock herself in and observing the deleterious effects of massive amounts of adrenaline on her ability to concentrate...

How would I go about charting degree of panic with inability to make a decision? The workhouse wouldn't really let me put my subjects into life threatening situations.

In the end she turned the key but left it in the lock, and stepped cautiously through the door she had opened, into what had probably been a dining room but was as large as the ballroom of her aunt's house in Mayfair. It was lined floor to ceiling with books: goods boxes had been stacked on top of the original ten-foot bookshelves, and planks stretched over windows and doors so that not one square foot of the original paneling showed and the tops of the highest ranks brushed the coffered ceiling.