“We are – going to Moorfields?” Hennessey asks, his voice strangled. Alfred turns, and oh – he’s right there, he could be dead in a moment, just one single, satisfying moment that would cost both Hennessey and James everything. And that – that is perhaps part of the intent. Alfred is not smiling, but his demeanor -“I assumed you would be pleased,” Alfred responds, and the urge to kill him burns,

From Full of Grace:

Hennessey is thinking one thing right here: murder. how do I murder him
and make it look like it was an ordinary carriage accident? because make
no mistake – Alfred is out for blood, here, James’ or Hennessey’s or
both. He’s a vicious, horrible spider of a man, and he’s trying to
provoke Hennessey into doing something stupid, something that Alfred can
use to get his claws into the Navy as a whole. He’s sitting there in
that carriage practically daring Hennessey to do what he wants to do,
and Hennessey knows that he absolutely can’t if he wants to have
anything left of his career or any chance of helping James or any
respect for himself given that he’d be betraying hundreds of men under
his command. If you’re looking for a mental image for this, imagine one
of those crisp December days where it seems like it could snow and
everything’s far too bright somehow and yet there’s something very dark
going on inside that carriage. I wanted to dive into what’s going
through Hennessey’s head and the political reality that he deals with
day by day where he has to make a hundred horrible decisions for the
sake of saving as many lives as he can. I didn’t want him to come across
as someone cold and unfeeling, just someone who’s under far, far too
much pressure and has so very little he can do safely in public and this
gets into that a bit. I also wanted to give everyone a glimpse of the
monster that Hennessey, Miranda, James, and Thomas face in this setting,
since we weren’t going to see much of him in the rest of the piece. I
wanted to get across the lurking, malevolent thing that’s sitting in the
shadows, pulling the strings, making the end conclusion almost
inevitable because there’s just no other way to deal with someone like
that sometimes.