“So,” Bette said, raising her voice, “I enjoin you: let us make it clear to our adversaries … to those who should be held liable … that we are angry.” The audience stared back at her, stirring. “And that this is not a game. Not to me, and certainly not to those who truly cared about him.”

She swept an imperious gaze across the audience, again, and declared, “Today we give those who killed Peter, and who wounded my friends critically, fair warning. Though we may have been shot at and driven against a wall, we remain unbowed.”

“Our adversaries may think that the paths to them have become too difficult to trace out, or that we have despaired that all ways to them have been barred from entry,” Bette’s voice continued to rise, and it boomed and echoed across the tomb-silent cavernous cathedral. She paused, and her voice dropped suddenly, to just above a whisper, “But they couldn’t be more wrong.” She let that last quiet statement sink in.

There was no mistaking her thinking that Peter’s killer, or whoever had ordered it, was in the cathedral. No one dared to move, dared to speak, and all barely took a breath.

She pointed an accusing finger into the crowd and announced with steely resolve, “Because we have chosen to act. We intend to change the dynamics, and throw ourselves into finding you with all the strength we can muster.”

And then she thundered, pointing to sections of the audience, “So on Peter’s behalf, and on behalf of my friends that you almost killed, and my family that you attacked from the shadows like a coward, I throw down this gauntlet!”

“Do you join with me?” she challenged those assembled, sweeping her gaze over them.

“Y-e-s-s-s-s!!!!” the audience thundered back.

“Yes!” Bette repeated. “Because, as Peter has asked me to remind you,”

“Tho much is taken, much abides; and tho

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;”

She challenged the assembled again, “Are we not?!”

“We are!” they responded.

She continued slowly, dramatically, “One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”