Islands of Mercy

Rose Tremain

Islands of Mercy

CONTENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rose Tremain’s novels and short stories have been published in thirty countries and have won many awards, including the Orange Prize (The Road Home), the Dylan Thomas Award (The Colonel’s Daughter and Other Stories), the Whitbread Novel of the Year (Music & Silence), the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Prix Femina Etranger (Sacred Country) and the South Bank Sky Arts Award (The Gustav Sonata). Rose Tremain was made a CBE in 2007 and a Dame in 2020. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer, Richard Holmes.

Of Islands of Mercy, Rose Tremain writes: ‘This novel explores the primal and timeless human quest to find meaning in a life, an aspiration which engages people in wildly different ways across the globe. I chose two contrasting locations: the genteel city of Bath and the harsh island of Borneo and unfolded in them both stories of sexual entrapment, material striving, loss of love, untimely death and – through them all – the desperate and unending search for places of consolation and solace.’

www.rosetremain.co.uk

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Novels

Sadler’s Birthday

Letter to Sister Benedicta

The Cupboard

The Swimming Pool Season

Restoration

Sacred Country

The Way I Found Her

Music and Silence

The Colour

The Road Home

Trespass

Merivel

The Gustav Sonata

Short Story Collections

The Colonel’s Daughter

The Garden of the Villa Mollini

Evangelista’s Fan

The Darkness of Wallis Simpson

The American Lover

Non-Fiction

Rosie: Scenes from a Vanished Life

For Children

Journey to the Volcano

To Richard, with love

‘Many a green isle needs must be

In the deep wide sea of Misery,

Or the mariner, worn and wan,

Never thus could voyage on.’

~ Lines written among the Euganean Hills, 1818 Percy Bysshe Shelley

Part One

THE RUBY NECKLACE

She came from Dublin.

In that crowded city, she had worked for a haberdasher and presided over the slow death of her mother, after which she’d discovered in herself an unexpected yearning to leave Ireland and see the world. Her name was Clorinda Morrissey and she was thirty-eight years old when she arrived in the English city of Bath. The year was 1865. She was not beautiful, but she had a smile of great sweetness and a soft voice that could soothe and calm the soul.

Clorinda knew that Bath was not exactly ‘the world’. But she had been told that it was built on seven hills, like Rome, and that it hosted ‘galas and illuminations’ in the spring and autumn seasons, and these things took on some splendour in her mind. It was also, she heard, a place where very many rich people assembled, to take the waters, or simply to take their leisure, and where the rich congregated, there was always money to be made.