It had been noticed, of course, by very many residents of Bath, that Miss Jane was a stubborn young woman, intent always on doing and saying exactly what she wished to do and say. Society was inclined to blame her father (if ‘blame’ was the right word) for doting too much upon his only surviving child. And it was true that Sir William Adeane was deeply attached to Jane, finding her presence in the house entirely comfortable and sometimes discovering himself to be uneasy if she wasn’t there, quite as if he were a child and Jane his adored mother.

But Sir William should not be held to account for Jane’s refusal to heed any but her own judgements upon what was the right path for her to follow in her life. The refusal was all hers, just as the startling height was all hers, and she was proud of them both. At the age of twenty-four, she had begun to suspect that one day, she and her magnificent inches would accomplish something the world might find extraordinary. That she didn’t yet know what the thing was troubled her not at all. The thing was just ‘The Thing’, a gleam in her soul. She was content to wait patiently to find out what that gleam revealed.

She liked to wear white. Though her sleeves and the hem of her skirts often had to trail in the waters, or were tainted with specks of blood or phlegm, she kept these snowy garments as starched and impeccable as she was able. As well as wanting them to be clean, she wished them to impart a subtle reproach to her patients. For what she saw in the crowd of invalids shuffling their way to her father’s practice in Henrietta Street was how very unclean they were. Sometimes, their teeth were black and loose and their gums filled with pus. Their beards were malodorous nests, nurturing tiny particles of rotting food. Their armpits stank of invisible pond life, their private parts of the sewer. And as for their feet … the prevalence of gout among them made the putting on and taking off of footwear such an agony that some poor sufferers slept in their boots and never washed their feet for days or weeks on end – with terrible corrosive consequence.

It was thus Jane’s belief that immersion in the waters of the Hot Bath, by rinsing these bodies of some of their grime and allowing the skin to breathe, brought them relief in itself. And – beyond the reproach that the whiteness of her uniform implied – she also felt that, with its suggestion of purity and virginity, it gave unexpected solace to minds crammed with worldly distress. She did not wish to believe, though her father and Dr Ross were the true physicians in the premises on Henrietta Street, that she herself had no power to cure. She knew otherwise.

Her methods were varied. ‘Strength through gentleness’ was a motto she often repeated to herself. Her hands, her arms, her shoulders were powerful and their careful massaging of aching limbs often put her patients into an almost religious kind of sleep, from which they would wake praising God that they were suddenly free from pain. But they knew that the alteration in them wasn’t due to any miracle, but to the inexpressible gift of the Angel of the Baths.