Now, she’d swum towards him in the candlelit dark of the Baths, her words and gestures seeming to reach out to him in a seductive fashion. Or had he misread these? Was she simply choosing to welcome him back in an intimate way that merely took account of their old friendship? When the morning dawned, would she once again be cold and distant?

He thought this the most likely probability. But supposing she was not? Supposing her feelings towards him had changed, then what would become of his resolution, so arduously arrived at, to quit one life for another in a distant world?

To try to stop thinking about Jane, Ross summoned images of his brother. He imagined him sitting by an open fire, examining the butterflies he’d captured, then pinning them, in all their gorgeous colours, to his cork boards and rejoicing in their beauty. Above Edmund, a different constellation of stars moved slowly across the sky towards a cloudless morning.

Oh, my dearest one, Jane wrote to Julietta by a midnight candle, it was the strangest thing you could imagine. I am just returned from the Baths. I took myself there in the darkness, hoping this would still the torment of longing for you and help me to sleep, and who should I find there, naked as a savage, but poor Valentine!

Because I can’t conceal anything from you (and because even now I am still thinking of all the places where I want to kiss you and be kissed by you) I will admit that I was indecently pleased to see him. I’d thought that he was quite lost to me, on some foolish expedition to find his brother in the Far East, but when I saw him, all your words and all Emmeline’s words about trying to make a life with him came back to me. And I saw their logic. So I think that this is what I must decide to do now: bring Valentine Ross back to me, stir up his passion, and have him once more within my grasp.

And then, who knows?

Since I met your beautiful Marco, I have thought how much I would like to have a child of my own. Ross is handsome enough and an excellent physician and I believe he would be a kindly father …

Well, you see how my mind is tending?

But, oh my dearest, because I love YOU, there are limits, I know, to what I will ever be able to feel for him, or for any man. Whereas for my poor Valentine, I believe there are no limits. So by calling him back to me, am I not acting dishonourably?

Tell me, Julietta … tell me if I am behaving like a selfish witch, or only as we women must behave to stay afloat and not sink into invisibility and wretchedness in a world where men wish to make all the rules.

From your adoring friend, Jane

COMPLICITY

Early in the morning, Jane was woken by the urgent ringing of the doorbell.