She left Latimer’s side, while his wife dried her tears and came to take hold of his pale hand. She went to the table where Sir William attended to what he called his ‘chemical magic’ and took down a vial of almond oil. For the balsam, she would need boiling water. Becky was not yet awake, so Jane descended quickly to the kitchen to put a kettle on the range. While she waited for the water to boil, she heard the front door open above. When she returned to the surgery with the bowl of hot water, Jane saw Valentine Ross standing at Mr Latimer’s bedside.

Jane nodded a ‘good day’ to Ross and he inclined his head. In the kitchen, Jane had tied one of Becky’s aprons round her silken dressing gown and she was glad of this now, to help maintain her modesty in the morning light, but she was aware that her legs and feet were bare and she saw that Ross couldn’t help glancing at these, as she mixed her balsam.

‘What do you think, Doctor Ross?’ she asked. ‘It is my own opinion that a tincture of bitter almonds will relieve much congestion in Mr Latimer’s lung and then he will be more at ease.’

Ross did not reply directly to her, but only nodded and then bent down towards Latimer and raised him up, placing cushions at his back, so that he could bend over to breathe in the steam from the almond infusion.

To put the bowl on Latimer’s lap, Jane had to move very close to Valentine Ross. The scent of his body (or perhaps it was just the scent of his clothes?) she recognised as if from long, long ago, as though it had been part of her childhood and she had always known it and liked it. She asked Ross to hold the bowl steady while she placed a towel over Latimer’s head, put a gentle hand on his neck and told him to breathe deeply of the pungent steam. But he could not breathe deeply. He could only gasp. The vapour whirled about his face and his open mouth tried to capture it, like a child might try to capture falling snowflakes, but he could inhale very little.

This sight of her husband moving his gaunt visage this way and that, under the towel, attempting to take the balsam into him, brought his wife to another spasm of weeping and she began to babble that she had been brought out of a ‘poor family’ by Latimer and given a good life.

Jane supposed that she thought Latimer couldn’t hear what she was saying because of the towel, for she ran on into a great storm of explanation of Latimer’s wealth, saying that he had been unfairly derided for his glue factory, but that glue ‘holds things together and how would society fare, indeed, if those things that needed to be attached to each other came apart?’

Neither Jane nor Ross said anything to this, but Mrs Latimer continued: ‘All our lives, we had to suffer the taunting that we got our money from making stews of animal bones, but everything is made of something. What is a leather bag but cow hide? What is in a pillow but down plucked from geese? It was never fair to us.’