Ross said, ‘It was surely never fair, Mrs Latimer. But most of what mankind attempts suffers derision from one quarter or another. There are those – very many, indeed – who deride doctors. They want us to be all-knowing, but we are not. The diseases of the body and mind are infinite and we lag far behind.’

‘But what about you, Miss Jane?’ asked Mrs Latimer. ‘I was told you could work miracles, but you have not saved Mr Latimer.’

‘He will live a while yet …’ said Jane.

‘But not long enough! Our new house is almost ready, but he will never see it, never stand at an upper window and look down …’

She wept again. Meanwhile, Latimer seemed to be in acute distress, struggling to breathe and giving voice to a howl of pain.

‘Let him lie back,’ said Ross to Jane. ‘I will take the balsam away and bring laudanum.’

Ross removed the bowl and went out of the room, to his own surgery, which he had not occupied for a long while. Jane wondered briefly what his feelings would be upon finding himself there – whether the familiar room and all that it contained of his life would call to him and beg him to stay in Bath. But she had to give all her attention to Latimer now. The poor man was shivering and crying out, struggling for air, and a tiny rope of blood progressed steadily from the corner of his mouth down his chin. Jane kept wiping this away. She arranged the blanket more snugly round Latimer and his wife took off her own shawl and laid it on him. She sought to hold his gaze as she bent over him, but his eyes wandered and could not come to rest on anything.

‘He is going,’ said Mrs Latimer. ‘He is going, Miss Jane …’

Jane put her hand on Latimer’s neck and could still feel a pulse, but she thought that his wife was right: he was dying. She heard the hall clock strike seven and was visited by the thought that it was strange to die at a moment when a new day was just beginning, when the people of Bath were travelling to work, when the errand boys were setting off on their deliveries, when the rich sat in their parlours and perused the Bath Chronicle, searching for news of their investments, when, in London, the Queen would be busy gobbling down a third helping of her favourite breakfast dish, Kedgeree …

She also wished that Ross would return with the laudanum. When he did, she decided that she would signal to him to let Latimer drink it all. That way, the terrible last moments of his life would be passed, not in the agony he was suffering now, but in a soft darkness, or even in a dream of what that life had been, lived mainly among splendour and warmth and the sound and stink of a great factory alchemising bones into money.