When Ross came back, Jane left Latimer’s side for a moment, to whisper her thoughts about the laudanum to him and he replied that he had already arrived at the same decision.

It was with some difficulty and slowness that Latimer swallowed the brandy and opium, but he managed it at last and its properties appeared to work very quickly in his afflicted system and his body ceased its struggles and his breathing became quieter. His eyes closed. Mrs Latimer laid her head next to his on the pillow and Jane and Ross could hear her tunelessly singing the words of a little Music Hall song:

‘My sweetheart’s name is the sound of the sea

And his arms are my ship of rest

His voice is the breeze which sings to me

And tells me I’ll ne’er be lost.’

Jane and Ross moved away from the bed and sat down, either side of Sir William’s desk, like patient and consultant, with Jane in the consultant’s chair. They didn’t speak, but only looked at each other with an enquiring kind of look, knowing they had been complicit in hastening Latimer’s approaching end and silently asking each other whether any mortal sin was being committed.

STRANGER

To find herself once again in Dublin troubled Clorinda Morrissey far more than she had anticipated. She told her fiancé that ‘it is as if everything which had once been familiar and dear to me has decided that I am no longer dear to it.’

‘What can you really mean?’ asked Sir William.

‘Well,’ said Mrs Morrissey, ‘I turned my back on Dublin. Now, it rewards me by making me feel like a stranger from Canada.’

‘Canada, my dear?’

‘Yes. I mean like one who comes from very far away and recognises nothing and does not know the correct meaning of anything.’

She couldn’t explain it more clearly than this. She knew, however, that her feeling of being shunned, or even disliked by her native city might have been brought about, not just by her desertion of it, but by the guilt she had begun to feel on the subject of the Morrissey heirloom.

Her brother Michael and his family lived in a tenement flat on Bishop Street, a road of once-handsome brick houses with Dutch-gabled roofs, now fallen into disrepair and having about it a feeling of peculiar emptiness, as though the wind which blew in off the river was intent upon turning everything that existed there to dust.

Clorinda knew this street quite well. In daylight, a few children played in the road, chalking out Hopscotch games or giving each other rides in an old baby carriage, their little legs hanging over the edge and their stout boots kicking the dented wickerwork. The bell of the Rag-and-Bone Man could sometimes be heard in the early evenings and shadowy figures might come out from the doorways, to see what they could sell to him for a few ha’pennies. But mainly the street felt like a place which a catastrophe had once visited, leaving behind it a feeling of anxious vacancy.