Jane had also learned from her father how to extract rotting teeth. She saw clearly that a contaminated mouth could poison and weaken a body, right down to the soles of its feet. Jane promised anxious patients that she could set them on a path to recovery without pain. They had only to inhale a little Nitrous Oxide to experience a feeling of exaltation, to start laughing at the very idea of suffering and the fear of suffering, at which moment, Jane’s strong left hand would hold their mouths agape and with her right she would manipulate her shining Leopold Extractor, to twist and pull out the rotting tooth almost before the patient understood that his jaw had been touched.

The swabbing of putrefaction with a pad soaked in distilled carbolic acid left the site of the extraction as free of infection as could be expected. When the euphoria of the Nitrous Oxide wore away, Jane would gently take hold of the patient’s first finger, dip it into a jar of Oil of Cloves and instruct him to ‘become an infant for a while’, sucking upon his own hand to take away the pain.

She never hurried a patient out of the quietly furnished room where she performed her dental work, but knelt by him and held his gaze, eye to human eye, until he could stand up and walk out into the bracing Bath air. This holding of a person’s features in the balm of her brown eyes always seemed to bring upon them feelings of calm, and Jane came to believe, without ever having witnessed the work of Monsieur Mesmer, that her will could still the agitation of a frantic heart.

It was quite natural, then, that patients longed to return to her and even fancied themselves in love with her, so effective were her cures and so powerful were her presence and her touch. Some of these sufferers, over the years, had forgotten themselves so absolutely, when lying on her massage couch, as to whisper to her that their only cure lay in her willingness to massage other parts of their anatomies until they arrived at blissful relief. It was even put about one summer that the Angel of the Baths would do this, in exchange for a guinea, thus emboldening more patients to ask for it. But there was no truth in the assertion. None. Miss Jane derived considerable satisfaction from her ability to help the sick and the dying; the very idea of using her powers to commit acts which would defile her made her feel sick. The truth was that she respected men, sometimes for their bravery, sometimes for their skill and sometimes for their dauntless yearning to be heroes. She also pitied them for their childlike natures and their emotional cowardice, but she did not love them at all.

You might have believed, therefore, that Dr Valentine Ross, who had worked side by side with Jane for almost two years and come to know her as well as any man, apart from her father, would have comprehended this. He was not an unobservant man. But his hopes for a cure for his own troubled emotional state were misguided. They were vain hopes, absolutely vain, because they counted on a cure which – he had quite failed to see – was not there to be given.