The Morrissey flat was small and cluttered with all the cheap household furniture which Michael and his wife Kathleen had bought for it over the years, now collapsing slowly where it stood, the table propped on wood blocks, a blanket chest gnawed by worm, a larder cupboard nailed up with broken chicken wire. Soot from the coal range blackened the ceiling and tainted the air. Toys Michael had made for his girls from bits and pieces of pine and plywood lay about the floors and got under everybody’s feet. Mice fretted behind the skirting boards.

There were two bedrooms and in one of these Maire and her sister Aisling slept. Since Maire’s illness, Aisling, too, had been in torment, kept awake night after night by her sister’s snores and by her crying. One evening, she had crept down to the street and climbed into the baby carriage abandoned near the tenement door and tried to sleep in that, with her feet splayed out against the handle.

When Michael found her like this, he understood that things couldn’t go on as they were. By some means, he had to find the money for an operation for Maire. He had to give them all hope in a better future. He stood in the empty street, looking down at Aisling’s eleven-year-old limbs contorted in the attitudes of an exhausted sleep and it was at that moment that he remembered the ruby necklace.

Told that his sister would bring her ‘fiancé’, a renowned surgeon, to Dublin to operate on Maire free of charge, Michael felt confused. He knew, without needing to be told, that Clorinda felt little for her nieces, that her successful business in Bath had taken her very far away from Ireland and from the family, and the feeling that she had to pay some price for this – for a kind of betrayal of her Irish roots and her blood relations – was disinclined to leave him. But what kind of price? To press her about the heirloom – which he now reasoned, must have been sold to establish her tea room – seemed a good way to begin her punishment. Perhaps it would end with that, or perhaps it would not?

Now, he wasn’t sure what to do. He could see that the offer she was making was generous. If Sir William Adeane were able to save Maire, then Clorinda would have to be forgiven and the moment, then, might seem inappropriate to a discussion of the ruby necklace. In Michael Morrissey’s dreams, however, these things were strangely conjoined: the wound that would have to be made in Maire’s neck; the circlet of blood-coloured jewels. To exchange one for the other had a symmetry about it which obstinately appealed to him.

But it soon transpired that Clorinda’s plan would not work. For this life-or-death operation, Maire would need to be taken into hospital. It wasn’t something which could be performed on a kitchen table. Michael Morrissey had hurried to the hospital to tell them that a great English surgeon, Sir William Adeane was offering to perform the procedure. But, the Dublin doctors, informed peremptorily that Sir William was proposing to colonise hospital staff and precious resources for his own use (and his own aggrandisement) chose the path of rebellion.