When they left Bishop Street, the beauty of the early morning had vanished and rain was falling. Sir William looked around for a Hansom Cab but Clorinda doubted they would find one in this part of the city and said that she didn’t mind an Irish rain; it was always a gentle thing.

So they walked on, arm in arm, at the slow pace Sir William favoured, their fine clothes beaded by the drizzle, their faces growing shiny and pink and Clorinda thought, as they went on, that she’d never enjoyed any walk more than this one. She felt, at last, reunited with her city, at one with the quiet streets and the rain. And towards Sir William she felt the greatest tenderness she had ever felt for any man.

When the sun came out again and they reached a small park where the berries on the rowan trees glowed a marigold orange, and where an organ grinder was playing an old song Clorinda remembered from her time working for a haberdasher, she knew that this was where she wanted to go before they left Dublin, to show Sir William the tiny shop with its drawers of ribbons and bindings, which had been her last lowly billet in the city of her birth before her momentous decision to leave.

But on the way to the haberdasher’s, they found a Coffee Room offering ‘Fine, true coffee from the Americas, No Added Ingredients’ and they went in and sat down. Clorinda looked about her, measuring the Coffee Room in her mind against her tea room. She ran her hand across the wooden tabletop and said: ‘What do you think, William? Are people comforted here in the way I like them to be in Bath?’

‘Not at all,’ said Sir William. ‘There is no fire.’

‘That is because it is summer.’

‘No. It is because there is no fireplace. And, worse than this, no visible means of ordering a brandy snap! But I am comforted because I am with you and can hold your hand if I wish.’

Clorinda laughed and Sir William thought once more what a sweet sound that laughter was and he grew grave, suddenly, with the thought that he would surely die long before his new wife and the gift of her laughter would one day go to somebody else.

‘I hope,’ he said, with a choke in his voice, ‘that we will be married for a very long time. Though everything about us may disappear or undergo some infernal alteration which nobody predicts, I want you and me to be just as we are now: happy and at peace. And you laughing.’

DARK AND SHINING COLOURS

In ten days’ time, the Rainsford would sail for Singapore.

Valentine Ross lay in his narrow bed and tried to weigh in his mind whether he would be aboard the ship, suffering in his hutch of a cabin, cold and seasick, yet embarked at last on his mission to find Edmund, or would he dare to postpone his sailing in one final attempt to woo Jane?