A hard chair had been set by the bedside and Jane sat down on this, allowing her hand to rest lightly upon Emmeline’s head, so that when she woke up, she would at once know that she was not alone. Only now did Jane begin to look around the ward. She saw that shutters had been closed across all but one of the narrow windows, so that the inmates of the beds were consigned to a peculiar daytime twilight. The air in the room was stale, unmoving, as though this air was considered almost unnecessary and was a foul, rationed quota deemed just sufficient for the fragile lungs which breathed it.

Jane peered through the semi-darkness, searching for a nurse, to whom she would have begged for a window to be opened, but she could see no one moving around the ward. And the female patients, each in her iron bed, appeared to be in a state of utter quietness, taut white sheets pinning them down, their bodies subservient to some fearful command not to move, as if rehearsing for the tomb.

And it then occurred to Jane that this ward was the one where the dying were put. Now and again, a nurse would pass through, administering the laudanum that kept them quiet and relatively free from pain, but mainly they had been abandoned. She suspected that no doctor came there. The doctors had relinquished all obligations towards these women, believing that nothing more could be done for them. Jane knew that they wouldn’t blame themselves for this impotence; they would blame the women for passing beyond their collective store of medical knowledge. To walk around this ward would only have put them into a state of irritation.

That Emmeline had been put here now filled Jane with a righteous anger. Her aunt didn’t belong in this ante-room of death and she saw now that it was her task to get her out of here before she suffocated in the darkness and floated out of her life on a sea of opiates.

She stood up and bent over Emmeline, shaking her gently by her shoulders and saying her name. Though she said it quietly, the beautiful word ‘Emmeline’ seemed to echo up towards the vaulted ceiling and circle there like the cry of a lone seabird following a ship. And this cry brought a nurse scuttling from some nearby room, carrying the lower section of a wooden leg, complete with its cleverly jointed foot. She went straight to Emmeline’s bed and pushed Jane aside, using the leg as a weapon. Jane cried out and this cry seemed to wake a few patients from their slumber and the room was suddenly filled with the noise of lamentation.

‘Now hear what you have done!’ said the nurse. ‘Whoever you are, you must leave at once. This patient must be left to die in peace.’

‘No!’ said Jane. ‘No! I am not going to let her die. Her heart can recover.’

‘It will not,’ said the nurse, now gesturing with the leg towards Emmeline’s breast. ‘She will be dead by tomorrow.’