At these words, Jane pushed aside the terrible leg from her aunt’s body and threw herself upon her and began begging her to wake up. She feared, at any moment, that she would be felled by the nurse, the wooden leg falling upon her neck like an axe, and – in her constant awareness of how human behaviour descended from one moment to the next into the farcical – saw how ridiculous this scene was becoming. And yet it felt right to her, that she was fighting for Emmeline. Her brave aunt could no longer struggle. Jane would be her defender and take her away from this cathedral of death.

The nurse didn’t hit her. She retreated, in her heavy shoes, to wherever she had come from, but Jane knew that this was only to summon reinforcements and that she would probably be manhandled out of the ward and into the street. So it was with great urgency now that Jane begged Emmeline to come out of her drug-induced sleep and speak her name. But Emmeline’s eyes remained closed. Her breathing was shallow, so shallow that it almost could not be heard. At the corner of her mouth, a tiny bubble of spittle bloomed and then burst.

Jane now sat on the bed, pulling Emmeline into her arms and rocking her back and forth, just as she might have comforted a weeping child. But it was she who now wept. She wept for all the suffering Emmeline had endured, for her loneliness, for her lost beauty, for her golem, but most of all for the love her aunt had given to her – the love of a mother – which, if Emmeline was indeed surrendering to the death prescribed for her here, she was going to lose.

A trio of people came: the nurse and two black-coated doctors.

Jane laid Emmeline down very gently, smoothing her hair from her temples and placing a kiss on her forehead. The trio did not touch her, but only waited, so close to Jane that she could smell the fustian of the men’s coats and the tobacco on their breath.

She turned to them, seeing in all of them stares of implacable hostility, and told them quietly that she was Miss Emmeline Adeane’s niece and herself a nurse and would be able to care for her in her own house. She informed them that on the morrow she would come back in a Hansom Cab. She asked if her aunt could be woken early and made ready for the short journey from the hospital to Tite Street, ‘and thereafter,’ she added, ‘you will be released from all responsibility for her and I will be the one who takes it on, for I do it gladly and I know that it is what Miss Adeane would have wished’.

The nurse who had relinquished the wooden leg said nothing, but looked towards the doctors, waiting for one of them to speak.

‘As I understood it,’ said the elder of the two men with a sniff of irritation, ‘this woman is not expected to survive.’