Then, when the music was nearing its end, Miss Jane had begun to cry – so moved was she by the sweet sadness of Chopin and by the talent of the pianist. Feeling her sobbing next to him, Valentine Ross had felt bold enough to take her hand and to lean in closer to her, so that his shoulder just touched hers – and she had not resisted him. When he’d passed her his clean silk handkerchief with which to dry her eyes, she had not returned it but tucked it intimately into the bodice of her dress.

‘What in heaven’s name,’ Ross now asked himself, in this night of sleepless agony, ‘was I meant to deduce from gestures like that? Are they not, precisely, the responses of a woman who feels herself to be loved and begins to bask in that affection? Would not other men have felt as I did, that this was proof of love? And – damn her to hell! – she never returned the silk handkerchief!’

This question of the handkerchief tormented him as much as any other. Was it simply an additional act of mockery on Jane’s part, or might he … dare he … take it as a ruse to summon him back, as though she were saying to him, ‘one stumbling offer of marriage might be sufficient for some women’s taste, but not for mine. I am Tall Jane. I am the Angel of the Baths. My exceptionality demands that you reflect on your words and improve them and then come to me again …’

But as the morning light began to show at his window, he was disposed to fear that were he to ask a hundred times for Jane’s hand, she would still refuse him.

GOLEM

When Jane had arrived back at Henrietta Street, the moment she stepped through the familiar door, she knew that she now had to find some means to escape from Bath for a considerable while. The mere idea of working side by side with Valentine Ross, pretending that nothing had occurred between them, made her feel faint with dread.

She retired to her room and wrote a quick letter to her beloved Aunt Emmeline in London, asking to come and stay with her ‘for a consoling stretch of time’.

She then went to her father and, as calmly as she could, without betraying to him – by a single gesture or any alteration of tone of voice or articulation – that anything unusual had happened, told him she had been missing Emmeline and now desperately wanted to go to London to spend time with her aunt.

Given that he was faced with hiring a new nurse to replace his daughter and would now have to oversee the running of the house as well, Sir William was disposed to feel cross with Jane for putting him in a vexing predicament. But he could never really be cross with his daughter, and Jane knew this. Crossness was not a feeling he could tolerate in himself in regard to her. So all he did was to take her hand in his and say, ‘you must do exactly as you please, dear lamb. You have worked very hard this season. Emmeline will be delighted to see you. And as for us, we will manage excellently, I’m sure. I will give you money for London fashions.’