‘I know,’ said Leon again. ‘No fish factory now. No money for Leon. No money for you, rajah. My beautiful idea kaput.’

OUT OF REACH

Jane left Julietta’s bed at dawn and walked back to Tite Street.

She asked for hot water and washed herself. She felt dizzy from lack of sleep, but was now concerned only with getting back to the hospital to rescue Emmeline. She knew that the day in front of her would be long and difficult, but her hours with Julietta had been so extraordinary, they had given her both peace and strength.

As she washed herself, she looked at her body in the mirror. It appeared to her the same as it always appeared. If she was indeed pregnant, it would still be so early in the process that she told herself she wouldn’t even think about it – not yet. Carrying Julietta in her heart and in her blood, she would now begin her fight to get Emmeline back. She had brought to London the gown she wore as the Angel of the Baths and she would now put this on. All the skill she possessed would be directed at making Emmeline well and placing her gently back in the life she loved.

She ordered Nancy to go out and buy fresh loaves, milk and oysters and to ask at the chemist for a strong fruit cordial and a balsam of camphor. She supervised the laying of clean starched sheets on Emmeline’s bed and searched her studio for books she might read aloud to her, pressing to her breast the poems of Tennyson, Browning and Christina Rossetti. She prepared a warming pan. She mixed tooth powder in a small dish. Then she went out into the neglected garden and searched the tangled area for flowers. She found a few pansies clustering under brambles and picked these and arranged them in a little cut-glass vase, which she placed on Emmeline’s dressing table. She took one of Emmeline’s turbans from a hat box and put it into a canvas holdall.

Then she set forth in a Hansom Cab for the hospital. On the short journey, she found herself summoning thoughts of her own mother, never known by Jane, her life ending only minutes after her daughter’s began. Her name was Alice. By Sir William’s account, Alice had been ‘a person to whom human kindness came as easily as breathing’ and it was often said of her that she had never ‘done any wrong in the world’. And Jane thought now, ‘I have done wrong – in the eyes of English society, which forbids love between women. I will do wrong again.’ And she wondered, with sudden sadness, whether this kindly mother, this perfect Alice, would have cast her daughter out from her affection because of her sexual transgressions. Was it better, she wondered then, that Emmeline had had to play the motherly role – she who had given birth to nothing but half-formed creatures, ejected from her body in agony and memorialised in a clay golem, but who seemed to understand so well what was in Jane’s nature and in her heart? Had Alice died, knowing that her daughter would come to need a different mother?