Jane held herself very still. She allowed the Matron to come bustling very close to her before she replied calmly, ‘I came looking for my aunt, Miss Adeane, to take her home.’

‘Who is “Miss Adeane”?’ said the Matron.

‘Miss Emmeline Adeane, the artist. I came to see her yesterday evening.

I informed two of the doctors that I would be returning this morning to convey her home.’

‘Well,’ said the Matron, ‘I know of no such person. I have been here since six o’clock, doing the roster, and no one of that name is on this ward.’

Jane pointed to the cot where Emmeline had lain. She was about to say that this had been Emmeline’s bed, when the Matron surprised her by snatching the bowl of junket out of her hand and slamming it down onto the table, after which she turned tail and began to walk away.

‘Where is my aunt?’ Jane cried out.

The Matron was almost at the door when she said, ‘if a female patient who was here yesterday is not here today, then there is only one place she will be: in the morgue.’

She was gone then and Jane stood very still, trying to catch her breath. She put a hand to her throat, as if to ease the passage of air. She was aware of some of the dying women attempting to sit up, to see her more clearly, this stranger in a white gown who had been stricken by the words of the Matron.

One of them reached out a beckoning hand to her, and Jane, wondering if this woman knew what had happened to Emmeline, moved towards her, but as she did so, the patient made a frenzied gesture towards the bowls of junket on the table, then pointed to her mouth. Jane turned to fetch the food for her and as she did so, other women began calling out for the junket and Jane wondered if they were often tortured like this – food being placed near them, but not within their reach.

She began distributing the bowls, placing them gently into trembling hands. All of this she did with her thoughts peculiarly absent from her actions. It was as if these things were being done in order, simply, to keep her breathing until she found the will to undergo the next moments of her life.

The hospital morgue was housed in a deep cellar.

Jane was led down to it by one of the doctors she had seen the evening before. He gave her a steadying arm. His former impatience with her appeared to have been mastered. Jane thought about the last time she had been in a morgue, in Paris. All that had been asked of her then was pity; now, she had been plunged into her own sorrow.

The doctor told her that Emmeline had died ‘in her sleep’ not long after she’d left. ‘In cases like hers,’ he said, ‘where the damage to the heart is great, we always pray that death comes quickly.’