‘I heard, I heard!’ cried out Julietta to Jane, ‘oh my poor darling! Ashton, how in the world are we to comfort Jane? Let me take her in my arms. Come here, sweet angel.’

Julietta pulled Jane towards her and the two women clung together and sobbed, while Ashton stood very still, looking on, and Ellen stood by him blushing so hard one might have expected to see some vestige of a pink colour creep its way into the white lace of her maid’s cap.

Given that he had been tasked with contacting Sir William Adeane, Ashton now excused himself from the room, quickly followed by Ellen. Sensing they had gone, Julietta began to kiss Jane’s face and lick the salt tears from it and from her lips and then let her tongue probe the wet mouth, as if tears were the things with which it now delighted to quench a vast thirst. And it felt to the two lovers that their intimate world had taken on an oily, liquefied form in which sorrow and desire gleamed and trembled with rainbow colours, like unction falling upon water.

TABLEAU

Knowing nothing of what had happened in the last twenty-four hours, and no longer content to wait passively in Bath for Jane’s return, Valentine Ross arrived at Tite Street on the afternoon of that same day.

In his pocket was the emerald and diamond ring, and all along his journey to London, he’d been instructing himself to set aside his anger with Jane for her sudden departure and to show her nothing but kindness. He had even decided that he might force himself down on his knees to offer her the ring. Yet he could feel inside him a residue of profound irritation with her which he could not shake. Since her father’s return from Ireland, she had steadfastly refused to let Ross make love to her, and she would not even come to his rooms alone – another vexing assertion of her power over him.

He had begun ardently to wish that he did not desire her so incontinently and once again indulged in fantasies of subduing her in ways that would give him sexual release but which caused her physical pain. For how, he reasoned, could he bear to have a wife like this, who submitted to him in nothing and never would submit? Surely, this was a recipe for unhappiness as deep as black night? In terrible day-dreams he bound her, face-down to his bed with rope, or even chains, whipped her buttocks till welts appeared on them, then entered there, a sodomite slipped from all bounds of tenderness or obligation – a man in flagrante delicto whose only intent was release through punishment.

Though he tried to lay such fantasies aside, they returned from time to time, causing him intense arousal, and this was so troubling to him that he had taken to revisiting the prostitutes at the Neck Tavern, but now paying additional sums to enact his cruelties with them.