Emmeline’s maid, Nancy had let him in to number 2a Tite Street. He introduced himself to her as Miss Jane’s fiancé and she bobbed a token curtsey to him. Ignorant as yet of Emmeline’s death, she informed him that Jane had returned to the hospital, but was expected to bring Emmeline home ‘as soon as she may be well enough’. He thanked her and asked her to make him a pot of tea.

Left alone in the hall, Ross wandered into the high space that was Emmeline’s studio. The scent of turpentine was both pleasing to him and a cause of immediate unease. It was the perfume of the artist’s work and in this large room he knew that what he was witnessing was the kind of dedicated endeavour of which he himself had never been capable. On an easel rested a half-completed still life of some china birds clustered around a wine bottle and he found himself admiring the way Emmeline had seen how the shapes of these objects made such a pleasing group.

Along the skirting were stacked canvases of differing sizes, some half-completed or rejected, some primed and pristine, waiting for new work. Although Ross expected to come across the portrait of Jane here and wondered what he would feel when he came face to face with it, there was no sign of it. He let his gaze shift above the stack of paintings, where, carelessly pinned to the wall, there were hundreds of charcoal sketches, essays upon ideas not yet fully formed: a human profile here, a naked foot there, a sprig of privet in flower, a bird in flight, a Chelsea costermonger with his cart, a wrought-iron gate, a rock rising from the sea …

And Ross saw in all this a mind restless to capture what it beheld and try to transform the mundane and the quotidian, as well as the beautiful, into art. He felt that what he was looking at was the embodiment of the things Jane loved and valued. She’d gone running to London, without a backward glance in his direction, because in Emmeline she’d found somebody she deemed worthy of her adoration.

His next thought, as he looked at the quantity of brushes and palette knives on Emmeline’s work table, was, could he, with the surgical instruments at his disposal, one day achieve some great medical triumph, some feat of salvation that would engender in Jane’s heart the reverence and admiration of the kind she felt for Emmeline? He could see how different his world might appear to her, if only he could do this. His wife would no longer be haughty and teasing. She would live in awe of him. In bed, she would submit to whatever he chose to do. He would have vanquished her.

It was then that a new idea began to form in his mind: he would marry Jane and oblige her to come with him to Borneo, thus separating her from all that she knew and cared for, aside from him. Once on the Malay Archipelago, he would set about his task of rescuing Edmund, then establish himself – there in a primitive land, where superstition no doubt vanquished sensible medical practice – as the man who was bringing healing medicines and a surgeon’s skills to an entire community, soon to be revered for hundreds of miles as a White God.