She was proud of the way she had turned Leon aside from his fish factory to build the hospital, but now, in the space of one night, it had been taken over by a gang of strangers. And so close to her own house they seemed! She fancied she could smell their sweat and the arak or the grog on their breath. It was as if, with their loud singing and their torches and their fires, they had moved the three new longhouses nearer to her pool than they were ever meant to be.

As she walked on, Taminah began to encounter one or two Chinese workers, emerging from the forest, going towards their day’s labour on the hospital dwellings. She wanted to warn them what they would find there, but she kept silent. She was walking quite fast and she was some way from the river now. But at her back she suddenly heard the echoing sound of a rifle shot. She stopped on the road. Birds flew up from their roosts into the pale sky. A gibbon cried out.

DUTTON & CALDECOTT

Around a polished mahogany table, where a glass vase of feathery anemones had been placed to offer some colour and softness to a room which was otherwise drab and severe, the solicitors Mr James Dutton and Mr Bernard Caldecott now sat opposite their new client, Miss Jane Adeane. In front of Dutton and Caldecott lay a legal document written on thick cream paper, sealed with scarlet wax and tied with a red silk ribbon. This document was Emmeline Adeane’s Last Will and Testament.

Jane, seated on the opposite side of the table, surreptitiously examined the faces of the solicitors. Her practised nurse’s eye told her that they were both men in good health, enjoying a prosperous, rosy-cheeked middle age. They appeared sane, and she was glad of this. They had begun by telling her that they had ‘acted’ for her aunt for many years and she was relieved to believe that men like these had probably had no reason to practise upon her beloved Emmeline the small swindling tricks of which so many lawyers were capable. In short, she was disposed to trust them and to like them.

What she did not like was the presence of Valentine Ross at her side. It wasn’t as if she had had to face the solicitors alone. With Sir William now arrived in London and Ashton Sims agreeing to attend, in order to introduce them both to Dutton and Caldecott, Jane felt that there was ‘no need’ for Ross to be there. But he had insisted that as her fiancé he had the right to be present at the reading of her aunt’s Will. She had wanted to say to him that, as far as Emmeline was concerned, he had no rights at all. He’d never known her. He’d never shown the least interest in her remarkable life. It felt to her that Emmeline did not belong to him in any way. She belonged to her, Jane, and to her father and she belonged to Ashton because they had been friends for so many years; Ross was truly an interloper in the room. But she had said nothing.