She woke to find Nancy at her bedside, carrying a bowl of broth for her supper, and as she drank this gratefully, feeling it calm her sickness, the two young women began to conjure memories of Emmeline: the way she regarded herself so critically in a looking glass, the way she would be ‘lost’ for hours in her studio, eating and drinking nothing, working on by lamplight and candlelight until she could hardly stand for weariness, the way she doted on ballotine of chicken and champagne, the way she arranged her provocative turbans so precisely on her head, the way she liked to dance, the way her moods could change with the changing of the hours …

‘She was complete,’ Jane found herself saying, not knowing exactly why she’d chosen this word, but knowing only that, for all her early sufferings, Emmeline had embraced her life. She had been the star of her own play. All the songs that had formed in her mind, she had sung.

‘Of course,’ Nancy said, ‘she was often lonely.’

‘I know,’ said Jane.

‘But after you came to stay and she painted your portrait, she said to me, I understand Jane perfectly now. Jane is with me and I won’t be lonely any more.’

‘I’m glad,’ said Jane. ‘This makes me glad.’

Nancy helped Jane to get up and she put on a grey silk robe given to her by Emmeline and she went down to her aunt’s studio. Here, she lit a lamp and sat down on the ottoman, where Jocelyn Hulton had once lain and pleasured himself, watching Emmeline work. Conjuring this image brought the pottery golem back into Jane’s mind and she suddenly felt an urge to see this object again and hold it – the only visible legacy of Emmeline’s lost babies – in her hands.

She found it where it had always been kept, at the back of a cupboard, and she brought the box to the lamplight, opened it and look down at it. She hadn’t remembered it as being so well formed as this, with a sad face which seemed to hold a human gaze. Had she not looked at it closely enough before? Or was it simply that the golem seemed to have greater life now that its maker was dead?

To respect this life, which was what she felt she wanted to do, Jane decided that she should try to mend the cracks in it. She took the lamp and began to search, among Emmeline’s pots of paint, for some glue. When she found it, she selected a fine sable brush from Emmeline’s great jar of brushes and palette knives, and working with infinite care to place just enough glue along the breaks in the body of the golem, imagined that she was a surgeon sewing up wounds, which, in time, would become almost invisible.

That night in her diary, she wrote: ‘At the end of a momentous day, in which I inherited Emmeline’s house and witnessed Valentine Ross attempt to snatch it from me, I rescued the golem. I was standing under the skylight in Emmeline’s studio, where once the rain fell on her pottery wheel.’