LILIES AND BRIARS

If Jane wondered at how often she succumbed to great tides of weeping in the wake of Emmeline’s death, she also reminded herself that pregnant women were said to become emotionally fragile in the early months of carrying a child. She knew, too, that she wept for her future. To become the wife of Valentine Ross now seemed to her like entering the portals of hell. The engagement would have to be broken off before Ross learned of her pregnancy. And after that, she would never see him again.

But what would then become of her? She feared some violent anger in Ross which might destroy her. But not only that: she knew that society liked to turn its back on unmarried mothers, even perhaps the bohemian, emancipated portion of society which had clustered around her Aunt Emmeline. And so she would be quite alone and the child would grow up to be alone and friendless – and all because it had interested her, for a brief moment, to know what making love with a man was like.

Now, she cursed her own foolish curiosity and her physical greed. If only she had not done that, then a bright future might have awaited her. She would have been able to make whatever she chose of a life in London, close to Julietta, a life of wondrous freedom. Perhaps she could have started her own clinic in Tite Street, or perhaps again some new direction could have been found, some gradual discovery of The Thing which she had always believed attended her somewhere along the pathway of her life …

But nothing of the kind would be possible now. To her diary, she confided: ‘Either I will become the unhappy wife of Valentine Ross, or I will be an Outcast Woman, trying my best to love and shelter a child. I see us now, the two of us, myself and a little girl, who already begins to grow tall, like her mother. Together, we wander Emmeline’s high rooms, unvisited. We are waiting only for the years to pass.’

Ross bombarded Jane daily with letters, asking forgiveness for his ‘ill-considered’ outburst in the offices of Dutton & Caldecott and begging her to return to Bath. But she would not go. She replied that she was ‘trying to assemble a beautiful service of farewell for Aunt Emmeline’ and that until this was over, she would remain in London.

At Tite Street, on the days before the funeral, Jane received many callers, offering their affection and condolences. Among these were Emmeline’s picture-framers, Mr Hartley and Mr Foulkes. They had brought with them the portrait of Jane, which had served as a stretcher to convey Emmeline to the doctor. It was now framed in ebony – Emmeline’s emphatic choice – and, to Jane’s eyes, it appeared fractionally altered, as though the subject in her white gown had aged a little during the intervening time when the frame was made.

Hartley and Foulkes propped up the portrait in the hall and they both looked from it to Miss Jane, now robed in black, and nodded their approval.