‘If I may say,’ said Mr Hartley, ‘a very successful likeness.’

‘And I notice another thing,’ said Mr Foulkes, ‘a likeness not just between portrait and subject, but a striking family resemblance between Miss Adeane and the late Miss Adeane.’

If Jane knew that this was flattery, that Emmeline had in her youth been a great beauty, while Jane, with her extraordinary height, was merely considered to be ‘handsome’, she was nevertheless gladdened by it. Anything which bound her retrospectively to Emmeline consoled her and she thanked Mr Foulkes and asked him if he and Mr Hartley would like to take a glass of sherry with her, while payment for the ebony frame could be handed over.

‘Payment?’ said Mr Hartley, ‘Oh no, my dear Madam. Mr Foulkes and I are absolutely agreed, we would like to offer the frame to you as a gift to the late Miss Adeane, as a mark of our respect and appreciation. She trusted our humble firm with her work for many years and we wish you to know how much we valued this.’

Jane regarded the two men, who were both now advancing in years and both a little stooped from the hours they spent at the framing table, and she thought how, here and there in the world, often hidden away in some alley or winding street which few people ever trod, there were small yet wonderful oases of human dedication and kindness of spirit, and this gladdened her most particularly because she had seen it and not allowed it to pass her by.

Hartley and Foulkes courteously declined the offer of sherry and were in the very act of replacing their top hats on their balding heads and making for the front door when Jane turned again to look at the portrait, and came to a decision which surprised her. She asked the framers if they might be able to hang the picture there where it stood in the hall – the first thing visitors to the house would see as they came in.

‘Ah,’ said Mr Hartley, ‘an excellent choice of location! The late Miss Adeane would have approved, I know. Do you have the necessary, Foulkes?’

‘I have it,’ said Foulkes and opened his frock coat to reveal a slim canvas bag attached to his waist, from which he produced a tape measure, a length of wire and numerous nails of varying sizes and conditions of rust.

So the portrait was hung in what Jane knew to be an ostentatious place, but she also knew why she had put it in the hall. The picture was the one thing shared completely between her and her aunt (each dependent on the other to bring it into the world, and both of them united in the secret of the golem) and so bound her to the idea that she had inherited the house by right and that only those who could bear to look at her portrait and walk by it without disdain would be allowed to enter there.