Clorinda again touched the beautiful jewel and the thought that it was an emerald and so contained within it the spirit of her Irish homeland moved her to say that she would accept it and treasure it for ever. This, in turn, emboldened Jane to say, ‘there is just one more thing, Clorinda. I discovered this emerald and diamond ring on my dressing table. I’m not sure how it found its way there. Perhaps it was dropped and Nancy found it on the floor and put it there, thinking it was mine. But when I put it into the jewel box, I saw that it appeared to be all of a piece with the brooch. So here, please take the ring, as well. If we hold it against the brooch – look – we can see that the cut and colour of the emeralds are almost identical. They should not be separated.’

THE WOODEN HOOP

On the day that Clorinda Morrissey and Sir William returned to Bath, something happened to Valentine Ross which had never happened before: one of his patients drowned in the Hot Bath.

The nurse assisting him and Sir William in Jane’s absence, who styled herself Nurse Marion, had accompanied the elderly woman, who was suffering from body tremors, the cause of which Ross was unable to diagnose, to the healing waters. Nurse Marion was the kind of sharp-nosed person who wished to give the impression of stern dedication to her calling, but who was addicted to the habit of making notes in minuscule neat writing upon everything that happened in the surgery and so was often distracted from actually observing the patients or listening carefully to what they had to say. This – together with the baleful fact that she over-starched her aprons and so walked about the premises crackling like a rasher of frying bacon – made Ross suspect that her time at Henrietta Street would have to be limited.

Now, when he heard about the death of his patient, who had ‘slipped so silently under the green waters that nobody noticed’ he was dismayed on two counts: that the patient had died for nothing but want of vigilance on behalf of Nurse Marion and that the whole sorry business had happened because Jane had deserted her duties, both as his fiancée and as his medical assistant. Indeed he felt that not only this, but everything that might go wrong in his professional life from now on was Jane’s fault. She was selfish and proud. If she was an Angel, then she was surely also a witch? People could fall under her spell and be cursed. Death could occur. And nobody was at greater risk from her maledictions than he was.

These thoughts brought about in him the certainty that he would have to act. He couldn’t remain patiently in Bath while Miss Jane drew out her mourning for her aunt for as long as it suited her. And, more importantly, he wished to know, once and for all, if Jane was deceiving him, either with some dilettante bohemian lover, or – and this thought caused him the greater amount of anger and repulsion – by going against nature and finding erotic satisfaction with her friend Julietta. As yet, he had no absolute proof of anything, but the tableau he’d seen in the Tite Street drawing room kept reappearing in his mind: Julietta’s head on Jane’s lap, an attitude of abandonment in both the women’s bodies. The picture would not leave him. And he felt that he had endured these terrible suspicions long enough. He had to find out the truth, no matter what the consequences would prove to be.