This story had been told to Jane by Emmeline some years ago, but Jane had never forgotten it. Compassion for her aunt, coupled with an admiration for her talent had led Jane to feel that Emmeline might be the person who would guide her towards the exceptional future she dreamed of. And now, in the tiresome wake of Valentine Ross’s proposal of marriage, she was on a steam train to London. As the fields of Wiltshire and Hampshire went by the window, Jane put all thoughts of Ross from her mind and let herself enjoy being carried so swiftly towards Emmeline.

CAPERCAILLIE

After Jane’s departure, Valentine Ross took to rising from his bed very early in the mornings, tugging on such clothes as came to his hand, winding a scarf round his neck and walking out into the cold mornings, almost before the sun had risen. Sometimes, there was a dusting of snow on the pavement. Sometimes, the wind was so strong that fallen leaves on the street were blown upwards into his face. But these things Ross observed, merely, and did not acutely feel. Let winter come, was his thought. Let the snow fall and consume Bath in a shroud of silence. Let everything feel as stifled and as bandaged as my heart.

His favourite walk was up Beacon Hill and across some grassy fields to the village of Charlcombe. Going up Beacon, he felt his lungs complain, but forced himself to climb faster, as though trying to test his body, even willing it to fail that test and to fall.

But it did not fall. One of the gifts he’d believed he was offering Jane was his body’s strength. In his surgery, he could, if the need arose, lift his patients onto his examination table. The power of his hands and his refined knowledge of the human skeleton enabled him to be swift and effective at bone setting. And as for his stamina as a lover, the girls working in the upstairs rooms of the Neck Tavern on Avon Street, where Ross was an occasional visitor, had nicknamed him Sir Diehard and he was vain enough to feel proud of this.

He had so often imagined this gift of his strength being offered to Jane that it was now almost impossible to accept that she would never experience it. He wanted to say to her, ‘let me show you how adroitly I can love you. Then decide whether you wish to marry me or not. To cast me away before I’ve given you the gift of myself is not reasonable nor fair …’

But of course no such words could be spoken. Jane had refused him and he now had to find it in himself to turn away from her and reimagine a different future. But where and how was that future to be found? It was this which Ross vainly hoped his cold morning walks would reveal to him. Yet he was aware, as he urged his body to its ever-faster pace, that his mind was a terrible blank. He supposed that thoughts must be flickering in some part of his brain, but he couldn’t actually think them. He wondered if this blankness was a prelude to madness or bodily collapse.