Julietta and Nancy tried to staunch the terrifying deluge with soft towels pressed against and inside Jane’s vagina, but by the time the doctor arrived, Jane’s face had lost all its colour and her hands and feet were as cold as marble.

She drifted in and out of consciousness. The throbbing in her head, where it had been struck against the wall, seemed to her to make a strange echoing answer to the agony in her womb. She could feel blood sliding down her neck, but she understood that this wound was invisible, as yet, in her hair. When she tried to cry out to Julietta that her skull had been bruised, she found that she couldn’t speak.

The doctor carried her to the bedroom that had once been Emmeline’s and laid her down on the wide bed. He placed pillows under her knees, to raise her legs in a vain attempt to stop the blood that was still flowing out of her. He ordered Julietta and Nancy to fetch furs and blankets to try to warm her. Aware now of her head wound, he got Jane to swallow a little laudanum. He saw that her lips were blue and her whole body was trembling. He spoke to her softly. He informed her that his name was Dr Wood. Then he told her what she already knew, that she had lost her child. Her large eyes stared up at him, but barely flickered. The doctor waited for her to say something, but she did not seem able to make any answer.

Dr Wood examined Jane’s head and found a flesh wound and livid bruising, but no crack in the skull that he could detect. He cut away some locks of Jane’s hair, matted with blood, which he put into an enamel dish. He then gently cleaned the wound with carbolic acid, laid over it a piece of lint soaked in carbolic oil and wound bandages in a tight helmet round her head. He saw her eyes close. He pulled a chair close to the bed and waited.

After taking the laudanum, Jane could remember very little. She told herself that she had to try to keep breathing, but it seemed to her that she had been transported to a grey wilderness where the air was so cold that she did not dare to inhale it. She found that she was swaddled in fur and the perfume of the fur was strangely familiar to her and this gave her hope that she wasn’t alone in the wasteland she now inhabited. She reasoned that she might be among people who would know how to build shelters out of blocks of snow and that soon she might find herself carried into one of these and made warm again.

But this didn’t happen. In spite of the fur, her whole body was convulsing with cold. She fancied she could hear the noise her bones made as they shook in their sockets, like the wooden bones of a puppet. And then she could no longer hear anything. She entered a tunnel of silence. It was black night in the tunnel, but a long way away she could see a tiny circle of light. She stared at this, not sure how she should interpret it. She knew she was moving very slowly towards it, but there was nothing to tell her whether it was the light of heaven or the light shining on some human shore.