That night, remembering her conversation with Marco, the beginnings of a story came into Jane’s mind.

She told herself that she probably wouldn’t be able to write such a thing, that ‘real’ writers – Guy Mollinet, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and even Emmeline’s detested Mr Wilkie Collins – had a vision of the world particular only to them and it was this which gave their work its power. She doubted that this was true for a woman who had spent almost ten years as a nurse. But she knew what pleasure and solace her reading had given her and remembered that she had found something of this same consolation in her diary jottings – in the act of writing. She dared herself to begin and see what happened.

She didn’t yet know if her story might be only for children or whether its reach was deeper and wider than that, but her mind was held by it, whatever it was, and, as the night went on, it expanded and grew to the point where she renounced sleep and went down into Emmeline’s studio. Shivering a little in the cool air of the autumn night, she picked up one of Emmeline’s sketch pads and embarked on her strange tale.

She formed the golem into a creature of unbaked clay, soft and pliant. It had the ugly features Emmeline had described to her, before she had thrown it into the fire, but it grew a little larger in her mind. It took on a kind of human life: the living representation of all the children lost to Emmeline and even of her own lost child. And it was, as she had described to Marco, possessed of magic powers. The most important of these was the power of healing, an attribute once given to her while her life had been an innocent thing, and which, she felt, had been lost when that innocence was lost. By this reasoning, she knew that it was the very core of herself that she was seeking to capture in the story, but in another form, and it would be her imaginative understanding of this other form – the living golem – which would give the work verisimilitude and truth.

Jane set the golem down alone at midnight in the Baths and let it see the wonder of moonlight on the tiny ripples of the water. In its dawning consciousness, it knew that it belonged here. It bent down and scooped up a little water and rubbed itself with this, so that its clay flesh shone more brightly and became softer. And then it sat quietly on the edge of the Hot Bath, breathing the sulphurous steam and letting its head fall forwards in a contented sleep. It knew that on the morrow, when the people began arriving, hoping to be consoled by the waters, or even cured of their maladies, it would show itself to them and they would reach out to it, yearning to feel its mercy.