She got slowly to her feet and went down to the kitchen. The maid, Nancy, was not yet awake, so Jane banked up the range with coal and set water on to boil. She made a pot of strong coffee and took this back to the studio. She knew exactly what she was about to do.

She went to her portrait, now turned to the wall. She barely looked at her torn and damaged body, but only at her head and shoulders, and she found, as she hoped she would, that there was strength and purpose in her look.

She laid the picture down and using a thin chisel, pared away the frame put on by Hartley and Foulkes. Then she drew a chalk line across the picture, just below her shoulders, took up some strong scissors, cut the canvas there and eased the cut section off the frame.

She pinned it to the wall and sat down, drinking her coffee. From time to time, she glanced at it – no longer Emmeline’s ‘Woman in White’ but simply Jane Adeane: a human face, an unrelenting gaze confronting the world.

‘ONE AND THE SAME’

When the Queen of the Islands reached Singapore and its teeming commercial heart gave shelter to the travellers disembarking there, Valentine Ross immediately found his way to the nearest whorehouse. He remembered the apoplectic Harbourmaster of Plymouth saying that a ‘satisfactory debauch’ could be had in Singapore for the price of a tin tea kettle and he hoped that, by surrendering himself to all his wildest sexual imaginings, the darkness he felt in his soul would begin to lift and that a glimmer of daylight would return. But it did not return.

When he came out of the brothel, sated, tired and dishevelled, he found Chesterfield standing patiently in the dirty street, waiting for him. When he asked the old man why he lingered there, Chesterfield replied, ‘just a feeling, Sir that somebody should be looking out for you.’

Ross regarded his servant’s tired and weathered features, across which another of his obstinate grins now made its way. And he understood that, in Chesterfield’s mind, he still had a role to play in the unknown future of a man who seemed to have no friends, who shunned society and all human discourse and was only clinging to life in the hope of rescuing his brother in Borneo. Setting aside a moment’s irritation at being followed like this, as a dog follows its master, Ross then allowed himself to be moved by the man’s loyalty. He knew that it was a long time since anybody had chosen to stay close to him. But now here was an ancient soul who had decided against helping to shepherd convicts to Australia and who wanted to be his companion on the next and final leg of his journey.

He thanked Chesterfield. He told him that he would pay him well and asked him to return to the harbour to seek out a ship travelling to Borneo. The only thing he longed for now was to sleep in a solid bed that did not tremble and pitch in the ocean’s maw.