As Emmeline set up a tall canvas on her easel, she already felt excitement about the picture. She was impatient to sketch in the rough outlines with charcoal and begin working with her beloved oils. But one thing about the composition wasn’t yet right: Jane’s long-fingered hands hung loosely at her sides, inert and slack, and Emmeline knew that this detracted from her goddess-like status, making her look idle and somehow at a loss.

She broke off from her preparations, rummaged in the low cupboard where the failed artefacts she’d made on the pottery wheel were stowed away in a clutter, like a collection of damaged toys cast aside by a child. At the back of the cupboard was the wooden box in which she kept the golem. She lifted this out, opened it and took up the little manikin. She stared at it for a moment. Then she crossed the room and put it carefully into Jane’s hands.

Jane looked down at what she’d been given. She felt moved that this was what Emmeline wanted: for Jane to be the custodian of a thing (or should she call it a ‘creature’?) which had been important to her.

‘I already feel tender towards it,’ said Jane. ‘And in your portrait, you will give it new life.’

Emmeline reached out and touched the soft skin of Jane’s cheek. ‘Let me remind you,’ she said, ‘that it’s you I’m searching for.’

The portrait was begun in the flat grey light of a winter London morning. After a long while of standing obediently still, watching her aunt’s gaze make small movements between her canvas and her subject, Jane’s mind began to be preoccupied with something she had never before seen so clearly – that Emmeline Adeane had survived sorrow and tragedy only through the intensity of her commitment to her art, that her gifts as a painter singled her out from the common roll call of humanity and made her capable of the kind of higher endeavour which ordinary people never even bothered to imagine.

When Jane remembered the shuffling, anxious and groaning patients she nursed at the Baths, she suddenly saw them all as pathetic clay, as beings as imperfectly formed as the golem in her hands, even as substances in thrall to a never-altering state of inertia and incompleteness. In magnificent contrast, she perceived her aunt as somebody who understood that surrender to the paltry limitations of the human body and the unenquiring mind was not to be tolerated, that striving was asked of her.

These thoughts led Jane, in turn, to look at her own life and dare to ask herself whether her belief in her own singularity, in her innate magnificence, might not be delusional. She knew that she was a clever and patient nurse and that, once in a while, she could seem to bring about relief from pain which appeared almost miraculous. But was she not working at something thousands of other women could have done? Had her head not been turned by hearing that she was known as the Angel of the Baths?