It had been a cold night, but Clorinda Morrissey, wandering alone among the crowds, had looked up at the stars above the town, heard the yearning of the gypsy violins and decided that she was, at long last, a rejoicing citizen of the world, in all its variety. She congratulated herself on coming to Bath and having the tenacity to realise her small enterprise. She blessed the ruby necklace for giving her the chance to take her place in a cosmopolitan society. When she thought of Ireland on this particular night, it almost seemed to her as though her homeland had floated away, out into the Atlantic Ocean, where, in its habitual surrender to persecution and suffering, it was now a small, striving speck of green in the vast wash of the swelling and unending sea.

It had been while she was engaged in this reverie that Clorinda had turned to see one of the acrobats on stilts coming towards her through the crowds. He was made up in a clownish way, with a red nose and a black moustache, and wearing billowing striped trousers. He seemed to walk without difficulty on his tall stilts, and Clorinda couldn’t help but stare at him, wondering what his life could possibly be like, if this was his occupation – to perambulate among crowds, six feet above them, then to risk his life on the flying trapeze. She asked herself how the human mind arrives at its unexpected decisions and whether they sometimes float up, unnamed and unbidden, from the long, shadowy road that is the past.

At this moment, the first of the promised fireworks exploded with a mighty boom in the sky and the acrobat fell over.

He fell sideways. He landed heavily on the grass, no more than a stilt’s length from an organ grinder with a monkey on his shoulder. The monkey screeched and jumped onto the organ grinder’s head. People around Clorinda gasped with shock and yet no one ran to the fallen man, quite as if they believed he was entirely made of wood and couldn’t be hurt. But Clorinda Morrissey ran. She knelt by him and put her hand gently on his shoulder. He had just had time to reach out with his arms to prevent himself falling on his head, but he was winded and gasping for breath. Mrs Morrissey talked to him softly, telling him to lie still.

Other people now clustered around. The stilts were pulled from the ridiculous trousers. Children came to gape, then to start playing mock battles with the wooden poles. Clorinda told everybody to move back, ‘to give the poor soul some air’. And after some minutes, the acrobat asked Clorinda if she might help him to his feet. She held his arm tightly. She saw that his false moustache had been torn off in the fall.

The following night, this man, Florian Bellenger, who was nearing fifty, but with the taut body of a youth and a smile of infinite charm, had come round to the tea room, dressed soberly in a black frock coat, bearing the gift of some autumn flowers. In his fractured English, he had told Clorinda Morrissey that he felt ‘great shame’.