The funeral parlour, however, was large: a handsome office at the front, where examples of coffin design were still on display, bolted to the wall. At the back, two rooms, kept as cool as possible by an arrangement of iron pipes ventilating into a sunless back alley and once furnished with expensive fresh-cut flowers, had served as ‘viewing parlours’ for those bereaved relatives who could stomach the sight and stench of an embalmed corpse.

Mrs Morrissey walked back and forth between these two areas, arranged to accommodate the conventions of English burial. And she saw immediately how her Irish spirit could adapt them very satisfactorily to her need for what she liked to think of as her resurrection. She stood at the window facing Camden Street and watched the scores of beautifully attired people strolling past. Her mind returned to the ruby necklace. She half expected to see it, adorning the crumpled neck of some wealthy dowager, but then she reasoned that it wasn’t necessarily the kind of jewel to be worn in the daytime, but rather saved for one of these ‘gala evenings’ that had been allowed to acquire such splendour in her mind, but of which she had heard little since arriving in Bath. And anyway, the necklace was no longer itself. It was on the very precipice of becoming something else.

Once she’d signed her lease and engaged workmen to refit the premises, she wrote out a notice and attached it to the front door of the shop with milliner’s glue. It read: Opening soon in this place. Mrs Morrissey’s high class Tea Rooms.

What Clorinda Morrissey wanted from her enterprise was not only to make the kind of living that had nothing of the ‘dying’ about it, but also for herself to become known – a landmark, a magnet, a destination in her own right. Though she had had many friends in Dublin, it had always seemed to her that in the great life of the city she had had no importance whatsoever. She was invisible in her haberdasher’s shop.

In the taverns, where she could match the men, mug for mug of ale, nobody paid her any special attention. She’d had a suitor once, a carrot-headed boy who had walked with his head in the clouds and been run over by the night mail coach. Later, she had had a proposal from a Norwegian sailor and wondered for a while whether she might enjoy lying in arms so strong and foreign, so inured against the cold. But in the end, she’d decided against him. The carrot-headed boy had died with his face turned to the sky; the Norwegian would probably fall into the sea and drown. And it came to her then that she didn’t really want to live with a man – or at least not yet, not until she found someone whose gaze was steady and whose feet were planted firmly on the earth. She wanted to live for herself, to travel her own road. By the time she set sail for England, she’d reinvented herself as a widow, because widows survived far more cleverly in English society than spinsters – or so she’d been told.