Edmund had no idea what time of night it might be. From his window, he could see no moon, only an icy clustering of stars above the palms. He yearned for a light less cold, a candle, and then pen and paper in his hand so that he could write to his brother. Indeed this was what he longed for, he realised, in a fierce moment which caught at his throat: he wanted Valentine to be by his side, to heal him, to reassure him that he could, by some means, embark upon the next bit of his life.

‘EYES WITH WHICH TO SEE’

Finding that he missed his daughter, and that his patients complained quite blatantly and loudly about her absence, Sir William Adeane decided to write to Jane, asking her to come back to Bath.

We have been troubled here, he wrote. The nurse who has replaced you has but a quarter of the medical knowledge which you possess. Furthermore, the household does not feel orderly, as it always did, when you ordered it. The most vexing occurrence is that our once-trusted Mrs Hughes has left us and Dr Ross and I have had no luck in engaging another cook. For the time being – and this was Valentine’s idea – Mrs Morrissey from the Tea Rooms furnishes us with meat pies, kidney puddings and the like and places these before us at lunch time. Becky – who has not left us, but who seems to have adopted a mood of insubordinate indifference towards the household – puts together some kind of cold collation for my solitary suppers.

Mrs Morrissey is exceedingly kind and your poor father has found himself quite charmed by her and by her tales of her life in Ireland, which come pouring into many conversations and seem to imbue them with an unfamiliar colour, (which I suppose must be an emerald-green kind of hue …) I am particularly moved, I cannot say why, by the image of Mrs M as a barefoot girl, gathering samphire on what she calls ‘the strand’ at the sea shore, with her grandfather, who fashioned clothes out of rabbit skins, and feel I could listen to these stories forever, so strange and compelling does her world seem to me, but she has her business to run and she tells me that, alas, this arrangement for pies and so forth cannot go on beyond Christmas.

Then there is something else, Jane. It seems to me that Dr Ross is in an agitated state, as though he were nursing some great trouble, of which I am ignorant. He has taken to going on long, cold morning walks, sometimes arriving here with ice on his beard. On more than one occasion he has been late for his first patient and it does appear to me that his work has, in some way, become distressing to him. By late afternoon, he seems very tired and anxious and instead of staying to take a glass of porter with me, or to share my meagre supper, he leaves abruptly to go to his own lodgings.

I have the feeling that if you were here, you would intuit what is troubling Valentine and find some means to help him recover his equilibrium. So please, dear Jane, see if you can prise yourself away from London and its delights, and from the smell of oils in Emmeline’s house and return to us. I would not ask this of you if I did not feel the time to be so out of joint since you left. We must contrive to restore some order to the house.

From your loving father,

Wm. Adeane