Compassion towards her father – for his loneliness, for his lack of real understanding of any world outside the world of his profession – had always dictated that Jane Adeane tried never to vex him or hurt him, but now she felt that, for once, she could not do as he asked.

It seemed to her, that in London, just as Aunt Emmeline was trying to see into her niece’s heart by painting her portrait, so she herself had begun in earnest an interrogation of her own future. She had come to believe – perhaps fancifully – that Tite Street, Chelsea was a more helpful address than Henrietta Street, Bath in which to discover the road to be followed in the next bit of her life. She believed that this road should have about it some inevitability: that it should point in some kind of unerring line, from which she wouldn’t be tempted to stray.

Jane knew that – for all her fame as the Angel of the Baths, for all her pride in the cures she seemed able to bring about – she didn’t wish to spend her whole life as a nurse. She knew that she had to arrive, one day, at something which could be mastered and possessed. And it was as if, though still invisible to her, that something would be more likely to reveal itself to her in Aunt Emmeline’s studio (in the ethereal, turpentine-scented air, under the high skylight which had once let the rain fall on a half-made creation on the pottery wheel) than anywhere else.

She also made good use of the library Emmeline had amassed, liking especially to lose herself in the myriad worlds conjured by Mr Dickens, admiring the reach of his imagination, but somewhat dismayed by the sickly sweetness of many of his heroines and wondering if she might write to Dickens suggesting that Lucie and Estella – to name but two – were somewhat marred by their own perfection.

She felt tempted to remind the great author that girls could be ‘as wayward in their minds as any young gentleman and might sometimes have dreams that did not begin with the letter M for Marriage’. It amused her to imagine a crestfallen look on the bearded visage of the famous man upon receipt of her letter, yet she knew that she would probably never write it. Instead, she began keeping a diary of her life in London, not only noting what she did but what she felt about everything and commenting very frequently upon her own reluctance to return to Bath.

She knew that she had a good reason to stay on in Chelsea. Emmeline was pleased with the way the portrait of her niece was taking shape. She told Jane that she was particularly satisfied with her capture of her height and the way the white robes she wore had about them a realistic heaviness, a heaviness which Jane’s body seemed to bear with an upright stoicism – even with a kind of nobility, entirely fitting to her character. But Emmeline admitted that she had not made the same kind of progress in her work on Jane’s face. The features, still only sketched in, did not yet even look like Jane. And the artist was frustrated by this. She made her niece promise that she wouldn’t leave until ‘at least you have eyes with which to see’.