Julietta’s eyes were, of course, large and dark and her nose admirably straight, but it was Julietta’s mouth, wide but not fleshy, with a Botticelli Venus curve to the upper lip, which gave to this face such extraordinary seductive power. Jane knew that she should look away, that Ashton Sims might reasonably be disconcerted by the length of time she was staring at his wife. But it felt to her that, by drinking in the beauty of Julietta’s features she was bringing nourishment to her very soul. She wanted to weep or cry out in wonder. And she soon became aware that Julietta’s hand was still held in hers and that the intensity of her immersion in Julietta’s face was returned by the young woman’s enraptured gaze.

At length, Jane turned aside and Julietta turned away. When Jane dared look at her again, it was to gaze upon the back of Julietta’s neck, lit so sweetly by the candlelight, and at her dark hair piled into an elegant arrangement, ornamented with jewels and feathers.

It was at this moment that Jane remembered Valentine Ross telling her how, at the Chopin concert in the Bath Assembly Rooms, he had longed to reach out and touch her hair, and some pity for him now found its way into her heart, for she at last believed she understood what he had felt. Jane ached to do what he, too, had longed for – to reach out and stroke Julietta’s hair and then her neck and then her bare shoulders beneath. This longing was so overwhelming that Jane feared her hand might stray towards Julietta of its own accord, but she controlled it by reaching for her champagne glass and calling to one of the manservants in the hall to come and refill it.

As the servant ascended the stairs, Jane was aware of Ashton Sims staring at her with an unfathomable expression on his face, and even as he stared she felt something touch her foot. She did not need to look down to realise that Julietta’s left hand had crept under Jane’s skirt and was now tenderly encircling her ankle.

MICROSCOPE

A cold winter had now tightened its grip upon Bath. In his morning walks, Valentine Ross had to fight against spiteful peltings of sleet, or found his path up Beacon Hill covered with snow. Sometimes a freezing fog joined with the smoke from a thousand coal fires to wrap the city in a poisonous mist, and this, Ross felt, was the most punishing of all conditions – the one most likely to lay him low. Yet he pressed on blindly, determined to reach the top of Beacon day after day, not caring if he fell ill, or perhaps wishing to surrender to some fearful bodily condition that might still the agitation of his mind.

By the end of each day’s work, he began to experience the kind of deep tiredness that he imagined afflicted infantrymen on their terrible forced marches towards enemy lines. And this was how he now perceived his predicament: that he was enduring the difficult present in order to keep walking towards some defining conflagration and that only when he had come through this would his life resume any kind of normality.