Sir William now fell silent. He began staring at the fire, which had burned very low. Clorinda Morrissey watched him with some tenderness. It came into her mind that many of the men she’d met since coming to England, including the amiable Sir William, appeared confused about one thing or another. She didn’t know precisely why this should be the case, unless … and she knew that only a woman could have dared give voice to this thought … society expected such vigilance, such leadership, such perpetual certainty from them – about everything from politics to manners, from monetary investments to questions of morality – that their vision of the world was as crowded and cluttered as a vast emporium of second-hand bric-a-brac and that much of what passed in front of their noses they did not veritably see.

TUMOUR

The solution to being able to perform the lung operation that afternoon lay, in the end, with Valentine Ross. He put a sign on the front door of Henrietta Street to say he was indisposed and regretted that he could see no patients that day. He then studied such notes as Sir William Adeane had made on the case of the man with the tumour, helped Sir William prepare the operating table and stood ready to help with this difficult and dangerous task.

The patient was a florid man of, perhaps fifty-five years, a Mr Latimer, the prosperous owner of a glue-rendering factory situated at the lower end of the city, about whose noxious emissions of foul-smelling steam there was much helpless complaint. It was also known that many beautiful living horses were slaughtered only to feed the glue vats with their bones, their sad flesh cut away and rotting in heaps in the open air, which attracted vermin to the area. Bath residents were vocal in their condemnation of Latimer’s ‘fearful enterprise’ and its despoilation of an entire area of the city. But Latimer had made very satisfactory money from his glue and would not be moved to change his practices or re-site his factory.

When Latimer came in, both Ross and Sir William noted that he appeared quite calm. As he lay down on the table and his shirt was removed, he told the doctors that he had ‘great faith’. He said, ‘my faith is of two kinds: a belief in God, that He does not wish me to die yet, and a belief in Sir William’s skill.’

Valentine Ross privately thought that a third kind of faith should have been added to his list: faith in his money – that it could buy him the best private care that was to be had in Bath, thus avoiding being placed in a hospital bed, where contagious diseases put so many at risk. But Ross said nothing on this subject and simply went about his preparations with quiet care.

He told Latimer that in a few moments he would be given a ‘Letheon’, a dose of gas confected from sulphuric acid and ethyl alcohol and named for the River Lethe, in which, in Classical Mythology, souls immersed themselves in the waters of forgetfulness. This administration would make him immune to the pain which was to follow.