‘But you are still asking me to marry someone I do not love …’

‘No. In all truth, I am not. I am not. Because you will love him. I feel certain of it. You will love him no more and no less than Julietta loves Ashton. And he will give you a good life.’

‘I don’t want him in my bed.’

‘You might decide you did, if you taught him how to love you. Ask Julietta to remind you how this may be affectionately and tactfully done.’

Jane found this conversation painful. She didn’t like talking about Valentine Ross, most particularly because she felt sorry for him, but that night, alone in her room in Tite Street, she decided to examine the truth of what she felt about him.

What she discovered surprised her a little. She remembered Ross arriving to begin his doctoring with her father two years ago, a serious person showing immediate dedication to his work. She remembered saying to Sir William that she thought his new assistant ‘very promising’. She had added that she was astonished to note that a man with such ‘outlandish blue eyes’ could look so steadily upon the maimed and the sick. In other words, her first reactions to Valentine Ross had been favourable. She had found nothing negative to say about him. It had also been true that he had settled into the Henrietta Street practice with graceful ease, neither presuming to loosen the bond that existed between Jane and her father, nor treating her as an inferior because she was a nurse and not a doctor.

In the two years that separated his arrival from the day in Mrs Morrissey’s tea room when he’d proposed marriage Jane could recall nothing that had alienated her in Ross’s behaviour. If she had been asked what she felt about him during this time, her answer might have been teasing. She might have said that ‘for a man, he is quite passable’ or ‘considering that I only admire one man and that is my father, Mr Ross is working quite well on his aspiration to join this company of one.’

She might also have added that there had been moments when she’d felt something for him which was fractionally more than mere approbation. One of these had indeed been the night of the Chopin concert at the Assembly Rooms. She had liked strolling through the crowd on the arm of a serious and handsome gentleman and she had very much liked the feel of his closeness to her at the music’s end, when tears overwhelmed her. He had made her feel cared for and he had made her feel beautiful.

It was only the proposal that had ended it all.

Jane simply could not see how Ross had arrived at something for which she was so unprepared. The chasm between liking him and wanting to be his wife and live with him for ever was extremely great. She had never thought of him in this way. How could he not have seen that? How could he not have known that Miss Jane Adeane had much more to achieve in the world before she committed to any such binding alliance? Even if she hadn’t precisely known what she might achieve, the aspiration to excel at something had never left her. It was with her night and day. She was ‘The Angel of the Baths’ already, the one woman whose touch everybody yearned for. Yet she would do more. She was certain of that. She would go on and discover The Thing which would make her exceptional in the eyes of the world. But she would not discover it as the wife of Valentine Ross.